March 8-10 2002, University
of California Santa Barbara
William Warner
English, UC/Santa Barbara
(all rights reserved)
If
an interface can be defined as a “surface forming a common boundary between
adjacent bodies”, and “a point at which diverse groups interact”, then this
conference is itself a kind of interface for the exchange of knowledge. I want
to begin that exchange by introducing you to groups that are sponsoring this
conference, and say a word about how we have designed this interface. My
co-organizer of this conference, Mark Meadow, has told you a bit about the
Microcosms project. I serve as the director of The Digital Cultures Project. We
are a group of 21 UC faculty whose research is centrally concerned with the history and theory of
new digital technologies, and the ways in which they are changing humanistic
studies and the arts. You can find out about the activities we sponsor by
looking around our web page. Most of the panel chairs and UC presenters at this
conference belong to the Digital Cultures Project. Mark Meadow and I have been
assisted in giving this conference by the creative energy of the Digital
Cultures research assistant, Jeremy Douglass. If you have any questions or
special needs, please don’t hesitate to ask the three of us for help.
Two
ideas animate the social design of this conference interface: first, we hope to
promote friendliness and informality, in several ways: by keeping
introductions very short, by offering breakfast rolls and coffee before the
conference each morning, and providing a full lunch for the whole conference at
mid-day. Secondly, by limiting our panel presentations to 15 minutes, and by
keeping other panel presentations to 20 minutes, we hope to have plenty of talk,
so that, through our conversation, we can all think through ideas together.
So without any more preliminaries, I would like to turn the proceedings over to the chair of the first panel, J. Hillis Miller. He is a member of the Digital Cultures Project, and comes to us from UC Irvine.