PETER LUNENFELD - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by PETER LUNENFELD
First, a caveat. The term ‘new media design ’ has the stink of the dot com bubble about it. New m... more First, a caveat. The term ‘new media design ’ has the stink of the dot com bubble about it. New media designers were the web wizards and interface gurus zipping down no-collar, hierarchy-free corridors on Razor scooters, grabbing double tall mocha lattes on the way to inventing the new, new thing. New media designers wore black, had goofy Pez dispensers on their desks, and laughed at the clueless squares in suits who were their clients. They chattered away about XML databases, NASDAQ, peer-to-peer (P2P), and Pets.com while watching their option packages and planning their ‘post-economic ’ futures. Or so went the fairy tale part of this story, where anyone with the ability to write HTML code and build a webpage labeled him or herself a ‘designer’. Then, poof... it was all over. Second, a reminder. Market euphorias and economic dystopias come and go, but where we are in the cycle does not in any way diminish the incredible impact that digital technologies and electronic networks have ...
journal of visual culture journal of visual culture
Fields of View
This collection grew our of "The Digital Dialectic: A Conference on the Convergence of Te chnolog... more This collection grew our of "The Digital Dialectic: A Conference on the Convergence of Te chnology, Media, and Theory," which was held the week end of August '5, 199'5, at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Califor nia. All of the essayists and the interactive architect Christian Moller gave presentations. The best conferences have the value of engaging the whole of the human bandwidth: the talks, the imagery (from slides, video, We b sites, CD-ROMs, hypertexts, and digital movies), and the discussions that go on before, during, and after the presentations themselves-and it is often here that the real pleasure and edification take place. For supporting the confer ence, and thereby this book, I would like to thank David Brown, Art Cen ter's president. Others at Art Center who deserve thanks include Linda
À medida que metodologias, ferramentas e habilidades digitais tornam-se crescentemente centrais p... more À medida que metodologias, ferramentas e habilidades digitais tornam-se crescentemente centrais para trabalhar nas humanidades, questões concernentes aos fundamentos, resultados de projetos, avaliações e design se tornaram urgentes. As especificações proporcionam um conjunto de critérios para guiar aqueles que realmente trabalham nas Humanidades Digitais, assim como aqueles a quem se pede para avaliar e financiar pesquisadores, projetos e iniciativas das Humanidades Digitais.Palavras-chave: Humanidades Digitais. Metodologias. Projetos. Avaliação.
Choice Reviews Online
Leonardo Roger F. Malina, series editor Designing Information Technology, edited by Richard Coyne... more Leonardo Roger F. Malina, series editor Designing Information Technology, edited by Richard Coyne, 1995 The Visual Mind, edited by Michele Emmer, 1994 Leonardo Almanac, edited by Craig Harris, 1994 Art and Innovation: The Xerox PARC Artist-in-Residence Program, ...
Choice Reviews Online
... Page 6. Page 7. Snap to Grid A User's Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures Peter L... more ... Page 6. Page 7. Snap to Grid A User's Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures Peter Lunenfeld The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England Page 8. ...
