Open Transcripts

Archive

Spring 2021 #OSSTA Lecture: Nathalie Lawhead

If you do any­thing gen­er­a­tive on com­put­ers and don’t know what to do with what­ev­er you just made, turn­ing that into a lit­tle tool that peo­ple can use to do stuff like tweak val­ues, play around with some visu­als, and just export what­ev­er they make goes a long way. Coming from more of a game design angle, it’s easy to over­think inter­ac­tiv­i­ty and want to build on the sys­tems in ways that get real­ly com­pli­cat­ed. If you look at tool design, often the oppo­site mind­set is the most rewarding.

Uncreative Writing

With the rise of the Web, writ­ing has met its pho­tog­ra­phy. And by that I mean writ­ing has encoun­tered a sit­u­a­tion sim­i­lar to what hap­pened uh, to paint­ing with the inven­tion of pho­tog­ra­phy. A tech­nol­o­gy so much bet­ter at repli­cat­ing real­i­ty that in order to sur­vive, paint­ing had to ors— or, uh, alter its course radically.

Common Tags

ethics surveillance Internet history politics Twitter community Carl Malamud education Histories of Violence religion algorithms artificial intelligence Berkman Klein Center Internet Internet Hall of Fame 2014 Internet Hall of Fame 2013 Internet Hall of Fame technology art privacy infrastructure design New America Geek of the Week open source