1

SIMON

In 1263, Simon de Montfort overthrew King Henry the 3rd of England. He held only two

parliaments before being killed in the Battle of Evesham just one year later, but history has been

kind to de Montfort. His second parliament was open to common citizens and for this reason, he

is considered a founder of parliamentary democracy. And while his rule over England was brief, a

timeless children’s game still bares his name. During de Montfort’s short reign, all of King

Henry’s orders were meaningless unless Simon said they stood. Such is the myth of Simon Says, a

children’s game entangled in the power struggles of early democracy, caught between control and

freedom. If “Simon says touch your toes”, you touch your toes. “Simon says flip the switch” and

you flip the switch. Simon says “read these words”. You lose.

Simon derives from the Hebrew “shim'on” meaning, “to hear” or “to be heard”.1

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The Institute for Advanced Concepts brainwashed Simon and convinced him that he was an

alien. While being brainwashed, Simon proposes a general theory of creativity, “I believe that

inside of everybody is a genius waiting to be released. The secret is that you gotta get yourself into

a kind of chaotic enough mental state and then the good material can break through from the

unconscious.”2 The film, Simon, was released in 1980 and the main character, Simon, was played

by Alan Arkin.

3Figure 1 : A Cover Story4

3

In 1950, Radio-Electronics magazine ran a series of articles about Simon. About the size of a

suitcase and costing $600 dollars, Simon could perform basic operations like adding, subtracting,

and simple selection. Early computer scientist, Edmund Berkeley, first envisioned Simon in his

1949 book called, Giant Brains, or Machines That Think, in which he outlines the design of a “very

simple machine that will think.” Berkeley lucidly describes Simon’s Flesh and Nerves, Simon’s

Mentality, Simon’s Memory, The Control of Simon, Simon’s Thinking, and Simon’s Computing and

Reasoning. He also advocates for these new mechanical brains...

These new machines are important. They do the work of hundreds of human beings for the wages of a dozen. They are powerful instruments for obtaining knowledge. They apply in science, business, government, and other activities. They apply in reasoning and computing, and, the harder the problem, the more useful they are. Along with the release of atomic energy, they are one of the great achievements of the present century. No one can afford to be unaware of their significance.5

Simon could only conceive of 4 numbers—2 bits. While the room-sized ENIAC could perform

over 5,000 operations per second, Simon clocked just over 1 operation per second. However,

Simon could transfer information automatically and perform operations of indefinite length, and

therefore, Simon is widely considered to be the first personal computer. Information was input by

paper-tape, processed by 129 electromechanical relays and a stepping switch and displayed as

light, turning on some combination of 4 bulbs to show not only the results of a problem, but also

the current stage of computation. At the end of his 1950 Scientific American article, “Simple

Simon”, Berkeley described how these brains might affect the future...

Some day we may even have small computers in our homes, drawing their energy from electric-power lines like refrigerators or radios... They may recall facts for us that we would have trouble remembering. They may calculate accounts and income taxes. Schoolboys with homework may seek their help. They may even run through and list combinations of possibilities that we need to consider in making important decisions. We may find the future full of mechanical brains working about us.6

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Important to Berkeley was the possibility that machines could help people learn, writing, “Simon

has the same use in instruction as a set of simple chemical experiments has: to stimulate thinking

and understanding, and to produce training and skill.” Berkeley also predicted that machines

would become the fascination of hobbyists, who could build their own devices for function and

wonder...

Simon has two futures. In first place Simon can grow. With another chassis and some wiring and engineering, the machine will be able to compute decimally, Perhaps in six months more, we may be able to have it working on real problems. In the second place, Simon may start a fad of building baby mechanical brains, similar to the hobby of building crystal radio sets that swept the country in the 1920's.7

Figure 2 : Simon

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Simon debuted in 1978 and quickly became the most popular game in the United States, selling

out well before Christmas. It would go on to become the top electronic toy of all time, bringing

in millions in annual revenue for the next decade. Simon became an icon of 1980s technophilia

and remained popular through the 90s. He is still in production today, 35 years later.

