12 Reading – 10 Dreams

Well here we are! The final week of classes, and despite the fact that I’ve enjoyed this semester, I’m well and truly ready for it to end. In our final reading, Steve Dietz presents ’10 Dreams of Technology’, themes that have been “developed and/or questioned by artists throughout history”. I’m going to rinse through three of them. Let’s do this!

1. The Dream of Symbiosis: Yeah, I’ve got no idea. And it’s late, so there’s little chance of comprehension going on here, but he brings up David Rokeby, and says that “Giver of Names” is “one of the most profoundly engaging dreams of cybernetic symbiosis”.

2. The Dream of Emergence: “The motion of networks as an extended and augmented nervous system out of which intelligence eventually and inevitably, emerges”. So this is cool as hell. Dietz brings up The Terminator (always a plus), but the analogy that I found really useful in my own understanding was “the movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication is what we call emergence”.

3. The Dream of Immersion: “Artists have dreamed of artworks in which the viewer is totally immersed”. Well, this is virtual reality, innit? Google Glass (check out our kickass niki), Oculus Rift – these are stepping stones along the path to this particular dream, methinks.