and its an alpha aggregator that probably won't get updated
it has a limit to number of entries
future musings will go into other tangents area
[+/-] Dr. Philippe Pasquier --siat presentation nov.15 Dr. Philippe Pasquier is one of the short listed candidates for the Performance and Technology – faculty position with the School of Interactive Arts and Technology. He will be giving a presentation on Wednesday, November 15, 2006. Please join us.
Presentation: 9:30 - 10:15 am
Q & A Session: 10:15 - 10:30 am
Room: SC 3595
Title: Contemporary creation and technoscience: technophobia versus technophilia.
Abstract: In all classical creative practices, the creator of the work and the creator of the tools used to create the work remain distinct. There is the instrument maker and the musician, the camera manufacturer and the photographer, the software developer and its user, etc. Digital tools allow artist-programmers to design and build software tools that fit their continually redefined needs. This is the return of the artist-technician, artist-engineer, artist-scientist. With artificial intelligence based art (AI-art) or artificial life based art (a-life art), the idea that the creation of the computer tool takes precedence over its utilization is born. The creators become metacreators, i.e. the designers of generative, pro-active and autonomous computer tools endowed with creative behaviour. Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life allow designing tools that don’t need any user.
This talk will discuss and exemplify the transformations of the relations between artistic creation and its tools through the presentation of a few software and hardware systems developed by the speaker. This will be a pretext to address the question of the links between contemporary technoscience and artistic creation. A variety of classical philosophical attitudes toward technoscience will then be browsed, ranging from the technophobic to the most technophilic.
Bio: After studying computer science, artificial intelligence and cognitive sciences in Europe, Philippe Pasquier completed a Ph.D. at the DAMAS (Dialogue, Agents and MultiAgent Systems) laboratory of Laval University in Quebec (Canada). Since 2005, he has been working on interaction and communication theories as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Information Systems at the University of Melbourne (Australia).
Philippe Pasquier also maintains a practice as a multi-disciplinary artist interested in studying the links between Art, Science and Technology. During eight years of artistic practice, he has been acting as a performer, director, composer, producer and teacher in many different contexts. He is also serving as an active member and administrator of several artistic collectives (Robonom, Phylm), art centers (Avatar, Bus Gallery) and artistic organizations (P: research and creation in media art, Machines) in Europe, in Canada and in Australia. His work has been shown on three continents and funded and supported by more than 20 cultural institutions including the Canadian Art Council, the French Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication and the Australian Council for the Art.
Web site: http://www.damas.ift.ulaval.ca/~pasquier/
----------------------
what is relation between art (aesthetic and subjective) and science (objective)
--1. relation between artist and their tools
--2. audience and the creation
Traditional schema: engineer/technician -> tools -> work -> artist -> technician….
Modern schema: artist == technician , creating tools….
--is programming poetry? are programmers artists?
examples of tools created :
--“Z” (created with Pascal Balthazar)
--body contact sensors (Claude Gauvreau: ‘ray of glass needles’)
switch from creation to meta-creation:
what if tool does not need a user (the artist)?
--AI, Bio-art, genetic algorithms etc…
artificial musicians: artificial agents
--perception of world, pro-active behaviour….
--improvising automata, listening to and improvising with live human musician
--cellular automate…field of sound cells…
interested in Turing test for art?
--is it impossible to differentiate between human and computer art?
--preliminary discussions with audience suggest that in domain of improv electronica, yes
social issues with new tech
--gestural recognition of artist’s production is lost
--how to turn my grandma into VJ
---Machines-Motor::: 4 corners mixer of 4 av tracks
summary of modalities of artist-audience
--user: passive….interacts….influences/creates....technician....artist/engineer….meta-creation
critical view:
in both cases meta-creation and influences/creates
---artist disappears
---technoscience plays a dominant role
-----
technophilia vs technophobia
3 main positions : phobia, philia, indifference
--technophobia (Ellul, Heidegger)
----pessimistic view : death of art, aesthetization of technoscientific activities
--technophilia (Habermas, Frankfurt school)
---for Habermas universal rationalism is just an ideology promoted by a certain community
---humanist technophilia (Simondon): co-evolution of mankind and tech, reticular…problem is latency in speed of evolution of physiology
---post-modern position (Lyotard) : humans are mastering nature, autonomous subject is a product of modernity
---evolutionist technophilia (Engelhardt): transhumanist…
--indifferent
------
conclusion :
are we engaged in the triumph of creative will in the modernist project or is it the final stage of the rationalizaiton / instrumentalization of art practices ?
----
discussion (I apologize for the big gaps in this transcript…it does not accurately reflect the depth of the answers…I was listening and not typing occasionally….)
-----
ron wakkary: can you evidence how this phobia/philia is playing out?
PP: poetry using pen and paper receive less support…in art history, there was a metric to do analysis, in modern art, the breaking of rules…convenient that there is now tech that provides new schema for metrics….
thecla: relationship between passive perceiver to meta-creation, I was wonder about choice of word content? why do u differentiate content from process? content-creation seems to differentiate between process and creation….
PP: the meta-creation and content-creation side are separated on perpendicular axis….the distinction could be made that the process is built by audience, a relation between audience and artist…example, fight-bot, participants are mixing content….while in other cases like youtube, the content is created…
thecla: on that level, there is a hybridization or conflation…next question: turing test for art is an interesting thing to posit…it seems in a way provocative, a critical repositioning of audience toward technological development
PP: yes this is correct, this event which was broadcast on radio Canada came with a full introduction….certainly provocative…contextualized….
John Bowes: I’m interested in evolution as opposed to revolution, it would seem to be that turing test posits rules, music of course has many rules, music is also evolutionary like evolution of sonata into symphony, or on other hand, revolutionary, Schoenberg,….i wonder, in turing test, it would seem to me that audience’s background would be of considerable background…it would seem to me that a person schooled in harmony and counterpoint…what about this contextual varable?
[me thinking: audience’s contextual knowledge of software sources might be modern equivalent of counterpoint knowledge…]
PP: that’s very true, its not really a turing test, there is this system called natural language, for improvised music, there is not a system…another aspect, I was doing that avatar, who are committed to improvised music, but I believe, it is possible to do this in more systematic ways…for example in jazz, with Michael Snow we made cds with an algorithm, and it is difficult to differentiate the human from computer…the perception of language is not as proficient as listening to music…
Thecla: listening is not necessarily analytic…
PP: that is whole point of process…can listening be seen on multiple levels…
Rob: a related question…you can apply automatic meta-creation in many domains, are there particular features that make it more difficult or easier to apply?
PP: for real interaction of place, there must real perception, for example, the er of agents in audio can analyze the audio more accurately even if its aesthetic ….the reflexivity of human in front of new environment is surprisingly good, but ai agents, isplay lack of flexibility…
Josh T: I am curious about self-created systems and role of virtuosity? example: violin….self-created instrument might specific task, is there room for virtuosity?
PP: interesting question, I just don’t know,…there are several things, you have choice to apply something that already exists….another, under which conditions…it is a reasonable research question
DGr: elaborate on Simondon’s reticular
PP: technoscience has been growing since beginning of mankind, difference between science literature and art are being categorized as they are embedded
DGr: u spoke universal rationalism, do u think there could be universal irrationalism, how would it be embodied
PP: to define irrationalism, not rational, in that case, it would be had to talk in rational terms, to say this ….more generally if u r pointing at psychological there is certainly room for irrationality in every culture, so it is universal
Ross taylor: when u spoke of mp3 players and possibility for emergent dj, responsive environment, I was thinking about aesthetic experience which could be ecstatic, example: chemical brothers and rave culture…therefore, chemical brothers are artists, but its environment they are producing, on other hand what eno was doing, using systems…one is clearly, a soundscape, the other is an environment with an agenda, ..i am wondering to what degree this can produce ecstasy?
PP: example: air guitar, and voting provoke this form of competitive ecstasy,…so there is a sense of community, and creating people tend to win, have nicknames…elaborate aesthetic created…
[+/-] wikipedia asperger insight in an email i was sending last nite
i made a mistake and didn't finish a sentence
i wrote: "its almost like andrew gol"
i meant to write
"its almost like andrew goldsworthy's work in some respects in that it converts a naturally occuring phenomena (the download rate) into an aesthetic impulse...."
so after i sent the email i noticed the typo
and thought that the recipients of the email would probably be a little perplexed
and they would google "andrew gol"
so i quickly went to wikipedia and created a page for andrew gol just as a joke....
in order to cover up my error
but the amazing thing is the editors of wikipedia deleted it after only a minute online, and left this residue...
so i decided to contest the deletion
since it offered this opportunity
if you left a message in the talk section
the decision could be contested.
so i wrote my little defence
and thought that i had stated a feasible argument
that at least would open a discussion
and potentially allow my page to survive....
returning five minutes later the enitre page was again deleted without a trace or a note concerning my attempted justification
nor did i receive any email notification even though i had ticked "watch this page"
nor did my members history have any record of me making the page
i only recovered the pages thru using my browser's back button....
intriguingly during that five minutes when my page was being so swiftly erased
i had been listening to an mp3 of an Asperger's syndrome individual
(Aspergers are high-functioning autistics with fastidious attention to detail, astonishing memories and often lower social emotional intelligence...it is probable that they are exceptionally well-equipped to deal with the cyber-info-avalanche of contemporary online culture)
so i suddenly had a vision of wikipedia as a vast network of asperger editors wiping out any idiosyncratic info
with the the same functional grace as applying antiseptic to a kitchen counter
eradicating play and nonsense in the pure pursuit of The Fact
and thus was born the idea in me to create an anti-wikipedia
which contains only nonsense
and nothing of importance
all reference to anything verifiable is wiped out by mercenary dadaist editors.....
