First thing I noticed when I entered the lecture theatre was Elliot’s nice black and white checked button up shirt. Nice purchase. Second thing I noticed was Kenton sporting a pale pink, purple, blue horizontal striped combination shirt. Eye catching and as usual Kenton pulled it off. The third thing I noticed was intense debate between the tutors and Adrian had already begun. There was an Art vs. Science related debate. (Yes, that is a band).
Is art technology? and is technology art? In my opinion the difference between technology and art is not the physical products themselves but the motivation behind them. Non-art is driven by functional requirements established by others. Although technology may make an idea reality, engage participants and make relationships that previously were elusive, their motivation is function. Therefore it can be said that technology is not art. Art results in structures that evoke feeling.
The talk of Ted Nelson interested me greatly. Yes this beautiful man. He founded Project 
Xanadu which was the first ever hypertext project and the concept behind links on the web. His vision included implementation of a “docuverse”, where all data was stored once, there were no deletions, and all information was accessible by a link from anywhere else. Navigation through the information would be non-linear, depending on each individual’s choice of links. This was more than just text… It was hypertext. See what I did there… That’s the name of the thing. The development continued to what it is today, a high-performance hypertext system that assures the identity of references to objects, and solves the problems of configuration management and copyright control.
Of course not Networked Media symposium would be complete without discussing whether its possible to not have a last paragraph in a book. There IS always a last paragraph in terms of visual order and conventions tell us to read that paragraph last… But we don’t have too.
PLUS DOES ANYONE REMEMBER THESE
Choose your own last paragraph,
Luke Egan