The story of Simon is entangled with the dawn of a digital age where smaller, faster computers

changed both work and play. He inspired other sound and memory games—Merlin, Bob-It,

Follow-Me, Space Echo, Copy Cat, and Loopz are all direct descendants—but his influence

moved well beyond those realms cordoned off for play. Encoded in the flashing patterns of sound

and light was a protocol. As children copied Simon, Simon copied children. A program, encoded

in carbon, spread throughout culture.

Simon sets the pace. You follow right along.

Light the lights that Simon lights or he’ll tell you that you’re wrong.

Simon’s a computer. Simon has a brain.

You either do what Simon says, or else go down the drain.

Simon is a master. He tells you what to do.

but you can master Simon if you follow every clue.8

Simon has a brain. He is named, gendered, and unpredictable. To master him, you follow his

rules. He shames you when you lose and congratulates you if you win. He operates on different

levels and when ignored, he reminds you to turn him off. He’s simple, but inside is a program

that conjures both fascination and anxiety—the double-take, life.

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Although Simon was cast to play the part of the robot adversary, his brightly colored plastic

interface lacks the detail and surface complexity to resolve as the enemy. The low resolution,

abstract gameplay is too simple and unpredictable. His memories aren’t specific and so they don’t

resolve as the memories of another.

Simon plays in a different uncanny valley, determined not by the realistic complexity of the

surface but through the durational interplay of a system that appears almost thoughtful. In

Simon, we find ourselves.

From Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud...

Figure 3 : You See Yourself 9

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Figure 4 : Familiar Face

In casting Simon as the enemy, Milton Bradley was working from an out-of-date manual.

Skepticism and paranoia dominated the technological discourses of the mid-60s and continued

through most of the 70s, a time of social and political unrest that resonated more with a return to

nature than trajectories of scientific and technical conquest. But as microprocessors allowed for

complex digital circuits to be enclosed within familiar interfaces, electronic products became

intuitive, practical and affordable.

For children, Simon was more than just a toy. He was a friend, a touchable machine at a time

when keyboards were off limits. While parents tried to communicate with their Apple II in

symbols and codes, their small children were pushing giant glowing buttons, ‘repeating Simon’s

flashing lights and sounds’. In escaping the productivity proposed by personal computers and

focusing on tactile low-resolution patterns, children came to explore less predictable dimensions

of the digital world. No longer just tools—computers became collaborators and teammates, then

experiences unto themselves, not “wonderfully functional, but functionally wonderful—a merry-

go-round of light, color, and music.”10

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Figure 5 : Final Scene11

In the quote above, Vivian Sobchack describes the UFO from Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of

the Third Kind”, released in 1977. The film played a large role in Simon’s success. The final

scene features a team of scientists communicating with a giant, brightly illuminated spaceship

through a sequence of synchronized lights and sounds. The interplay is similar in both behavior

and design to Simon’s flashing tones and flying-saucer shaped appearance.

Figure 6 : Poster

A close encounter of the third kind, those in which the presence of animated creatures is reported… (I say “animated” rather than “animate” to keep open the possibility of robots or something other than “flesh and blood”)’

~ Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience The nature of the set itself and what transpired within it was, from start to finish, veiled in top secrecy. Only those required for the filming were permitted entrance after displaying proper identification badges, checked by an around-the-clock security force.

~ Close Encounters Souvenir Book

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In the film, a vacuum cleaner moves across a room on its own and an oven repeatedly cycles on

and off. Cars, mechanical systems and electronic gadgets are brought to life by a mysterious

power. Cameras, microphones, digital tape decks and other recording technologies make frequent

cameos. Electronic gadgets are present in nearly every scene, referenced with both a paranoid and

idolizing obsession that suggests the presence of a different kind of being. Are we looking for

aliens or systems born of our own minds and hands? Are they real or do we make them real?

