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.

While working so hard on shaping the Augment story, it’s important not to lose track of the aesthetic component: what will the pieces look and feel like? What will they be made of?

This week I explored those questions by creating a “mood board” — a collage of existing visual elements that give a sense of the colors and textures that I want the final piece to have.

Checkout the larger size on Flickr.

As I worked on the collage, three clusters of images took shape: color snapshots from the 60s, special effects making-of imagery, especially blue screen work, and white architectural imagery, especially that with a Greek, neo-classical, or minimalist look.

The 60s snapshots (many of which are of actual period Augment activities) have a saturated color palette and a kind of soft focus that is core to how I visually imagine that style. I imagine this look being especially prevalent for the psychedelic and countercultural material in acts 2 and 3.

The blue screen and special effects imagery comes out of my sense of the relationship between the technical form of image making that make up the modern “cinema of attractions” (computer graphics, motion control, compositing) and the early personal computer world of Augment. Behind-the-scenes process shots from that world feel like a contemporary counterpart to equivalent 60s scenes of bearded men in blue jeans playing primitive computer games and building the first robots.

Finally the classical/minimalist white architectural imagery has a relationship to the material that’s a little bit harder to define than the other two clusters. Partially it comes out of my sense that what I’m trying to build is a kind of monument. Art historically, monumental sculpture (and, ironically, the ground-based minimalist sculpture that most sought to resist it) has tended to have a strong relationship to architecture via the formats of the plinth and the pedestal. Further, the austere white in which classical architecture and sculpture comes down to us (however distant that is from how it was originally constructed) has developed deep associations with the arts of memorialization and monument building. I envision this portion of the aesthetic spectrum as, at least in part, relating to the framing and presentation of the work.

A couple of posts ago, I presented an outline for the story of the rise and fall of Doug Engelbart. Since then, I’ve been working on how to translate that outline into something visual. The core of the challenge is: how do you condense a large amount of narrative material into a short series of sculptures/visual objects? How does each sculpture communicate the plot and character points necessary to convey that step in the story? Further, how do you get across the changes that the characters, places, and ideas involved in the story are undergoing across the pieces? Specifically in the case of the story of Engelbart and Augment, how do you show the transition from the military/engineering context to the countercultural one? How do you get across the tragic arc of the whole story through a series of static scenes?

To try to start answering these questions, I’ve been working on expanding the outline into a series of storyboards. In this post, I’ll go through the storyboards for each of the acts and mention a few things that I learned while working on them.

Act 1:

As a reminder, here’s the written outline for this act:

• Engelbart ships out on VJ day. The end of the war is declared as his ship pulls away from the dock
• Engelbart is bored in a grass hut in the Phillipines on radio duty. Someone drops off a copy of the Atlantic Monthly with Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think in it. He dreams of Memexes.
• Engelbart, returned to California, happily married, and bored, pulls over on the side of the road suddenly and realizes he’s achieved all of his dreams. He has a vision of using computers to help people better understand their complex world.
• Now, having finished grad school, and working as a junior researcher at the Stanford Research Institute, Engelbart meets Bill English, a well-liked fellow researcher who has a knack for actually implementing things and getting people to follow him. Doug tells Bill about his Augment dream.
• Bob Taylor from NASA hears about Doug’s Augment idea and decides to support it with its first real funding.
• Doug gets a lab for the first time.

Working on this act, I was surprised at which scenes were easy and which were difficult. For example, scene #5 here, Bob Taylor giving Engelbart his first federal funding seemed incredibly difficult and dry to me in theory but in the process of drawing it, something about having the Washington Monument out the window and figuring out Taylor’s square military haircut as the core of his caricature really made it come together. Similarly, the moment of Engelbart and English meeting at SRI seemed overly abstract in spec, but was crystalized for me when I saw the photo on SRI’s page about the history of its magnetic logic lab.

On the other hand, a scene which had been especially vivid in my imagination, Engelbart’s vision by the side of the road, doesn’t look like much when I draw it out. I’m going to have to think hard about how to bring that scene to life.

