Opinion
by Natalie Jeremijenko

If you were to seriously focus on the opportunities for social transformation presented in the so-called digital revolution, how would you? Can you change the way stuff gets designed, systematically? Can you take on the complex organizational structure that has such an inordinate influence on technological development?

Most critical technoartists, net artists, indy media or radical designers use appropriation to adapt these technologies to different purposes. But is it possible to directly engage with the corporate process of innovation, to directly translate between corporate wealth and progressive social agendas?

I know someone who tried to intervene in this way. Tragically, Rich Gold has just died. His death poses the question: can one intervene?

Rich Gold, aka Richy Goldstein, designed Mattel’s Powerglove in the mid-80s and popularized fantasies of virtual reality, human augmentation and cyberspace. Before that he was at Sega directing the sound and music of the coin-ops and inventing “Little Computer People” (Activision), which was the first fully autonomous, computerized AI person that one could buy--think “the Sims,” early '80s. His artificial cocktail party “Party Planner” (1982) programmed ‘agents’ so that they were all attracted to the bar, but were a little shy (i.e. repelled from each other), and was a hilarious dynamic system that provoked the idea that complex social interactions might well be simulated--or something harder: parodied. Then he spent 10 years at Xerox PARC--a corporate research lab, that, with Bell Labs, was (is still?) the most influential lab if we measure this in terms of what our digital technology looks like and does. Here, through the 1990s, he worked on the idea of Ubiquitous Computing that Mark Weiser had described--invisible, embedded and distributed computation. He also initiated the PARC Artists in Residence program, PAIR. As Mother Xerox rebranded itself as “the document company,” he seized the opportunity to create the first fully-fledged design group, making the argument that others have not been able to make: that experimental design is a valuable form of research and intellectual production. These two initiatives within the prestigious Xerox PARC of 300 academic researchers, provide the best examples of interventions in process of corporate technology development. Rich Gold’s death is tragic, but his career was a provocation, and is an example of a strategy for intervention.

Rich Gold began his career as a conceptual artist and composer, yet he worked in and through corporate contexts including Sega, Mattel, and Xerox PARC: serious engagement with corporate America is hardly the typical path of an alternative voice. His route from experimental artist and independent thinker of the 70s, veering into the family-supporting capacity of a ‘real job,’ is not unusual. However, his strategies while there were. In stark contrast to the digital revolutionaries of the 90s who customarily cleaved their lives and politics into corporate day jobs and after hours gigs as artists, djs, actors, or burlesque dancers. (Check out the great photo of the Director of Content of Razorfish mid-act in Andrew Ross' new book, No Collar that examines this very issue.) Rich understood that new technology is as cultural as any traditional art medium, moreover, that it is the dominant form of material culture. It is a common mistake to recognize art more by its medium (as film, photography or theatre, not PowerPoint or A4 paper) than the critical and independent approach to representing technosocial phenomena.

In the belly of this corporate body Rich never took the position of the external critic (eschewing critical distance), or chiding moral scold. He was complicit, never ironic, and involved in the culture of ‘stuff;’ in its ridiculous excesses and the commodification of communications and activities that were otherwise freely available--like selling you back a desktop. Yet he was never in the yes-ma'am get-the-job-done position of a design consultant. Rather, he became increasingly involved in the conception, vision and philosophy of design. And his primary medium became PowerPoint. His persuasive representation strategies became simpler, clearer and populist enough to be legible to corporate America while analyzing technological culture with heterogeneous ideas borrowed from Heidegger, My Little Pony, ethnographic research, critical theory, Python language structure and the behavior of hardisks. This could be maddening and was rarely footnoted, but he always drew on evidence you could immediately test--pointing to the number of shirts in the room or the results of a websearch. A compendium of his particular PowerPoint genre can be found at www.richgold.org, and I highly recommend it.

