Academic literature on the topic 'Art metal-work, Gothic'

"Harmony of Positive and Negative Spaciousness in Ingo Glass sculpture. The aim of this article is to discuss issues regarding the ways spaciousness and harmony of positive and negative surfaces in Inglo Glass sculpture are valorized. The artist was born in 1941 in Timișoara, he studied at the Traditional School of Arts from Lugoj and then he attended the university in Cluj. Between 1967-71 he worked as curator at the Museum of Contemporary Arts from Galați and he established connections with visual artists from all over the country. Later on, between 1972-73 he worked as teaching assistant at the Architecture University from Bucharest and then he became cultural consultant at the German Culture House Friedrich Schiller. During this period, Ingo Glass created a Constructivist Art with metal structures developed vertically following the spatial pattern specific to the great Gothic cathedrals– the most famous work Septenarius was built in 1976 on the Danube boardwalk from Galați. Being forced by the political circumstances from the Socialist Republic of Romania, he emigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1979, he moved to München where he worked for the Municipal Art Gallery and where he was integrated in the group of Concrete-Constuctivist Art artists. After 1989 he came back to Romania with different exhibitions and he created public monuments in Galați, Timișoara, Moinești and Lugoj. Then, in 1992 he presented his PhD thesis about the influence of Constantin Brâncuși Art over the 20th century sculpture. Between 1989-1998 the artist crystallized an original visual concept based on the usage of the basic geometric shapes in conjunction with the primary colours. Ingo Glass upgraded Bauhaus theory and he associated the square with blue, the triangle with yellow and the circle with red. By using shapes and primary colours the artists creates Concrete Art, a new symbolic universe, purely geometrical, the harmony of his entire work being given by the proportion and link between full and empty spaces. Expanded spaciousness specific to the Constructivst Art phase experiments the architecture-sculpture link and the monumentality of the metallic structures encourages the entrance to the central core of works. The open, non-material dimension forms the main volume of the sculpture, the empty space dominates the full shape and it outlines the effects of an unrated and irrational spaciousness. Balanced spaciousness specific to the Concrete Art phase experiments geometrical combinations, based on the basic shapes in positive and negative intersections, by the spaciousness and non-spaciousness link, the pace between full and empty spaces. The usage of the three basic geometrical shapes also influenced the combining vocabulary of these elements, and it even ensured the ordering and deduction of the empty space. The utopia of basic forms expresses tendencies towards positive irreductible forms of energy or negative forms through non-materiality, where the concepts of mass, weight, space and time are added. In each of his works, the artist used a proportion between the elements of the composition through a rational interpretation stimulated by the achievement of a geometrical order as the essential basis of tasks. The relation between positive and negative spaciousness appears constantly in the sculpture of the last century and the rhytm and sequence of its spatial effects are determined by a sense of proportion that involves an aesthetic of proportion. Thus, we can definitely say that the work of the artist Ingo Glass originally captures all these aspects of Contemporary Art. Keywords: sculpture, spaciousness, Ingo Glass, constructivism, Concrete Art. "

IntroductionThis paper addresses two separate notions of embodiment – western maternal embodiment and art making as a form of embodied critical resistance. It takes as its subject breeder; my unpublished five minute video installation from 2012, which synthesises these two separate conceptual framings of embodiment as a means to visually and conceptually rupture dominant ideologies surrounding Australian motherhood. Emerging from a paradoxical landscape of fear, loathing and desire, breeder is my dark satirical take on ambivalent myths surrounding suburban Australian motherhood. Portraying my white, heavily pregnant body breeding, cooking and consuming pink, sugar-coated butterflies, breeder renders literal the Australian mother as both idealised nation-builder and vilified, self-indulgent abuser. A feminine reification of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Children, breeder attempts to make visible my own grapplings with maternal ambivalence, to complicate even further, the already strained position of motherhood within the Australian cultural imaginary. Employing the mediums of video and performance to visually manifest an ambivalent protagonist who displays both nurturing maternal ideals and murderous inclinations, breeder pushes contradictory maternal expectations to their breaking point and challengingly offers the following proposition: “This is what you want; but what you’ll get is so much more than you bargained for” (Grosz 136). Drawing upon critical, feminist theorising that challenges idealised views of motherhood; accounts of motherhood by mothers themselves; as well as my own personal grapplings with maternal expectations, this paper weaves reflexive writing with textual analysis to explore how an art-based methodology of embodied critical resistance can problematise representations of motherhood within Australia. By visualising the disjuncture between dominant representations of motherhood that have saturated Australian mainstream media since the late 1990s and the complex ambivalent reality of some women’s actual experiences of mothering, this paper discusses how breeder’s intimate portrayal of maternal