SIGCHI San Francisco Bay Area Chapter: Monthly Program

Full event details: http://www.baychi.org/calendar/20061114/

From Counterculture To Cyberculture: How The Whole Earth Catalog Brought Us Virtual Community
Fred Turner, Assistant Professor, Stanford Department of Communication

In 1993 just as the Internet was swinging into public view, journalist Howard Rheingold brought a new phrase to public discussions of computer-mediated communication: virtual community. Within months, the phrase had spread from researchers to programmers to corporate CEOs, and virtual communities seemed poised to become one of the defining social formations of the Internet age.

Yet the notion of virtual community substantially predates the advent of networked computing. This presentation will trace the origins of the concept within the Whole Earth network of publications and people. It will show how the rhetoric of virtual community first emerged as what historian Peter Galison has called a "contact language" on one of the most influential computer networks of the 1980s, the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (the WELL).

It will then demonstrate that the communities who used the early WELL system and the system itself embodied networks and networking habits of mind first developed around the Whole Earth Catalog some twenty years before. Thanks to these connections, Rheingold and other WELL users helped transform a countercultural vision of community into a powerful symbolic resource with which they—and we—have continued to frame our understandings of technological and economic change.

Fred Turner is an assistant professor and the director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. He is the author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory (Anchor/Doubleday, 1996/second edition, University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

Before coming to Stanford, he taught Communications at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and MIT's Sloan School of Management. He also worked for ten years as a journalist. He wrote for a variety of newspapers and magazines, including the Boston Phoenix, the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, and the Pacific News Service. During the academic year 2007-2008, he will be a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Be the Ball
Greg Niemeyer and Joe McKay, UC Berkeley

In their creative research and artwork, Joe McKay and Greg Niemeyer explore play as a key method for connecting world and mind. They consider all games as serious games, as they all model modes of interaction between players and the gamespace, and allow players to test diverse strategies for "being in the world". Game interfaces define the physical aspect of such interactions and shape the gameplay experience. Niemeyer and McKay discuss how specific interfaces in their projects define gameplay. They also ask how their projects subvert traditional expectations of interaction, and allow players to experience alternative ways of interacting in real life. After reviewing their separate projects The Color Game, Big Ups, Oxygen Flute, and Good Morning Flowers, they will demonstrate their joint effort, Be the Ball, a game about focus, balance, and being the ball.

Joe McKay is an artist who makes work with and about digital culture. McKay grew up in Ontario, Canada and went to school at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. In 2001 McKay participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program and had a two-person collaborative exhibition with Kristin Lucas titled "The Electric Donut." He has shown his work in the Berkshire museum, the National Gallery of Canada, the ICA in San Jose, an the New Museum. Currently Joe is pursuing his MFA at UC Berkeley.

Greg Niemeyer was born in Switzerland in 1967. Niemeyer studied classics and photography. He started working with new media when he arrived in the Bay Area in 1992 and he received his MFA from Stanford University in New Media in 1997. At the same time, he founded the Stanford University Digital Art Center, which he directed until 2001, when he was appointed at UC Berkeley as assistant professor for New Media. At UC Berkeley, he is involved in the development of the Center for New Media, focusing on the critical analysis of the impact of new media on human experiences. Greg & Joe are currently co-teaching the course "Foundations of American Cyberculture," presently being taught at UC Berkeley. The lectures from this course are available as podcasts.

His creative work focuses on the mediation between humans as individuals and humans as a collective through technological means, and emphasizes playful responses to technology. His most recognized projects were Gravity (Cooper Union, NYC, 1997), PING (SFMOMA, 2001), Oxygen Flute (SJMA, 2002), Organum (Pacific Film Archive, 2003), Ping 2.0 (Paris, La Villette Numerique, 2004), Organum Playtest (2005), and Good Morning Flowers (SFIFF 2006, Townhouse Gallery, Cairo, Egypt, 2006).