The “Tag ties & affective spies” show in Athens, present online pieces questioning the Web 2.0 like the excellent “we feel fine” project by Jonathan Harris, or Folded-in, by Personal Cinema and The Erasers (http://www.foldedin.net/).

In “Put-That-There”,  Richard Bolt discuss a system where the end user can command a computer with a set of more human-based language instruction. Using human like deduction, and pointing direction, a computer can understand and accomplish instructions like “make the circle larger” or “delete the triangle”. While todays computing left away command line driven instruction to the profit of graphic user interface, there’ still many cases where Bolt ideas may be put in practice to improve the communication quality between a computer and its user. For example, in most software (like operating systems), we need to precisely define each element for each instruction, even if there’s only one. Bolt suggested that if only one element would correspond to the instruction, the computer should assume the user refers to this one. I’m amaze to realize how today’s user commands in software, are still directly based on machine-level type of instruction. With proper implementation of Bolt’s ideas, user wouldn’t have to learn how the machine works internally and would be able to focus more on the tasks itself instead of the computer vocabulary that can translate their gaoled into sets of instructions.

“On the Rights of Molotov Man” reading raises interesting questions about images rights. For a series of paintings, Joy Garnett replicated carefully a relatively famous Sandinista rebel photos that she found on the internet. She haven’t credited the original photographer (Susan Meiselas) and the copy process wasn’t  part of her discourse, only a strong inspiration. While I’m not against protecting the rights of images creator for their work, I feel too much legislation makes it hard for creator to built on top of their cultures. Even for photographers, who usually own all the rights on their photographs, it’s becoming more and more difficult to present image of others, and even some buildings and brands. While it might be seen as an step forward for the privacy of image for individuals, we should keep in mind that art and amateur based photography account for a very small portion of cameras looking at us. Security cameras are everywhere and our personal photos become aggregated in social network available to hundreds of our contacts. In my opinion, this alone represent a much bigger privacy violation that any tourist, amateur or artist using my image.

While it’s becoming harder and harder, Photographers can still base their photos images on the images of other’s work(person, objects, buildings, etc) without too much hassle. I find it unfortunate that a painter can’t take inspiration on photography. While Joy Garnett work isn’t bringing much to the world in my opinion, it’s easy to find very similar case where the use of photography has been a really important step in the complete artistic process. For instance Shepard Fairey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_Fairey) based his internationally famous Obama hope poster(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_%22Hope%22_poster) on a photograph took by a former AP freelance photographer named Mannie Garcia.

In”Man-Computer Symbiosis” written in 1960,  J.C.R. Licklider explain the idea of improving the communication between human and computers, so they can be both more effective. He’s suggesting the use of a the same surface for input and output. Something that finally start to be applied today with the toutch-screen devices. He’s also suggesting other improvements that would help the computer better respond to human input.

The “As we May Think” text by Vannevar Bush written in 1945. At a time where computer are nothing more than giant pieces of circuitry resolving simple math operations, Bush explained the advantage of an organizational system based on the human mind. By creating organic links across the content, Bush envisioned that data would be accessed more quickly and more naturally. The web is based today on such structure and allow et data to get organized in a complex, but effective organic ways. The algorithms behind today’s search engines are exactly based on the analysis of these organic links between web-pages. In other words, the system imagined by Bush is today the key of online content found-ability.