domesticity at the limits of tolerability, critically resists socially acceptable mothering practices by satirising the cultural construct of motherhood as a means “to use it, deform it, and make it groan and protest” (Nietzsche qtd. in Gutting).Contradictory Maternal KnowledgeImages of motherhood are all around us; communicating ideals and stereotypes that tell us how mothers should feel, think and act. But these images and the concepts of motherhood that underpin them are full of contradictions. Cultural representations of the idealised and sometimes “yummy mummy” - middle class, attractive, healthy, sexy and heterosexual – (see Fraser; Johnson), contrast with depictions of “bad” mothers, leading to motherhood being simultaneously idealised and demonised within the popular press (Bullen et al.; McRobbie, Top Girls; McRobbie, In the Aftermath; McRobbie, Reflections on Feminism; Walkerdine et al.). Mothers own accounts of motherhood reflect these unsettling contradictions (Miller; Thomson et al.; Wilkinson). Claiming the maternal experience is both “heaven and hell” due to the daily experience of irreconcilable and contradictory feelings (Coward), mothers (myself included), silently struggle between feelings of extreme love and opposing feelings of failure, despair and hate as we get caught up in trying to achieve a set of ideals that promulgate standards of perfection that are beyond our reach. Surrounded by images of motherhood that do not resonate with the contradictory nature of the lived maternal experience, mothers are “torn in two” as we desperately try to reconcile or find absolution for maternal emotions that dominant cultural representations of motherhood render unacceptable. According to Roszika Parker, this complicated and contradictory experience where a mother has both loving and hating feelings for her child is that of maternal ambivalence; a form of exquisite suffering that oscillates between the overwhelming affect of blissful gratification and the raw edges of bitter resentment (Parker 1). As Parker states, maternal ambivalence refers to:Those fleeting (or not so fleeting) feelings of hatred for a child that can grip a mother, the moment of recoil from a much loved body, the desire to abandon, to smash the untouched plate of food in a toddler’s face, to yank a child’s arm while crossing the road, scrub too hard with a face cloth, change the lock on an adolescent or the fantasy of hurling a howling baby out of the window (5).However, it is not only feelings of hatred that stir up ambivalence in the mother, so too can the overwhelming intensity of love itself render the rush of ambivalence so surprising and so painful. Commenting on the extreme contradictory emotions that fill a mother and how not only excessive hatred, but excessive love can turn dangerously fatal, Parker turns to Simone De Beauvoir’s idea of “carnal plenitude”; that is, where the child elicits from the mother, the emotion of domination; where the child becomes the “other” who is both prey and double (30). For Parker, De Beauvoir’s “carnal plenitude” is imaged by mothers in a myriad of ways, from a desire to gobble up the child, to feelings of wanting to gather the child into a fatal smothering hug. Commenting on her own unsettling love/hate relationship with her child, Adrienne Rich describes her experiences of maternal ambivalences as “the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves and blissful gratification and tenderness” (363). Unable to come to terms with this paradox at the core of the unfolding process of motherhood, our culture defends itself against this illogical ambivalence in the mother by separating the good nurturing mother from the bad neglectful mother in an attempt to deny the fact that they are one and the same. Resulting in a culture that either denigrates or idealises mothers, we are constantly presented with images of the good perfect nurturing mother and her murderous alter ego; the bad fatal mother who neglects and smothers. This means that how a mother feels about mothering or the meaning it has for her, is heavily determined by cultural representations of motherhood. Arguing for a creative transformation of the maternal that breaches the mutual exclusivities that separate motherhood, I am called to action by Susan Rubin Suleiman, who writes (quoting psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch): “Mothers don’t write, they are written” (Suleiman 5). As a visual attempt to negotiate, translate and thus “write” my lived experience of Australian motherhood, breeder gives voice to the raw material of contradictory (and often taboo experiences) surrounding maternal embodiment and subjectivity. Hijacking and redeploying contradictory understandings and representations of Australian motherhood to push maternal ideals to their breaking point, breeder seeks to create a kind of “mother trouble” that challenges the disjuncture between dominant social constructions of motherhood designed to keep us assigned to our proper place. Viscerally embracing the reality that much of life with small children revolves around loss of control and disintegration of physical boundaries, breeder visually explores the complex and contradictory performances surrounding lived experiences of mothering within Australia to complicate even further the already strained position of western maternal embodiment.Situated Maternal KnowledgeOver the last decade and a half, women’s bodies and their capacity to reproduce have become centre stage in the unfolding drama of Australian economic policy. In 1999 fears surrounding dwindling birth-rates and less future tax revenue, led then Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett to address a number of exclusive private girls’ schools. Making Australia-wide headlines, Kennett urged these affluent young women to abandon their desire for a university degree and instead invited them to consider