Research#4—Smarterchild & Eliza

#8 Smarterchild
http://smarterchild.conversagent.com/faq.shtml#whatis

What is SmarterChild?
SmarterChild is an interactive agent built by Conversagent, Inc. Interactive agents are software applications, often called "bots," that interact with users on Instant Messaging or other text messaging services. You can "chat" with an interactive agent, whether on the web or over IM, the same way you talk to any other contact. To talk with SmarterChild, just send him a message saying "hi!"

#9 Eliza, computer therapist
http://www.manifestation.com/neurotoys/eliza.php3

ELIZA emulates a Rogerian psychotherapist.
ELIZA has almost no intelligence whatsoever, only tricks like string substitution and canned responses based on keywords. Yet when the original ELIZA first appeared in the 60's, some people actually mistook her for human. The illusion of intelligence works best, however, if you limit your conversation to talking about yourself and your life.
This javascript version of ELIZA was originally written by Michal Wallace and significantly enhanced by George Dunlop.


ELIZA--A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine
http://i5.nyu.edu/~mm64/x52.9265/january1966.html

Abstract
ELIZA is a program operating within the MAC time-sharing system at MIT which makes certain kinds of natural language conversation between man and computer possible. Input sentences are analyzed on the basis of decomposition rules which are triggered by key words appearing in the input text. Responses are generated by reassembly rules associated with selected decomposition rules. The fundamental technical problems with which ELIZA is concerned are:
1 the identification of key words,
2 the discovery of minimal context,
3 the choice of appropriate transformations,
4 generation of responses in the absence of keywords, and
5 the provision of an ending capacity for ELIZA "scripts".
A discussion of some psychological issues relevant to the ELIZA approach as well as of future developments concludes the paper.

Introduction
It is said that to explain is to explain away. This maxim is nowhere so well fulfilled as in the area of computer programming, especially in what is called heuristic programming and artificial intelligence. For in those realms machines are made to behave in wondrous ways, often sufficient to dazzle even the most experienced observer. But once a particular program is unmasked, once its inner workings are explained in language sufficiently plain to induice understanding, its magic crumbles away; it stands revealed as a mere collection of procedures, each quite comprehensible. The observer says to himself "I could have written that". With that thought he moves the program in question from the shelf marked "intelligent" to that reserved for curios, fit to be discussed only with people less enlightened that he.

The object of this paper is to cause just such a reevaluation of the program about to be "explained". Few programs ever needed it more.

ELIZA Program
ELIZA is a program which makes natural language conversation with a computer possible. Its present implementation is on the MAC time-sharing system at MIT. It is written in MAD-SLIP [4] for the IBM 7094. Its name was chosen to emphasize that it may be incrementally improved by its users, since its language abilities may be continually improved by a "teacher". Like the Eliza of Pygmalion fame, it can be made to appear even more civilized, the relation of appearance to reality, however, remaining in the domain of the playwright.

For the present purpose it is sufficient to characterize the MAC system as one which permits an individual to operate a full scale computer from a remotely located typewriter. The individual operator has the illusion that he is the sole user of the computer complex, while in fact others may be "time-sharing" the system with him. What is important here is that the computer can read messages typed on the typewriter and respond by writing on the same instrument. The time between the computer's receipt of a message and the appearance of its response is a function of the program controlling the dialog and of such MAC system parameters as the number of users currently corresponding with the system. These latter parameters generally contribute so little to the overall response time that conversational interaction with the computer need never involve truly intolerable delays.

When in conversation with ELIZA, the user types in some statement or set of statements in natural language using normal punctuation and sentence structures. Only the question mark may not be used, because it is interpreted as a line delete character by the MAC system. The user's statement is terminated by a double carriage return which serves to turn control over to ELIZA. ELIZA then analyzes the user's statement and generates some response which it types out. Control is then again with the user.

A typical conversation is the following:

Men are all alike.

IN WHAT WAY?

They're always bugging us about something or other.

CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE?

Well, my boyfriend made me come here.

YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE

He says I'm depressed much of the time.

I AM SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED

It's true. I am unhappy

DO YOU THINK COMING HERE WILL HELP YOU NOT TO BE UNHAPPY

I need some help, that much seems certain.

WHAT WOULD IT MEAN TO YOU IF YOU GOT SOME HELP

Perhaps I could learn to get along with my mother.

TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR FAMILY

My mother takes care of me.

WHO ELSE IN YOUR FAMILY TAKES CARE OF YOU

My father.

YOUR FATHER

You are like my father in some ways.

WHAT RESEMBLANCE DO YOU SEE

You are not very aggressive but I think you don't want me to notice that.

WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I AM NOT VERY AGGRESSIVE

You don't argue with me.

WHY DO YOU THINK I DON'T ARGUE WITH YOU

You are afraid of me.

DOES IT PLEASE YOU TO BELIEVE I AM AFRAID OF YOU

My father is afraid of everybody.

WHAT ELSE COMES TO YOUR MIND WHEN YOU THINK OF YOUR FATHER

Bullies.

DOES THAT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE FACT THAT YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE

The capitalized lines are the machine responses.

The gross procedure of the program is quite simple; the input is read and inspected for the presence of a keyword. When such a word is found, the sentence is transformed according to a rule associated with the keyword, if not a content-free remark or, undercertain conditions, an earlier transformation is retrieved. The text so computed or retrieved is then printed out.

In detail, of course, the procedure sketched above is considerably more complex. Keywords, for example, may have a RANK or precedence number. The procedure is sensitive to such numbers in that it will abandon a keyword already found in the left-to-right scan of the text in favor of one having a higher rank. Also, the procedure recognizes a comma or period as a delimiter. Whenever either one is encountered and a keyword has already been found, all subsequent text is deleted from the input message. If no key has yet been found, the phrase or sentence to the left of the delimiter (as well as the delimiter itself) is deleted. As a result, only single phrases or sentences are ever transformed.

Keywords and their associated transformation rules constitute the SCRIPT for a particular class of conversation. [The word "transformation" is used in its generic sense rather than that given it by Harris and Chomsky in linguistic contexts.] An important property of ELIZA is that a script is data; i.e., it is not part of the program itself. Hence, ELIZA is not restricted to a particular set of recognition patterns or responses, indeed not even to any specific language. ELIZA scripts exist (at this writing) in Welsh and German as well as in English.

The fundamental technical problems with which ELIZA must be preoccupied are the following:
1 The identification of the "most important" keyword occurring in the input message.
2 The identification of some minimal context within which the chosen keyword appears; e.g., if the keyword is "you", is it followed by the word "are" (in which case an assertion is probably being made).
3 The choice of an appropriate transformation rule, and, of course, the making of the transformation itself.
4 The provision of a mechanism that will permit ELIZA to respond "intelligently" when the input text contained no keywords.
5 The provision of machinery that facilitates editing, particularly extension, of the script on the script writing level

There are, of course, the usual constraints dictated by the need to be economical in the use of computer time and storage space.

The central issue is clearly one of text manipulation, and at the heart of that issue is the concept of the transformation rule which has been said to be associated with certain keywords. The mechanisms subsumed under the slogan "transformation rule" are a number of Slip functions which serve to (1) decompose a data string according to certain criteria, hence to test the string as to whether it satisfies these criteria or not, and (2) to reassemble a decomposed string according to certain assembly specifications.

While this is not the place to discuss these functions in all their detail (or even to reveal their full power and generality), it is important to the understanding of the operation of ELIZA to describe them in some detail.

Consider the sentence "I am very unhappy these days". Suppose a foreigner with only a limited knowledge of English but with a very good ear heard that sentence spoken but understood only the first two words "I am". Wishing to appear interested, perhaps even sympathetic, he may reply "How long have you been very unhappy these days?" What he must have done is to apply a kind of template to the original sentence, one part of which matched the two words "I am" and the remainder isolated the words "very unhappy these days". He must also have a reassembly kit specifically associated with that template, one that specifies that any sentence of the form "I am BLAH" can be transformed to "How long have you been BLAH", independently of the meaning of BLAH. A somewhat more complicated example is given by the sentence "It seems that you hate me". Here the foreigner understands only the words "you" and "me"; i.e., he applies a template that decomposes the sentence into the four parts
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
It seems that
you
hate
me
of which only the second and fourth parts are understood. The reassembly rule might then be "What makes you think I hate you"; i.e., it might throw away the first component, translate the two known words ("you" to "I" and "me" to "you") and tack on a stock phrase (What makes you think) to the front of the reconstruction. A formal notation in which to represent the decomposition template is
(0 YOU 0 ME)

and the reassembly rule
(WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I 3 YOU).

The "0" in the decomposition rule stands for "and indefinite number of words" (analogous to the indefinite dollar sign of COMIT) [6] while the "3" in the reassembly rule indicates that the third component of the subject decomposition is to be inserted in its place. The decomposition rule
(0 YOU 1 ME)

would have worked just as well in this specific example. A nonzero integer "n" appearing in a decomposition rule indicates that the component in question should consist of exactly "n" words. However, of the two rules shown, only the first would have matched the sentence. "It seems you love and hate me," the second failing because there is more than one word between "you" and "me".

In ELIZA the question of which decomposition rules to apply to an input text is of course a crucial one. The input sentence might have been, for example, "It seems that you hate," in which case the decomposition rule (0 YOU 0 ME) would have failed in that the word "ME" would not have been found at all, let alone in its assigned place. Some other decomposition rule would then have to be tried and, failing that, still another until a match could be made or a total failure reported. ELIZA must therefore have a mechanism to sharply limit the set of decomposition rules which are potentially applicable to a currently active input sentence. This is the keyword mechanism.

An input sentence is scanned from left to right. Each word is looked up in a dictionary of keywords. If a word is identified as a keyword, then (apart from the issue of precedence of keywords) ony decomposition rules containing that keyword need to be tried. The trial sequence can even be partially ordered. For example, the decomposition rule (0 YOU 0) associated with the keyword "YOU" (and decomposing the sentence into
1 all the words in front of "YOU",
2 the word "YOU", and
3 all the words following "YOU")
should be the last one tried since it is bound to succeed.

Two problems now arise. One stems from the fact that almost none of the words in any given sentence are represented in the keyword dictionary. The other is that of "associating" both decomposition and reassembly rules with keywords. The first is serious in that the determination that a word is not in a dictionary may well require more computation (i.e., time) than the location of a word which is represented. The attack on both problems begins by placing both a keyword and its associated rules on a list. The basic format of a typical key list is the following:
(K ((D1) (R1,1) (R1,2) ··· (R1,m1))
((D2) (R2,1) (R2,2) ··· (R2,m2))
. .
. .
. .
((Dn) (Rn,1) (Rn,2) ··· (Rn,mn)))

where K is the keyword, Di the ith decomposition rule associated with K and Ri,j the jth reassembly rule associated with the ith decomposition rule.

A common pictorial representation of such a structure is the tree diagram shown in Figure 1. The top level of this structure contains the keyword followed by the names of lists; each one of which is again a list structure beginning with a decomposition rule and followed by reassembly rules. Since list structures of this type have no predetermined dimensionality limitations, any number of decomposition rules may be associated with a given keyword and any number of reassembly rules with any specific decomposition rule. SLIP is rich in functions that sequence over structures of this type efficiently. Hence programming problems are minimized.

An ELIZA script consists mainly of a set of list structures of the type shown. The actual keyword directory is constructed when such a script is read into the hitherto empty program. The basic structural component of the keyword directory is a vector KEY of (currently) 128 contiguous computer words. As a particular key list structure is read the keyword K at its top is randomized (hashed) by a procedure that produces (currently) a 7-bit integer "i". The word "always", for example, yields the integer 14. KEY(i), i.e., the ith word of the vector KEY, is then examined to determine whether it contains a list name. If it does not, then an empty list is created, its name placed in KEY(i), and the key list structure in question is placed on that list.

Discussion
At this writing, the only serious ELIZA scripts which exist are some which cause ELIZA to respond roughly as would certain psychotherapists (Rogerians). ELIZA performs best when its human correspondent is initially instructed to "talk" to it, via the typewriter of course, just as one would to a psychiatrist. This mode of conversation was chosen because the psychiatric interview is one of the few examples of categorized dyadic natural language communication in which one of the participating pair is free to assume the pose of knowing almost nothing of the real world. If, for example, one were to tell a psychiatrist "I went for a long boat ride" and he responded "Tell me about boats", one would not assume that he knew nothing about boats, but that he had some purpose in so directing the subsequent conversation. It is important to note that this assumption is one made by the speaker. Whether it is realistic or not is an altogether separate question. In any case, it has a crucial psychological utility in that it serves the speaker to maintain his sense of being heard and understood. The speaker furher defends his impression (which even in real life may be illusory) by attributing to his conversational partner all sorts of background knowledge, insights and reasoning ability. But again, these are the speaker's contribution to the conversation.

