The Recominate Form

Belgium: Those dirty chocolate making, stuck up Europeans with a flare for hate are poisoning our sweet and innocent American citizens. Belgium has a chip on its shoulders and a grudge against America due to our powerhouse status among other countries. Belgium has always been a small little country with very little respect, now however they are making their move to replace America as the worlds most feared and respected super power. How are they going to do this you ask? Well they sure don't have the military strength, so Belgium officials have concocted a plan to slowly kill off Americans from the inside using no physical force: Chocolate. A Belgium ex-patriot who was part of the initial chocolate-tainting-operation (code named Brown Death) has defected from Belgium after his American wife conviced him that life across the pond was more fun and eventful. He has made contact with local law enforcement and has revealed the devious Belgium plot. Top ranking Belgium officials have partnered with all of the major chocolate producers in the country and have instructed them to inject any and all chocolate bound for the states with deadly arsenic. There have already been a dozen chocolate related fatalities and officials are now deciding that military force is necessary to stop the plague.

Invention of a Medium

Do you think it is possible that Alan Kay knew what impact the Dynabook would have on human culture?

It seems to me that Alan Kay knew exactly what he was doing and what the impact would be.

"What would happen in a world in which everyone had a Dynabook?"

Kay goes into detail about how people of different professions could benefit from the use of a 'tool' that has the capability to allow "any owner to mold and channel its power to his own needs, then a new kind of medium would have been created: a metamedium, whose contents would be a range of already-existing and not-yet-invented media."

He had the foresight to know that a graphical user interface was necessary for the computer to take off globally and that new mediums were going to be invented that would facilitate his creation.

Autonomous Agents

Lynn Hershman Leeson is a 68 year old multimedia artist out of California. She has done work with painting, drawing, sculpting, performing, photography, cyber art, robotics, artificial intelligence, and also has made eight full length feature films: Conceiving Ada, Teknolust, and Strange Culture to name a few. She holds a bachelor's degree in Education, Museum Administration and Fine Arts from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and a Master of Fine Arts from San Francisco State University. She is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis, and an A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.

In 1972, she exhibited several wax figures, accompanied by an audiotape of breathing and voices, at the University Art Museum in Berkeley. The museum abruptly canceled the exhibition, claiming that audio had no place in an art museum. This leads me to beg the question: Does audio have a place in art museums? But I digress.

Hershman Leeson’s latest work is an exhibit at the University of Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery entitled Autonomous Agents: The Art and Films of Lynn Hershamn Leeson. This is her first exhibit in the UK and will mainly be a showcase of all of her work, including drawings, paintings, and screenings or her films. Hersman Leeson’s focus is on the concept of “self through work, examining the relationships between the body and machines and the shifting ideas of the real and the virtual”. Her art is a cornucopia of self exploration pieces that aim at portraying the true state of humanity. This collection is sure to do just that. It is going on from now until December 12th in Britain, so if you're across the pond anytime soon, go check it out.

Here is a clip from her movie Teknolust: