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Title: The Emergence and Growth of Evolutionary Art - 1980-1993
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2013: XYZN: Scale
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
One of the most interesting-if frustrating-aspects of charting the history of computer art is trying to understand the intersections of specific technologies and artistic experimentation. It is rarely as clear-cut as a simple linear influence of one to the other, partly because artists are able to envision all kinds of possibilities that technology might enable them to realize in some kind of form, but as they do so, the technology is itself shaped, especially in terms of how it is perceived by others. Do artists find a way to give technologies an aesthetic outlet, or do some technologies possess-or facilitate-a characteristic aesthetic that finds its expression through specific artists? Certainly, in the history of computer art it would seem that particular aesthetics, technologies, and artists are closely intertwined in certain periods. This intertwining of art, technology, and ideas stolen from the natural world has never been so arguably merged as the period in the history of computer art from 1980 to 1993. We take as the defining start of this period the initial work of Mandelbrot on fractals that became known as the Mandelbrot set and led to his famous illustrated art-science book The Fractal Geometry of Nature. In 1993, this first highly creative period in evolutionary computer art came to an end with major publications by pioneers Karl Sims, Stephen Todd, and William Latham.
Title: The Emperor's New Art?
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1991: Art and Design Show
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Premature over-promotion of any and all “artwork” created with computers has caused art critics to feel as if they are being asked to admire the Emperor’s New Clothes. At the same time, computer artists accuse art critics of being uninformed, myopic, and hopelessly out of touch with the new media concerns.
Artists visiting computer art shows disdain the oft-exhibited science fiction grotesqueries masquerading as art: Bad critical reception is said to be because of this “nerd” aesthetic. On the other hand, technical-minded factions also wonder when computer artists will actually learn to program, or produce something besides canned paint system imagery and indecipherable bad video tapes. Such squabbling and shifting of the blame from one group to the next is not the way to correct the problem.
Adding to the problem is the fact that standards by which we have evaluated computer art have evolved outside of the “high art” community and tend to be too low. Often the concepts of science and tools of technology are merely appropriated and exhibited as art without true artistic transformation or social context. Furthermore, when work refers to contemporary art world trends, it often does so as a form of imitation or serves merely to reinforce what we already know about image making. Without true understanding of either art or science and technology, this work can hardly help being superficial.
We need to fairly evaluate work using standards as high as those by which the rest of the arts are judged. We need to extend beyond the isolation of our small community and address broader issues. Most importantly, we need to take advantage of the uniqueness of computing and push its properties to their limits. Only as these issues are addressed and resolved will computer art gain in significance and authenticity.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: The Engineering of Vision and the Aesthetics of Computer Art
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1994: Art and Design Show
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
The rise of modern image industries, such as computer graphics, human factors research, or computer vision, can be seen as a part of the shift to the post-industrial society of perceptual labor. In contemporary society, human vision has become the key instrument of labor: the channel of communication between human and machine. If the industry aims to make human vision as productive and as efficient as possible, the computer artist, in contrast, can be defined as a designer of bad interfaces: interfaces that are inefficient, wasteful, confusing.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: The Image in Art and 'Computer Art'
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1989: Art Show
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
In this essay the author takes a cursory look at the increasing range of applications of computers to art and design practice and questions some of the assumptions that have been made about their use. The proliferation of computer imagery in society as part of the video culture and its effects on our attitudes towards digital representation are emphasised. This leads to a redefinition of the intimacy of the relationship between artist and art object. Such issues contribute to the comparative study of digital media and physical/mechanical media and the computer’s impact on the creation and apprehension of imagery.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: The Immediacy of the Artist's Mark in Shape Computation
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2010: TouchPoint: Haptic Exchange Between Digits
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This paper contributes to the area of computation in the production of artistic form. The author-artist describes a computational system in the form of a curvilinear, parametric shape grammar. Based on an analysis of over 3,000 entries in her traditionally hand-drawn sketchbooks, she describes the grammar that synthesizes drawings in the design language of her evolving style and serves as a tool for selfunderstanding of her artistic process.
Title: The Interactive Image: A Media Archaeology Approach
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2017: Unsettled Artifacts: Technological Speculations from Latin America
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This paper examines the history of the influential Interactive Image computer graphics showcase, which took place at museum and conference venues from 1987 to 1988. The authors present a preliminary exploration of the historical contexts that led to the creation of this exhibition by the Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL), which included the integrated efforts of both artists and computer scientists. In addition to providing historical details about this event, the authors introduce a media archaeology approach for examining the cultural and technological contexts in which this event is situated.