Research#3—EcoChamp, AI Planet, Bug-Fest, DALiWorld

#3 “EcoChamp” – Introduction
http://www.ecochamp.com/main.php?op=introduction1

An educational Game about Renewable Energy Resources

The supply of traditional energy resources will begin to run out in the early 21st century. Not only will the burning of fossil fuels lead to a global climate change, but it will also causes all sorts of pollution and environmental damages. As a result, we should all familiarize ourselves with the most promising types of alternative renewable energy resources currently available. We should learn their usage, advantages, and constraints, as they will have to replace the traditional resources in the near future.

Eco Champ introduces 6 different kinds of renewable energy sources (wind power, solar energy, biogas, wave and tidal, hydroelectric and geothermal) to the audience.

Eco Champ is an educational game. The purpose of the game is to learn about renewable energy in an interesting and entertaining way. Players will learn a lot about the different alternative energy resources by simulating the development of these resources on a virtual island operating under certain constraints and with a limited amount of a virtual currency.

The goal of the game is to maintain or to improve the power level of the virtual island by installing different renewable energy sources in the most appropriate locations. The power consumption will change according to simulated seasonal and population patterns. In the background a time transformation is used to simulate changing weather conditions. One full year is condensed to 1 hour playing time (therefore, one month passes by in just 5 minutes).

One of the tasks that must be solved by the players is to determine and find the best location for the sites to build each type of renewable energy plant. The best locations are constrained by local parameters such as the elevation, wind and temperature patterns.

Players also need understand the proper design, the technical constraints and some aspects of the application of the different kinds of renewable energy.

An intelligent agent (the "Bot") will act as a tutor and will support the players. The Bot will guide the players on how to play the game more wisely. For each action executed by the player, the Bot will give a context sensitive response, advice, comment and/or hints to the players. In this way, players can get instant feedback on what they are doing. This will help the players to better understand the effects of their actions.

Players have the option to pay the Bot a consulting fee with the virtual currency in order to receive the Bot's expert advice. . However, advanced players may use their knowledge to their benefit and gain new virtual money by answering quiz questions posted by the tutorial bot. This additional funding can be used to construct even more renewable energy sources.

Future versions will introduce new variables as part of the game's environment such as simulated human and animal populations, and simulated urban areas.



#4 “AI Planet”
http://aiplanet.sourceforge.net/

AI.Planet is a virtual world for artificial intelligence. The environment has water, land, suns, moons, and atmosphere. Plants, animals, fish, and insects can be added to create a dynamic ecosystem. Clouds, rain, wind, lightning, rivers, and icebergs naturally arise from the sun and other influences. You can explore your planet from outer space, by walking around, by tracking creatures, or by controlling a robot that interacts with objects. Artificial Planet is an OpenSource project built with Delphi and GLScene.


#6 “Bug-Fest”
http://necrobones.com/bugfest/

This program was designed mostly for the author's enjoyment, but he has decided to make it available for everyhone to observe. What it does is quite simple: it simulates a large world with growing grass and simulated insects live in the world, eating, breeding, killing the enermy, and dying.

THE SIMULATION:
In this simulation there are a variety of bugs (when I refer to "bugs" here, I mean "critters" not "program flaws"). The simulation will start with several hundred of them placed within the upper-left quadrant of the map (to give a decent population density for breeding purposes and to give them room to expand into). The map will be generated with a random plasma fractal. This creates a reasonably realistic map, and the data is used to not only determine the color of the soil depending on how far from water it is, but also how much plant life can exist at any given location (also due to distance from water).

The results of the simulation will vary from one run to another. With the same internal settings, I've seen one run end up with all the carnivores dying out and then the herbivores died about an hour or so later while I was away from my computer; And in another run the carnivores managed to wipe out most of the herbivores that weren't on isolated islands. I've also seen the carnivores nearly wipe out the herbivores, but then die because of their isolation from one another (no chance to breed), thus leaving the herbivore population to explode from practically nothing. The balance truly is very dependant on the starting conditions. The lay of the land, the placement of the carnivores relative to one another (if they're too close together they wipe out a region then die of starvation, but if they're too far apart they never breed and all end up dying of old age), and overall food availability all play a part in determining which way it will go. It's almost like a chaos experiment. :-) Of course, after witnessing many such balance swings, I added some code to control the relative population levels to force a little more balance (described in more detail below).


#7 “DALiWorld”
http://www.daliworld.net/index2.html

Imagine a virtual world teeming with artificial life. This virtual world is an ocean, and the ocean is populated with a diverse and abundant ecology. Sea horses float among coral reefs, schools of fish dart and weave to evade hungry predators, a mother humpback whale and her calf migrate to cooler waters to feed... Myriad beautiful autonomous creatures are caught in the web of life that plays out before your eyes. As a user you are able to build and influence the ecology of the world, sculpt the surroundings, breed artificial life, or create new life forms from scratch.

Sound like the sort of thing you would like to have running on your computer?

How about on every other computer in the world too?

At DALi we are not just building software that will allow you to have a localized world and ecology, we are building systems that will engender truly ubiquitous artificial life. We are not targeting any particular platform. Instead, we are targeting all of them. Our universe will be everywhere - bits of DALi scattered across millions of computing devices the world-over. In personal computers, portable devices, automobiles, airplanes, even your television. Our aim is to be the first company to realize the living global digital Gaia: a virtual ocean distributed across machines that span the entire non-virtual world; a community of millions of users all taking part in building this virtual ocean, creating the ecology and the life forms that inhabit it; the life forms seamlessly swimming from one machine to the next... And we want you to be our co-creator.

Introduction

When you install DALiWorld, you have an online virtual aquarium sitting on your desktop. Fish swim around for your viewing pleasure, darting on and off your screen. If you enable networking, your fish can swim over the internet to your neighbor's aquarium and computer, and vice versa. You can control the general number of fish you have in your aquarium, add fish to your aquarium, and find out where fish that enter your aquarium have been in the real world. See the Operating Instructions for more information on this.

While the majority of the fish available in DALiWorld can be created in anyone's aquarium, there are a small number of special fish that are not generally available. When you start up DALiWorld for the first time, you are assigned one of the special fish species. This is the only species from the group of special fish that you will ever be able to add to your aquarium (you may have more than one of that species swimming around at the same time though). However, you can get to see another type of special fish if it swims from someone else's aquarium to your own. We hope this will encourage the community to run in networked mode, which is where the true power of DALiWorld becomes evident.

DALiWorld is meant to operate as something you watch and interact with directly, as well as something that runs in the background while you use your computer for other things.

{Technology}
The DALiWorld Infrastructure

The DALi Infrastructure is a platform that architects large, massively distributed virtual worlds inhabited by artificial life forms. The worlds we build support an exceptionally compelling, interactive and aesthetically appealing user experience where you are able to create new life, build ecologies, and participate in the communities that spring up around this unique distributed virtual world.

The infrastructure is a 100% pure Java, fully componentized, pluggable architecture that ensures platform neutrality and portability. Click on any of the components in the list below to get a more detailed view what sits under our hood.

• Artificial Life
• Learning Systems
• Mobile Agents
• Graphics Engine
• Physics Engine


#8 “Biota.org”
http://www.biota.org/about/ (about us )
http://www.biota.org/links/ (links)

Biota.org promotes and assists the engineering of complete, biologically-inspired, synthetic ecosystems and organisms. This involves the creation and deployment of digital tools and environments for simulation, research, and learning about living systems both natural and artificial. These tools range from simple genetic algorithms to full multi-user virtual environments.

Biota.org seeks to nourish a community of interest and to bring the experience of interacting with digital biota to a large audience through the internet.

An Interdisciplinary Approach

The dissemination of interdisciplinary concepts is an important aspect of promoting the field of cyber-biology. To this end, Biota.org welcomes members from all scientific disciplines including evolutionary science, microbiology, medicine, computer science, robotics, nano-technology, palaeontology, social science, and artificial intelligence. Biota also encourages artists, technologists, philosophers, and educationalists to join in and add their input to the developing body of experimental work.

Biota.org holds conferences and workshops on its key themes to specifically encourage a multi-disciplinary approach. These events aim to foster lively debate on methods for the creation of digital biota, as well as looking at the philosophical implications of such work, scenarios for the incorporation of digital biota in virtual worlds, and the examination of the consequences of creating artificial life-forms.

Tasks of Biota.org

1. To sponsor an annual conference on cyber-biology bringing together international experts in relevant fields for presentations, discussions, and the exploration of sites that inspire work in the digital realm with lessons about the evolution of life on Earth.

2. To engage in building and hosting biologically inspired environments to demonstrate concepts such as generating artificial plants from algorithmic seeds, the formation of a digital ecosystem using a token economy with equivalents for energy and resources, the setting up of predator prey relationships within such an ecosystem, and the establishment of multi-user interaction within a virtual world inhabited by digital biota.

3. To incorporate in cyber-biology systems engines for realistic physics, emergent and learned behaviour, and networked mobile code so that the environments are continuously evolving.

4. To define an open-standard and open-source tools, modules, protocols, grammars and methods for the collaborative design and creation of cyber-biological systems.

5. To establish a public repository for these creations which supports their continuous evolution within a networked environment.

Definition of Digital Biota

Digital Biota (also called cyber-biota) are a class of self-replicating autonomous software objects which can be embodied by (benevolent) computer viruses and worms, artificial life programs, cellular automata, genetic algorithms, and general adaptive networks. Once released they live or die by their own decisions as they interact with their environment. They are usually capable of reproduction - if they also have the ability to mutate and be affected by the force of natural selection to some degree then they can evolve.

Digital Biotes are differentiated from semi-autonomous objects which includes artificial intelligences, software agents and bots. These generally have only limited control of their own functionality, operate according to outside goals, and do not reproduce.

Digital biota can be incarnated or given a physical presence by putting them inside a robot. This means that tele-presence devices can at times contain digital biota. Digital organisms do not have a visual appearance other than one they are given so humans can interact with them. This appearance can be a 2D or 3D computer generated image or animation and may be representative of the functions and abilities of the organism.

A Cambrian Explosion on the internet?

We speculate that some time in this new century that Digital Biota may undergo a Cambrian Explosion of diversification within the novel ecosystem of the planet's computer networks. We believe that the richest ecosystems, with the greatest selection pressures, are multi-user virtual worlds.

The probability, form, and implications of the rise of true cyber-biota is the core theme of the Biota.org group. Another way to consider this is: why would nature seek to evolve massless information-based life at this time in the history of the Earth? There are many superb and diverse minds considering these key questions.


#9 “Alcyone”
http://www.alcyone.com/max/links/alife.html

Research#2—Cyber Girlfriend

Research#2—Cyber Girlfriend

The virtual girlfriend created by the company "Artificial Life"

#1 “HK firm develops cyber girlfriend”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3591856.stm

The Hong Kong company Artificial Life, which developed the new game, says the girl will appear as an animated figure on the video screen of a mobile phone.
But there is a downside to the virtual girlfriend - she will require more flowers and gifts than many real women.
Artificial Life is hoping to launch the new game later this year, on the latest 3-G mobile phones.
All virtual girls will look the same - but each girl will behave differently - depending on how much money is spent on her.
On top of a general subscription, men will be charged a fee to buy flowers and gifts for the virtual girlfriend.
In return, she will introduce them to different aspects of her life, like letting them meet her female friends - also electronic images.

Cash counts
If players neglect her, she will refuse to speak.
The company says the amount of money players will have to spend has yet to be determined.
But unlike other computer games, it seems that cash, not skill, will enable players to climb the different levels in the game.
The virtual girlfriend is slim and dark-haired, like the Lara Croft character in the game Tomb Raider, which won a huge male following.
The company has plans to introduce a virtual boyfriend for women, although it remains to be seen how it will persuade them to spend extra money on the game.
But it may be encouraged by the success of a Japanese company that recently created a Boyfriend Arm Pillow - for women who miss being hugged by a man at night.
The product is reportedly a big hit with the ladies.

#2 “3G Virtual Girlfriend”
http://www.3g.co.uk/PR/August2004/8226.htm

ASIA : Hong Kong based Artificial Life, Inc. (OTC: ALIF) a leading provider of intelligent agent based mobile and Internet technology and applications today announced the upcoming release of its new 3G game and product line: Virtual Girlfriend.

The Virtual Girlfriend is a very innovative mobile game that is based on intelligent animated 3-D characters (avatars) that live in a virtual mobile world. The virtual girls can be contacted and seen using a 3G phone at any time. However, the characters will be involved in different activities during the day, for example, the girlfriend may be in her virtual home or at her virtual workplace or in a virtual bar or restaurant or just shopping with another virtual friend in a virtual shopping mall. The user can watch the characters during these activities and interact with them via the mobile phone. The characters and the game follow a certain daily and weekly schedule which will continuously change and progress over time.