Act 2:

• Engelbart has 2 LSD experiences at the International Foundation for Advanced Study. In the first one he is by himself and stares catatonic at a wall for 8 hours. In the second one, he’s with other engineers and co-workers and has a vision of a “tinkle toy” for helping potty train young boys.
• Engelbart and English build the first mouse prototype and it performs extremely well in early tests of input devices
• Augment people visit the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Labratory and play Space War
• Augment participates in sending the first ARPAnet communication to UCLA, the command “LOGIN”, which causes the system to crash after “LOG”
• Stewart Brand helps Augment prepare the Mother of All Demos presentation, their public triumph

One of the challenges here is going to be to figure out how to bring out the counterculture thread that starts in this act. Opening it with Engelbart’s LSD vision gets us off in the right direction (and I love the image of the toilet vision), but it’s something of a challenge to keep that in focus in the other scenes. One important opportunity for that is going to be in the costume and set dressing of the scene at SAIL: the engineers are going to need to start looking scruffy and the environment should start having some psychedelic art/coloration going on. A key to this as well, I think, is going to be shifting the color palette away from the austere almost black-and-white of the 50s towards the washed out rich colors we associate with the 60s. That transition should start here and really reach completion in Act 3.

Also, the idea I came up with for how to tell the story of the first ARPAnet message — combining the UCLA and Augment sides of the scene so that they almost appear to be in the same room — will be a bit of a challenge to realize. How do you represent the lightning bolt/scene divide? Also who are the people on the UCLA side and how do we know they’re not just some Augment extras we haven’t encountered before?

Act 3:

• Stewart Brand brings Ken Kesey to the lab to use the Augment technology and he says “It’s the next thing after acid.”
• Augment researchers visit Lama, a hippie commune in Taos, New Mexico with Brand and live temporarily amongst the Bucky domes and hippies.
• Augment researchers become obsessed with Est, a pseudo-psychological cult of ‘interventions’; members of the lab are caught doing a drug-fueled, computer-enhanced encounter session while Engelbart is giving a tour to pentagon funders
• Bob Taylor recruits Bill English away to Xerox PARC; he’s the first of many top Augment staff to leave.
• JCR Licklider returns to ARPA and cuts off Augment’s funding
• Engelbart is left alone, using NLS by himself in a closed-down Augment lab.

Now here we have lots of new elements: exterior sets for the first time with the Lama visit and English’s recruitment at PARC. Also there are some interesting echoes of early scenes, for example the est intervention session makes an interesting parallel with the SAIL visit from Act 2. Also, and this was not something I realized until I drew the storyboard, the last two scenes of this act (Licklider cutting off Augment’s funding and, Engelbart alone in a cleared-out Augment) echo the last two scenes of Act 1 in a way that I think is really satisfying. You kind of get the whole arc of the story right there: he’s back where he started, but now the personal computer is a real thing sitting on his desk.

Another question for all of these acts is: what role can a moving camera play? If this was a traditional hollywood film, you’d want to vary the camera approach from scene to scene so that the film took on a more dynamic exciting feeling during important action sequences. What’s the equivalent of that here? It seems important to use some motion to break up the static quality things could fall into, especially as the arc of the story moves from the 50s into the 60s countercultural parts, but how to do it?

One big positive thing that’s come out of making these storyboards is that they’ve gotten me thinking about the kinds of things I’m going to have to build or represent in each scene. I’ve got the beginnings of a catalog of effects, props, people, and locations going in my head now.

I mentioned last time that I’m starting to approach my thesis as if it was a Hollywood blockbuster. Right now I’m in the pre-production phase which means: story work, character work, casting, design of the sets and props, special effects planning, etc.

In this post, I’d like to talk about one component of that process: the character design. Unlike most blockbusters, I’m starting with real people and using media and objects instead of actors to represent them. Hence character design is extremely important. Will the viewer immediately be able to recognize each of my four or five main characters across different pieces that render them in different forms and possibly different media?

In order to ensure that they will, I’m conducting a series of visual studies of my main characters designed to reduce them to caricatures. For each person who figures prominently in the story, I’m making study drawings of them from historical photographs with an eye towards the question: what is the single defining visual characteristic needed to represent them? How simply can I indicate their visual identity.

