Public (E-Journal, York University)

Payne, Andrew

English

Of (Mishaps) Miracles

Goggin, Joyce

Corpus Simsi or, Can a Body Tell a Story?

Papagiannis, Helen

Augmenting Digital and Analog Memory
HELEN PAPAGIANNIS
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My work in augmented reality (AR) began with the creation of a series of memory
albums and paper-based objects which presented digital video footage from my
travels. My interest in creating these works was, in part, due to a desire to capture
"live" moments from my sojourns that were beyond still photographs, which
would aid in temporarily transporting me back to these foreign and exotic locales
to relive those instants. These moving images assisted in the evocation and recollection
of my memories by rearticulating a past vision of a particular location: once again
seeing how the waves crashed, how the wind blew, how my body moved within a
space to which I no longer had physical access. Unlike digital photographs, which
I would eventually print and place in an album, these moving images (MPEG format)
most often remained archived on disc or on my computer, never to be experienced
again. I wanted to create a tactile object that, alongside my still photographs,
would allow me to hold and view these "live" moments again-offering an oppor-
tunity to move through the still images in a way that extends into, and beyond,
their virtual viewing space.
I created a series of small handheld objects, including a palm-sized memory
album: a series of paper slides cased in a petite box; a postcard that included a pan
of the same space that appeared as the card's frontal image; and, a travelogue
which, alongside video clips accompanied by handwritten stories, included actual
objects from my journeys, to enhance the aura. None of the moving images I chose
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to include featured people; they were all pans of landscapes of the sites I visited.
(This is interesting and important to note, as the work I've created recently,
specifically the paper dollhouse, departs from this and will be discussed further.)
I viewed this as an opportunity to document the physical places I visited, as a form
of souvenir that would allow me to visually virtually revisit and enter that space
again via a moving image that captured my field of vision in a horizontal pan. The
absence of other people in the footage aided in creating an intimate, uninterrupted
space, as though that particular moment was for me, undisturbed by anyone else:
a private memory, between that place and me. My works further exhibit a level of
intimacy in their miniature scale.
Of particular interest to my work in AR is how emerging technologies have
allowed us not only to see, but to see again that which is no longer, to recollect
and to remember, and to recreate the past with verisimilitude. In their book,
Memory Trade, Darren Tofts and Murray McKeich refer to philosopher Henri
Bergson's text, Matter and Memory, in a discussion of memory and recollection in
cyberculture. Tofts and McKeich write, "The apparent problem of how the past
remains with us and yet is in actuality no longer present, is resolved through the
identification of recollection as being virtual" (66). In Bergson's words:
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Whenever we are trying to recover a recollection, to call up some period of our history,
we become conscious of an act sui generis by which we detach ourselves from the pres-
ent in order to replace ourselves, first in the past in general, then in a certain region of
the past-a work of adjustment, something like the focusing of a camera. But our recol-
lection still remains virtual; we simply prepare ourselves to receive it by adopting the
appropriate attitude. Little by little it comes into view like a condensing cloud; from the
virtual state it passes into the actual; and as its outlines become more distinct and its sur-
face takes on colour, it tends to imitate perception. (quoted in Tofts and McKeich, 66)
My thoughts turn to the technology of AR, particularly the process within
which the images and memories I have presented in my work come into view via
the feducial markers, and how this aligns with the action of recollection described
above by Bergson as "virtual." As the camera "focus[es]" to view and read the pat-
terns of the feducial, "little by little" the image the feducial is replaced with "comes
into view like a condensing cloud," blurring and shifting, becoming "more distinct"
as the new "surface" image adjusts to the outlines of the marker's container. This
technical process imitates the act of perception Bergson describes. At times, the
new augmented image may ''break'' if moved, or be temporarily interrupted
revealing the background image of the feducial marker, which may be thought of
