Krueger’s conjecture, that response is the medium through which meaning can be conveyed is excellent. Certainly his works strip everything away but the interaction, masterfully pointing the experiencer of the piece toward his focus. This reminded me of the pragmatist theory; that one would strip everything away from architecture and so build the diagram of the building as a result to most clearly communicate what the architecture was about. I could see response becoming part of the pragmatist movement; especially in the way Krueger concerts. The response of the medium, space, could communicate the diagram, or the concept. In fact, I’ll argue that response has to communicate the conception; otherwise why is something responding?

This interactivity and response relates to the idea of feedback-which Krueger even acknowledges. The user facilitates a response, then reacts to that response thus facilitating another response. The system becomes a cybernetic feedback loop through which ever changing effects are produced and responded to.

Before going to discuss about the principles and fundamental points of this week’s readings, I want to express my excitement about the contexts and conceptions those guys were thinking off in 60s and 70s. Though thinking about information technology and computers is a daily habit nowadays, in the articles we can see the intellectuality of people who are working on these issues when in terms of tools, they were still in time of punch cards and magnetic tapes. Their anticipations were very clever too. When, for example, in Licklider’s text you see “cyber-romance” as a possible phenomenon, simply because of the sensation you will have to whom you are in contact with despite it is a man or a machine. After more than half of a century, mainstream artists find this notion as well as many other notions, interesting enough to produce a film upon; “HER”. I just want to mention that how distant mainstream is rather than the people who theoretically, tried to improve our perceptions of this issue. Like many other technologies, when tools are economically reasonable for everyone, the main stream started to think about art works can be produced.

It goes without saying that Krueger’s artistic/technological experiences are interesting even decades after they were developed. One of the important reasons why they are still discussing, in my point of view is that he tried to rethink and redefine the conception of artistic aesthetic. He mentioned himself many times in the text that in this experiences what is beautiful is the connectivity and interactivity not the form. In this case aesthetics may refer to the responses from environment, feedback and the contemplation following this procedure.

In Licklider’s article he argues for a very odd shape of relation between a man and a machine; Symbiosis. It seems that his suggestions may lead us to the intelligence for an artifact, about which many debates are ongoing even after 50 years. What is very interesting to me is that Licklider as well as Negroponte, saw lots of technological problems on the way of symbiosis of a man and a computer. Although some of them are outmoded regarding decades of improvements, some of them are still serious issues. The most important one, I think is the problem of “language” which Licklider mentioned it as “the most serious obstacle”. One of the problems is that machine language works based on information and amount of data which conveys meaning. It seems not to be sufficient for the man-machine symbiosis, discussed by Negroponte. He mentioned that we need computers to understand gestures and pulses which help the understanding of messages, though they have no meaning. He then gave examples of body gestures in human world and compare them with noises which regarding the Norbert Wiener’s articles are lack of meaning. In some way they are comparable. It means that in human language, even information-less parts, like idioms or expressions (information-less because of their probability) play role in our understanding.

When I read Negroponte’s article I faced a very big question. I want to know if, after all these years passed and huge amount of technological improvement, we are using computers as dumb, fast servants. When we use CAD we still see someone/something to obey the “commands”. Despite some of pioneering design methods, designers still need assistants rather than colleagues. Many questions should be answered and the most important one, in my point of view is the impacts and influences this interactivity of man-computer had, have and will have on the whole issue of design.