TIMELINE (CONTD.)
Augusto Boal is a South American interactive performance artist,who creates opportunities for interaction around the problems that confront ordinary people. He spent time among some of the most oppressed people in South America, using techniques described in his 1974 work,
Theater of the Oppressed, where many of the described techniques are cataloged into
Games for Actors and Non-Actors. He was initially based in Brazil--until the military government murdered his colleges and jailed and tortured him. He then fled to Argentina, worked in Chile for sometime, and was eventually exiled to Europe.
Many architects have made great contributions to new media. One of the most obvious applications of virtual reality was in architecture, where technology allowed for the first-person visualization of a planned physical building. Many new media insights offered by architects have come as innovative applications of architectural knowledge about space, or about design. The most influential architects working with computers--including
Michael Benedikt,
Marcos Novak,
William Mitchel and
Nicholas Negroponte--have developed new principles and theories for the digital realm, both to the cyberspace concept as well as new media in general. In 1967, Negroponte founded the
Architecture Machine Group at MIT. In this group, he and his collaborators developed methods of managing data spatially rather than numerically or in textual lists. In 1975, Negroponte published
Soft Architecture Machines, which remains of great importance to the design of software.
(For more information on the above mentioned architects, see 'Architecture'
Here.)
In 1976,
Joseph Weizenbaum wrote
Computer Power and Human Reason, where he discusses his program
ELIZA, which allows an individual to "converse" in English with a computer.
Those who forged new media have often seen themselves as simultaneously pursuing artistic and technological goals.
Myron Krueger has worked and written primarily in areas called "responsive environments" and "artificial reality." He is often called the "father of virtual reality." He is renowned in both the computer science and art worlds, for exploring more interesting ways for men and machines to relate.
Also in 1977,
Alan Kay and
Adele Goldberg described and foretold what notebook computing had become (the
Dynabook) in there essay
Personal Dynamic Media.
In 1980,
Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari published
A Thousand Plateaus. In the introduction, they discuss
rhizomatic writing which has been used to describe hypertext, or the properties of one hypertext system opposed to another. The text challenges readers to reconsider dualisms.
In
Seymour Papert's 1980 publication,
Mindstorms, he writes a hypothetical conversation between two children who are working and playing with a computer.
Put-That-There, written by
Richard A. Bolt, also in 1980, describes systems of managing graphic space that combine not only speech, gesture, gaze, and facial expressions, but a preference for speech over typing.