as a moment of distraction in recollection or the difficulty in attempting to place
a memory or envision a particular image. These breaks, or fractures, as I will later
describe them, also serve as reminders of how fragile and fleeting these past
moments were and are in their temporary and instable state of (virtual) recollection.
Although the primary subject matter of my initial explorations in AR were
panoramic landscapes and vistas from my travel expeditions, my recent work has
focused on building miniature fictional environments, including a hand-sized,
folding, pop-up paper dollhouse. The dollhouse integrates feducial markers
throughout its constructed environment, which are replaced with short video
clips that appear on the screen when a handheld camera is pointed at the markers.
This includes such miniature objects as a television screen, a fireplace, a window
that opens and closes (offering a viewpoint outside of the house), a 3-D stereo-
graphic image book (a pun on AR's connection to the stereoscope), and a hidden
element (a rat), which appears from underneath a rug when a paper lever is
pulled. This work was inspired by my love for children's pop-up books and the
magic and wonderment such (analog) devices can create.
All of the video files which appear in the dollhouse project (with the excep-
tion of one clip to be further discussed) are stock footage, unlike the video clips
in the memory album series, which embody a personal and private quality. The
stock footage utilized is slick and polished, almost machine-like in its idealized
perfection, which helps to uphold the illusion and spectacle of the dollhouse,
whereas the videos featured in the memory objects have a certain roughness and
human quality in their jerking movements and pans, evoking a more personal and
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intimate experience. Although the memory books and pop-up dollhouse are both
handcrafted, the dollhouse was built and designed to be primarily illusionistic
(using such tools as Photoshop). The memory books, on the other hand, feature
personalized details to highlight the trace of the human hand. The dollhouse was
meticulously created to scale by carefully resizing and digitally manipulating found
photographs of objects (often taken from furniture catalogues on the Internet), to
build a realistic-looking environment which is intended to be believable. (In fact,
at the Film Studies Association of Canada's annual conference, an image of the
dollhouse was projected onto a wall and a viewer asked, "Where is that house?"
not knowing that the miniature pop-up dollhouse was what was being displayed,
rather believing that this was an image of an actual, or "real" house.)
The polished appearance of both the digitally manipulated photographic
elements and the video stock footage utilized in the dollhouse recall Susan
Stewart's description of dollhouses in On Longing: Narratives if the Miniature, the
Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, in their presentation of "the illusion of a
perfectly complete and hermetic world" (62). This can be said for the most part
about the AR dollhouse project, however, there are a few instances in which the
perfection and hermeticism is temporarily fractured. The first instance is in the
case of the one exception to the sleek stock video footage used in the dollhouse,
which was a home video posted on YouTube.com of a pet rat. The feducial marker
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on which this video clip appears is hidden beneath a rug in the second room of the
dollhouse, which can be seen by pulling a paper tab to reveal the concealed image.
The hermeticism was also ruptured in unintentional and unpredictable, yet wel-
comed moments; this was due to momentary glitches in the marker tracking system,
when feducials were mistaken by the software for another similar pattern, and
different augmented images were substituted. Examples include a video clip of
fire (intended for the fireplace) coming from the bedroom window rather than the
programmed image of a friendly pair of young people knocking at the windowpane,
and the pattern of the rug under the bed (an actual photo, not feducial)-mistakenly
interpreted by the software as a feducial marker-displayed as a video clip of fire
coming out from under the bed.
Stewart continues her discussion of the dollhouse in respect to the topic of
the miniature, in the chapter, "The Gigantic": "In approaching the miniature, our
bodies erupt into a confusion of before-unrealized surfaces. We are able to hold
the miniature object within our hand, but our hand is no longer in proportion
with its world; instead our hand becomes a form of undifferentiated landscape, the
body a kind of background" (70). In fact, it was the sight of the disproportionate
hand invading the dollhouse to interact with the elements, as shown on the