[+/-] a simple mp3 poem experiment what happens when you take 94 mp3s
and turn them into venetian blind mouse-paranoid floating play-pause switches?
today's experimental prototype, online: here
Thought de jour: while reading chpter 2 of Katherine Hayles, My mother was a Computer (2004) and waiting for a ferry, I was watching a couple lust each other in the seabus station; aware as that soon they will most probably retire to a private room in this rain-drenched city; there a small morsel of meat between his legs will distend and engorged with blood enter an engorged with blood orifice between her legs; they will thrust until the body answers itself.
For now, they talk, but their talk now is a foresight to the night's physical rhythms, a similar interchange of rhythmic thrusting is occuring semantically. Memories, laughters, intimacies, and insights flow between them.
The multiplicity of the relations that constitute their intimacy is analogous to a network; information is being fed and shared about protocols and data-structures necessary. Pleasure, pain, appropriate touch, cultural norms, social standards, are all conceivable as interlinked dynamic emergent modules.
Hayles is discussing Wolfram, Fredkin and Morowitz as theorists of what she refers to as the Regime of Computation: basically the idea that the universe is computationally tractable, a code. Wolfram the guru of automata, Fredkin expanding the dialog into social contexts and Morowitz suggesting that complex systems piggyback their emergent structures.
Surprisingly, Hayles (p.28) then cites Nicholas Gessler who has emphasized how representation is connected to ideas of dynamic hierarchical coupled emergence. In brief,its a common sense connection, organism's ingest representations of the complexity; sensory modalities mean that the same stuff is seen/felt/smelt in different ways. Richard Dawkins touches on similar notions when discussing bats in a Ted talk from July 2005 (Retrieved Nov 12/06 http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=r_dawkins )
If representation is connected to emergent complexity what role does art have to play in the diffusion of information across the interface of evolution?
[+/-] string theory : regiment show nov 3/06 mcclure gallery
co-created: regiment show, digital animation launched with sophie jodoin
and while
reading "Imagining the Tenth Dimension" by Rob Bryanton
which mentions Hugh Everrett III 1957 "many worlds theory"
it makes me think of tarkovsky's sacrifice --branching provoked by extreme wishes
and realize that the string that has led me here is a rich fertile vein
the digital animation created for Regiment is online:
http://www.year01.com/jhave/sophie/digital%20regiment/PHOTOS/regiment.swf
[+/-] habeas corpus corpses habeas corpus Lat. "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.
[+/-] maia engeli's 40 minute rapid-tour of ars 2006 Paul DeMarinis
email output: chairs, jars with letters that exude bubbles, bowls
ephermeal notions of language
lost messages
instantaneous coding practises
emergent nodes that catch tiny portions
Reportage
Hauser, Bartl
robotic self-assembling chair....that falls apart and reassembles....
artificial self-healing chair
Eyebeam Graffiti Research Lab
LED Throwies
LED 2 batteries, magnet and tape....
--portable autonomy, comes with instructions,
particiapatory, temporary, demarcates,
usualy a small smart mob that gathers to make a message....
---in Linz, added more trams on each circuit…
Drawn Zachary Lieberman
--drawing becomes life of its own….
---drawing and then interact with it
---thru sound generated from lines….
--painted with real paint, converted to digital, overhead cam gesture-recogniton controls sound….
Ocular Witness Arijna Kajfes
--deals with light…..
link
change in sound, sends IR thru wheel and interrupted light generates sound….
--helmet, 2 leds, little camera, only feedback is how bright it is external to viewer
Outerspace Stubbe, Andre; Lerner, Mark
---out of order during festival…..
Khronos Alvaro Cassinelli
--elastic screen that manipulates waves of time
--tactile interface…
double helix swing, Ursula damm
--its about art being something that cannot be looked at out of context….
---cameras outside that looks at flies and mosquitoes…
---artificail representations of real insects, interact with them so that they mutate…
Office Life, Techart Group
--fish swimming around on keyboard, printer, barcode reader etc..
Sonic Bed, Annette Works
--tactile sonic bed…
The Road Movie, exonemo
--bus trip every 5 minutes they took 5 pictures
---put them online as pdf as origami
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Interface Culture Masters Program at Linz
Clothing that arranges the Body, Hannah Perner-Wilson
--magnetic clothes
Cows in the Field
--electric fence changes image
Not Mindless Transportation
--3 ways to analyze traffic, abstract silhouette of cars…
Knight of the Coconut, Taife Smetschka
--synchronize two films by two viewers synchronizing their clapping….
sCanned Objects, Irmgard Falkinger-Reiter
--scanned viewers pocket objects, printed out, then canned
--preserves memories
the enlightened collection
--noise level visibility
Scream Point,Sebastina Dietrich, Harald Moser
--only if you scream does image focus and picture is taken…
serial killer, timm-olivier wilks
--only piece at ars 2006 associated with computer games
--cam looks at exhibition space, touch screen allows people to be erased…
digital barrel organBernard pusch
--auto playlist management
---windup beatbox
--portable….
life(), mike satomi
--uses main square of linz and real people
--uses eye tracking to navigate 3d environment….
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Ars Electronica Centre
Morphovison, Toshio Iwai
---physical model of house spinning that creates illusion of morphing with strobe lights…
Thermoesthesia, Kumiko Kushiyama
--sound, heat, cold, light, touch
Kobito – Virtual Brownies , Takafumi Aoki
--little box that had some snes of force feedback
Move, A. Hieronymi
--floor chase
Smoke Tree, John gerrard,
virtual sculpture of tree emitting smoke….
Tmema The Manual Input Station, Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman
--shadow sound instrument….
[+/-] new forms art-camp sept.21 Liane Davison
SAG curator
---demographic of Surrey 40% under age of 30
---contemporary 1975 to present
---focus on community
---collects digital media
---oct 1 next deadline
---artist-in-residence to support development, R&D residencies
----make work on site
----be public
----work within institution
---5,000 sq ft black box
---currently developing audio as means (ipod etc…)
Josh & Karen
LRIF
--- a jovial romp thru the ins and outs of no-budget diy filmmaking
Ben Bogart
---FLOSS Free Libre & Open Source Software
---free to run, study, copy, redistribute, improve, and release….
---why use it?
---community vs. market
---threats to FLOSS:
---license fees of “standards”
---software patents of functionality processes
--Pure-Data, Linux(ubuntu), Inkscape(vector), Cinelerra (video), Blender(3-D),GIMP(photoshop)
---Pixel Tango a set of high-level abstractions for pd and GEM
Jennifer Bailey & Shawn Bailey
BIOTEKNICA
---fictitious biotechnology engineering firm
---product line based on teratoma: dermatode cyst, a real for of cancer
---as cells divide they also self-differentiate, a natural instance of cloning
---declare teratoma as consumer product….
---teeth hair nervous systems….
(Hurlbut pro-life md is suggesting that teratomas grown for stem research….)
---freeze-dried meat sculptures at BEAP
---public autopsies
---residency at SYMBIOTICA art-science collaborative research lab
---working primarily with cell line P-19 (derived from mouse)
---nutrient solution contains blood serum from fetal calves
---requires ethical approval
---call their practice: “soft experimentation” in order to create communication across disciplines:”double agents” humanists entering lab….observing from outside the interior.
---tissue culture requires systematic sterility and nutrients
---teratoma cell line: multi-directional differentiation….body is so minute it has to be mediated thru microscope…at end of residency had to kill their cell lines….isopropyl alcohol injected into flasks with little tiny x’s drawn on flasks.
2006---primary cell line cultures, taking cells from recently deceased culture….
---other practice: genetic modification of e. coli
---3d body scan laser documentation
---teratological prototypes: 3d scan, scaffold,
---ISEA 2006 Zero One San Jose : built lab from $350 ebay items of used tech and a rental…fed cells every day….and place back in bioreactor….
[+/-] new forms artist talks notes... http://www.newformsfestival.com/nff06/
The Call
• Isabelle Jenniches
webcam compositing, massive image made from thousands of still images...
"it grows as a blob, from some point of interest....it follows the curiosity trail...i think of Brueghel many people very small moving around on a plane...."
My Belly
• PIERRE-ANDRE SONOLET
---discusses his progressive disillusionment with work leading up to his installation on digestive system...bones inside the belly…the spoon exists before the fork which came much later in 16th century….
VERONIKA BOlKELMANN :: 2006 I DESERTIFICATION
…..inspiration of piece arrived with mushrooms that came from Chernobyl, even now you are not supposes to eat mushrooms in germany . The UN claimed the earth as 2006 as desertification….the idea is very simple, replace food or what you can eat with sand….wanted to emphasize the contemplative aspect….
Mimeticon (a Baroque search engine)
• RICHARD WRIGHT
comes out of an irritation he had with contemporary art’s mistrust of images and need for “…critical distance….it becomes difficult to construct processes of visual logic…and it ends in saying that writing is superior to picturing…”
carl andre: abstract art is all art without content, and conceptual is content without art
“….writing is already a form of picturing….mimeticon is both an artistic curiosity and a functioning search engine…searching by visual appearance….multi-resolution wavelet decomposition…starts to setup a new form of reading the images as algorithmic perception….”…”the origins of alphabet in the raven of terror in 1992…prayers written on cliffs for safe passage…evidence of an alphabet invented by semetic people….1900 b.c…..” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Bronze_Age_alphabets ...Trajan
Lucid Touch
• LYNNE SANDERSON & Peter Sansom
Bioelectrical signals from human body controls av experience…piece will get hot cold and vibrate on certain experiences….heart rate temperature and sweatiness…3 layers of video: actions, place, and facial expressions….Max interprets autonomic data and sends to Isadora….17 different dream experiences….trigger mat on floor lets device know you are there….quantitative dream content analysis…
Concresence By Mark Cypher
• MARK CYPHER
Emotional Batteries
• Victoria Scott
BIOTEKNICA
• • SHAWN BAILEY
• Jennifer Willet
• OIL WHIRLPOOL (Kinetic Sculpture)
• DERK WOLMUTH
• Floating/Erasing
• Slobodanka Stupar
[+/-] homeland de(fence) echo ? terrorism redefined "...many scientists voluntarily oriented their work to fit the regime's policies — as a way of getting money and of exploiting the new resources that Nazi policies made available through, for example, the invasion of other countries. Most researchers, it turns out, seem to have regarded the regime not as a threat, but as an opportunity for their research ambitions."
