Engelbart Haunts SRI

Last summer when I first began seriously thinking about making art about the history of the personal computer, one of the early images that emerged for me was of a ghostly Doug Engelbart floating over the classically-white colonnaded building of the Stanford Research center.

I imagined a table-top monument: a square box of shiny ipod-white plastic containing a rolling Silicon Valley vista of blue foam covered by a thin veneer of fake grass. At the center of this would sit the temple-like SRI building in a rough 3d-printed white, like a post-modern Parthenon. And, hovering over this, would be a translucent Engelbart, a pepper’s ghost reproduction of the classic portrait: pointing forward to the future with the dangling cord of some unknown machine augmentation dangling out of his ear.

I even made a furious sketch of the idea on a flight out west, complete with classical pedestal:

When I began talking about my project around ITP this semester, I used this image as a starting point, taking off from it to explain the larger idea of making art about the history of the personal computer. I found that it worked quite badly for this purpose. In order to get fellow students and professors to understand any of the importance I attached to this image — why I’d want to make such a seemingly strange and specific monument — I found myself gropingly telling the story of Augment as a linear narrative. It was a monument that only had meaning if you already knew the details of the story and why they mattered. Hence all the work I’ve been doing (and documenting on this blog) to figure out how to tell Doug Engelbart’s story in a way that is engaging and powerful even for the uninitiated.

Last week, in my Materials and Building Strategies class, we presented prototypes for larger projects we intend to work on for the rest of the semester. Even though I now realize that this piece about Engelbart haunting SRI is not a good starting point viewers of my project, I’ve yet to decide which scene is, exactly. Should it be the scene of Engelbart and English assembling the first mouse prototype? Or the scene of SRI participating in the first ARPAnet transmission? Or the scene of Stewart Brand and Ken Kesey visiting Augment with the Merry Pranksters bus?

Due to this indecision, I went ahead and prototyped this original idea. I figured that a lot of its elements will end up being included in whichever scene I do decide to take on.

Engelbart Haunting 333 Ravenswood prototype from Greg Borenstein on Vimeo.

I built the box out of foam core. The base is architectural modeler’s grass over blue foam. The building is blue foam painted white and the pepper’s ghost is just a piece of plexi attached at a 45 degree angle to a cheap digital picture frame.