projection, which served to shatter the illusion for the viewer who believed it to
be a "real" house. Stewart continues, "Once the miniature world is self-enclosed,
as in the case of the dollhouse, we can only stand outside, looking in, experiencing
a type of tragic distance" (71). The dollhouse project can be seen as exhibiting a
cold distance which limits the viewer as an outsider "looking in" at an artificial and
idealized space that in fact, exists only virtually. In contrast, the memory albums
and objects create an environment that offers an intimate and personal perspective
within which the viewer becomes an insider looking out.
My current and future work explores integrating lenticular-based imagery
with AR markers. My intent is to create tactile objects that store and display mul-
tiple moving images, combining both analog and digital modes of memory. I have
always been mesmerized by the magical quality of lenticulars and their ability to
contain and reveal multiple images with a slight shift of hand. I have recently
created an AR marker within a lenticular lens that contains two separate patterns.
Each of these patterns reveals a different AR image when the object is moved
slightly to display the lenticular-based markers.
I have been experimenting with various applications for lenticular-based AR,
one of which explores the ability to display memories over time from past to present,
combining archival footage with contemporary moving images. This technique
may be used to show growth over time, or various stages of one's life memories.
A recent lenticular AR prototype I have created first displays a black-and-white
film clip of two children playing and shyly kissing each other on the cheek; the
second marker reveals a video clip of the two children, now grown up, playfully
behaving in the same manner as they did in the previous moving image. The
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lenticular-based markers may be used to display a before-and-after of sorts. The
viewer can "flip" between the two moving images in the same handheld object,
mid-clip, reverting between the two, crossing over time with a slight hand gesture.
Another prototype demonstrates the ability to change the direction of the moving
image, between forward and reverse, when the handheld lenticular object is
slightly shifted.
I am particularly interested in the dual memory of the physical object and
virtual imagery in lenticular-based AR. Although the augmented image is stored
digitally within the software, activated upon recognition of the AR marker in the
pattern file, the physical lenticular lens also contains an analog-based memory system
to store and reveal the two different markers. The direction of my current and
future work looks to combine these two methods, utilizing both to create a final
output where the digital and analog coalesce.
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WORKS CITED
Babbitts, Judith. "Stereographs and the Construction of a Visual Culture in the United States."
Memory Bytes: History, TechnoloaY ond Diaital Culture. Eds. Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Gei!.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2004,126-149.
Benosman, Ryad, and Sing Bing Kang, eds. Panoramic Vision: Sensors, Theory, and Applications. NewYork:
Springer-Verlag, 2003.
Crouch, David, and Nina Lubbren, eds. Visual Culture and Tourism. Oxford: Berg, 2003.
Grau, Oliver. "Into the Belly of the Image: Historical Aspects ofVirtual Reality."
Leonardo 32.5 (1999), 365-371.
Miller, Angela L. "The Panorama, the Cinema, and the Emergence of the Spectacular."
Wide Anale 18.2 (1996),34-69.
Mitchell, WiIliam J. "Wunderkammer to World Wide Web: Picturing Place in the Post-
Photographic Era." Picturina Place: Photoaraphy and the Geoaraphicallmaaination. Eds. Joan M. Schwartz
and James R. Ryan. London: LB. Tauris, 2003, 283-304.
Oettermann, Stephan. The Panorama: Histol)' '!fa Mass Medium. Trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider. New
York: Zone Books, 1997.
Rabinovitz, Lauren. "More than the Movies: A History of Somatic Visual Culture Through Hale's
Tours, IMAX, and Motion Simulation Rides." Memory Bytes: History, TechnoloBJ' and Diaital Culture. Eds.
Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Gei!. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004, 99-125.
Stewart, Susan. On Longina: Narratives '!fthe Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham:
Duke University Press, 1994.
Strain, Ellen. "Exotic Bodies, Distant Landscapes: Touristic Viewing and Popularized Anthropology
in the Nineteenth Century" Wide Anale 18.2 (1996), 70-100.
Tofts, Darren, and Murray McKeich. Memory Trade: A Prehistory '!f Cyberculture. North Ryde, NSW:
Interface, 1998.
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Augmenting Digital and Analog Memory