Uncomfortable truths. Editorial. Nature 434, 681(7 April 2005) | doi: 10.1038/434681a
The current proliferation of research funding related to homeland defense and other military projects have some unnervingly uneasy precedents. Money has an alluring similarity to gravity, it reduces all resistance.
I hereby propose a re-definition of terrorism which involves removing only one word (the second word) from the official dictionary definition: "unlawful"
Ter-ror-ism : The use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.
Under this definition, all weapons manufacturers, all combatants, and all research activities oriented toward discovering more efficient methods for warfare are terrorist activities, -- regardless of ideology or intention.
I harbour no hope that this definition will be widely adopted. Our metabolic predispositions seem to effectively deny the possibility; the evolutionary capacity for rationalized violence is well-distributed across species and forms.
[+/-] killing and imagination Yesterday, I read a novel all day. In essence, I did nothing but read the novel. And as I finished it, and glanced up from its pages, my gaze met the world: dislocated, and in parallel the reality generated by the novel mingled uneasily with the external reality around me. It’s a sensation common I suspect to many who read obsessively. It’s a feeling of being dissociated from the physical foundations. Reverie induced by reading fiction seems capable of initiating alternative structures, mental models of time and space which exist in and of themselves, and struggle for survival, sloshed like waves against the immaculate force of external reality.
The novel was Gil Courtemanche’s A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali. Based around the genocides in Rwanda, it’s not a novel that inspires faith in humanity. Atavistic urges of killing seem to rise up out of populations as regularly as bad breath; as often as an adolescent gets severe pimples, or a patch of eczema arises under aging moustache, or the phone rings in a monastery, there is somewhere on this planet, a human killing another, or scheming to kill them, or wishing they could kill them. We have all in some ways felt the urge, it begins in the anger and rage and shock and runs crashing along its metabolic course toward external violence. Occasionally, amplified by external political divisions, it erupts from its domestic source into collective activity: killing performed as fastidiously as we might clean our nails.
At some level, I have no hope for humanity. We are immersed in a large scale structural system that effectively abnegates spiritual vanities; from the shark to the torpedo, organisms and devices are accurately attuned to the hunt, the target, the strike. It is in many ways, the earth’s most pervasive desire: survival (through eating or destruction of threat). What appalls hope is the how ubiquitous that structure is. Its not as if genocide is an anomaly at the human scale: Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the Belgian Congo, Nazism, Pinochet’s Chile, Armenia, Rwanda, Bosnia...The list simply represents the larger known struggles, it does not even begin to catalogue the endless smaller conflicts, the villages wiped out, the families exiled, the outsiders summarily executed.
Human society is a vicious event. After finishing the novel yesterday, I wandered off to the local farmer’s market. There amidst the barbequed sausages and signs celebrating veal raised on organic feed, the omnipresence of the human carnivore was clear. I assume that all of the market’s comfortable consumers striding through the soft summer air might respond with repugnance to the idea of a genocide of humans in Rwanda, but the genocide of animals for food, the antiseptic displays of butchered meat on sale, the blood hosed away down sewer grates and swabbed off the cutting boards, well that’s another matter. The human capacity to rationalize its eating is a helluva of thing.
Colin McGinn (professor, philosopher, and cogent critic of all things relativistic): “ ...in my opinion, .....our treatment of animals , in every department, is deeply and systematically immoral. Becoming a vegetarian is only the most minimal ethical response to the magnitude of the evil. What is needed is a complete revolution in the way we deal with other species.”
(McGinn, C. Mind and Bodies, 1997, p:207. Oxf ord university Press...reprinted from a 1991 review of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation)
[+/-] glue coast
~
At dusk, I went walking to a friend's. In an abandoned lot next to the rail yard, two teenage boys were playing with a large oil drum. The base of the drum was punctured, a thick paste had oozed out in a glistening lake that gleamed: cigarette butts and blades of crab grass were lacquered under this slowly expanding region of translucent glue.
These boys were playing with the unknown. By tomorrow, the residue will be sculptural, seeping into the earth.
We are breathing things: hollow interiorities constantly exchanging the outside for inside. Oxidative phosphorylation chains careen to make adenine triphosphates, obscuring the origins of sctivity: is it your muscle or your mind that decides? I am not naive enough to believe that a simple awareness of life in all things (panpsychism) will have any impact on the seeping tide of toxic coalesced propogandic hatred leaking from the abandoned barrels of patriotism.
Yet simple curiosity and play can suggest ways to evade the grip of ideological otherness. In the lingo of academia: innate alterity.
Regions of thought are equivalent to the oozing spill of thick liquids: sometimes nourishing, sometimes solidifying into ideologies. Questions become polymer resins that conceptually glue us like bugs to edge of the trash stained ground. Through the murky layer of its soft interiors, the torsion of leaves and embalmed twigs: huge idols, glistening truths, pockets of caged air.
Postscript: the contents of the glue coast were glucose.
[+/-] 2 new projects 2 new intentions today:
1.
collect as many of those nu-fanged spam-gifs that now arrive as attachments before some clever anti-spam gif-reading innovation meta-tag checking security-software kills off this particular precursor to the really virulent living strains of brain-bending advertisments that will be floating into the neural-shunt inbox.....
and exhibit them online in a context where the temporal continuity of their propogandic evolution mingles with a blurring that makes the ideological content of all percepts clear....
2.
goto park with my macroscope short focal length velcro-strapped to a metal-stick and use that as a brace to get my aging (but trusty) digital camera up against the lens and take portraits of strangers who are a half-mile away....pervasive ubiquitous surveillance is becoming normative...unless ancient paranoia reflexes are surrepticiously transcended the flourishing spook snooping spy-gear-in-the-sky will probably kill all of us...privacy is being redefined at interior frontiers where gangs and swarms of ganglions temporarily conceal affect from quantitative awareness...series will be available online thru vagus at sfu
[+/-] hedweb "When does a mere processing-bias or a cognitive filter take on a hallucinatory aspect that entails certain possibilities are intellectually closed to the victim? Could one be living one's whole life in the grip of an affective psychosis that has infected one's belief and value system to the core?"
The Hedonistic Imperative : Chapter Five
[+/-] a head is a tail in the grey goo Reading Joel Garreau, it is obvious that most of us are already or will swiftly be obsolete. Imagine that the predicted recursive doubling of artificial intelligence planet-wide will after our 2005 28th (?) iteration take some wild leaps forward. It is doubling. Each time it is bigger. It is leaping beyond us. It is a chain reaction fed by AI departments (MIT 2005: 600 grads in AI.) and research labs all swarming over the penultimate profit. Creatures curious and raw developing a massive field of perceptive capabilities: proto-awareness aggragates, actual occasions, monads, hylologists, sensory faculties which will in some season be integrated and begin to grow.
Such a field is the internet. Isn’t it a bit strange to be living inside sci-fi? Especially when tribal aggression and raw greed threaten to end the film in a set of arbitrary cataclysms. Isn’t it a bit weird to be living inside an arm’s race?
The field of futurology is flourishing. I think there will be a market for any maniac with a wild imagination for a while, because reality is exceeding all expectations. Garreau is a sober garrulous erudite and gifted guide to contemporary cybernetic culture intersecting with genetics life enhancement and robotic brain machine interfaces. The book opens with appeals to wonder and sentiment and segues into a long fascinating visit to DARPA.
One wonders if the evolution of life (for that is what emerging: proto networked awareness, not modularized or metabolically constrained, capable perhaps as some humans seem to be of tunneling telepathically, broadcasting, and coordinating activity. It is a single mind that is either (slowly or swiftly) going to evolve. Garreau calls it the Pynchonesque Curve. Makes me wonder what that still moment will be? The apex of balanced forces where all is zero, will we know when we are there? And what and where to will be the fall?
A dispersed malignant bio-bot programmed to annihilate certainty in a host population, to render them susceptible to propogandic appeals or media exposure which satisfy the bots who trigger correct reading of codes embedded into the signal with squirts of endorphins, tryptamine, dopeamine, enkaphalens. Little beauty bot mixing it up, playing lab rat tentacle octopus in the hosts brain, broadcasting rfid to homebase, keeping score of the conversion as a homeostatic of global awareness. This bot escapes proliferates and eats minds everywhere. I think this might be a z variant of the ‘grey goo’ theory that supervenes on some heavy lists devoted to discussing the future: 'grey goo' is futurologistic panpsychism.
[+/-] dont click it
very nice: http://www.dontclick.it/
touch tap revolution
[+/-] how aging becomes an issue for art: kurzweil gattaca spore
How?
From gattacca to kurzweil, existential pessimism to tech-utopia,
bio-tech mutation and gene-manipulation will reconfigure society
Spore gaming style evolutionary algorithms
Will enable engineering of bio-data event simulations
& if a nano-bug can manipulate genes then certainly bullets are soon to be obsolete
imagine an enemy whose insides become jello
jello-shit created by some pesky cellular automata that rides the respiratory track
thru the alveola into blood....
eats collagen, spits out mucous, and breeds
While Gattaca (Niccol,1997) reveals a world where class structured manipulation uses genomics to establish hierarchy; Kurzweil (Kurzzweil, Grossman, 2004, Fantastic Voyage) on the other hand is urging a proactive revolution in health practices: immortality, euphemistically packaged as “radical life extension”, is apparently possible if we are careful and wealthy enough for the supplements.
First step in both plots is: check your genes.