Users can interact with the game characters on their mobile phones by sending SMS and MMS messages or chat with them in real time through a J2ME client. Several interactive game icons are available as well. Users even have the option to interact with the Virtual Girlfriend by sending her virtual gifts which can elevate the user to different, more sophisticated game levels. A Virtual Boyfriend version of the game is scheduled for release in February 2005.

The new 3G game supports all major 3G handsets currently on the market. Furthermore, 2G users can access a limited version via a WAP interface. The 2G counterpart will not have any autonomous behavior and visual content will be down sampled to make up for limited bandwidth.

The Virtual Girlfriend product line is scheduled for launch on December 1, 2004 and will be presented to the public and a broad audience during an invited speech by Artificial Life's Chairman and CEO at the upcoming 3G World Conference to be held in Hong Kong on November 15, 2004.
"We are very proud of this new product line. It combines in a unique way our Smart Engine Mobile Platform™, proprietary artificial intelligence technology, human like behavior of the game characters, natural language processing in several languages including English, German, Chinese, Korean and Japanese, uses text to speech voices, high quality and realistic 3-D animations, a sophisticated and innovative game logic with a continuously evolving and always progressing story and user specific content delivery. For our corporate partners we offer a new and innovative way of advertisement: virtual product placements as part of the game. The Virtual Girlfriend is a lot of fun to play and the game sets new and high standards for future 3G mobile games" said Eberhard Schoeneburg, CEO of Artificial Life, Inc.


Technology:
All of the products are based on ALife-SmartEngine‚Ñ¢ technology which allows our products the expertise to communicate with users in natural language text or speech. It is based on several intelligent modules that include natural language understanding and processing.

ALife-SmartEngine‚Ñ¢
The primary control or core of the ALife-SmartEngine‚Ñ¢ is a meta-controller that is essential for the bot to formulate appropriat responses to user inquiries.



Other sites by Artificial Life, Inc.:

V-girl
A new networked mobile interactive companion
www.V-girl.com

V-GIRL

While 3rd Generation (3G) mobile subscribers are demanding more than traditional mobile
content, telecommunication companies are looking for innovative ways to help them to
re-stimulate the 3G market and retain customers. Artificial Life, offers V-girl—the virtual
girlfriend—as a solution that helps telecom operators differentiate their services from the
competition and convert more 2G clients into 3G subscribers. Through V-girl’s innovative andsticky games, operators can create a marketing niche for services. Users consume data packages due to the built-in sticky gaming features, providing operators more opportunities to enhance their revenue base.
Backed up by a strong A.I. engine, V-girl is able to handle over 35,000 different topics. With the Sun Java™ Enterprise Platform, all video and audio streams are handled by Java™ technology and the game updates and logics are maintained on the server. Artificial Life’s user-specific content delivery technology lets users build their profiles and allows them to experience a very unique journey with V-girl.
With the flexibility of the Sun Java Enterprise Platform, V-girl allows users to fully experience the power of a 3G network by deploying under-utilized 3G features in a single platform. Java technology also provides the flexibility necessary when it comes time to integrate with the operator infrastructure. V-girl combines a server-side logic engine built on top of a Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE™) application container, which provides back-end intelligence and drives interaction pathways with each unique subscriber. User profiling and data mining filters allow for unique and tailored content and in-product placements for the individual. Customization rules are easily added for the global deployment locations and localized media.

V-disco
http://www.v-disco.com/
Enjoy music on 3G phone and feel like you are at a dance club with real or virtual friends.
It’s fun to watch sample video clips on this site.

V-boy
It will target the younger female audience between 15 and 30 years of age.

Botme.com
You can find SMS, MMS,2G, 3G application and Java games
www.Botme.com

EcoChamp.com
Online educational game about renewal energy resources and environmental protection.
www.ecochamp.com

Research#1—The Telegarden

http://www.usc.edu/dept/garden/
http://queue.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/garden/Ars/

Ken Goldberg and Joseph Santarromana (UC Irvine)

A robot as gardener, a flower bed as international meeting place in the World Wide Web. You can control a robotic arm via WWW in order to observe and tend the garden. Sow and water the plants, or simply get together in the Chat Channel with other telegardeners from all over the world.

This tele-robotic installation allows WWW users to view and interact with a remote garden filled with living plants. Members can plant, water, and monitor the progress of seedlings via the tender movements of an industrial robot arm. Internet behavior might be characterized as ``hunting and gathering''; our purpose is to consider the ``post-nomadic'' community, where survival favors those who work together.

The Telegarden was developed at the University of Southern California and went online in June 1995. In its first year at USC, over 9000 members helped cultivate.

Video:
http://www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/TG1.mpg
http://www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/art/telegarden2.mov

Pictures:
http://www.telegarden.org/tg/
http://www.telegarden.org/tg/animations.php

Demo:
http://www.telegarden.org/tg/tour/

Websites for a final presentation

Research#1—Websites


Websites I found for the related topics:


#1 Artificial life:

— Telegarden:
http://www.telegarden.org/tg/composites.php
http://www.usc.edu/dept/garden/
—Ecochamp:
http://www.ecochamp.com/
—“AI Planet”
http://aiplanet.sourceforge.net/
—“Bug-Fest”
http://necrobones.com/bugfest/
—“DALiWorld”
http://www.daliworld.net/index2.html
—Biota.org:
http://www.biota.org/about/ (about us )
http://www.biota.org/links/ (links)
—alcyone
http://www.alcyone.com/max/links/alife.html
—Algorithmic Botany
http://algorithmicbotany.org/
—Biots
http://algorithmicbotany.org/
—Biods - updated site
http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/
—BRAID Media Arts - Alife inspired art
http://www.braid.com/
—Chaoslab
http://www.eldian.com/chaoslab/ChaoslabDesktop.html
—Cyberbotics
http://www.cyberbotics.com/
—Erik Max Francis' Artificial Life Links - comprehensive set of links
http://www.alcyone.com/max/links/alife.html
—Fluidiom - created by Beautiful Code
http://fluidiom.sourceforge.net/
—Genetic Art from the Virtual World - William Latham's ALife art
—Genetic-Programming.org - a source of information about the field of genetic programming and the field of genetic and evolutionary computation
—International Society of Artificial Life
http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/events/latham.html
—Kybernetes - a leading journal in the field of systems and cybernetics
http://thesius.emeraldinsight.com:80/Insight/urlResolver.do?uri=%2Fvl%3D1394348%2Fcl%3D96%2Fnw%3D1%2Frpsv%2Fkyb.htm
—LIAP5 - CRIP5 ALife Team
http://www.math-info.univ-paris5.fr/alife/
—Lsys - Lsystem based interactive VRML generator, Patrick Murris, Montreal
http://www.alpix.com/vrml/lsys.htm
—Martin Baker's 3D World Simulation
http://www.martinb.com/
—MIT Media Lab: Software Agents Group
http://agents.media.mit.edu/index.html

mouseDown - online life and amoebic lifeforms
—Nerve Garden - islands created during SIGGRAPH '97
http://www.karenmarcelo.org/ng/
http://karenmarcelo.org/ng/siggraph/
—Noble Ape
http://www.nobleape.com/
—Optimization and Automation
http://www.upl.cs.wisc.edu/%7Ecreed/
—Swarm.org Wiki
http://www.swarm.org/wiki/Main_Page
—Tierra
http://www.his.atr.jp/%7Eray/tierra/
—Tomaz Amon's VRML Biology Page
http://www.bioanim.com/
—Virtual Life Software
http://www.his.atr.jp/%7Eray/VirtualLife/
—Virtual Zooarium
—VRML ALife Worlds - hosted by Ryoichiro Debuchi's atom.co.jp
http://www.atom.co.jp/vrml2/
—Zooland
http://zooland.alife.org/


#2 Games & artificial Intelligence:

—Virtual girlfriend:
http://www.artificial-life.com/
http://alife.fusebox.com/
http://www.v-girl.com/
http://www.botme.com/
—Eliza (Computer Therapist)
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=%22Eliza%22&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
http://www-ai.ijs.si/eliza-cgi-bin/eliza_script
http://www.manifestation.com/neurotoys/eliza.php3
—Smarterchild:
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Smarterchild&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
http://smarterchild.conversagent.com/
http://smarterchild.conversagent.com/faq.shtml#whatis


#3 Game:

— Norikore online
http://www.ars-artis.com/no/menu.html
— Biots
http://www.scarybug.org/biots/
—Dating Sims
http://www.newgrounds.com/collection/datingsims.html
—Orgasm Girl
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/180106

Final Presentation Topic

Final Presentation Topic

These are my possible research topics for the final presentation:

1. Artificial life
2. Artificial intelligence
3. Idea of virtual reality & virtual experience
4. Art games

Ideas:
-Reality vs. simulation
-The material world vs. representations of reality
-Physical presence vs. virtual reality

Example of virtual experience:
—Traveling without you actually travel by watching TV programs or video of (different countries and people)
—Virtual pet- providing food, water etc to grow pet in virtual environment
—Video games –driving game, snowboard game, shooting game etc.

Since I heard about artificial gardens and Eliza in one of my major courses 2 years ago, I’ve been interested in virtual experiences including artificial life and artificial intelligence. So I want to research about topics related to those technologies in depth.
In the near future, interactive media and virtual reality technology
will be further developed by contemporary artists. Because of the
power of computer representations, artists in many fields don't use
the real objects or materials in their creation of art anymore.
Thus, I think the next wave of digital media art will use technologies, such as the virtual reality, artificial life, and artificial intelligence which contain visual, sound, and kinesthetic senses, promises to increase the effect of representation to substitute for material experience. Computer simulations and representations of reality are going to develop furthermore.

Purpose of creating something in virtual environment is to have :
—A sense of making something
—A sense of owning objects
—An experience
without they actually do something in real world.


Here is the senario:
First, I’ll learn about what these technology are, what they do, and how they work.
Secondly, I’ll find some works or websites that use this technology.
Thirdly, I’ll discuss on my favorite works by showing them how they work and what they do, then I’ll talk about why I find it interesting.
Finally, I’ll make a conclusion about this technology and their use, and the potential use/ development of this technology.

These are many websites related to an artificial life and artificial intelligence which let you explore with what new technology has brought to us.


Definitions (from Wikipedia):

#1. Artificial life—
Artificial life, also known as alife or a-life, is the study of life through the use of human-made analogs of living systems. Computer scientist Christopher Langton coined the term in the late 1980s when he held the first "International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems" (otherwise known as Artificial Life I) at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1987.

Nature of the field
Although the study of artificial life does have some significant overlap with the study of artificial intelligence (AI), the two fields are very distinct in their history and approach. Organized AI research began early in the history of digital computers, and was often characterized in those years by a "top-down" approach based on complicated networks of rules. Students of alife did not have an organized field at all until the 1980s, and often worked in isolation, unaware of others doing similar work. Where they concerned themselves with intelligence at all, researchers tended to focus on the "bottom-up" nature of emergent behaviors.
Artificial life researchers have often been divided into two main groups (although other groupings are possible):
_ The strong alife position states that "life is a process which can be abstracted away from any particular medium". (John Von Neumann). Notably, Tom Ray declared that his program Tierra was not simulating life in a computer, but was synthesizing it.
_ The weak alife position denies the possibility of generating a "living process" outside of a carbon-based chemical solution. Its researchers try instead to mimic life processes to understand the appearance of single phenomena. The usual way is through an agent based model, which usually gives a minimal possible solution. That is: "we don't know what in nature generates this phenomenon, but it could be something as simple as..."
The field is characterized by the extensive use of computer programs and computer simulations which include evolutionary computation (evolutionary algorithms (EA), genetic algorithms (GA), genetic programming (GP), swarm intelligence (SI), ant colony optimization (ACO)) artificial chemistries (AC), agent-based models, and cellular automata (CA). Often those techniques are seen as subfields of alife. With technical papers on the subjects being included and accepted in artificial life conferences until their field has grown enough to hold their own conferences. As such, over the years, artificial life has also worked as a temporary umbrella term for different techniques that would not be accepted in other fields.
Artificial life is a meeting point for people from many other more traditional fields such as linguistics, physics, mathematics, philosophy, computer science, biology, anthropology and sociology in which unusual computational and theoretical approaches that would be controversial within their home discipline can be discussed. As a field, it has had a controversial history; John Maynard Smith criticized certain artificial life work in 1995 as "fact-free science", and it has not generally received much attention from biologists. However, the recent publication of artificial life articles in widely read journals such as Science and Nature is evidence that artificial life techniques are becoming more accepted in the mainstream, at least as a method of studying evolution.

