<nettime-ann> Lecture Series: Do You Believe in Users

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

.

Subject: Lecture Series: Do You Believe in Users
Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2012 22:31:53 +0200
From: olia lialina <olia@profolia.org>
To: nettime-ann@nettime.org

Speakers:  Jason Scott, Niscal Roy, Christina Xu, goto80
Place:  New  State Library of Stuttgart
Organised by Olia Lialina
http://nm.merz-akademie.de/2012/08/lecture-series-do-you-believe-in-users/
http://merz-akademie.de/lectures/series/do-you-believe-in-users  
(deutcsh)

Do You Believe in Users?

This question, asked in the legendary 1985 movie Tron, nowadays would  
have to be asked with a smile, as a nostalgic remark about the days  
when "apps" in neon costumes competed with each other and their users  
in racing games -- but instead it is gaining earnest relevance.

Three years ago in the introduction to the Digital Folklore Reader we  
asked "Do you believe in Users?" to emphasize that the personal  
computer must be regarded as a medium with a cultural history shaped  
more by its users and less by its inventors.

In this lecture series we raise the question again, for the sole  
purpose of reminding that computer users do actually still exist,  
along with their right to understand how their computers, big and  
small, work. This is essential in times when interaction processes got  
way too smooth, pleasant and invisible, when designers and developers  
don't even talk

We  invited five speakers, whose academic, artistic, curatorial and   
archival work make personal computer and its user visible again.

Mi, 31.10.  "The Power of User Error" Christina Xu, co-founder of  
Awesome Foundation and ROFLcon (Boston) roflcon.org/ christina@roflcon.org

So we have the people who just create, and people who just use, but  
what about all the people in the middle who come up with innovative  
ways of using the technology? Consider the early Twitter users who  
imported the hashtags and @s from IRC and made them so popular that  
they're now part of Twitter's official design terminology. These  
people are still users, but their use patterns blaze trails for  
others. And any user can become one of these, like a school of fish  
turning in random directions! A lot of our ROFLCon guests follow this  
pattern; they are people who somehow started a trend among other users.

Mi, 14.11. "Hackers and Suckers: Understanding the 8-bit Underground"   
Anders Carlsson (goto80), musician (Göteborg) www.goto80.com/   info@goto80.com

Discussions of 8-bit art and music is usually framed in words like  
limitations, nostalgia and reappropriation. The lecture will examine  
where these discourses come from and suggest better concepts, that are  
also useful in modern computing. By combining his long-time personal  
experience as a musician with research in low-tech hacker cultures,  
Anders Carlsson’s ideas about man-machine creativity is both  
controversial and pragmatic.

Di, 04.12. "Where are the Files"  Jason Scott, archivist and computer  
technology historian (New York) http://textfiles.com/ jason@textfiles.com

"And what happened in the last decade or so, is that an awful lot of  
computer history is in danger. A lot of it has been deleted. In fact,  
if you step back and look at it, the loss of data has moved to  
epidemic proportions. I use the term epidemic specifically here; I  
mean that there is a mental condition to accept the loss of data as  
the price of doing business with computers. And beyond that, the  
expectation that data will be lost, and the spreading of this idea to  
the point that data loss becomes no big thing."

Di, 11.12.  "Useless Things", Niklas Roy, artist (Berlin),  
niklasroy.com  nikl@s-roy.de

Niklas Roy uses art in order to explore technology. The outcome of his  
research are mechanical sculptures, electric machines, interactive  
performances and electronic devices. Before concentrating on making  
art, he worked as director, as 3D animator and as visual effect  
supervisor for several international film productions.


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