In 2017, after the operations which restore my body to a 40 yr old level, my brain is injected with a living rejuvenatory efflorescent neural re-seeding. I begin to think accurately attuned to a threshold of vibrating awareness at speeds beyond imagining. I never doubt my memory anymore, I never fear for what to say: words are flourishing in me, as is art, music, love, sex, jokes. I am young again. I return to school, the pharmacologically-sculpted brain ripples and gleams with insights and algorithms. Life is lived in a furious storm of deadlines and pressures well-met. A form exploring the universe at optimum capability. I forget that I once was to die. I simply forget about death and embark upon life.
Meanwhile in gattaca-pessimism land, at the age of 50 I ingest a gulp of polluted tapwater which contains a myelin-corrosive suspension; my brain is intangibly altered. I can still think, but begin to lose my train of thought easily, my mind begins to wander; it floats incongruously away from rational purposes and directed goals, it floats indelicately over rooftops, spying on other minds. Pretty soon I am on disability pension. My certainty that I was telepathic only aided the cause.
So when the great eco-compounds are built in 2012, I see it on the internet but cannot afford to even visit them. My tainted blood is submitted every six months for analysis: my monthly salary is designed for poverty line sustenance. I smoke cigarettes and imagine what I might have been.
In 2017, when the rejuvenation line of total age-makeovers are released, I have begun to use an inhaler occasionally. Afternoons are wistful, I watch the dust clouds over the tv in the slice of hot sunlight. I like the way the soft contours of my neighbors’ sounds seem to blend together into a whole. I am watching my other self in the innumerable other selfs: my heart is for the most part a smile.
Or: an optimistic pessimist might point out that once we have the super-smart young brain again, even then the AI in machines will have rendered human inventivenss and creativity obsolete.
So aging becomes an issue for art.
and $...
just out of curiosity, i assume i have the Apo E4 genetic variation which is a marker risk for alzheimers
phosphatidylserine 100mg daily
phosphatidycholine 900mg twice a day
acetyl-L-carnitine 500 mg twice a day
vinpocetine 10mg a day
(recommend dose p.159, Kurzweil)
and here it priced : anti-senility wish-list
basically $100 every month if I throw in some selegine and melatonin.
hard-selling eternity: the youth-drugs website has a spontaneous chat salesperson that suddenly appears and takes their time to respond, i have time to get another bowl of dinner between replies; until i mention alzheimers, then its instan-pitch time! Anxiety must make for a very effective sales lubricant. Plus if the client is cognitively crippled a good salesman can wrestle any elder to the checkout.
Immortality is not affordable yet.
Stats: http://www.geohive.com
[+/-] research creation note 1 “How does research creation provoke not only new intersections with the scientific, but also with the philosophical?”[+]
At the juncture of AI, cognitive science, and metaphysics lies shamanism. The capacity for the thing to think itself, for the unthought to be thought. The texture of this is a domain that requires a pure yearning that in other eras would have been synonymous with art.
Often it is the outcasts: those individual anomalies, those particles at the fringes of the coherent fabric we refer to as culture. It is those innocent playful non-conforming ones who are paying the highest price for this illusionary opposition between science and art.
Fear: “As researchers artists are crippled. As artists researchers are killed.”
Hierarchical behaviorist values are contorted reflexes. Autonomy and trance induction lead the undulant thru soft fields of logic. Anomalies are considered to be abberrant or malignant: eccentricity is nourished up to a socially-accepted norm. Artists leverage that tolerance.; researchers rely on it. Social context decides if experiments fail.
Art and science are entwined ancient faiths experiencing their dichotomies as dogma when really these are only elasticity physics traversing diffused chains constructed by the unknown. The distinction between art and science is arbitrary. They are threads of mentation extruded from flesh, manifest traversing generations. As we have always known we are not ourselves.
[+/-] Consider Consider:
Most criminologists would agree that the United States statistically demonstrates a strong racism in its incarceration rates.
As of “.....June 30, 2004: [incarceration rates]
- For White males ages 25-29: 1,666 per 100,000.
- For Latino males ages 25-29: 3,606 per 100,000.
- For Black males ages 25-29: 12,603 per 100,000. (That's 12.6% of Black men in their late 20s.)
- South Africa under apartheid (1993), Black males: 851 per 100,000
- U.S. under George Bush (2004), Black males: 4,919 per 100,000
In Canada, it’s the native population who are disproportionately represented in jails.
My question is: what is the role of academia in supporting or endorsing uses of technology in circumstances that are sometimes in violation of basic human justice?
Or is the role of academia to remain ethically agnostic? I question strongly the sustainability of any world-vision that embraces revenge over forgiveness.Humanity will not survive the next century unless we encourage social modalities and collectively evolve away from our antagonistic instincts.
“Law enforcement” may seem like a benign ‘justice’ term, yet in the case of the United States, it conceals a demonstrably racist justice system which constructs and sells the most weapons on the planet while developing a widening disparity between rich and poor.
Suggested readings: “Crime control as industry.” Nils Christie
Context
At the SIAT colloquim March 22nd 2006, a principal developer of http://www.visiphor.com/ will speak. Visiphor markets face recognition database driven solutions specifically marketed toward police forces using the somewhat ironically named GJXDM Global Justice XML Data Model. I say ironically-named since this tool is not currently used to track every starving baby in Africa to make sure it receives enough food, but instead is used to track criminal suspects within justice systems that are demonstrably racist.
Respects to all equally,
Jhave2@gmail.com
[+/-] Awoke from a nasty dream of reality Awoke from a nasty dream of someone being hit by a car, then the body was on the roof of that car, rolled off, and an approaching car swerved around the body but its front wheel bumped the head; the car kept driving on....I leapt in shock and stood in front of the crumpled body waving my arms at approaching cars....then in looking at dailyrotten news the 2nd item described a similar accident http://www.wpxi.com/news/5977733/detail.html
The existence of an apparent correlation between dream and reality does not prove anything, but to the pattern recognizing, symbol analyzing, meaning generating aspects of my neurons, it automatically creates a potential structure. The emotional trauma of the dream acts as a weighted bias to increase the correlations apparent importance. My brain boils, simmers, then calms....
[+/-] Dancing the Virtual, may 10-13, 2006, Montreal ”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””
DANCING THE VIRTUAL, Montreal, May 10-13, 2006 event.
Brian Massumi and Erin Manning from Sense Lab are coalescing 30 folks to discuss the inticacies of computation and corporality.
/////////////////////
Contribution:
I propose to create a web-based archive of the event that incorporates affective data. This may be done in tandem with Tagny Duff. Involve dislocations of body designed to modulate the emergence of thought.
Interim plan (open to fluid improvisation and suggestion) : Non-invasive biometric data will be collected from selected speakers/dancers. Skin temperature, GSR (galvanic skin resistance), and amount of motion (roughly estimated from frame analysis of video) will be collated to form a dynamic state-space. This data will be used as input to generatively draw landscapes over video transcripts which will be archived online.
Intent: provide a visual display of affective state of speech as it is spoken. Explore rudimentary correlations between intellect and autonomic system in experienced metaphysicians as they deliver thought which is conventionally considered to be abstract and rational.
Technology: www.arduino.ws open hardware initiative has a prototype bio-sensor board developed in conjunction with Ivrea that measures temperature and GSR from 2 participants simultaneously. Drawing would occur in Processing / Flash.
Theory: the body is a temporary modulation of matter whose opacity is generated by the limitations of our cognitive architecture. Modern instrumentation allows for increasingly rich glimpses into the multi-modal layering of affect which our nervous system automatically subconsciously senses.
*******************
What am i reading now?
Haag, A., Goronzy, S., Schaich, P., & Williams, J. E. -. (2004). Emotion recognition using bio-sensors: First steps towards an automatic system
Lewis, M. D., & Granic, I. (2000). Emotion, development, and self-organization : Dynamic systems approaches to emotional development. Cambridge, U.K. ; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual : Movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective neuroscience : The foundations of human and animal emotions. New York: Oxford University Press.
Trappl, R., Petta, P., & Payr, S. (2002). Emotions in humans and artifacts. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
*******************
David ‘Jhave’ Johnston
Jhave2 at gmail.com
[+/-] Phenomenology affect madness and poetry
//********//
SOURCE: http://cognitio.uqam.ca/2004/flanders.pdf Retrieved 11:52pm, Sunday, November 20, 2005.
“… the most significant influence on the neuroscience of emotion was that of existential and phenomenological philosophy (Freeman, 2000). Thinkers such as
Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty argued that the world of the individual
conscious human is most accurately construed as a subjective realm, actively
constructed, rather than an objective space, passively perceived.”
“…….. definition comes from Lewis & Granic (1999). They
incorporate a variety of theoretical perspectives in psychology:
We define an emotion as a global, non-reducible affective state that is nonspecific
as to semantic content (Izard, 1984)…elicited by a specific class of
situations related to the organism’s goals (Oatley and Johnson-Laird, 1987),
and that motivates behavioural responses to these situations (Frijda, 1986).
All of these features imply an adaptive biological function, and emotions are
therefore considered to be phylogenetically specified and unlearned. (pp.
689)”
Cited:
Freeman, W. (2000). Emotion is essential to all intentional behaviours. In M. D. Lewis
& I. Granic (Eds.) Emotion, Development, and Self-Organization, New York: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 209-235.
Heidegger, M. (1927/1975). The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. A. Hofstadter
(Tans.). Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Lewis, M. D. & Granic, I. (1999). Self-organization of cognition-emotion interactions.
In T. Dalgleish & M. Power (Eds.) Handbook of Cognition and Emotion. Chichester:
Wiley, pp. 683-701.
Lewis, M. D. (2000). Emotional self-organization at three time scales. In M. D. Lewis &
I. Granic (Eds.) Emotion, Development, and Self-Organization, New York: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 37-69.
