« Josephine Bosma, Mediated Remains: | Main | okno / Network Summer »

July 04, 2007

Digital Art Weeks 2007

daw07_2.jpg

Keynote: Dr. Joseph Weizenbaum

Digital Art Weeks 2007 at ETH Zurich :: July 10 - 14 :: Keynote: Dr. Joseph Weizenbaum :: ETH Zurich, Auditorium Maximum, F 30 :: Host: Prof. Dr. Jürg Gutknecht, Computer Science Department (D-INFK) :: Additional keynote speakers at this year's Digital Art Weeks: Régine Debatty (we-make-money-not-art), Jeffrey Huang (EPF Lausanne), Helen Thorington and Michelle Riel (turbulence.org), Roger Malina (CNRS Marseille).

The DIGITAL ART WEEKS program is concerned with the application of digital technology in the arts. Consisting of symposium, workshops and performances, the Digital Art Weeks program offers insight into current research and innovations in art and technology as well as illustrating resulting synergies in a series of performances during the Digital Art Weeks Festival each year, making artists aware of impulses in technology and scientists aware of the possibilities of application of technology in the arts.

We are proud to announce this year's special guest Prof. Dr. Joseph Weizenbaum, author of the influental book "Computer Power and Human Reason - From Judgment to Calculation" (1976). He will open the festivities with a talk directed at both scientists as well as cultural workers. His talk will be followed by two important documentary films on computer science. The first concerns Weizenbaum's life and work and the second shows how influential computers can be on the arts.

Keynote Address
Prof. Dr. Joseph Weizenbaum

In 1972 I published a paper under the title: On the Impact of the Computer on Society (Science, Vol. 176, Issue 4035, pp. 609 - 614, May 1972). Four years later the Book: Computer Power and Human Reason - From Judgment to Calculation (Freeman, San Francisco 1976). Years later, I began to have second thoughts about the titles of both works. Yes, the computer had enormous impact on societies world wide. But it became ever clearer to me that the very shaping of computers, the very manner of their development and refinement, the actual purposes, ex and implicit, for which they were created, that all of these were determined by the values of the societies in which they were imbedded, My paper should have been On the Impact of Society on the Computer and not the other way around. The main thesis of the paper should have been that science and the technology are not value free, that both inherit their values from the society in which they are imbedded. Insane societies produce insane ideas and corresponding instruments. Warier societies produce weapons, and, in our time, weapons of mass destruction.

As for the Book: Its subtitle, it is now clear to me, should have been its main title. For now, obviously, judgment in human affairs has been and is increasingly replaced by calculation. The largely self appointed deep thinkers of our time preach that all aspects of reality are computable. Things are "figured out". Parameters are optimized, strategies computed. Human beings are said to be "merely" machines whose fates are anyway determined by the natural laws that the physicists teach the neurologists, they the behavioral scientists and they, in turn, those who say they are philosophers. And all of them compute. They cannot do otherwise, for concepts such as wisdom, dignity, will, respect, kindness love and joy and grief simply do not exist in their universes of discourse. They are not measurable, not computable, not part of their vocabulary and hence not of their reality. What remains for them IS indeed calculable. The fundamental dogma of our time is that to understand a thing is to be able to program it ... finally to simulate it in the form of a computer model. Then, truly, the intelligent robot becomes the ideal of what it means to be human.

If the above is true, then, a question becomes of enormous relevance to our time: what should be the highest priority of formal education, independent of whether in the schools or in so-called higher education? It is a matter of utmost importance, for whenever something new is to be inserted into a curriculum, something already there has to be reduced or eliminated. It is a question of what, in education, is more important than what else. For example, how much more important, if at all, is it to teach the writing of computer programs as opposed to teaching the history of one's homeland?

The answer to the central question is, it seems to me, obvious and true for all places and all times: the first priority of formal education is to educate students to master their own language, to give them the ability to clearly articulate their thoughts in speech as well as in writing ... and that also implies to be able to listen and to read, to critically interpret the vast flood of signals that constantly impinge on all of us. I want to emphasize the distinction between hearings and listening, namely that hearing is largely passive while listening involves thinking and judgment. Absent this ability, as I believe it to be in very large parts of our people, condemns the afflicted to a life of servitude to the clichés, half-truths and lies served up by the overwhelming majority of the world's mass media!

Posted by jo at July 4, 2007 03:13 PM

Comments