Afterimage, Mar 1, 2006
The World Wide Web as a medium and Web design as a creative practice are now both old enough to h... more The World Wide Web as a medium and Web design as a creative practice are now both old enough to have histories. The period between 2003 and 2005 saw various public celebrations of the first ten years of this quintessential new medium. But, when my turn to participate arrived at the first international symposium on the history of Web design, I began to think about revisionism at the very moment of historicizing. (1) By all rights, a history of Web design ought to run from the medium's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, to a hot designer of the moment--Joshua Davis from the United States, Yugo Nakamura from Japan, or a collective like Paris-based LeCielEstBleu--in other words, from the first screen shot of the Berners-Lee browser to a selection from Davis's Praystation. Signposts along the way would include the Web's movement out of academic communities and explosion into the public's consciousness when venture capitalists financed the development of the Netscape browser. Detours would lead through the perverse fun of the Webbys, a celebration of Web design that exploded from a small-scale lampoon of the Oscars in the back of a bar to a full scale media extravaganza that rivaled the Oscars five years later. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A history of Web design would have to discuss everything from the information overload of the original Yahoo homepage to the design degree zero of Google, from the net.artists at jodi.org to the dot.commers at a firm like Razorfish, from 256K twisted copper to wireless broadband, from primitive gifs to complex animations. Detailed histories of the evolution of the medium would follow Berners-Lee's development of the Web as a means to distribute physics papers at the Swiss research laboratory CERN, through the release of the first alpha version of the NCSA Mosaic browser for X-Windows in '93, and then on to the frenzy around the spinning off of Mosaic's development team, lead by Marc Andreessen, to form Netscape in 1994. They would discuss the browser wars; the successive releases of HTML, XML and XHTML; the move from static page design and tables to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS); the often invisible but no less crucial design features that enhanced searchability and ranking; server sided scripting that added acronyms like PHP, ASP, and JSP to the lexicon; debates over liquid versus fixed layout schemas; and that perennial favorite, the use and abuse of Flash; and the nascent origins of Web 2.0. [GRAPHIC OMITTED] THE OLD NEW ECONOMY All of the above and much more did indeed characterize the first decade of Web design, but that particular trajectory does not much interest me. I posit that the bounding figures are not programmers like Marc Andreessen, who formed Netscape in 1994, and designers like Amy Franceschini of Futurefarmers, but rather Mikhail Gorbachev and Osama bin Laden, and that we are talking about a long decade, the twelve years from 1989 to 2001. (2) Remember that Al-Qaeda was forged in the battles against Soviet troops, and that those same battles contributed to the bankrupting and breakup of the USSR. It was their respective actions such as the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and plotting the destruction of the Twin Towers that delineate the long first decade of Web design. One might object that the decade under discussion begins in 1994, when the Web moved from text-only to incorporating images (roughly from Netscape to now). I argue for a first decade that is twelve years long, beginning in 1989, the year that Berners-Lee first circulated his paper "Information Management: A Proposal," which "derives a solution based on a distributed hypertext system." (3) While it took him a few more years to launch the World Wide Web, this 1989 paper was the medium's foundation. The post-'89 period contained a multitude of features, but one unifying construct was the belief that after the fall of the Wall, and then the Soviet Union itself, not just communism, but all other countervailing forces against market capitalism were vanquished. …
Intelligent Environments, 1997
... They had created an imagescapea visual matrix for the space surrounding the users. 1 How are... more ... They had created an imagescapea visual matrix for the space surrounding the users. 1 How are we to characterize this phenomenon of castles at the flick of a switch? ... A rallying point for SI was the 441 Page 462. P. LUNENFELD concept of'unitary urbanism'(UU). ...
Journal of Visual Culture, 2014
To begin at the beginning, which is a tired trope rather than an exhausted meme, this piece was o... more To begin at the beginning, which is a tired trope rather than an exhausted meme, this piece was originally intended to be a cranky rant, a form best analyzed via genre study rather than memetics. As I pitched it to the editors, I would craft a narrative of decline, positing an originary moment with Richard Dawkins as both God and Adam, a religious metaphor entirely inappropriate for our most prominent atheist. In The Selfish Gene (1989), Dawkins proposed the meme as a replicating 'unit of culture', inspiring other scholars and researchers to develop a theory of memetics that was inherently intrinsic to the mind itself. In other words, the Lost Eden to which I would have referred was that period in which memes were to visible cultures as genes were to visible attributes of the organism-underlying structures of organization rather than the thing in and of itself. To develop my narrative of decline, I would have noted that as the very concept of memetics spread more broadly, a serpent entered the Garden, and that snake was an alternate theory of memes as extrinsic entities, external to the mind and slithering through the culture itself (here, the Devil is in the details, and my reptilian metaphors have no venom).
The digital dialectic: New essays on new media, 2001
Revista Passagens, 2011
Resumo O que podemos falar então da imagem? Durante a maior parte da história humana a sua reprod... more Resumo O que podemos falar então da imagem? Durante a maior parte da história humana a sua reprodução foi mais problemática do que a da palavra. Nem mesmo o maior dos tiranos propôs colocar em um único lugar todos os trabalhos de arte da humanidade–a ...
New Media & Society, 2004
Leonardo, 2012
... My thanks to Danielle Haase-Dubosc, Mihaela Bacou and Naby Avcioglu. ... If marketing campaig... more ... My thanks to Danielle Haase-Dubosc, Mihaela Bacou and Naby Avcioglu. ... If marketing campaigns and the lure of the exotic convinced these ragazzi to scarf down frozen, prefab, meat-and-cheese-product-bedecked circles and triangles of carbohydrates, what hope might there ...
