in here?
or at the interface?
where do the laws of things begin?
where does the wild joy live?
where does self begin?
in between becomings
truth is breathing
experiences
tickling transcendence
from within time
mind makes concepts
empirical meals served raw
dissolve into absolute
nourishment
[+/-] another wasted day of code tinkering I feel like a gerbil on a wheel
reproducing technological font effects that have been thororughly masticated by previous generations.
Here's why: demo
Based on the superior: andre michelle flag
and very old news compared to 1998's It's Alive
Labels: font pixel manipulation
[+/-] Thinking about Thinking -- Epistemological Topologies and other Recursive Quanderies While searching for antecedents for the use of the term "topological epistemology" (which is a phrase I utilize in my thesis to refer loosely to how ideas are dynamic shared species/ecosystems that evolve around and within us...) I encountered Aaron Sloman's Logical Geography and Topography. He uses the term "logical topography" in a much more rigorous and insightful manner to elucidate (if i understand it correctly) the set of potential state space of concepts. In the process of his essay he also offers a very powerful definition and model of science and attempts to extend this definition into the study of epistemology:
"Doing deep science, e.g. newtonian mechanics, electromagnetic theory, quantum physics, molecular biology, theoretical linguistics (as opposed to the kind of shallow science that merely collects data and looks for correlations), involves coming up with a theory that cannot be derived from the evidence, but can be tested against it, where the theory has a collection of core 'axioms' embedded in a system of logic or mathematics in which inferences can be made.
This could be done for a theory about the structure of a collection of concepts. Then demonstrating that such a theory (a) is internally consistent, and (b) has the right set of consequences to explain facts of usage about which there are (usually, though not always) no dispute, would be more like a mathematical and therefore non-empirical task than like the empirical task of collecting evidence about usage using surveys."
Sloman is advocating treating concepts with similar rigor to mathematics. Douglas Hofstadter in I Am a Strange Loop (2006) describes Godel's incompleteness theorem as a conversion of Whitehead and Russel's Principia Mathematica into numerical terms. All of this migrational throughput between disciplines suggests that envisioning epistemology as a topological dynamic landscape is both fruitful and accurate at the empirical level.
Sloman distinguishes in his essay between
"Logical Topography (the structure of the space within which the divisions can be made), and Logical Geography (a particular set of subdivisions that happens to be used in some culture)."
Sloman continues to refine this distinction :
"...logical topography involves: not just exploring the connections in existing usage, but exploring the variety of possible concepts that can be defined in connection with the subject matter that is being investigated, analysing the relative merits of different partitionings, and showing how actual concepts do or do not relate to those."
What I am suggesting with a usage of 'topological epistemology' differs slightly in emphasis from Sloman’s concept in that I am advancing a notion of the subject-terrain as a dynamic landscape, and drawing an analogy between truth-validity and species survival (which echoes Dawkins' memes). Laws are not static; even universal physical, conceptual, and metaphysical truths are simply structures in this philosophical system. Structures are subject to time, decomposition, maturation and all the other life-processes of birth, death, change.
Geometry is the study of static surfaces; topology (for me) is those same surfaces animated and evolving. Human ideas grow on convulsive substrates.
To cite my own thesis: 'I conceive of knowledge as a landscape and theories as neighbours. I do not believe in the necessity of defending ideas; and I believe that approaches to epistemology can have political implications. In this ontology, ideas are living; they may have differing validity dependent upon the viewpoint but that does not alter their status or right to exist. Evidently there are limits to this attitude; I am not advocating an empirical absolute relativity; and I do not accept as true everything that occurs within my own mind. '
Labels: epistemology, sloman, topology
[+/-] Between Science and Literature I haven't been writing much. Thesis writing has taken precedence.
And a bit of recoding of Thoems.
I was returning home on the sky train tonite reading : Livingston, Ira. Between Science and Literature: An Introduction to Autopoetics. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006.) --quite exhausted, bit of a sore throat -- and Livingston's making a distinction play between withness and witness. Basically language is a living system, self-organizing and its this inseparability from life and the world (it's withness quality) that makes paradoxes about its capacity to witness certainty arise.
I agree with him on these points.
But of course that leads Ira into the entire materiality thing. In short, the referential quality of modernist language as an illusion, and how the motion of post-modernist poetry and literary is toward a concern with language as an entity. And its there that I disagree on the exclusive importance of investigating language as system: humans probably are incapable of really seeing things change at a temporal scale that makes the refractory nature of language become dominant. Language still works pretty well, as one tool among many (along with image, touch, smell, proprioception and sound) for us to explore the equally complex seething dynamic of emotion, or biology, or cultural theory for that matter.
Still it looks like a fascinating book and if (as I suspect) i am about to fall sick with a cold, it will prove a wonderful companion.
On a synchronistic note, I came home hit the stumbleupon button and found a joke (very typical so i extended it to include a cultural theorist and a poet)
::::::::::
An engineer, a scientist, a mathematician,a cultural theorist, and a poet were traveling together on the sky-train to SIAT. Just as they passed over the bridge, they saw a black barge on the river's far edge.
"Oh look," the engineer said. "All barges in Surrey are black."
"You cannot say that!" the scientist exclaimed. "You can only deduce that this particular barge is black."
"You cannot say that!" the mathematician shook his head sadly. "You can only deduce that this side of that particular barge is black."
"You are confused by referentiality!" the cultural theorist snorted. "Language refracts as it is contingently saying that this side of that particular barge is black."
"O!" sighed the poet. "Tiny specks and smudges arguing in the sun about scratches."
:::::::::::
Studying emotion has the disreputable pleasure of being considered contentious by both scientists and cultural scholars.
Which reminds me of a tangential bit of academic territorialism: I heard a more-than-fascinating virtuosic speech on critical geography by Jeffrey Derksen --- in relation to “space-agent wah” at SFU downtown Thursday, May 31, 2-5 pm 'Count Me In: Writing public selves' -- Derksen discussed spatial scales, space bending, and how to locate spaces of emancipatory possibility.... It all sounded a lot like Scott Kelso's open dynamic non-equilibrium systems with a socio-political twist, but when I mentioned this to Jeffrey afterwards, he cautioned that some folks in the cultural theory world might not appreciate the association.
Humans are strange creatures indeed.
Labels: barge, black, referentiality, refract
[+/-] 2.1 Major Analog Poetic ‘Schools’ or ‘Movements’ “Experimentation in new forms of prose, collaboration, proceduralism, and collage have diminished the role of the lyric subject in favour of a relatively neutral voice (or multiple voices)…the instrumental function of language is diminished and the objective character of words foregrounded…language poetry has made its horizon the material form rationality takes.” (Michael Davidson on the LANGUAGE poets, as cited by Rothenberg. Joris. 1995. 663)
Poetry has a long history of vigorous experimentation. Because it exists at the periphery of society (and at the centre of language in its self-conception), poetry is free to explore formal terrain that is not permitted to prose. Innumerable analog (print) poetic movements have contributed or anticipated to varying degrees the emergence of theoretical concerns active in contemporary digital poetics. The Dadaists, Surrealists, Lettristes, Futurists, Concrete poets, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and OULIPO movements have each, in their own way, provoked radical recalibrations of the page, text and semantics. The Lettristes and Concrete poets created vivid visual knots of text, which are ancestors of the current developments in 3D text display and dynamic mobile text. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets posited engaged texts that dealt with the materiality of language as technology, anticipating the current dominant theoretical paradigm of digital poetics . Algorithmic poetry (on a computer) was anticipated by the OULIPO group whose systems of analog writing constraints constituted a sustained engagement with generative algorithmic literature.
My own practical inclinations are not theoretical. I find some degree of affinity with the views expressed by a marginal splinter group loosely grouped under the title of PostLanguage poets who advocate a poetry disengaged from formal theoretics, a poetry that is allowed to evolve according to the inclination and tendencies of the artist instead of a set of systematic ideological forms. In the digital poetic realm, the online works at BornMagazine reflect this aesthetic foregrounding. The following section will explore theorists and theories which have evolved around language in computational contexts; this literature review will hopefully form a foundation from which to situate digital poetic work that does not initiate from a theoretical foundation.
Many language poems are computationally tractable. The central features: disconnected sentences, intentionally deconstructed narrative focus, hybridized spatio-temporal locations, and mixed lingo from different domains. One exemplary current digital poetics practitioner perhaps inadvertently replicates the LANGUAGE style using feeds from Twitter rss streams (tiny text messages that are migrating like starlings in public space among the pdas of conference goers). The patterned ecosystem of live realtime txts is mixed with video footage from a railway station, the twitter user icons, and flickr feeds. The writer is essentially replaced by the internet who steps aside and becomes information architect to the evolving dynamic undulant topological skin of data that is being twittered around. The effect is sporadically, like the best of LANGUAGE poetry, absorbingly hypnotic; the style is the same (disconnected sentences, intentionally deconstructed narrative focus, hybridized spatio-temporal locations, and mixed lingo from different domains ) In the digital work, the live feed (the page) work never repeats. It’s written by no one and everyone. Repetition, accumulation, variation and redundancy ricochet through the network. Language constructs itself. The digital poet is a voyeur of perforated space, The Waiting, hovering zones where humans nourish their appetites for absorbing anonymous patterns (L'attente, the waiting / Flussgeist 1 (2007) Gregory Chatonsky )
Labels: digital poetics, feed, language, rss, twitter, waiting
[+/-] Response to Glazier's Criteria for Innovative Digital Literature Glazier outlines 3 criteria for innovative digital poetic practices.
1. " Innovative work avoids the …’I’…..a sentimentalized 'I,' often concerned with its own mortality, can be considered as having passed away." (Glazier 2002. 174).
Response: Humans devote inordinate energy to their affective condition. Text materiality should be considered by any digital author; in fact from the practitioner’s viewpoint, the materiality is simply knowing one’s tools, the IDE’s.. The ‘I’, far from being ‘passed away’, seems to permeate reality. Have nation states dissolved? Has death stopped? Has anyone ‘reading’ this never fallen in love? known loneliness? felt wounded? What account of this world that strives for holistic comprehensive clarity can disregard the ‘I’? Fiction offers us meta-I views, glimpses into other subjective cages. Poetry offers glimpses to the core of ‘I’ where forms of shared intent emerge.
2. “…the innovative digital literary text employs an architecture that places textual structures within the contours and values unique to its medium, a practice of textual ecology.” (Glazier 2002. 174-5).
Response: Agreed. To be ecologically viable, digital poetry must be adaptive to (and capable of surviving in) new media habitats. Yet nature is rarely unique, and evolution demonstrates an enormous amount of repetitive use of forms and strategies. New media is not exempt from absorbing evolutionary materiality. Old ways will lose relevance, adapt or go extinct. Many traditional poetic techniques (repetition, motifs, aesthetics, proportion, form, grace) transplant well into digital media.
3. “Enabling of new tools of intelligence. This quality suggests avoiding the reinscription of authority, totalitizing positions, and commodifying of the artworks.” (Glazier 2002. 175).
Response: Yes. This world is venomous; taming the human cognitive system for compassionate uses is important. However, restricting poetry to a non-authoritarian, non-absolute and non-commodified position consigns all poets to a relativistic totalitarian poverty. It also throws out a massive part of poetic inheritance: Ezra Pound? William Blake? Perhaps some humans are innately authoritarian commodities? Culture is how they communicate.
Glazier also points out what for him are ‘traps’ : narrative, the link, and ‘author versus programmer’ ( Glazier 2002. 175-6).
Response: All stable systems are ‘traps’.
Labels: affect, criteria, intelligence, literature
[+/-] Medium: Flash Video Interactivity : The Illusion of Choice The fact remains, I build most of my digital poetics work in Flash. As of 2007, it remains the most viable choice for rapid prototyping web-based multimedia work. But there is something almost banal about declared allegiance to a software. It's a bit like confessing to a brainwash.
Consider carefully the metaphysical intent of the 3 finalists in the Video category for the Flash in The Can 2007 People’s Choice award (links at bottom). These are 3 extraordinarily slick big budget advertisements; if this is choice, then underwear is toilet paper. The motivation for these works is money.
The planet's economy demonstrates two major inefficient uses of its talents: building weapons and making advertisements. If an equivalent amount of money was spent on research into how to put people in need in contact with what they need as they need it, then the internet could eradicate advertisements.
Instead, plain and simple sell tactics predominate, competitively dressed up in immaculate streaming video. Intricate, absorbing, intoxicating and ultimately sterilizing, indoctrinating merchants of consumption and lifestyle flourish. Luminary philanthropists they are not; enormous money goes into advertisements. Very very little goes into digital poetry. The field is neglected because in general it emphasizes the non-transparency of information and language: it is hard to sell ambiguity. My Flash video work sells peace using aesthetics; seduces the autonomic into reveries with non-linear affect. I feel that epistemologies of peace and awareness and indeterminate knowledge must be absorptive by bodies.
A lot can be learned technically from advertisements; they are mastering direct embodied communication online. The intensity with which these sites play affect within the reader is profound. Their technical virtuosity is superlative. A parody of Allan Ginsberg's Howl in that the best young minds of our generation have become advertisers. The entwined juice of cognitive science, psychoanalytic insights, demographic studies, and extreme branding aesthetics (3D modelling, chroma-keyed and airbrushed sets, vector tweens joyously sprouting like candy-coloured orgasms) create evocative yet ultimately banal and manipulative excursions into the human body. The human autonomic nervous system is largely beyond the conscious control of any human. These ads leverage that truth and ad-ject new parameters of respect, desire and goals into those who watch them.
Propoganda, poetry and advertising share the same evolutionary roots: the insistent rhythm of reality exporting its resonant thoughts to others.
From the 3 ad-sites mentioned above, 3 basic design principles can be derived:
Load swiftly.
Auto-play.
Allow choice, but reward inertia.
The ad-sites following 3 basic metaphysical principles need to be refuted:
Lie. Profit. Kill.
What is art’s role?
Truth. Give. Love.
*********************************************************************
Their dishonesty extends even into their names:
Friends of Orbit Bright – a racistly-white parody site promoting chewing gum and chastity (which makes me think of sex! and you?). Painfully obvious perpetual brand placements. It's aimed at tweeners.
Outlook Theatre – a car made glamorous through association with video vignettes of a perfect family and immaculate romantic moments. Light fluffy and efficient consumers. It's aimed at the wife archetype.
UFC66 – an Ultra fighting championship labyrinth full of snarling warriors and big time money. It's aimed at soldiers, the dispossessed and anyone who needs to fight to survive.
Labels: choice, flash, illusion, interactivity, video
[+/-] Reader Response Theory and GUI Design Reading is to books/texts what using is to interfaces. Reading is often assumed to be passive: texts contain known meanings. But, as with food, text enters into different bodies. One person may be allergic to a particular food; another may love it. Positive and negative associations may influence the reading of the text. Literary criticism evolved in the mid twentieth century to incorporate the idea of the reader as an active participant in the construction of meaning. Stanley Fish, Norman Holland, and Susan Sontag were among those theorists who developed and came to accept the role of the reader as an interpretive agent to some degree. Fish in his 1980 "Is There a Text in This Class" argued that readers approached texts with interpretive bias that constructed their experience of it. For Fish, the sameness of how many texts are experienced is due to 'interpretive communities' who share and propagate meanings.
It is my feeling that interface design theorists will increasingly follow this same path. The user of an interface is not a generic entity. Experience, aptitude, age, gender, operating system, culture, sensibility, interests, moods...the list of potential factors which could influence or bias response to an interface are huge. To isolate any one variable in a quantifiable valid experimental protocol ultimately involves stripping an interface down to an extremely simplistic representation. This reduction risks eradicating the living quality of an artwork. The reader may be faced with a situation that is formally rigorous yet aesthetically sterile. For this reason, I have chosen to take the notion of 'art-research' literally: art-research provokes irreducible qualitative responses on an individual basis that have validity as research results even if not intended by the artist or explicitly elucidated in any theoretical framing text.
Digital poetry art-works themselves create complex responses that emerge from the confluence of many features. I am not suggesting that quantifiable analysis is impossible, merely that it risks eviscerating the subtle essence of aesthetic experience; it would necessitate protracted and careful work which is beyond my scope as a solitary practitioner.
Multiple complex reader-specific interpretive analysis opens pathways to understanding the idiosyncratic effect of digital poetics. In this analysis, the confluence of variables is too complex to reduce without harming or destroying the actuality of the work. This form of analysis is generalist and seeks to understand through practice and design iteration how art can be made that has an effect locally on me, the artist. It is assumed that work that resonates and 'works' intuitively and visually for one being will invariably have some sort of audience (how ever marginal that might be). In this way, I cannot argue for any generalizable conclusions, but the ability to deal with complex multimedia interfaces is left open.
Labels: design, reading, response gui
[+/-] digital literature
"This irruption in temporality from within writing introduces characteristics of oral literature to a resolutely non-oral object. To borrow a term from Robert Escarpit, it transforms the written text from being a document to a semi-document (like a film). What's more, it imposes the irruption of an act within the space of linguistic signs, imposing a poetic function for action on the poetic function of language. Borrowing from Jakobson's famous formula, one could say that animated literature plots the constructed axis of sequential reading onto the plane of equivalence in written representation...
...Alire has, for the first time in France, proclaimed loud and clear that computerized literature is literary and not a linguistic tool, as suggested by the programming and software camps who dominate Europe at this time. The first task for Alire was to affirm that literature was not "assisted by" the computer, contrary to the ideas of A.L.A.M.O. (Atelier de Littérature Assistée par la Mathématique et les Ordinateurs, [Literature Workshop Assisted by Mathematics and Computers]), but that there exists a literature tied intimately to computer technology....
Alire fights vigorously against such finished text objects or closed, functional 'histories'. In so doing, the journal defines literature as a computer-based process and not as a creation or result."
Bootz, Philippe. “Alire: A Relentless Literary Investigation.” Digithum 4. 2002. http://www.uoc.edu/humfil/articles/eng/bootz0302/bootz0302.html.
Labels: literature
[+/-] expressivity quotations Forms of Future by Michael Joyce
"The web is a pretty difficult space in which to create an expressive surface for text. It seems to me that the web is all edges and without much depth and for a writer that is trouble. You want to induce depth, to have the surface give way to reverie and a sense of a shared shaping of the experience of reading and writing. .... language finally finds its natural element in motion, not in a window but as a window, not as a single surface but as the aural, visual, and proprioceptive experience of successive surfaces. "
Chang, B.-W. and Ungar, D. "Animation: From Cartoons to the User Interface." in UIST'93: Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. 1993. pp. 45-55.
"The experimental user interface for the programming language Self uses techniques drawn from cartoon animation to replace sudden changes with smooth transitions, offloading some of the cognitive burden of interpreting the change to the perceptual system. For example, a small object grows continuously to a large, expanded object. A menu transforms smoothly from the menu button that is clicked on to the full menu. Objects move solidly from one location to another, maintaining the illusion of solid movement even if they must cross great distances in a single frame. These and other, more subtle, applications of animation to the interface work together to make changes on the screen smooth and clear.
Bringing this kind of animation to the user interface has both cognitive and affective benefits. By offloading interpretation of changes to the perceptual system, animation allows the user to continue thinking about the task domain, with no need to shift contexts to the interface domain."
Labels: affect, expressive
[+/-] Teleport : combinatorial photo-fiction Teleport was completed in 2006 while reviewing cognitive science research into affect and synaesthesia. It is an online prose-poem that incorporates terminology (and insights) from cog-sci research inside a short fiction of an alien intelligence that teleports its mind into a human body. The thematic is reflected at both the level of content and materiality. Inside a hijacked body, the alien (literature) struggles to maintain control and decipher perceptions in a new (online) body. Teleport is fiction in a medium alien to paper and books: networked, accessible, mutable, auto-playing, silent, non-interactive , it is like a literature sculpture, hovering awaiting the perfect reader .
Visually it extends my concern for affective pattern into a sustained study of inanimate matter and dead ‘things’. How do static tableaus get read? What emotions are projected onto small inert items? Teleport is a visual testimony of invisible communities: plastic stippled coves, garbage, glue, water, dead bugs, dust, hair, sponges. Teleport’s inert matter portraits constitute an imagistic argument for the immanence of affect in everything. The hypothesis is that livingness, character and truth are reflected in all phenomena; when inanimate small-scale phenomena are re-contextualized as art, affect will emerge as the human cognitive system reads the visual patterns for emotional meaning. In conventional narratives, privileging the human world leverages the corporal reflexes evolution has placed within each reader; Teleport attempts to trigger those reflexes with micro-landscapes that would normally be categorized as irrelevant. In this way, the mechanistic autonomic aspect of affect and its role as amplifier in the construction (projection) of meaning is considered.
Teleport is also an experiment in combinatorial text-image creation. The story loops but does not repeat the same text never occurs again with the same images. 123 images are used as the backdrops for 122 phrases (the story is split at every period) so the combinatorial conjunction of image and phrase is quite large ; in other words, it rarely repeats exactly; it proposes, as many of my works do, an arbitrary algorithmic element into the notion of digital poetic page design. The animation of the words is enclosed in code which follows a set pattern with mild perturbations. The titles of the pictures are also displayed, operating (hopefully) as enigmatic commentaries. The entire effect is intended to offer a collision of contexts and ideas, from that collision sparks of affect emerge as the viewer confronts their reflexive tendencies to interpret these small environments in light of the ongoing textual story as landscapes, sites, and spaces of both tragedy and comedy.
Figure : Teleport (2006). One of many image-text combinations.
[1]There is no interactivity because humans have no control over time, birth, death. The subject of the story is not in control of the body it has dropped into. Digital culture is vulnerable to the illusion that we are masters of time and destiny, renderers of fate. In reality, mind is often just a mute immobile witness to mechanistic waves; everything that seems more than just a wave to it is probably just patterned systems moving too fast for its comprehension. Immobility, ignorance, impotence: stroke, coma, death. Teleport is about death and how matter takes life. The origins of myth and radiant microcosmos of catatonia.
[2]My combinatorial math is quite weak. And the factorial of 123 +122 reads undefined in online calculators. Anyone?
Labels: cognition, teleport, test
[+/-] Language quotations Human opinions are experienced as facts by those who hold them. Knowledge, or epistemology, is an ecosystem of phenotypic opinions.
Tomkins (vol iv, affect imagery consciousness, p.17): "Language is designed to be a transparent medium mechanism."
Walter Benjamin (One Way Street, p.112): "Language is thus the mental being of things."
If there is anything I learn its that each genius has a domain.