#2. Artificial intelligence (AI)—
Artificial intelligence (AI) is defined as intelligence exhibited by an artificial (non-natural, manufactured) entity. Such a system is generally assumed to be a computer.
Although AI has a strong science fiction connotation, it forms a vital branch of computer science, dealing with intelligent behavior, learning and adaptation in machines. Research in AI is concerned with producing useful machines to automate human tasks requiring intelligent behavior. Examples include: answering questions about products for customers, handwriting recognition, speech recognition, and face recognition in CCTV cameras. As such, it has become an engineering discipline, focused on providing solutions to practical problems.
AI methods were used to schedule units in the first Gulf War, and DARPA stated that the costs saved by the efficiency of AI have repaid the US government's entire investment in AI research since the 1950s. AI systems are now in routine use in many businesses, hospitals and military units around the world, as well as being built into many common home computer software applications and video games.

#3. Virtual reality
Virtual Reality (VR) is an environment that is simulated by a computer. Most virtual reality environments are primarily visual experiences, displayed either on a computer screen or through special stereoscopic displays, but some simulations include additional sensory information, such as sound through speakers or headphones. Some advanced and experimental systems have included limited tactile, haptic force feedback. Users can interact with a virtual environment either through the use of standard input devices such as a keyboard and mouse, or through multimodal devices such as a wired glove, polhemus boom arm, and/or omnidirectional treadmill. The simulated environment can be similar to the real world, for example, simulations for pilot or combat training, or it can differ significantly from reality, as in VR games. In practice, it is very difficult to create a high-fidelity virtual reality experience, due largely to technical limitations on processing power and image resolution. A related term coined by Myron W. Krueger, "artificial reality", has been in use since the 1970s and "cyberspace" dates to the 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer by William Gibson.

Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/Virtual%20reality
An artificial environment which is experienced through sensory stimuli (as sights and sounds) provided by a computer and in which one's actions partially determine what happens in the environment

Powerpoint Artist: David Byrne

At The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium in UC Berkeley
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/events/

DAVID BYRNE
“I [heart] Power Point”
http://www.davidbyrne.com/
http://www.davidbyrne.com/art/eeei/index.php

#1—David Byrne’s autobiography: Artist, Musician, NYC

• He is best known as one of the Talking Heads, has been making visual art for more than 25 years and is represented by Pace/MacGill Gallery in NYC. He has been working with PowerPoint as an art medium for a number of years. What started off as a joke took on a life of its own as Byrne realized he could create moving pieces, despite the limitations of the medium. His new book of artwork done with PowerPoint is “Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information.”

• http://www.designboom.com/eng/interview/byrne.html
david byrne —in 1970 he went straight from high school to the
rhode island school of design. he studied a functional design
programme known as the bauhaus theory course. he also took a conceptual art course. the staff were not sure about david, particularly when he put on a performance in which he had his hair
and beard shaved off onstage to a piano accordion accompaniment
and a showgirl displaying cue cards written in russian.
the professors at RISD were less charmed, however, and david
found himself out on the street. back in baltimore david met
a guy called marc kehoe and together they formed a duo
called 'bizadi' - and apt name since david played violin,
ukelele and sang and marc kehoe sang and played the accordion.
bizadi lasted until march 1972, during this year they played at
the art school, a theatre and the baltimore playboy club,
before moving to san francisco where they busked on the streets
and sometimes got jobs in restaurants…
david was leadsinger and guitar player of 'talking heads'.
he also (co-) wrote most of the 'talking heads' music and lyrics.
since 1981 he has been doing solo projects, which eventually
resulted in the split of 'talking heads' in 1991.
byrne also composed and created an evening length ballet score
for choreographer twyla tharp (the catherine wheel ); directed many of the first videoclips to appear on mtv; collaborated with brian eno on a record using "found" voices including radio preachers, talk show preachers, talk show guests and arabic singers (my life in the bush of ghosts ): and created a score for brass band and spoken text for a theater piece directed by robert wilson (the knee plays ). in 1985 a prize-winning film was made of the talking heads in concert entitled "stop making sense", directed by oscar-winner jonathan demme. in 1986, byrne co-wrote and directed a feature film entitled "true stories" and in 1987, byrne won an academy award for co-writing the score for bertolucci 's epic "the last emperor". in 1989, byrne directed a documentary on african religion in brasil entitled Ile aiye: the house of life and released a record, rei momo , on which he collaborated with some of the best latin musicians in newyork. byrne has been involved in photography and design since his studies in college, but has only recently begun to show his work which include his photos in books and magazines. his first book of photographs, strange ritual , was published in 1995 and was chosen by the n. y. times book review as one of the top 10 photography books of the christmas season. byrne has had popular solo exhibitions throughout europe, japan, south america and the u.s. and last summer marked his first museum installation ( desire ) at the massachussetts museum of contemporary art. the san francisco museum of modern art recently added one of his pieces to its permanent collection. during autumn 1998 byrne has exhibited his artworks in trieste(I) in a double one-man show,
organized by lipanjepuntin artecontemporanea,
see their site for an extended biography
http://www.lipanjepuntin.com/artists/Byrne.htm
related links:
http://www.davidbyrne.com
http://www.talking-heads.net/davidbyrne
http://www.davidbyrne-virginrecords.com
http://www.luakabop.com


#2—About his work:
• From a flier of this lecture on Mar 7th, 2005:
PowerPoint, the software application developed by engineeres at Microsoft Corporation, has become the ubiquitous standard for presentations on topics ranging from business to academia to charity fund-raising.

The structure and features of PowerPoint were designed assuming a specific world view. The software, by making certain actions easier and more convenient than others tells you how to think as it helps you accomplish your task. Not in an obvious way or in an obnoxious way or even in a scheming way. The biases are almost unintentional; they are natural and well integrated. It is possible that the engineers and designers have no intention of guiding and straightening out your thinking; they simply feel that the assumptions upon which they base their design decisions are the most natural and practical. You are thus subtly indoctrinated into a manner of being and behaving, assuming and acting, that grows on you as you use the program.

Let us imagine, then, that PowerPoint and its attendant softwares are actually a means to a positive emotional and philosophical end, a path towards a goal that is easy to reach and available to all. The billions of people who use it are on their way to happiness, contentment and a feeling of belonging to a society that thinks and feels the same way and shares their values.

“Rather than resist, I decided that I must surrender and learn to use this software myself, for, like everyone, I long to belong. I have a long way to go: my presentations are sometimes unclear and confusing. But I have made huge advances and I feel myself more at ease with each new presentation.”



#3—Websites:

• http://www.davidbyrne.com/art/eeei/index.php
E.E.E.I.— Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information

“I have been working with PowerPoint, the ubiquitous presentation software, as an art medium for a number of years. It started off as a joke (this software is a symbol of corporate salesmanship, or lack thereof) but then the work took on a life of its own as I realized I could create pieces that were moving, despite the limitations of the "medium." I have shown these pieces in galleries and museums and most recently have produced a book with a DVD (Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information) as means of presenting these curiosities.”


• http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt1.html
Learning to Love PowerPoint

We interrupt this magazine for a PowerPoint presentation:
• For artist and musician David Byrne, the medium is the message.
• Infographic guru Edward Tufte wants to kill the messenger.

“A while ago, I decided to base the book-tour readings from my pseudoreligious tract The New Sins on sales presentations. I was going for a fair dose of irony and satire, and what could be better than using PowerPoint and a projector, the same tools that every sales and marketing person relies on?
Having never used the program before, I found it limiting, inflexible, and biased, like most software. On top of that, PowerPoint makes hilariously bad-looking visuals. But that's a small price to pay for ease and utility. We live in a world where convenience beats quality every time. It was, for my purposes, perfect.
I began to see PowerPoint as a metaprogram, one that organizes and presents stuff created in other applications. Initially, I made presentations about presentations; they were almost completely without content. The content, I learned, was in the medium itself. I discovered that I could attach my photographs, short videos, scanned images, and music. What's more, the application can be made to run by itself -no one even needs to be at the podium. How fantastic!
Although I began by making fun of the medium, I soon realized I could actually create things that were beautiful. I could bend the program to my own whim and use it as an artistic agent. The pieces became like short films: Some were sweet, some were scary, and some were mysterioso. I discovered that even without text, I could make works that were "about" something, something beyond themselves, and that they could even have emotional resonance. What had I stumbled upon? Surely some techie or computer artist was already using this dumb program as an artistic medium. I couldn't really have this territory all to myself -or could I?”

"In thinking about graphic design, industrial design, and what might really be the cutting-edge of design, I realized it would have to be genetic engineering. Dolly (God rest her soul) represents the latest in design, but it is, in her case, design we cannot see. Dolly looks like any other sheep, which is precisely the point. The dogma of some graphic designers is that their work be invisible. This perfection has been achieved with Dolly."

"I began this project making fun of the iconography of PowerPoint, which wasn't hard to do, but soon realized that the pieces were taking on lives of their own. This whirlwind of arrows, pointing everywhere and nowhere -each one color-coded to represent God knows what aspects of growth, market share, or regional trends -ends up capturing the excitement and pleasant confusion of the marketplace, the everyday street, personal relationships, and the simultaneity of multitasking. Does it really do all that? If you imagine you are inside there it does."


"This is Dan Rather's profile. Expanded to the nth degree. Taken to infinity. Overlayed on the back of Patrick Stewart's head. It's recombinant phrenology. The elements of phrenology recombined in ways that follow the rules of irrational logic, a rigorous methodology that follows nonrational rules. It is a structure for following your intuition and your obsessions. It is the hyperfocused scribblings of the mad and the gifted. The order and structure give it the appearance of rationality and scientific rigor. This appearance is easy to emulate.Phrenology sought to reveal criminal propensities -and those of potential leaders and geniuses -in the shapes and bumps of the head and face. Nowadays we see it as a scientific justification for racist and cultural biases. A dangerous pseudoscience. But if phrenology was the genetic profiling of a previous era, what will supplant genetic profiling when that too appears as ridiculous as phrenology does to us now? Nonrational logic will not go away."


• http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1595838
David Byrne's PowerPoint Art
Musician Uses Business Program for Ironic Avant-Garde Art

• http://www.npr.org/ecommerce/purchase/2004/jan/byrne_book.html

“A lot of these business and economic phrases do have a lot of personal and emotional, and even erotic parallels -- which may be partially intentional.”
David Byrne, on the intended use and unintended consequences of using PowerPoint

Day to Day, January 14, 2004 · PowerPoint, Microsoft’s ubiquitous slideshow program, is used by business people all over the world to enliven their presentations -- and maybe keep listeners awake -- during long meetings. It’s become part of our culture, and now it’s been turned into art.

David Byrne, best known as the lead singer for the '80s rock band Talking Heads, has collected his PowerPoint art into a book and DVD with original songs, Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information.

Reporter Debra Schifrin spoke with David Byrne about his new work. The musician says he hadn’t planned to do an entire multimedia art project using the program, but he created a presentation a few years ago and says he was struck by the negative effect it had on the way people communicate.

But despite his initial disdain for the program, Byrne became intrigued by its artistic potential. He began turning PowerPoint's bars and lines, stock images and clichéd phrases into his creative playground.

The main idea, Byrne says, was to take the rational forms and structures of this business tool and use them in an irrational way.

"Artists are notoriously snooty and suspicious of anything coming from the business community," Byrne says. "So I have all kind of built in prejudices and suspicions that are working against me, that would naturally steer me away from anything like this. That’s why I have to turn the steering wheel and go right into it."


• http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,61485,00.html

Turning Heads With PowerPoint
By Xeni Jardin

LOS ANGELES -- From televised presidential aircraft carrier visits to the glut of unreal reality TV shows, "American culture is becoming a culture of pageants," says David Byrne.

"We're surrounded by show, just as the Roman Empire turned to bread and circuses to hide other things that were taking place."

To examine how the medium shapes the message, the former Talking Head uses Microsoft PowerPoint -- the ubiquitous presentation software -- as a creative tool.

His art presentations make babble of business-speak, and question whether the form of what we communicate can affect its truth: Rebellious flow charts stream backward, screens overflow with clip art gone wild, deliverables and leave-behinds assume surreal new roles, and renegade bullet points assault the viewer in a rapid-fire barrage.

Wired News recently spoke with Byrne in Los Angeles, where he was attending a series of events promoting the release of his new book and DVD set Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information, which chronicles the artist's PowerPoint peregrinations.

Wired News: What inspired you to explore how PowerPoint could be used to make art?

David Byrne: I'm not someone who used PowerPoint in my professional life, but a couple of years ago I'd finished this pseudo-religious book and wanted my live readings to feel like the sort of presentation that a motivational speaker might deliver. I knew this was something they might use, so I thought -- OK, to complete the illusion, I'll do these readings accompanied by PowerPoint. I decided to learn how to use it for that purpose, but discovered along the way -- wow, this is really easy. I don't have to stop here, I can do other things with this tool.

WN: What kinds of other things?