Title: The Next Generation Poetic Experience
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH Asia 2013: Art Gallery
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This paper presents the motivation, background and implementation of The Muses of Poetry, an interactive installation that combines dynamically generated character animation, semantic analysis, natural voice interaction and affect in poetry. Inspired by the subjectivity and ethereal quality of this literary art, we wanted to enhance the act of reciting poetry by providing a set of characters the possibility to “understand” and manifest the emotional content of the poems through facial expressions and affective speech. We believe that this original installation will bring poetry closer to a wider audience, while creating a playful, interactive and surprising experience for the user.
Title: The Pleasures of Immersion and Engagement: Schemas, Scripts, and the Fifth Business
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2001: n-space
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Presently, designers of interactive narratives and video games have only a slender understanding of the aesthetic experiences their audiences and users seek. Using schema theory, this study articulates the two varieties of aesthetic pleasures that users of interactive works enjoy: immersion and engagement. It uses schema theory to define the characteristics of immersion and engagement in both conventional and new media. After examining how readers’ experiences of these two different aesthetics may be enhanced or diminished by interface design, options for navigation, and other features, the essay concludes by looking beyond immersion and engagement to “flow,” a state in which readers are both immersed and engaged.
It must be granted that there is some value in mystification, labyrinth, or surprise in the environment… This is so, however, only under two conditions. First, there must be no danger of losing basic form or orientation, of never coming out. The surprise must occur in an overall framework; the confusions must be small regions in a visible whole. Furthermore, the labyrinth or mystery must in itself have some form that can be explored and in time apprehended. Complete chaos without hint of connection is never pleasurable. – Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City⁵⁷
Those roles which, being neither those of Hero nor Heroine, Confidante nor Villain, but which were nonetheless essential to bring about the recognition or the denouement, were called the Fifth Business in drama and opera companies organized according to the old style; the player who acted these parts was often referred to as Fifth Business. – Robertson Davies, The Fifth Business: The Deptford Trilogy²²
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: The Proceduralist Manifesto
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1989: Art Show
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
‘Computer art’ has become a meaningless term, because soon virtually all art will be computerized in some way or another. The author introduces the concept of proceduralism as a label to represent a special class of art, one that constructs images using abstract qualitative and quantitative parameters, rather than simulates classical drawing and painting. This approach to making art ditters radically from drawing and painting approaches because the picture-making process is detached from the picture. The net result is that an entirely new area of creativity has been unveiled for the artist. As such, proceduralism is a logical successor to conceptual/process art; it is a major art movement and a new medium.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: The Readers Project: Procedural Agents and Literary Vectors
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2011: Tracing Home in The Age of Networked Techniques
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
The Readers Project is an aesthetically oriented system of software entities designed to explore the culture of human reading. These entities, or “readers,” navigate texts according to specific reading strategies based upon linguistic feature analysis and real-time probability models harvested from search engines. As such, they function as autonomous text generators, writing machines that become visible within and beyond the typographic dimension of the texts on which they operate. Thus far the authors have deployed the system in a number of interactive art installations at which audience members can view the aggregate behavior of the readers on a large screen display and also subscribe, via mobile device, to individual reader outputs. As the structures on which these readers operate are culturally and aesthetically implicated, they shed critical light on a range of institutional practices – particularly those of reading and writing – and explore what it means to engage with the literary in digital media.
Title: The SF of Technoscience: The Politics of Simulation & A Challenge for New Media Art
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2000: Art Gallery
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
“In fact, science fiction … is no longer anywhere, and it is everywhere, in the circulation of models, here and now, in the very principle of the surrounding simulation.”
— JEAN BAUDRILLARD
“Biology is becoming an information science … and it will take increasingly powerful computers and software to gather, store, analyze, model and distribute that information.”
— BEN ROSEN
Chairman, Compaq Computer Corporation
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
— RICHARD FEYNMAN
One of the significant characteristics of the last decade, and the new millennium, is the way in which advancements in biotechnology and medicine have come to the attention of the public, through the media, as one of the primary areas in which the future is being vigorously imagined. What distinguishes biotechnology from other sciences is the way in which it is increasingly fusing genetic code with computer code, encapsulated in what Incyte Pharmaceuticals calls “point-and-click biology.”
