Byron Hawk, David M. Rieder, Ollie O. Oviedo (eds.): Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools (2008)

Experts examine the ways digital tools affect social and cultural experience.

The essays in Small Tech investigate the cultural impact of digital tools and provide fresh perspectives on mobile technologies such as iPods, digital cameras, and PDAs and software functions like cut, copy, and paste and WYSIWYG. Together they advance new thinking about digital environments.

Contributors: Wendy Warren Austin, Jim Bizzocchi, Collin Gifford Brooke, Paul Cesarini, Veronique Chance, Johanna Drucker, Jenny Edbauer, Robert A. Emmons Jr., Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Richard Kahn, Douglas Kellner, Karla Saari Kitalong, Steve Mann, Lev Manovich, Adrian Miles, Jason Nolan, Julian Oliver, Mark Paterson, Isabel Pedersen, Michael Pennell, Joanna Castner Post, Teri Rueb, James J. Sosnoski, Lance Strate, Jason Swarts, Barry Wellman, Sean D. Williams, Jeremy Yuille.

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2008
ISBN 0816649782, 9780816649785
236 pages

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Susan Kozel: Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology (2007)

“In Closer, Susan Kozel draws on live performance practice, digital technologies, and the philosophical approach of phenomenology. Trained in dance and philosophy, Kozel places the human body at the center of explorations of interactive interfaces, responsive systems, and affective computing, asking what can be discovered as we become closer to our computers—as they become extensions of our ways of thinking, moving, and touching.

Performance, Kozel argues, can act as a catalyst for understanding wider social and cultural uses of digital technology. Taking this one step further, performative acts of sharing the body through our digital devices foster a collaborative construction of new physical states, levels of conscious awareness, and even ethics. We reencounter ourselves and others through our interactive computer systems. What we need now are conceptual and methodological frameworks to reflect this.

Kozel offers a timely reworking of the phenomenology of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This method, based on a respect for lived experience, begins by listening to the senses and noting insights that arrive in the midst of dance, or quite simply in the midst of life. The combination of performance and phenomenology offered by Closer yields entwinements between experience and reflection that shed light on, problematize, or restructure scholarly approaches to human bodies using digital technologies.

After outlining her approach and methodology and clarifying the key concepts of performance, technologies, and virtuality, Kozel applies phenomenological method to the experience of designing and performing in a range of computational systems: telematics, motion capture, responsive architectures, and wearable computing.

The transformative potential of the alchemy between bodies and technologies is the foundation of Closer. With careful design, future generations of responsive systems and mobile devices can expand our social, physical, and emotional exchanges.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2007
Designer: Rebeca Méndez
ISBN 0262113104, 9780262113106
355 pages

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Christa Sommerer, Lakhmi C. Jain, Laurent Mignonneau (eds.): The Art and Science of Interface and Interaction Design (2008)

“Artists and creators in interactive art and interaction design have long been conducting research on human-machine interaction. Through artistic, conceptual, social and critical projects, they have shown how interactive digital processes are essential elements for their artistic creations. Resulting prototypes have often reached beyond the art arena into areas such as mobile computing, intelligent ambiences, intelligent architecture, fashionable technologies, ubiquitous computing and pervasive gaming. Many of the early artist-developed interactive technologies have influenced new design practices, products and services of today’s media society. This book brings together key theoreticians and practitioners of this field. It shows how historically relevant the issues of interaction and interface design are, as they can be analyzed not only from an engineering point of view but from a social, artistic and conceptual, and even commercial angle as well.”

Published by Springer, 2008
ISBN 3540798692, 9783540798699
190 pages

Key terms: Augmented Reality, Prix Ars Electronica, wearable computers, Christa Sommerer, interactive art, media art, ubiquitous computing, interaction design, Mixed Reality, Fluxus, Virtual Reality, RFID, mass media, Chaos Computer Club, Wolfgang Strauss, Monika Fleischmann, Linz, John Cage, Human-Computer Interaction, Peter Weibel

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