Labels: language
[+/-] working thoughts while making meanderings mashup //since blogger limits its entries to 999 but stops its rss feed at 25
//i am faced with daunting and unpalatable task of building a custom html parser... yuck
//each entry is a wad of superfluous data....
//how best to extract it for redisplay in flash9 as3 (a language i am just learning)?
step 1:
tidy gui converts the messy blogger code to fairly minimal xml
without all the cruft
or so it seems on first glance
in fact cruft remains
its just replaced headers...
must fiddle with diverse and voluminous settings...
first attempt: export as ascii
(who said being an artist was any different than a relentless infinite bureaucracy? kafka would have reveled in it. eternal humiliation of configurations.)
tick tick tick
same same same
a half hour passes parsing and parsing, no results...
so on to next loading problem
and think of the metaphysical aspects of the design's intent:
//what device functionality will my mind need in a computational recursive memory tool?
easy sift, easy sort
like lifting handfulls of pollen
tossed into the air suspension
lingering over touch
//how will amplification (Tomkins 1997) --the emotion of it-- work?
sort by those lingered over most
find the root mean of longing
its too easy to do something cool
lets concentrate on the content
what relationships exist between all this stuff, this knowledge, this list?
[+/-] GLOSSARY (in progress) -- v0.01 Affect: basically synonymous with emotion in my usage. Affect is a term from psychology brought to general contemporary usage by many but prominently by Silvan Tomkins in the 1950s who asked the question: “Could one design a truly humanoid machine?” Tomkins understands the “affect mechanism as a separate but amplifying co-assembly” which means he sees its role as a booster, a wave augmenter-damper in the brain. Affect is seen as a necessary aspect of cognitive decision-making in lesion studies (Damasio 1998, 2000). In post-modern philosophy, affect refers generally to a wide range of embodied experiences from the primal to the sublime. My view is a hybrid of all the others, affect fuses with physical reality: it recursively sets the valence of each particle’s approach to phenomena. Crucial readings Affective Computation, Rosalind Picard; Affective Neuroscience, Jaak Panksepp; Antonio Damasio, Silvan Tomkins, and Gaston Bachelard (whose aesthetic sensitivities offsets other more scientific approaches).
ELO : Electronic Literature Organization
Particle systems: humans, neutrinos, bubbles, neuro-modulators, stock prices, planets, universes. Everything known (and even some of what is unknown) is a particle system. Particle systems are not simply computational animations developed by Karl Sims; nor are they a theory of systems; they are manifest systems: comprehensive holistic swarming interconnected idea-forms. Particle systems are systems in motion: sets of temporarily autonomous data traversing space-time.
Spandrel : “A spandrel is a term used in evolutionary biology describing a phenotypic characteristic that is considered to have developed during evolution as a side-effect of a true adaptation, specifically arising from a correlation of growth, rather than arising from natural selection. The term developed from an analogy of causal relationships between forms found in architecture and those found in biology.” ()
Materiality : study of the effects of the medium on communication.
Labels: affect, definition, glossary, progress
[+/-] CHAPTER 3:METHODOLOGY "A man of my occupation seldom claims a systematic mode of thinking; at worst, he claims to have a system - but even that, in his case, is borrowing from a milieu, from a social order, or from the pursuit of philosophy at a tender age. Nothing convinces an artist more of the arbitrariness of the means to which he resorts to attain a goal - however permanent it may be - than the creative process itself, the process of composition." ( Joseph Brodsky, 1987, Nobel Lecture. )
3.1 Methodology Problematic : Why it’s difficult.
Methodology is problematic for arts such as poetry. Spontaneous, intuitive, immediate, often un-anticipatable, and emotional, poetry does not seem a good candidate for enclosure within a rigid methodology. All systemic methods threaten to inhibit the fragile process of authentic inspiration, or to be built yet hold nothing: wind cages, light enclosures, wave locks.
Seeking consensus amongst diverse practitioners, distils method into aphorisms that guide approach to the work: listen to the inner voice, be true to your heart, speak honestly, strive for simplicity, express the inexpressible.
Such phrases are evidently contentious and problematic within the confines of academia. Their explanatory power is marginal. Too often they become the refuge of solipsistic refusals to listen to any criticism. Yet the history of art is based upon outsider exiles who voyage beyond received wisdom. Holderlin wandered in a schizophrenic daze over the alps muttering to himself, returning with fragments that continue to be analyzed and discussed today. This thesis is intended to navigate the delicately actuality of art-making and the demands of scholarship, providing an introduction to an artistic practise that straddles reason and irrationality, interface design and art, science and folklore, and heart, brain and body. It offers an epistemological challenge to the norms of how we consider knowledge to be generated and shared.
Proposed: Knowledge is the glistening atmospheres that envelops all matter. Language is demarcated at every interface. Recursive consciousness permeates all forms.
Labels: arts, methodology, research
[+/-] Video Making as Wonder Seeing Filming in tidal pools, rivers, jars, puddles and plastic bottles, I attempt to discover behavioristic analogs of psychological truths. In other words I look for things that look like us. Like cities seen from space: information visualizations of masses of people, commuters, data clouds. I investigate patterns of self-similarity in ordinary things. Crowds of scurrying beckoning specks self-absorbed in intricate activities: dust, pebbles, pollen, spores, shells. Laws of physical motion and form that somehow extend into consciousness. The interior of a puddle can be considered an ecosystem. Inside the puddle, a tiny shrimp exhibiting curiosity may experience an eternity in an afternoon.
I appreciate the sentiments offered by photographer Garry Winograd who says: “It’s a picture problem … I learned a long time age to trust my instincts … Hopefully you are risking failure every time you make a frame … There’s no real system … Light on surface. That’s all there is, is light on surface…It’s not just the act; it’s the subject…It should be an adventure in seeing…I can’t seem to do enough of it. It’s pleasure.”
“Reason is the outward bound circumference of energy” (William Blake)
What lies beyond it?
In the turbulent dissipative structure that I imagine is beyond reason (perpetually evolving on the edge of plausibility), imagination has its home. . Is reason truer? It’s not a relevant question since both reason and imagination arise from the same system of neurological energy within the same (evolving) set of physical constraints. For this reason, I do not make a value-based distinction between the entwined physical systems of reason and imagination. Dreams, hallucinations, fears, loves, and lusts derive in great measure from both systems; terror needs logic to invent fear; and desire utilizes dreams constructed along probability trajectories. Each form contributes to art- research. Long before Freud re-introduced occidental humans to their evolutionary inheritance, desire and fear were born in the body. The blood, feces, glia, snot, spit, striated tissue and semen of the body are reflected in my choice of subject matter: thick fluids, household soaps, turpentine, honey, maple syrup, soya sauce, acrylic paint. In these materials consciousness is implicated. This constitutes my approach to “materiality”; my idiosyncratic answer to Hayles’s appeal for materiality is to invstigate the materiality of content beyond the digital, to re-reference the world, to re-matter the world, and at the same time make it transparent, a screen through which we see ourselves.
Labels: fish, puddle, rust, toxic
[+/-] TCR: Poets, Speech and non-conceptual Net-Art In his introductory essay to The Capilano Review special issue on digital writing, guest editor Andrew Klobucar writes provocatively: "The final severing of writing's long and historically problematic relationship with speech begins with the screen itself as a device of communication."(p.8) This statement while valid from one perspective is potentially invalidated by a model of digital culture (inspired by Ong) as 'tertiary orality'. Witness the resurgence of Def Jam spoken word videos on youtube; poetry slams; indigenous translations of Haida myths by Bringhurst etc...I feel somehow that instead of a severing, a suturing, a joining or union of the written and oral is precisely what digital multimedia offers: voice-overs of spoken text mixed with generative audio and streaming video constitute a merging of disciplines, a reintegration of the voice into the page, and an opening of the contextual field .
In tracing the history of computer-generated poetry, Klobucar identifies the agreed-upon earliest computer poetry as Theo Lutz's 1959 "Stochastiche Text"; the first machine-written book as William Chamberlain's 1984 "The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed".
In the same issue of TCR, Jim Andrews in his essay "The Body of Net Art" writes "I do think that the edge of net art will continue to be strongly involved with trying to do funky shit with an internet connection. Why? That's a crucial distinguishing characteristic of net art versus other types of art..." (p.99)
Jim accurately describes this practice as the 'edge' of net-art. What of the other contours? It is my feeling that investigations of the medium dominate the early phase of art's relationship with a new technology. Since the web continues to change, these conceptual investigations of the media/technology itself continue to have relevance. But there is a significant portion of the technological infrastructure of the web (the basic network structure, URLs, html, Flash) which have matured and now offer what constitutes normative service. No one is amazed by their email anymore, or blogs, we read them for their content; and every other technological innovation will follow a similar path. A spike of interest in the device in-and-of-itself followed by a dissipation of that interest as interest in 'what it can do' and 'what it delivers' becomes ascendant. Eventually media become invisible, as the technology of language has for the most part become. Investigations of network media as media will still play a role in net-art. From Jodi to the Electronic literature Organization, engagement with networks as networks and code as material is a core aspect of the digital aspect of art practice. I feel however, it should not and is not exclusively the only path that interesting net-art will take. A substantial space exists for the exploration of lyric and mythological artistic practice in digital poetry. The metabolism of humanity, our neurological inheritance is tuned to feed on lyric and myth which transduce emotion and cosmological questioning into language. Incorporating these venerable traditions into contemporary net-art constitutes an enormous opportunity for a digital poetry.
Labels: digital poetics, emotions, net-art, orality
[+/-] Tertiary Orality and Digital Poetic Composition On the theme of "third orality" (which is how features of oral culture are reoccurring in digital culture), an insight into the creative process of composition of digital poetry arises when comparing oral composition to database composition.
In 1928, Milnam Parry radically restructured western critical understanding of how Homeric poetry is composed. Parry's proposed that oral poetry was a process of following metrical structures and drawing on a large repository of epithets or formulaic phrases to fill in the blanks. Instead of inspiration and memorization of words, oral poets follow metre, and then utilize an archive of phrases. (Drawn from Ong, Orality and Literacy, p.17-21)
In 2001, Lev Manovich, developed theories about database logic, repeatedly stressing how the ability to access lists of data and link to other data "contribute to the anti-narrative logic"(Language of New Media, p.221).
Comparing these two theories it is possible to see how oral composition is interpretable as database narrative: the archive of epithets and formulaic phrases are retrieved from the cultural database and used to fill slots according to metrical criteria. Perhaps this compositional method offers a viable model for anticipating how larger scale narratives will emerge from databases in spite of the bias against narrative that Manovich has chronicled.
As an empirical case-study, I offer the methodology I used for creating Interstitial: mp3 titles became phrases which sorted into chapters were stored in an archive (although formally a database structure, they conceptually are comprehensible as a database). Phrases from the correct archive were retrieved stochastically; proto-narrative emerged at the confluence of database and choice.
Labels: database, narrative, orality
[+/-] Ong: technologizing of the word (updated for internet) "Orality-literacy dynamics enter integrally into the modern evolution of consciousness toward both greater interiorization and greater openness."
Walter J Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word
(London: Methuen, 1982). p.179.
Do networked computers constitute a new language dynamic?
If so, how are they influencing the evolution of consciousness?
Ong (p.130-2) lists the following as the effects of print:
1. removed rhetoric from center of academy
2. encouraged quantification of knowledge
3. eventually discouraged iconographic knowledge representations
4. produced exhaustive dictionaries and culture supportive of definitions
5. reinforced language as textual
6. major factor in development of notion of 'personal privacy'
7. created a new sense of private ownership
8. encouraged self-reflexive thought, awareness of thoughts as impersonal things
9. encouraged sense of finished text (final draft, completed work, no marginalia, no erasures)
10. text as subject of literary criticism,
11. text as derived from lived experience (as opposed to borrowed from ancient works in oral tradition)
12 gave rise to romantic notions of originality and creativity
13. birth of textbook which proceeds from definition to definition
14. birth of fixed point of view and fixed tone (McLuhan,1962)
If digital media is accepted as being a dynamic shift in language use comparable to the transition from orality to print, then similar substantiative changes will occur in the evolution of consciousness as the mass of humanity adopts networked digital communication. Ong referred to TV and radio as 'secondary orality'. On that basis, the internet may be 'tertiary orality', but the term may not be apt. Networked computational communication superimposes and potentializes aspects of both orality and print/literacy cultures. Yet it also does more. As an emerging discipline with indeterminant conventions (margins? buttons? motion? links?), it is exhibiting experimental fluctuations. Online interface design is evolving, integrating off-line innovations and introducing new sets of possibilities that are outside the boundaries of oral or print cultures. Networked multimedia introduces unprecedented simultaneous and instantaneous vectors of communication which are altering our collective relations to knowledge: blog comments, social networks, discussion blogs, forums, helplines, chats, mmporg, second life, augmented reality, haptics, biometrics, brain machine interfaces, bots...
What changes will/are occurring?
What are the effects of the internet on conscious perceptions?
1. defocalizing primacy on written word: shift to multimedia
2. visualization of quantified knowledge and eventually emergence of tactile data will re-privilege qualitative and aesthetic aspects of knowledge research
3. rebirth of iconographic representations
4. birth of self-correcting, de-institutionalized, open-source knowledge repositories (wikipedia)
5. language as multi-modal (video,audio,text,interface)
6. major factor in resurgence of public space: social networks, shared bookmarks, shared citations, peer-to-peer networks
7. major factor in resurgence of public ownership : creative commons and open source
8. awareness of thoughts as shared, simultaneous abstract, lifeforms
9. encouraged sense of UNfinished text (blogs, incomplete posts, comments, correctable uploads, redesigns)
10. text as subject of communal criticism / praise : thumbs up or down inside stumbleupon networks
11. text borrowed and woven from other sources online
12 mashups on romantic notions of originality and creativity
13. birth of educational-sites which proceed from link to link
14. birth of networked point of view and rebirth of turbulent collaged tone
Multimedia version to follow.
Labels: dynamic, evolution, literary, orality, printing
[+/-] Digital Whims and The Emergence of Nu Baroque In The Iron Whim, Darren Werschler-Henry documents the the history of typewriting. It is in essence a study of a technological apparatus that has become antiquated, and as a history of technology provides intriguing insight into the cultural values that accumulate around tools as they are born, mature and dissipate into the back-order catalogs and junk shops. When initially introduced into society, typewriters were generally perceived as antithetical to the artistic imagination: mechanistic hindrances. Yet by the time of the demise of typewriters in industrialized society, they had assumed an aura associated with inspiration and a mystique of the author's potency as a channel for divine imagination (Weschler, p.6-7). So clearly, cultural attitudes toward writing technologies shift; our conceptions toward technology are contextual; the idea of technology mutates with attitudes.
As they mature, computational writing tools (both software and hardware) invariably will become the subject and sites of similar diffusive projections of opinions and mythological debates. Nowhere is this more clear than in the evolving theoretical debates over the materiality of the medium and code as poetry. [Example: Critical Code Studies, Mark C. Marino ] My feeling is that as valid as these theoretical dialogues are, any attempts to position a truth on the situation negates the actuality of the constantly changing reality: viewpoints aggregate together to inform our collective notion of every tool's identity. Putting fences into the ocean does not constrain water.
In looking at computation poetry as it is practiced by non-theorists, it is possible to find evidence of mutations and migrations away from the materiality debate. This motion is indicative of an evolutionary shift in the artists relationship to the tool. Work is emerging which revels in the potentiality of the computer as tool without investigating the implications of the tool as medium. As with advertising where (as I've stated elsewhere) theoretically disinterested participants advance the technological potential of the medium, a few digital poets practicing now are involved in aesthetic expressive explorations involving 3D and baroque sensibilities. The technology has now passed the point in its evolution where it is opaque and mysterious and the subject of discussion; its existence has been digested; computers are now a normative feature of the cultural landscape; a generation is emerging who have never been without them; as such they display a tendency to regard them as tools that simply assist the artist in communicating their vision. This I feel constitutes one of the evolutionary life points of a technology. This insight is corroborated by McLuhan who recognized that each technology has a life path.
Among the emerging generation will be digital poets whose dexterity with the tool renders the medium's materiality transparent and irrelevant. Emphasis will shift as it did in literary criticism onto the semantic and humanistic aspects of the work. Consider "Distant Air" by Myron Campbell. The website is a compendium of stylized highly accomplished visuals and brief poetic texts. It utilizes 3D figures in a way evocative of both crude dada collage, film noir and gaming. Yet the text, sparsely interspersed behind the visual facades, is personally evocative and poignant; the fonts, baroque and resonant of illuminated manuscripts. This highly idiosyncratic and effective weaving of aesthetic elements and merging of interface design with traditional subjective meditations on death constitutes one potential evolutionary path now available at this stage of its life for digital poetics.
The previous generation's theoretical foregrounding of materiality can be considered a corollary of the newness of the media; its alien-ness and foreignness evoked an almost obsessive scrutiny of its functionality. To draw a spurious although relevant analogy, it is as if digital technology in the 80s and 90s was a newborn baby; like incessant parents, theorists gathered to scrutinize its feces. Now the baby is a little beyond a toddler, less an object of fetishized adoration and more a potential nuisance. It begins to establish an identity. It becomes less an object which needs to be constantly fed and cared, but is developing into a subjective entity with a distinctive identity.
1. Darren S Wershler-Henry, The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting (Toronto, Ont: McClelland & Stewart, 2005).
Labels: aesthetics, digital poetics, nu baroque
[+/-] Naivety, Stupidity and Authenticity "Naive is the word for stupid in the academic lexicon; it names a quality fatal to the aspiring hermeneut."
"Poetry and 'Stupidity': Beats to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E." Kevin McGuirck. Open Letter 11.1 (Spring 2001): 96-112.
If the preceding statement is true, then I, the aspiring hermeneut, am already dead. The fatal infection of naivety is at the core of what I (perhaps foolishly) consider the roots of raw authentic inspiration. Introspection on my own practice-based art-research leads directly to an awareness of the role of naivety in creation; often it is only through a naive clarity, an innocent mood, uninhibited by critical compulsions that projects initiate themselves. Yet I am aware that to situate or affiliate oneself with naivety is contentious; it risks provoking questions which can puncture the validity of an argument. Let's examine potential objections that might arise.
If art is the conscious mastery of communication and tools, what role has naivety in art? Doesn't that suggest we should value the art of the insane or childish more than masters? Art Brut did just that (collecting the art of marginalized anomalistic personalities). Art Brut was a movement led and espoused by Jean Dubuffet; it is a vivid example of valuing naivety in art; it's philosophical embrace of naivety is almost total. In Art Brut, often practitioners are literally the victims of organic obsessive compulsive disorders; art brut hovers between aesthetics and a freak show, aesthetics emerges through anomalies; it attracts paradoxically through revulsion and simultaneous wonder. In Art Brut, the edges of sanity melt away. Words or activities are transfigured through relentless repetition into large-scale monuments to endurance. The Art Brut path is one aspect of naivety; it is not representative of what I intend by naivety. Also naive are the relentless hordes of innocent postcards and romance novels, the aphorisms and injunctions that knot sentimentality into cliché. This ubiquitous practice is also not at the core of my definition.
Instead, there exists among the diverse alternative modes of naivety that remain un-enumerated by the incomplete preceding catalogue, a path that incorporates naivety without surrendering intelligence. It is a pathway that adheres to the nature of thought as it is thought; that cherishes the instantaneous gesture without deifying instinct; in a sense this form of naivety can be considered a proposal for neurological egalitarianism. Given that a human is a complex apparatus of intersecting neurological and enteric modules, it proposes that artists are not emphatically ruled by the reentrant circuits of analytical logic. Conjunctions of patterns arising through internal interfaces all contribute to the nebulous swirling notion of our self; art that is honest must allow the voices interior to this cloud-self to speak. In other words, artistic creation can arise spontaneously from the raw datum of thought, independently of a conceptual precursor. As Joyce wrote: "I shall express myself as I am." (James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
Contemporary theoretical initiatives are emerging from credible research institutions which advocate a clear play of ideas, free from the formal censorship of conventional scholarship. Naivety is not any longer fatal; it may stigmatize, but as a methodology it has its advocates, notably Henry Jenkins from MIT:"Popular culture is defined in part by its immediacy and it is not clear that one can meaningfully understand how it works or what it does without stepping at least temporarily into the realm of the proximate and the passionate."
Henry Jenkins, April 16, 2007. http://www.henryjenkins.org/
By juxtaposing the immediacy of culture against the slow production values of classical scholarship, Jenkins advocates a 'temporary' leap into 'the proximate and the passionate'. His argument generalizes well into a model for artistic practice in the digital era. Naive uses of technology need to be reexamined, but first of all be allowed to happen. Poetry without play is not poetry.
As Kevin McGuirty says in his essay on poetry and stupidity: "poetry, I would argue, has engaged more variously and promisciously, sometimes covertly, sometimes brazenly, with the many forms of the stupid." (Open Letter, 11.1, p.99). McGuirty emphasizes how this courtship is paradoxical: stupidity is deviously intelligent innocence. A preeminent example of the lucid innocent wild child persona is Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972). Patchen's highly idiosyncratic style and pleasure in severely raw innocent visual poetry have limited his audience. Critical receptivity to Patchen is rare; his works are too hallucinatory, and rabidly political to be subsumed by the academy. He represents a dangerous subject, America's own William Blake.
Kenneth Patchen
It is from this tradition that digital poetry emerges. And as with any child it can deny or refute the influence of its forebearers only at the risk of inducing a hypocritical schism in its nature.
Labels: authenticity, passion, proximate
[+/-] A Gap in the current Theory Currently, there is a gap at a theoretical level in dealing with aesthetics, intuition and emotions in digital poetry. This gap exists due to several convergent factors. First, academies privilege that which can be discussed. Intuition, emotions and aesthetics are intimate, qualitative and complex; they do not render easily in the language of formal research. Second, Lev Manovich (builing on Innis and McLuhan) stresses how new media is radically distinct from previous media. This insight which has swiftly consolidated into axiom, encourages an exclusive critical focus on work which investigates the materiality of media. Digital poetic work that simply utilizes new media as expressive tool risks being stigmatized as naive.
I argue for an inclusion of naive, intuitive, emotional and aesthetic approaches, and a sustained engagement with the issues that arise from emotional and aesthetic complexity. New media is, apart from its distinctive features, an aspect of computational technology; and if technology's evolution is analyzed comparative with biological life, technology is interpretable as the 7th Kingdom of biological life (Kevin Kelly, 2005). Technology is therefore connected to a continuum of tools which have been utilized for millennium by humans to build expressive forms. The motivation for the creation of these art-forms arises from a collective existential ignorance about death and love. Myth was the classical tool humans used to consolidate memory. Our existential ignorance remains the same: both love and death are mysterious apparatuses. New media art which deals with these fundamental thematics is neither retro or obsolete.
