Page 50 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 50/206
This is James Gleick on Ada Lovelace: “She pondered her growing powers of mind. They were not strictly mathematical as she saw it. She saw mathematics as merely a part of a greater imaginative world. Mathematical transformations reminded her ‘of certain sprites and fairies one reads of, who are at one’s elbow in one shape now, and next minute in a form most dissimilar; and uncommonly deceptive, troublesome and tantalising are the mathematical sprites and fairies sometimes; like the types I have found for them in the field of fiction.’ Imagination – the cherished quality. She mused on it; it was her legacy from her never-present father.” James Gleick: The Information (2011)p112.
A remarkable pre-Modern woman, Lovelace is celebrated as the first computer-programmer, and thus as the patron saint of hackers, coders, developers – and all those who work in digital media, who are tinkering and inventing in that fusion of narrative, computation, 3d-modelling, simulation, image, sound and motion where everything consists of binaries. Benefitting from an artist’s education, I was late in discovering the joy of telling a machine what to do (watching my mate Chris Brisco programming a PDP-11 in the basement at the Slade School of Fine Art in the 1980s), then discovering the joy of writing code myself in the later 1980s (helping code a hyper-magazine, High Bandwidth Panning in 1988). The ecstasy of realising how digital media worked and glimpsing at least some of its potential! Sydney Padua’s excellent graphic novel : The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer (2015) is a great introduction.