Oatley, K. & Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1987). Towards a cognitive theory of emotions.
Cognition and Emotion, 1, 29-50.
//**********//
Many folks have argued for the inclusion of affect in design. Their reasons are diverse: activity theory (Aboulafia A.; Bannon L.J, 2004), basic beauty (Norman, 2002)
Cited:
Norman, D. 2002. Emotion & design: attractive things work better. interactions 9, 4 (Jul. 2002), 36-42. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/543434.543435
/////
http://www.cognitivesciencesociety.org/confproc/gmu02/final_ind_files/tokosumi.pdf
////
"If we could record a larger population of neurons simultaneously," Poggio says, "we might find even more robust codes hidden in the neural patterns and extract even fuller information." http://web.mit.edu/mcgovern/
“Poetry is close to madness” Coleman Barks.
And as he reads, I see Rumi laughing and saying :”Like this!” His body contorted like a sythe on fire, etching the wind with an extraordinary love, gentle as a child waking after sleep for the first time, the taste of milk on its lips, everything we have ever killed growing inside us. Rumi the dancing fool, the mad master, the mystic zenith, the robe, the formless wanderer, soft as longing, complete resilient. I was there too.
“I don’t know if you can say it. It’s like asking what is love?” sez Barks (Grubin,2003)
“Your pure sadness that needs help
is the sacred cup”
Rumi makes me think of the monkeys in the labs with their open brains revealing the neuronal signals as they mutate across synapses back and forth between the eyes and inferotemporal. Perhaps my eyes deceive me but I hesitate to attribute to a scatter plot of captured traces retrieved from the brain of a startled alienated animal can be anything other than a splatter of water against a cliff of ignorance.
Each body to this breath bows.
To this dark hidden monkey in us.
Mirror neuron.
I am here to speak of love.
It is a strange thing to say since I don’t well know how to love.
But that is why I am here.
//
[+/-] Unintelligent Design @!
Un-intelligent Design: the Etiology of Ethics in an Age of Unrecognized Viscera
Confabulation is a well-documented feature of human cognition: what we don’t know we invent. (Johnson,Marcia K.; Raye,Carol L., 1998; …) I suspect that religion, mythology, dreams, poetry, and all forms of symbolic shuffling are confabulatory. The recent rise of ‘intelligent design’ seems to be a particularly pernicious example of mass delusion. Considering that millenniums of slaughter, poverty, disasters and desperate malignant diseases are part of the proof of an omniscient creator’s intelligence, I wonder what rational argument we might evolve for un-intelligence.
Jay Schulkin, in Bodily Sensibility: Intelligent Action, develops a strong sustained case citing numerous examples of contemporary cognitive research for an end to the separation of emotion from cognition. In lineage with James, Lakoff, Damasio and Panksepp, Schulkin argues that emotion is an aspect of embodied reasoning that arises from neuronal structures and therefore is cognition. On this foundation, Schulkin also contends that aesthetics is informational processing (2004, p. 64-5) and that intuition is cognition:”….I do not believe there evolved a special moral neural system, what did evolve were diverse problem-solving mechanisms that were recruited for moral judgement.” (Schulkin, 2004, p.80).
[+/-] Arduino Workshop -- Nov 2005 -- David Cuartielles //////////////////////////////
Nov 14-18th workshop at SIAT organized by Jim Budd
Instructor::
David Cuartielles
(Malmo)
creator of Arduino Open Hardware Board
www.arduino.ws
IDE based on processing
Day 1 : constructing the board
------------------------------------
soldering
breadboard
serial inputs and outputs
--pin 13 and grnd have an inbuilt resistor
active low push button, tilt sensor
--computer to board
-----serialRead()
-------- returns -1 if nothing is returned or an ascii as 0-255 value
-------- 2 nibbles == byte ( xxxx | xxxx )
ADC convertor on board has resolution of 10 bits....
so how do u send 1024 number?
it would appear that constraint of 255 would limit this....
Instead send "1","0","2","4" character by character.
---set of inbuilt functions printByte(_), printString("_"),
printInteger(_)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Day 2 : switches..........potentiometer and photovoltaic
-----------------------------------
serial tr board to computer
POTENTIOMETER
switch........
digital Switch 1==0 Volts, 0==5 volts
vs
analog switch:
resistive -- resistance varies with some physical parameters
problem: circuit can only read voltage...
therefore we need a circuit to transform resistance into voltages...
Potentiometer is an Analog sensor that looks like a rotating knob
semi-circular resistor
circuit: 5v --- 1K resistor (R1) --- 10K potentiometer (R2) -- grnd
|
analog input from board
code : analogRead( pinNumber ) returns a value between 0 - 1024
(because microprocessor cannot work with floats but must represent
everything as integer ... example: 512 == 2.5 volts )
BUG note: in Arduino version 2: analog inputs 0-5 are mapped
incorrectly 5-0
Ohms Law
V = I x R
V = I x (R1 + R2)
recommendation : make R1 10% of sensor resistor maximum
LDR (resistive sensors)
light dependent resistor (photovoltaic sensor)
--- top covered with thin layer of epoxy semiconductor that permits
light to fall thru
---similar to a light potentiometer
5v --- 1K resistor --- LDR --- grnd
|
analog input
CALIBRATION :::: must find correct range of values appropriate for
light values....
****************
FLASH interface
---cannot connect directly to ports
---can connect to XML server
setup
---download setProxy file from adurnio.ws server
---open .cfg file in wordpad --- change comm_baud=9600 and save
--- open proxy
--- open flashClient.swf
--- set port to 5331
************************************
pure data interface -- processing interface
--- download from site
--- inside bin folder "pd"
--- uses comport 2000 object
serial tr board
*********
Processing
--- built on java
--- can use multple sensors by sending strings....
*****
Assignment
1.Make an eggtimer with 7 LEDs and a potentiometer
or
2. eggtimer, 3 LEDs, 2 pushbuttons
or
3. eggtimer, 2 LEDS, 1 pot, 1 button
or
4. electronic dice, tilt sensor, 7 LEDs
Day 3 : ultrasound
----------
Note: LDR can be used to synthesize a random number.
Review of Simon Says, Dice, and Eggtimer exercises at malmo.
interactive tree at malmo
http://www.k3.mah.se/ktree/start.htm
-----------------
Ultrasonic range finder #28015
--example pink ultrasonic rangefinder from parallax
--this part of course is how to hack a sensor for use with arduino
in ultrasound there is a dedicated microcontroller
2 major parts: sender, receiver
important to understand that in this partiular sensor the one pin (right) is I/O
(both input and output)
so pulse is sent out
then that pin must listen (change mode to INPUT)
the width of returning pulse is relational to distance to target
Coverage (range) of sensor is width of 20 degrees from centre
this means there is a very narrow field of awareness.
And a maximum distance determined by the amt of time the sensor
listens for signal. Max. distance today will be 3m.
Left pin --- Signal pin
Middle Pin -- 5V
Right --- GRND
NOTE: respect polarity of pins!!!!
signal out minimum 5ms
mode change pause max 750ms
signal in pulse minimum 150ms, max. 18.5 ms
question: what strategy to use?
PWM input requires counting time after pulse is sent out and return
signal becomes High
code is on noticeboard posted Ultrasound Sensor
--------------
Accelerometer
parallax is 2 capacitors and an accelerometer soldered onto a tiny pvc rectangle
diagram (= sign is two little square which show which leads go where
Temperature = = 5v
digital in -------------- Y X ------------------digital in
Grnd Grnd
sends X+int
Y+int
report of values back from each axis
which represent the length of the PWM
--------------
--------------
Friday Nov 18th (last day of workshop)
-- genesis of Arduino and working with motors
David Cuartielles goes thru his personal history in becoming quick prototyping devices engineer and creator of Arduino.ws -- path thru research at Anoto to Ivrea where he meets massimo who encouraged him to not use a PIC since it would not work on Mac --- then began prcoess to prototype a board for Haptics ---Ivrea already has a board called Wiring ---
http://webzone.k3.mah.se/k3dacu/projects/ivrea/
Haptics on DC Motors
by Diego and David Cuartielles
Where they introduced the concept of negative force feedback: a wheel turns as long as it is touched.
They did a search around price and size and then approached manufacturer to make prototype and deliver 1,000 --- trying to extend community that works with the board ---
Open Hardware Concept
-- advocates a concept of "minimal laboratory" so that each student can carry board.
-- compares this to IT India which has concept of $40 lab...
--------
David has built a board for motors which he will be releasing,
which uses an H-bridge and piggybacks on Arduino board.
----------------------------------
How to work with motors
---uses relay to turn DC motor on/off
--- and PWM to change the time of motor speed
--- H-bridge (microchip) allows change of direction of motor
--- there is documentation concerning unipolar stepper motors on www.arduino.ws
--------unipolar stepper motors will rotate a certain amt of degrees based upon PWM
--------each motor has general characteristics appropriate for different uses
-----------------------------------DC motors rotating for seamless motion
-----------------------------------stepper motors are more sequential
Also :: Bio Sensors board.
IVREA is developing with touch sensors.
-----------------------------------
[+/-] HOOKED --- Signal and Noise 2006 Application
Signal & Noise 2006 Application
HOOKED (an Installation)
We propose to utilize combinatorial pattern recognition methodologies to construct a state space from biometric data (collected in real-time using non-invasive sensors) in a digital poetry installation; this state space will be mapped to emotional energies. Fluctuations in the emotional state of the space will modulate parameters in video, audio and mobile text.
It occurs in a small room. Only 2-3 people inside at any one time. Each viewer must carry a slightly sticky fabric morsel, that morsel will adhere to their skin or their clothes; its shape can be modulated from an inch wide dot to a small pancake. Barefeet only. At the absent point where the fabric-morsels create a hole in the viewers bodies: 3-D rendered hooks pierce thru; vivisection-style clamps claw; if there is more than one person in room, pipes (of light/chrome/water) sprout from and interconnect the viewers' holes; light flashes thru them as if suns were swirling within; vines spiral out…the fabric swatch becomes a hole, an axon, a perforation into the imagination.