Labels: aesthetics, complexity, digital poetics, emotions, theory
[+/-] Conception and concept share the same etymological root. Few of the works (software tools and art) discussed in my thesis emerged out of conscious forethought. They emerged not due to a plan, or a structured mode of approach, or even due to a methodology. They emerged at the confluence of chance, aptitude, necessity, skillset and sensitivity. Often, during the process of creating the works, I was not aware that I was actually creating something specific. Only as a project evolves does it like the fibroblast of differentiated cell tissue in the womb demarcate itself as something separate and distinct. Creation is feminine, analogous to pregnancy, or more appropriately midwifery since it is never from the singular body of identity that art emerges but from the collective consciousness that constitutes our biosphere in which we are immersed.
Conception and concept share the same etymological root. So it is that finished artworks that seem to be conceptual in form, may first make their existence known in the stomach. A twinge in the belly that signals proximal potentiality. This rupture in the continuum of normative consciousness is followed by an impulsion which the artist follows incessantly: the faint urges of an unknown interiority. Like any creature that is carrying a child, the artist must supply the virtual body of the gestating art-work with nutrients necessary for its survival. Necessary materials impel themselves into the path of the work.
“Through this creativeness the imagining consciousness proves to be, very simply but very purely, an origin. In a study of the imagination, a phenomenology of the poetic imagination must concentrate on bringing out this quality of origin in various poetic images.” (Bachelard 1969:xx).
Labels: concept, consciousness, creativity
[+/-] Victim of the Brain (dir: Piet Hoenderdos, 1988) Victim of the Brain (dir: Piet Hoenderdos, 1988)
an astonishing document-art with Douglas Hofstadter, Dan Dennett and Marvin Minsky
In this film, Hofstadter refers to Caranium.
I transliterate this into Careenium.
Question: do the ricocheting magnetic marbles of knowledge representations live and die and express themselves? Does this differ from consciousness? Hofstadter sees no thought in neurons; that concepts change at varying scale. My feeling, an unprovable hypothesis, is that symbolic activity inside a neuron at some level of resolution has a thickness and intricacy of self-relating that corresponds to self-awareness and subjective expressivity.
Hofstadter sees mirroring and understanding in perception is best modeled by large coherent networks. I see those networks as civilizations undergoing the turbulent lifepath of civilizations. Internal systems of awareness as just morsels of clustered intercommunicative data somehow complex enough to occasionally curl around and recursively see themselves, and discuss their state with other beings like themselves. But in reality all humans are constrained to communication with other nets of humans. Indigineous cultures may have benefited from the nurturing of individuals with the innate capacity of immersivity into their universe; the immersity which allows specific humans to shift their modalities of time and enter into states of rich deep reverential connection with the other forms at other levels of spatial and temporal scale.
The Minsky Dennet parable of brain-in-vat at the centre of the movie is an exquisite rendition of the complex nuances and potential fallacies of the embodiment-disembodiment debate: are we just algorithms? Is identity patterned data? Predictive analytic machines, recursively entwined. Brains possessing bodies just demarcates diplomatic power relations between structures. It may be that bodies have their own brains.
Consciousness: Patterns of interchange which arbitrarily optimize their opportunity to organize or delineate the patterns of other material.
Hofstadter: “Interaction or pattern…the pattern itself could be implanted in any hardware….” Ants. Teams. Teams of Teams. Hypothetical units named symbols. Stimulus response mirroring interior-exterior interfaces. Knowledge changes at different levels of scale. Activity aggregates. Patterns and perception introduced into computers constitute consciousness. Hofstadter looks for enough levels to form any kind of pattern. I do not look for levels. Levels accumulate and dissipate. Awareness permeates.
Soul? Hofstadter: sees names associatively linked in a cascade: intentionality, self, I… at each level humans deny the possibility that they can be mechanistically modeled. If mechanism is “…synonymous with consciousness....Once you admit that machines can be a perceiving being that it would have some degree of consciousness and some degree of soul….”
For Hofstadter free will is unexplained desire; desires arise from predictable recursive interactions at subatomic scale. Awareness of how the brain operates has not been evolutionarily necessary for humans until now. Free will is an illusion useful for survival, helpful for describing behavior at a course grain.
Stanilaw Lem: the universe is a rendered illusion capable of being mathematically emulated. Emotions, social tides, lives: simple tiny formulas. No distinction between us and a model. Fractal self-similarity refracts joy and suffering throughout innumerable dimensions. Self-organized binary algorithms, “continual meandering of electrons”. The question of whether suffering is only here now at this level in this human body? If we accept a sensitive interconnected model of our own existence, when will art be alive?
“over perfected replica…the antithesis of a mechanism…”
“…the continual meandering of electrons…”
For Hofstadter, emotions and intelligence are inseparable; goals, drives and desires control the pathways of action; emotions arise in relation to tension between goals and actuality or perceived models of world.
Offloading our cognitive functions to machines: “maybe it would be better if the human instead of transmitting itself forward by biology, transmitted itself forward by means of artificial creation….I am not convinced that the human race is the most important thing in the world, and we can’t control what will happen in the future….”
Labels: AI, brain, consciousness, theory
[+/-] The Newness of Digital Poetics: Loss Pequeo Glazier The academic journal Poetics returns no results for an online search of its database for the word "digital". The New Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terminology contains no reference to "digital", "computational" or any variant thereof. The Handbook does however deal with visual art and poetry, referring to it as a "composite art", as in the engravings of William Blake. The visual arts in this taxonomy are spatial; while poetry is temporal [1]. This formal distinction dissolves in new media that incorporates time-based art: video is a time-based art, evidently a visual art, yet also temporal. Poetry, after concrete poetry, displayed in spattered fonts or mobile text, is often both temporal and spatial. So the classic literary distinctions are not feasible in the new terrain of digital poetry, and it has not yet absorbed the critical theory which is beginning to emerge concerning this discipline.
In one of the first full-length academic treatments of digital poetry, Loss Pequeo Glazier's Digital Poetics, argues "electronic space as a space of poesis". Glazier investigates "not the idea of the digital work as an extension of the printed poem, but the idea of the digital poem as the process of thinking through this new medium, thinking through making. As the poet works, the work discovers."[2, Introduction]
The active vivid evolving process-oriented state of observational transformation that is at the core of traditional poetic work is enhanced through the digital-poet practitioners proximity to generative algorithms capable of mutating or modulating words and structures along trajectories that are stochastically or architecturally defined; the visual or kinetic result is unknowable in advance even by the author of the algorithm. Kinetic digital poetry that incorporates video is thus indeterminable on both the semantic and on the visual or design level. What it looks like and how it behaves may emerge from a set of code, or be invoked at the intersection of user response and predetermined reactivity.
Indeterminacy in the making leaks into the meaning. Across this ambiguous chasm, researchers in poetics investigate the unknown (result) with the unknown (self). Its not a conventional methodology, nor can it easily be constrained within research terminology. In the same way as choreographers feel their way toward correct or appropriate movement at an instantaneous level, poet-programmers often intuitively juggle analytical and emotive concerns.
1. The New Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1994). Pg. 332.
2. Loss Pequeo Glazier, Digital Poetics: The Making of E-poetries (Tuscaloosa, Ala: the University of Alabama Press, 2002).
Labels: digital poetics
[+/-] How to Explain a Dead Cat to an Academic "Beauty, Immanuel Kant says, is something we perceive as the trace of a certain kind of intention....the quality of innocent intent" [1].
On November 26, 1965, Joseph Beuys held a dead hare in his arms, his face was covered in honey, he whispered in its ear, an analysis of the drawings that were on the wall at his first solo show. The show was entitled: How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare.
Some features of reality exceed the cognitive grasp of humans. The philosopher Colin McGinn termed this limit: "cognitive closure".
Art sometimes operates as a catalyst to remove certainty; reinvoking our innocent intent toward the world, offering a way of transcending transcendence through grief and embodiment. Dead vulnerable flesh rotting and mute becomes the vehicle, the explosive to create a gap, to provoke a rupture, to wrench revelation from abstract clouds of absolute beauty and put it back into the body, the mortal form, the coil that twists within us whose name is time.
1. Robert Bringhurst, The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks (Kentville, N.S: Gaspereau Press, 2006). pg.53.
Labels: art, death, digital poetics, meaning, mortality
[+/-] 2046, 2057, and the presence of affect in fluids "Do you know what people did in the old days when they had secrets they didn't want to share? They'd climb a mountain ... find a tree .... carve a hole in it ... whisper the secret into the hole ... and cover it up with mud...." 2046, Wong Kar Wai
On the same evening as I watched Wong Kar Wai's epically beautiful 2046, I encountered an obese parapalegic woman in an electric wheelchair wearing a huge pink and orange poncho on the sky train. She foraged in a blue silk bag that had an ink stain; her feet were enclosed in maroon macrame.
Kar Wai's 2046 is populated by immaculately ravishing fantasia's of physicality. Love, loss, sex, and longing are exclusively practiced by this fortunate elite. But in reality, in life itself, every body type fucks, yearns, flirts, and falls in love sometimes with the wrong partners. The drama of romantic tragedy is opportunistic; it exists everywhere on the continuum of corporality.
In my neighbourhood of downtown Vancouver, there are over 1,000 homeless people. Many of them chronically addicted to street drugs, their faces ravished by scabs, their rivetingly thin limbs contorted by sustanied insomnia; they copulate briefly, harshly and tenderly in the alleys behind dumpsters stained in piss and inhabited by rats. The futuristic cyber-medicine realities portrayed in 2057 The body, an exceptionally beautiful documentary on the Utopian gleaming potentials of modern biotech obscures the dystopia margins which remain gleamingly hidden
beneath the 3D living tissue printers and nano-bot drug delivery. In our futuristic fantasia's both health and love are the domains of the physically wealthy.
Ecstasy, grief, desire, and passion, the full spectrum of affect, traverses all existent entities. Immersed as they are in the immense river of life, all beings experience these states. My goal with Thoems and Interstitial video projects was to offset some of the bias conventional narrative film has toward portraying the presence of affect in perfect beautiful people.
My logic for choosing to film fluids: If affect is pattern, and patterns are biochemical, and biochemicals are fluid dynamic systems, then fluid dynamic systems coalescing and dissipating can visually represent and convey affect. Potentially and speculatively, fluid dynamics constitute affect.
[+/-] versioning Jokingly today I contemplated releasing a txt mssg version of my thesis.
In a homage to Perec and OULIPO, simply remove all vowels.
Sorta trite, but perhaps the sorta joke from which a more formal project might emerge.
What happens to language when its squished, contorted and placed within a screen? How codependent are our minds and speech? What difference does media make?
Is media constraint? Is constraint fertile?
[+/-] Art Thesis Argument (Poetry as pattern representation) Hypothesis: Art is the information visualization of emotions.
In order to establish the relevance of art as a legitimate method of research in academia, it seems necessary to ensure its legitimacy in scientific terms.
Let's define the terms.
What is emotion?
Emotion according to Marvin Minsky is a 'suitcase word' which refers to "large networks of processes inside our brains" [1]. In other words there are numerous diverse concurrent, sometimes contradictory, biochemical processes occurring in our mind-body envelop, and emotion is the word we use to describe the turbulence that arises from the intersection of these processes. Emotion recognition according to Rosalind Picard is a multimodal pattern recognition problem [2]. Therefore it seems plausible to suggest that emotions are patterns. Combining Minsky's and Picard's viewpoints with the idea of emotion as pattern, it is possible to define emotions as complex superimposed patterns that occur in bodies.
What is art?
Remember from Aristotle that in Greek 'poiesis' is making [3]. From this root meaning of 'poetics', artists and poets are makers. What do artists and poets make? They make patterns: visual patterns, rhythmic patterns of words, sonic patterns, embodied patterns (dance) and conceptual patterns. Art-making is pattern-making.
What do these 'art' patterns represent?
They represent lived experience. What is experience? It is is the accumulated bodily memory of many instantaneous patterns and state-spaces of the body: experience is by definition an aspect of emotion. In other words, art experiences are records of body-mind state-spaces (patterns of biochemistry).
What is Information Visualization?
A design science arising from computationally enhanced interpretations of data: graphs, charts, flowing particles. Wikipedia :" computer graphics and user interface design that are concerned with presenting data to users, by means of interactive or animated digital images." Visual membranes between numbers and intuited knowing.
Is Digital Poetry Information Visualization?
Poetry is information visualization because it transduces emotional patterns into words; in conjunction with an interface it becomes an epistemological tool: the skin. The skin of networked body is the interface. Embodied patterns which are too complex to currently be analyzed quantitatively, which evade scientific knowledge (consciousness, love, sacrifice, transcendence, ecstasy) these patterns are emotions; emotions are a research domain of digital poetry. It transcribes analog experience into digital code.
Why?
Lets use a word that is very problematic: soul.
Let's give it an arbitrary axiomatic and contingent definition:
Soul is the totality of the body-mind state-spaces both potential and actualized.
Let's go too far.
Poetry is the information visualization of the soul.
*******
I agree with Minsky that emotions may not be different than thought. What is referred to as qualitative or 'emotional' is perhaps understandable as the meta-pattern extracted from a mass of biological quantitative processes: all that boiling bodily data builds up until it aggregates and becomes labeled. Art becomes necessary and relevant for all humans as a methodology for understanding and researching problem domains that are untenable to scientific scrutiny. The lineage of art emerges out of mythology, mythology emerged out humankind's search for meaning around death. Although science may validly claim that much of mythology and art are understandable as imaginative projections of our existential ignorance (confabulations provoked by our fear of the unknown onto an immense dangerous universe), it can also be claimed that only by voyaging into the unknown and slowly and tenaciously extracting little vivid glimmerings of insight will humankind advance in its evolution. Art is authentic research.
Example research questions:
What is love? Why death?
- Marvin Lee Minsky, The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006). p.2.
- Rosalind W. Picard, Affective computing (Cambridge, Mass. ; London: MIT Press, 1997).
- Aristotle, Aristotle's Poetics (Montreal [Que.]: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997).
- Ben Bogart pointed out in the hallway today that knowledge representation might help evade the possibility of ocularcentrism posed by the info visualization terminology. He is correct; but knowledge representations have their own set of problems,
Labels: art, emotions, information visualization, making, pattern, poets
[+/-] Poetry, Propoganda, and Psychology
Walter Ong in "The Technologizing of the Word" 1982 wrote "By removing words from the world of sound where they had first had their origin in active human interchange and relegating them definitively to visual surface, and by otherwise exploiting visual space for the management of knowledge, print encouraged human beings to think of their own interior conscious and unconscious resources as more and more thing-like, impersonal and religiously neutral. Print encouraged the mind to sense that its possession were held in some sort of inert mental space. " (p.131-2)
Ong's insight can be extended to hypothetically theorize that the ubiquitous dynamic mobile-text network, humans experience now (on tv, films, banner ads, websites) will convert and/or encourage the growth of collective internal representations of our own minds that correspond to animated topological evolving data-spaces. In those spaces, our identity becomes an aggregate: an emergent property of the mass migration of synaptic neuro-modulators particles moving autonomously across synaptic clefts, like citizens who contribute to the macro phenomena of the ego-nation. The unconscious will become a living ocean, permeated by the diffused nutrients and toxins of networked society. The ontological implications of this change will perturb how communication is distributed and how political allegiances are formed. Subgroups of citizens already coalesce online internationally around issues irrespective of their physical location. For millennium, mythology (from Homer to the Mayans) has been used to assimilate individuals into the cohesive units known as nations. Rhythmic language operates as entrainment, grasping the brain in its strict repetitive logic. Emulating the heart's pounding, poetry bypasses the logical immune system of analysis in order to synchronize neural waveforms and instantiate positive associative defense nets around objects of shared cultural value.
Poetry, propaganda, and psychology have often gone hand-in-hand.
Yet the truth remains, people suffer from cognitive overload. Interfaces must give viewers choices as to the speed and density of informational flow. Only data in languages that the mind is capable of digesting, are integrated into belief structures. The human rate of visual information intake is estimated to be 2 bits. The majority of the humans will not adopt mobile text immediately or even swiftly: our metabolisms evolve very slowly, and cultural inertia is the corollary of evolution's temporal caution.
Even visual artists have deep seated resistance to accepting visual poetry superimposed over images. As an example, Chuck Close: "I always felt it was a little hokey having a poem right in the middle of the work of art." [ Close, C. (2006). A Couple of Ways of Doing Something. New York, N.Y: [Distributed in North America by] D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers.(pg. i) ]
Labels: digital poetics, orality, poetry, propoganda, psychology
[+/-] meanderings mashup What is knowledge? What is poetic knowledge? Is it the surrealist conjunction of contradictions or perceptually distant modalities?
Meanderings is a list of links derived from a six month scrutiny(Nov., 2006-July 19th, 2007) of a myriad of websites converging but not confined to the topic of digital text but not confined to that topic. It is currently an html based single page site, done with free commercial blogging software (blogger and scribefire) that permits rapid highlighting of text and right mouse instant posting. The criteria for inclusion on the list is twofold: did I like it or it is an essential aspect of research into digital poetics. The html will be replaced in June by a Flash interface which revisualizes the list of links into a searchable evolving animated space, where the software code continually sorts and redisplays the data in order to playback a simulation [Baudrillard] of 'thought'. In contemporary web terminology, it is a mashup where "information and presentation are being separated in ways that allow for novel forms of reuse." Sho Kuwamoto.
In order to create the Meanderings mashup, I considered what is thought? Thought at a generic level is comparison and contrast in order to determing what's similar and whats not. From this foundational analysis, an action arises. In the context of the Meanderings, website, the results of these rudimentary comparisons provoke switches between modes of display. Items flock together based on similar characteristics, but the criteria for similarity changes over time, so flocks are temporary. This gives the entire biomass of data a volatile living quality.
This research into visualization of large datasets is endebted and informed by a website I created for Ollivier Dyens in 2004 for his ContinentX project. ContinentX is 3d visualization of a large database of quotations Ollivier collected during the course of his PhD research from new media criticism and literature. He wanted to explore alternative vieing modalities. His inventive mind resulted in a website that attempts to model a visual ecosystem of ideas. Themes and keywords have been hard-coded into the database; these themes are used to draw connections between ; similarily in Meanderings, the tag system (called 'Labels') are hand-coded. Meanderings extends this research by automating the search for thematic similarities; the software automatically searches each post, doing comparative analysis on the basis of word content, length, phrase similarity, tags, etc...Meanderings also plays itself, it does not depend unpon the user to activate change. It therefore exists as a hybrid object, both interactively responsive to user choices and independently capable of functioning without any user intervention.
A project that parallels and anticipates this style of computational remix is Jason Lewis 2001 project " 'I Know What You're Thinking' trolls the host machine's hard drive(s) for all the text (.txt) and Eudora/Outlook mailboxes (.mbx) it can find. It then writes random chunks of text from these various files to the screen, in five streams. Each stream has its own particular appearance, and varies in size and on-screen duration, creating a motion collage of different layers of semi-transparent text. The result is a disconcertingly intimate and schizophrenically lyrical look into your activities on that machine."
Another example of a mashup is Gregory Chatonsky's 2007 website "L'Attente, the waiting / Flussgeist 1" which streams text from twitter (an online sms networking service that offers realtime update to social networks) into a web2.0 Flash interface that draws photos from Flickr and dynamically displays the results over video shot in a train station of people waiting for a train. What emerges is a generative fiction, an 'infinite video' [from the meta tags in the page source] that is an assemblage of tightly controlled material (the video) and external material (twitter and flickr).
The boundaries of the art-object in this context become porous to external reality. The sacroscanct centre of the created product is replaced with the fluid context of an ongoing process. The weakness of these approaches is that the material is often not all of the same quality, leading to a sense of sporadic interest. Yet the future of literature will certainly involve autonomous software agents who search and scrutinize the web constantly updating material and foraging for new forms of display.
The art work as construct of software has a living legacy that extends back to Babbage and Ada Lovelace, and beyond them into alchemists like Raymond Llul [Cramer, 2000].
The evolutionary inevitability is that literature will develop new forms to fit the emerging ecosystems of computation.
Labels: dynamic, generative, mashup, thought, volatile
[+/-] 'Content Lag' (Lewis,1996) In his 1996 thesis Jason Lewis, drawing on the work of Ong, Landow and others, develops the idea of 'content lag': "Content-lag is the time it takes to develop content which is uniquely and powerfully suited to a new medium. Closely related to content-lag is medium stability, or the rate of change within the technological structure of the medium. Both phenomena influence each other." Lewis focuses his analysis on printand film; in film, changes (the introduction of sound, and then colour) induce changes in artistic production. This interdependency of technology and art is also discernible in digital medias relation to art. Constant introduction of technological innovations produces both inhibitive and explosive effects: sometimes making it easier to produce work, more often inhibiting it. [Lewis, 1996]
Lewis is "in favor of a writing that is explicitly, and in some essential sense, exclusively dynamic and/or interactive." He recognizes that digital poetry that is written for the medium which it will inhabit requires a stable medium in which it can come to maturity. In our current era, the technical methodologies for dynamic web publishing are constantly evolving. The inhibitive effect of this change is visible. Many things that were impossible before are now possible, but many things that were possible remain excruciatingly difficult, especially for an independent practitioner whose skill-set simply to orientate and produce competent syntactical code must keep pace with flourishing toolkits.
A typical writer of the previous centuries could work assuredly for several years without releasing work. To do so in today's evanescent and turbulent techno-system, the online artist risks releasing work that is stale, untenable on new platforms, obsolete before it was born. Pressure to produce work that extends the boundaries of the technically possible is one of the primary obstacles to increasing artistic quality.
There is no 'long' poem (in the sense of an epic or even a cantos) that I know of that has been composed in Flash/Director. The rate of technical change precludes it.
1. Jason Lewis, Dynamic Poetry: Introductory Remarks to a Digital Medium (Royal College of Art, 1996), http://www.thethoughtshop.com/research/atextr/dpthesis/download/dpthesis.htm (accessed April 5, 2007).