However, I want to note his overall strategy, not his particular arguments. He deployed his PowerPoint cartoon tool in the formidable task for convincing the corporate powers to import artists into the research context, in an effort to import diverse agendas. This may not seem by itself a radical project. There have been other art/science collaboration programs. Most famously, Billy Kluver’s EAT program, begun in 1966, enlisting engineers to realize the art project of Rauschenberg, Warhol, Oldenburg and others. However, this and other efforts were problematic because it was organized with the artists as creative visionary (and primary author) and engineers as implementers. Actually, artists do not have a monopoly on creative vision, and scientists and engineers routinely claim creativity too. (In fact a survey of so-called creativity literature will demonstrate that it is mainly books on management that dominate this realm.) In yet another model, Interval research had artists on staff in an equivalent role to researchers, but also with equivalent corporate pressures. They were paid as well as the researchers, and were under the similar incentives to produce technological innovation. In fact at least three of the latter Interval spin-offs were initiated and driven by artists--interesting projects but duly shaped in the interests of the investors. In Rich’s program the artists were not asked to collaborate; they were paired on the basis of shared technical language. There was much work that went into translating between the researchers and artists (i.e. how Paul De Marinis' projects juxtapose the technologies from radically different historical periods and demonstrate the contingencies of technological development; or why a particular algorithm that Michael Black was working on was interesting to the community interested in facial recognition). The artists’ work was not “out of the box,” nor were the researchers questions seen as arcane. This ongoing translation work may well have been the most important activity of the program. The artists were not particularly well paid, but in contrast to the Interval model, the artists owned everything they did in terms of intellectual property, and if they produced nothing that was fine too. The important part of the project was to introduce and preserve independent voices in these powerful and complex organizations.

One notorious example of the organization of technological innovation that is more distant than the glowing embers of the digital boom is the development of the Atomic bomb. The A-Team assembled in Los Alamos undoubtedly had some misgivings about developing the capacity to destroy the earth, but primarily--according to sociologist of technology Steven Shapin--were having a good time working with very smart people on a difficult and interesting problem. The hand wringing came later. Likewise a design problem can be hard and interesting but of contestable social value: another handheld widget, wearable computer, web interface, or a game character can all present tremendously interesting design problems without raising a question about atomizing people in privatized information bubbles selling back communication rights and abilities via one or another telecommunication company. Ongoing translation between radically different agendas seems to be one way to interrogate the complexities of the techno social. PAIR was an opportunity to discuss, for instance, the current technological development in the historical scope that Paul De Marinis’ work introduced.

Design Research
The mediagenic quality of PAIR drew attention and provided a mechanism to talk (if obliquely) about the research at PARC, and in particular this was used as an opportunity to discuss the social preconditions of particular technologies. It provided perhaps the closest thing to public discourse on technoculture. Instead of the atmosphere of nondisclosure agreements and “no cameras allowed,” PAIR provided stuff to look at and enabled more opinions on the stuff to be voiced. The Research in Experimental Documents (RED) group built on this. This was Rich’s next intervention. This group was constituted of researchers, not outsiders, and was different to the ‘independent voices’ approach of PAIR. It was organized around developing exhibitable ‘stuff’ that drew from the research at PARC. RED was a new animal that instantiated a new genre of intellectual production in this context. The exhibition they developed, called “Experiments in the Future of Reading,” has traveled the country and has been widely covered by various media. The exhibition was not an experiment or user study done for the benefits of the researcher, however. Nor was it a tradeshow exhibit to ‘showcase’ products in the pipeline. It was closer to research, and more functional than form-driven ‘concept cars’ for information technology. The exhibit was intended for a public venue with a diverse audience: the science museum. Here it was a strange animal too, with no real didactic goals or messages, but instead an invitation to play with and experiment in a possible future reading condition. These museums have a participatory imperative that perhaps make them a site for something that resembles a participatory engagement in the technological future.

Contrast this approach with traditional corporate visions of the future that promise familiar, reassuring, gleaming clean lifestyles that will be delivered to you by corporation X. These are delivered incontestably and whole. “Experiments in the Future of Reading” differs radically from this. The exhibits are possibilities, rather than concepts, built so that many people can play with possible technological futures, not the binary buy/not buy engagement of mall-museums of the probable technological future. The technological progress in this realm no longer looks like an inevitable process of optimization. It is a new institutional stance. Technological futures have few if any public forums, but this use of design, this last project of Rich’s, seems to instantiate an open vision of technological change: exploiting the museum as a that to engage a diverse range of people in a somewhat naturalistic setting. RED was not a design consultancy, it was design research that was an example of a different process of technological innovation. I recognize this as a more substantive alternative to the casual dress code and humane work environments that Andrew Ross describes as characterizing the digital boom. Rich’s work demonstrated some overall commitment to finding something that looks a little more like participatory democracy in material culture. His work in this is unfinished.

Jeremijenko directs the experimental product design lab in the faculty of engineering at Yale University.