Programmer vs. User

[Greg J. Smith]

A recent and related text: Seb Franklin's "On Game Art, Circuit
Bending and Speedrunning as Counter-Practice: 'Hard' and 'Soft'
Nonexistence" in the most recent ctheory.net dispatch -
http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=609

A nice passage: "Viewed in this way, there are many practical ways in
which the distinction between user and programmer can be
intermediated, leading to nonexistence. An extreme example: in 1994, a
seventeen-year-old schoolboy and boy scout named David Hahn attempted
to build a fast breeder nuclear reactor in the shed of his mother's
house. [13] Possessing no specialist education in chemistry or
physics, and equipped only with a copy of Robert Brent's The Golden
Book of Chemistry Experiments, Hahn extracted radium from fluorescent
watch and clock faces, americium from smoke detectors and lithium from
batteries, amongst other elements harvested from everyday household
goods, assembling a reactor that emitted over a thousand times normal
background radiation. Frightened by the high amounts of radiation
emitted by his successfully constructed reactor, Hahn began to
disassemble it, but not before attracting the attention of the FBI and
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Despite the technical skill
required to carry out his teenage experiments, Hahn subsequently found
it impossible to secure employment as a nuclear specialist. The
questions that result from this incident are closely related to the
idea of user/programmer nonexistence. Since Hahn possessed no
specialist training or higher education when he made his reactor, does
this exclude him from the role of programmer? Since he did not put his
reactor to any useful purpose such as generating power, can he be
definitively be classed as a user?"

This is a pretty good essay that will be of interest to the folks
congregating around this timely discussion list/reading group. If you
can work through the somewhat generic reading of Cory Arcangel's work
the essay also contains some commentary on circuit bending and speed
runs in gaming.

I haven't said hello yet. My name is Greg J. Smith and I'm a designer
based in Toronto.

Keep the links/texts coming!

Greg J. Smith
http://missionspecialist.net - studio
http://serialconsign.com - blog
http://twitter.com/serial_consign

[Steve]

Fascinating story, but it's more than a slight stretch to claim that
Hahn made a reactor - you can see what was really happening in this
review by Albert Ghiorso, http://pubs.acs.org/cen/books/8232/8232books.html.
"Technical skill" covers a lot of territory, and it seems that Hahn's
skill was pretty primitive - scraping materials out of batteries and
smoke detectors. As Ghiorso says, "Silverstein's book is a stark
reminder that a vivid imagination is not sufficient to create a real
scientific breakthrough, though sometimes it can initiate one. In the
end, knowledge is needed, and that comes about, I have found, only
through education, study, and lots of experience."

But I must admit that I have no idea how this relates to the "user/
programmer nonexistence" theory. You can intermediate anything if you
try, but it doesn't mean that drawing distinctions isn't useful.

--Steve

On Jun 6, 2:19 pm, "Greg J. Smith" <serialcons...@gmail.com> wrote:
> A recent and related text: Seb Franklin's "On Game Art, Circuit
> Bending and Speedrunning as Counter-Practice: 'Hard' and 'Soft'

> Nonexistence" in the most recent ctheory.net dispatch -http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=609