motherhood as the ultimate career choice (Dever). In 2004, John Howard’s Liberal government made headlines as they announced the new maternity allowance; a $3000 lump-sum financial incentive for women to leave work and have babies. Ending this announcement by urging the assembled gathering of mostly male reporters to go home and have “one for the Dad, one for the Mum and one for the Country” (Baird and Cutcher 103), Federal Treasurer Peter Costello made a last ditch effort to save Baby Boomers from their imminent pensionless doom. Failing to come to terms with the impending saturation of the retirement market without the appropriate tax payer support, the Liberal Government turned baby-making into the ultimate Patriotic act as they saw in women bodies, the key to prevent Australia’s looming economic crisis. However, not all women’s bodies were considered up to the job of producing the longed for “Good tax-paying Citizen” (Tyler). Kennett only visited exclusive private girls’ schools (Ferrier), headhunting only the highest calibre of affluent breeders. Blue-collar inter-mingling was to be adamantly discouraged. Costello’s 2004 “baby bonus” catch-cry not only caused international ire, but also implicitly relegated the duty of child-bearing patriotism to a normalised heterosexual, nuclear family milieu. Unwed or lesbian mothers need not apply. Finally, as government spokespeople repeatedly proclaimed that the new maternity allowance was not income tested, this suggested that the target nation-builder breeder demographic was the higher than average income earner. Let’s get it straight people – only highly skilled, high IQ’s, heterosexual, wedded, young, white women were required in this exclusive breeding program (see Allen and Osgood; Skeggs; Tyler). And if the point hadn’t already been made perfectly clear, newspaper tabloids, talkback radio and current affairs programs all over the country were recruited to make sure the public knew exactly what type of mother Australia was looking for. Out of control young, jobless single mothers hit the headlines as fears abounded that they were breeding into oblivion. An inherently selfish and narcissistic lot, you could be forgiven for thinking that Australia was running rampant with so-called bogan single mothers, who left their babies trapped in hot airless cars in casino carparks all over the country as they spent their multiple “baby bonus’” on booze, ciggies, LCD’s and gambling (see Milne; O’Connor; Simpson and Dowling). Sucking the economy dry as they leeched good tax-payer dollars from Centrelink, these undesirables were the mothers Australia neither needed nor wanted. Producing offspring relegated to the category of bludgerhood before they could even crawl, these mothers became the punching bag for the Australian cultural imaginary as newspaper headlines screamed “Thou Shalt Not Breed” (Gordon). Seen as the embodiment of horror regarding the ever out-of-control nature of women’s bodies, these undesirable mothers materialised out of a socio-political landscape that although idealised women’s bodies as Australia’s economic saviour, also feared their inability to be managed and contained. Hoarding their capacity to reproduce for their own selfish narcissistic desires, these white trash mothers became the horror par excellence within the Australian cultural imaginary as they were publically regarded as the vilified evil alter-ego of the good, respectable white affluent young mother Australian policy makers were after. Forums all over the country were inundated. “Yes,” the dominant voices seemed to proclaim: “We want to build our population. We need more tax-paying citizens. But we only want white, self-less, nurturing, affluent mothers. We want women who can breed us moral upstanding subjects. We do not want lazy good for nothing moochers.” Emerging from this paradoxical maternal landscape of fear, loathing and desire, breeder is a visual and performative manifestation of my own inability to come to terms with the idealisation and denigration of motherhood within Australia. Involving a profound recognition that the personal is still the political, I not only attempt to visually trace the relationship between popular Australian cultural formations and individual experiences, but also to visually “write” my own embodied grapplings with maternal ambivalence. Following the premise that “critique without resistance is empty and resistance without critique is blind” (Hoy 6), I find art practice to be a critically situated and embodied act that can openly resist the power of dominant ideologies by highlighting maternal corporeal transgressions. A creative destablising action, I utilise the mediums of video and performance within breeder to explore personal, historical and culturally situated expectations of motherhood within Australia as a means to subvert dominant ideologies of motherhood within the Australian cultural imaginary. Performing Maternal KnowledgeReworking Goya’s Romantic Gothic vision of fatherhood in Saturn Devouring His Children, breeder is a five minute two-screen video performance that puts an ironic twist to the “good” and “bad” myths of Australian motherhood. Depicting myself as the young white heavily pregnant protagonist breeding monarch butterflies in my suburban backyard, sugar-coating, cooking and then eating them, breeder uses an exaggerated kitsch aesthetic to render literal the Australian mother as both idealistic nation-builder and self-indulgent abuser. Selfishly hoarding my breeding potential for myself, luxuriating and devouring my “offspring” for my own pleasure and delight rather than for the common good, breeder simultaneously defies and is complicit with motherhood expectations within the suburban Australian imaginary. Filmed in my backyard in the southern suburbs of Perth, Western Australia, breeder manifests my own maternal ambivalence and deliberately complicates the