Marisol Vasquez Core Response 1 / 5

    Across these readings, each addressed a border—whether as a boundary in thought, profession, or culture or as an extension of preexisting borders between race and class. Nevertheless, the emergence of "new media" is also responsible for destabilizing these purported boundaries. In particular, Stone's discussion on the dissolving separation between body and interface brought to the fore through smooth interaction design held a particular fascination for me. Namely, Stone articulates the body as increasingly privatized during the industrial age. While recapitulating Frances Barker's contention that the "human body gradually ceased to be perceived as public spectacle...and became privatized in new ways" (Stone 12), Stone furthers Barker's claim to postulate that the information age is another extension of the industrial age. More significantly, however, in the information age, the privatization of the body holds consequences for refiguring the ostensible boundaries between the subject and the rest of the world (12). In her case study of phone sex workers and VR engineers, Stone commentates on the absolving boundary that constitutes the "body as object of power relationships" (16). 

    However, regarding her assertion about the power relationships performed upon the body through a smooth interface, Stone confronts and challenges Bolter and Grusin, who assert that an engineer's authorship effaces through processes of automation. In other words, Bolter and Grusin contend that automation contributes to the erasure of "human agency" from the production of the image: "All of these classes of programmers are simultaneously erased at the moment in which the computer actually generates an image by executing the instructions they have collectively written" (Bolter and Grusin 27). I would argue, however, that Stone opposes Bolter and Grusin's claim. By intimating a gender critique on the body and highlighting the male-dominated industry of VR engineers, Stone calls forth the palpable presence of the VR engineer's authorship, who articulate "their own assumptions about bodies and sociality and projecting them onto the codes that define cyberspace and systems" (Stone 14). Finally, this notion of smoothness is the concluding point of Stone's essay. While Bolter and Grusin also contend for a logic of immediacy and an uninterrupted continuous interaction with the screen, Stone ultimately highlights that there are implications and effects of a smooth and continuous interaction, which Bolter and Grusin, who fixate on establishing relationships of immediacy, hypermediacy, and remediation, tend to gloss over how these processes might translate power relationships between race, class, and gender. 

    If engineers pose a problem of authorship amidst automation, Manovich also contributes to the debate. By placing new media in a cultural context of modern art and computing, Manovich subtly touches upon the compounding issue of computer automation and authorship but instead bases his argument within a cultural context of fine art. Manovich proclaims that new media art continues the developments initiated by the avant-garde, who "invented a whole new set of visual and spatial languages and communication techniques that we still use today" (Manovich 22). His discussion of the avant-garde also ties back to the notion of 'automation,' in which the processes of avant-garde's manual processing of collaging resurface as a "cut and paste" command, all of which can be automated through software and interaction design (22). While Manovich argues for the automation techniques on the ends of the user, Bolter and Grusin point out how automation invokes an erasure of the engineers. 

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    To offer an aside on the Manovich reading, I appreciated it, and it is a text I wish I had encountered during art school. In particular, his statement that the move towards human-computer interaction will render its emergent cultural innovators—"interface designers, computer game designers, music video directors and DJs" (Manovich 16)—as the artists of the new media age might be a controversial statement in a fine art context, but that feels sensible given Bolter and Grusin's critique. In other words, Manovich's assertions might congeal with Bolter and Grusin. The latter's argument focalizing the desire for immediacy and the accompanying logic of immediacy draws a continuity between new media's Virtual Reality and old media's linear perspective. In other words, if this is to say that interaction design and the pursuit of immediacy in the computer age suggest ties to painting and linear perspective, then Manovich is probably correct in assuming that HCI design will constitute new major modern artists.