Bok, Christian

Aleatory Writing: Notes Toward a Poetics of Chance

Tan, Xiao Li

Story Wearables: An Alternative Autobiography
XIAO LI TAN
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My project is an autobiography told through wearable computing.
What is a wearable? Smart clothing/accessories that have technology embedded
within the fabric and/or design. According to Massachusetts Institute of
Technology's Wearable Computing at the MIT Media Lab website:
A person's computer should be worn, much as eyeglasses or clothing are worn, and
interact with the user based on the context of the situation. With heads-up displays,
unobtrusive input devices, personal wireless local area networks, and a host of other
context sensing and communication tools, the wearable computer can act as an intelligent
assistant, whether it be through a Remembrance Agent, augmented reality, or intel-
lectual collectives.
While MIT's focus is on aiding the wearer to complete certain tasks, my
wearables focus on aesthetics and ways to carry and tell stories. My project is a
search for storytelling nuggets in wearables. Interactivity will be studied, experi-
mented with, and implemented within the wearables. Stories will be embedded
and revealed through interaction with the clothing.
My project is directed towards post-linear moviemaking and the creation of a
communion between stories and wearables. What's unique about my project is its
unusual marriage: autobiography / storytelling, a traditional convention, is reinvented
when combined with the emerging field of wearable technology.
Background
I've been fascinated by storytelling ever since I was a kid. I used to direct
my village friends in musicals and plays that we staged. I loved playing with cos-
tumes, props, and "actors." In grade school and middle school, I loved dancing.
Music and movement became very appealing to me. I liked the way music has the
power to move the body and how the body has the power to convey strong emo-
tions and suggest narratives. In college, I studied film and TV because I wanted to
tell stories. But I fmd the space constraints within which the audience is confined
when watching a movie, and the passivity of movie-watching, limiting.
I want to challenge my audience. I want viewers to get physically involved. I
want them to discover the story, as though they are playing a game, or getting to
know an interesting person slowly, unexpectedly, beat by beat, discovery by
discovery-each discovery wrapped in the rewards of thrill and satisfaction.
Concept Overview
I've divided content into three parts: emotions, architecture/sounds and peo-
ple. These three elements are categorized as mental space, environmental space
and kinship connection. They are integrated within three wearables items: neck-
laces incorporate the emotions, movie bags house architecture/sounds, and skirts
are embedded with portraits.
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One of the challenges with which I'm confronted is in ensuring that my non-
linear stories are both engaging and cohesive. I need to deal with the timeframe,
character introduction order, sequences and structures. I need to find a structure
that will satisfy my viewers, and allow for multiple viewings of the autobiography.
In addition to narrative, I must also explore where and how I can insert and dis-
play my tales within the wearables. I want people to experience my autobiography
in a fresh new way. I want them to find and ponder the hidden narratives as they
interact with my autobiography wearables. I want them to leave with sensations of
awe, excitement, pleasure, mystery, and satisfaction, as well as a sense of who I am
and where I am from, the nature of my city. I want technologists, scholars and
inventors, to rethink storytelling and physical computing in clothing. I want to
trigger people's imaginations and take my inventions further.
PROTOTYPE DESIGN TREATMENT
The Form / Structure
WEARABLES
Necklace
Movie Bag
Skirt
STORYTELLING
Emotions
Architecture / Sound
Portraits/People
The three pieces will each carry one or two components from the storytelling
mode. The form for the piece is through wearables. The content is divided into
three categories.
The Content
The necklace carries my childhood memory. My hometown, Taishan, is close
to the sea, so shells were childhood toys and they remind me of past playtimes. I
remember a time my cousin brought me the most beautiful shells from her mother's
beach house. I've always imagined magical things happening by the sea. The beau-
tiful patterns on the shells captivate me. Because of this, I want to use LEDs to
bring out the shape, patterns and colors in the shells. As a result, this necklace is
about memories, happiness, admiration for natural beauty, and the fantasy of
magical happenings. The design is a simple necklace that resembles an amulet. The
PlC programming on the breadboard will illuminate the shells. Ideally, the PlC
chip will be embedded inside the bigger shell. As of now, the breadboard will be
externally hooked to the skirt.
The movie bag has a portable multimedia player sewn in, which shows an
LCD screen. On the LCD screen are pictures and videos showing the architecture
of my town. By picking up the headphone, the viewer can listen to the sounds
from my city.
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The skirt is of '50s vintage, full-circle style, decorated with prints of vintage
poster-ladies, each of whom wear veils. Underneath each veil, viewers will find
removable stickers bearing the faces of my relatives. On the reverse side of each
sticker is a bio and website link with which the viewer can learn more about the
person in question.
The Function
The wearables will be displayed on a mannequin. The necklace is eye-candy,
offering a sensual, visual experience. The bag is also a visual display but it carries
more content than the necklace. The skirt requires physical interaction. The viewer
must lift up the veils on the skirts to find the biographies of my relatives. I, the
creator, serve as a live director for the autobiography. The viewers will experience
a rewarding discovery that touches their aural, visual and emotional senses. I will
lead them through by allowing them to feel free to experiment and touch the
various parts of the clothing. Each person's experience will be unique because of
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the sequence of discovery of different parts of the garment. A group experience
will be unique because people can converse and discuss the pieces as they explore. The
overall interaction is non-linear; there's no sequential preference for the biography.
The Look
The overall look is nostalgic: all of the elements are organic and glorify
aesthetics from the past. I want a recycled look that blends smoothly with
technology. The project is feminine since it consists of a necklace, bag and skirt. The
computation will be as hidden as possible. I want the technology to be present but
also inconspicuous.
Visual Elements
Photographs - printed on old paper and manipulated to look vintage
Video - raw, very few cuts, with little or no manipulation
Audio - raw, short 15-30-second clips
PlC Chip - as invisible as possible
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WORKS CITED
Deren, Maya. "An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film," Maya Deren and the
American Avant-Garde, ed. Bill Nichols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Wearable Computing at the MlT Media Lab. Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology.
<www.media.mit.edu/wearables/index.html>
Meshes if the Afternoon. Dir. Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid. 16mm. 1943.
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Story Wearables: An Alternative Autobiography