dichotomous and strained position motherhood holds in western society. Breeder is presented as a two screen video installation. The left screen is a fast-paced, brightly coloured, jump-cut narrative with a pregnant protagonist (myself). It has three main scenes or settings: garden, kitchen and terrace. The right screen is a slow-moving flow of images that shows the entire monarch butterfly breeding cycle in detail; close ups of eggs slowly turning into caterpillars, caterpillars creating cocoons and the gradual opening of wings as butterflies emerge from cocoons. All the while, the metamorphic cycle is aided by the pregnant protagonist, who cares for them until she sets them free of their breeding cage. In the left screen, apricot roses, orange trees, yellow hibiscus bushes, lush green lawns, a swimming pool and an Aussie backyard garden shed are glimpsed as the pregnant protagonist runs, jumps and sneaks up on butterflies while brandishing a red-handled butterfly net; dressed in red high heels and a white lace frock. Bunnies with pink bows jump, dogs in pink collars bark and a very young boy dressed in a navy-blue sailor suit all make cameo appearances as large monarch butterflies are collected and placed inside a child’s cherry red insect container. In a jump-cut transition, the female protagonist appears in a stark white kitchen; now dressed in a bright pink and apricot floral apron and baby-pink hair ribbon tied in a bow in her blonde ponytail. Standing behind the kitchen bench, she carefully measures sugar into a bowl. She then adds pink food colouring into the crystal white sugar, turning it into a bright pink concoction. Cracking eggs and separating them, she whisks the egg whites to form soft marshmallow peaks. Dipping a paint brush into the egg whites, she paints the fluffy mixture onto the butterflies (now dead), which are laid out on a well-used metal biscuit tray. Using her fingers to sprinkle the bright pink sugar concoction onto the butterflies, she then places them into the oven to bake and stands back with a smile. In the third and final scene, the female protagonist sits down at a table in a garden terrace in front of French-styled doors. Set for high tea with an antique floral tea pot and cup, lace table cloth and petit fours, she pours herself a cup of tea. Adding a teaspoon of sugar, she stirs and then selects a strawberry tart from a three-tiered high-tea stand that holds brightly iced cupcakes, cherry friands, tiny lemon meringue pies, sweet little strawberry tarts and pink sugar coated butterflies. Munching her way through tarts, pies, friands and cupcakes, she finally licks her lips and fuchsia tipped fingers and then carefully chooses a pink sugar coated butterfly. Close ups of her crimson coated mouth show her licking the pink sugar-crumbs from lips and fingers as she silently devours the butterfly. Leaning back in chair, she smiles, then picks up a pink leather bound book and relaxes as she begins to read herself into the afternoon. Screen fades to black. ConclusionAs a mother I am all fragmented, contradictory; full of ambivalence, love, guilt and shame. After seventeen years and five children, you would think that I would be used to this space. Instead, it is a space that I battle to come to terms with each and every day. So how to strategically negotiate engrained codes of maternity and embrace the complexities of embodied maternal knowledge? Indeed, how to speak of the difficulties and incomparable beauties of the maternal without having those variously inflected and complex experiences turn into clichés of what enduring motherhood is supposed to be? Visually and performatively grappling with my own fallout from mothering ideals and expectations where sometimes all I feel I am left with is “a monster of selfishness and intolerance” (Rich 363), breeder materialises my own experiences with maternal ambivalence and my inability to reconcile or negotiate multiple contradictory identities into a single maternal position. Ashamed of my self, my body, my obsessions, my anger, my hatred, my rage, my laughter, my sorrow and most of all my oscillation between a complete and utter desire to kill each and every one of my children and an overwhelming desire to gobble them all up, I make art work that is embedded in the grime and grittiness of my everyday life as a young mother living in the southern suburbs of Western Australia. A life that is most often mundane, sometimes sad, embarrassing, rude and occasionally heartbreaking. A life filled with such simple joy and such complicated sorrow. A life that in reality, is anything but manageable and contained. Although this is my experience, I know that I am not the only one. As an artist I engage in the embodied and critically resistant practice of sampling from my “mother” identities in order to bring out multiple, conflictive responses that provocatively encourage new ways of thinking and acknowledging embodied maternal knowledge. Although claims abound that this results in a practice that is “too personal” or “too specific” (Liss xv), I do not believe that this in fact risks reifying essentialism. Despite much feminist debate over the years regarding essentialist/social constructivist positions, I would still rather use my body as a site of embodied knowledge then rhetorically give it up. Acting as a disruption and challenge to the concepts of idealised or denigrated maternal embodiment, the images and performances of motherhood in breeder then, are more than simple acknowledgements of the reality of the good and bad mother, or acts reclaiming an identity that they taught me to despise (Cliff) or rebelling against having to be a "woman" at all. Instead, breeder is a lucid and explicit declaration of intent that politely refuses to keep every maternal body in its place.References Allen, Kim, and Jane Osgood. “Young Women Negotiating Maternal Subjectivities: The Significance of Social Class.” Studies in the Maternal. 