Byrne: I realized pretty quickly that the software could run by itself, to present autonomously. You can remove the person from the equation, and use PowerPoint as an art medium. It can loop interminably and do all the transitions by itself. There doesn't need to be a guy in a suit clicking buttons onstage; it can progress on its own.

At first, the presentations I made poked fun at it -- using business-y clip art, making light of sales pitches. But then I started to wander beyond that, making things that weren't self-reflective and weren't about the medium itself. I found that you could make these independently progressing things that said something else. They really began to take on a life of their own.

WN: When you began creating these art presentations, did you incorporate music?

Byrne: I placed music beneath the presentation, quietly, to establish a sort of mood. There was no synchronization -- it's completely different than the process of creating a music video -- but the sound created an emotional setting. And I began to think I should either write music for these pieces or plug in "found" musical pieces that fit, and tailor each aspect of this audiovisual thing to the other.

Along the way, I figured out that I seemed to be the only person working in this medium, in this way.

WN: Was that a surprise?

Byrne: Yes, because people make art out of all kinds of crappy things -- Lite Brites, or Pixelvision cameras. For every odd little tool, there's someone out there who's chosen that as a medium. And in spite of the limitations of a given technology, they turn it around so that each defect becomes a positive quality.

I was doing the same thing, turning the faults of PowerPoint into virtues. There are things it doesn't do well -- but I liked the way it tried to do them and failed. I've since learned that there are newer versions of the software that fix those things -- but I'm sticking with the old version.

WN: What would you say if the people at Microsoft were so taken by your work that they decided to re-market the software as a tool for artists?

Byrne: I don't think they will, but you never know. They did fly my assistant out to Redmond to talk about it. I have no idea what they thought of it.

WN: What insight do you hope people find in these performances?

Byrne: I'd like for people to feel less timid about taking things into their own hands. This is exactly what was intended by the people who developed this program. They hoped that this tool would allow people to bypass the middleman, to communicate without having to work through a gauntlet of graphic designers or AV professionals. Do it yourself. After all, I learned how to do it in only a couple of hours.

The fact that I'm kind of jumping into this with complete freedom and disregard for any kind of rules or strictures is, I imagine, exactly what its makers were hoping.

WN: What's next for you, more PowerPoint?

Byrne: Perhaps. I just completed a new solo album, which is due out in March 2004. I'll be touring and performing in the spring, and I'm also working on a new book -- this one will be a collection of drawings.

WN: As tech tools for creative expression -- digital cameras, image-editing software and the like -- become simpler, cheaper and more accessible, does art become democratized?

Byrne: It's true, but then again, it's not. Even before the advent of digital imaging, when large videotape cameras became small handhelds, the idea was that now everyone will become a filmmaker. And as technology progressed, this has become so easy that now you really can make a film on your laptop.

New people do become creators; they jump in where they might not have before. Within the last few years, for instance, all of a sudden we have a glut of artists who do video installations -- perhaps too many. But some of this new work is really great; the simplicity and affordability makes it happen.

I think this trend will continue. But just like the Internet itself, the fact that everybody now has access opens up this possibility for broader participation, but most of the time the potential isn't realized.

Just because it's there doesn't mean people will use it.

Is Powerpoint evil?!

Powerpoint is evil?! —Opinions about Powerpoint I found it interesting:

#1:
“I don't hate Powerpoint. I hate the presentation culture that expects me to stand up and talk in front of a screen full of silly dot points. I write well, and I speak fairly well. I love telling stories as part of my presentations - I watch the audience, and stories are the parts that people really listen to. However, when I'm forced to distil an otherwise good story into a few dot points, all of the power of the story and the elegance of the narrative disappears. I am held to the rigid listing of points on a screen. They control me and try to make me elaborate on each as a point, rather than weaving them together into something lovely.Oh, I know that I can use them as reminders and triggers, but when the audience expects to use the slides as a takeaway of the presentation, this just isn't enough.So, what should I do - retain the eloquence of the verbal presentation, or provide the audience with the visuals and takeaways...maybe I can find a way to provide some combination of both”
vs.

feedback:
“Who's to say it has to be distiled into a few dot points? Presentations are whatever you make them to be and it's much more about the presenter (you) than what's on the slides. Get creative and stop limiting yourself to templates!”


#2:
"The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" in which he tears this software tool apart as being superficial, presenter-friendly but listener/viewer-unfriendly and having a very low infomration density. He also blasts PowerPoint as being only useful for the "sales pitch" and for transmitting a "commercial attitude to everything".

#3:
“Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides -a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.”


#4:
“I’ve found myself wondering what it is exactly that makes PPT evil. Certainly it is dangerous: a graphic communications tool in the hands of people poorly trained in graphical communication is a bad thing. Hierarchical outlines can be used to lend a spurious authority to banal or misleading statements and imply non-existent chains of inference and conclusion. But this, I think, is not enough to make PPT truly evil. For a long time I wondered what I was missing, until I came across this:

Leverage your existing presentations so you don’t have to start from scratch. You can import just about any file type into Keynote - including PowerPoint, PDF and AppleWorks presentations - and then enhance with themes. You can paste data from Excel documents into your Keynote charts and tables. Keynote lets you export presentations to PowerPoint, QuickTime or PDF.

Here http://www.apple.com/keynote/ …

PPT, surely, has as its antecedents the blackboard, the flip chart and the ohp. Even used amateurishly, all of these media are effectively deployed in communication. Thinking back to my schooldays, I was always worried about teachers who flourished OHPs rather than wrote on the board, for some obscure reason, but they never struck the terror into me that a session of PPTs can. Why is this? And why did ohps make me more nervous than blackboards?

In the 1970s Chomsky noted that television was destroying political discourse. He realised that, in fact, discourse was stopping, as television demanded immediacy, and is not well suited to the delivery of lectures, encouraging a style of discourse now known as the “soundbite”. At first, “soundbites” were the distillation of more complex arguments - and this was the point of Chomsky’s objection: that complex political debate was being “dumbed down” into a soundbite for television’s consumption.

This was the effect of television itself—as McLuhan spotted, the medium is the message—but the political classes soon got with the medium and rather than “dumb down” the argument to get to the soundbite, dropped the argument entirely to produce just the soundbite. By the 1980s, politics had become merely soundbite packaging: Consider, since when did “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” actually substitute for a policy on criminal justice?

Although politics has always been about sloganeering—wrapping a complex idea into a memorable phrase like “votes for women”, “peace in our time”, “liberty, equality, fraternity”—there used to be complex political ideas behind the slogans. Nowadays, political parties don’t have policies as such, they instead craft soundbites to appeal to target swing voter groups. The party that does this best gets elected.

There are no longer any big ideas in politics not because all the big idea battles have been won, but because there are not anymore big ideas at all - and PPT has helped this happen to the presentation of complex information.

In the past, the notes on the blackboard represented a summation. The teacher wasn’t writing all there was to know on the subject - that existed in books, papers, pictures, documents, films, and other archives. The teacher merely presented a synthetic overview of the corpus relevant to the lesson at hand.

The teacher was able to do this (if they were a good teacher) because they had some mastery of that corpus. The notes on the board were ephemeral, epiphenomena of the narrative the teacher’s master caused him/her to weave around the source material. On reflection, this is why I got nervous about OHPs.

OHPs were more difficult to produce, and were produced in advance of the lesson. The teacher became preoccupied with the presentation of the OHPs, making sure they were laid out clearly and legible from the back of the class, as they would be unable to effect significant changes on the fly. They would have to prejudge very accurately the length of their talk, and the level of engagement of their audience. They would, in short, have come to see the production of the OHPs as the end in itself, rather than the summative mastery of the subject matter.

PPTs, too, has become an end in itself. PPTs don’t summarise more complex corpora, they are the sole embodiment of a piece of thinking, information or ideas. The are lavishly prepared: my anecdotal impression is that for every hour a PPT is worked on, 40 minutes are on looknfeel, and 20 minutes are on content.

As more and more visual tools are loaded into presentation software, as with Keynote, more and more time is spent on the looknfeel. This is what makes PPT evil: it is the primary medium for the expression of ideas in business, and, increasingly, education.

PPT is no longer an ephemeral medium, but a medium of record - so what we record is executive summaries and bullet-points. Not only are complex ideas no longer explored —if they won’t fit on a slide, there’s no place for them—but people are becoming increasingly ignorant of complex ideas: All thought has become slogans.

Is there hope? Very little, I fear. But I say this - delete your PPT slides after presenting them. Promise yourself that you will always treat them as ephemeral, that your primary sources will be elsewhere, in greater depth, and with more detail, and you may yet be saved.”


#5:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/12/30/byrne.powerpoint.ap/

PowerPoint Is Evil

A discussion of the evils of "powerpoint" presentations is in current issue of WIRED. An excerpt and link follow:

Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn't. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication. These side effects would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall.

Yet slideware -computer programs for presentations -is everywhere: in corporate America, in government bureaucracies, even in our schools. Several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint are churning out trillions of slides each year. Slideware may help speakers outline their talks, but convenience for the speaker can be punishing to both content and audience. The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch. "

#6:
PowerPoint is evil, by Volker Weber

“I had to troubleshoot another problem with PowerPoint today. Juan has created a very elaborate tutorial with lots of hyperlinks in PowerPoint. He was complaining that the presentation loses those hyperlinks after he saved and reloaded the file. It turns out that Microsoft knows about this problem:
SYMPTOMS

If you add or make a change to a hyperlink setting in a large PowerPoint presentation, the changes that you made are not retained when you reopen the file.

CAUSE

PowerPoint stores the hyperlink information in the Document Summary storage area of the presentation. This storage area has a limit of 64 KB. The Document Summary storage contains all the document properties, custom properties, references, and other similar data.

Because the Document Summary storage is used by different aspects of the presentation, there is a finite number of hyperlinks that can be stored in presentation. This is compounded by the fact that the longer the text is for a hyperlink that you have to store, the fewer you can store.

Theoretically you can store upward of 32 KB of characters in the Document Summary, which translates to approximately 6,500 words. More than half of this is already allocated to dedicated Document Summary items. After the free space is used, no more can be allocated to the presentation.

So PowerPoint renders the whole tutorial useless. Needless to say that this limitation has not been fixed in PowerPoint 2002 or the new version that came out this week.

And adding insult to injury: PowerPoint does not tell you that it is throwing away your hyperlinks.”

#7:
The article (which I hadn't seen before, and which I agree is
valuable) attacks *users* of PowerPoint for abuse of the medium.

Interestingly, whoever dreamt up the title is guilty of the same
category of mistake: the title vilifies the tool, whereas the
content vilifies the *users* of the tool: "the PowerPoint **style**
routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content. Thus
PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play -very loud,
very slow, and very simple. ... rather than supplementing a
presentation, [PowerPoint slides have] become a substitute for it".

Once upon a time, we used the quaint term 'visual aids'. One needs
to think of slides as something for the eyes to look at while the
upper parts of the brain chew over what the ears are delivering to
it. They should complement (not merely 'supplement'), and provide a
parallel but distinct flow. Text and bullets should *never* be read
out by the speaker; *but* diagrams sometimes need to be 'spoken to'.

I had a chat on a plane the other day with someone who was admiring
my PowerBook (even though it's fully 2 years old, some people assume
it's brand new, so far ahead are Apple's portable designers). He
turned out to be a professional lecturer (i.e. expensive) who uses
music quite a bit to accompany his slides. It's not the melody that
matters so much, as the rhythm - he orchestrates the bullet-point
revelations. On the one hand, it's a gimmick; but on the other it
neutralises all those excess cycles that drag us off on tangents and
break our concentration, and assists the audience to focus on the
subject-matter, and hence better assimilate the material.

Yes, such a technique is Stalinist, because it supports control of
the audience by the speaker. You can use it the way that marketers
do, and that's of course evil. Or you can harness it as a way of
shocking your audience into new insights, and stimulating them to go
forth and view the world differently, which is of course angelic.

By the way, the Wired article missed an important example of abuse of
PowerPoint, and of audiences. During the last 5-10 years, major
consultancy firms have taken to delivering their 'reports' to their
clients as folders of slides. It's great (for them), because it
saves money, ducks the need for careful reasoning of arguments, and
the slides can mean whatever you want them to mean - 'applied
post-modernism', I calls it. Us honest, competency-based consultants
- as distinct from mere brand-name consultants like the Big 5 -
bucked the trend and still deliver actual information and
understanding.

#8:
PowerPoint is evil (or is it?)
“ I'm now about 70% done with my slides for the China conference presentation. It gives me some pause... a lot of virtual ink has been spilt over whether PowerPoint is Evil or not, the dreaded PowerPoint cognitive style, whether PowerPoint has any place in pedagogy, and what it does to the quality of communication.

("PowerPoint," here, is a generic term. I'm doing my slides in OpenOffice Impress, for reasons already noted herein.)