Figure 7 : Transcendence

[Close Encounters] initiates a new iconography of beatific human wonder, editorially linking affect to effect. Heads tilted, eyes gazing upward with childish openness and unfearful expectancy--this is the human face of transcendence whose emotion is enacted by what it sees.12

Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space

Simon became the handheld controller for communicating with another life form, worshipped

with cult-like fervor. With their mechanisms hidden, objects of our own design became life-like

and magical. Animated devices, simultaneously depicted as both friend and foe, were worshipped

with cult-like intensity. Both Close Encounters and Simon became iconographic agents of a

nascent digital aesthetic, shaping popular perspectives that led to a new-wave of cybernetics that

defined 80s culture—the pulsing, boldly-textured patterns of sound and light.

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Figure 8 : Studio 54

Simon debuted in 1978 at Studio 54 in New York City. Descriptions from the party reference a 4

foot replica swinging above the dance floor, flashing colored light on the guests below. There was

a console at every table, playing underneath the steady pulse of Kraftwerk’s Man-Machine,

released 2 months earlier. The celebration was regularly punctuated by a harsh “RAZZ” as guests

failed to keep up with Simon’s digital brain.

There are show biz people galore: Baryshnikov and Alvin Ailey, cabaret artiste Lorna Luft and Neil Sedaka, tennis champ Vitas Gerulaitis, Geraldo Rivera, the Playmate of the Month (Dito: "We accepted her for what she was"). Disco Sally, who is not on the guest list, has been admitted because she is a Studio fixture, its resident senior citizen; she comes every night to boogie. "I can't tell whether she's a good dancer," Dito says to himself, "or whether it's Parkinson's disease." The rest of the guests, though— they are here because of George Ditomassi.13

: Diane McWhorter, Boston Magazine, 1978

“Dito”, the spokesperson for Milton Bradley, played host. He awarded Neil Simon “Simon of the

Year” and gave away an all-expenses-paid trip to St. Simon Island. There were over a thousand in

attendance and Simon was the guest of honor, squaring off with actors, sports-stars and game

enthusiasts. In the most legendary club at the height of Disco, Simon became a star.

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Figure 9 : Simon Controls14

Mode I : Player vs. Simon

Simon generates a random sequence that the player must copy. If correct, Simon repeats the

pattern and adds another tone to the end, and again, the player copies the sequence. Each turn,

the pattern grows by 1, until a button is pressed out of order and the player loses or the player

successfully repeats a 31 tone sequence, and wins.

Mode II : Player vs. Player

Simon begins with one tone, the first player must repeat the tone and select the next tone. Each

subsequent player must repeat the current sequence and then add one tone. This continues until a

player makes a mistake or the maximum sequence of 31 colors is successfully navigated. In this

mode there is only a loser, no winners, Simon officiates.

Mode III – Player vs. Player vs. Player vs. Player

A multi-player version of Mode I. Each player is responsible for one or more colors during the

sequence (up to 4 players). If a button is pressed out of order that color is removed from the game

and play continues with a new sequence until only one color is left. This game has one winner and

up to three losers (all human). Simon generates patterns and officiates.

Levels change the maximum length of the sequence in all three modes. There are four levels. In the multi-

player games, it usually makes sense to be on level 4, allowing for the longest possible gameplay. The

maximum sequence lengths are as follows:

Level 1: 8 Level 2: 14 Level 3: 20 Level 4: 31

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Figure 10 : The Inside

“It's incredible that Milton Bradley could have gotten hold of a microprocessor and come up with something that dumb." …”you have to make the computer dumb and slow," says an electronic game inventor, "for people to be able to play with it.”15

: Boston Magazine

Simon’s brain is the TMS 1000 “computer on a chip”, the first ever microcontroller, a 4-bit

single-chip CPU with 32 bytes of RAM developed by Texas Instruments in 1971 and

commercialized in 1974. Microchip developments made computers practical and affordable and

with the release of the Commodore 64 in 1982, digital computing entered the home. Small,

cheap microcontrollers like the TMS 1000 changed the face of countless industries, and, outfitted

with embeddable logic chips, the game industry went electric. A 1978 article in Boston

Magazine, “Electronic Shock in Toyland”, outlines some of the new capabilities of digital games.

