Impermanence Agent Essay Online
I’ve (finally) put online an essay I wrote with Brion Moss a little while back — “The Impermanence Agent: Project and Context.” It was originally written for a special issue of PAJ, and then revised and expanded for Cybertext Yearbook 2001, and now it’s had another small revision. Along the way it’s picked up a couple nice sidebars by Adam Chapman, and some of the illustrations have been revised as well.
Last Fall I got email from someone who’d taught this essay, and I was intrigued to hear about some of the student reactions. Here’s part of the email:
The background: most of my students are in CS or HCI. Some of the major issues we discussed in class were the differences between an agent as a research product vs. agent as cultural artifact – people were intrigued by how you had set up your agent to make particular conceptual points, that wasn’t something previously in their repertoire and they thought it was an interesting idea. Critiques of agents sit well with my students (they had read some cultural critique of agents before), so they were interested in your critique and mused about various aspects of it. They also liked the idea about relating CTP to PD and we talked about that quite a bit.
The biggest effect your article had, though, was that one of my more technical students said, “Why is he talking about all this personal stuff in the paper? Why doesn’t he just get to the point and tell us his results?” which led to a long, interesting, and very fruitful conversation on disciplinary differences in communication, why artists/writers/cultural critics think personal experience is central in knowledge vs. why scientists generally don’t, what are the pros and cons of each aspect, why each might look silly from the other’s point of view, etc., and how this leads to problems in interdisciplinarity.