Working in corporate America instilled the idea in me that to give a presentation, you have to have slides on your computer. Now that I'm in it up to my neck, I'm questioning whether that's really true. Edward Tufte's argument in "PowerPoint is Evil" is compelling, although it speaks more to the tendency of PowerPoint users to substitute a gee-whiz slide show for clear thinking and focused speaking. At the same time, it's worth noting that many PowerPoint apologists also happen to work for design and consulting companies who prepare PowerPoint presentations for corporate clients.

Let's face it. PowerPoint is sales software. Its job is to help you bludgeon the audience into uncritical acceptance of your propaganda. The ideal slide reduces complex ideas into soundbites, and makes the soundbites seem self-evident. I've sat through enough company-wide meetings where we are told exactly the "correct" way to view the state of things to be fully aware of the dark side of this software. PowerPoint is evil when it's badly used because it obfuscates the subject matter. It is more evil when it's used well, because it makes things that should be questioned seem to be unquestionable.

What place does it have at an academic conference, then?

I've taken the following process to prepare this presentation:

1 Outline. Put everything into the outline. Make it hierarchical. Have sections that relate to each other while grouping ideas into sensible clusters.
2 Make slides. Follow the general outline, but also evaluate whether the sections make sense as discourse. Think through the flow of ideas.
3 Flesh out a more comprehensive outline of each slide to use as lecture notes.


I think the process has helped me focus the sequence of ideas, actually. I have two years' research to compress into 40 minutes, and I can't afford ill-conceived digressions. I believe the ideas will be easier to understand and remember for the careful highlighting of the main points that will be projected in the lecture hall. Would I use the same approach in a classroom for this material? Probably not, because slides shut down exploration.

So I'm ambivalent. Will I use it the next time I have to present? I don't know. It may depend on how it goes in China. I also note how many times I used buzzwords like "clear" and "focused" in this posting, so I'm not sure I haven't already become what I dread.”



Artist: David Byine

#1:

Rock star David Byrne turns PowerPoint into art

David Byrne, an accomplished composer, photographer and lead singer of Talking Heads, has evolved -- some would say devolved -- into an unlikely artistic medium: PowerPoint.

Best known for vocals in "Psycho Killer" and "Burning Down the House," Byrne originally intended to spoof the ubiquitous software as a dumbed-down form of expression between communication-addled business executives.

But after spending several hours designing a mock slide show, Byrne became intrigued. He decided to experiment with PowerPoint as an artistic medium -- and ponder whether it shapes how we talk and think.

In his book and DVD compilation, "Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information," Byrne twists PowerPoint from a marketing tool into a multimedia canvas, pontificating that the software's charts, graphs, bullet points and arrows have changed communication styles.

"I just got carried away and started making stuff," Byrne said. "It communicates within certain limited parameters really well and very easily. The genius of it is that it was designed for any idiot to use. I learned it in a few hours, and that's the idea."

The 96-page compilation, which debuted in September for $80, is best described as a coffee table book for nerds. The initial printing run of 1,500 copies sold out by mid-December.

The book includes mostly lucid musings on how PowerPoint has ushered in "the end of reason," with pictures of bar charts gone hideously astray, fields of curved arrows that point at nothing, disturbing close-ups of wax hands and eyebrows, and a photo of Dolly the cloned sheep enclosed by punctuation brackets.

The 20-minute DVD, encased in the navy blue hardback cover, features the same abstractions in motion. Byrne wrote most of the music.

Byrne, 51, who was born in Scotland but has spent most of his adulthood in New York, said the compilation wasn't meant as a "serious statement about anything."

But by fixating on PowerPoint, Byrne -- idolized by millions as a rock star for intellectuals -- has stoked a fierce debate.

Visual artists say Microsoft Corp.'s popular "slideware" -- which makes it easy to incorporate animated graphics and other entertainment into presentations -- lulls people into accepting pablum over ideas. Foes say PowerPoint's ubiquity perverts everything from elementary school reports to NASA's scientific theses into sales pitches with bullet points and stock art.

One of the Internet's inventors, Vint Cerf, gets laughs from audiences by quipping, "Power corrupts and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."

Cerf, now an MCI executive and chairman of the Internet's key oversight body, doesn't shun PowerPoint completely, but said avoiding it "actually improves communication because people have to listen rather than being distracted by fancy PowerPoint charts."

Edward R. Tufte, a Yale University professor and author of graphic design book "Envisioning Information," is perhaps the most vocal PowerPoint hater. He believes PowerPoint's emphasis on format over content commercializes and trivializes subjects.

In a Wired magazine editorial in September titled "PowerPoint Is Evil," Tufte compared PowerPoint presentations to a school play: "very loud, very slow, and very simple."

Peter Norvig, 46, engineering director at Google Inc., is generally credited with creating the first PowerPoint parody in 1999, when he published an online slideshow of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. The spoof, which by Norvig's estimate has been viewed by at least 500,000 people, includes bullet points such as "unfinished work (great tasks)," "new birth of freedom" and "government not perish."

Norvig, who recently ordered a copy of Byrne's compilation for himself, said Byrne is wading in treacherous waters.

"People are asking whether, ultimately, PowerPoint makes us all stupid, or does it help us streamline our thoughts?" said Norvig, who first saw Talking Heads in the late '70s. "My belief is that PowerPoint doesn't kill meetings. People kill meetings. But using PowerPoint is like having a loaded AK-47 on the table: You can do very bad things with it."

Microsoft spokesman Simon Marks wouldn't comment on whether PowerPoint has debased society but said in an e-mail, "PowerPoint continues to evolve to make it easier for customers to present their information in the style that best suits the content and the audience."

Byrne, a Tufte admirer who attended the Rhode Island School of Design, writes that PowerPoint's "subtle sets of biases" indoctrinate users to speak -- and think -- simply.

But the overall tone of this compilation is somewhat like a sales pitch -- whimsical and upbeat. Byrne is unapologetic about liking PowerPoint.

"Software constraints are only confining if you use them for what they're intended to be used for," Byrne said in a phone interview. "PowerPoint may not be of any use for you in a presentation, but it may liberate you in another way, an artistic way. Who knows."

The gulf between Byrne's and Tufte's outlooks troubles fans.

Jimmy Guterman, 41, a writer whose Boston-area office includes posters of Tufte and Byrne, said he feels like the child of divorce.

"Quite frankly, I have to side with Tufte on this one," Guterman said. "Byrne thinks it's funny that this tool exists, and he wants to play with it. Tufte is going for the jugular. But they both in different ways understand that PowerPoint is a broken tool."


#2:
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/03/08_byrne.shtml

How did I get here? Former Talking Head David Byrne steps out from behind the podium to explain an Edward Tufte chart. (Bart Nagel photos)

David Byrne really does _ PowerPoint, Berkeley presentation shows

By Bonnie Azab Powell, NewsCenter | 8 March 2005

BERKELEY – "Hello. My name is David Byrne, and I'm going to do an introduction to PowerPoint."

The roar of applause and cheers that greeted this deadpan statement was undoubtedly the most enthusiasm ever exhibited before a lecture held in UC Berkeley's Dwinelle Hall. Byrne, best known as the front man for the Talking Heads, proceeded to do exactly what he said he would. But while he poked fun at the popular Microsoft presentation software's bullet-point tyranny and Autocontent Wizard inanity, Byrne also defended its appeal as more than just a business tool — as a medium for art and theater. His talk was titled "I _ PowerPoint," and he confessed that he loves the program not in spite of, but in some ways because of, its shortcomings.

Byrne waits for his turn at the laptop.

"I love not having an unlimited palette. In that sense it's like a pencil. You don't expect to have other typefaces or fonts; you have fun with what's there," Byrne said. "Freedom — who needs it?"

This must be the place

"PowerPoint is the Rodney Dangerfield of software: it gets no respect," summarized Ken Goldberg, the Berkeley engineering professor and artist who invited Byrne to speak as part of the Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium series he started in 1997. "It's easy to ridicule it for its corporate nature, but the real story is about how participatory and democratic it is. High school kids use it, rabbis use it, people even use it for wedding toasts."

Byrne discovered the software a few years ago and, excited by how easy it was to integrate visuals and music, began to create art pieces with it. He collected them into a book, "Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information," which came with a DVD of about 20 minutes of his "PowerPointillism," as Goldberg calls it. Those slides — among them images of Dolly the cloned sheep, simple drawings, and arrows jostling each other like a confused school of fish (below right) — cycled across the screen before the lecture began.

Still slide from Byrne's "Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information" book, part of the pre-show.
Unfortunately, the crowd was so large and so excited as they awaited David Byrne's appearance, that the music accompanying the slides was all but inaudible. Faculty and students were too busy playing spot-the-Bay-area celebrity to pay attention to the pre-show. Milling about were Wired magazine founders Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalf, Google technologist Peter Norvig, multimedia artist Lynn Hershman, movie producer Tom Luddy, and Webby Award founder Tiffany Shlain.

The crowd settled down quickly when Byrne emerged, perching on the edge of the stage as Goldberg introduced him as "the Renaissance man of rock & roll." In addition to the Byrne's successful solo career post-Talking Heads, he has written an Oscar-winning soundtrack ("The Last Emperor"), had multiple solo art shows, and been instrumental in bringing African and Latin American music to a wider audience.

Goldberg's preamble was in the form, of course, of a PowerPoint presentation: one with snapshots of businesspeople in offices. They turned out to be 1980s photos of the original team who created PowerPoint, led by Berkeley alumnus Bob Gaskins and Dennis Austin. When Goldberg announced the two men were in the audience — "To us engineers, you're rock stars!" — the applause was almost as loud as it had been for Byrne.

Despite having performed before millions of people in his life, Byrne shuffled nervously behind the podium, stepping from side to side in scuffed white saddle shoes. With his slender build and crest of silver hair, he seemed birdlike, an impression only heightened by his darting eyes and bobbing head movements. He rarely smiled as he clicked through several examples of unintentionally hilarious PowerPoint slides that he found on the Web, such as these:


He joked about how when he began playing with PowerPoint, he didn't know about its unwritten rules — that everything should have bullet points — and said he was fascinated by the Autocontent Wizard. "If you don't know what to say, if you don't have content, it'll help you out," he said mischievously, showing a slide about how to deliver bad news:

Our situation
• State the bad news
• Be clear, don't try to obscure the situation

Make it up as we go along

But bad PowerPoint presentations, such as the ones the audience were chortling over, are the fault of the presenter, not the software, Byrne said. "There's a lot of criticism of PowerPoint" — for encouraging users to do things in a particular way and discouraging them from other things, such as putting more than seven bullet points on a slide, he acknowledged. "But if you can't edit it down to seven, maybe you should think about talking about something else." PowerPoint restricts users no more than any other communication platform, he asserted, including a pencil: "When you pick up a pencil you know what you're getting — you don't think, 'I wish this could write in a million colors.'"

What bothers PowerPoint critics, most prominent among them the information-design guru Edward Tufte, is that the software seems to circumvent creativity, to elevate clip art and gaudy graphics to the status of actual substance. But while acknowledging the general trend toward such vacuity, Bryne said "you can't blame it on PowerPoint. …You see it on the TV news, everything's filled with graphics and icons — it has the illusion of content but there's very little being communicated."

What Tufte and other critics are missing, he said, was that PowerPoint was just one element of the presentation. He invoked the influential media commentator Marshall McLuhan, author of "The Medium is the Massage," to counter Tufte's reductivism. Only the worst presenters stick to reading what's on their slides; most ad-lib and engage with the audience both verbally and nonverbally. "Sixty to 90 percent of the communication we receive is nonverbal," said Byrne. He waited a beat. "That's more than half!"
PowerPoint's history
Bob Gaskins, a former Berkeley Ph.D. student, conceived PowerPoint originally as an easy-to-use presentation program. He hired a software developer, Dennis Austin, in 1984 to build a prototype program that they called "Presenter," later changing the name to PowerPoint for trademark reasons. PowerPoint 1.0 was released in 1987 for the Apple Macintosh platform; later that year Gaskins's company Forethought and the program were purchased by Microsoft for $14 million. The first Windows and DOS versions of PowerPoint followed in 1988. PowerPoint became a standard part of the Microsoft Office suite in 1990. According to Microsoft, more than 30 million presentations are made around the world with PowerPoint every day.

PowerPoint, because it is ubiquitous and user-friendly, has the potential to become an everyday art form. Byrne showed slides created by other non-corporate PowerPoint users, such as Google's Norvig, whose parody of Lincoln's Gettysburg address has been viewed by half a million people online. Eventually, Byrne said, PowerPoint could be the foundation for "presentational theater," with roots in Brechtian drama and Asian puppet theater. "What I am doing now is not considered theater, but give it a little more time," he said modestly.