Because of its ability to endow a game with memory, the computer has transformed their notion of what a game is: by providing random variables that dice cannot; by making play cheat-proof, since the computer neither lies nor can be lied to; by adding an "intelligent" opponent, which radically redefines the concept of solitaire games. 16

: Boston Magazine

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The availability of microcontrollers was the driving force behind the industry’s shift to handheld

digital systems, and, while video-games would quickly come to dominate the entertainment

market, standalone electronic games were popular as well. By the late 80’s, digital systems—

hand-held interfaces (Simon, Merlin), arcade games (Space Invaders, Pong), dedicated

videogame consoles (Atari 2600), and the infinitely reprogrammable personal computer (Apple

II, Commodore 64)—had become the primary sites of play, advertising not only new experiences

but new modes of life (social networking, virtual reality, networked gaming).

The promise of the digital extended well beyond play. With small, cheap, easily programmable

chips and fast connection protocols, computers could sense, model and process the physical world

in close to ‘real-time’. With the bit as a common denominator, information was to be free from

material limits, and, sold on this vision, people increasingly turned their attention to the glow of

the virtual—a techno-utopian optimism that recalls Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem “All

Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.”17

I like to think (and the sooner the better!) of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky.

I like to think (right now, please!) of a cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics where deer stroll peacefully past computers as if they were flowers with spinning blossoms.

I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.

The promise of a digital future radiated from both Silicon Valley and Hollywood, spreading with

ever-increasing resolution—life free from identity, difference and body. But the digital was

promoted and produced by people positioned to profit from its realization and a cast of mostly

white, male tech-entrepreneurs with military contracts saw financial opportunity in digitizing life

and built systems to control its currency, information.

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As the promise of freedom was manufactured into increasingly directed systems and sold as

productivity machines, the virtual came to reflect the real. ‘Digital freedom’ resembled a more

efficient version of an all too human logic.

Often overlooked in the spectacle of animated technologies, people catalyze the entangled

influences that perpetually remake what both ‘human’ and ‘technology’ mean. People are specific,

varied and noisy and only in their hands and minds do machines become more—extensions of

life. Alan Perlis describes the computer program in the forward of Structure and Interpretation of

Computer Programs, the basis of MIT's computer science courses since 1980:

Every computer program is a model, hatched in the mind, of a real or mental process. These processes, arising from human experience and thought, are huge in number, intricate in detail, and at any time only partially understood. They are modeled to our permanent satisfaction rarely by our computer programs. Thus even though our programs are carefully handcrafted discrete collections of symbols, mosaics of interlocking functions, they continually evolve: we change them as our perception of the model deepens, enlarges, generalizes until the model ultimately attains a metastable place within still another model with which we struggle.18

: Alan J. Perlis, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (Forward)

Our technologies are processes abstracted from the human mind. From the Greek “technic”, a

method or manner of accomplishing something, technology is not only a description of technical

devices but a method for formalizing and systemizing human processes. By using our technical

devices we develop new perspectives that help us build new technical devices and the concept

‘human’ is remade at an exponential pace. The rapid refiguring of both human and machine is

perhaps what makes people seem different from other forms of life. But what are technologies

used for, ultimately? Creating better worlds? Producing new patterns? Or are they simply

something to do? Something to keep people productive.

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New technology doubles as both savior and captor, a confusion illustrated in the lines outside

Apple stores and the real blood on technology’s ‘bleeding edge’. It is the dualism at play in

countless science fictions—a simultaneity and a genre that all technical projects move within.

People make instruments that change the way people work and in working with them, people are

changed. A cup lets its inventor live further from water but, living further from water, the

inventor needs a cup. This feedback system is found throughout history—humans making

systems making humans.

In time and with use people have come to incorporate the silicon perspective as part of the carbon

consciousness. The microcontroller, capable of performing aspects of human logic, works bi-

directionally. As people copy systems, systems copy people. An iPhone is a perspective, just like a

cup. When people are copies, they are easy to control.

Figure 11 : Mions19

The history of Simon, like history more generally, contains confusion between original and copy.