1.2 (2009). 30 July 2012 ‹www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk›.Almond, Barbara. The Monster Within. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.Baird, Marian, and Leanne Cutcher. “’One for the Father, One for the Mother and One for the Country': An Examination of the Construction of Motherhood through the Prism of Paid Maternity Leave.” Hecate 31.2 (2005): 103-113. Bullen, Elizabeth, Jane Kenway, and Valerie Hey. “New Labour, Social Exclusion and Educational Risk Management: The Case of ‘Gymslip Mums’.” British Educational Research Journal. 26.4 (2000): 441-456.Cliff, Michelle. Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise. Michigan: Persephone Press, 1980.Coward, Ross. “The Heaven and Hell of Mothering: Mothering and Ambivalence in the Mass Media.” In Wendy Hollway and Brid Featherston, eds. Mothering and Ambivalence. London: Routledge, 1997.Dever, Maryanne. “Baby Talk: The Howard Government, Families and the Politics of Difference.” Hecate 31.2 (2005): 45-61Ferrier, Carole. “So, What Is to Be Done about the Family?” Australian Humanities Review (2006): 39-40.Fraser, Liz. The Yummy Mummy Survival Guide. New York: Harper Collins, 2007.Gutting, Gary. Foucault: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.Gordon, Josh. “Thou Shalt Not Breed.” The Age, 9 May 2010.Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1986.Hoy, David C. Critical Resistance. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005.Johnson, Anna. The Yummy Mummy Manifesto: Baby, Beauty, Body and Bliss. New York: Ballantine, 2009.Liss, Andrea. Feminist Art and the Maternal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.McRobbie, Angela. “Top Girls: Young Women and the Post-Feminist Sexual Contract.” Cultural Studies. 21. 4. (2007): 718-737.---. In the Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. London: Sage. 2008.---. “Reflections on Feminism, Immaterial Labour and the Post-Fordist Regime.” New Formations 70 (Winter 2011): 60-76. 30 July 2012 ‹http://dx.doi.org.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/10.3898/NEWF.70.04.2010›.Miller, Tina. Making Sense of Motherhood: A Narrative Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2005.Milne, Glenn. “Baby Bonus Rethink.” The Courier Mail 11 Nov. 2006. 30 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/national-old/baby-bonus-rethink/story-e6freooo-1111112507517›.O’Connor, Mike. “Baby Bonus Budget Handouts a Luxury We Can Ill Afford.” The Courier Mai. 5 Dec. 2011. 30 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/handouts-luxury-we-can-ill-afford/story-e6frerdf-1226213654447›.Parker, Roszika. Mother Love/Mother Hate, London: Virago Press, 1995.Rich, Adrienne. “Anger and Tenderness.” In M. Davey, ed. Mother Reader. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001.Simpson, Kirsty, and Jason Dowling. “Gambling Soars in Child Bonus Week”. The Sunday Age Aug. 2004. 28 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/handouts-luxury-we-can-ill-afford/story-e6frerdf-1226213654447›.Skeggs, Beverly. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage, 1997.Suleiman, Susan. “Writing and Motherhood,” Mother Reader Ed. Moyra Davey. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001. 113-138Thomson, Rachel, Mary Jane Kehily, Lucy Hadfield, and Sue Sharpe. Making Modern Mothers. Bristol: Policy Press, 2011. 30 July 2012 ‹http://www.policypress.co.uk/display.asp?K=9781847426055&sf1=keyword&st1=motherhood&m=1&dc=16›.Tyler, Imogen. “’Chav Mum, Chav Scum’: Class Disgust in Contemporary Britain.” Feminist Media Studies 8.2. (2008): 17-34. 31 July 2012 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14680770701824779›.Walkerdine, Valerie, Helen Lucey, and Melody June. Growing Up Girl: Psychosocial Explorations of Gender and Class. London: Palgrave. 2001. Wilkinson, Tony. Uncertain Surrenders: The Coexistence of Beauty and Menace in the Maternal Bond and Photography. PhD thesis. Perth: Edith Cowan University, 2012. 31 July 2012 ‹http://ro.ecu.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1458&context=theses›.

Introduction In The World Is Not a Desktop, Marc Weisner, the principal scientist and manager of the computer science laboratory at Xerox PARC, stated that, “a good tool is an invisible tool.” Weisner cited eyeglasses as an ideal technology because with spectacles, he argued, “you look at the world, not the eyeglasses.” Although Weisner’s work at PARC played an important role in the creation of the field of “ubiquitous computing”, his ideal is widespread in many areas of technology design. Through repetition, and by design, technologies blend into our lives. While technologies, and communications technologies in particular, have a powerful mediating impact, many of the most pervasive effects are taken for granted by most users. When technology works smoothly, its nature and effects are invisible. But technologies do not always work smoothly. A tiny fracture or a smudge on a lens renders glasses quite visible to the wearer. The Microsoft Windows “Blue Screen of Death” on subway in Seoul (Photo credit Wikimedia Commons). Anyone who has seen a famous “Blue Screen of Death”—the iconic signal of a Microsoft Windows crash—on a public screen or terminal knows how errors can thrust the technical details of previously invisible systems into view. Nobody knows that their ATM runs Windows until the system crashes. Of course, the operating system chosen for a sign or bank machine has important implications for its users. Windows, or an alternative operating system, creates affordances and imposes limitations. Faced with a crashed ATM, a consumer might ask herself if, with its rampant viruses and security holes, she should really trust an ATM running Windows? Technologies make previously impossible actions possible and many actions easier. In the process, they frame and constrain possible