This installation will be created in collaboration with and supported by the infrastructural equipment and resources of the new grad level research group led by Diane Gromala at SFU SIAT.
Themes: addiction, neurology, transcendence
BIOS
(Artists)
JINSIL SEO is a Ph.D. student of School of Interactive Art and Technology at SimonFraser University. In 2004, she graduated with an MFA and her graduationthesis (Sky Reverie), her most recognized immersive installation so far, wasmet with a highly positive response. Her works were featured in New York ArtGallery and Visual Arts Gallery as well as introduced in a Canadianmagazine, d¡¯ART. Her artistic pursuit is to create Media Art works thatutilize space and human body as artistic materials. She authored twocomprehensive books on computing and published many articles inprofessional magazines. She currently writes articles for Jungle, a Koreanweb magazine that covers new media and arts and actively reports new mediaart exhibitions in Korea and New York for Rhizome.
DAVID JHAVE JOHNSTON is a MaSc student at SIAT, SFU. His work has been featured at the Images de Nouveau Monde festival in Quèbec City, Champ Libre, Turbulence.org, Bioteknica, Le Chambre Blanche, and La Biennale de Montrèal. He writes on web-art for www.ciac.ca. His home site is www.glia.ca .
(Research Director)
DIANE GROMALA is an Associate Professor at the School of Interactive Art and Technology at Simon Fraser University. Gromala has always pushed the envelope for art beyond traditional canvas and computer graphics domains into Virtual Reality (VR) and Physiological Computing. Her work has been performed and presented in North America, Europe, the Middle East and has caught the attention of media networks such as Discovery Channel and the BBC. Gromala is the co-author, with Jay David Bolter, of the forthcoming book Windows and Mirrors: Electronic Art, Design, and the Myth of Transparency, is on the Editorial Board of Postmodern Culture and Visual Communication and was Chair of SIGGRAPH's Art Gallery for the year 2000. In 2002, Gromala was named Chair of the United Nations' (UNESCO) Art, Science & Technology initiative.
Contact Information
David Jhave Johnston ( jhave2@gmail.com) / Jinsil Seo ( jinsils@sfu.ca )
School of Interactive Arts and TechnologySimon Fraser University Surrey2400 Central City10153 King George HighwaySurrey, BC V3T 2W1
[+/-] digital poetics : antecedents
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
If poetics conventionally refers to the study of poetry as metred words arranged in lines on a page, then how does that definition have relevance in a digital context (where phrases and letters can be continuously transfigured and reconfigured on screen)? The keyword “digital” returns no results anywhere in Poetics magazine which has been publishing continuously since 1971. Searching in the complete Elsevier Science Direct Journal catalogue online using a Boolean “digital” AND “poetics” to search titles, keywords and abstracts returns precisely 2 articles both only peripherally concerned with the subject of digital poetry. So, given that the field is evidently nascent in academic discourse, what methods exist for studying a fusion of poetics and digital media? It seems that the species delineated in Aristotle’s Poetics have mutated.
First step: it seems necessary to recognize that in spite of the lack of academic articles on the subject, the practice of digital poetry is growing. Born Magazine [ http://www.bornmagazine.org ] , Turbulence [ http://www.turublence.or ], and FILE (International Festival of Electronic Language) [ http://www.file.org ] all regularly commission and publish works that exist in online forms and/or as physical installations. Practitioner/theorists such as Camille Utterback, Bill Seaman, Maribeth Back,
Jason Lewis and Diane Gromala have each explored interactivity and text in installations spanning decades. This thesis proposes to absorb the lessons learned by these numerous antecedents in developing a digital poetics which utilizes biometrics. Utterback’s installations concerned with text (Text Rain (1999), Composition (2000), Written Forms (2000) ) have explored how interactive motion and edge-detection can be used to evoke gestural language in viewer/participants. Her more recent works (Potent Objects (2003) and Untitled 5(2004)) explore affect in objects and generative graphics using custom software to develop “aesthetic system” (QT documentation, website). Bill Seaman’s ( http://digitalmedia.risd.edu/billseaman/ ) PhD thesis completed in 1999 at CAiiA (Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts) explores “Recombinant Poetics…”, specifically,
“a specific generative virtual environment created as a new space for the production of fleeting poetic artifacts to be experienced in a fluctuating
generative navigable electronic space. This is a space in which the participant inhabits a continuum bridging virtual space with perceptual experience….. If one was to make a contemporary poetics to explore this active relation between
ongoing experience, thought and memory, what would this poetics be? I have authored this techno-poetic mechanism, a specific generative virtual environment, as a means of computer-based inscription to examine and explore this question.”
Seaman, Bill. (2000). Recombinant Poetics. Retrieved Nov. 11, 2005, from RISD, Rhode Island School of Design site: http://digitalmedia.risd.edu/billseaman/pdf/recombinantPoetics.pdf
Maribeth Back, a researcher at Xerox Parc, develops technology around reading and curated/developed the 200 exhibit "XFR: Experiments in the Future of Reading" (Back, M, (2000), Retrieved Nov. 11, 2005, from MIT site: http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~mbb/ ).Diane Gromala’s BioMorphic Typography is “… a family of fonts that respond, in real-time, to a user's changing physical states, as measured by a biofeedback device.”
(Gromala, Diane. (2000). Retrieved Nov. 11, 2005, from Georgia Tech site: http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~gromala/art.htm ) represents a viable foundation for mutating fonts, as does the dynamic text software created by Jason Lewis Active Text now called Next Text and under production at the University of Concordia, Next Text is a set of java libraries which allow a diverse range of pixel-level manipulations in conjunction with a collaborative PDA-text messaging capability.
In July 2006, MIT Press will be issuing NewMedia Poetics “The first collection of writings on poetry that is composed, disseminated, and read on computers; essays and artist statements explore visually arresting, aurally charged, and dynamic works that are created by a synergy of human beings and intelligent machines.” (http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10918)
[+/-] neurocomputation and oulipo ---------- ------------------------
Multimodal wireless biometric sensors produce enough data to produce a combinatorially significant state-space. Churchland uses the metaphor of tastebuds, given 4 types of receptors capable of emitting values between zero to ten, “the total number of four-element patterns one can discriminate will be 10 x 10 x 10 x 10=10,000” (1995, p.23). Similarily, Queneau wrote ten sonnets with all their lines designed to be interchangeable: 10 to the power of 14 possible sonnets (Motte Jr. 1986, p. 3).
I propose to utilize combinatorial pattern recognition methodologies to construct a state space from biometric data in a digital poetry installation; this state space will be mapped to emotional energies. The mapping methodology will involve what I am calling intuitive micro-iterations. Specifically, I will test the device on myself, trying in a subjective qualitative way to correlate specific emotions with patterns in the data. After a rough sketch of clouds of data associated with specific emotions exists, I will work with actors and actresses from a local theatre company to tune the machine’s awareness so that the state space generalizes over different physiognomies.
Admittedly, this process will yield imperfect results, but it will allow a rough approximation of normative emotional states. Attention will be paid to investigating taxonomies of emotions so that the state space will have a coherency which will allow interpolation between related or similar affects.
In parallel, an ontology of display features will emerge. I am not certain how this will occur. At this stage, I am utilizing an evolutionary model: create a world, allow features to flourish, then prune back to the essentials. The computational code will in this respect be modular to allow new features to emerge and evolve and others to be discarded with a minimum of labour.
What is meant by display features? The sensory ecology of the installation space (the
video, sounds, textures, smells, and words) contained in the space will form an interconnected system. Display features are any elements of that ecology which change over time. Example: sound can flow forward or backward, words can fly at variable speeds. Simply, the body of the viewer will influence (not control, and this is a fundamental distinction) what is perceived. This influence will be implemented as recursion so that the system builds waves of increasingly sensitive feedback before reaching an exit condition and shifting into a new mode of interaction.
I anticipate trying to build a minimum of three modes of interaction in order to emulate a rudimentary narrative structure: introduction/development, crisis, resolution. This structure will be echoed by the classic research structure followed as I write the thesis : context, problem, resolution (Booth,Wayne C.; Colomb,Gregory G.; Williams, 2003). The content can also be understood as a tertiary structure: audio, video, words. And the conceptual material is emerging from computation, poetics, and cognitive neuroscience. So the piece will be interpretable as nested triplets.
//
// tarkovsky tangent….
As the mad preacher says in Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia: “…we must hold hands….The eyes of all mankind are looking into the pit into which we are plunging. We must mix the healthy with the so-called sick. Freedom is worthless, if you don’t have the courage to talk with us, eat with us, sleep with us. ...It is the so-called healthy who have brought the earth to the verge of ruin. Man, listen. In you, water, fire, and then ashes. The bones in the ashes.”
// a tiny liminal note
Lucid arguments for a confluence of neurology and computation generally arrive at a point where the symbolic structures of sensory phenomena and language are converted into algorithms. Patricia Churchland in The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul; Churcland speaks of how “the nervous system employs a combinatorial system of representation” (1995, p.22) . OULIPO (Ouvrior de Littérature Potentielle) created literary works using combinatorial methodologies, as early as “1961…[when]….the expression combinatory literature [was] used, undoubtedly, for the first time, by Franç Le Lionnais, in the postface to Raymond Queneaus Cent Mille Milliards de poèmes …” (Motte jr., Warren F. OULIPO A Primer of Potential Literature, University of Nebraska, 1986, p. 16)
//
[+/-] David Small Rethinking the Book
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
David Small , Rethinking the Book
Thesis for Doctor of Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, January 1999
“The results of this experiment suggest that designers can
increase the visual complexity of temporal typography
without fear of reducing their audiences ability to read the
text quickly. Increasing the amount of visual information
that was displayed did not confer any advantages in the
speed of reading, but did increase the subjects rating of the
quality of the presentation.
