Down with Cybercrud – A Reading of: Computer Lib/ Dream Machines: New Freedom Through Computer Screens – a Minority Report: (09/2023)

Down with Cybercrud looks back at a computational future we now inhabit as imagined by Ted Nelson in Computer Lib/ Dream Machines: New Freedom Through Computer Screens – a Minority Report (1974). The short video piece is constructed from extracts from the text and musings woven into 4 Video Elements, as a recursive rumination, thinking through the algorythms

1. “NO MORE TEACHERS’ DIRTY LOOKS. If the computer is a universal control system, let’s give kids universes to control – Uniview Software a computational model of the Known Universe or to paraphrase Carl Sagan: ‘If you wish to make an apple MacBook from scratch, you must first invent the universe’.
2. Ada Lovelace, Deep Nostalgia (absent from the document but here narrating the algorythms). By 1980 there should be as many pro­grammed and programmable objects in your house as you now have TVs radios and typewriters.
3. EVERYTHING IS DEEPLY INTERTWINGLED. Generative Adversarial Network. BigBiGAN Model images generated in response to Stanly Donwood’s cover image for
4. Did you knew our Big Bird satellite either chirps back its pictures by radio, or parachutes them as Droppings? Video sequence from “THE HUMMING OF STRINGS” which uses the distance (23000 mile) between the satellite UpLink (ESA TDS 4 based @ Plymouth University) and the Satellite, and back again, (INTELSAT or EUTELSAT) to generate a quarter of a second delay in the transmission and reception of the video signal. In effect this creates a 46,000 mile echo chamber. A sonic computation…

[Made for a show that never happened "Summer Brief".]

NELSON T. H. Computer Lib/ Dream Machines: New Freedom Through Computer Screens—a Minority Report, Hugo’s Book Service, Chicago, 1974.