Title |
We Are Human Beings! |
Author |
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Date |
2011 |
Description |
A poster including a quote by Mario Savio visualized through CAPTCHAs. |
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Statement |
We Are Human Beings! connects two contrasting attitudes towards information technology as a means of control. Its text derives from the founding manifesto of the Free Speech Movement, pronounced by Mario Savio at Berkeley in 1964. In his perspective, machines were the dehumanizing force of a technocratic society. Computers and punch cards ( early paper devices to store data) were contributing to turn citizen in mere numbers. One way to protest against this was to punch holes through the punch cards in the shape of letters that the machine couldn’t read. After more than forty years CAPTCHAs were developed. Universally adopted as a tool to discern humans from bots, they consist of a series of alphabetic glyphs that have undergone various distortions generated by a computer. The user is asked to face a problem that the machine cannot solve and in this way spam is prevented. For the protest movement of the '60s, punch cards were a symbol of alienation, therefore the conversion to a system of signs understood by human beings was an act of revenge. On the contrary, CAPTCHAs are means of accessing machine functions while assessing its user. The machine is now the one who judge the human nature of the user, while the user relates to it performing a mechanical, machine-like process. There is neither ideological nor political claim in this action, it only works as a procedure for identification. |
URL |
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Medium |
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Size |
A1 |
Buy |
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Price |
€19.00 |
Technology |
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Download |
we-are-human-beings.pdf (8.6 mb) |
Source Materials |
The Machine Speech by Mario Savio, 1964. |
Keywords |
control, language, progress, reading, typography, writing |
Added |
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ID |
1418 |