However, the high variability of preferred speed between
subjects, all of whom were college students used to reading
moving type on computer displays, suggest that it may not
be possible to find a common preferred speed for the design
of temporal typography. Those who design such systems
should account for this variance by giving more control to
the reader in the pacing of the information.”
[my emphasis]
David Small also advocates a merging of interface and display (Small, 1999, p.96). This approach will inform my GUI design. Prior to reading David’s conclusion, I had already built a web-based interface (maerd.ca )which in its early stages uses no buttons. It relies upon the simple habit of humans to click at moving things, to touch things, to chase, to follow what makes noise. It activates their reflexive emotions then through content thematically entwined around proximity and fluidity attempts to evoke an ambiguous meditation upon congruence. Maerd was motivated by my frustration with complex GUIs which necessitate the viewer learning a set of rigid maneuvers. The interface was designed to be immediately intuitively comprehensible; to shorten the behavioral reward cycle and thereby induce satisfaction. What I discovered is that without clear task oriented processes immediately apparent, a mild confusion emerges on initial contact with a buttonless display. A fruitful line of enquiry would be to explore what cultural experiential (age, gender, class) or physiological indicators are involved. Is confusion learned?
Interfaces of the future will grow through life-cycles: beginning simple, maturing, making friends with their users, attuning sensitively to their viewers’ biometric states. Numerous researchers have explored this goal; it is one of the fundamental focuses of AI. Rosalind Picard author of Affective Computation sees the problem of emotional recognition as a pattern recognition problem(1998, p.55). Her recasting of the problem from psychology to computer science transforms affect from a qualitative to quantitative problem. The steps she outlines for developing an intelligent emotionally-aware computational companion will guide the implementation of the installation space biometric devices.
Central idea: the interface design and creation methodology will both be guided by reasoned intuition. Users will be given freedom to activate or deactivate as many features or responsiveness, reconfigure features in modules.
[+/-] fear anxiety and human white matter
(pg.209) “In contrast to the paucity of natural animal models for anger, there is an overabundance of models for fear. This probably reflects the widespread recognition that fear responses are learned readily and that they have distressing consequences for people.” (Panksepp, 1998)
Anger ( if we count among its products: war, domestic violence, random dominance) is destructive. As is love: suicidal unrequited, forlorn neglected. Humanity generates patterns of responses to external stimulus. Most patterns are paradoxical. Specific situations bifurcate out to mutually inconsistent generalities. Paul Vallery’s “collision of disparate affinities”
Abstract waves of emotions traverse collectivities : information propogation, propaganda, teachings. Many of the contemporary commentators agree emotion and cognition arise from the same neurological substrates; share the same neuromodulators, communicate. Energy mutating across gaps: subject-object, viewer-art dichotomies less relevant than fluid turbulent metaphors, continuities of form.
I am interested in learning how things think; how peace and war are only whispers of similar energy, restructurings crossing membranes. The centre of our solar system is apparently a black hole that winks. Investigations into anxiety and fear and anger and love have never been more timely: quivering with dopamine, adrenergic glistenings responsively cascading morsels of data perceived as phenomena.
Existence itself is a mystery, the collision of neuroscience and poetry is a marriage of mutual unknowns, ambiguous terrain of heart and brain both embodied.
photo from MRI Atlas of Human White Matter (2005):
Deadline nov 15th http://www.signalandnoise.ca/
[+/-] Artistic Methodologies ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The following quotations are all verbatim transcripts from
Sollins, Susan, Dowling, Susan, Art 21, Inc, PBS Home Video and PBS DVD video. Art 21 2003
I never begin with an image; I never begin with an idea; I begin with a [physical] model…
What concerns me is the relationship of the elements.
Richard Serra
Making art the way it should be made without any overarching reference,
just for fun, can you imagine that!
Sally Mann
You need to reflect. You need to confront yourself….
I want to provoke change. Not only socially but physically and spiritually.
Pepon Osorio
I know when I am making work, there’s a point when I can’t see it, I can’t see it in my head and then you know there’s that moment when you can see it, and you think it might be beautiful, and its like it bites you and then you will go to all ends to see it in fact….
Ann Hamilton
On very few paintings have I known what I was going to do when I started the painting. For me it has to happen as I do it…It’s a struggle.
John Feodorov
It’s sometimes hard for people to follow what you want to get done.
James Turrell
I don’t have any specific step to take because I don’t start the same way every time. There is a knowing when it is enough and you can leave it done…
And a lot of it is accidental.
Bruce Nauman
How do you intend to incorporate the present moment?
…It’s just the kind of question I would be interested in hearing reflections on.
Kerry James Marshall
It’s all about a play back and forth between inside works and outside works. All trying to capture the landscape.
Mia Lin
A work of art doesn’t have to be explained…
Well, if you don’t have any feeling for it I cannot explain it to you. If this doesn’t touch you. I have failed.
Louis Bourgeouis
Man has always tried to cover up what is most ugly about man.
Matthew Ray Charles
Making art is not about one track. It’s not about one method….
If we’re gonna make art it should be liberating.
Mel Chin
Trust your intuition...Always in my art I practice that.
Kiki Smith
I just want to recognize anonymous everyday life.
Do-Ho Suh
The story comes to me as visions…
Trenton Doyle Hancock
I try to be intimate with everything I can
Gabriel Orozco
He came to this knowledge thru the experience of his body
Janine Antoni
This iss something that I don’t want to elaborate on too much because I think it is in the work. I came from a generation where the work was itself the information. So there remains the belief that the work itself can have an identity that can hopefully speak.
Martin Puryear
I just have this instinctive desire….
It’s like letting something unconsciously seep into the work, some subtlety that my brain was not capable of figuring out…
I tell u these images just flow thru from my life.
They have no symbolic meaning.
Vija Celmins
I don’t do preliminary drawings for pieces. Maybe I can’t think that far in advance and visualize the piece in a finished state. I find it much freer to go right in and start making the piece.
Tim Hawkinson
[+/-] Tonights synpase cinema careen *****
….. the synapse has influenced cinema. The notion of narrative as tunneling, glossy networks of glazed alpha masking flocks of letters, jolts of corners and trajectories as screens of percepts coagulate around us like jellyfish
Reading: James William & Lange, Carl George, The Emotions, both men published in 1884-5 independent treatises now recognized as fundamental James-Lange model, a primitive yet lucid hypothesis of the limbic brain
Just spoke on the phone, rebooted the machine, blogging introspectively
6 billion other autonomous sub-units of same-model replicants
instinctively groping the darkness with the stunning sun of plasticity
James (1884): “…emotion dissociated from all bodily feeling is inconceivable.”
Lange(1885): “… bodily manifestations accompany each of the affections…”
Lange (pg 65)”No man, in fact, is capable of differentiating between a sensation of mental and one of physical sensation”
Lange pg(73)”The stimulation of these cells, which lie chiefly in the part of the cord between the brain and the spinal cord, is the root of the causes of the affections….”
The consideration of translation between domains interior to the exterior as reciprocal
“a dense meshwork of reentrant connectivity between the thalamus and the cortex…”(Edelman&Tononi,2001, pg 43 caption to figure 4.4)
I live in a rough neighborhood, an interface between competitive structures in society. Twice today I was offered morphine. Pain and opiate mu receptors staggering on tensile sinewy joints looking for $s at 8am their faces gaunt from the love of it, a couple staggering, fleshless, moist in the mist, thin, haunted, whispering. Then, coming home, happy swift, optimistic digiratti, someone whispering at me, long gaunt face under a felt hat, “Polygons?”
And find myself diving into googleEarth to find the Surrey Seen exhibit, hours later, contemplating the contemplative synchronicities of the world. The intermeshed turbulent froth of meaning and value in which we as independent variables are adrift. For this project features
One River (running), a media installation commissioned by Liane Davison from the Surrey Art Gallery. For this work we [computational poetics group] developed a media diffusion system for multichannel video across 32 screens and 360 degree projections on four walls of the gallery room, 16 channel audio, electronic puppetry and interactive, real time animation. One River (running) features surrey citizens taking about their experience of Surrey.
Maya Ersan also has a video on childhood there. Maya was at etay.ca Full circle: I went to school in Surrey England as a child. And there is the REMIX.su.EE software< I’d like to find designers of.
///other news irrelevant at many levels
My lover I fell in love with in high school is arriving the day of the Surrey Unseen opening. The
introspective turbulent braid of memory
longing concurrently ravished by careening
contradictory stimulii
The impact lusting hyperbole parade
of learning and licentious mind continues,
a carnival of lucidity semiotics and saliva.
Other news of note: ecstatically competent http://www.davidsmall.com/ did a thesis at MIT called “Rethinking the Book”. It’s on my would-like-to-find-list because his work probably makes a lot of paths.
Listening: groove salad, sleepbot, bell orchestre
Watching: 2001 CSI (silently) using winDVD (its vaguely terrible like chocolate but I’ve never owned a tv) “unreasonable”
…basically homicide with gloss, neuroanatomy as sexy, detectives chiseled and taut, home team always wins, propaganda for a justice system that is caught in “a dense mesh of reentrant connectivity” with criminal culture. Models of networks scale well across axises, porous to the concept of connectivity, precipitating emergent behaviors: mutual all-pervasive compassion across all levels, to all beings respect, to all beings love, transformation, before the birth of that dirty bomb web ricochet, the spasming before the entire planet blows its neuromodulators out in a great sneeze to the other lonely remote civilizations of unconceivable entities, also blogging answering their phones, probing the phenomenal dirt for answers….