Here are a few examples of what I’ve come up with so far.

Bill English. Engelbart’s right-hand man, the Chief Engineer and Assistant Director of Augment. His two defining features seem to be his big dark glasses and his round domelike forehead, emphasized by his slightly receding haircut.

Doug Engelbart. Founder of Augment. Our hero. This is a little bit of a tough one as in many ways Engelbart was the typical suit-and-tie engineer-type. But after making this drawing and a few others, I focused in on the hair and the head shape. His hair has this signature pompadour flow to it and striking shocks of gray and his whole head has a very solid rectangular shape with a very strong chin.

Now, here’s an example of how these two caricatures in action. The following is a frame from my storyboard of the scenes in Act 1 (about which more in the future):

Hopefully, even with just those few extremely messy strokes, the presence of the hair and the glasses let you know that what you’re seeing is Engelbart and English looking through a door into an empty room.

Let’s take a look at two of our secondary characters as well. In many ways these are harder as they are likely to get less “screen” time and hence need to be instantly recognizable.

This first one is John McCarthy, the head of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, which had a kind of sibling rivalry relationship with Augment. Thankfully, McCarthy is a caricaturist’s dream: giant halo of frizzy hair and beard, big black glasses and prominent nose. The glasses alone wouldn’t do it for us as we’ve already got glasses as the primary element of English’s caricature, but with all of McCarthy’s frizzy hair poking out in every direction they should be confused.

This last “character” is a little different, but I think it plays an important enough role in the story to actually be worth considering as a character rather than a prop or an effect.

The original mouse prototype. English built it out of wood and two potentiometers from a sketch by Engelbart; its invention was one of the most famous achievements of the lab. As a caricature, I think the things most important to emphasize are its large size compared with today’s mice, its primitive construction, and the fact that it’s made out of wood.

Next time, I’ll have an example of using these caricatures: a basic storyboard from the outline I presented last time.

In my last post, I made a case for myth making as an important role for art which has once again become possible after a long absence during the modernist period. “Could art actually be important to how a group of people define and understand themselves?” I asked.

So, what group of people, what myth to tell, and how to tell it? As an answer, here’s the start of a manifesto or mission statement:

The mid-century American techno-cultural movement which created the personal computer and internet industries is beginning to enter history. As the internet grows towards ubiquity, the ideas, artifacts, and culture of the small group of people involved in this movement become massively influential on the larger society. It is time for an art that addresses that history, an art that will tell its story, explore its material forms, and investigate its way of seeing the world. This art should use tools of representation appropriate to the mid-century technological milieu as well as contemporary tools sympathetic to its aesthetic and descended from its ideas. These include special effects (miniature photography, compositing, etc.), rapid prototyping and fabrication, motion control, computer graphics.

Who created the personal computer? What were they trying to achieve in doing so and what became of them? It is amazing that, in contrast to other technologies with equal impact on our lives, we have no shared myth to answer these questions. What’s personal computer equivalent to the story of Ben Franklin with his kite or Alexander Graham Bell with his wire?

The answer lies in the biography of Doug Engelbart, a World War II radio operator and early computer engineer who is the first person to have conceived of the computer as a device that could be used by individuals to aid in their own personal work for memory recall, information organization, communication, etc.

Sculpting the rich facts of Engelbart’s life into a story that has the shape and impact of myth is a challenging prospect. As a way into that problem, I’ve been employing the process used by screenwriters in developing movie scripts: trying to boil down the events of Engelbart’s life into a three act outline that focuses on the ways in which Engelbart and a small number of supporting characters around him were changed by the events that took place. As an artistic choice, emulating the “pre-production” process of a major motion picture seems especially appropriate for this subject matter as I intend to use many of the techniques and materials of movie special effects to create the images and objects that will be the final result. As I understand it now, the final result will not likely be a big budget blockbuster, but I’m treating the storytelling and design process as if that was what I was working towards.

So, here’s my current draft outline for a three act story that could be called something like “Augment: The Rise and Fall of Doug Engelbart.”

