Stories in Digital Media (SIDM) was a blog run by a few students and the professor Frieder Nake, part of the former Digital Media programme in the state of Bremen, Germany. By the end of the first decade of the millennium, the web and digital technology were advancing at an unprecedented pace in the social and artistic sphere. Developments were exciting, and we kept a log of some events and took time to reflect.

What you see here is a rendition of the content as it was back then, in a different, static archival representation. Enjoy this glimpse into a hopeful and exciting past.

Stuff that may be relevant for the Digital Media programme in Bremen.

ORIGINS

· Frieder Nake · in Art Theory
Nobody really believes anymore that anything in the world could have a definite and precise date when it started. As soon as we define a phenomenon as “new" by giving it a name, and talking about it in particular ways, we discover its pre-cursors. Digital media need digital technology to be what they are. Digital technology is more or less bound to the existence of digital computers. Digital technology is algorithmic technology. That's a funny technology, as you know: it is more immaterial than it is material. That is to say, digital technology is of semiotic kind. Once this was discovered in the late 1980s, it dawned upon some of the early contributors to what is often called »computer art« that computer graphics is the field that later spawned digital media. This is so because computer graphics deals with the contradiction of aesthetics and algorithmics. So digital media had its first phase between 1963 and 1968. Again that year!

3 Comments

  1. admin
    If you consider Games as a medium, it started even earlier: The game he created was called "Tennis For Two" – and it was the first recorded iteration of the game that later evolved into "Pong". Featuring a blip of electronic light, this revolutionary tennis simulation was programmed in 1958 by Higinbotham [Willy, from the Brookhaven National Laboratory, USA] and his team using trajectory paths on an analog computer. The team also added two ball and "serve" button – likely the first implementation of a "joystick" in an interactive game. "Tennis For Two" was displayed on a 5" monochrome oscilloscope screen and debuted in the Instrumentation Division display that same year. People waited for hours to play. (van Burnham (2001): Supercade. A visual history of the videogame age. MIT Press.)
  2. drnn1076
    Frieder I don't see the reason for such a contradiction between Aesthetics and algorithms, I would talk better of an aesthetic of the algorithm.
  3. Frieder Nake
    On even earlier precursors of digital media than computer graphics.– It is good to have Tennis for Two and Pong identified here. They are both, of course, demonstrating a great step away from the pure number crunching capasity of the huge computer. In those two exercises, the principle of interactive use und the data type of graphics get introduced. They get introduced in a truly media-like fashion, "games". So we learn, that digital media appear in very simple forms long before anyone thinks of the computer this way. On the contradiction of aesthetics and algorithmics. "Contradiction" here stands for the principle of dialectics. Nothing exists in the world as a developing phenomenon unless it is part of a system of two (or more) forces that pull and push in different directions. Aesthetics is certainly linked to a kind of thinking that concentrates on the individual case perceivable by our senses. Algorithmics is likewise linked to a thinking concentrating on general cases imaginable by our brains.

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