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: The Tao of Postmodernism: Computer Art, Scientific Visualization and Other Paradoxes
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1989: Art Show
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
The author suggests that a paradigm shift must occur in art criticism to assimilate the nonlinear branching of aesthetic activities in our era. These activities include computer art and scientific visualization, and they reflect many issues addressed in postmodern dialogue such as our image-synthetic, “simulacrum” society. Postmodernism unexpectedly informs most disciplines, including the natural sciences, and is a cultural systemic norm that relates to our electronic information age. The Taoist concept of oneness is used as a metaphor for the interrelatedness of electronic-mediated societies, and this social connectedness explains the enfolding and complex nature of contemporary aesthetic activity. A cybernetic paradigm might provide a better model for criticism than modernism or postmodernism, since this paradigm presents a holistic view that concentrates on creativity and the organization of interrelated systems. The convergence of art with science is assumed as a logical interdisciplinary outgrowth of this electronic oneness.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: The Trained Particles Circus: Dealing With Attractors, Automatons, Ghosts, and Their Shadows
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2019: Proliferating Possibilities: Speculative Futures in Art and Design
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This paper identifies the nature of the circus as an ideal place to host a possible scientific-artistic-speculative symbiosis. In it, reality and fiction are found precariously, almost outsider, hardly exportable, halfway between the credible and the fake, amazement and extravagance, science and simulation.
Title: The Unknown Person
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2020: Think Beyond
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
“The Unknown Person” uses mythotechnesis as a fictioning method to re-live a brutal incident in the artist’s family history under colonial rule. Employing machine learning processes and facial recognition techniques, the artist interrogates surveillance and social control systems to explore the fiction of the self, data, and liminal spaces.
Title: The Wizard of Ethereal Pictures and Virtual Places
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1989: Art Show
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Renaissance artists constructed pictorial space using algorithms based on Euclidean geometry. Computer artists use algorithms based on the analytic geometry of Descartes to compute pictures as well as the subjects in them. An examination of the workings of these two different types of algorithm reveals that the computer offers a radical new approach to making art, which is not yet well understood. Postmodern algorithms for picturemaking are more evanescent than their Renaissance counterparts because computers process information conceptually instead of storing it physically. The computer is neither a passive medium nor a pliant tool, but an active creative partner.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Thick & Thin: "Direct Manipulation" & The Spatial Regimes of Human-Computer Interaction
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2001: n-space
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Consider a design trajectory, figured on one end by the screens of early command-line computer interfaces and Coleco Vision’s “Donkey Kong” (1981), and on the other, by the more complex and finely rendered spaces depicted in “Tomb Raider III: The Adventures of Lara Croft” (1999) and Apple’s newly-released Mac OS X.
Lara Croft runs, jumps, tumbles, and blasts away at her opponents in visual fields that are more subtle and perspectivally sophisticated than those inhabited by Mario and “Donkey Kong.” The responses of the screen images to the user’s keyboard, gamepad, or joystick have been enormously enhanced, in both quickness and variety. But the fundamental spatial tropology – the tropology of space: abstract space, empty space, space that doesn’t get in the way of players or their agents on the other side of the glass – remains consistent, from the earliest to the most recent examples of both desktop computing interfaces and computer gaming. The conceptual and psychological commonplace that grounds play in the domains inhabited by Mario and Lara, and the principles of “direct manipulation” in the graphical user interface, is the assumption of a permeable field of agency, essentially free of substance or resistance, or marked only by the sorts of resistance that a more efficient game pad, a faster processor, or a more “intuitive” visual metaphor, may eliminate.