actions. They mediate. Communication technologies allow users to communicate in new ways but constrain communication in the process. In a very fundamental way, communication technologies define what their users can say, to whom they say it, and how they can say it—and what, to whom, and how they cannot. Humanities scholars understand the power, importance, and limitations of technology and technological mediation. Weisner hypothesised that, “to understand invisibility the humanities and social sciences are especially valuable, because they specialise in exposing the otherwise invisible.” However, technology activists, like those at the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), understand this power of technology as well. Largely constituted by technical members, both organisations, like humanists studying technology, have struggled to communicate their messages to a less-technical public. Before one can argue for the importance of individual control over who owns technology, as both FSF and EFF do, an audience must first appreciate the power and effect that their technology and its designers have. To understand the power that technology has on its users, users must first see the technology in question. Most users do not. Errors are under-appreciated and under-utilised in their ability to reveal technology around us. By painting a picture of how certain technologies facilitate certain mistakes, one can better show how technology mediates. By revealing errors, scholars and activists can reveal previously invisible technologies and their effects more generally. Errors can reveal technology—and its power and can do so in ways that users of technologies confront daily and understand intimately. The Misprinted Word Catalysed by Elizabeth Eisenstein, the last 35 years of print history scholarship provides both a richly described example of technological change and an analysis of its effects. Unemphasised in discussions of the revolutionary social, economic, and political impact of printing technologies is the fact that, especially in the early days of a major technological change, the artifacts of print are often quite similar to those produced by a new printing technology’s predecessors. From a reader’s purely material perspective, books are books; the press that created the book is invisible or irrelevant. Yet, while the specifics of print technologies are often hidden, they are often exposed by errors. While the shift from a scribal to print culture revolutionised culture, politics, and economics in early modern Europe, it was near-invisible to early readers (Eisenstein). Early printed books were the same books printed in the same way; the early press was conceived as a “mechanical scriptorium.” Shown below, Gutenberg’s black-letter Gothic typeface closely reproduced a scribal hand. Of course, handwriting and type were easily distinguishable; errors and irregularities were inherent in relatively unsteady human hands. Side-by-side comparisons of the hand-copied Malmesbury Bible (left) and the black letter typeface in the Gutenberg Bible (right) (Photo credits Wikimedia Commons & Wikimedia Commons). Printing, of course, introduced its own errors. As pages were produced en masse from a single block of type, so were mistakes. While a scribe would re-read and correct errors as they transcribed a second copy, no printing press would. More revealingly, print opened the door to whole new categories of errors. For example, printers setting type might confuse an inverted n with a u—and many did. Of course, no scribe made this mistake. An inverted u is only confused with an n due to the technological possibility of letter flipping in movable type. As print moved from Monotype and Linotype machines, to computerised typesetting, and eventually to desktop publishing, an accidentally flipped u retreated back into the realm of impossibility (Mergenthaler, Swank). Most readers do not know how their books are printed. The output of letterpresses, Monotypes, and laser printers are carefully designed to produce near-uniform output. To the degree that they succeed, the technologies themselves, and the specific nature of the mediation, becomes invisible to readers. But each technology is revealed in errors like the upside-down u, the output of a mispoured slug of Monotype, or streaks of toner from a laser printer. Changes in printing technologies after the press have also had profound effects. The creation of hot-metal Monotype and Linotype, for example, affected decisions to print and reprint and changed how and when it is done. New mass printing technologies allowed for the printing of works that, for economic reasons, would not have been published before. While personal computers, desktop publishing software, and laser printers make publishing accessible in new ways, it also places real limits on what can be printed. Print runs of a single copy—unheard of before the invention of the type-writer—are commonplace. But computers, like Linotypes, render certain formatting and presentation difficult and impossible. Errors provide a space where the particulars of printing make technologies visible in their products. An inverted u exposes a human typesetter, a letterpress, and a hasty error in judgment. Encoding errors and botched smart quotation marks—a ? in place of a “—are only possible with a computer. Streaks of toner are only produced by malfunctioning laser printers. Dust can reveal the photocopied provenance of a document. Few readers reflect on the power or importance of the particulars of the technologies that produced their books. In part, this is because the technologies are so hidden behind their products. Through errors, these technologies and the power they have on the “what” and “how” of printing are exposed. For scholars and activists attempting to expose exactly this, errors are an under-exploited opportunity. Typing Mistyping While errors