First, a caveat. The term ‘new media design ’ has the stink of the dot com bubble about it. New m... more First, a caveat. The term ‘new media design ’ has the stink of the dot com bubble about it. New media designers were the web wizards and interface gurus zipping down no-collar, hierarchy-free corridors on Razor scooters, grabbing double tall mocha lattes on the way to inventing the new, new thing. New media designers wore black, had goofy Pez dispensers on their desks, and laughed at the clueless squares in suits who were their clients. They chattered away about XML databases, NASDAQ, peer-to-peer (P2P), and Pets.com while watching their option packages and planning their ‘post-economic ’ futures. Or so went the fairy tale part of this story, where anyone with the ability to write HTML code and build a webpage labeled him or herself a ‘designer’. Then, poof... it was all over. Second, a reminder. Market euphorias and economic dystopias come and go, but where we are in the cycle does not in any way diminish the incredible impact that digital technologies and electronic networks have ...
journal of visual culture journal of visual culture
Fields of View
This collection grew our of "The Digital Dialectic: A Conference on the Convergence of Te chnolog... more This collection grew our of "The Digital Dialectic: A Conference on the Convergence of Te chnology, Media, and Theory," which was held the week end of August '5, 199'5, at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Califor nia. All of the essayists and the interactive architect Christian Moller gave presentations. The best conferences have the value of engaging the whole of the human bandwidth: the talks, the imagery (from slides, video, We b sites, CD-ROMs, hypertexts, and digital movies), and the discussions that go on before, during, and after the presentations themselves-and it is often here that the real pleasure and edification take place. For supporting the confer ence, and thereby this book, I would like to thank David Brown, Art Cen ter's president. Others at Art Center who deserve thanks include Linda
À medida que metodologias, ferramentas e habilidades digitais tornam-se crescentemente centrais p... more À medida que metodologias, ferramentas e habilidades digitais tornam-se crescentemente centrais para trabalhar nas humanidades, questões concernentes aos fundamentos, resultados de projetos, avaliações e design se tornaram urgentes. As especificações proporcionam um conjunto de critérios para guiar aqueles que realmente trabalham nas Humanidades Digitais, assim como aqueles a quem se pede para avaliar e financiar pesquisadores, projetos e iniciativas das Humanidades Digitais.Palavras-chave: Humanidades Digitais. Metodologias. Projetos. Avaliação.
Choice Reviews Online
Leonardo Roger F. Malina, series editor Designing Information Technology, edited by Richard Coyne... more Leonardo Roger F. Malina, series editor Designing Information Technology, edited by Richard Coyne, 1995 The Visual Mind, edited by Michele Emmer, 1994 Leonardo Almanac, edited by Craig Harris, 1994 Art and Innovation: The Xerox PARC Artist-in-Residence Program, ...
Choice Reviews Online
... Page 6. Page 7. Snap to Grid A User's Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures Peter L... more ... Page 6. Page 7. Snap to Grid A User's Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures Peter Lunenfeld The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England Page 8. ...
Afterimage, Mar 1, 2006
The World Wide Web as a medium and Web design as a creative practice are now both old enough to h... more The World Wide Web as a medium and Web design as a creative practice are now both old enough to have histories. The period between 2003 and 2005 saw various public celebrations of the first ten years of this quintessential new medium. But, when my turn to participate arrived at the first international symposium on the history of Web design, I began to think about revisionism at the very moment of historicizing. (1) By all rights, a history of Web design ought to run from the medium's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, to a hot designer of the moment--Joshua Davis from the United States, Yugo Nakamura from Japan, or a collective like Paris-based LeCielEstBleu--in other words, from the first screen shot of the Berners-Lee browser to a selection from Davis's Praystation. Signposts along the way would include the Web's movement out of academic communities and explosion into the public's consciousness when venture capitalists financed the development of the Netscape browser. Detours would lead through the perverse fun of the Webbys, a celebration of Web design that exploded from a small-scale lampoon of the Oscars in the back of a bar to a full scale media extravaganza that rivaled the Oscars five years later. