91-09/CyberConf2.review From: Soren Renner Subject: Review of 2nd annual cyberspace conference. Date: Tue, 10 Sep 1991 20:50:34 -0400 (EDT) (Sorry this is a few months late. sr) The Conference The Second International Conference on Cyberspace took place on April 19th and 20th in Santa Cruz. Sponsored by the Group for the Study of Virtual Systems, Center for Cultural Studies, UC Santa Cruz, it concentrated on social, philosophical and theoretical issues. It was limited to 140 invited participants. About 15 papers were presented over the two days of the conference. There was also a roundtable discussion on Friday night, which included John Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and many of those who presented papers. The opening paper, Identity and Mask In Virtual Reality, was presented on Friday morning by Ann Lasko-Harvill of VPL, Inc. (Jaron Lanier did not attend the conference.) She showed slides of VPL's extensive collection of masks, including one of Nixon painstakingly crafted of latex. Facial expressions are hard to simulate and image in realtime, and they are also hard to sense with, say, strain gauges attached to the face. This makes the creation of a realistic face in VR that shows the owner's true expression difficult. Ms. Lasko-Harvill did not help her credibility by suggesting that continuously monitored blood pressure readings be displayed as a surrogate for facial expression, or by saying that "art is dangerous because it can change society." The second speaker was Stuart Moulthrop of the University of Texas at Austin. His paper, titled Paradise for Paranoids: The Critical Hermeneutics of Cyberspace, was fascinating and enjoyable. He spoke of cyberspace as being a narrative or speculative fiction. After a brief recap of French poststructuralism (Baudrillard's "precession of simulacra", etc.) and look at etymology ( the prefix "cyber" is Norbert Wiener's redaction of "governor", from the Greek for "helmsman"), Mr Moulthrop -- or it may be Professor Moulthrop-- plunged into the heart of the matter: Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Rainbow's recursively articulated fantasies of paranoia, "synthesis and control", infinitely nested wheels and levels of influence provided a basis for a theory of "secondary literacy", cyberspace as text, and hermeneutics of resistance. The notion of "liminal paranoia" - the ability to confront a structure and deny its absoluteness - (or, in other words, to see that All is One and then back off enough so that the pieces are discernable again), combined with the references to Ulysses, made the speech one of our favorites. Next, Jean-Claude Guedon of the University of Montreal gave his paper, Spectral Subjects, Simulacra and Cyberspace: Epistemological Lessons Drawn from Minitel. It dealt with his research into the "chat lines" on Minitel, the French telecommunications experiment which put small, crude terminals in homes in France. Many services are offered: directory assistance (previously in France, one had to go to the local post office to look up an out-of-town telephone number!), weather, sports and other information services, and "chat lines", which permit anonymous participation. Most chat lines concentrate on sex fantasies and dirty language, like our American "dial-a-porn." These services were instrumental in the rapid growth of the Minitel system, providing a revenue base. Most other services offered on Minitel are used quickly, like directory assistance, but the chat lines inspire long login times at an average of 12 dollars per hour. They are becoming somewhat less important as the system grows, and the telephone authorities have tried to discourage the explicit advertisements which once lined the Paris Metro with promises of nameless lust. Kudos to Jean-Claude for observing that ". . ." and "!" are used on chatlines as "substitutes for words which are themselves substitutes for a solitary act substituting for actual lovemaking." (At this point it became clear that spinning recursion was the secret theme of the conference.) His main conclusion was that total anonymity is very limiting, and boring after too long . In our opinion, this is a powerful argument against allowing unlimited control over personal identity in VR. Without persistence of identity, there can be no nontrivial social behavior. In the afternoon, Scott Bukatman presented his paper, The Cybersubject and Cinematic Being. Scott teaches film theory and criticism in Brooklyn, and he had many things to say about Tron, a Disney film from the early eighties in which a hacker "falls into" a magical world inside his computer. Interestingly, current ideas about cyberspace were anticipated by early filmmakers who dreamed of "total cinema". Luckily, we had seen TRON and could follow much of the lecture. Kathleen Biddick's paper, Uncolonizing History In Cyberspace, looked at images of cannibalism and mummification in Western culture. She had many good slides. Our favorite slide was of an old engraving of several Jesuit priests being martyred by cannibals. One of the priests was the saint that the speaker had had an icon of as a little girl. Another slide showed the cover of The Raw and the Cooked, an album by the Fine Young Cannibals. The album's cover art included, yes, a mummy. One felt breathlessly decolonized. The roundtable discussion was held in a different building, in a forested part of the campus that looked a bit like Rivendell. No hobbits or elves were invited onto the panel. Too bad: they might have improved the tone. The next morning, during a question and answer period, (each presentation was followed by one) John Barlow made a comment about free speech and was attacked by Ms. Biddick, who wanted to know why, if he was so interested in freedom of expression, he had interrupted her lecture the previous afternoon to ask her what the point was. There were more lectures, but we felt we had taken enough notes. Saturday's highlight was our encounter with Scott Kim in the audience. Scott Kim is a brilliant designer of tricks and puzzles with letterforms and word forms. Some of his work graced Hofstadter's Gpdel, Escher, Bach. He has published at least one book of his own, and coauthored a program for the Macintosh. He expressed interest in developing for the NeXT, and we hope he does. NeXT and Cyberspace Unsurprisingly, there is overlap and mutual interest between the cyberspace scene and the NeXT scene. Mr. Barlow owns a NeXT. Many conference attendees expressed interest in the platform. But is cyberspace just around the corner? To implement even a crude VR system takes more than a 68040. A top-of-the-line Silicon Graphics system may represent the bare minimum imaging power and speed necessary. This year, that is. Hardware leapfrogs hardware with each workstation released. Software, especially system software, is different. NeXT does have a lead here, and will maintain that lead for quite some time. The NeXT development environment, combined with a board that renders NURBS in hardware, could do some amazing tricks. Is there anything to do until the goggles and gloves show up at K-Mart? Certainly. If the conference proved anything, it proved that the field is wide open for people with ideas, even (or especially) tangential ideas. If you have access to a NeXT, use it to learn about images and compositing. (See the article on Icon, this issue.) Learn Interface Builder. Try to write a program that does something interesting, visibly. Watch it. When you get bored, try to make it more interesting. Here's a slogan for the new fin de siecle : VR is NeXT!% [MODERATOR'S NOTE: Better late than never, and this was quite good. -- Bob Jacobson]