3. Sketchpad exemplified a new paradigm of interacting with computers: by
changing something on the screen, the operator changed something in the
computer's memory. The real-time screen became interactive.
However, in the analogue world images are not information in the sense that
they have become bits and pixels in the digital world. In fact, some serious
questions need to be asked about the role of aesthetics and design as the
distinction between images and information blurs into pixels, lines, and rates
of compression.
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5. Concepts which never before had any visual representation can be shown, for
example the “constraints” in Sketchpad.
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6. A hand-held tool of enormous importance is one that, when applied to a surface,
leaves traces and thus affords trace-making. The tool may be a stylus, brush,
crayon, pen, or pencil, but if it marks the the surface it can be used to depict and
to write, to represent scenes and to specify words.
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8. Unlike an ordinary pencil, the stylus itself does not make any direct mark on the
display. The computer is placed, in effect, between the “point of the pencil” and the
“paper.”
The light pen is a photosensitive device which responds to the light generated by
an intensified point on the scope face and which amplifies, shapes and transmits
this response back to the computer where it can be tested by the program and used
as a branch condition.
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9. The cathode-ray tube is a form of visual indicator that permits an interpretation of
electrical phenomena in terms of a picture painted on a phosphorescent screen by
a sharply focused beam of electrons which is controlled in position and intensity
by electrical signals. Under the proper conditions it paints this picture in an
extremely facile way, being capable of utilizing many millions of separate data per
second.
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10. One should realize and admit that the display data channel is not a mere data
channel at all; it is a processor. From here on out one's thinking about the display
changes radically
To use the opposition introduced in the "Cultural Interfaces" section, we can say
that the screen keeps alternating between the dimensions of representation and
control. What at one moment was a fictional universe becomes a set of buttons
that demand action.
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13. His (Seuratʼs) immersion in the mechanics of vision was directed to the creation of
a luminosity with no direct material substrate.
The chip is pure surface, pure simulation of thought. Its material surface is its
meaning without history, without depth, without aura, affect or feeling. The copy
reproduces the world, the chip simulates it. It is the difference between being able
to remake the world and being able to efface it. The micro-electronic chip draws us
into a realm, a design for living, that fosters a fetishized relationship with the
simulation as new reality all its own based on the capacity to control, within the
domain of the simulation, what had once eluded control beyond it.
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14. The essence of ecological optics is the demonstration that there is information in
ambient light. The common assumption of physical, geometric, and physiological
optics, however, is that there is no information in light, that is, no information
about the ordinary things from which the light is reflected.
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The information displayed is dual. The picture is both a scene and a surface, and
the scene is paradoxically behind the surface.
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15. We need to understand the apprehension of virtual objects and, of course, virtual
places, events, and persons. We can only do in connection with the perceiving of
the real surfaces of the environment, including the picture surfaces. Note that our
distinction between virtual and real will have to be independent of the distinction in
classical optics between virtual and real images, which is swamped in
epistemological confusion.
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16. The impressionists painted light on. Seurat painted light through, making paint
itself the light source.
By utilizing the Newtonian analysis of the fragmentation of light, he (Seurat)
came to the technique of divisionism, whereby each dot of paint becomes the
equivalent of an actual light source, a sun, as it were.
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17. The peculiarity of television, as distinguished from photographs and movies, is
that the image is constituted by light-through; shifting mosaic illuminations project
themselves at the viewer.
In a word, the message of the electric light is total change. It is pure information
without any content to restrict its transforming and informing power.
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