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A history of Web design would have to discuss everything from the information overload of the original Yahoo homepage to the design degree zero of Google, from the net.artists at jodi.org to the dot.commers at a firm like Razorfish, from 256K twisted copper to wireless broadband, from primitive gifs to complex animations. Detailed histories of the evolution of the medium would follow Berners-Lee's development of the Web as a means to distribute physics papers at the Swiss research laboratory CERN, through the release of the first alpha version of the NCSA Mosaic browser for X-Windows in '93, and then on to the frenzy around the spinning off of Mosaic's development team, lead by Marc Andreessen, to form Netscape in 1994. They would discuss the browser wars; the successive releases of HTML, XML and XHTML; the move from static page design and tables to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS); the often invisible but no less crucial design features that enhanced searchability and ranking; server sided scripting that added acronyms like PHP, ASP, and JSP to the lexicon; debates over liquid versus fixed layout schemas; and that perennial favorite, the use and abuse of Flash; and the nascent origins of Web 2.0. [GRAPHIC OMITTED] THE OLD NEW ECONOMY All of the above and much more did indeed characterize the first decade of Web design, but that particular trajectory does not much interest me. I posit that the bounding figures are not programmers like Marc Andreessen, who formed Netscape in 1994, and designers like Amy Franceschini of Futurefarmers, but rather Mikhail Gorbachev and Osama bin Laden, and that we are talking about a long decade, the twelve years from 1989 to 2001. (2) Remember that Al-Qaeda was forged in the battles against Soviet troops, and that those same battles contributed to the bankrupting and breakup of the USSR. It was their respective actions such as the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and plotting the destruction of the Twin Towers that delineate the long first decade of Web design. One might object that the decade under discussion begins in 1994, when the Web moved from text-only to incorporating images (roughly from Netscape to now). I argue for a first decade that is twelve years long, beginning in 1989, the year that Berners-Lee first circulated his paper "Information Management: A Proposal," which "derives a solution based on a distributed hypertext system." (3) While it took him a few more years to launch the World Wide Web, this 1989 paper was the medium's foundation. The post-'89 period contained a multitude of features, but one unifying construct was the belief that after the fall of the Wall, and then the Soviet Union itself, not just communism, but all other countervailing forces against market capitalism were vanquished. …
Intelligent Environments, 1997
... They had created an imagescapea visual matrix for the space surrounding the users. 1 How are... more ... They had created an imagescapea visual matrix for the space surrounding the users. 1 How are we to characterize this phenomenon of castles at the flick of a switch? ... A rallying point for SI was the 441 Page 462. P. LUNENFELD concept of'unitary urbanism'(UU). ...
Journal of Visual Culture, 2014
To begin at the beginning, which is a tired trope rather than an exhausted meme, this piece was o... more To begin at the beginning, which is a tired trope rather than an exhausted meme, this piece was originally intended to be a cranky rant, a form best analyzed via genre study rather than memetics. As I pitched it to the editors, I would craft a narrative of decline, positing an originary moment with Richard Dawkins as both God and Adam, a religious metaphor entirely inappropriate for our most prominent atheist. In The Selfish Gene (1989), Dawkins proposed the meme as a replicating 'unit of culture', inspiring other scholars and researchers to develop a theory of memetics that was inherently intrinsic to the mind itself. In other words, the Lost Eden to which I would have referred was that period in which memes were to visible cultures as genes were to visible attributes of the organism-underlying structures of organization rather than the thing in and of itself. To develop my narrative of decline, I would have noted that as the very concept of memetics spread more broadly, a serpent entered the Garden, and that snake was an alternate theory of memes as extrinsic entities, external to the mind and slithering through the culture itself (here, the Devil is in the details, and my reptilian metaphors have no venom).
The digital dialectic: New essays on new media, 2001
Revista Passagens, 2011
Resumo O que podemos falar então da imagem? Durante a maior parte da história humana a sua reprod... more Resumo O que podemos falar então da imagem? Durante a maior parte da história humana a sua reprodução foi mais problemática do que a da palavra. Nem mesmo o maior dos tiranos propôs colocar em um único lugar todos os trabalhos de arte da humanidade–a ...
New Media & Society, 2004
Leonardo, 2012
... My thanks to Danielle Haase-Dubosc, Mihaela Bacou and Naby Avcioglu. ... If marketing campaig... more ... My thanks to Danielle Haase-Dubosc, Mihaela Bacou and Naby Avcioglu. ... If marketing campaigns and the lure of the exotic convinced these ragazzi to scarf down frozen, prefab, meat-and-cheese-product-bedecked circles and triangles of carbohydrates, what hope might there ...