History says Simon is the child of Ralph Baer, an engineer and head of the new electronics

division at top game design firm Marvin Glass and Associates. In 1977, while attending the

Music Operators of America conference, Baer played a four-button memory game made by Atari

called “Touch-Me.” He remembers the initial meeting…

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Figure 12 : Touch-Me

Working with programmer Lenny Cope and funded by Marvin Glass, Baer rebuilt Touch-Me in

a portable enclosure with buttons arranged in a square and called it “Follow-Me”. The most

notable updates were to the design and the button sounds. The arcade style console was replaced

by a portable flying-saucer shape and, inspired by the tones of a bugle, Baer selected the pitches

E, C#, A, & E (one octave above) to correspond with the colored buttons (Blue, Yellow, Red,

Green respectively). The tones outlined a major chord in second inversion, a set that ‘musically

works’ in any sequence. A deeper, chiding “Razz” sound was designed to indicate defeat.

…soon we were ready for a demo to potential clients: Milton Bradley were the first to see the current incarnation of “Follow Me” at the Marvin Glass studio in Chicago. As usual, it was Mel Taft who came from Milton Bradley’s Massachusetts’ head-shed to view new products. What he saw at the time was a square unit, about 8x8 inches, which played like gangbusters. The illustration in the Simon patent still shows that configuration. The cover page of that patent is shown nearby. At the time, the game had acquired a new name: “Feedback”. 20

: Ralph Baer, Videogames: In the Beginning Touch me… Follow me… Feedback… Simon

Milton Bradley decided to “go” with the game shortly after that demo; they renamed the game Simon, which made perfect sense.” 21

Touch-Me was in a waist-high cabinet with four large, dark “buttons” facing the player on its top, nearly horizontal surface; during the game, the buttons lit up in random sequences and the machine issued truly awful, raucous accompanying sounds. It was the player’s job to follow the light sequence by pressing the appropriate buttons.

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For Baer, electronic toys were a passion, but also a hobby. He worked as an engineer for Sanders

& Associates developing defense technologies. There, Baer developed the Brown Box, widely

considered the first videogame system. It was reworked as the Magnavox Odyssey and released a

year before Atari’s Pong debuted with an identical gameplay. Baer sued Nolan Bushnell and Atari,

but it was Bushnell who got both the patent and the coveted title of “Inventor of the Videogame”.

Strangely, Baer received the patent for Simon, his knock-off of Bushnell’s Touch-Me.

The early battles for the rights to play were taken seriously and Marvin Glass was notoriously

strict about protecting the firm’s ideas. The office was double-walled and prototypes were locked

in a large bank vault at the end of the work day. Two years before Simon’s release, this obsession

with control led to tragedy, described in an edition of Newsweek from 1978…

Toy companies have been involved in fraud, espionage, piracy and theft, and that can produce a lot of paranoia. At Chicago's Marvin Glass & Associates, probably the largest toy think tank in the nation, there are no windows and no lunches outside its building. Such intense secrecy may keep Glass at the top: it develops one of every ten games in the U.S., including this year's Simon. But the pressure can also warp minds. Two years ago, a quiet electronics engineer went berserk, killing three Glass executives and crippling two others before turning the gun on himself; the note he left said co-workers were out to get him. – Langway

Figure 13 : July 28th 1976

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Figure 14 : Reanimation

Simon is now 35 years old. He lives in the subliminal space of the discarded toy, tucked into

closets behind board games that pre-date him. On ebay he sells for less than he did in 1978 and

he has yet to establish a relevant nostalgia market. Playing Simon today, the buttons don’t feel

very responsive, the size is awkward and the timing is strange. Simon has become a passing

curiosity, eliciting a smile of recognition and little else. After everyone gives him a go, he returns

to the table and sits for a few minutes before beeping twice, to tell you he’s still on.

But Simon’s work was already done. By introducing popular culture to the unpredictable digital

interface, he shaped perspectives in the digital age. In playing with Simon, a generation found

themselves inside of their systems. It is not that digital technologies produced virtual worlds that

can be entered and left at will, but that digital programs merge with life—no glasses necessary—

we are already here.

