Manifesto for now

It all started with a public speaking project. I was going to make an impassioned speech to my audience to buy the Atari 2600 (or some other simulated wood home gaming system created by that company). All I needed was a picture. Instead of a picture I stumbled upon a world.

Chalk it up to serendipity, consider it an answer to that value question of why libraries promote the 'collect everything' OCD--I found a mountain of information. A couple of things stick out at that time. Arcades were at that time a threat to the youth. It stole their lunch money. Using their narrative savvy, the news reporters would report about all the young adults, men with jobs, on their lunch break, pumping quarters into these machines, aiming for that lucrative high score. Regulations were passed. I'm certain that town halls were amassed. All of this 'sturm und drang' over a silly machine. But I remember the kind of hold they had on me. My adrenaline would flow, my heart would race, I'd die continuously as I fumbled with the controls, and I'd continue to beg for quarters. I became rather acquainted with my dad's hand reaching into his jean pocket. Therein lay my video game Valhalla, the quarter. From the ages of 6 to 8 I basked in that arcade glow, which economists recognized was a video-game industry bubble, and I loved it. That same transfixed gaze and cast iron attention that I exhibited toward the arcade would be the same that inspired Gibson to write Neuromancer.

I found out something else about games in that afternoon I stood transfixed on the microfilm machine. Stories of great feats on games were also making the news. One kid mastered the game of Defender so well that he played it for a stretch of 8 hours, letting lives that he racked up during his virtuoso piloting to expire while he used the bathroom. He drew a crowd and at least one reporter who's long-forgotten story I found amid the dim glow of the microfilm's screen. I found and read the book "Zap," which I did in an afternoon. I had tapped back into that excitement. It inspired my writing and led me to some provisional views about interfacing with technology. I'll present them.

Interfacing with technology is a performance. Aside from commenting upon the world that opens up, the avatar you control, the narrative that plays out, I was merely interested in how technology bisects bodily action. I tied this performance concept to that of musicianship. The reason I did this was merely because I found some affinities in how people spoke about Paganini's violin performances and how people spoke about computer hackers. I was seeking something on the order of transcendence, the arena of action and interfacing that lay beyond the code not only of the technology but the social code that regulates how this technology is used. I wrapped that up into a paper, got my A, shipped it on to a national conference, and had my moment on the panel. My god, a beautiful woman was in the crowd, and I did my damndest to put on a show. That was my last great moment of academic show.

But now I'm back and I'm fired up about this notion of how computer algorithms or technical logic form a basis for tactics out of which emerge discernible human performance--the stuff of Victor Turner's culture, performative anthropology, the lived now in which an old idea finds new life in the cultural actor's body. Fun stuff. The prose is still clunky, but I come back to this idea. Now what do I want to do with it?

Well, I really want to dig down to that point where I think I can marry the materiality of the machine with the materiality of the body. Interface works for this, but how deep does it go? Provisionally I say it goes to the code, but I suspect it goes deeper than that. What's to say about code? In playing the idea in my head, I wanted to explore code by doing 'viral criticism.' What's that you say? Rhetorical criticism of a computer virus: where I splay the code out and describe its finite elements in detail that demonstrates how each element can be figured as persuasive elements, persuasive enough for a host computer to reproduce them or reproduce actions contained therein. But I suspect these actions aren't discreet. I'm not going to find a code that says, 'host computer, jump on one foot and bark like a dog.' No, what I suspect I'll find again are the tactics employed by the virus' author to exploit elements of the computer. More tactics.

Another word: bricolage. Piaget considered this the lesser learning practice to its counterpart, conceptual learning. Bricolage is working with what you have and mucking through, theory in practice. Conceptual learning is making your blueprint and carefully following it to completion. Yes, two different ways of learning. Turkle and Papert recognized these as two epistemologies operating in the computer programming classroom. Conceptual learning is the canonical view. Bricolage is the hacker's MO. Let the logic of practice, the logic of the machine, and the emerging intimacy with how the person interfaces with that machine to define the experience and the learning. That's a simple ethical stance and the grain of a pedagogy. But I'll leave that aside to consider the other version of bricolage. Bricolage, as it is defined in a footnote to Rabinow's book on the invention of polymerase chain reaction (PCR), is simply any extraneous movement, a ball's ricochet during tennis, the follow-through after a swing, the stuff that isn't necessarily part of the match. But it is, am I right? We're back to tactics. Ricochets are part of the game. A quickly returned ball can take advantage of the time it takes the other player to re-cock for a return after just swinging. It's tactics, adjusting play, upping the ante, finding an exploit.

My manifesto for now is to do viral criticism. My manifesto for now is to explore how the game narrative is itself built upon the computer algorithm. Think about it. The first video game was a showcase of the ability to connect a few simple transistors to a monitor to move a point of light. The next showcase was moving that movement knob away from the exposed transistor and onto a spill-proof surface built for the rough wear of a bar. Why is this important? We're witnessing proof of concept. Techno-poesis in making a manipulable object on a screen, and using this to create a game for metered play--the beginning of an industry. While the narrative has gotten more complex and involved, there are still algorithms underneath.

"No matter where you go, there you are."

An industry that started by figuring out how to move a point of light on a screen has evolved into a billion-dollar entertainment industry. That doesn't interest me. What does is that, everyday, the development crew, the creative army, is still working within the confines of the algorithms that define movement, shading, dimension, space, color, fluidity, realism. Those can't be forgotten. An industry and a discipline have grown around tactics for working with these algorithms.

I witnessed something in an HTML training course that interested me. I was studying them, more or less, and I witnessed a student become excited by watching something he programmed his page to do, show up on him refreshing the page. He commented upon it, and it stuck out for me, that it's this interactivity between us and this graphical Galatea that enamors us to it. We fall in love with the thing that we create. This takes me into new territory. This forces me to read Hegel, not all, just some--the Hegel I need.

That's my manifesto for now. Will I accomplish either of the two agenda items? We'll see.