have a profound effect on media consumption, their effect is equally important, and perhaps more strongly felt, when they occur during media creation. Like all mediating technologies, input technologies make it easier or more difficult to create certain messages. It is, for example, much easier to write a letter with a keyboard than it is to type a picture. It is much more difficult to write in languages with frequent use of accents on an English language keyboard than it is on a European keyboard. But while input systems like keyboards have a powerful effect on the nature of the messages they produce, they are invisible to recipients of messages. Except when the messages contains errors. Typists are much more likely to confuse letters in close proximity on a keyboard than people writing by hand or setting type. As keyboard layouts switch between countries and languages, new errors appear. The following is from a personal email: hez, if there’s not a subversion server handz, can i at least have the root password for one of our machines? I read through the instructions for setting one up and i think i could do it. [emphasis added] The email was quickly typed and, in two places, confuses the character y with z. Separated by five characters on QWERTY keyboards, these two letters are not easily mistaken or mistyped. However, their positions are swapped on German and English keyboards. In fact, the author was an American typing in a Viennese Internet cafe. The source of his repeated error was his false expectations—his familiarity with one keyboard layout in the context of another. The error revealed the context, both keyboard layouts, and his dependence on a particular keyboard. With the error, the keyboard, previously invisible, was exposed as an inter-mediator with its own particularities and effects. This effect does not change in mobile devices where new input methods have introduced powerful new ways of communicating. SMS messages on mobile phones are constrained in length to 160 characters. The result has been new styles of communication using SMS that some have gone so far as to call a new language or dialect called TXTSPK (Thurlow). Yet while they are obvious to social scientists, the profound effects of text message technologies on communication is unfelt by most users who simply see the messages themselves. More visible is the fact that input from a phone keypad has opened the door to errors which reveal input technology and its effects. In the standard method of SMS input, users press or hold buttons to cycle through the letters associated with numbers on a numeric keyboard (e.g., 2 represents A, B, and C; to produce a single C, a user presses 2 three times). This system makes it easy to confuse characters based on a shared association with a single number. Tegic’s popular T9 software allows users to type in words by pressing the number associated with each letter of each word in quick succession. T9 uses a database to pick the most likely word that maps to that sequence of numbers. While the system allows for quick input of words and phrases on a phone keypad, it also allows for the creation of new types of errors. A user trying to type me might accidentally write of because both words are mapped to the combination of 6 and 3 and because of is a more common word in English. T9 might confuse snow and pony while no human, and no other input method, would. Users composing SMS’s are constrained by its technology and its design. The fact that text messages must be short and the difficult nature of phone-based input methods has led to unique and highly constrained forms of communication like TXTSPK (Sutherland). Yet, while the influence of these input technologies is profound, users are rarely aware of it. Errors provide a situation where the particularities of a technology become visible and an opportunity for users to connect with scholars exposing the effect of technology and activists arguing for increased user control. Google News Denuded As technologies become more complex, they often become more mysterious to their users. While not invisible, users know little about the way that complex technologies work both because they become accustomed to them and because the technological specifics are hidden inside companies, behind web interfaces, within compiled software, and in “black boxes” (Latour). Errors can help reveal these technologies and expose their nature and effects. One such system, Google’s News, aggregates news stories and is designed to make it easy to read multiple stories on the same topic. The system works with “topic clusters” that attempt to group articles covering the same news event. The more items in a news cluster (especially from popular sources) and the closer together they appear in time, the higher confidence Google’s algorithms have in the “importance” of a story and the higher the likelihood that the cluster of stories will be listed on the Google News page. While the decision to include or remove individual sources is made by humans, the act of clustering is left to Google’s software. Because computers cannot “understand” the text of the articles being aggregated, clustering happens less intelligently. We know that clustering is primarily based on comparison of shared text and keywords—especially proper nouns. This process is aided by the widespread use of wire services like the Associated Press and Reuters which provide article text used, at least in part, by large numbers of news sources. Google has been reticent to divulge the implementation details of its clustering engine but users have been able to deduce the description above, and much more, by watching how Google News works and, more importantly, how it fails. For example, we know that Google News looks for shared text and keywords because text that deviates heavily from other articles is not “clustered” appropriately—even if it is extremely similar