Fisher, Caitlin

First-Person Hypertext

Pohflepp, Sascha

Buttons: A Blind Camera
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Taking a photo means making a memory. Choosing a moment in time and framing
a situation. Archiving it or making it public. Either way, we create a visual item
that we have an emotional attachment to through our memory. Photos help us to
remember moments in our past. Often they even become a memory in their own
right. For many, making their moments public through services like Flickr is
already part the process of photography itself, creating archives which contain a
vast collection of visual fragments of individual lives.
Buttons takes on this notion of the camera as a networked object. It is a camera
that will capture a moment at the press of a button. However, unlike a conventional
analog or digital camera, this one doesn't have any optical parts. It allows you to
capture your moment but in doing so, it effectively separates it from the subject.
Instead, as you will memorize the moment, the camera memorizes only the time
and starts to continuously search on the net for other photos that have been taken
in the very same moment.
Essentially, it is a camera that-using a mobile communication device-takes
others' photos. Photos that were created by someone who pressed a button
somewhere at the same time as its own button was pressed. Even more so, it
reduces the cameras to their networked buttons in order to create a link between
two individuals.
After a few minutes or hours, depending on how soon someone else shares
their photo on the web, an image will appear on the screen. In a way, it belongs
half to the person who had pressed the button and still remembers that moment.
Because of that connection, the photos are never dismissed as random, no matter
how enigmatic they may be.
To create a networked button and retrieve other individuals' photos, Buttons
consequentially employs the technology which some cameras are presently merging
with-the mobile phone. The object itself is made of laser-cut acrylic. The button
was deliberately chosen and taken from an Agfamatic 901 and is combined with an
electronic button underneath. This in turn is connected to a Sony Ericsson K750i
which is running a custom software written in Mobile Processing. For retrieving
others' photos, the device connects to the internet and contacts the same server
as Blinks. This server's custom PHP-script will continously search Flickr for the
indicated moment while Buttons regularly asks for results. As soon as a photo of the
moment has been shared on the web, it is transmitted and displayed on the device's
screen.
www.blinksandbuttons.net/buttons_en.html
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Buttons: A Blind Camera

