William Gibson's Pattern Recognition: A Discussion
Speakers
MITH's first Digital Dialogue of the spring 2006 semester will be a discussion of William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition (2003), on Tue, Feb 7 at our usual 12:30 time in the MITH seminar room. Anyone with an interest in the book is welcome to attend. Pattern Recognition has been widely received as Gibson's most significant and prescient work since he coined the term "cyberspace" in 1984. "We have no future because the present is too volatile," observes one character. "We have only risk management. The spinning of a given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition." But how do we tell the difference between pattern and coincidence? Is pattern recognition enabling or constraining? What kind of patterns emerge in a novel about digital art, Web memes, global capital, viral marketing, a postmodern advertising agency, cool hunters, and collectors of antiquarian computing equipment in settings from London to Tokyo to Moscow to post-9/11 New York? Our discussion will be the basis for three additional Digital Dialogues, to be held at intervals throughout the semester, each of which will explore the general theme of "pattern recognition"–a heuristic for much of MITH's current research–in varied contexts.
Speaker Bios
Craig Dietrich’s online work includes Tenants in Action (TIA), an app that facilitates slum-housing reports to LA city agencies; the Mukurtu Archive and Plateau People’s Web Portal, for which he was the first lead developer; Scalar, which he co-created with the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture (ANVC); and Tensor, an iTunes-like app for managing content from cultural archives. His offline production includes Walking Wall Street, a project that has seen Dietrich find Wall Streets in towns and cities across America; and Occupy Roundtable, which he hosted in Los Angeles lecture-halls.
A continuously updated schedule of talks is also available on the Digital Dialogues page.
Unable to attend the events in person? Archived podcasts can be found on the MITH website, and you can follow our Digital Dialogues Twitter account @digdialog as well as the Twitter hashtag #mithdd to keep up with live tweets from our sessions. Viewers can watch the live stream as well.
All talks free and open to the public. Attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.
Contact: MITH (mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 301.405.8927).