Chapter 18 6. Doctors and teachers who passed through the space-time tunnel of neo-electronic expressionism

Posting children's graffiti on the refrigerator is as authentically American as apple pie.We encourage children to express themselves and make things themselves.But when they were 6 years old, we suddenly reversed course and made them feel that art class was like a baseball extracurricular activity, not as important as English or math, and that young people with aspirations should spend their time reading, memorizing, and review.So, in the 20 years after they went to school, we tried to instill all kinds of knowledge into their left brains like a force-feeding duck, but made their right brains shrink day by day.

Papert once told a story.A surgeon in the mid-19th century magically travels through a time tunnel to a modern operating room.Everything is completely foreign to him.He didn't know any surgical instruments, he didn't know how to operate, and he didn't know how to help.Modern technology has completely changed the face of surgical medicine. But if a 19th-century teacher rides into a modern classroom in the same time machine, he or she can immediately learn from his or her late-20th-century Take over from there to teach.Compared with 150 years ago, our teaching methods today have almost no fundamental changes, and the use of technical means is almost at the same level.In fact, according to a recent survey by the U.S. Department of Education, 84 percent of U.S. teachers believe that only one type of information technology is absolutely necessary: ​​copiers plus plenty of copy paper.A Better Palette However, we are finally starting to move away from this rigid teaching model, moving from primarily catering to kids who constrain themselves to follow-through, to more diverse teaching.In this kind of teaching, there is no clear distinction between art and science, between left brain and right brain.When a child uses a computer language like Logo to draw a picture on the computer screen, the picture drawn is both artistic and mathematical, and can be regarded as either of the two.Even abstract mathematical concepts can now be illustrated with the help of concrete images in the visual arts.

Personal computers will make future adults more mathematically capable and more artistically accomplished. Teenagers 10 years from now will have more diverse choices, because not only nerds can achieve advanced knowledge, but people with various cognitive styles, learning methods and performance behaviors may become masters. The middle ground between work and play can get incredibly wide.Because of digitization, the lines between love and duty are no longer as clear.The proliferation of amateur painters symbolized the advent of a new age of opportunity and social respect for creative leisure.The future will be an era of lifelong creation, manufacture and performance.Today, when a retired old man picks up his paintbrush, he seems to have returned to his childhood, but compared with the young and middle-aged, what he gets is completely different in return. In the future, people of different ages will find that their life course is more complicated. Harmony, as tools for work and tools for play will increasingly become one.There will be a better palette for harmonizing love and responsibility, self-expression and group work.

Computer hackers, young and old, are the perfect example.The programs they design are like surreal paintings, both highly aesthetic and technically superior.We can discuss their works from different aspects such as style and content, meaning and expressive technique at the same time.Their computer programs express a new aesthetic.These hackers were the forerunners of the new electronic expressionism.The Driving Force of Music Music has proven to be one of the most important driving forces in the formation of computer science. We can approach the question of music in three very powerful and complementary ways.The first is the processing of the digital signal—say, the extremely difficult problem of sound separation (such as erasing the noise of a cola can falling in a recorded music).

We can also explore from the perspective of music cognition—how to interpret music language, what are the elements of music appreciation, and where do emotions come from?Finally, we can think of music as a means of artistic expression and storytelling—telling a story, evoking some emotion.All three aspects are equally important and make music the perfect intellectual domain that allows us to move gracefully between technology and representation, science and art, private and public worlds. If you asked a packed auditorium of computer science students how many of them knew how to play an instrument, or how many of them thought they liked music, most of them would raise their hands.The traditional affinity between mathematics and music is now strikingly expressed in the computer science and computer hacker communities.The Media Lab has attracted a group of outstanding computer science students because of its music research.

Childhood hobbies such as art and music enable children to observe and explore with a comprehensive perspective the vast intellectual world that has hitherto been presented to them in a single way.However, parents and society often intentionally or unintentionally hinder children from developing their interests in this area, or let children only regard art and music as a means of relieving stress during academic climbing.I hated history classes at school, but I could name all the important milestones in the history of art and architecture and their dates, but I couldn't remember anything about the dates of political events and wars.My son is also dyslexic through my inheritance, but he can read magazines about high-altitude surfing and skiing with relish.For some, music may be the best way to study math, learn physics and learn about anthropology.

After talking about the above, turn around, how do we learn music?Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was common to practice musical instruments in schools.Later, the development of recording technology stopped this trend.Only recently have some schools reintroduced students to learning music by making it, not just by listening to it.There are great advantages to allowing young children to use computers to learn music, as computers offer a wide variety of avenues to get started.Computers do not limit musical opportunities for gifted children.There are a variety of different ways a child can experience music through a computer. Music games, sound data tapes, and digital sounds that are themselves controllable are just a few examples.

