Panel Statement

Panel: Pedagogy of the Oppressed 

There are many representations of spatial relationships in human culture, art, and science, both now and through history. All are abstracted tools of situations, and all work better for some people better than for others. Rectilinear coordinate systems, and their close cousin Renaissance perspective, are examples. Recognizing these differences, we should NOT strive for the mediocre ideal of some sort of “androgeny of geometry”, but must instead build instrumentalities and interfaces that are richly multimodal in the way they empower people
who are differently endowed.

• Rob Tow, USA. At Interval research Rob Tow is engaged in active research into gendered constructions of space and interface. As a working scientist with two granted and three pending patents in applied visual psychophysics, he has a wide background in  psychophysics and perception – and has worked at Xerox PARC and Schlumberger Palo Alto Research with 18 years of experience in image processing, graphics, and applied vision. He also has studied the history of art (including a deep descend into Renaissance perspective). He is a white male who wrote half the code in the Placeholder virtual reality project that Brenda Laurel created.