I guess we must be having fun

Ultimately, Byrne said, he just enjoyed playing with the program, and continues to do so. "I made a presentation recently that was just colored slides fading in and out, like a rainbow. I put this gospel music to it — it was this wonderful, uplifting celebration," he said. "Who knew? Sometimes you only find out what's in there when you take everything out."

UC Berkeley engineering professor Ken Goldberg, the event's host, with PowerPoint creators Dennis Austin and Bob Gaskins.

As Byrne signed copies of his books after fielding (and bunting most) questions from the audience, PowerPoint creators Bob Gaskins and Dennis Austin and their wives were still chuckling good-naturedly over the performance. "[Byrne] was past engineering, he's doing stand up!" said Austin. "All of those jokes about using PowerPoint badly, everyone can relate to that."

Gaskins pointed out that a lot of the humorous ways people were using PowerPoint were not in fact new. The very first version came with a sample presentation by Christopher Columbus, with bullet points illustrating why Queen Isabella of Spain should fund his voyage. "So while I think the Gettysburg Address presentation is really funny, it's not new," he said.

Ultimately, PowerPoint is just an instrument like a guitar, with ones and zeroes in place of strings and wood. And as Byrne showed last night, perhaps the naïve melodies are best.

Hypertext. Language as Code.

Hypertext: Language as Code

--Definitions of “Hypertext” from Wikipedia.

(Redirected from HyperText)
In computing, hypertext is a user interface paradigm for displaying documents which, according to an early definition (Nelson 1970), "branch or perform on request." The most frequently discussed form of hypertext document contains automated cross-references to other documents called hyperlinks. Selecting a hyperlink causes the computer to display the linked document within a very short period of time.
A document can be static (prepared and stored in advance) or dynamically generated (in response to user input). Therefore, a well-constructed hypertext system can encompass, incorporate or supersede many other user interface paradigms like menus and command lines, and can be used to access both static collections of cross-referenced documents and interactive applications. The documents and applications can be local or can come from anywhere with the assistance of a computer network like the Internet. The most famous implementation of hypertext is the World Wide Web.
The term "hypertext" is often used where the term hypermedia would be more appropriate.

--History of Hypertext:
In the early 20th century, two visionaries attacked the cross-referencing problem through proposals based on labor-intensive brute force methods. Paul Otlet proposed a proto-hypertext concept based on his monographic principle in which all documents would be decomposed down to unique phrases stored on index cards. In the 1930s, H.G. Wells proposed the creation of a World Brain. For obvious reasons like cost, neither proposal got very far.
Therefore, all major histories of hypertext start with 1945, when Vannevar Bush wrote an article in The Atlantic Monthly called "As We May Think," about a futuristic device he called a Memex. (memex--model for interernet) He described the device as mechanical desk linked to an extensive archive of microfilms and able to display books, texts or any document from the library, and further able to automatically follow references from any given page to the specific page referenced.
Most experts do not consider the Memex to be a true hypertext system. However, the story starts with the Memex because "As We May Think" directly influenced and inspired the two American men generally credited with the invention of hypertext, Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart.
Nelson coined the word "hypertext" in 1965 and helped Andries van Dam develop the Hypertext Editing System in 1968 at Brown University; Engelbart had begun working on his NLS system in 1962 at Stanford Research Institute, although delays in obtaining funding, personnel and equipment meant that its key features were not completed until 1968.
After funding for NLS slowed to a trickle in 1974, progress on hypertext research nearly came to a halt. During this time, the ZOG at Carnegie Mellon started as an artificial intelligence research project under the supervision of Allen Newell. Only much later would its participants realize that their system was a hypertext system. ZOG was deployed in 1980 on the U.S.S. Carl Vinson and later commercialized as KMS.
The first hypermedia application was the Aspen Movie Map in 1977.
The early 1980s saw a number of experimental hypertext and hypermedia programs, many of whose features and terminology were later integrated into the Web. However, none of these systems achieved widespread success or name recognition with consumers.
Guide was the first hypertext system for personal computers, but it was not very successful. Guide was quite expensive and difficult to use, as it had originally been developed for UNIX workstations and was subsequently ported to DOS. It was immediately eclipsed by HyperCard.
In August 1987, Apple Computer revealed its HyperCard application for its Macintosh line of computers at the MacWorld convention in Boston. HyperCard was an immediate hit and helped to popularize the concept of hypertext with the general public (although as Jakob Nielsen later pointed out, it was technically a hypermedia system because its hyperlinks originated only from regions on the screen). The first hypertext-specific academic conference also took place that year.
Meanwhile, Nelson had been working on and advocating his Xanadu system for over two decades, and the commercial success of HyperCard stirred Autodesk to invest in his revolutionary ideas. The project limped on for four years without ever releasing a complete product, before Autodesk pulled the plug in the midst of the 1991-1992 recession.
In late 1990, Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web to meet the demand for automatic information sharing between scientists working in different universities and institutes all over the world. Early in 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released a first version of their Mosaic browser to replace the two lacking existing web browsers: one that ran only on NeXTSTEP and one that was minimally user-friendly. Mosaic ran in the X Window System environment, popular in the research community, and offered usable window-based interaction. Web traffic exploded from only 500 known web servers in 1993 to over 10,000 in 1994 after the release of browser versions for both the PC and Macintosh environments.
All the earlier hypertext systems were quickly overshadowed by the success of Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web, even though the latter lacked many features of those earlier systems such as typed links, transclusion and source tracking.
[edit]

--Hypertext as Literature
The development of hypertext fiction, a branch of electronic literature, has coincided with the growth and proliferation of hypertext development software and the emergence of electronic networks. Two software programs specifically designed for literary hypertext, Storyspace and Intermedia became available in the 1990's. Storyspace v2.0, a professional level hypertext development tool, is available from Eastgate Systems, which has also published many notable hypertext fictions, including Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story, Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl (hypertext), and Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden. Important early hypertext critics and theorists include Jay David Bolter, George Landow, Stuart Moulthrop, J.Yellowlees Douglas, Robert Coover, Douglas Anthony Cooper, and Michael Joyce.

Hypermidea-images vs. Hypertext-text


---Hypertext is divided into:
1.poetry
2. fiction
3. drama
4. nonfiction
‡
1. “Hypertext poetry”
Hypertext poetry, a form of e-poetry, is hard to delineate, since it is often very visual, thus seeping into hypertext fiction and visual arts. A definition would include its use of links using hypertext mark-up. The links mean that a hypertext poem has no set order, the poem moving or being generated in response to the links that the reader/user chooses. It can either involve set words, phrases, lines, etc. that are presented in variable order but sit on the page much as traditional poetry does, or it can contain parts of the poem that move and / or mutate. It is usually found online, though CD-ROM and diskette versions are not unknown. The earliest examples date to no later than the mid 1980s.

Websites I checked:
#1 Electronic Literature Directory ---http://directory.eliterature.org/browse.php?t=1&g=3874e6192
#2 ABC--- http://www.tonyrickaby.co.uk/animations/conception.html
#3Ô--- http://www.vispo.com/O/index.html
#4 intimacy--- http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/frame4/atavar/intimacy00.html
#5 Jennifer--- http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt/z.htm
#6 lalalangue--- http://freewheelin.nu/texts/lalalangue/
#7 The Language of the Void--- http://www.heelstone.com/meridian/

2. “Hypertext fiction”
Hypertext fiction is a genre of electronic literature found mostly online, characterized by non-linearity and reader interaction. The reader typically chooses links to move from one node of text to the next, and in this fashion arranges a story from a deeper pool of potential stories.
The first hypertext fictions were published prior to the development of the World Wide Web, using software such as Storyspace and Hypercard. Michael Joyce's Afternoon, a story is generally considered the first hypertext fiction.

Websites I checked:
#1 Douglas Anthony Cooper's Delirium (1994)---the first novel serialized on the web; it permitted navigation between four parallel story strands. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0786863412/103-9924174-5961405
#2 Sunshine 69--- http://www.sunshine69.com/69_Start.html
#3 The Company Therapist--- http://www.thetherapist.com/
#4 These Waves of Girls-- http://www.yorku.ca/caitlin/waves/
#5 The Electronic Literature Directory maintained by The Electronic Literature Organization.---http://directory.eliterature.org/browse.php?t=1&g=38c49bb72
#6 1969/99---http://barrysmylie.com/flash/1999/index.htm
#7 24 hours with someone you know... http://www.glasswings.com.au/modern/24hours/
#8 About Time---http://www.wordcircuits.com/gallery/abouttime/
#9 Accss Points--- http://www.391.org/29/
#10 Serious hypertext--- http://www.eastgate.com/LastingImage/Welcome.html
#11 My Body by Shelly Jackson--- http://www.altx.com/thebody/
#12 the doll games by Shelly Jackson --- http://www.ineradicablestain.com/dollgames/
( I can’t find “Patchwork Girl” by Shelly Jackson on web)
#13 Shelly Jackson’s Ineradicable stain---http://www.ineradicablestain.com/
#14 _][ad][Dressed in a Skin C.ode_ --- http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/netwurker/

3. Hypertext Drama

#1 Electronic Literature Directory---http://directory.eliterature.org/browse.php?t=1&g=38c49ca02
#2 b.e.c.c.a project---
http://www.leeon.de/start.html
http://www.leeon.de/showroom/beccaProject/
pixel porno--- http://www.leeon.de/showroom/n_rop_le_xip/start.html


4. Hypertext Nonfiction

#1 Electronic Literature Directory---
http://directory.eliterature.org/browse.php?t=1&g=390cfcaa2
#2 360degrees --- http://www.360degrees.org/
http://www.360degrees.org/360degrees.html
#3 African Fragrance--- http://www.thing.de/blinkface/africa/welcome.html
http://www.thing.de/blinkface/index.html
#4 anxiety--- http://21dish.com/anxiety/index.html
#5 binary--- http://www.391.org/25/index111.htm
#6 Extension--- http://www.leeon.de/showroom/Extension/start.htm
#7 Fragments & Artifacts---
http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/studio/radams/mediatravel1.html
#8 Garden ---http://21dish.com/garden/
http://21dish.com/
http://21dish.com/project/project.html

---Articles for hypertext poetry and related forms:

1. Hypertext poems--- http://web.mala.bc.ca/guppy/crew410/hyperpoem.htm
2. Poets In Cyberspace--- http://members.shaw.ca/rucyber/names.html
3. Chris Funkhouser: "Hypertext and Poetry,"
http://www.txt.de/spress/reader/stateside/one/essays/funkh.htm
4.Project Xanadu (The original Hypertext Project) www.web.mala.bc.ca/guppy/crew400


---Other items related:
1. Hypertext projects (cut-ups, poems, literature, etc), text, messaging, wiki

2. Rhizome-->hypertext (find art object, artwork)

3. Short message service (SMS), text message
All about texting, SMS and MMS---www.textually.org
Jerry’s blog---jpham180.blogspot.com

4. Chat room

Semiotics

Here is the definition and key notes about Semiotics from various sites I checked :

1.http://www.colorado.edu/communication/meta-discourses/Theory/semiotics.htm

2. http://www.arthist.lu.se/kultsem/encyclo/intro.html

3.http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SEMIOTER.html —Semiotic Terms

Sign :
A deterministic, functional regularity or stability in a system, also sometimes called a sign-function. Something, the signifier, stands for something else, the signified, in virtue of the sign-function. May be either lawful, proper, or symbolic depending on the presence or absence of motivation. This is, of course, a very general definition, but it is in the tradition of both semiotics and general systems theory to think very generally.
Contains: signifier, signified.
Cases: lawful, proper, symbolic.
Synonym: sign function.

Sign Function :
Synonym: sign.

Signifier :
That part of a sign which stands for the signified, for example a word or a DNA codon.
Synonym: token, sign vehicle.
Part-of: sign.

Token :
The physical entity or marker which manifests the signifer by standing for the signified.
Synonym: signifier, sign vehicle.

Sign Vehicle :
Synonym: token, signifier.

Signified :
That part of a sign which is stood for by the signifier. Sometimes thought of as the meaning of the signifier.
Synonym: object, referent, interpretant.
Part-of: sign.

Object :
Synonym: signified, referent, interpretant.

Referent :
Synonym: signified, object, interpretant.

Motivation :
The presence of some degree of necessity between the signified and siginifier of a sign. Makes the sign proper, and complete motivation makes the sign lawful. For example, a painting may resemble its subject, making it a proper sign.
Antonym: arbitrariness.

Arbitrariness :
The absence of any degree of necessity between the signified and siginifier of a sign. Makes the sign symbolic. For example, in English we say "bachelor" to refer to an unmarried man, but since we might just as well say "foobar", therefore "bachelor" is a symbol.
Antonym: motivation.

Proper Sign :
A sign which has an intermediate degree of motivation. For example, a photograph is a proper sign.
isa: sign.
Cases: icon, index.