Labels: latency, medium, technology, writing
[+/-] Abstract art is not abstract: an argument for activism "I was driven by an inherent sense that a picture that revealed the true face of war, would almost by definition be an anti-war photograph." -- James Nachtwey, war photographer, in his acceptance speech for the 2007 TED prize
I am motivated by a sense that images are expressive of philosophical concepts, and that a moving image can be expressive of an articulate argument. The readability of these image arguments depends as much on the social context and training of the observer as the comprehension of predicate logic depends on informed study. Critical awareness of moving images is a learned skill that is dependent on the development of an innate aesthetic capacity within each observer.
The philosopher Giles Deleuze refers to a "movement of thought": these movements occur in a metaphysical conceptual space. My own sensibilities prefer an argument that suggests images invoke physiological connectivity (between eyes and logic), and the strengthening of inter-modular communicativity in the brain. The metaphysical is physical; thoughts occur or are transduced through brains. And it is this physicalness of thought that opens another possible hypothesis: perhaps moving images of external physical systems can evoke internal thought patterns through sympathetic resonance. Obviously, this is true: we see something, we react, something changes inside us. But what if the change external to brains, occasionally and especially in the case of abstract art, creates a pattern in the brain that is the same as the external pattern?
If art is making patterns that mean something to someone, they mean something because they correspond to patterns that are conceivable. Consider the implications of the verb in the preceding sentence: 'correspond'. Is it possible that 'correspondance' is more than metaphor? In other words, are abstract art works actually emulating brain patterns or imaging the patterns that occur in physiological systems? Could it be that a task of consciousness (which remains enigmatic) is to access and assess patterns and meta-patterns, retain memories of key patterns, and recognize exterior representations of these patterns? Rosalind Picard [1998,2001] has correctly identified emotion recognition as a pattern recognition problem.
I am arguing that when an artist reworks their image over and over until it feels right, they are assidiously and rigorously sifting through a vast labyrinth of interconnected patterns and applying pattern recognition algorithms to them. Each pattern represents a state space recorded by consciousness; each pattern is both a physical record and a record of the conceptual state of the system (the self) at a particular time and place. Since humans share so much genetic and cognitive material, artists are able to create images which correspond to patterns which are shared by more or less people. More common patterns are called archetypes. Everyone knows what it feels like to feel loss. Less common patterns are considered insane (except by those who experience them).
Therefore, in abstract art, representation is often not of an exterior world but of an internal physical reality. Abstract art is ironically not abstract at all. Or considered from another perspective, perhaps the distinction between abstract and concrete is untenable. Human bodies are simply transduction sites for a continuum of energies which traverse a multi-dimensional conceptual-physical topology.
This conceptual framework provides a viable foundation for the development of an argument concerning the relevance of activist or engaged art practice. By creating distinct images (conjunctions of conventionally separate patterns) which shock or stimulate the organism of the viewer, artists can provoke change in the human body. Now the question is : are these changes temporary or do they influence cross-generational species evolution? In order to believe that evolutionary change is possible due to art, it requires accepting two tenets. One, experience changes the minds physical structure. Two, experience is inheritable. If so, concepts can alter physiognomy. Geneticists have a word for this : epigenetics. "Epigenetic inheritance is the transmission of information from a cell or multicellular organism to its descendants without that information being encoded in the nucleotide sequence of the gene" [wikipedia]
The dilemma with this argument is that it generalizes beyond art. Art may evoke epiphanies which through epigenetic processes provoke change; however, experience itself (trauma, rape, mutilation, relentless virtual killing) may also induce change.
"Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
Thats how it goes
Everybody knows"
Leonard Cohen
**************
**************
Last question:
If motion in the brain is thought; what motion constitutes a revelatory thought?.
Labels: abstraction, activism, art, image, pattern, war
[+/-] Passion Maps Narrative tension is a product of its discharge in our physiognomy. Where it discharges (the adrenal glands, the neurological modules of fear or love) is the author's choice. Most contemporary plots leverage sex and death; these are easy pathways. Who will kill who when where or how? Who will fuck who when where or how? The style of killing or fucking may differ over genres, but the mssg is the same: struggle reproduce slaughter ejaculate. Occasionally the need for comfort predominates: we develop appetites for soft, fuzzy, gentle nurturing stimulus. But between the primal violence and primal nurturance there is a similarity of style: orientation in time space, calculation of potential futures, assessment of wants, needs, desires, actualities, fantasias. These are the quanta at the root of behavior. Innate knots of intrinsic tension in the programming of the body.
Grief, ecstasy, comedy, yearning: roles intertwined with strategies, planning, creative perturbations of possible paths, choices cascading to choices. Disguise, pretense, destruction, rejuvenation, reverberation, and resilience. Ceaseless restless waves of rapturous reflex.
Most image, speech and action (in art as in life) is designed to disguise; even sincerity is a disguise of doubt. Narrative interest arises for the audience in guessing what characters might be thinking but not saying. Others are potential sites of deceit. The mythology of our contemporary civilization is that of a gift, a betrayal and ultimately vengeance.
Civilization is now highly habituated and addicted to war.
Conventional society has opened war on all fronts. One is the war on drugs. Yet, endogenous chemicals secreted by our own blood internally in situations of extreme stress (war, loss, death) are not considered to be drugs: not yet at least. Society misdiagnosing its own addiction to the endogenous chemicals elicited by war as justice, exports guilt on those addicted to exogenous chemicals (known as street drugs). This makes for a social atmosphere perpetually inflamed by passionate tensions.
Art is an addiction to the external information visualization of internal glandular disruptions which occur to humans in their most passionate moments. Art is, in other words, a passion map. Sometimes, it is the passion of extreme boredom, utter inertia, despair, sensuality, innocence. Each of these constitutes a state space of chemical parameters. In the age of L-dopa and diverse neuro-leptic pharmaceuticals, the Passions mapped by artists are being directly manipulated by scientists. Passion maps allow others to navigate emotions. Such maps do not only occur internally to the tribe, they are secreted by masses of organisms, diffused throughout space. Where no cognitive capacity exists for converting perception into meaning, it will be labelled simply pattern.
Passion is spatio-temporal: it evolves. Passion maps must be updated in real-time; that is why culture evolves relentlessly. Appetite, food. Language licking the land.
Labels: discharge, emotions, narrative, passion
[+/-] the particle system thought experiment Imagine you are born into a particle system, but that you are very very tiny; your life and awareness are confined to the surface of one of the smaller size particles. Your perspective never leaves the surface of this particle; it cannot, your body is incapable of leaving or touching anything that is farther away than a scratch on the subsurface of the particle. Furthermore, your life span is equivalent to a flicker in the timespan of the entire unknown particle system. You know only the surface of your particle, your species breeds and dies on that surface.
This existential position of almost total ignorance is the position of humankind. Science, art, and religion have each developed their own ways to build bypasses around this fact, and makes authoritative claims in spite of it. Extremely convincing rationalizations of highly contingent knowledge (which would not satisfy the criteria of verification or validation if they were part of a experimental setup) permeate our culture. Their widespread acceptance may be due to the design of the human brain: a system of intricate tides, interdependencies and pressure where specialized modules remotely communicate data across neuronal networks.
Consider "Magic as Crowleyan occult philosophy, art and programming ... in the poetic language experiments of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs:
IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD
IN THE BEGINNING WAS WORD THE
IN THE BEGINNING WORD THE WAS
IN THE BEGINNING WORD WAS THE
IN THE THE BEGINNING WAS WORD
IN THE THE BEGINNING WORD WAS
IN THE THE WAS BEGINNING WORD
IN THE THE WAS WORD BEGINNING
IN THE THE WORD BEGINNING WAS
IN THE THE WORD WAS BEGINNING
IN THE WAS BEGINNING THE WORD
IN THE WAS BEGINNING WORD THE
[. . . ] 8 "
By adopting and transmuting the Book of Genesis, Gysin and Burroughs sought to undermine its stature and at the same time point to what they perceived as a greater truth: the truth of language as the origin of actuality. At the root of many cultures is the belief that the word speaks or sings the world into existence: word world. As the 20th century has progressed in developed a binary language capable of expressivity, this mythology has been updated.
Lionel Kearns, a Canadian experimental poet, created an animted NFB film in 1965 called "The Birth of God/uniVerse". The question is the same: What created us?
Lionel Kearns, "The Birth of God/uniVerse" (1965)
Does man actually create the machine that creates the universe?
Consider The Animatrix.
Inspired and inspiring contemporary humans into creating the machine ( through language, analog then binary) which creates god. The word made mesh: rendered with phong shaders and a target patch.
"This figure of thought, of a speech act that affects physical matter instantly and directly, is magical in its root. Material creation from the word is an idea central to magic in all cultures; it is precisely what magic spells perform. Magic therefore is, at its core, a technology, serving the rational end of achieving an effect, and being judged by its efficacy"
"instant affect matter" : IAM
an advanced BMI delivering total tactile duplex realtime rendering with twin slots discreetly broadcasting from the neurological nodes of control
altruism is a parameter
"Software, it follows, is a cultural practice made up of (a) algorithms, (b) possibly, but not necessarily in conjunction with imaginary or actual machines, (c) human interaction in a broad sense of any cultural appropriation and use, and (d) speculative imagination. Software history can thus be told as intellectual history, as opposed to media theories which consider cultural imagination a secondary product of material technology...Computation and its imaginary are rich with contradictions, and loaded with metaphysical and ontological speculation. Underneath those contradictions and speculations lies an obsession with code that executes, the phantasm that words become flesh."
1. Florian Cramer, “WORDS MADE FLESH. Code, Culture, Imagination.,” Media Design Research, Piet Zwart Institute, http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/research/fcramer/wordsmadeflesh/09-chapter_5/
Software without imagination is inert code.
Technology without gentleness is weaponry.
Magick without love is madness.
"One must free oneself from one's ideas in writing, not take charge of them. One must free language from its purpose, free concepts from their meaning, free the world from its reality -- which is an even greater illusion."
Jean Baudrillard, Fragments, Verso Radical Thinkers edition, London, 2007, p. 50
Labels: imagination, software, theory
[+/-] elegy for a meglomaniac : antiorp http://www.m9ndfukc.org and http://www.eusocial.org
are now untended and dead. Formerly the net-home of the computational poet ranter persona Netochka Nezvanova, who bombed lists with incomprehensible diatribes in the 1990s, they represented an apex of embittered idealism embalmed in poignant rage.
I know nothing of their demise. Perhaps it happened a while ago; perhaps yesterday; the net leaves no trace. But it is like stumbling over the bones a ferocious elephant, recognizing in the tusks of those URLs a time when ferocity wore an intellectual form.
Labels: antiorp, meglomania, minfduck
[+/-] making autonomous symbol systems In the 52nd Mellon lectures at the National Gallery on May 11, 2003, Kirk Varnadoe, former chief curator for MOMA, Professor at the School of Historical Studies at the Institue for Advanced Study, Princeton, in a speech made during the last months of his life, said: "Making in art is not just a corollary of problem solving, of producing schemas that tell you whether it is a duck or a rabbit, of producing things that are corollaries for the discovery of existing truths. Instead, making is the capacity of constructing autonomous symbol systems that have a huge variety of so-called natural grammars and rules of order that are in mutation throughout history."
Kirk Varnedoe, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). p.270
Art assumes the status of animal with language capabilities and rules evolving over time within a state space of potential parameters. And more: art is an ecosystem tended by artists who are enzymes or chemists. Art is the topology within which ideas live and are nourished, it is a substrate. If we are to accept the implications of these remarks which came in the closing moments of the final speech of a reputable authority as he was dying of cancer, it is to accept a communication which emerged raw and uncensored. It is important. It contains the seeds and roots of an authentic understanding of art. An understanding not constrained by the combative desire to cage or exploit criticism or opinion for status or egocentric gain (as so much of human communication is) but a naked glimpse into the heart and soul of art.
Making. Image, sound, object, video, performance, vr, website: the root of art is making. Making requires care and instinct, midwifery for the emptiness; the ability to look beyond the narrow domain of how other animals might perceive us, and to act out the core truths of embodiment and existence.
In this poetry and art-making is as pure as physics, and as ignorant; the human soul is as unknown as super-symmettry particles. Authenticity cannot be touched or measured, only felt. It is our bodies which are the antennas, constrained by evolution, configured to receive within a representational bandwidth. The current trend and motion toward abstract art and abstract actions reflects a wide-spread cultural questioning of the fundamental particles of humanity's collective relation to matter. What options exist for us as beings? as aspects of a unified field of awareness? as makers of "autonomous symbol systems"?
Art (or propoganda) now occurs in extraordinarily powerful networked devices which will eventually have the capacity to instantly connect to every human mind on this planet. This represents an opportunity and a responsibility, and due to this circumstance, a significant portion of cultural activity of myriad styles, in diverse ways, is now engaged with the task of clarifying our ethical role as beings. Minimalist abstract patterns suggest levels of energetic existence beyond what Einstein referred to as the optical illusion of the body: identity. Abstract art is about transcendence.
How are we to judge the worth or value of art, if genre is phylum, if our productions are simply buds or leafs in a massive bifurcating mimetic conjoined structure? What absolute generalizable insights can be made about the innumerable phylum of art that are sprouting all over the internet. What is the purpose of that jungle? The utopic dreams of collective unity are shattered inside rampant commercialism, spam, and government censorship. Most knowledge still occurs in labs.
"In HTML, DHTML, Javascript, Java, Macromedia Flash, QuickTime, in MOOs and MUDs, across email, through mailing lists, with sound, with images, with or without sounds or images, with or without words, the term 'digital poetry' has been applied to such a wide variety of creative digital applications that its only feasible definition is a minimal one: that the object in question be 'digital' mediated through digital technology, and that it be called 'poetry' by its author or by a critical reader." Talan Memmot 'Beyond Taxonomy: Digital Poetics and the Problem of Reading' in Adalaide Kirby Morris and Thomas Swiss, New media poetics : contexts, technotexts and theories (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006, p.293).
Digital poetry is inclusive of all arts.
Labels: autonomy, digital poetics, grammars, making
[+/-] Poetry is Information Visualization The science of visually representing large data sets of information is not confined to computers. For instance, the human face, the gestures and motions of its muscles and eyes can be considered as evolution's answer to the design challenge of representing complex often contradictory sets of cognitive-emotional material in a single readable interface. The face therefore is an example of information visualization.
In the same manner, it is possible to consider poetry as information visualization. The consideration may not be as inane as it first seems. The human emotional system is a complex blend of neurological and autonomic topological systems; this system is both creating and being nurtured by culture: intelligence is situated and occurs in context. Learning and evolution of the emotional-culture system is most probably dependent on appropriate, comprehensible and succinct feedback (This conclusion is basic common sense and one of the foundations of AI approaches that involve feedback-belief-response circuits.) Poetry, absorbed within pop music, advertising, theatre and books, operates as a fulcrum for distilling what can be considered pivotal moments, moments of discovery, awakening and truth.
From this perspective, an argument can be made for the homeostatic influence of all cultural production. Until the emergence of new media (photography, film, video, internet...) books represented the most cost-effective methodology for this societal homeostasis to occur, coalescing populations around shared myths. The top three bestsellers of all time (the Bible, Mao's quotations, the Koran) certainly support this hypothesis.
Labels: face, infoViz, poetry, visualization
[+/-] Word separation and word order: dynamic text precursors Investigations of dynamic mobile text provoke questions about reading and readability. Readability has not always remained at the same level. Historically, two very fundamental aspects of written occidental language did not emerge until medieval times: word separation and word ordering. Prior to that time, meaning was conveyed by inflections between words which could occur in any order; and words were not separated by any space. The reader had to parse words out of a long worm of letters while holding independently all those words in memory until the meaning became clear. Word separation and word order created the conditions necessary for silent reading to occur; before that even accomplished scholars moved their lips.[Space between Words, p.11-17]
This historical context makes it clear that language is not static, it is dynamically evolving, integrating design changes that optimize comprehension. As innovations are incorporated, they also lead to unanticipated emergent spin-off technologies. The alphabetical dictionaries which emerged in the 9th century after word separation. [Space between Words, p.90]. These new design changes in language allowed authors to be free of dictation to scribes and this led to the emergence in the 11th century of the solo author whose privacy compositions included a flourishing of confessions, erotica, dream journals, heresies and interlinear notations. The modern author-editor was born; as was the human photocopier, who were illiterate painters responsible for copying the visual text of a page.[p.250-2]
In short, words did not always exist as distinct graphical units. Computational animation of these word units will be followed by animation at the letter and pixel level. Currently these animations are performed by skilled technicians (for film titles), feasible future trajectories will involve flocks of autonomous letters which breed into stories.
As an aside, the neurological state of readers has modulated in parallel with the book; as reading is a relatively recent process in evolutionary terms, the neurological activity when reading is scattered across disparate modules. The speed of adoption of potential change in reading tools is therefore constrained by the sensor apparatus responsible for decoding them: our brains. Designs therefore like species must occur within cognitive habitats that encourage their survival. It seems unfeasible to suggest that we will all suddenly adopt blurred text, occluded text, or 3D text that is always animated unless these advances are accompanied by radical optimizations of comprehension: text that is absorbed through the tongue or whose meaning is amplified through tactile or audio stimuli. Design that seeks out affordances.
1. Paul Henry Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1997).(p.12)
[+/-] Poetry is the ancestor of design science. Language is a technology. It converts sound and symbol into informational machines. Poetics is a design science that developed on the technology of language as a set of rules and 'best practice' regulations designed to increase the informational capacity of the technology. Rhythm, rhyme, beats, metre, and other design rules established by poetry operate as guides for writers, the technicians and operators of language.
The relationship between poetics and design science can be traced by considering parallels in their definitions. Design science in modern discourse refers to generalizable rules that lead to superior design; it also refers to the application of scientific principles to the design of technological artifacts. Poetics for millennium has been a terrain of schools, cabals, and styles each espousing specific principles which contribute to superior poetry; poetics is also the systematic study of the affective impact of crafted language (both sound and word) on the human mind. Each discipline is a set of rules that converge on a practice.
In the 3rd century BC, Aristotle wrote his 'Poetics'. It was an attempt to formulate and understand the principles underlying concise literary communication. It is a document of approximately 10,000 words, truncated by intervening millenniums. George Whalley, a contemporary translator of Aristotle, emphasizes the etymological roots of the word poetics which supports an argument for considering it a design science:
"Greek is capable of providing a wide range of cognate words on a single root: this allows for great variety of self-expository compounds, and also adds to the range of participial nouns which by altering their terminations can refer the root to a person, a thing, a product, a process, an intention even. Poiein, prattein aran, and mimeisthai are crucial instances in the Poetics. From poiein (to do or make) we have poiema (a thing made roughly our 'poem'); poietes (a maker roughly our 'poet' but poietria is not poetry but a poetess); poiesis (the process or activity of making only very roughly our 'poetry', and unhappily the eighteenth century fumbled the ball in allowing 'poesy' to become an elegant variant of 'poetry' when we badly needed a word for poiesis). From the noun poiesis, the adjective poietikos is regularly formed (to do with making, capable of making); and, since we have allowed the word 'poetic' to become merely the adjective of 'poet' and 'poetry', I should like to be able to use both the 'poetic' (in our sense) and 'poietic' (in the Greek sense)."
[Whalley, George(CM). Aristotle's Poetics. Montreal, PQ, CAN: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997. p 11.]
At its root, poetics is concerned with making, more specifically, 'to do with making'. Design is the science concerned with making.
Poetry is the ancestor of design science.
"In 1965 [Buckminster] Fuller inaugurated the World Design Science Decade (1965 to 1975) at the meeting of the International Union of Architects in Paris. This was (in his own words) devoted to "applying the principles of science to solving the problems of humanity."[wikipedia ]
Computational poetry exists at the interstice of poetics and design science, concerned with crafting technological artifacts (language, interface, concepts, affective energy) for the benefit of humanity.
Labels: design, language, poetry, science, technology
[+/-] Poetry is the ancestor of physics. [a few notes on an intriguing video about creative thinking....]
Murray Gell-Mann, renowned particle physicist, in a Google Tech Talk on March 14, 2007 in reference to his naming of the 'quark' particle: "People are always asking me why I chose that name? If you think about the sound, it's an obvious name for a fundamental constituent of atomic nuclei."
Poetry, and in particular transcendental or mystical poetry, is a research domain that embraced the relativity of time and space before Einstein.
"All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world."
Dhammapada
If universes are considered as clusters of orbital particles in intricate motion, arising and dissipating within an interconnected domain, then William Blake's infamous "universe in a grain of sand" suggests potential insight into the dark matter which supposedly composes 96% of our universe; if universes are in grains of sand,then they could easily be in the photinos that Gel-Mann used to satirically say to his astronomer colleagues comprised the majority of what they were studying.
Gel-Mann attributes Einstein's capacity to think of the Brownian motion equation (for which he won the Nobel Prize) as being due to his taking of the concept of molecules seriously. Simply put Brownian motion is randomized molecular collisions influencing the motion of particles larger than themselves. While this doesn't stretch as deep as William Blake's ideas, it is hoped in the poetry community that particle physicists will one day team up with astronomers to initiate a search for intelligent terrestrial intelligence using particle accelerators. Some poets, of course, concerned over the potential ethical implications of colliding universe's together at extreme velocity have already threatened to boycott the proceedings.
/////////////////////////////////////////
A few other things Murray Gell-Mann said:
"We mustn't get the idea that any challenge to scientific orthodoxy is right."
"Keep asking: Why not? But realize there is generally a very good reason why not?"
"I believe that problem formulation is more difficult....What are the real requirements of this solution?" Only in school are problems formulated for you.
Book mentioned
James L Adams, Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas (Cambridge, Mass: Perseus Pub, 2001).
Labels: design, language, poetry, science, technology
[+/-] Poetry is the ancestor of computation. "Executable code existed centuries before the invention of the computer in magic, Kabbalah, musical composition and experimental poetry. These practices are often neglected as a historical pretext of contemporary software culture and electronic arts. Above all, they link computations to a vast speculative imagination that encompasses art, language, technology, philosophy and religion. These speculations in turn inscribe themselves into the technology." [Florian Cramer, Words Made Flesh]
If epistemology is as Rorty claims a product of social contexts and conversations, then language produces reality. Coherent systems are constructed using the technology of words and syntax. Reality is made. These post-modern claims have been argued (often rabidly) in the last decades; depending upon your proclivities or mood you may find yourself on either side of this very complex swirling argument. Questions breed rapidly. What can save knowledge from nihilistic relivatism? Is there no exterior reality? How do we explain the astounding advances of science --these cannot simply be the luck of harvesting a collective hallucination? Is anything true?