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But Simon was made to model control, to see technology as an other and to disguise the

programmer’s agency as friendly foe—both evil and harmless. A first step in unraveling this

narrative is to become programmers ourselves, taking an active role in writing the systems with

and within which we play. A second step is to consider how we interface with our programs. A

computer is not a passive object, but “a process or active threshold mediating between two

states.”22

Simon is called upon to frame a constellation of ideas, figures and experiments that collide within

new systems for playing with patterns of sound and light. Simon guides as we feedback between

people and technologies, blurring the lines between people and programs, games and music and

culture. Our goals are not fixed, our boundaries are animated, and we are cast as both a navigator

and navigated.

It’s about the human/machine relationship or interface—the power of technology to expand the mind. You find solutions to creative problems and those solutions lead you into new territory where new solutions have to be found.23

: Pauline Oliveros

At our best, we reconsider the patterns of control and influence in an attempt to work out how

new technology can be used to expand the mind rather than control it. By embracing ambiguity

and playing with interfaces that push back—that are life-like—we might discover new cybernetic

relations—reconsidering the pattern in light of the system for reconsidering the pattern—the

eternal navigation of the animating interface.

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{ Onism }

Simon says, pick up a handful of parts. Test them. Are they fair, intact, gleaming? This is a laboratory, so experiment. Simon says, revise this story, or make a better one. Title it “Simon Says.” 24

~ Shelley Jackson, Simon Says

Haraway cuts straight to the matter, “Late twentieth century machines have made thoroughly

ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and

externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines.

Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.”25

It was never the goal to explore the boundary between human and technology. Actually, on the

surface, it was, but the idea was to focus on the surface. We set out to explore the interface, but

interfaces are not merely surfaces—or, surfaces run deep.

To make words represent a method to be played with hands, ears, and eyes is the struggle that

underscores this entire project, writing. Reinforcing the dualisms inherent to language, to us. We

can play with words as material, twisting them into a spiral in an attempt to obscure the binaries,

but they resist, and their resistance been instrumental in shaping our worldview.

But there are other options. We can extend words through figuring, but figures have their own

tendencies and biases. They do not escape linguistic structures, they only patch between them,

folding the texture of language to hold multiple variables in a set of relations. Samuel Delany is

virtuosic at patching between folds, but he does it despite words, not because of them... or, is that

right?

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The computer allows for a different kind of engagement with information. Instead of describing

the results of our figuring, we can program procedures that simulate it. We can build structures

that are dynamic and models that allow for the manipulation of ideas in time. The computer

provides the means to play with our worldviews. Yet, we still engage with computers primarily

though symbolic structures: metaphorical interfaces that wrap the possibility space of the digital

within icons and words that allow for an ease of use. In translating familiar communication

paradigms to the digital realm, we reproduce a worldview that effectively hides the possibility of

new perspectives that computers might allow.

There is also the larger issue of power and control. Those that control the social, economic,

political and cultural systems are invested in maintaining control, which requires a preservation of

worldviews predicated on symbolic representation. Money is a symbol of wealth, but money is not

wealth. But to realize that in a deep way might change how and where people spend money.

Efficiency and productivity—faster, and with less effort—are what drive our new technologies,

but why? Who actually wants simply faster and easier?

I might be arguing for slower and stranger. Less predictable, more ambiguous and mysterious and

curious and obstinate and less efficient—perhaps even unproductive, at least from the perspective

of those in power.

…we’re now living in a world with exponential and continuous change. We’re not just living through a transition; we have transitioned into always transitioning… That is to say, we have to be willing to constantly regrind our conceptual lenses. In order to continually make sense of this changing world, we need the freedom to explore, mess up, pull back, reflect, and try again.26

: John Seely Brown

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The protocol that Simon transmitted to millions of children in the 80s is best articulated by

computer scientist Alan Perlis, “see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it,

that you can make it more.” The computer is not merely a tool or a medium. It is both. It is also

much more. It is a medium for making tools and a tool for creating mediums. It is a means of

control and provides control over means. In connecting people, people become connected to it.