Children with a wonderful sense of sight may even wish to invent a way to see music.Electronic Arts When computers and art meet for the first time, it can have dire consequences for both.One of the reasons is that the imprint of the machine is too strong. In holographic art or three-dimensional movies, the performance of the computer often overwhelms the connotation originally intended to be expressed by the art.Technology is like the pepper in French sauce. The result of too much computer flavor is to overwhelm the guest and mask the most subtle signals of artistic expression. Not surprisingly, computers and art work best together in music and the performing arts.Because in these two fields, the expression, communication and experience of works of art can be easily integrated technically.Composers, performers and audiences are all in digital control, and if Herbie Hancock launches his next work on the Internet, it's like playing in a theater with 20 million seats, And each listener can change the performance of the music according to their own situation.For some, simply adjusting the volume is enough.Others may turn the music into karaoke.Others will even adjust its pay.

The digital highway will make the phrase "finished, unalterable work of art" a thing of the past.Painting Mona Lisa with a mustache is child's play.On the Internet, we will be able to see many people performing various digital operations on various works that are "supposedly completed", and transforming the works, and this is not necessarily a bad thing. We have entered a new era of more vivid and participatory artistic expression, and we will have the opportunity to communicate and experience rich sensory signals in a very different way.This new approach is different from reading a page, and easier to do than a physical tour of the Louvre.The Internet will become the world's largest art gallery for artists from all over the world to display their works, and it will also be the best tool for directly disseminating artworks to people.

When digital artists provide the means to adapt works, they also create a great opportunity for the development of digital art.Although this approach seems to completely secularize important works of art-it is like printing all photos of Steichen on postcards, or turning all works of Andy Warhol (1928-1987) into Art Deco as well.The point is, digitization allows us to communicate the process of making art, not just show the final product.This process may be the ecstatic fantasy of a single mind, the collective imagination of many, or the shared dream of a revolutionary group. The original idea of ​​the deviant Salon Media Lab was to take the research of human interface and artificial intelligence in a new direction.This new direction refers to shaping the human interface and artificial intelligence through the content of information systems, the needs of consumer applications and the essence of artistic thinking.We pitched this idea heavily to the broadcast, publishing, and computer worlds because it brought the sensory richness of imagery to bear.The depth of information in publishing, and the inherent interactivity of computers all rolled into one.The concept sounds perfectly logical today, but at the time it seemed foolish.According to The New York Times, an unnamed senior professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology believes that everyone involved with the project is a "charlatan."

The Media Lab is housed in a building designed by renowned architect I.M. Pei (after the extension to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and before the Pyramid at the Louvre in Paris).It took us about 7 years to raise money, build buildings, and recruit talent. Just as the establishment of the Paris art world refused to allow the Impressionists to participate in a formal art exhibition in 1863, the original researchers of the Media Lab, who were rejected by the orthodox, formed their own "unselected". Some of these people are too radical in the eyes of academia, some people's research does not fit in their own departments, and some people have no place at all.Besides Weissner and me, the group included a filmmaker, a graphic designer, a composer, a physicist, two mathematicians, and a group of The researchers who invented multimedia. We came together in the early 80's as a sort of non-mainstream culture in computer science.At that time, the computer industry was still dominated by programming languages, operating systems, network communication protocols, and system structures.What binds us together is not a common academic background, but a common belief: we all believe that as computers become ubiquitous and ubiquitous, they will dramatically change and affect the quality of our lives, not only changing the face of scientific development, And it will be filmed. every aspect of life. We were a perfect combination of people, because the personal computer had been born, the user interface was beginning to be valued, and the telecommunications industry was deregulated.Owners and operators of newspapers, magazines, books, movie studios, and television stations are beginning to ask themselves what the future will look like.Two smart media monstrosities, Time-Warner's Steve W. Ross and Dick Monroe intuitively saw the coming of the digital age.And to invest in a crazy new project at MIT... It doesn't cost them much.So we quickly developed into a research institute with 300 people. Today, the media lab is mainstream, and the surfer on the Internet is the crazy kid who roams the streets.The actions of digital people have gone beyond multimedia and are gradually creating a real way of life, not just a posturing of intellectuals.They call themselves bit tribes or computer tribes, and their social circle is the whole planet.Today, they represent the Salon of the Losers, but the place where they meet is not a café in Paris, or a Belchingh building in Cambridge.Their salon is somewhere on the "net". This is digital survival.