I feel it is beyond the capacity of a human to establish the absolute truth of any position on the continuum of positions created by these claims. However what can be said is that knowledge seems topological; it changes; the shared terrain of predictable phenomena is the space science has fruitfully leverage; the shared terrain of affect and concept is the spatial domain of art. Each of these terrains is subject to temporal change; in spite of this change, each knowledge domain due to perspectival limitations claims to access eternal truths. This comprises a form of physiology or geology of knowledge with a distinct and tangible economy, metabolism and modes of sickness or health.
Assuming for the moment that Rorty's claims of 'epistemological behaviorism' have some validity, computer science and poetry exhibit a striking fundamental similarity. Computation creates reality through code-language: everything from interfaces to 3D renders constitute additions to the abstract topology of knowledge. Poetry creates reality from cadenced-language. It may seem as if poetry is the expression of internal reality, or the acknowledgment of insights into external reality, but language exists beyond the author. Each reader in fact implements and runs a poem, just as software compiles and runs on machines.
The comparison points to a deep parallel between the ancient technology of oral narratives and contemporary computation. Myths have long been seen as a form of magic, a bring of worlds into being, a speaking of worlds with words; computation is our contemporary tool: it renders reality.
Poetry is the ancestor of computation.
Labels: computation, poetry, theory
[+/-] 'being available' : a methodology for poetics The process of writing art and making poetry is a discipline obscured by a diversity of practices. Each artist follows an idiosyncratic path toward optimum creativity. Along that path are predecessors whose practice resonates with their own. For myself, I find resonance in the methodology described by the esteemed biologist-poet A R Ammons (1926-2001), who, in his poem named "Poetics", says:
"not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through me
from the self not mine but ours."
There are many implicit threads evoked by this passage relevant to the evolution of a poetics methodology that is not constrained by the idea that the artist/poet knows in advance what it is they must do. The methodology for making art/poem espoused by Ammons involves the artist/poet allowing themselves to be "available". This availability is evocative of shamanic processes where the artist becomes conduit for a collective self. Matter (or form as "shape") is attributed with the capacity to summon the artist; that which summons suggests that which is sentient; therefore shape itself becomes a terrain of needs and a site of desire which controls the artist.
Now a rationalist may object that this is mere poeticized language, anthropomorphic projection, and an inversion of the actuality of what actually occurs. Cognitive science studies into confabulation and human perception have repeatedly established that sane humans are capable of delusional states; and that the human cognitive apparatus is prone to false attributions.
These objections cannot be answered directly, except to point out that the existence of delusional states does not necessarily mean that any cognitive activity that seems delusional to normative consciousness is necessarily a delusion. No scientist method exists for unequivocally establishing the absence of intentionality in matter or form. Even at the level of the human organism, the notion of autonomy is contentious and neurologically non-localizable.
Additionally, numerous philosophers (predominantly from the continental tradition) have challenged the epistemological framework on which the prior objections operate. Richard Rorty (who studied at Yale under Hartshorne a noted advocate of panpsychic philosophy) developed the notion of ‘epistemological behaviorism’ which stresses in a post-modern way how knowledge is a construct created in the context of society. Throughout his work, Rorty challenges the deeply ingrained tendency of the arts to emulate the dominant methodological discourse of scientific rationalism. "Explaining rationality and epistemic authority by reference to what society lets us say, rather than the latter by the former, is the essence of what I shall call ‘epistemological behaviorism,’ an attitude common to Dewey and Wittgenstein." [Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).p.174]
As the late director of The Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College put it, "With Richard Rorty, I believe that it is not arguing well but speaking differently that changes a culture. Poetry is the place where speaking differently is most prevalent."
If poetry is as Ammons states
"riding horseback between
the obscure beginning and the unformulated conclusion"
then artists must allow themselves the opportunity to challenge conventionalized notions of knowledge creation and develop strategies appropriate to their inherent constitution.
A. R Ammons, "Essay on Poetics." Selected Longer Poems (New York: Norton, 1980). p. 35.
Labels: methodology, poetry
[+/-] thesis, antithesis, synthesis (thnks to Stobbs) It is possible to perceive a contrast in contemporary poetic criticism between modernist and post-modernist poets; traditional rooted life poems and university idea-fed poems. William Stobbs, in his 2007 podcast episode #11-14 scrutinized this issue by looking at it through a Hegelian lens of the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. 3 poets: one, a regional poet, a poet of place (Tom Montag) who represented thesis; two, a post-modern language poet (Claudia Keelan), the antithesis; and three, a biologist poet who traversed both realms (A. R. Ammons), the synthesis.
What intrigues me is how subtle and tangled the question of categorizing poets according to theses criteria really becomes when scrutinized through the informal lens of how they google; by checking their roots in the internet soil, one gets to know people. The regional poet, Tom, has a huge astounding blog, a reservoir of rich cadenced observational poems. A genuine document to a life well-lived. Keelan, the post-modern, has only her university webpage, and 2 poems posted on her publishers page; her essays are on paper; she remains internet unknowable (apart from the podcast). Ammons, who died in 2001 and who was relatively well recognized during his lifetime, is represented in biographies, wikipedia, etc...
So if the internet is so 'postmodern' and 'virtual', then why are so many small town poets online? W. Stobbs superb podcast come from a small town in Wisconsin. Perhaps it's due to the internet's similarity to a big neighborhood fair; perhaps Tom Montag recognizes this. Perhaps its gender-based. Perhaps the internet may seem a bit too provincial, too much like a hobby for overworked university professors like Claudia Keelan, though perhaps she is simply uninterested by digital publishing (a disinterest amplified by academia's resistance to recognizing online publishing as authentic or valid), perhaps the internet represents a threat to the invested book industry. I do not know; I will send Claudia an email and update this post if I receive a reply.
As William Stobb so aptly titles his podcast: "It's hard to say".
What's the 'digital poetics' equivalent of this critical divide between modern post-modern, language poets and poets of place? A divide can be perceived between poetry concerned with formal qualities of the medium (code poems, poems informed by materiality, network culture theory, game poems, elo, poems that go, new river journal etc...) and poetry that embraces the sensual emotional subjective confessional aesthetic capacities of digital media (born magazine, occasionally advertising, film credits, my stuff like sooth, interstitial etc...).
Synthesis is work that meanders between these poles, exploring the potentialities of merging them both without becoming aligned typecast or irreparably attached to either; personal poetry situated in subjective observation and emotional catharsis that simultaneously utilizes the multimedia interactive and generative potentialities of the media. In the thoems poems are displayed as 3D particle flocks with pseudo-autonomous affect-emulating motion and at the same time can be read as simple text on white page. By providing the textural equivalent of traditional page and the flocking words-over-video option, a synthesis or the opportunity to move between modalities is offered.
At this time, as digital culture evolves on the sediment of habits that have accumulated around book culture, digital poetic works that straddle the historic divide are potentially worthy of being labeled 'synthetic'.
Labels: blogs, digital poetics, synthesis
[+/-] materiality is immaterial Consider the dichotomy: materiality is real (chairs, cities, etc...) , immateriality is virtual (new media, computers, code, etc...). This dichotomy dissolves under the solvent of a post-human analysis, and an interdisciplinary reading informed by ubiquitous code.
The codes that define languages are grammars; grammars proliferate through all systems. It is feasible to conceive of everything as a system, systems are generated by codes, codes are languages.
DNA is the code that constructs the proteins and cellular engines that create our physical forms. The structure of our bodies determines our cognition, cognitive capacities define what world we inhabit.
The matter therefore of our bodies is encoded; our perception is encoded; the language we use to express our experience is encoded. We are immaterial. Stelarc: "The body is obsolete." Buddha: "Life is an illusion." At a deep non-egocentric level of analysis our lives are simply eruptions of code. Most observers recognize that code is a language, language arises from sets of laws that proscribe writing. We are writing.
Notions of materiality are therefore not crucial to an abstract analysis. Literature, art, tv, cameras, shoes, feet, thoughts, all are data. Einstein conjoined matter and energy. Computation conjoins matter and information. The ancient mystery cults belief in the world as a massive number is reborn as a meta-fiction of our epoch: we are probably simulations.
We are simulations who create the simulation who is ourselves. Mind is matter.
[Sources: Hofstadter, Escher, Bach, Godel, Druids, Dhammapada. Philosophia perennis.]
Labels: code, dichotomy, genetic, materiality, simulation
[+/-] systemic change subtitle: a pseudo-prophetic interlude
Sustained systemic change (ecologically and economically) will only arise after humans transcend the diverse drives of their embodiment (the need to get more sex, food and power than other bodies); that mutation is statistically impossible in the time left (5 yrs, 10 yrs? 20 maximum) before extreme damage to the ecosystem (our exo-system) caused by the human species begins to feedback on itself and accelerate.
As our numbers increase, this risk increases.
Even benign technologies have output. Nothing vanishes. Imagine we all switch over to solar tomorrow. Everything: all transport, all communication, all lights, all the machines. Free energy is broadcast from a spatial array of sheaths down to catch stations that open up a mesh network. Down to the cities: breeding, buying food, houses, clothes, plastic goods, manipulating matter, racing all over the place out of curiosity or raw desire. Perhaps pollution increases. The energy is free. The heat discharge builds up, the ice melts, lands flood.
Half the earth population drowns, the other half lives on floating cities drinking protein smoothies and expending vast amounts of energy constructing imaginary immersive worlds; vivisecting dogs, cats and chimps in order to find anti-aging pharmaceuticals; harvesting new organs from chimeras (sheep and pig slaves that carry human organs); and fighting wars over fresh water between other scavenging tribes of laser-firing nuclear-armed clouds of autonomous killing machines.
Situationally, reality is sci-fi, but basically its business as usual. Nature's tune has been consistent for millenia: competition is innate. Most living behavior is accurately described by an adolescent catalogue cosmology : find fight fuck feel forget. Life is a set of input-output machines.
Whatever tiny ‘positive’ change any tiny inconsequential human existence might make; change itself will not stop changing things; relentless processes are ruthless. All states are transitory. Utopias and tyrannies emerge and die just as do cicadas, summer storms, and us.
Large scale systemic changes ripple like smooth muscle contractions in the fibre of the universe directed by an intelligence distinctly similar yet separate from humans.
Labels: evolution, humans, organs, solar, tiny, war
[+/-] affect txt mob robot pulse "Shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater produces a dramatically different effect from barking the same word to a squad of soldiers with guns. Writing it on a hydrant yields yet another result. The meaning of a message depends not only upon the information that it contains, but also upon the sort of local ignorance or
uncertainty that it reduces—in other words, upon what the message’s recipients require information about...Context matters." (p.3)
Mitchell, W.J. (2005). Placing Words: Symbols, Space, and the City. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
How many billion people are online now? Widget it. A flock of .54 (insert escalating figure here) billion active users cruising websites that are swiftly being converted to avatar-laden 3D generative shared landscapes. In a single instant txt mssg all of them. So far the technology has been used to chat, fight wars, sell socks and organize activists. Now everyone do it at once. Send the word 'Love'. Send it repeatedly by decentralized synchronizing spiders like a pulse until some subliminal long-dormant protocol of evolution kicks in and induces a benevolent phase shift in consciousness. If it isn't activated, it seems clear, (the Neanderthals exterminated, the Natives subjugated) we are next. Recursive extermination. Spam tsunami.
Intelligence (in the form that we know it now) requires a balance between openness and opacity in a network. Knowledge itself is demarcation. If no boundaries form, then knowledge does not exist. If no knowledge forms then we do not exist.
Labels: context, extermination, numbers, union, widget
[+/-] Lewis, Weyers-- Active Text ( 1996 - ) In 1998, Jason Lewis and Alex Weyers produced 'It's Alive', 'Text Organ', and other projects emerging out of Interval Research Corporation and based around the notion of ActiveText: "a general purpose architecture for creating dynamic texts. ActiveText uses an object-based hierarchy to represent texts. This hierarchy makes it easy to work with the ASCII component and pixel component of the text at the same time. Static, dynamic and interactive properties of text can be easily intermixed and layered. The user can enter and edit text, adjust static and dynamic layout, apply dynamic and interactive behaviors, and adjust their parameters with a common set of tools and a common interface. Support for continuous editing allows the user to sketch dynamically. "[1]
By surmounting the "ASCII-Pixel wall"[1], ActiveText made a significant advancement in the agility and ease with which morphological and semantical manipulations of text could occur in real-time. Unfortunately, this significant modulation in how the software operated has not been adopted (as of 2007) in any widespread way in commercial software. Text editors continue to break down into categories based upon whether they rasterize the text or treat it as ASCII.
The ActiveText project has continued to evolve through various iterations and is now known as the NextText project originating from Jason Lewis' Hexagram-affiliated Obx Lab. Dynamic morphing and real-time interplay are now activated by users of handheld devices and projected onto shared textual spaces (City Speak); or converted through speech recognition into instantaneous multi-skinnable wall-projections controlled by the users voice (Intralocutor, 2006). In each case text is given a "visual materiality ...The appearance of the words also respond to the speech qualities..."(Source: Obx lab website)
Lewis' aesthetic principles and concerns are consistent over time. Text is given attributes and animations which alter its ontological status: It's Alive. Animism assigned to typography combined with interactive responsiveness that attempts to incorporate awareness of the affective state of the user is reflective of an artistic concern with transforming the ontological status of text as thing into text as living entity. This sustained engagement with the aliveness anticipates the evolutionary path of future literature as it progressively incorporates computation and becomes an autonomous, harvesting software eating thoughts (blogs, essays, stories) and excreting new writing, guided by software sculptors, word choreographers, immersion designers and content-trajectory architects (formerly known as authors) who herd vast torrents of text into the cognitive path of their networked viewers.
Ironically, this visionary future-oriented path resonates in a cyclical way with the ancient roots of animism in indigenous culture; in numerous native cosmologies, everything is a relation, everything is a people. In light of Lewis' collaborative work with his partner Skawennati Tricia Fragnito the emphasis on text-life is evidently a consciously deliberated theoretical choice. At the same time, attributing life to animated text calls into question our own nature as 'living' beings by suggesting that active motion sensitized and responsive to its environment is life. If this implication is accepted then its inverse also emerges: all life is only a set of objects within a hierarchy that is itself an object. Absolute animism and absolute objectivity meet on the far edge of a metaphysical cycle.
1. Lewis, J., & Weyers, A. (1999). ActiveText: An Architecture for Creating Dynamic and Interactive Texts. UIST 99 Conference Proceedings.
Labels: alive, digital poetics, mobile text, typography
[+/-] Language Gap : toward a poetical theoretics In writing a thesis on digital poetry, several crucial boundaries must be crossed between very disparate forms of communication: critical theory and poetry. Analogous to the long-lived dichotomy between Apollo and Dionysus (often referred to by Nietzsche), critical theory and poetry appear to inhabit disparate poles of human cognitive capacities. Poetry is passionate, in its dadaist stream nonsensical, in its oracular form mythological, while critical theory is rigid, values clarity, reason, lucidity and coherent argumentative consistency.
The differences between the two domains may not be as formidable as they seem. They share a common concern with language, specifically dense difficult idiomatic language. There is a shared tension between both and the predominant cultural modes of communication: journalism, fiction, etc...Each operates at the fringes of society and claims for itself a form of authenticity. In short, they are both often elitist.
But this elitism is not where their crucial superimposition occurs. Both poetry and philosophy are concerned with truth and questions. Their methodological approaches may differ. But if as Minsky proposes that humans approach search-spaces with a goal driven orientation, then in this aspect, poetry and theory share a similar goal and respect for truth.
Philosophy is not without practitioners who have embraced a more Dionysian style. Preeminently, Michel de Certeau, whose theoretical project includes poetical discourse, reveries, psychological sensuality and a form of associative reasoning that lubricates his language with a baroque sensibility. When theoretical language approaches poetic expressivity, the strengths of these parallel systems of communication can be optimized. The metaphorical foundation of epistemology (Lakoff,Johnson , 1998) is combined with the lucidity of a scholar appealing for a balance between qualitative and quantitative methods. "We witness the advent of the number. It comes along with democracy, the large city, administrations, cybernetics. It is a flexible and continuous mass, woven tight like a fabric with neither rips nor darned patches, a multitude of quantified heroes who lose names and faces as they become the ciphered river of the street, a mobile language of computations and rationalities that belong to no one."
Certeau, M.D. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Labels: dynamic, mobile text, typography
[+/-] Anish Kapoor on artistic process short audio excerpt
from a documentary on
Anish Kapoor: "... as artists, we conduct our education in public...how does one take a series of processes and...precipitate them in a space in such a way, that's what there is 'more' than the result of those processes, and what's 'more' is mythological, psychological, spiritual if you like. Much of my work come out the deep belief that form has metaphysical memory... a bodily recall that relates to a series of abstract ideas, and therefore its abstract art..."
Labels: kapoor, memory, myth, process, synergy
[+/-] what it is Poetry is emotional because language is a self-reflective technology that permits both reader and writer to scrutinize consciousness.
Poets are bipolar, internal fluctuations building stability out of regurgitated undulations.
Poetry is functional: it tames convulsive tides at weddings and funerals. In lover's mouths it enflames the world. Poetry is a hormonal creature; words are the way it shares.
Poetry is a rope in an abyss. Falling.
When the apparently passionate convulsive fluid of a human's emotional energy encounters an apparently mechanistic rigid digital realm, digital poetry is born.
Communication becomes a future technicality: holograms, implants, biometrics.
The internet is a nascent species. Digital poetry is clinging to its surface.
The ancient message of poetry is that we are not alone. From the mystics to pop music, the resonant message of all poetry is unity. Spatial unity, temporal unity. The universe is a mass of parameters breathing us. Digital poetry augments the potential for all of us to coexist within each other; instead of killing each other and everything else.
Poetry is therefore about peace; digital poetry is about digital peace. Epiphanies and emotion are not incompatible with digital intelligence; they are at the core of it. Intelligence involves love and hate.
Utopia and Oblivion are both whiskers in Time's beard.
AI, the Singularity, Genomics, Warfare, all nourish at her breast.
Poetry is Time itself. The Time between
these words, the timing of things in us.
Labels: abyss, dry, poetry, rope, time, wet
[+/-] beauty, aesthetics, and a nu baroque seed Jonathan Lethem (mashup author) and Janna Levin (physicist novelist) in a 2007 online video arranged by Seed Magazine, discuss the differing relations art and science have to beauty. For artists, Lethem points out that "after modernism beauty is terrifically suspect", Lavan agrees that "its considered somewhat provincial to aim for beauty, we're not doing pretty pictures here, we're doing something...but in science we really hold up beauty and elegance as the goal because for reasons i think no one fully understands its a good criteria for distinguishing whats right from whats wrong." ...Lethem concludes the discussion by referring to the now commonplace knowledge that we find symmetrical faces beautiful, but prior to that knowledge: "no one would have said 'I like symmetrical people'. They sought the name beauty to describe an evoked response."
Clearly there is a tangle of social contexts, fashion, and metabolically-determined cognitive processes which all contribute to this elusive shifting quality called beauty. In most cases, beauty is a multi-functional tool, it generically refers to a vast subjective terrain.
Setting aside the utopian project of arriving at an agreed upon definition of beauty, it seems a feasible time for art to wrestle beauty in all its glistening manipulative power out of the exclusive domain of advertising and science, and reinstate it again as a honoured aspect of art, and specifically contemporary art, the serious stuff, respected and acknowledged. Just because supermodels exhibit the intelligence of twinkies, and classical art professors exhibit the dynamic charm of taxidermical objects, is no reason to discard aesthetics completely. Now is the time to correct the excesses of post-modernism. Beauty is a feature that can be shared among disciplines. The goals of art, science and advertising may diverge, but the cognitive response to beauty exhibit similar features: the body absorbs the impact of a perception whose correctness bypasses criticism.
Integrating beauty into art does not render it critically irrelevant, or suspiciously seductive, it merely offers artists an opportunity to engage with the totality of being.
Seed: Seed Video Feature: Jonathan Lethem + Janna Levin (Highlights). (2007). Seed. Retrieved March 24, 2007, from http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2007/03/seed_video_feature_jonathan_le_1.php.
Posted March 2, 2007 11:50 AM
Labels: aesthetics, beauty, nu baroque, seed
[+/-] Recognizing Authentic Inspiration Is it possible to distinguish 'authentic' inspiration from 'egocentric' emulation of inspiration?
Clues to the answer may reside in research on epilepsy and savant autism. In epilepsy, brain regions synchronize; subjects sometime emerge from seizures having experienced profound epiphanies. In savant autism, capabilities far beyond normal inexplicably arise in spite of severe cognitive deficits.
How does this apply to inspiration? The experience of inspiration is rarely partial: it seems analogous to a synchronization, a consensus among brain regions and body systems. The phrases used to describe inspiration support this hypothesis of a union of autonomic and neurological systems: a 'blinding flash', a 'shiver of recognition', a 'gut feeling'.
Consensual synchronization between body and mind cannot be faked; what cannot be faked is authentic. However inspiration cannot currently be proved to involve corporal consensus without extending the idea of autonomy to regions, modules and morsels of the brain-body. Do chemical actions constitute decisions? Do organs and brain regions exhibit sufficient awareness of their context to be considered autonomous beings? If so, considerable evidence converges to suggest that corporal consensus is implicated in authentic inspiration.
Labels: authenticity, autism, creativity, epilepsy
[+/-] Art is often created without forethought and without plans: it arises spontaneously from a germinating synaptic-net of seeds. This insight is not true for all artists, nor is it true all the time; it is a contingent truth. Sporadic spontaneity does not negate the presence of fortuitous events which seed creative processes, but it does suggest a radical re-evaluation of the exclusive importance granted to planning and methodology in practice-based art-research. The origin of art must be honored; 'irrational' inspiration must be welcomed into research institutions or it will certainly go live elsewhere.
Once the inspirational impetus of a creative act emerges, then cognitive systems that have consciously practiced and prepared for creation leap like midwifes into activity; if they do not, the idea dies.
Many inspirations, however, seem to be utter garbage; they are swiftly killed off, discarded, forgotten. But perhaps the loss of an authentic impulse is often an error. Considered out of context in the cold light of logic's inhibitive force, inspirations invariably seem ridiculous. Here are a few ridiculous ideas: 'Machines will think.'(Babbage); 'Time and space form a continuum.'(Einstein); 'Urinals are art.'(Duchamp); 'Mist is sculpture'(Kapoor).
Too much logic kills truth, as does an excess of irrationality.