In this paper, I propose that the “thin” spaces typical of the modern GUI and videogaming appear self-evident or “intuitive” to users and designers because they draw upon conventions of spatial thought that strategically foreclose traits of actual embodied encounters of human-computer interaction. It is desirable, I argue, to reconceive the forms of space commonly presupposed by the contemporary discourses of the GUI – to grasp these spaces materially, not as empty domains, open to the user’s purposive manipulations of objects sited within them, but rather as persistently impermeable, resistant – “thick” – spaces, in which objects are only imperfectly manipulated and incompletely detachable from the lived moment of the interaction.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Topics on Aesthetic Data Visualization: Viewpoints, Interpretation, and Alternative Senses
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH Asia 2013: Art Gallery
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Aesthetic data visualization, which looks at complex data sets from an ingenious perspective, is difficult to empirically organize due to its insufficient records. Fortunately, insightful artists and curators have recently provided some notable interdisciplinary exhibitions and publications. This author was a recent participant at such an event; however, it is not easy to summarize the various projects into a single vision because each artist’s value, method, philosophy, and aesthetic preference are unique. This paper categorizes data visualization based on various topics. Aesthetic data visualization is similar to conventional data visualization in that it organizes ambiguous data into a database. Artists then tend to integrate the information into their art. In this regard, it might be possible to identify tendencies and examine data as contemporary iconology, as well as discover hidden possibilities of recent aesthetic data visualizations.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Topics on Bible Visualization: Content, Structure, Citation
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH Asia 2013: Art Gallery
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Text visualization begins with understanding text itself which is material of visual expression. To visualize any text first and the expressive approaches theoretical foundation about the about the approaches for text visualization by diverse examples of test visualization which are derived through the various characteristics of the text. To do this, we chose the “Bible” test which is well known globally and digital data of it can be accessed easily and thus diverse test visualizations examples exist and analyzed the example of the bible text visualization. We derived the unique characteristics of the text-content, structure, and quotation as criteria for analyzing and supported validity of analysis by adopting at least 2-3 examples for each criterion. In the result, we can comprehend that the goals and expressive approaches are decided depending on the unique characteristics of the Bible text. We expect to build theoretical method for choosing the materials and approaches by analyzing more diverse examples with various point of views on the basis of this research.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Touching Space: Using Motion Capture and Stereo Projection to Create a "Virtual Haptics" of Dance
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2010: TouchPoint: Haptic Exchange Between Digits
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This paper describes the work of a group of artists in Australia who used real-time motion capture and 3D stereo projection to create a large-scale performance environment in which dancers seemed to “touch” the volume. This project re-versions Suzanne Langer’s 1950s philosophy of dance as “virtual force” to realize the idea of a “virtual haptics” of dance that extends the dancer’s physical agency literally across and through the surrounding spatial volume. The project presents a vision of interactive dance performance that “touches” space by visualizing kinematics as intentionality and agency. In doing so, we suggest the possibility of new kinds of human-computer interfaces that emphasize touch as embodied, nuanced agency that is mediated by the subtle qualities of whole-body movement, in addition to more goal-oriented, task-based gestures such as pointing or clicking.
Title: Transdisciplinarity, Yesterday and Today
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2007: Global Eyes
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
In the first part, this paper intends to show some reasons for the advent of transdisciplinarity as a strategy of knowledge in the 21st century. In the second part, it develops the basis for a transdisciplinary attitude required to solve complex and contemporary problems, and to promote a new articulation among science, art, technology, and culture.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Transforming the Commonplace through Machine Perception: Light Field Synthesis and Audio Feature Extraction in the Rover Project
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2017: Unsettled Artifacts: Technological Speculations from Latin America
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Rover is a mechatronic imaging device inserted into quotidian space, transforming the sights and sounds of the everyday through its peculiar modes of machine perception. Using computational light field photography and machine listening, it creates a kind of cinema following the logic of dreams: suspended but mobile, familiar yet infinitely variable in detail. Rover draws on diverse traditions of robotic exploration, landscape and still-life depiction, and audio field recording to create a hybrid form between photography
and cinema. This paper describes the mechatronic, machine perception, and audio-visual synthesis techniques developed for the piece.
Title: Translation + Pendaphonics = Movement Modulated Media
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2012: In Search of the Miraculous
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Translation is a multimedia dance performed on a vertical wall filled with the projected image of a lunar surface. Pendaphonics is a low-cost, versatile, and robust motion-sensing hardware-software system integrated with the rigging of Translation to detect the dancers’ motion and provide real-time control of the virtual moonscape. Replacing remotely triggered manual cues with high-resolution, real-time control by the performers expands the expressive range and ensures synchronization of feedback with the performers’ movements. This project is the first application of an ongoing collaboration between the Motivational Environments Research Group at Arizona State University (ASU) and STREB Extreme Action Company.
Title: Transmission: A Telepresence Interface for Neural and Kinetic Interaction
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2014: Acting in Translation
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Transmission is both a telepresence performance and a research project. As a real-time visualization tool, Transmission creates alternate representations of neural activity through sound and vision, investigating the effect of interaction on human consciousness. As a sonification project, it creates an immersive experience for two users: a soundscape created by the human mind and the influence of kinetic interaction. An electroencephalographic (EEG) headset interprets a user’s neural activity. An Open Sound Control (OSC) script then translates this data into a real-time particle stream and sound environment at one end. A second user in a remote location modifies this stream in real time through body movement. Together they become a telematic musical interface—communicating through visual and sonic representation of their interactions.