Steigler, Bernard

Philosophizing by Accident

Uriu, Daisuke

Ogasawara, Takahiro

Shimizu, Naohito

MASTABA: Family Digital Shrine
DAISUKE URIU, TAKAHIRO OGASAWARA, NAOHITO SHIMIZU
(KEIO MEDIA DESIGN, OKUDE LABORATORY, JAPAN)
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What is MASTABA?
In Japan, the meaning of a grave is changing. Traditional Japanese graves have
been eternal places where ancestors sleep. But today, many Japanese people think
that preserving and archiving memories of the dead is more important than the
burial place itself. We think that these modern graves should be called "family
shrines."
We designed MASTABA as the future family shrine. MASTABA allows generations
of family members to hand down memories through digital pictures of themselves.
This future family shrine consists of digital memories of ancestors shown on a
tabletop large enough for family members to gather around, and is housed within
a physical wooden structure. The glowing boxes framing the structure work with
the RFlD tags contained in what appear to be simple drinking cups that, held
by participants, trigger particular configurations of images on the tabletop. In
MASTABA, multiple users can view pictures of themselves at various ages, alongside
images of their ancestors at those same ages. The lighting caracole consists of 100
steps indicating age 0 to 99 years.
Digital memories are eternal, but a physical shape of MASTABA is not eternal.
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MASTABA: Family Digital Shrine