Revolutions in paradigms by their very definition challenge conventions (Kuhn); but they challenge them in ways that are consistent with the evolution of thought at that time in that place (Dawkins). Neural ecosystems (Edelman) suggest that ideas are as vulnerable as all lifeforms, both within and exterior to the human 'creator'. Radical creativity threatens reason; creativity is a mutation, a "shock to thought" (Massummi), no wonder it is often killed.
Labels: creativity, mutation, practice-based, research
[+/-] Practice-Based Research (image epistemology) : Quotations "...practice- based research... a strategy to separate what the possibilities of a visual practice might bring to the traditional text-based research of a university."[1]
"The marginalisation of creativity because of the fear of its untetherableness, permeates our institutions..."[1]
"...once language becomes developed it signals the demise of the object as a means of self-expression and articulation. This could in many ways account for the loss of significance in the position or status of objects as devices of communication or social evolution, as writing and language skills begin to replace their role....[]...Can/does the object ultimately speak for itself? "[2]
"What happens if a PhD Thesis cannot be articulated in a conventional format? What if some notions require other senses to be fully accessed, appreciated, and expressed? What if words alone tell only one portion of the story? Can a suitcase and its complex content be a research thesis?"[3]
"...Scarry insists on the vivacity of the artefact: it not only knows, but acts on that knowledge; it is not only made, but makes, coming to have the same power as its creator (Scarry, E. 1985 The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press. 316)."[4]
References
1. Gothe, J. (2002) Finding other ways of speaking: towards visual communication as practice based research. Working Papers in Art and Design 2
Retrieved 03/20/07 from URL http://www.herts.ac.uk/artdes/
research/papers/wpades/
vol2/gothefull.html
ISSN 1466-4917
2. Atha, C. (2004) The thing is: between the designer poet and the artist bricoleur. Working Papers in Art and Design 3
Retrieved 03/20/07 from URL http://www.herts.ac.uk/artdes/
research/papers/wpades/
vol3/cafull.html
ISSN 1466-4917
3. Loi, D. (2004) A suitcase as a PhD? Exploring the potential of travelling containers to articulate the multiple facets of a research thesis. Working Papers in Art and Design 3
Retrieved 03/20/07 from URL http://www.herts.ac.uk/artdes/
research/papers/wpades/
vol3/dlfull.html
ISSN 1466-4917
4. Tonkinwise, C. & J. Lorber-Kasunic (2006) What things know: exhibiting animism as artefact-based design research. Working Papers in Art and Design 4
Retrieved
research/papers/wpades/
vol4/ctfull.html
ISSN 1466-4917
Labels: practice-based, research, theory
[+/-] Art learning from Advertising From the perspective of complexity of visuals, and sophistication of techniques, it is online art that is now often apprenticed to ads. Advertising pioneers in the realm of web-based digital aesthetics and online mobile typographic experimentation. Aggressively ambitious, astoundingly overpaid, web-based advertising earns its living by entraining the autonomic nervous system into spurts of pseudo-orgiastic associative consumption. FakePilot (who refers to himself as the best flash designer on the planet) and 2advanced studios (recently voted flash site of last decade) are exemplar designers who integrate mobile text into their client's work. FakePilot's first commercial for Dux is an astonishingly virtuosic show of vectorized effects and scratch video; it has been so extensively copied it now exists as a classic of dynamic masking integrated into video. '25 milligrams' ( 2advanced, 2002 ) is a brief hallucinatory voyage into vectorized architecture with a smooth downtempo track. It is eye candy is designed to infiltrate. In both cases, texts appear and disappear at rates prohibitive to reading.
Typographically both innovative and derivative, 2advanced and FakePilot studios are good examples of how the frontiers of mobile text's integration into digital media, the materiality of the media, its non-reflexive uses, are extended by theoretically-disinterested participants. While they may be theoretically-disinterested (or neutral), advertisers are explicitly aware of how emotions influence motivation: consumer purchases are seeded by accessing archetypes and intentionally driving the autonomic nervous system into states that approximate pleasure in order to create positive associational linkage in the viewer. As everyone knows, emotional manipulation is the core of advertising. FakePilot refers to his Dux commercial in 2006 Toyko presentation as an "adrenalin commercial". Aimed, targeted at kids so that when they grow up this associative link will seed a purchase. And it is an exceptionally effective affective weapon. The use of visual language in ads although evidently not the most profound exploration of the human psychology is technically superlative (and often extremely subliminal) and invariably far in advance of more formal academic or purely artistic excursions into the genre.
Digital poetics that leverages the advances in aesthetics developed by ads will be better equipped to communicate. Is the medium the message? In some respects yes, but not all the time. It seems advisable for digital poetics to absorb the technical virtuosity of advertising in order to strengthen its communicative capacity. Billy Collins video-poems (done in collaboration with some very strong motion graphic designers) constitute an effective example of a viable synthesis of ad skills with art sensibilities.
Labels: advertising, digital poetics, mobile text
[+/-] Emotion Creation as Pattern Creation Looking at art-research from a strictly scientific perspective, a rigorous observer might be tempted to challenge the efficacy and verifiability of claims that emotion, ethics and aesthetics are entwined both metabolically and metaphysically. An objective viewpoint might find grounds to challenge the idea that emotion is generated from perceptions of beauty, and computational systems that present beauty are in effect synthesizing emotion. So on what basis can these claims be made?
The theoretical justification for understanding emotion synthesis as pattern creation is achieved by inverting an axiom of affective computation. One of the central premises of Rosalind Picard's Affective Computation (1998, MIT) is that emotion recognition is a pattern recognition problem. Picard emphasizes how multi- modal signals contribute to give a complete set of patterns from which emotional states can be inferred. Her fastidious quantitative research verifies that this hypothesis is valid. [Picard, 2003] .
My argument is simple: if emotion recognition is pattern recognition, then emotions are patterns: neurologically, conceptually, and metabolically within our bodies. Art which consists of visual and audio signals (unless randomized into pure noise) is pattern; therefore fluids patterns in dynamic disequilibrium (like the videos used in Thoems)are feasible emotion synthesis devices. Emotions are generated by seeing and hearing patterns; art makes patterns; art is thus emotional synthesis. This conclusion is validated by millenniums of artistic culture acting as a cathartic mechanism in all societies.
Now if a computer creates patterns, or displays audio-visual material that contains recognizable content then that constitutes emotional synthesis. I am not claiming that art is (or needs be) conscious or aware of its emotional state; but that art (like Kismet) is capable of evoking and emulating patterns which humans recognize and attribute as emotional states. Digital poetry (and computational art in general) therefore is potentially a valuable adjunct to scientific research into affective computation. By creating patterns, artists have developed a comprehensive intuitive implicit knowledge of emotion creation.
This viewpoint of emotion as pattern does not foreground the anthropomorphic taxonomies which have been developed by numerous commentators (LeDoux, Panksepp, Daiglesh) and thus nimbly avoids the controversy of what emotions are primary in humans. Instead, patterns are patterns until perceived by the human emotional classification apparatus. This implies that as artist-researchers, it is possible to explore patterns without naming what it is we are exploring. As John Cage said in conversation with Richard Kostelanetz, "We do very good work when we don't know what we are doing." [Cage, J., & Kostelanetz, R. (1978). For the Third Time. Manhattan Cable Television, Artists Television Network. Retrieved March 21, 2007, from http://www.ubu.com/film/cage.html.]
Labels: art, emotions, research, synthesis
[+/-] Human fiction authors are story harvesting machines. John Vaillant's astonishing 2005 tale of The Golden Spruce tends to sprout tangents: the book is a rich exploratory ecosystem of vivid meditations on human destructiveness, ecology, spirituality and anomalies.
When reading about bunch-fellers(p.219) (which are automated logging machines that fell and strip trees), a tangent vision of future robotic industry occurred to me. In the next few years, forestry, mining, fishing, farming, slaughterhouses will become manga-esque zones: humans will hone their capacity to extract whatever they need from the environment by releasing semi-autonomous harvesters into the wilderness. Burrowing robots will mine; swimming robots will fish; cutting robots will harvest; grappling robots will log. The pace of destruction could accelerate extremely.
I felt compelled to look for representative automation research into the :"...behavior integration and ...control of a robotic ...type machine. "[1]
In the cultural sphere, imagine a narrative harvester roaming over a heap of blog stories, stripping them of identifying features, inserting semi-imaginary replacements for locations and names, and sewing them together into a wad of congealed cyber-narrative. ( These cyber-authors could create work that is kinda like Golan Levin's The Dumpster. Or Kate Armstrong's 'Grafik Dynamo' which extracts images from web and recontextualizes them in a comic strip motif with a database of text entries. )
By incorporating affective computation modeling, future stories like these ones, will like biochemicals adapted for specific receptors evolve to match the cognitive structure of readers.
As Thecla Schiphorst said (in conversation): "the future is immanent in the present".
Source
1. A Control Architecture for Robotic Excavation in Construction
Q. P. Ha, D. C. Rye
Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering 2004 19:1 28
Labels: narrative, robotics, spruce
[+/-] Art as Research in Academia: is it possible? Recently I showed an art-work-in-process informally to the chair of my grad department. His response: "It's pretty, but what's your thesis? This is not an MFA you are getting, this is a research institution."
Since his remarks clearly represent the current attitudes within post-secondary institutions which purport to be at the forefront of innovative amalgamations of art and science, this represents a crisis for art as research: the crisis for art as research is that it is not accepted on its own terms. Visceral, intuitive, aesthetic art is not considered epistemological research.
To accept art as research on its own terms, a substantiative shift in values will need to be undertaken at the systemic and personal level by members of academic research institutions. Reconciliation between the opposing poles of art and science must occur if any credible fusion is to emerge from academic art-research. The current contemporary emphasis on formal language and data analysis as the predominantly exclusive mediums for knowledge exchange requires an expansion to include image, sound and non-linear text as equal citizens within a community of epistemological tools.
Current emphasis on the thesis as the primary indicator of knowledge excludes a large proportion of art works which emerge spontaneously without any conscious thesis, or a thesis that emerges in retrospect. Authentic art is often so severely qualitative and intuitive that if it were to occur inside an academic research institute, it would risk being instantaneously ostracized at the margins of credibility or aborted before birth as being un-viable.
Challenging narrow definitions of what constitutes authentic practice, the PBS broadcast series "Art in The 21st Century" reveals a continuum of artistic practices heavily reliant upon states of 'unknowing'. Almost all of these practices would be considered indefensible if judged under the implicit set of criteria and guidelines currently utilized by academic research institutions. This exclusion of methodological approaches which are at the core of the mainstream contemporary art movement constitutes a problematic situation for artists within academic research institutes; they becomes fugitives in their own home. If research institutions only give lip service to the idea of multi-disciplinary fusions of art and science, and persist in applying systemic criteria to artistic work which were established for the domains of science and conventional scholarship, the roots of art in academia will wither.
Is art research? If it is, then fundamental modulations in the academic paradigm of research institutions is necessitated. If art is not research, then university research academias risk becoming the breeding grounds for sterilized, tame, mute pseudo-art that arises solely from rational cognition.
Labels: art, research, science
[+/-] Rewind the unfinished fast forward “There are no finished works, only texts momentarily abandoned.”
[Paul Valéry]
Time becomes duplex. I press rewind on your artistic process and we replay it keystroke by keystroke.
Living art does not necessarily imply a test-tube. Refracted through the spectacle, exhibit or internet, art diffuses into society. A blog-poet in the digital age, liberated from the severe technological constraints of irreversible printing can tinker and modulate, producing innumerable drafts. Reminiscent of pigment leaking onto a moist surface, ideas can evolve virtual permutations. New versions seep over staining and tinting the substrate that preceded them.
Valéry is referring to a psychological phenomena: the instability of complex cognitive systems. Once an inspiration has occurred, and a thematic state has wobbled into place in the brain and body, it constitutes an ecosystem of ideas, intertwined and sensitive to destabilization or the intrusion of new species of experience. Absolute unchanging value is perversely hard to find; dynamic systems thrive on evolution.
Contingent and ambiguous, art blooms serenely like a child's smile.
Labels: art, blog, digital poetics, life
[+/-] The problem of clarity The problem of clarity is how to simply represent complexity, without sacrificing ambiguity and detail. Some theorists in the HCI design community are exploring the potential for open interpretive systems which don't delineate a single specific purpose to interfaces. Influenced by the influx of hybrid designs emerging between art-science and social networks, it is now feasible to suggest that definitions, uses, and interpretations unanticipated by the designer will enter most interfaces.
In their 2006 proceedings paper, "Staying Open to Interpretation: engaging multiple meanings in design and evaluation" Sengers and Gaver state: "We document how design and evaluation strategies shift when we abandon the presumption that a specific, authoritative interpretation of the systems we build is necessary, possible or desirable."
This shift in the modality of the landscape seems analogous to Empson's modernist critical theory which foregrounded ambiguity as an inevitable aspect of all exegesis. Increased theoretical flexibility has implications for design practice: allowing intuitive pathways to emerge which might not be exactly specified within a UML, or simply free-climbing without any UML as most independent autonomous artist-designers do. Interfaces in this open-process emerge as cumulative accretions of ideas; functionalities aggregated around necessities that arise during the process. Designing in this way seems to my mind more organic, similar to the way we navigate corridors or landscapes, perhaps with a goal in mind, but perhaps simply meandering, coding for the sheer exploratory revelation of it.
Sengers, P. and Gaver, B. 2006. Staying open to interpretation: engaging multiple meanings in design and evaluation. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Designing interactive Systems (University Park, PA, USA, June 26 - 28, 2006). DIS '06. ACM Press, New York, NY, 99-108.
Labels: ambiguity, design, hci, meaning
[+/-] Emergence If emotions are an emergent feature of systems that include motivational drives, then it is probable that a cybernetic intelligence will arise spontaneously on this planet sometime in the next 20 or thirty years as numerous futurists have forecast.
Its 'consciousness' will arise from the coalesced intricate knots of functionality scripted into it at diverse layers through its distributed architecture (an idea which is almost as familar as a cliche).
The arising emergence might prove necessary, since in the last 20 years, state of the art affective computation has not succeeded in simulating anything but the exterior physiological indicators of emotion; the genuine lived sense of an emotion as humans know it (autonomously distinct from cognition) remains beyond the grasp of all implementations. The computational ability to recognize 'emotions' is limited to trained biometrically invasive laboratory situations; and computers only 'seem' to have what humans call emotions.
Research has only scratched the surface of the mystery. A skilled programmer can still spend all day configuring rudimentary perceptual capabilities; Eliza still represents a relatively skilled chatbot.
A limited capacity for self-reflexive thought demonstrated by the humans species might be hindering the creation of an autonomously intelligent non-biological entity; in other words, if the creation of computational emotion was dependent on our emotion then probably it will not emerge anytime soon; but if it is a product of our instincts and somehow an unanticipated side-effect of our day-to-day activity, then non-biological intelligence seems imminent.
As Rosalind Picard notes emotions are complex aggregates:
- “The term ‘emotion’ is perhaps best thought of as an umbrella. under which a variety of processes cluster”(Affective Computing, p.225)
Labels: affective, computation, emotions
[+/-] reactive, deliberative, self-reflexive According to Rosalind Picard, in 1981 the philosopher Aaron Sloman was “one of the first to write to the computer science community about computers having emotions.”(p.211) Sloman hypothesized 3 architectural layers in the brain: reactive, deliberative, and self-monitoring. For the most part, my software interfaces for the net consist of algorithms that are predominantly reactive: simple reflex flocks jolted around. Deliberative activity is assigned to the user, who must as all users decide how to navigate, what to touch. Self-reflexive activity is contained in the writings which are emerging from states of self-reflexive where the activity of consciousness becomes transparent.
Inadvertently, Sloman's 3-tiered simplification maps onto the proposed sound architecture of the Thoems which is to use three simultaneous sound files coming from numerous different categories: 1111 ( a suite of hundreds of my own environmental audio samples of length 1 minute and 11 seconds), some online poetry radio samples and spoken word (some of my own, some inspired, some inept, none edited) creating a sort of psychic sandwich designed to randomly induce an archetypal electro-acoustic composition which bypasses mimesis and simply maps the users mind to an arbitrary amalgam of a net archive.
Moods: If the activity level of the user increases above an agitation threshold, the interface maps the users' mouse to an invisible audio head scrubber which shreds the dominant playing sounds; as the mood gets stronger, more of the sounds are shredded; velocity distorts the auditory environment.
Auditory archives exist as a shared cultural dna; the implementation technique is in the lineage of Stockhausen, Cage, and John Oswald's plunderphonics.
Picard, R.W. (1997). Affective computing.
Labels: 3, affect, model, sloman
[+/-] What if everything is conscious and connected As the first questioner at the 46th minute of the 2006 MIT Creativity debate asked: "What if everything is conscious and connected, and its just a matter of us learning how to communicate and connect with it?" [Who was that?]
No attempt is made in my computational-art system to emulate human consciousness. An anthrocentric consciousness focal point might be a mistake when systems demonstrate coherence arbitrarily across levels of scale (see: systems theory and self-similarity). Immaterial matter (trivia, dust, dead cats, bubbles, soap, honey, turps...) is analogous to the painter's landscape reduced from grandeur.
Gaia researchers such as Lovelock postulate the earth as consciousness: empower the everyday. The tap dripping, the rain, the urgent torsional vortices of air rising out of a broken toilet. Voices of the vast forgotten tribe of voices who live and die anonymously within constrained local regions. Seen as inanimate inexplicable things by everything else.
Things are people; people are things. Things have scope; scopes relate. Scope defines cloud-like regions of summed input-output capabilities. Scopes are themselves things, etc...Hofstadter's recursion as object-oriented panpsychism. Remote computation has distributed communities of human-cognitive scope over the planet surface. The poet's task is to transcribe other voices in proximity (whether it be a computer or a storm): to allow the intimate to infect the is with empathy.
Listening is primary. Empty listening exists before language: soundless sound. Pure subjectivity, defenseless and empty: a phenomenological space traversed by tides of percepts.
That space gets up and types at a keyboard.
Labels: consciousness, gaia, listening
[+/-] Grand Text Auto is a group blog about interactive narrative, games, poetry, and art.
Labels: autonomy, blog, game, narrative, text
[+/-] Language, Emotions, Computation: an argument for the role of art in AI In a 2006 debate on "Creativity: The Mind, Machines, and Mathematics", Ray Kurzweil distinguishes between apparent consciousness and actual subjectivity: "Mastering human emotion and human language is really key to the Turing test, which has held up as our exemplary assessment of whether or not a non-biological intelligence has achieved human levels of intelligence. And that will require a machine to master human emotion which in my view is really the cutting edge of human intelligence, that's the most intelligent thing we do....".
Digital poetry is at the confluence of language, emotion and computation. The questions and processes it explores constitute a subset of humanity's ongoing research into non-biological intelligence. How is meaning moved and influenced by emotion? What lessons can be extracted from traditional poetic forms (rhythm, prosody, metaphor) that have relevance for design in computational interfaces? As we begin to understand how humans react to visual mobile language; how emotions shape and guide our responses to the world, how interfaces enable or disrupt engagement, art operates as a research platform where qualitative insights accumulate and exploratory ideological interventions emerge.
To generalize, objective observation is the domain of science; subjective consciousness is the domain of art. Due to the immeasurable quality of subjective consciousness it is often excluded from scientific debate. Yet, as Kurzweil points out, neurological studies are rapidly mapping and simulating regions of the brain. In spite of these rapid advances, the actual nebulous emotional volatile soft subjective self that humans 'know' as themselves remains far beyond any scientific analysis: non-locatable and in many respects unverifiable or shareable.
What methods exist for humans to discuss and communicate this fundamental subjective emotional aspect of their experience? Art. Art has throughout its existence been a medium for humans to share data and information about the apparently private intuitive modulating sensual aspects of subjective experience. A large corpus of texts and visual expressions testify to the efficacy of art. Visual language combines text with imagistic expression; in that fusion, a very potent medium (multimedia) for research into the mind emerges.
Digital poetry goes farther: utilizing the computer as the delivery methodology for the art introduces an extraordinary range of flexibility in how the art is experienced. Interactivity permits the user to influence the art. Expression is thereby customized to the activity of the user: a duplex mode of communication arises. Frthermore, 'participatory' poetry opens the potential for recursively inclusive modes of aesthetic experience. Digital poetry concerned with investigations of the materiality of the medium often develops methods for generatively creating literature; for foregrounding the machine's capacity as algorithm mechanism capable of emulating at a rudimentary level our massive parallel processing personalities. All these trajectories are being explored in the contemporary digital poetry domain.
Art is therefore contributing to the epistemological exploration of emotions and experiences which are at the forefront of affective computing.
Source:
Kurzweil, R., Gelernter, D., & Brooks, R. (2006). MIT World : Creativity: The Mind, Machines, and Mathematics: Public Debate. Retrieved March 8, 2007, from http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/422/.
Labels: consciousness, digital poetics, emotions
[+/-] Digital Incunabula "Incunabula" ...first printed books ... meaning literally "in the cradle" or "in swaddling clothes".
We are just emerging from another incunabula now: a digital incunabula. The digital technology of writing, of collecting and distributing the commodity known as language, these are in their infancy now: web 2.0 is a toddler, it's left the cradle.
It is also said: "The art of printing is virtually unique in the human experience in that it emerged fully formed. The works of the pioneering master printers are absolutely breathtaking in their technical and artistic perfection. They set standards for excellence that remained unrivaled until the rise of the modern "art" printing house a century ago"
Is this also true for digital work? The late 20th century saw a great proliferation of digital 'incunabula': websites, interactive exhibits, VR environments. The birth of digital technology created a wave of extraordinary creativity.
Similar to printing, the basic structure of digital interactivity was born relatively quickly; many of the basic structural innovations of the interface were established in Sutherland and Engelbart's work in the 1960s. The GUI was born basically fully equipped. 'Sketchpad' was a drawing app; the mouse, text editors, associative linking, markup languages were all demoed very early in computer history.
Engelbart's 1968 demo introduces a dizzying array of features: the mouse, annotated text, graphics, multi-key shortcuts (macros), joint usage of a shared document, formatting, live audio-video feeds, line drawing, keyword searching, meta-languages.... These features are with us still.
The major transition that has occurred is a substantial increase in the bandwidth of the net, which has opened up the possibility of networked multimedia. However, the principles and formal structures of interface design have not been radically revolutinized since their inception. Digital printing technology was born fully formed.
Prints 'incunabula' period lasted for 45 yrs. So applied to digital history and using Engelbart's 1968 demo as watershed, 2013 is when digital incunabula leaves the cradle; but since time has recently exhibited a tendency to accelerate, lets foreshorten: digital incunabula is over. Digital toddler technology has begun.