Title: Ut Pictura Poesis: Drawing into Space
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2013: XYZN: Scale
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
In 1735, Leonard Euler presented a solution to the practical problem of whether a route could be plotted to cross each of seven bridges in Konigsberg once. His negative solution used the simplest of mark-making strategies to resolve a conceptual problem. Euler did not actually cross the town’s bridges, but used them to resolve questions of connectivity, after which diagrammatic representations can be seen as the restructuring of logical problems to allow for inductive reasoning, for fruitful application beyond theory. But what if such a working graphic has as its target something that is simply incomprehensible? What are the upper limits of the denotational logic of such diagrams? This paper presents a drawing-research project that tests the cognitive advantages of technical graphics by directly engaging with things that cannot be made easier to understand through their use.
Title: Visual Anecdote
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2010: TouchPoint: Haptic Exchange Between Digits
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
The discourse on information visualization often remains limited to the exploratory function -its potential for discovering patterns in the data. However, visual representations also have a rhetorical function: they demonstrate, persuade, and facilitate communication.
In observing how visualization is used in presentations and discussions, I often notice the use of what could be called “visual anecdotes.” Small narratives are tied to individual data points in the visualization, giving human context to the data and rooting the abstract representation in personal experience. This paper argues that these narratives are more than just illustrations of the dataset; they constitute a central epistemological element of the visualization. By considering these narrative elements as parts of the visualization, its design and knowledge organization appear in a different light.
This paper investigates how the “story” of data representation is delivered. By means of ethnographic interviews and observations, the author highlights the different aspects of the visual anecdote, a specific point where the exploratory and the rhetorical functions of visualization meet.
Title: Visual History with Choson Dynasty Annals
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2016: Data Materialities
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
For this paper, the authors selected three historical events taken from the Annals of the Choson Dynasty that represent dramatic and tragic stories about parents and their sons for data visualization. By connecting names with entities indicating conductions from history books, they found interesting patterns that tell stories with embedded relations. The visualized images in this paper were mainly code-generated, based on the data of the Annals, with some graphic embellishment added.
Title: Visual Indeterminacy in GAN Art
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2020: Think Beyond
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
We describe artwork based on GANs with the concept of visual indeterminacy, connecting them to art history and to the science of perception of art. GANs seem predisposed to producing indeterminate images; we hypothesize about why this is and where to go next.
Title: Wearable Forest Clothing System: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2009: BioLogic: A Natural History of Digital Life
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Wearable Forest is a garment that bioacoustically interacts with distant wildlife in a remote forest through a networked remote-controlled speaker and microphone. It expresses the unique bioacoustic beauty of nature and allows users to interact with a forest in real time through a network to acoustically experience a distant forest soundscape, thus merging humans and nature without great environmental impact. This novel interactive sound system can create a sense of unity between users and a remote soundscape, enabling users to feel a sense of belonging to nature even in the midst of a city. This paper describes the theory of interaction between the Human and the Biosphere through the design process of the Wearable Forest concept.
Title: Weaving Objects: Spatial Design and Functionality of 3D Woven Textiles
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2019: Proliferating Possibilities: Speculative Futures in Art and Design
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Our interdisciplinary design research group demonstrates a novel methodology and new computational tools to access 3D weaving as a spatial and material design platform for innovative softgoods and accessory products. We develop a fully formed 3D woven shoe and document volumetric textile behavior and simulation technology for creative design.
Title: What Does a Very Large-Scale Conversation Look Like?
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2001: n-space
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Introduction
The new electronic spaces that I am interested in have the following characteristics in common:
• They are large. Many server sites now support interchanges between hundreds and thousands of people. Usenet newsgroups and large listservs are the most common such sites. I call these usually text-based, usually asynchronous interchanges very large-scale conversations.
• They are network-based. More specifically, they support network-based communities. The boundaries of these spaces and the communities they support are not geographic boundaries. Communities of artists, writers, and scientists are examples of pre-Internet, network-based communities (communities based upon a social network and some shared interests or needs). Network-based communities are of a different kind than geographically based communities like neighborhoods, cities, and nations. Network-based communities (for example, the scientific community) have continued to grow with the help of new network technologies, but contemporary technologies have also engendered a variety of new communities (for example, the open source community).
• They are public. As more and more people gain access to the Internet from their homes or schools rather than from their workplaces, the Internet increasingly becomes a space for public discussion and exchange. Very large-scale conversations are a common event within the confines of large industry (for example, the huge number of communications among thousands of people required to design and build an airplane or coordinate production of a film). However, these have a distinctly different character than the very large-scale conversations in which people are participating as individuals rather than as employees. The Internet is engendering the production of new public spaces that may offer the means to reinvigorate public discourse.
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