Brushwood-Rose, Chloë

Technobiographies as Stories of Learning
CHLOE BRUSHWOOD-ROSE
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In her introduction to her 1984 text, The Second Self, Sherry Turkle contrasts our
study of the computer-an object that exists ''betwixt and between,''''a new mind
that is not yet a mind"-with early studies of the Wild Child of Aveyron, another
phenomenon that she argues poses similar questions about the nature of humanity.
The Wild Child was a boy of about thirteen who was discovered in 1800 in the
Aveyron region of Southern France. To all appearances, he had spent his entire life
surviving alone in the wilderness. He could not speak and seemed to make only
meaningless utterances. As Turkle suggests, the Wild Child ''became the occasion
for what has been called 'the forbidden experiment,' the experiment that
would reveal what human beings really are beneath the overlay of society and
culture" (11).
Turkle argues that, as with our study of the Wild Child whom we wanted to
speak to us of our relation with nature, we ask the idea and object of the computer
to speak to us about "where we stand in the world of artifact" (12). She writes,
"We search for a link between who we are and what we have made, between who
we are and what we might create, between who we are and what, through our
intimacy with our own creations, we might become" (12).
In the twenty years since Turkle's study was first published, we have only
begun to grapple with how people make relationships with digital objects, and
what the vicissitudes of those relationships make of the subjects and objects they
encompass. In thinking about these questions, I am drawn to an emerging genre
of autobiographical narratives, memoirs, and auto-ethnographies, sometimes
referred to as "technobiographies" (Henwood, Kennedy and Miller), which
describe the use and usefulness of digital objects in complex ways, as both social
and affective as well as technical. These technobiographies offer stories about
ambivalence and uncertainty in our relations with objects of the digital age. In this
essay, I want to consider the question that Turkle suggests about "what, through
our intimacy with our creations, we might become." Put another way, I am
wondering how we might understand these narratives of the digital subject and
object as stories of learning?
In his memoir, Extra Lye, about "coming of age in cyberspace," David
Bennahum writes that "part of the success of digital toys lay in their nature: they
were not just toys, but playmates" (25). While his acknowledgement of the experience
of toys as playmates is, in itself, not particularly remarkable, Bennahum suggests
that there is something remarkable about his initial experience of the electronic or
digital animation of the object that made it, for him, an active-and surprisingly
powerful-social partner in play. Bennahum describes his early interest in the first
handheld digital games this way:
MyoId toys-Star Trek dolls, plastic guns-were dead things. They didn't move the way
these new toys moved, and they weren't smart. These inventions represented a new digi-
tal way to play. They played back, reacting to what you did. And in this was something
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entirely new: an experience of communication-dialogue-with an inanimate object.
We actually played together. This would become the singular characteristic of a digital
world-machines that felt alive, malleable, responsive, changeable over time. (25)
Like Bennahum, the children in Turkle's study are both excited and disturbed
to discover the degree to which digital games seem able to both respond and not
respond in unexpected ways. Turkle describes a six-year-old named Laura, who
reacts emotionally to the fact that the computer toy, Merlin, is able to repeatedly
beat her at tic-tac-toe, and a seven-year-old named Paul, who, when the toy will
not allow him to shut it off, enjoys repeatedly "killing" the Speak and Spell by
removing its batteries.
In these stories about the use of the digital object, what is curious is that the
intended "usefulness" of the machine is not of primary importance. Instead, these
children imbue the digital object with their own meanings and uses. Like the
children inTurkle's study who become focused on killing and reviving the machine
by putting in and taking out its batteries rather than playing the game it offers,
there are many other examples of children acting in opposition to a digital game's
intended use: stories of children intentionally and repeatedly smashing up their
cars in racing games or allowing the Sims character they are meant to protect,
starve to death.
In this way, the digital object is not simply a tool with a technical or functional
use, but also an encounter in which we work through our relation to the outside
world. In this sense, these digital objects become sites of curriculum.
The complexity of these relations for adults is beautifully illustrated by Gary
Lee Downey in The Machine in Me, his 1998 auto-ethnography about living among
computer engineers and engineering students. Downey elaborates on the com-
plexity of the negotiation between inside and outside when he suggests that, in
order to understand the experiences of computer engineers, "one possible pathway
may be to think about each machine as a configuration of agencies-acts of
positioning-that are part-human, and of each human as a configuration of
agencies that are part-machine" (6).
At one point in his study, Downey describes the difficulties engineering
students are having in accepting this shared agency, because it means "questioning
the whole content of engineering knowledge as repeated iterations of submission
and control" (158). Students enrolled in a course on technologies of Computer-
Assisted Design/Computer-Assisted Manufacturing (CAD/CAM), had expected
to gain a sense of mastery, but found instead that they had to enter into an
exchange with some other configuration of agencies located within the computer.
For each student, gaining access to the technology through its elaborate protocol
of "logging in" established a connection between the human and the machine that,
in its complexity, exceeded the relation of control and submission the students
were expecting. Downey writes:
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Without following these steps, the user's agency could not exist, nor would the user
itself. In other words, just as these novice humans were beginning to extend their
agencies inside the computer to participate in an electronic exchange, so the computer
was extending its agencies into their bodies, producing a significant bodily interaction and
exchange. (152)
Rosanne Stone uses the notion of prosthesis to describe her own experience of
the interpenetration of human and machine. In contrast to the common concep-
tualization of the computer as a tool, discrete and separate from the human who
wields it, Stone argues that as prostheses, digital technologies are inseparable from
the humans who experience them as extensions of their will and identity. She asks,
what happens when a technological prosthesis becomes necessary to one's
identity?Where do we stop and where does the technological object begin? Where