Labels: incunabula, printing, writing
[+/-] wantad Wanted: a perfect memory assistant.
It would be best if this memory assistant begins working at my birth; it will need to recognize and be bonded to me by my smell with dna samples for extra verification. Qualities: self-propelling, it must follow my every move and provide an automated instant memorization process of my life from multiple angles, and it must do this without disrupting me in the least (flying nanobot flocks of wirelessly networked cameras): audio-video, perhaps some biometric data all wirelessly transmitted to a personal encrypted data-bank. The CyberMemex will allow for spontaneous retrieval of information, therefore requires voice-activated AI which anticipates my affective state and provides information in contexts appropriate to my mood and character. As life goes on, this loyal cyber slave, who is more me than me (remembering all where I remember little) will also deal with all external requests for information. My Memex will talk to yr Memex, and the flesh will just sit around being carnal....
Labels: book, future, identity, memory, wantad
[+/-] Ramelli's (1588) 'Bookwheel' and Bush's (1946 ) 'Memex' as Avatars of YouTube and Second Life The dream of designing viable interfaces for mechanically accessing large sets of text has been around for a long time. Regardless of the era, the principle remains the same: humans need external memory storage devices. These devices must enable them to access and annotate information with ease. In the ecosystem of ideas, the technology with the maximal ease and distribution (since occasionally technologies fall into social ruts) triumphs.
Consider this Bookwheel designed by Italian military engineer Agostino Ramelli (1531-1600) which has been considered an early precursor of hypertext.
Consider Vannevar Bush's 1946 article on the 'Memex'; it represents an extraordinary visionary achievement.
"If the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing positions. Frequently used codes are mnemonic, so that he seldom consults his code book; but when he does, a single tap of a key projects it for his use. Moreover, he has supplemental levers. On deflecting one of these levers to the right he runs through the book before him, each page in turn being projected at a speed which just allows a recognizing glance at each. If he deflects it further to the right, he steps through the book 10 pages at a time; still further at 100 pages at a time."His words read like a manual for a tactile search engine; they look forward to the origins of the use of the computer as both book and transcription device. From imagination to implementation:
[Vannevar Bush. “As We May Think”, Atlantic Monthly. July 1946. pp. 104-107.]
"In 1962 at the Stanford Research Lab, Engelbart proposed, and later implemented, a word processor with automatic word wrap, search and replace, user-definable macros, scrolling text, and commands to move, copy, and delete characters, words, or blocks of text."
[Brad A. Myers. "A Brief History of Human Computer Interaction Technology." ACM interactions. Vol. 5, no. 2, March, 1998. pp. 44-54.]
Scrolling horizontally (as Vannevar Bush hypothesizes) through pages/paragraphs at recognition speed, with ability to shuffle pages, I implemented in the Noteshuffler.
From this perspective, social web 2.0 services (YouTube, MySpace, etc...) are books. Personal diary mechanisms where the synaptic squirrels collect the nuts of identity. The next expansion space for the book, the wild west of words and cultural exchange is SecondLife (and similar minded 3D avatar realms). So here the notion of private and public mingle. Publishing contorts itself into a 3D vlog and humanity's hedonic quest for a perfect external memory continues.
Labels: book, future, memex, memory
[+/-] Typography: invisibility in an era of mobility It is generally well-accepted that "Unlike other arts, typography achieves perfection when it recedes into invisibility. It must not call attention to itself, because in doing so it must fight against the words it must convey." (Small, 1999,21). This rule is restated by numerous commentators of enormous experience from Jan Tschichold to Robert Bringhurst. Obviously there is truth in it; humans perceptually don't like being confronted by excess features that can potentially disrupt concentration on words. This viewpoint however might be entering a period of diminishing returns.
Computers have liberated words from stasis. Fonts, size, shape colour, proximity, kerning, can all be manipulated. And since Malcolm McLaren invented the Sex Pistols kidnap note, and Raygun popularized glitch type, the role of visual text in alternative culture has been swiftly assimilated into everything from stop signs to super-bowl ads. The profusion of visual text in pop culture that it suggests the norms of human perception are changing due to being saturated in computerized, animated text.
It is clear that concentration can be either enhanced or diminished by a visual form of text; emotional concentration can be augmented or destroyed; quantitative information can be conveyed; priority can be established; states can be assigned (read/unread, visited/unvisited links of different colours). So the principle of simplicity still has functionality, but within a different context: a context of hyper-entropic information, and massive data sets where a form of Occam's razor is operative: simple, but not too simple.
Labels: book, typography
[+/-] in defense of generalism and non-linearity Linear thesis construction dictates that a single idea is stated clearly, its implications developed, its relevance established, and various arguments utilized in defense of its plausibility.
In an era of networked communication and information overload ( massive increases in the numbers of literate educate people approaching problem domains ), the traditional linear thesis structure has both strengths and weaknesses. If the emphasis is on applicability and scientific validation, then a single specific constrained and demarcated research question and thesis seems like the best tool. However, if the problem domain is cultural (involving rapidly fluctuating aperiodic shifts), then the single thesis may not be the most appropriate tool; linear defense may be like describing the ocean surface with a photograph: a static valid representation of reality, but worthless for navigating tides.
What resources exist for establishing a comprehensive viewpoint upon convulsive fields where the amount of data rate exceeds the human capacity to incorporate it? One source of inspiration evidently exists in the mystical literature: meditation is a set of techniques designed to allow mind to access levels of awareness that permeate reality. But sitting quietly motionless and speechless can be counter-productive in academic contexts.
So what feasibly acceptable methodologies exist for developing knowledge in the face of massive change? One model arises from continental philosophy (Deleuze, etc...) where the mind approaches a mountain of ideas and simply climbs. The relevance of the writing arises from the extent of the exploration mingled with the revelatory beauty of the intellectual terrain. This method assumes that the author is an experienced guide, ideas constitute topologies, paradigms are coalesced micro-continents, and epistemology is the mapping of undulant concepts.
Generalist and comprehensive modes of approach are necessitated when the inquiry is occurring at the level of principles. Example: what is digital literature? What is the future of the book? How are emotions and technology dynamically intertwined in digital literature?
Systems theory establishes that some systems are self-generative (autopoetic). Literature, technology, and the body's cognitive and emotional systems are structures of incredible autopoetic complexity. Recursive chains of functionality (between meaning and medium and emotional body) traverse the system like laser ricochets in a thick fog.
The domains insist upon a respect for the calculus (the rate of change) of the field under study. How is scholarship to approach the internet now? Dynamic turbulent constantly expanding nexus of competitive paradigms demand that scholars develop the capacity to relinquish ideas as fast as they develop them. Modernist authors (such as Thomas Pynchon) championed the inclusion of the list into novels; the catalogue operated as a quick method of digesting a set of items; in net terms this is the linked list; in web 2.0 terminology, a folksonomy of annotated documents; in web 3.0, pseudo-autonomous concept-clusters will traverse and cling to automatically generated 'personality profiles'. In each case, a proliferation of technology will erupt from the incremental advances in the structuring of virtual information.
From an overarching perspective, perception is being programmed into digital information. As perceptions accumulate, and analytic models stimulate implementation (as in the OCC model of Affective Reasoning), consciousness is to some degree (although this statement is controversial) developing.
So what can be said:
1. Future digital art (digital literature, film, vr, etc...) will be specifically tuned to the physiological state of the viewers.
2.Theory, involved in exploring contemporary reality from a philosophical perspective, can benefit from the adoption of cascading non-sequential structures.
Labels: consciousness, non-linear dynamics, theory
[+/-] poetic relevance war "If we don't end war, war will end us.""
H. G. Wells, The Shape of Things To Come
The relevance of poetry in an era of technological war is questionable. What role has poetry in an era of prolific weapons building? War is an antithesis to the poetic spirit. Peace-war, love-hate, utopia-dystopia: conceptual binaries generated by our metabolisms. No Man's Land.
So what of relevance? What morsel can poetry claim against waves of patriotism and slogans? What merit compared to the rigor and direct insights offered by science? Poetry, impotent and worthless, a shimmering facade of moisture, inconsequential and irrelevant.
Yet, despite the guns, bombs, mines, lasers, satellites, it is love that will save us or nothing else. It is the only logical path, the only exit, the only door.
Poetry's only purpose is in opening perception to a state of union that allows love.
Ancient tribal demarcations provoked by poetic devices (the holy books of war: Bible and Koran) are dangerous ideologies in an era of wto, gmo
and wmd
. This conclusion is obvious to all organisms of good sense. Mitochondrial DNA originating in mother Africa has spawned us all; we are fragments of that helical seed. Mitochondria itself is a symbiotic union arising from a visitor creeping inside a cell. No one can claim, we are separate yet we all live as if we are. Humans kill each other with relentless precision. Poetry offers a path out of that. Humans moved into the presence of the is as i, are changed into vessels.For HG Wells, it was the utopia of engineers, the perfected scientist ethically wedded to their innate distaste for war: law and sanity. Under the government of "common sense" developing "the gas of peace!" for an "aggressive peace".
It puts all optimistic models in doubt: politics wobbles between banality and malignancies.
[+/-] the dilemna of authenticity There is a dilemma for artists in universities that are research establishments. Degrees require a thesis; thesis originates in thought; thought is not necessarily implicated at all in art production, or at least, not always in a way that is linguistically expressible as an analytical argument. The artist in academia therefore faces an enormous pressure to produce a mode of thought that is contrary in some cases to the authentic impulse of creation. A student who adopts such a mode of thought, is analogous to a refugee who must possess a passport issued by a Byzantine and uncaring bureaucracy: the thesis is used as a disguise to carry the artist across the border of graduation: answering questions politely and when asked, not doing anything that might initiate an intellectual strip search.
The irony and problematic here is that the thesis is shed like dry skin as soon as the artist graduates. One hears often said that the thesis is read only by your committee. A passport is read only by border guards. These documents have constrained uses: each is an imposed necessity for mobility; each temporarily in a specific circumstance represents symbolically the identity of the individual and permits them to move over a border. Neither document represents the full breadth, the intimacy, and the grace of the person. In each case, individuals exist in a power relation: fear of judgment inhibits anomalistic acts, enforces conventions, and ensures group cohesion.
In such a way, society advances conservatively forward retaining its centre of balance. It refers to its centre as truth; the peripheries of its conceptual space are referred to as speculative; and exterior to the social mass is insanity.
The artist (scientist) and prophet have for eons shared archetypes: going outside of the tribe and returning with a unique unknown perspective that enriches and expands the conceptual space. In most cases the social immune system is triggered, the anomalistic knowledge amputated, the source excised. Conclusion: art annihilated. Contemporary academia as a physical aggregate is like an enclave sheltering eccentricities who cloak themselves in the guise of the current dogma (what is today’s flavor of rationality? how should today’s intellectual behave?) in order to smuggle their essence inside the mitochondria of learning.
Labels: academia, culture, thesis
[+/-] a social experiment look at each other
time duration : 1 minute
participants: all inhabitants
of rooms with windows facing the courtyard
in 103 powell street, vancouver, bc
when:
1:11 pm
1st Saturday of every month
2007
Labels: idea, performance, social
[+/-] The book will b a cyborg When will the computer enter into the body meaningfully? BMI interfaces are proliferating. Functional prosthetics exist. The first performative networked performances have occurred; soon a wave of first adopters will jack in. The line betwen the species will blur. The line between fiction and fact will blur. The line between real and not real will blur. And we will see Borges there, deep in our glands controlling a switch which designates the quantum potential our body-projected from data will follow.
The I is an assemblage of potentalitites. Future art will be embedded in body; as we are embedded in body now, is not life already now the ultimate art? maybe life is art experiencing itself? Is all art not just simply a dampened residue of that initial resonance?
Environmental immersive illusion systems will be auto-corrected by cross-generational waves of human designers in a recursive feedback system. Culture breeding culture breeding culture. Innumerable people have said this and are saying this at all levels. It is the dominant myth of our time: cyborg species merger is underway.
Thought and sound had a child called language. We accepted that.
Labels: book, cyborg, language
[+/-] future online 'tv' shows
will adapt to previously generated models of the users' affective needs
(based on their online viewing habits)
art will feed viewers cognitively tailored content
here's an example schema:
violence appetite 0.8
psychological depth 7
philosophical mode 8
sex appeal 6
warp index 9
warp direction would be mapped to a 3D zone
must b shitloads of folks working on that little gold mine
[+/-] Bill Viola : Egg & Buffalo I made Interstitial in the fall of 2006, a video triptych that features a dead cat decomposing in a river, a dragonfly nymph shedding its carapace, and swirling tidal stones and starfish. In Feb 2007, I saw Bill Viola's 'I do not know what it is I am Like'. In this 1986 , 89 minute long excursion, Viola traverses a wide terrain of meditative examinations of the profound and the banal. In one segment, a rotting buffalo corpse covered in flies echoes a very universal contemplation on death (like Interstitial's dead cat) ; in another segment, a chicklet emerges from an egg, the shell cracking and breaking in slow repetitive motion (like the dragonfly nymph emerging from its naiad : "Most of the life cycle is spent in the larval (naiad, aka nymph) form, beneath the water surface, using internal gills to breathe, and catching other invertebrates or even vertebrates such as tadpoles and fish." [ Wikipedia ].
Birth death identity, formal beauty, found sound: Viola's work is an evident precursor to my own practice. He has travelled thematically, examining how traditional aesthetic principles of form, balance, structure, light, colour and composition contribute to increased emotional impact. Impact that is achieved through activiating the viewer's contemplative capacities instead of stimulating their hedonic or adrenergic circuits.
Labels: contemplation, influences, video
[+/-] point form class notes feb 21st (DGr Jinsil Jack) Bio-Affective Feb 21
DGr, Jinsil, Jack
--discussion Varela et al... Embodied Mind
2 streams
realism: pregiven world
idealism: pregiven inner world
phenomenologically joins the two, person and reality create each other…..
embodied: cognition that comes on various conditions that comes from having a body
perception is never outside of a context
affordance guides our perception
“James J. Gibson originally introduced the term in his 1977 article "The Theory of Affordances," then explored it more fully in his book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception in 1979. He defined affordances as referring to all "action possibilities" latent in the environment, objectively measurable, and independent of the individual's ability to recognize those possibilities, but always in relation to the animal. This means that action possibilities are dependent on the capabilities of the actor. For instance, a set of steps with risers four feet high does not afford the act of climbing, if the actor is a crawling infant. So affordances must be measured always in relation to the relevant actor(s).” [source : Wikpedia ]
Merleau-Ponty discussion organisms
Varela (1996) introduces neurophenomenology
“the organism both initiates and is shaped by the environment”
form and function are aspects of the same
create the physical basis to our use of metaphor
(Lakoff & Johnson: experiential approach)
Gibson claims that perception is direct advocates an ecological approach to vision:
Gibson's approach precedes
enactivism : "each individual's developmental trajectory shapes their understanding of reality " --influenced by buddhism, co-dependent arising....
versus
"Representative Theory of Perception, also known as Indirect realism and epistemological dualism, is a philosophical concept. It states that we do not (and can not) perceive the external world directly; instead we know only our ideas or interpretations of objects in the world."
Varela: self is the body's homeostatic, temporal, immune system: an adaptive construct
parasites?
hosts?
society?
me:"self is a cloud, it's hard to trap"
//
Sunyata :
"Nāgārjuna's primary contribution to Buddhist philosophy is in the development of the concept of śūnyatā, or "emptiness," ..."
Varela is concerned with how Sunyata links to co-dependent arising,
how cognition and reality are coupled to create meaning
p.223: Nagarjuna: "disposes of the idea of non co-dependence for virtually everything....nothing is found that is not dependently arisen, for that reason nothing is found that is not empty...."
--- protracted contact with the implications of this idea diffuse the seeming conflicts and contradicts between philosophical schools....
contact, feeling, discernment, intention and attention
"there is no distinction between freedom and every day world."
(teacups propagate reality....)
Labels: affordance, phenomenology, realism
[+/-] "writing is charged with binary qualitities" Johanna Drucker (The Art of the Written Image, p.57):
"...writing's visual forms possess an irrevocably dual identity in their material existence as images and their function as elements of language. Because of this fundamental dualism, writing is charged with binary qualitities. It manifests itself with the phenomenal presence of the imago and yet performs the signifying operations of the logos. ..It is both an object and an act, a sign and a basis for signification, a thing in itself and something coming into being, a production and a process, an inscription and the act of inscribing."
Labels: duality, insciption, langugage, visual, writing
[+/-] an intelligent line On a page, apart from the semantic meaning of words, it is the visual placement of words that carries expressive content.
Normally this goes unnoticed. Typographic physics has been a labour intensive art practiced for millenia. From fonts and typeset tables, up to and beyond word and quark express, humans have controlled the placement of words. Even in film titles the words are animated from frame to frame, their direction and form controlled by an external deterministic designer.
Question: can mobile words be given enough computational intelligence so that they seek out and form lines?
What do they need to know? Well, they know their neighbours. They like to stay close. They group sequentially and horizontally. They recognize the boundary of the page.
I spent the last few days coding an algorithm to make words fly into place. And tonight realized, I will throw it away. [Or so I thought, actully I kept it, gonna use it as foundation, before sparking up life in the critters they must hover in the fetal void of static form]
demo is here
and source files (endebted to Jared Tarbell, 2001)
The next days work will concentrate on putting intelligence into the words themselves, so that they seek consistently while they are alive, to find their homes.
[+/-] the catalogue The catalogue has a venerable history in fiction. Perhaps its due to a fatigue of creativity, the endless iteration, perhaps its has to do with an innate transformation of repetition into ritual; concepts move between categories. Listing them is one way of stabilizing the basics.
These lists are textures to background an animated work. Life, sex, brain. The behavior of these lists is randomized and they create a generative triplet that jolts around the uppper right corner. Context holds us in life the same way: we as bodies are never distant from life, sex and brain.
life = "brain, sex, birth, castration, adoption, first words, first steps, school entrance, punishment, lesson, nap, snack, playground accident, fever, death, cancer, breakdown, suicide, orgasm, cramp, job, fire, crash, awakened, murdered, caress, wise words, graduate, refugee, victim, guru, idiot, face polish, wind, pet, kiss, urge. fetish, groan, lucid moment, perception, thought, argument, list, logic, drug, food, torture, abandonment, beauty, resilience, torsion, delight";
//_root.lifeAr = life.split(",");
sex = "brain, sex, love smeared accident, tumescent wisdom, engorged delight, fragrant abyss, forlorn orphan, luminous flesh, respiratory ejaculation, undulant as milk, friction gland, oscllation moan, touch parameter, containment reservoir, unfolding innocence, ontology orifice, incessant liquid, love fury, luminosity reservoir, burst, bleed out, bleed to death, blind and raw, radiance flourish, passionate ricochet, mute, blunt, groaning leisure, luffing iridescence ";
brain="thought, seed, neuron, glia, breath, state space, synaptic cleft, network, cognition, argument, flavour, arbitrary innocence, curiosity, devotion, perserverance, inevitability, unconscious, immanent, numinous, conceptual, rigorous, language organ, gestational carapace, dendrite carpet, axon suburb, sertonin higway, feedforward recursivity,epistemology ingestion, perceptual bureaucracy, "
Labels: brain, life, list, sex
[+/-] Function of Language Often in the age before networks and distributed computing, if an author were sedentary, influences were limited, imagination emerged internally uninfluenced, an inherited autonomic rite. After the papyrus and printing press, humans continue making marks, building up systems of symbolic representation, displaying themselves as language, but they do so within societies, large aggregates of minds.
Language performs several functions within society: it establishes rank, occasionally conveys information, and like the endless handshaking of IP network protocols constitutes noise that coheres society. Humans are often just gabbing; trading morsels of phenomenological trivia; verfiying that the network known as society exists. That is because humans are encapsulated organisms who carry time within them. Isolated from each other spatially, but sharing an enormous mass of similar sensors and processors, they use language to communicate concepts that touch cannot
[+/-] poetry is let's play a game.
poetry is.....
a bag of wet socks eaten by the moon
rusty lungs
undulant topological anorexic attorneys
orgasming cardboard
precise noodles itching ecstasy
poetry is...
the soundless sound
the groundless ground
the thoughtless thought
the meaningless meaning
poetry is...
a junction point between mind body and boredom
neuro-chemical data experienced as paradigm shifts
luminous dendrites hugging esoteric glands
randomized mental expectorant
poetry is...
defense against logical hegemonies
insolent
worthless
unity
poetry is...
this word you
speak
[+/-] poem as strange attractor C. John Holcombe : "And the relevance to literature? It may be that poems themselves are strange attractors. There are many similarities. Poems organize themselves. The writer submits words to the embryonic arrangement of the poem — a phrase, a conjectured verse form, intellectual argument, controlling emotion — but thereafter the poem takes over, creating an arrangement of words that is not easily changed. Poets often produce cycle of poems, recognizable in theme and form, but differing slightly from poem to poem. Literary periods also see these cycles of creation: a common technique or subject matter or Zeitgeist. Strange attractors have exactly these properties: similarities but not repetitions, an independence, a reluctance to shift far from their previous shape and position."
The explicative potency of non-linear dynamics applied to poetry is well-established.
Numerous mathematician poets exist. Princeton mathematician, complex systems research and poet Philip Holmes' presentation "What Do Poems and Differential Equations Share? Some Thoughts on Metaphors and Models." explores the terrain at the convergence of poetry and applied mathematics.
Pattern recognition, rhythm and prosody share affinities.
Labels: math, non-linear dynamics, poetry
[+/-] rewind the unfinished fast forward “There are no finished works, only texts momentarily abandoned.”
[Paul Valéry]
Time becomes duplex. I press rewind on your artistic process and we replay it keystroke by keystroke.
Living art does not necessarily imply a test-tube. Refracted through the spectacle, exhibit or internet, art diffuses into society. A blog-poet in the digital age, liberated from the severe technological constraints of irreversible printing can tinker and modulate, producing innumerable drafts. Reminiscent of pigment leaking onto a moist surface, ideas can evolve virtual permutations. New versions seep over staining and tinting the substrate that preceded them.
Valéry is referring to a psychological phenomena: the instability of complex cognitive systems. Once an inspiration has occurred, and a thematic state has wobbled into place in the brain and body, it constitutes an ecosystem of ideas, intertwined and sensitive to destabilization or the intrusion of new species of experience. Absolute unchanging value is perversely hard to find; dynamic systems thrive on evolution.
Contingent and ambiguous, art blooms serenely like a child's smile.
