[SIGCIS-Members] Silicon City

Fri Dec 18 11:38:16 PST 2015

I am very pleased with the Tennis For Teo exhibit. Hats off to the
museum team that put the exhibit together.

Raiford

On Friday, December 18, 2015, Laine Nooney <laine.nooney at gmail.com> wrote:

> The position of the exhibit was "Greater NYC", which certainly makes sense
> as a regionalist designation, and allowed the exhibit to extend its scope
> into spaces like Tennis 4 Two at Brookhaven National Lab in Long Island,
> Bell Labs in NJ (whose famed artistic-engineering collaborations were
> largely possible because of proximity to the collective creativity of NYC),
> and IBM itself in upstate.
>
> For the sake of transparency in the record, I also consulted very briefly
> regarding the games component of the exhibit, but ultimately passed the
> curator off to my colleague Raiford Guins, who was better specialized in
> topics the exhibit wanted to focus on.
>
> Evan I would be very interested in some sort of panel discussion (rather
> than a series of presentations) about these issues, especially in
> collaboration with key exhibit decisionmakers. I'd like to find our common
> ground here. Perhaps it would be even more valuable to bring in people not
> yet included in the story--it was surprising to see no representation of
> NYC's 1990s "Silicon Alley" moment. Other topics drifting include Stacy
> Horn's ECHO, and the history of NYC's polytechnic schools, as well as
> programs like ITP @ NYU.
>
> thoughtfully,
> Laine
>
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 2:09 PM Kim Tracy <tracy at cs.stanford.edu
> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','tracy at cs.stanford.edu');>> wrote:
>
>> Bell Labs did start in 1925 in NYC on West Street as part of Western
>> Electric and moved to Murray Hill, NJ in the early 1940s.  A number of
>> folks that I worked with started at the West Street location.  So, some of
>> the computing work was done there but much more after that in NJ.
>>
>> --Kim
>>
>>
>> --Kim Tracy
>> tracy at cs.stanford.edu
>> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','tracy at cs.stanford.edu');>
>>
>> On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 1:57 PM, Evan Koblentz <evan at snarc.net
>> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','evan at snarc.net');>> wrote:
>>
>>> Would also like to encourage others to go, perhaps most especially to
>>>> start a conversation about how we can imagine computer histories. I
>>>> attended yesterday with a colleague and left feeling dismayed--the
>>>> sticky fingers of IBM (a major donor for the exhibit) appeared to be all
>>>> over it (at one point I openly laughed at some wall text that described
>>>> Apple as a "plucky startup" but insisting IBM /really/ drove the tech
>>>> revolution). There are a few special, very sincere parts--the 1964
>>>> Worlds Fair dome, the focus on NYC's role in electronic art and music
>>>> (Cage, Bell Labs, etc) but otherwise reads like the history of computing
>>>> told through the history of IBM--which feels strange given that there's
>>>> no special effort to frame IBM as a /regionalist /company.
>>>>
>>>> Would love to stoke a conversation, even off list, about other's
>>>> impressions...feel free to drop me an email.
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> I'm planning to go soon.
>>>
>>> NYHS asked for my assistance several months ago. I provided a lot of
>>> feedback about NY computer history beyond Big Blue. They said I'd be
>>> credited as a consultant, so I am disappointed to hear that the exhibition
>>> is basically just an IBM gig.
>>>
>>> I hope that didn't claim Bell Labs as a NY entity. Statue of Liberty is
>>> in * New Jersey * waters, the "New York" Giants and Jets both play in New
>>> Jersey, now Bell Labs? Note to myself .... go see the exhibit firsthand
>>> before getting judgmental. :)
>>>
>>> In 1966 -- a decade * before * IBM started telling customers that real
>>> computers are made out of metal by east coast corporations, not plastic by
>>> west coast hippies -- Steven Grey began publishing the "Amateur Computer
>>> Society" newsletter from his home in Manhattan. This was before the Mother
>>> of All Demos, Xerox PARC, and the People's Computer Company.
>>>
>>> Upon starting his newsletter, Gray contacted IBM to see about funding.
>>> IBM replied with a very nice letter saying no. The letter is signed by
>>> Thomas Watson Jr. -- there are copies online, but the original is at the
>>> (Wall, N.J.) InfoAge Science Center where I run the computer wing.
>>>
>>> Tens years later, when Creative Computing, Byte, DDJ, etc. all emerged,
>>> and the photocopied ACS newsletter closed, IBM invited Gray to lecture
>>> about this "new" idea of microcomputing -- in the Thomas Watson Research
>>> Center.
>>>
>>> I'm just saying. :)
>>>
>>>
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>>
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>
> --
> Laine Nooney
> www.lainenooney.com
>
> DM <http://dm.lmc.gatech.edu/> @ LMC <http://lmc.gatech.edu/> @ GT
> <http://www.gatech.edu/>
> Assistant Professor
>

-- 
Raiford Guins
MIT Press "Game Histories" Book Series Editor
Principal Editor, *Journal of Visual Culture*
Curator, William A. Higinbotham Game Studies Collection
Associate Professor of Culture and Technology
Stony Brook University
2121 Humanities Bldg
Stony Brook, NY 11794-5355

Personal Webpage: raifordguins.com
Game Histories webpage: http://www.gamehistoriesbookseries.org/
*Journal of Visual Culture *website: http://www.journalofvisualculture.org/
*G**ame After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife. *MIT Press, Feb
2014. http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/game-after
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