Systems are seductive. They promise to do a hard job faster, better, and more easily than you could do it by yourself. But if you set up a system, you are likely to find your time and effort now being consumed in the care and feeding of the system itself. New problems are created by its very presence. Once set up, it won't go away, it grows and encroaches. It begins to do strange and wonderful things. Breaks down in ways you never thought possible. It kicks back, gets in the way, and opposes its own proper function. Your own perspective becomes distorted by being in the system. You become anxious and push on it to make it work. Eventually you come to believe that the misbegotten product it so grudgingly delivers is what you really wanted all the time. At that point encroachment has become complete... you have become absorbed... you are now a systems person!

: John Gale, Systemantics27

The computer is not unique in its bi-directionality but it does not simply amplify pre-existing

modes either. By animating interfaces I am not attempting to show that interfaces are alive, but

that they are active and that they matter—to bring them to life. Our digital interfaces are already

a big part of our lives but we engage with them largely as passive boundaries. But they can be so

much more. Embedded in our interfaces are philosophies and perspectives, the structures that

shape who we are. By animating interfaces I hope to build systems for active collaboration with

the aspects of computing that characterize this new digital realm. To develop new modes of

thinking that figure in rather than figure out.

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Shelley Jackson says “Simon says imitate a human”28 and so I try, but I do not know ‘human’.

“pick up a handful of parts” and “test them. Are they fair, intact, gleaming?”

This is a laboratory, so experiment.

Simon says, revise this story, or make a better one.

Title it “Simon Says.” 29

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NOTES

1 Baby Names by ThinkBabyNames.com. "Simon - meaning of Simon name." Accessed March 31, 2014.

http://www.thinkbabynames.com/meaning/1/Simon. 2 Brickman, Marshall. Simon. 1980. USA: Warner Bros., Film. 3 Berkeley, Edmund C. and Robert A. Jensen, “World's Smallest Electric Brain.” Radio-Electronics

(1950): 1, 29 4 Berkeley, Edmund C., "Simple Simon." Scientific American (1950): 1. 5 Berkeley, Edmund C., Giant Brains; Or, Machines That Think. New York: Wiley, 1949. Print. 6 Berkeley, Edmund C., "Simple Simon." Scientific American (1950): 43. 7 Berkeley, Edmund C., “IBM Fact Sheet” Interview, Columbia University, May 18, 1950 8 “Simon Commercial from 1978,” YouTube video, :32, posted by "Gamez Gear," July 9, 2013,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF0ZUXclW8Y. 9 McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. 10 Sobchack, Vivian. "Child/Alien/Father: Patriarchal Crisis and Generic Exchange." Camera Obscura 15

(1986): 7-34. 11 Spielberg, Steven. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. 1977. California. : Columbia Pictures, Film. 12 Sobchack, Vivian Carol, and Vivian Carol Sobchack. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film.

(New York: Ungar, 1987): 284. 13 McWhorter, Diane. "Electronic Shock in Toyland." (Boston, 1978): 104 14 Simon Instruction Manual, 1978. Milton Bradley. 15 McWhorter, Diane. "Electronic Shock in Toyland." (Boston, 1978): 164 16 Ibid., 104 17 Brautigan, Richard. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. San Francisco: Communication

Company, 1967. 18 Abelson, Harold, Gerald Jay Sussman, and Julie Sussman. Structure and Interpretation of Computer

Programs. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1996. 19 Found using a picture of Simon in a Google Image Search. (August 23, 2013) 20 Baer, Ralph H. Videogames: In the Beginning. (Springfield, NJ: Rolenta Press, 2005), 323. 21 Ibid,. 324. 22 Galloway, Alexander R. The Interface Effect. Cambridge, UK: (Polity, 2012): 10 23 Arcangel, Cory. “Pauline Oliveros.” BOMB 107. Spring 2009. Accessed 12 March 2014.

http://bombmagazine.org/article/3268/pauline-oliveros 24 Jackson, Shelley. "Simon Says." Fence, (2013), 22. 25 Haraway, Donna Jeanne. The Haraway Reader. (New York: Routledge, 2003), 12. 26 Seely-Brown, John. Web Interview. Accessed 12 March 2013. http://spotlight.macfound.org/featured-

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