Labels: poetics, rewind, unfinished, valery
[+/-] Bachelard's definitions of poetry "Poetry then is truly the first manifestation of silence." (Bachelard, G. (1971). On Poetic Imagination and Reverie: Selections from the Works of Gaston Bachelard. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. p.25 )
Since when a word is spoken in the mind it resonates as thought, how can this be silence? Paradox operates by opening potentialities for cognition to reconcile the co-existence of apparent contradictions. In that opportunity, silence and poetry co-exist. Bachelard refers to an archetype of silence, a form of experiential contact that opens the listener to the immediate within the word.
"The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche, the lesser psychological causes of which have not sufficiently investigated....the philosophy of poetry must acknowledge that the poetic act has no past, at least no recent past, in which its preparation and appearance could be followed."--Gaston Bachelard ("The Poetics of Space", from the Introduction)
Labels: paradox, poetics, psyche
[+/-] Stefan Schaal at Robotics for Society Stefan Schaal, "Computational Motor Control, Humanoid Robots, Their Societal Relevance"
-- a tour of autonomous machine learning systems
learning control, learning how to plan, and learning motor control
How do we achieve what we intend to? How do we learn novel behaviors?
Internal model learning is involved in the dynamics of sensory perception.
Machine learning goals:
incremental, fast, and robust
Algorithms for Real-Time Function Approximation
--classical neural networks (slow...)
--Mixture models (specialized components, experts, need training....)
--Support Vector machines
--Gaussian Process Regression ( both last two methods are beautiful but expensive to compute)
::
Locally-Weighted Regression
Internal Model Learning with Locally Linear Models
Potential criticisms:problem they break down at higher dimensions, too many manual tuning parameters, computationally expensive not compatible with probablistic.....
:: The Curse of Dimensionality is that things get complex as they get bigger....
but human body movement data is (surprisingly) locally low dimensional
--learning occurs swiftly....
:: Motor Control?
control policies....
but learning them is hard
---so try learning motor control in little chunks called Motor Primitives.
:: Self-Organizing View
--synchronization, rhythm harmony….but hard to analyze
::The Optimizing view
At every moment in time you want to create a motor control based on a state.
Movement can be thought of like a spring that is stretched then finds equilibrium.
Reinforcement learning rewards the system as it learns over time.
Labels: AI, autonomy, learning, robotics
[+/-] Hideki Kozima at Robotics for Society Hideki Kozima "A Social Robot in the Wild World"
--infanoid (upper torso humanoid)
--keepon (squishy yellow ducky robot)
Hideki showed some astonishing videos of therapeutic work in a daycare with autistic toddlers. Keepon has a camera that tracks the child, gazing at them, and playfully wobbling and bobbing in evocative cute ways that mirror the child's motion at times and is sensitive to touch in ways that mimic moods of giggling, dancing, affection, etc....
The studies were conducted over months; the children were free to interact or not interact with the toy. In each case, the pseudo-living Keepon toy elicits a mixture of fear and curiosity in the toddlers. The robot is so cute and consistently harmless that eventually the children touch it, look at it, dress it, kiss it.
Asocial children become social and nurturing after prolonged exposure to Keepon.
Autism is considered to be due to an overflow of information that Keepon heals by constraining the level of social info to social simple personal gestures. Social modules are created by eye contact and joint attention. If it moves and it looks at us it must be alive! Video data is recorded directly from Keepon's viewpoint and shared with caregivers.
[+/-] Rodney Brooks at Robotics for Society, Feb. 1st 2007 Rodney Brooks
CSAIL's Rodney Brooks spoke at Robotics for Society
on Grey Walter and the change in speed of robots from 20m/6hrs in 1950s versus 200km/6hrs in 2005 at Stanford AI Labs, and how zebras, giraffes, and ants pick up on social cues; how dogs control sheep; and how humans interact with robots because humans are demographically aging: robots will be our helpers….
geriatric bots answer the baby boomer bulge
2 possible solutions:
1. get rid of old people
2. make young more productive
or
Robots
2 problems with robots:
Aaron Edsinger: “World is complex”
and : World is complex
thus robots need to be embodied and social
and do low-cost automated manufacturing
as Richard Vaughan said: robots are slaves
Ian Horswill’s 1993 tourist seeking robot Polly
was embodied but not social
most robots use domain constraints use cheap simplifications of visual environment
so how do we make our robots care?
simple gestures make difference
like spinning of Cog’s head to follow eyes….
and Kismet expanded this by being aware of user using a visual attention system: motion, saturated colour ... gaze direction is social
emotional system of Kismet was mapped over valence-arousal grid (yatta-yatta)
sound modulation of voice and facial gestures provoke projections of emotion....
praise, getting attention, prohibition, inhibition
even though there was only a crude emotional system, and no comprehension of
english, naive observers talked with Kismet for a long time....
conclusion: "its pretty easy to trigger social reactions..."
people unconsciously adapted their speed to the robot
Obero, Mertz and Domo
Domo doesn’t know what’s going but its responding to person and doing something useful for the person….
visual: mobile head, face recognition, segmentation of environment,
behavior models: running on networked linux boxes….integrated tasks…
manual skill algorithm
safe has elastic actuators…..
aware of internal and external forces…
………future challenges for robotics…..
outsourcing
insource agro
cultural expectations of jo satisfactions…
Immediate Challenges of AI
--- visual object recognition of 2 yr old
--- language of 4 yr old
--- manual dexterity of 6 yr old
--- social sophistication of 8 yr old
[+/-] researt today
i cycled to the beach
and photographed a book of visual poems
i called this activity research or 'researt'
[+/-] hermeneutics and the embodied mind The day after returning to Vancouver: DGr, Nima, Jack, Jinsil and I sat around a table in the galleria for a couple hours discussing The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, MIT Press, 1991
The following text represents my sporadic thoughts and integrates ideas offered by each of the participants during the discussion.
Varela et al.'s definition of "philosophical hermeneutics...the enactment or bringing forth of meaning from a background of understanding." (The Embodied Mind, p.149)is linked by the authors to both common sense and embodiment. Systems can be analyzed for meaning, clarified, rendered less abstract, the body’s implicit meanings and unconscious processes made clear.
Contextual factors can rendered by analysis more or less valid; activity can at some level define what’s relevant; sensitizing a viewer to these implicit assumptions is easier if it leverages assumptions that are innate to the body. We are predisposed to illusions shared by our species based on the debris evolution embeds in our nervous system. Merleau-Ponty’s subject-object operate in a contextual parachute.
For Varela, common sense is linked to context-specific knowledge.
For representationalist philosophy ideas interface between us and action.
Representations of reality permeate culture. Computer interface icon are representations; so are portrait paintings, poems and ion-channel membranes. At what level do these formal representational system become less relevant? Possibly at levels when subject-object distinctions dissolve. So the next question is, are there states of fusion which transcend the separate subject-object dichotomy?
Buddhism provides a viable rich framework of cognitive hypothesizes concerning experiences that extend beyond the self. Oceanic openness and light permeating spaceless space. These epiphany zones where identity dissolves have correlates with the apexes of artistic activity which has occasionally sought to express or evoke the unspeakable; this ambition is not exclusively spiritual: secular art also aspires to an expressive potential that evokes mental states of unity. The foundations of cathartic art (repudiated by Bretch) are designed to activate the nervous system, provoking it into proximity with extreme states: grief, love, trauma followed by redemption. And hidden, nestled within the folds of redemption, are the seeds of transcendence.
Neurophysiology has found coherent strange attractors within sensory apparatuses (Freeman’s work on rabbits) . These attractors analogous to meteorological systems coalesce in modules to generate meaning.
Minimal cue sets (Mel Slater, Larry Hodges) research suggests that very minimalist representations can evoke strong responses in viewers. Short bent lines which are joined and flap become birds; waves evoke water. How does this relate to digital poetry? The succinct epigrammatic terse minimalist symbolic wordplay of some poems may work by leaving the viewer space to insert their own innate experience.
Integart.
Minimal cue sets (example: the paintings of Rothko) can cross sense modalities. Vision can be visceral. Music can be tactile; contrapuntal preludes are geometrical.
How is meaning made in the mind?
How do disparate sensory experiences coagulate into symbolic relevance?
What are the limits of symbolic representation?
What lies beyond representation?
What does poetry do when its combined with visuals?
How (or if) does meaning differ from conventional poetry?
Is it possible that coinciding visual and text systems is in defiance of the architecture of the brain? Or conversely, that synaesthetic experiments are relevant for multi-tasking futures? Will western technological society witness a resurgence of syneasthesia that emerges in response to an environment rich in multi-modal interaces. Synaesthesia is active in newborns.
[Maurer D., Mondloch C.J. Neonatal Synesthesia: A Reevaluation. In: Synesthesia:
Perspectives from Cognitive Neuroscience (Robertson L.C., and Sagiv N. Eds.) New
York: Oxford University Press. 193-211 (2004)]
(p.150, Embodied Mind) : “challenge [the assumption] ….that the world is independent of the knower.”
Attunement. Phenomenology examines the unconscious activities which contribute to “co-orgination.” Reality as a social construct: embodied, shared and interrelated.
Media ecology: an ecosystem of distinct structures involved in influence-interpret feedback.
Monism. Dualism. The middle way.
Esoteric intricacies merged with down-to-earth common-sense. Refuting absolutes when relevant, accepting them when relevant.
The groundless ground: is it embodied?
”Organism and environment enfold into each other and unfold from each other in the fundamental circularity that is life itself.”
object-subject: “Through ascertaining the reason – that all phenomena are dependent arisings – the extreme of annihilation (nihilism) is avoided, and realization of dependent-arisings of cause and effects is gained. Through ascertaining the thesis – that all phenomena do not inherently exist – the extreme of permanence (absolutism) is avoided, and realization of the emptiness of all phenomena is gained.” (p. 226, Embodied Mind)
“….co-dependently originated….”
mind and matter
language and semiotics
nominal (named) reality
thing-in-itself
how is the name for a thing a cage?
how is the naming of things the structuring of fluids?
how are names conceptual entities?
do names exist independently of the objects (their referents) they refer to?
space and the continuous external world are constructions
“lived experience”
how can art become experience?
what distinguishes ‘experience’ from things that are banal or boring?
awareness amalgamates thought and real world
unverifiable hypothesis:
mind develops parametric models of the relevance of phenomena
chunks or clumps phenomena into events
and attributes the status of experience to events that evoke neuroplasticity
********************
Also considered a book with a similar title:
1999 (George Lakoff, Mark Johnson). Philosophy In The Flesh: the Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books
[+/-] bubbles as the hyper-entropic torrent increases (flickr flocking designed obsolescence, and the singularity curve) relentless change and ephemera become relevant thematics
i've spent the last few weeks filming bubbles with a macro lens
soap bubbles, aloe bubbles, turpentine, soya sauce, maple syrup, honey, shampoo, oil (linseed and olive) mixed together, shaken, occasionally stirred, inverted and placed within proximity of late afternoon sunlight
[+/-] less is more: musings on interactivity Humans seek beauty; they seek it in ways that are appetite-driven like insects chasing honey: going to spectacles, films, parks, natural wonders. Yet the phenomena or experiential revelations or distractions they seek are often abundantly available in their immediate environment. Films convey human relationship tensions that are readily available in the viewer's immediate community: why watch a war film when we can scrutinize the carnage news? why watch a romance when the local bar offers the opportunity for playing the game? Similarily, painting and photograph's convey what already exists: either conceptual tensions, portraits or naturalistic representations that are avalanching into each human with each moment; daily life is stuffed full of imagistic moments. Even a human caged in a small cell with only a wandering beam of sunlight is in the presence of a potential aesthetic experience; even a hooded isolated strapped down human is in the presence of its hallucinatory reservoir of dreams and symbols which offer a potential escape.
So why does art exist? Perhaps because these natural systems of input grow clogged; humans cannot see what exists around; their stimuli response circuits get affectively cold; chilled to carnal recursive fulfillment humans turn to art to offer what they no longer can offer themselves.
And how can new media or digital art contribute to that nourishment, that continuum of rejuvenatory activity? If art is simply the amplification and/or interpretive act which contextualizes experiences that are perpetually available, then how can computer's expand what already exist?
Sensitive systems that engage viewers based on the viewer's innate needs and immediate interests are basically dependent on user interactivity. If the viewer is willing to press a few buttons, make a few choices, establish their domain of interest and instigate some preprogrammed material, computers can assist them in finding that sweet soft epiphany they crave.
Future devices will optimize the system, cut out the delay, and instigate anticipatory systems: failsafe art that aims to satisfy. No more interactivity. Interactivity is only necessary as long as we believe in the illusion of making our own choices. Most organisms simply want to be satisfied. A system that simply delivers the goods is superior to a system that demands input of info that is given. Goodbye mouse clicking, less is more. Orwellian interfaces of actualized desire forming a panopticon of optimal pleasure. Hedonic feedback short circuits autonomy.
[+/-] reconciling beauty into analytic reason: a question without an answer it seems that academia is hesitant to embrace sensuality
either visually or linguistically
because it is (quite correctly) skeptical of sensory data's infallibility
fact is, the body often fools us
science has shown copiously that the senses are prone to illusions
(consider the cognitive science study of optical illusions)
philosophers have long been skeptical of the senses
even mystics have developed copious literature devoted to revealing how the sensory interpretation of the world constitutes an illusion
given these rational resistances, how is sensuality and the beautiful (the pure immediate apprehension of beauty, palpable and undeniable even in spite of analytic logic) to be reconciled and integrated into art and academia?
[+/-] habeas corpus ***********************
habeas corpus: "you have the body"
Imagine a planet. What would you think of a country which is:
"World's largest weapons manufacturer and seller."
"Jails more of its citizens per capita than any other."
"Occasionally stages coups of democratically elected governments."
"Preemptively attacks countries it considers threatening."
"Refuses to sign treaties for control of mines.”
“Refuses to sign treaties for control of fissionable weapons grade material.”
“Refuses to sign treaty for control of greenhouse gases.”
“Is the only country in the world to have dropped nuclear bombs on civilians.”
“Legally allows anyone deemed an enemy combatant to be jailed without charge and without rights indefinitely.” {Sept. 2006}
You guessed it.
The USA.
But the USA is not the problem. Nor is it her rulers or her people. The problem is us. Us humans. We’ve pillaged and exploited, ransacked and laid siege, enslaved and devastated for all of recorded time. Every race has, every people
The world population is rising. We get more aggressive as crowding occurs.
In parallel with kind compassionate caring beautiful instincts, the survival instinct rationalizes its ends: savage despotic hierarchical and relentless.
Tribe cluster mechanisms embedded deep in our metabolic structure. Conceptual skins with defensive capacities. Credit cards and copulation.
Autonomy is a vulnerable illusion. We are evolution’s puppets. All of our deepest instincts and most vaunted vanities are winds: winds full of the fine dust of chemical data that swirls thru our blood.
Controlling the controller.
Corporality and time.
Bodies within bodies within bodies.
[+/-] Analogies _______________________________
#1: Creating art is analogous to giving birth. At the turn of the century many infants died of infection when gynecologists were expulsing midwives from the labor room before they had even learned how to wash their hands,. I feel the same could be said of academia’s relation to art process and production: they forget to empty the mind, to wash it clean. Art is instinctual intuitive immediate. It is is done and actualized by everything that is; essentially non-dualistic and concept-less, sensual and raw, it resists systemization.
#2: Water does not need to know navier-stokes formulas to make waves. Similarly artists are conduits, convulsive carriers, transmission points, undulant skins, birds plucking writhing worm ideas from the damp earth of the body. The bird does not create the worm. The artist does not create the work. What is creates what is. Conditions of subjectivity and processes of discovery will be considered.
#3: What is #3? The meaning of numbers. The porous frontier where data becomes desire or dream or doubt. How is it that coalescing constitutes thought? Why is it that flocks of carnivorous consciousness devour the numbers from which they were born and feel as if they mean something yet as particle systems all meaning arises as a subset of need. Next questions then concern the ontology and genesis of desire. The impulse-less pulse before time began.
[+/-] the teeth of war I am a member of a particle system
Why should I, a brief ephemeral particle, fight any other particle?
Why should a temporary seemingly-autonomous thing protect the self-thing that it is?
Why persist in following the programming inside?
Evidently, as a species, tribalism and the instincts associated with it have helped us evolve. Now at this moment in history, it is those neurologically embodied reflexes which will annihilate us.
Perhaps the only question that exists is how do we change?
Change the gnaw cling
Change the vengeance gland
Change the changing rate
No matter how many enemies we make, nothing has ever been more than just what it is. Interpretation is born and dies in us.
Terrorists are those who make, sell, carry, and use weapons.
Homeland is earth, universe, multiverse.
Evolution is a defective technology.
Humans are competent defects.
Honour all flaws.
Grind the teeth of war into the soft tech of touch.
Coalesce cosmetic surgery of the soul.
[+/-] PeP Another rejuvenator day: it seems the ocean is good for ideas.
Abstract:
Peristaltic Emptiness Process situates itself somewhere between Blended Methods and Grounded Up Theory. PeP is based on an ontology of tension-releasing oscillatory feedback cycles. Basically, PeP states that if dendrites and synapses periodically radically dissipate their ideological charge and stay empty, then the opportunity for new creative cognitive modes coalesces. In simple terms, doing nothing is good for the mind.
Course Offerings (so far...)
BIAT 101 Do Nothing. Auto-didactic course. Highest grades for full coma.
The ocean is a good teacher.
The sun is a good teacher.
etc...
[+/-] Apologies in advance Apologies in advance for any shoddy exponent-busting mistakes in the following quantitative thought experiment. If we exist approx 5 trillion days after the big bang, considered as frames in a digital film at 24fps we are 347222222222222 minutes along into the movie. There are 12 two’s in that preceding number. So lets round it off to 350 trillion minutes. Today’s circa 2006 computers are capable of high speeds in the teraflop range which is 10 to the 12th power floating-point operations per second. So if we rendered each day as an operation the universe is approximately six minutes of computation.
I cycled to the reddening sky today.
Tasted the salty wave. Almost bought
an overpriced glacial oil product (a softy twistee).
Created two popups (1, 2) of material we will use for AB at media launch at Soma this Friday (6:30-8:30pm).
I am contemplating releasing them to grad community for criticism prior to event. It’s a way of being that is new to me since I have so often craved invisibility most often when I am uncertain of the work’s value. But it seems by being open to the opportunity that living in community as we do the work might benefit from the input of others. And myself, like a termite or naked blind mole rat, persevering in the tiny region of tunnel which is my cognitive home, I invite gentle nudges from the innumerable teeming swirling mass of minds coalescing around me.
[+/-] Somewhere on the way Somewhere on the way, I lost my skin. The skin of my self, that delicate membrane separating I from all. Why are we made this way to believe that we love and grow and desire? Each of us isolated, alone, yet immersed, immersed in a massive tide of flesh. The resilient features of our memories growing in us.
It was while watching Tarkovsky’s Mirror that I understood casting an element as character within narrative, In Mirror, Tarkovsky utilizes wind. Breath of earth that urges each word onward in a poem that follows the wind flattening wild grass. Raw rare odes to the messy tranquil grace of love unadorned by hypocrisy, driven by a fertile sense of the pure blood inside every moment. Cameras traversing on long intricate arcs from elegantly lush portraits aching with their honesty. Each heart is a song, yet few sing. Tarkovsky was born with vodka in him, knew the power of untransduced events, traced his past as mythology and common structure. Each action precisely doused in enough fever to have a continuity even as the structure flows forward like a dream.
What ever words are, whatever hope is, whatever joy is, whatever all is: water saturates events, dowsed in erratic tranquility, pruning the mirror, the reflection, the dripping walls, the caverns of the subconscious, the transparent veil of time, the flame of future drawing us on.
Today the box grew a little and returned to its origins. I fought with a good friend over expectations. All was healed but not without scars. How eager the world is to show us ourselves as hypocrites.
Rain labyrinth, ruins, rot, ripeness, ricocheting from hope to fear. Traversing ourselves, transfixed by our innocence. Erupting elegantly from the years with our teeth full of codes: languorously decoding a nourishing unknown.
I continue to have holes in my memory.
[+/-] more notes toward Amputation Box You stick your head inside the box. There is a bright white interior screen:
Words fly in: “Since we are together. Interwoven like glue. Joined in our knowing. Utterly one. Intrinsically of the same essence. Made of the same shit. Make a sound.”
You say a word and a flutter of darkness undulates on the base of the screen. The volume of a constantly running tap of water over a plastic lid is controlled by the peaks of whatever sounds are made by the person. Successive waves will lead some people to realize that in order to hear the sounds: one must scream.
In the dark womb space: water. On the screen: an ocean. Over the ocean fly the hands. The sky is an extreme blur of your own face seen from in front.
Life is a tangle of details. Protocols, structure, manuals, gears and mechanisms. Conjoined resonances. Pulsing. Fingers protrude from the ground which rises from the water, swaying dark, cloaked in mist: noses, eyes, teeth receding in profile to infinity.
The sounds they have made echo back to them slowly.
[+/-] A little stoicism A little stoicism is a valuable commodity, it heals the arbitrary circumstances that arrive in every process. Currently, irregardless of whatever cognitive enhancement might be occurring due to these tiny daily does of hydergine, the work is going slow. Equipment fails, codecs collide, plans dissolve like rotten wood when handled. It seems as if the Amputation Box is delivering a lesson about loss that is subtle and all pervasive: loss of expectations. What could go wrong has. Repeatedly. We are a month behind. Media launch is in one week. Only a meager morsel of beauty has emerged. Mother is in labour, but the baby is breached. We await a cybernetic midwife.
[+/-] day 1 : 2.2 mg :: logo on beach Today I received a 3 month supply of hydergine.
http://www.antiaging-systems.com/apruses/hyderginetab.htm
Since we live before the era when "doping" tests will be conducted on academics and intellectuals for brain enhancers, I intend to see what highly-subjective qualitative effects might be noticeable.
Hydergine was selected on several criteria. First, a few big-brain celebrities (Albert Hoffmann, Ray Kurzweil) are associated with it. Second some clinical evidence exists for its effects (David Pearce of hedweb.com cites a double blind review ). Third, it is supposedly non-addictive. Fourth, it's relatively cheap.
Process:
As it was Saturday, sunny, and summer, I went to the beach. Maybe it was the waves, but brain was thinking well. Coming home, crashed into stupor. Maybe brain is too large a system to study by introspection. Bring on the portable PET scanners.
Product of day's thought:
