A Danger Derby in E.A.S.T 2012

Every year during the East Austin Studio Tour (E.A.S.T) local artists open their work spaces to the public and organize exhibitions, performances, pop-up shows, and informal parties. For a couple of days the Austin art world, official and underground, become very vibrant and busy. A quick look at the map of E.A.S.T. 2012 could [...]

The Grotesque Imagery of Basil Wolverton

For a long time I have been interested in the popular arts. Their vernacular power and their low brow sensibility have captivated my attention and trigger my curiosity. Whenever I am immersing myself in a culture I always try to devour the popular imagery and language, and discover the carnivalesque in everyday life. During my [...]

Children and the Social Construction of the Personal Computer (Part 2)

Children-Computer Symbiosis and the Reinvention of Childhood

Since the 1950s, researchers in the fields of artificial intelligence, cybernetics, and computer science, were asking questions about how humans learn and think. At university laboratories they were designing theories of the mind and imagining machines that could think and augment human intelligence. One of the most influential [...]

Children and the Social Construction of the Personal Computer (Part 1)

The cover of BYTE magazine (the small systems journal) from November, 1976, is a color photograph of two children sat in front of what it seems to be a home computer system. The children are not looking at the camera. Instead, they are looking the screen of a 15” TV monitor that is placed in [...]

Outer Space and the Home/Personal Computer

The history of the personal computer revolution has several myths. Some of them focus on individual geniuses (hackers, nerds, or hippies), others on single machines (ALTAIR 8800, Apple II). Those myths tend to ignore not only the role of the USA government in helping to set up the sociotechnical infrastructure for the development of computing, [...]