Act 1

• Engelbart ships out on VJ day. The end of the war is declared as his ship pulls away from the dock
• Engelbart is bored in a grass hut in the Phillipines on radio duty. Someone drops off a copy of the Atlantic Monthly with Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think in it. He dreams of Memexes.
• Engelbart, returned to California, happily married, and bored, pulls over on the side of the road suddenly and realizes he’s achieved all of his dreams. He has a vision of using computers to help people better understand their complex world.
• Now, having finished grad school, and working as a junior researcher at the Stanford Research Institute, Engelbart meets Bill English, a well-liked fellow researcher who has a knack for actually implementing things and getting people to follow him. Doug tells Bill about his Augment dream.
• Bob Taylor from NASA hears about Doug’s Augment idea and decides to support it with its first real funding. Doug gets a lab for the first time.

Act 2

• Engelbart has 2 LSD experiences at the International Foundation for Advanced Study. In the first one he is by himself and stares catatonic at a wall for 8 hours. In the second one, he’s with other engineers and co-workers and has a vision of a “tinkle toy” for helping potty train young boys.
• Engelbart and English build the first mouse prototype and it performs extremely well in early tests of input devices
• Augment people visit the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Labratory and play Space War
• Augment participates in sending the first ARPAnet communication to UCLA, the command “LOGIN”, which causes the system to crash after “LOG”
• Stewart Brand helps Augment prepare the Mother of All Demos presentation, their public triumph

Act 3

• Stewart Brand brings Ken Kesey to the lab to use the Augment technology and he says “It’s the next thing after acid.”
• Augment researchers visit Lama, a hippie commune in Taos, New Mexico with Brand and live temporarily amongst the Bucky domes and hippies.
• Augment researchers become obsessed with Est, a pseudo-psychological cult of ‘interventions’; members of the lab are caught doing a drug-fueled, computer-enhanced encounter session while Engelbart is giving a tour to pentagon funders
• Bob Taylor recruits Bill English away to Xerox PARC; he’s the first of many top Augment staff to leave.
• JCR Licklider returns to ARPA and cuts off Augment’s funding
• Engelbart tries to convince Bob Taylor to bring all of Augment over to PARC, but Taylor refuses
• Engelbart is left alone, using NLS by himself in a closed-down Augment lab.

Now, with the story in mind, let’s return to the question of what group of people mind find this myth important to their self-definition and identity. (Note: every point in that outline is true insofar as it supported by one or more party in the current historical record of this period as it is available to us; it is a myth solely in the sense that I’ve tried to reduce a complex and multifaceted story into a linear one with a clear and iconic shape.)

At the broadest level, Engelbart’s story is important to all of us who live surrounded by personal computers, smart phones, social networking sites, and the other media through which we conduct contemporary life, all of which have their root in this encounter between the military industrial complex and the counterculture in the bay area in the 1960s.

At a deeper level, this myth is vitally important to people who work in these fields: making websites, designing and building computers and the next generation of technology. It puts their work in context and gives it a sense of importance and tradition. From the founders of Google, Apple, and Microsoft to the young engineers and designers working on Twitter and Facebook, this story is at the heart of the battle over the meaning of what they do.

Even more specifically, this story is a matter of active concern to the older generation of technologists who were actually part of it and who are now entering the phase of life where they find themselves concerned with their place in history. Many of them have specifically dedicated their energies to ensuring that aspects of the history of technology, from Andy Herzfeld’s work at folklore.org documenting the creation of the Macintosh to Vint Cerf’s role at Google as Chief Internet Evangelist, which often includes memorializing and storytelling.

I want all of these groups to be the audience for this work, especially that latter two who are not especially well-known as patrons of the arts and who have a particular interest in the meaning and interpretation of this story. In my last post, I described the “complex terrain of political and aesthetic geography” provided by princely patrons as being creatively stimulating for artists as they tried to work “within and against it”. Similarly, I want these people as patrons because they have powerful opinions about the meaning of this story in itself. The friction and feedback they provide as I attempt to render it into meaning and myth will make for better art and a more lasting monument to this story of invention.