Voices from the Future: Virtual Reality Patents and Interviews for HASTAC

I have to admit that when I first came to Duke I was a bit overwhelmed with the concept of "interface." It is very difficult to say precisely what "interface" is. Interface is always the Janus-faced border, yet at the same time enunciating the very division of the border, for at the interface that which was previously disparate mixes, combines, becomes one. How does one understand, much less visualize, such metaphysics? With video interviews with digital pioneers and 3-d patent visualizations, of course! But that is jumping ahead...

Why "interface" and why the HASTAC conference? As David Liu reminded me, in medieval times things like "human" and "lake" had essential essences - the world was fundamentally unchanging, and the job of the scholastics was to in an Aristotelian fashion to sort these essential attributes out. Raymond Lull's wheels that showed the "eternal attributes" of God in a mechanical fashion is a perfect example of this. Yet things did change in medieval times, just not at such speed that a single human noticed it over the course of their lifetime, and so the appearance of things being composed of individual discrete objects with eternal attributes remained with us. The true revolution of the digital age has nothing to do with silicon per se, but has been that before our very eyes, all the categories that we had assumed would be relatively unchanging, have changed dramatically within the course of the last few years - and thus the popularity of the posthuman, the assemblage, the cyborg. HASTAC and the Interface Seminar are precisely these attempts to, as a friend put it once, to "catch our concepts back up to our technology."

How do we understand these changes? Precisely why did they happen, and why now? On the edges of our discussions there kept coming up a few names like Douglas Engelbart and Alan Kay. As a computer scientist by training, I have always been surprised by the sheer lack of history of computer science - in essence, one is taught the main ideas ahistorically and then a set of skills (like programming) with a mode of thought. With new media, this lack of history is even more obvious, being implicated in the term "new" in "New Media." One powerful method to understand anything that claims to be ahistorical is to understand its history, in this case the material forces that gave birth to the immaterial age. I read as much as I could get my hands on, but with a few exceptions (like Waldrop's excellent "Dream Machines"), almost all the books on the birth of the computer revolution were relatively light reading, leaving one strangely unfulfilled, and never drawing up into the present day.

The only solution was to go on across the country, video-camera in hand, to record the voices of many of the engineers that brought us the digital age, so they could speak in their own words to participants at the HASTAC conference. There is little alternative but video interviews for many of these little-known engineers that created the digital world that we all take for granted: They were so busy actually helping conceptualize and build revolutionary technologies that they did not even have time to write their thoughts down in papers or books. Rather surprisingly, almost all of them did manage to take the time to respond to my rather out of the blue e-mails, and to take out often hours of their time for interviews in their offices and homes. From this overview, a few key institutions, in partular industrial research labs like Xerox PARC and Licklider's "Galactic Network" of early academic computer science labs, came to the light as supernovas of innovation. These supernovas all shared some of the same characteristics: large amounts of funding, small groups of creative works, and minimal bureaucratic control yet bound together tightly by a common vision of human-machine symbiosis. The interviews range widely, from the past to the present day, including interviews with Bob Fano, who both worked as an information theorist and directed Project MAC at MIT to create some of the first interactive computers, to Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web and now director of the World Wide Consortium. These interviews, along with images and excerpts from their seminal papers and patents, will be displayed in the Studio for the HASTAC conference. We also have videos of some of the original demonstrations, such as Douglas Engelbart's demonstration in 1968 that featured everything from the mouse to real-time networked collaboration, to demonstrations of Xerox's Alto computer, the first recognizable personal computer.

Those at the HASTAC conference can also hear first-hand the the keynote speaker John Seely Brown, former director of Xerox PARC and author of the seminal "The Social Life of Information," give his own story. In fact, while much that has come out of Xerox PARC, ranging from Ethernet to laser-printing, is so widespread as to become normal, many of Brown's ideas, such as ubiquitous computing, are just now being realized. Furthermore, since much of the seminal research happened at industrial research lab, we combined Tim Lenoir's work on patents with Rachael Brady's work on visualization to allow us to visually map out networks of patents in three-dimensions, so that one can trace lines directly from Microsoft to Xerox to Douglas Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute. Even after exploring the data quite a bit, even I discovered a few strange connections, such as the links between Xerox, Terry Winograd, and a little-known business consultant firm called Action Technologies. Indeed, it is precisely by discovering and understanding these strange connections that we historicize and so they become less strange, and begin to understand, what is "new" about new media as well as the preconditions and flow of ideas that created this digital world.

While our traditional ontologies may be in process of full-scale collapse, history no more ended with the advent of digital computing than it did with the fall of the Soviet Union. In eras of reaction, as Jameson reminds us trenchantly in his analysis of science fiction, our utopian desires flee from the political into cultural forms, a cultural imaginary that is both strangely profound and strangely irrelevant, as it guides our future possibilities. Now, these utopian desires have been transferred into technology, as Mark McCahill of Gopher fame (now at Duke) reveals when he says that his interest in 3-d began after reading "Snow Crash." Speaking of McCahill, with David Smith and Julian Lombardi he'll be giving an OpenCroquet demonstration, a cutting-edge virtual reality collaborative platform built with the help of Alan Kay, at HASTAC as well. With the Web 2.0, these technologies are beginning to profoundly democratize, and as the recent use of Myspace and Youtube demonstrate, the feedback loops between technological and political forms is growing ever more powerful. There is no better time for the humanities, and I hope our demonstrations and interviews reveals some light into why our interfaces, both with each other and the world around us, are becoming more and more fluid and important.