are our edges?
In trying to make sense of our intimacy with and ambivalence towards the
machines that populate our lives, these technobiographical narratives and the
strange use of digital objects they illustrate offer two interconnected stories of
learning: first, they narrate the ways in which objects become imbued with
psychological meaning; second, they tell us about the usefulness of these digital
objects in our negotiation of the relationship between inner life and external
reality.
For Turkle, the computer, like the Wild Child, is both an "evocative object"
and a "marginal object." As with many other cultural icons and objects that exist
on the edge of mind-such as the madman and the monster-the computer exists
''both within and outside the normal social order [... ] both within and outside our
normal categories of what is alive" (24). Most technobiographies seem to echo the
narratives of the children in Turkle's study who experience the computer as a site
of subjectivity and have a hard time determining whether or not these digital
machines are in fact, alive, and, in the context of digital technologies, what counts
as a living thing.
Turkle suggests that computers function as "marginal objects on the boundary
between the physical and psychological" (3 I ). In her study, she noticed that
children's beliefs about computers did not correspond to previous research on the
development of their perceptions about animate and inanimate objects. According
to Jean Piaget, as quoted by Turkle:
Childhood animism [...1is only gradually displaced by new ways of understanding the
physical world in terms of phYSical processes. In time the child learns that the stone falls
because of gravity; intentions have nothing to do with it. And so a dichotomy is con-
structed: phYSical and psychological properties stand opposed to one another in two
great systems. (30)
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However, Turkle's extensive interviews with children and adults about their
experiences of computers have led her to conclude that the computer is, for most
of us, a new kind of object: it is an object that disrupts the dichotomy between the
physical and the psychological. The computer is "psychological, yet a thing" (31).
Object relations theorists understand the "evocative object" as an object
external to the subject that becomes evocative because we affect it with inner
meaning (Bollas). Psychoanalysis uses the idea of "symbolization" to describe how
the object is imbued with meanings in such a way that it becomes evocative of new
ideas and new worlds. In its most primary form, symbolization allows the infant
to use transitional objects to stand in for an experience of union with the mother
until the infant is more fully able to accept the reality of separation.
As Donald Winnicott suggests, transitional objects or phenomena are devel-
opmentally necessary for the infant to progress to the recognition of external
reality and to an experience of the world. Often in the guise of a well-loved teddy
bear or blanket-and later in the guise of a digital toy or Sims character-the
transitional object is perceived by the child to be both "me" and "not-me": it is
never under complete control like an internal object, nor is it outside the child's
control as is the external object of the mother. The parent makes an agreement
with the baby, Winnicott argues, not to force differentiation between primary
creativity and objective perception of the transitional object. The parent must
never ask, "[D]id you conceive of this or was it presented to you from without?"
(12). This allows for a neutral area of experience in which the child gets to have
the illusion that external reality corresponds to her own capacity to create.
Ultimately, the task of parents and educators is disillusionment, and the
child's developmental task is that of reality-acceptance, although each of these
tasks is interminable. Winnicott writes that the transitional object is what we see
of "the infant's journey from the purely subjective to objectivity [... ] of this
journey of progress toward experiencing" (6). The intermediate area of experience
posed by the transitional object "is necessary for the initiation of a relationship
between the child and the world" (13). The intermediate area of experience is
where we work out the dynamics that become our way of relating to the external
world and ourselves, where we learn how to learn and to think, or as Maxine
Greene might suggest, to engage in learning as a reordering of the self.
The notion of the transitional object and the process of symbolization both
return us to Turkle's observations about the computer as an evocative object,
which entices us to explore "who we are and what, through our intimacy with our
own creations, we might become" (12). This question about the relations,
encounters, and intimacies that constitute learning stands in contrast against more
frequently considered questions about "media effects," or the effect of the digital
object on the subject. In this way, these technobiographies offer stories of learning
that are not easy for educators.
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D: \personal
As Alice Pitt argues, object relations is less interested "in what we learn from
our encounters with knowledge about the world; rather [... ] [it] is curious about
what we use knowledge to do" (87). Her remarks suggest that we consider curricular
experiences and objects not primarily in terms of their content, "but rather as a
method for observing how we experience ourselves in the world" (89). Following
Pitt's lead, I ask, how do digital objects allow us to observe our experience in the
world?The writers of the memoirs and narratives that constitute technobiographies
follow the strange vicissitudes of their relationships with digital objects in order
to explore just that. Their stories of learning can broaden our curricular under-
standing of the use of the digital object, not simply as a tool of transmission, but
as an evocative object that can facilitate the working out of reality acceptance and
the attachment to new ideas.
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WORKS CITED
Bennahum, David. Extra Life: Coming'!JAge in Cyberspace. NewYork: Basic Books, 1998.
Bollas, Christopher. Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience. New York: Hill and Wang,
1992.
Downey, Gary Lee. The Machine in Me: An Anthropologist Sits Among Computer Engineers. New York:
Routledge, 1998.
Greene, Maxine. Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1995.
Henwood, Flis, Helen Kennedy, and Nod Miller. Cyborg Lives? Women's Technobiographies. York, UK:
Raw Nerve Books, 2001.
PiU, Alice. The Play '!Jthe Personal: Psychoanalytic Narratives '!JFeminist Education. NewYork: Peter Lang,
2003
Stone, Allucquere Rosanne. The War '!J Desire and Technology at the Close '!J the Mechanical Age.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. NewYork: Simon and Schuster, 1984.
WinnicoU, Donald. Playing and Reality. 1971. NewYork: Routledge, 1989.
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Technobiographies as Stories of Learning

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