semantically. In this vein, blogger Philipp Lenssen gives advice to news sites who want to stand out in Google News: Of course, stories don’t have to be exactly the same to be matched—but if they are too different, they’ll also not appear in the same group. If you want to stand out in Google News search results, make your article be original, or else you’ll be collapsed into a cluster where you may or may not appear on the first results page. While a human editor has no trouble understanding that an article using different terms (and different, but equally appropriate, proper nouns) is discussing the same issue, the software behind Google News is more fragile. As a result, Google News fails to connect linked stories that no human editor would miss. A section of a screenshot of Google News clustering aggregation showcasing what appears to be an error. But just as importantly, Google News can connect stories that most human editors will not. Google News’s clustering of two stories by Al Jazeera on how “Iran offers to share nuclear technology,” and by the Guardian on how “Iran threatens to hide nuclear program,” seem at first glance to be a mistake. Hiding and sharing are diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive. But while it is true that most human editors would not cluster these stories, it is less clear that it is, in fact, an error. Investigation shows that the two articles are about the release of a single statement by the government of Iran on the same day. The spin is significant enough, and significantly different, that it could be argued that the aggregation of those stories was incorrect—or not. The error reveals details about the way that Google News works and about its limitations. It reminds readers of Google News of the technological nature of their news’ meditation and gives them a taste of the type of selection—and mis-selection—that goes on out of view. Users of Google News might be prompted to compare the system to other, more human methods. Ultimately it can remind them of the power that Google News (and humans in similar roles) have over our understanding of news and the world around us. These are all familiar arguments to social scientists of technology and echo the arguments of technology activists. By focusing on similar errors, both groups can connect to users less used to thinking in these terms. Conclusion Reflecting on the role of the humanities in a world of increasingly invisible technology for the blog, “Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory,” Duke English professor Cathy Davidson writes: When technology is accepted, when it becomes invisible, [humanists] really need to be paying attention. This is one reason why the humanities are more important than ever. Analysis—qualitative, deep, interpretive analysis—of social relations, social conditions, in a historical and philosophical perspective is what we do so well. The more technology is part of our lives, the less we think about it, the more we need rigorous humanistic thinking that reminds us that our behaviours are not natural but social, cultural, economic, and with consequences for us all. Davidson concisely points out the strength and importance of the humanities in evaluating technology. She is correct; users of technologies do not frequently analyse the social relations, conditions, and effects of the technology they use. Activists at the EFF and FSF argue that this lack of critical perspective leads to exploitation of users (Stallman). But users, and the technology they use, are only susceptible to this type of analysis when they understand the applicability of these analyses to their technologies. Davidson leaves open the more fundamental question: How will humanists first reveal technology so that they can reveal its effects? Scholars and activists must do more than contextualise and describe technology. They must first render invisible technologies visible. As the revealing nature of errors in printing systems, input systems, and “black box” software systems like Google News show, errors represent a point where invisible technology is already visible to users. As such, these errors, and countless others like them, can be treated as the tip of an iceberg. They represent an important opportunity for humanists and activists to further expose technologies and the beginning of a process that aims to reveal much more. References Davidson, Cathy. “When Technology Is Invisible, Humanists Better Get Busy.” HASTAC. (2007). 1 September 2007 http://www.hastac.org/node/779>. Eisenstein, Elisabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Latour, Bruno. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Harvard UP, 1999. Lenssen, Philipp. “How Google News Indexes.” Google Blogscoped. 2006. 1 September 2007 http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-07-28-n49.html>. Mergenthaler, Ottmar. The Biography of Ottmar Mergenthaler, Inventor of the Linotype. New ed. New Castle, Deleware: Oak Knoll Books, 1989. Monotype: A Journal of Composing Room Efficiency. Philadelphia: Lanston Monotype Machine Co, 1913. Stallman, Richard M. Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman. Boston, Massachusetts: Free Software Foundation, 2002. Sutherland, John. “Cn u txt?” Guardian Unlimited. London, UK. 2002. Swank, Alvin Garfield, and United Typothetae America. Linotype Mechanism. Chicago, Illinois: Dept. of Education, United Typothetae America, 1926. Thurlow, C. “Generation Txt? The Sociolinguistics of Young People’s Text-Messaging.” Discourse Analysis Online 1.1 (2003). Weiser, Marc. “The World Is Not a Desktop.” ACM Interactions. 1.1 (1994): 7-8. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hill, Benjamin Mako. "Revealing Errors." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/01-hill.php>. APA Style Hill, B. (Oct. 2007) "Revealing Errors," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/01-hill.php>.