Icon :
A proper sign where the motivation is due to some kind of physical resemblance or similarity between the signified and siginifier. For example, a map is an icon of its territory.
isa: proper sign.

Index :
A proper sign where the motivation is due to some kind of physical connection or causal relation between the signified and siginifier. For example, smoke is an index of fire.
isa: proper sign.

Symbol :
For CS Peirce, a sign where the sign function is a conventional rule or coding. The operation of a symbol is dependent on a process of interpretation.
isa: sign.

Rule :
A functional regularity or stability which is conventional, and thus necessary within the system which manifests it, but within a wider universe it is contingent, or arbitrary. For example, if we wish to refer to an unmarried man in English, then we must say "bachelor", even though "bachelor" is a symbol.
Synonym: code, semantic relation.
Antonym: law.

Semantic Relation :
Synonym: code, rule.

Code :
The establishment of a conventional rule-following relation in a symbol, represented as a deterministic, functional relation between two sets of entities.
Synonym: semantic relation, rule.

Interpret :
To take something for something else in virtue of a coding.

Interpreter :
That entity, typically a human subject, which interprets the sign vehicle of a symbol.

Interpretant :
For Peirce, that which followed semantically from the process of interpretation.
Synonym: signified, object, referent.

Law :
A regularity or stability which is necessary for all systems, and thus immutable as a fact of nature. The necessity of the relation is called the sign's motivation.
Antonym: rule.

Semantic Closure :
Propounded by Pattee [ PaH82], the property of real semiotic systems like organisms, wherein the interpreter is itself a referent of the semantic relation.


4. http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/semiotics.html

5. http://www.newcastle.edu.au/discipline/fine-art/theory/analysis/semiotic.htm
SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF IMAGES—There is a huge amount of material related to semiotics on the Web. However, very little of this is focused on semiotic analysis of visual images. Because many semiotic sites originate in Media Studies departments, visual analysis is often directed to written texts, film and advertising images. Also, the quality of the material varies greatly. Therefore, in the early stages of your research stay with the links listed below.

6. http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/semiotics.html#resources
Useful resources page



7. http://www.nerdshit.com/archive/2004/06/02/semiotics_for_b/
We seem as a species to be driven by a desire to make meanings: above all, we are surely Homo significans - meaning-makers. Distinctively, we make meanings through our creation and interpretation of 'signs'. Indeed, according to Peirce, 'we think only in signs' (Peirce 1931-58, 2.302). Signs take the form of words, images, sounds, odours, flavours, acts or objects, but such things have no intrinsic meaning and become signs only when we invest them with meaning.

8. http://coolblue.typepad.com/the_cool_blue_blog/2004/06/semiotics_for_b.html

• Semiotics: the shortest definition is that it is the study of signs
• The kinds of signs that are likely to spring immediately to mind are those which we routinely refer to as 'signs' in everyday life, such as road signs, pub signs and star signs. If you were to agree with them that semiotics can include the study of all these and more, people will probably assume that semiotics is about 'visual signs'. You would confirm their hunch if you said that signs can also be drawings, paintings and photographs
• It also includes words, sounds and 'body language' they may reasonably wonder what all these things have in common and how anyone could possibly study such disparate phenomena
• Semiology (from the Greek semeîon, 'sign'). It would investigate the nature of signs and the laws governing them. Since it does not yet exist, one cannot say for certain that it will exist. But it has a right to exist, a place ready for it in advance. Linguistics is only one branch of this general science. The laws which semiology will discover will be laws applicable in linguistics, and linguistics will thus be assigned to a clearly defined place in the field of human knowledge. (Saussure 1983, 15-16; Saussure 1974, 16)
• 1. the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), a founder not only of linguistics but also of what is now more usually referred to as semiotics
• 2. Other than Saussure (the usual abbreviation), key figures in the early development of semiotics were the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (sic, pronounced 'purse') (1839-1914) and later Charles William Morris (1901-1979), who developed a behaviourist semiotics
• 3. It is difficult to disentangle European semiotics from structuralism in its origins; major structuralists include not only Saussure but also Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-1990) in anthropology (who saw his subject as a branch of semiotics) and Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) in psychoanalysis. Structuralism is an analytical method which has been employed by many semioticians and which is based on Saussure's linguistic model. Structuralists seek to describe the overall organization of sign systems as 'languages' - as with Lévi-Strauss and myth, kinship rules and totemism, Lacan and the unconscious and Barthes and Greimas and the 'grammar' of narrative. They engage in a search for 'deep structures' underlying the 'surface features' of phenomena. However, contemporary social semiotics has moved beyond the structuralist concern with the internal relations of parts within a self-contained system, seeking to explore the use of signs in specific social situations. Modern semiotic theory is also sometimes allied with a Marxist approach which stresses the role of ideology.
• Semiotics began to become a major approach to cultural studies in the late 1960s partly as a result of the work of Roland Barthes.
• Writing in 1964, Barthes declared that 'semiology aims to take in any system of signs, whatever their substance and limits; images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, and the complex associations of all of these, which form the content of ritual, convention or public entertainment: these constitute, if not languages, at least systems of signification' (Barthes 1967, 9).
• Semiotics is not widely institutionalized as an academic discipline. It is a field of study involving many different theoretical stances and methodological tools. One of the broadest definitions is that of Umberto Eco, who states that 'semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign' (Eco 1976, 7). Semiotics involves the study not only of what we refer to as 'signs' in everyday speech, but of anything which 'stands for' something else. In a semiotic sense, signs take the form of words, images, sounds, gestures and objects. Whilst for the linguist Saussure, 'semiology' was 'a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life', for the philosopher Charles Peirce 'semiotic' was the 'formal doctrine of signs' which was closely related to Logic (Peirce 1931-58, 2.227). For him, 'a sign... is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity' (Peirce 1931-58, 2.228). He declared that 'every thought is a sign' (Peirce 1931-58, 1.538; cf. 5.250ff, 5.283ff). Contemporary semioticians study signs not in isolation but as part of semiotic 'sign systems' (such as a medium or genre). They study how meanings are made: as such, being concerned not only with communication but also with the construction and maintenance of reality.
• Semiotics and that branch of linguistics known as semantics have a common concern with the meaning of signs, but John Sturrock argues that whereas semantics focuses on what words mean, semiotics is concerned with how signs mean (Sturrock 1986, 22). For C W Morris (deriving this threefold classification from Peirce), semiotics embraced semantics, along with the other traditional branches of linguistics:
* semantics: the relationship of signs to what they stand for;
* syntactics (or syntax): the formal or structural relations between signs;
* pragmatics: the relation of signs to interpreters (Morris 1938, 6-7).
• Semiotics is often employed in the analysis of texts.
• A 'text' can exist in any medium and may be verbal, non-verbal, or both, despite the logocentric bias of this distinction. The term text usually refers to a message which has been recorded in some way (e.g. writing, audio- and video-recording) so that it is physically independent of its sender or receiver. A text is an assemblage of signs (such as words, images, sounds and/or gestures) constructed (and interpreted) with reference to the conventions associated with a genre and in a particular medium of communication.
• Semiotic studies focus on the system of rules governing the 'discourse' involved in media texts, stressing the role of semiotic context in shaping meaning.
• C W Morris's definition of semiotics (in the spirit of Saussure) as 'the science of signs' (Morris 1938, 1-2).

Commtent by CoolBlue:
Semiotics is important because it can help us not to take 'reality' for granted as something having a purely objective existence which is independent of human interpretation. It teaches us that reality is a system of signs. Studying semiotics can assist us to become more aware of reality as a construction and of the roles played by ourselves and others in constructing it. It can help us to realize that information or meaning is not 'contained' in the world or in books, computers or audio-visual media. Meaning is not 'transmitted' to us - we actively create it according to a complex interplay of codes or conventions of which we are normally unaware. Becoming aware of such codes is both inherently fascinating and intellectually empowering. We learn from semiotics that we live in a world of signs and we have no way of understanding anything except through signs and the codes into which they are organized. Through the study of semiotics we become aware that these signs and codes are normally transparent and disguise our task in 'reading' them. Living in a world of increasingly visual signs, we need to learn that even the most 'realistic' signs are not what they appear to be. By making more explicit the codes by which signs are interpreted we may perform the valuable semiotic function of 'denaturalizing' signs. In defining realities signs serve ideological functions. Deconstructing and contesting the realities of signs can reveal whose realities are privileged and whose are suppressed. The study of signs is the study of the construction and maintenance of reality. To decline such a study is to leave to others the control of the world of meanings which we inhabit.

Commtent by simon:
'semiotics' refers to the study of signs in all forms. it is the term used by c s peirce --- saussure called it 'semiology'. however 'semiotics' is widely used to refer to both. 'structuralism' is linguistic perspectives ('codes', 'signs', 'grammar', 'text', 'language') used within a wider cultural context. the structuralist would say that not only words on a paper can be read in terms of rules for a language -- a photograph, an item of clothing or any artifact could be 'read' or 'decoded' in the same way--- hope that clarifies at least something



9. http://www.humbul.ac.uk/output/full2.php?id=12614
Catalogued By Dr James Wilson

10. http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/
Description : "Semiotics for Beginners"
It is an online book by Daniel Chandler, a lecturer in media and communication studies at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. It was originally written to assist his undergraduate students and to address the need for a clear, understandable introduction to the subject. The book largely succeeds in this respect, offering a readable and accessible guide to semiotic theory and its application to various fields. The online text is conventionally divided into chapters, with some light hypertextual features such as links between chapters and to external sites. Chapters cover issues such as: the nature of signs; paradigms and syntagms; denotation, connotation and myth; rhetorical tropes; encoding and decoding; and intertextuality. There is also a section covering the strengths and frequent criticisms of semiotic approaches. The book concludes with some advice to students regarding the interrogation of texts via semiotic analysis. This should act as a useful introduction for undergraduates studying critical theory, media studies, literature, or linguistics.
Semiotics has tended to be largely theoretical, many of its theorists seeking to establish its scope and general principles. Peirce and Saussure, for instance, were both concerned with the fundamental definition of the sign. Peirce developed elaborate logical taxonomies of types of signs. Subsequent semioticians have sought to identify and categorize the codes or conventions according to which signs are organized.
Semiotics represents a range of studies in art, literature, anthropology and the mass media rather than an independent academic discipline.
Beyond the most basic definition, there is considerable variation amongst leading semioticians as to what semiotics involves. It is not only concerned with (intentional) communication but also with our ascription of significance to anything in the world.
Saussure argued that 'nothing is more appropriate than the study of languages to bring out the nature of the semiological problem' (Saussure 1983, 16; Saussure 1974, 16).
Saussure referred to language (his model being speech) as 'the most important' of all of the systems of signs (Saussure 1983, 15; Saussure 1974, 16). Language is almost unvariably regarded as the most powerful communication system by far.
Claude Lévi-Strauss noted that 'language is the semiotic system par excellence; it cannot but signify, and exists only through signification' (Lévi-Strauss 1972, 48).
In the last decade or so, semiotics has undergone a shift of its theoretical gears: a shift away from the classification of sign systems - their basic units, their levels of structural organization - and towards the exploration of the modes of production of signs and meanings, the ways in which systems and codes are used, transformed or transgressed in social practice. While formerly the emphasis was on studying sign systems (language, literature, cinema, architecture, music, etc.), conceived of as mechanisms that generate messages, what is now being examined is the work performed through them. It is this work or activity which constitutes and/or transforms the codes, at the same time as it constitutes and transforms the individuals using the codes, performing the work; the individuals who are, therefore, the subjects of semiosis.



11. http://garnet.acns.fsu.edu/~sullivan/MMC2000/documents/SemioticsforBeginners.htm
…Contemporary semioticians study signs not in isolation but as part of semiotic 'sign systems' (such as a medium or genre). They study how meanings are made: as such, being concerned not only with communication but also with the construction and maintenance of reality. Semiotics and that branch of linguistics known as semantics have a common concern with the meaning of signs, but John Sturrock argues that whereas semantics focuses on what words mean, semiotics is concerned with how signs mean (Sturrock 1986, 22). For C W Morris (deriving this threefold classification from Peirce), semiotics embraced semantics, along with the other traditional branches of linguistics:

o semantics: the relationship of signs to what they stand for;
o syntactics (or syntax): the formal or structural relations between signs;
o pragmatics: the relation of signs to interpreters (Morris 1938, 6-7).

Semiotics is often employed in the analysis of texts (although it is far more than just a mode of textual analysis). Here it should perhaps be noted that a 'text' can exist in any medium and may be verbal, non-verbal, or both, despite the logocentric bias of this distinction. The term text usually refers to a message which has been recorded in some way (e.g. writing, audio- and video-recording) so that it is physically independent of its sender or receiver. A text is an assemblage of signs (such as words, images, sounds and/or gestures) constructed (and interpreted) with reference to the conventions associated with a genre and in a particular medium of communication.