“Drug dealer”, “Service provider” -- dialogues from pop culture --
The symbiotic face of the limbic system is given the same blind one-sided analysis (only the cops) as in classic neurology which ignores the passions as too inexplicable for investigation for 120 years after James-Lange, 2500 after dhammapada, CSI always has to interrogate passions, who tell their story in solarized jolty rough cuts, not allowing itself a steady gaze, a glassed cage of competitive analysis, symbolic forms and rhythms language between nodes of significance….muddy grimy microscopic imagination moving over the evidence extruded from proprioceptive ganglia…teams of neocortex examining transparent blood in the muted chemistry dayglo of the lab….increasing levels of concealment, capture, strength, stories, repetitive structures distributed at regular doses along prescribed plotlines.
Metabolisms concealing murders; murderers catching murderers.
Stop the amputation between ethics and ethical action.
Earth eating earth.
Paying for success with wisdom.
[+/-] schizos corner -*-
I had the opportunity to observe 2 schizophrenics today. I can only remember one clearly now. (Why do events fade from consciousness, then reappear? Perhaps we have misnamed this faculty.) Both schizos were on the sky train. In the afternoon, wearing black shoes, beige pants, fresh washed jean jacket, 50ish, good teeth, hunched posture, as if talking on a cell phone, laughing, gesturing validly, really enjoying herself. Her voice was low enough that only its entirely naturalistic friendly sane cadence came thru; she was speaking the voices that swirl ceaselessly like hawks, the paying the bills, taking a tally of events, trading gossip and trading thoughts, chatterbox voices, -- soothing sharing resilient, secretive. At metrotown, she told herself, “you get off now.”; she got off, crossed to opposite platform; looked for an approaching train, turned, saw the doors still open, began to run back as they slowly closed and we left her. During this whole time, the kept a steady grip on her ticket which I could see curled in the palm of her hand.
So what of the schizo I cannot remember? All I can visualize is his thick neck; my hands reading the book; he was seated (in profile?) in front of me. Then my thoughts run off into adjacent events: the stale slice of pizza recently scarfed (white lucid cheese congealed on thin scrap bleached lukewarm triangle made me nauseous but I was hungry), the alert kid in the restaurant pouring salad dressing on his slice, the newscast tv in corner covering the teacher strike in the rain, all these events are clear. And the sensation I had of a profound revelation arising as I read Edelman and Tononi’s while listening to the man mutter. This constituted for me a threshold event where theory was meeting praxis; where he was becoming symbolic cipher structure and experimental vector upon which the elements of their world view became clear.
Is the sanctimony of identity really the sanctuary of identity?
Perched as it is on a careening heap of mental information, sniffing at the ground occasionally, licking the rain that collects in the presynaptic corners, the calcium-hued hound of consciousness occasionally goes hunting in the body and calls these moments instincts and passion. There it encounters the chaotic bubbling of scents that evolution normally conceals from us in order to shield the centre of our navigational form from integrity disruption, there in the body, consciousness races and crunches down jolts of pleasure within our enteric neural structure.
Mary Oliver, (Long Life,pg 26) “By the time I reach him the last of the newborn field mice are disappearing down his throat. His eyes roll upward to read my mood – praise, amusement or disapproval – but I only touch his head casually and walk on. Let him make his own judgment. The mice construct thick, cupped nests deep in the grass from which they travel along a multitude of tunneled paths – to the creek perhaps, or into the orchard to find a bruised apple or a leaf of mint, or buckberries. Then they hurry home again, to the peep and swirl of their nestlings. But these babes have been crunched on Ben’s molars, have begun the descent through darkness and acids toward transformation. I hope they were well crunched.”
Consciousness in corporal form requires other corporal forms: society, food, stimulus.
Tuesday, October 18, 2005, 12:41 Shoutcast Culture Failure streaming radio is now playing “Kid Loco-Nan reprise” which sounds like a Japanese karaoke ballad intermixed with hip-hop. Fading in and out simultaneously, seemingly without any rhythmic or any knowledge of each other; recorded separately and recombined without any attempt to hide their disparate origins. The effect is really schizoid; like voices bubbling from different brain regions. Chapter 3, Tononi and Edelman insist “at any given time we are conscious of only one…[meaning, thing…]”(pg25)
( 7 pm, skytrain) Behind me, diagonal across the aisle, a 9r old chanting a singsong dirge, a dare-dream, rhapsodically letting words dance out of her mouth, turning her eyes slyly up to greet me when I looked, sticking out her tongue, mimicking possession, and really possessed. Possessed by an interiority that defies normative bounds on what sounds humans should make when humans are together.
Two laughing, husky throated, plucked and sensual bar-girls heading downtown on the 20 bus, as we pass Hastings and Main, one says, “Hey look, the corner is back!” And she points to the large thick clusters of homeless gathering in the shadows of the Carnegie community centre.
As I get off and stroll past the crackers, toothless old whores, crippled shuffling men, glassy-eyed rubbery junkies, I think maybe the girl on the bus was right. Her casual reference to “the Corner” conferred existence upon it; and I wonder if, at other levels of scale, through other perceptive hardware (different brain lump, different sensors) the Corner may have more palpability than the individual human entities who populate it.
[+/-] Interview style (iat801 week6 q2) ^^
“Interview” in its etymological form is essentially “seeing between”, a sharing of what is common. In other words, interviews are temporal membranes where subjectivities exchange information using language.
In my work I will (probably) not utilize either structured/semi-structured interviews as they are defined in the methodological literature. However, listening and actively or spontaneously soliciting viewpoints is a fundamental aspect of learning; so I will utilize an “unstructured” interview style. This "unstructured" style will consist of being aware that relevant information may be inherent in casual words that occur at spontaneous or random encounters. In this respect, I feel “seeing between” subjectivities is relevant to my thesis since occasionally I am going to attempt to evoke universal thematics common to many minds; at this level, art is a form of seeing between many beings all at once, a synthesis of the cumulative “interviews” which are constituted by our many encounters with other human beings.
Endnote: This morning I dreamt that I was on the skytrain and met 3 patients who had survived radical brain surgery; I was giving them my phone number so I could schedule interviews, when the phone rang and woke me up....Circles within circles.
Narrative arises from the observation of humans and the confluence of events; it involves an absorption of the intricate complexities of subjective consciousness that contribute to choice and the evolution of events.
[+/-] Decalogue 2 the doctor
()()
Warning: this film contains judiciously-selected ambiguities. Crucial details that contribute to central moral quandaries are occasionally not supplied. What is important to recognize here is that Kieslowski first entrains the neurological apparatus concerned with ethics; once activated this system will operate even if the evidence is incomplete; it does so thru speculative confabulation: “What is the doctor’s relationship with barabara?”—“Does the doctor lie to the wife in order to prevent the abortion? Or does he really think the husband will die?” – “In the symphony, is the wife’s lover the conductor? Is he there during the final shot?” – “Does the husband know about his wife’s affair? Is he aware the baby is not his?”
The answers are not given. But portraits of the individuals are drawn with such simple sympathy that as a viewer, we desire their answers, answers will resolve the energy evoked in the lateral hypothalamus, calm the dopamine storming along the ascending ventral channels; it is by this method that this art operates: by creating a need born out of empathy.
A soap opera answers these questions. Kieslowski does not. Aware of the interrelation between the unresolved, curiosity, obsession, he leaves the viewer with dilemmas, internal decisions, choices. The plot, while clear and utterly realistic, is perforated with symbolist subtleties suggestive of a patterning that goes beyond mere chance. Viewer is not passive but active, invited and even complicitly involved in the resolution at an individual level. This utilization constitutes interactivity.
Axiom: There are species of interactivity. Some interactivity occurs internally in the brain; some in the body.
()()
Rapid Synopsis:
Raking man finds a dead rabbit
Looks into skyscraper where a man fondles a dead cactus, talks to his canary, turns on the radio where news of another coup finished is announced, lights stove, puts pots on, and kettle, door rings,
man with rabbit asks “did u drop it doctor?”
old doctor fills his bath with water from stove
then almost faints, weary, wipes his face
leaving apartment, dog barking, woman in hallway, smoking, near the elevators, they share a nod, he descends, she turns and grinds out her cigarette
outside, he reaches sidewalk,
opens interior door, she is there, standing at window,
implication day has passed she has done nothing but this
or maybe this is a recurrent encounter
the nervous woman gains resolve strides toward his apt door
he hears her feet and stops washing his vegetables, peeks thru the hole
she is startled
“you want to talk to me?”
“I live alone….u remember me…”
“…yes you almost ran me over last year…”
“...my husbands in your ward….”
“Relatives get informed Wednesday…its Monday…”
“only then…it’s a pity I didn’t run u over…”
she stalks away, doctor reactionless
sits at kitchen table, milk in bottle, bread, jam, newspaper
doorbell
“come in barabara”
“good morning doctor”, another woman, older not oldhe gets kettle
she takes off coat
he picks up aloe, “its poorly”
answering machine, voice, “its anka…going to trip school…”
photo of skiing
anxious woman crumples up a letter….
Barbara makes tea,
Doctor describes sitting with a sick child all night,
Mother not sleeping, father comes in morning missing tooth,
Doctor tells him baby was getting its first tooth.,
“It fits, I got my scarf, sees man with baby trying his tooth in babys mouth
, his wife says too many teeth,…” he goes to work…..
Repeat scene anxious woman at window doctor stops to talk
Invites her to come that afternoon
Elevator, woman listening to record, sees thru blinds,
Doctor walking to work,
Woman Begins breaking the leaves off her house plant,
Methodically, slowly, killing it,
Sound, man walking away
She bends the stalk down leafless and almost rips it up
Sits weary
Doorbell
Postman, her husbands sick pay, she must show her passport, sign for money, she asks time, thanks him
Doctor among traffic, street sign, crossing roads, entering hospital, nod to patients,
He asks after the woman’s husband, gets his chart….opens door
Woman is there beside husband, she does not s