"I read this book. It's pretty good even if they made it in a week. Worth the fifty bucks, easy."

— Bruce Sterling


In February of this year, I had the distinct pleasure of being invited to the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, a zygote of an institution nestled between departments at Carnegie Mellon University, to work on a strange collaborative project called a "booksprint." A booksprint, I discovered, is a fairly new practice, derived from the world of open-source software "codesprints." In this version, a group of writers work exhaustively for a week on a shared project, which is then made into a book at the conclusion of their session. In seven days, our group of sprinters turned an idea—"let's write a book about the intersection between art, science, and technology!" —into a 190-page, full-color, nattily-designed compendium of the current moment in art/science affinities.


The book in its developmental stages.

We wrote collaboratively in shared, networked documents, ensuring that the finished book would have no single author. Of course, we all have our specialities: Régine Debatty the international new media blogger was our encyclopedia of projects, Andrea Grover the project leader our thesis synthesizer, Pablo Garcia the image-hounding art history scholar, and, well, you can see my pawprints all over the sections on science fiction, utopian architecture, and visionary philosophy.

We worked passionately, discussed endlessly, enlisted the research assistance of dozens of interns, and the finished project emerged (relatively) without incident. I still can't believe that a group of erstwhile strangers could so swiftly and seamlessly brainstorm, structure, research, and design something of such substance from nothing.



That said, it's been many months since we left Pittsburgh to return to the hectic pace of our normal lives. What was created in a week has taken nearly a year to fine-tune, but I'm immensely proud to announce that we're finally finished. Behold, NA/SA: New Art/Science Affinities, a book about the intersection between art, science, and technology.

The book includes meditations, interviews, diagrams, letters and manifestos on maker culture, hacking, artist research, distributed creativity, and technological and speculative design. Sixty international artists and art collaboratives are featured, including Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Atelier Van Lieshout, Brandon Ballengée, Free Art and Technology (F.A.T.), Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, The Institute for Figuring, Aaron Koblin, Machine Project, Openframeworks, C.E.B. Reas, Philip Ross, Tomás Saraceno, SymbioticA, Jer Thorp, and Marius Watz. It also has the gall to posit some categories for thinking about art in a scientific context, or vice-versa, breaking up a massive (and by definition undefinable) movement in the arts into functional blocks with poetic names like "Artists in White Coats and Latex Gloves" and "The Overview Effect."

NA/SA was designed as it was written by Jessica Young and Luke Bulman of Thumb Projects. Immeasurable credit is due to them for organizing the endless flow of text into readable, beautiful documents at the end of each workday. To anyone thinking about organizing a booksprint—really, I can't speak enough for the uncanny efficacy of the process, given the right people—consider bringing designers on board from the beginning. Doubtless we would've had an arduous time marshaling our ideas had Thumb not been involved; their approach to layout had us feeling like we were creating a book (as opposed to a giant text file) from day one.

More about the book and its process at Carnegie Mellon University's Miller Gallery website. New Art/Science Affinities can be bought printed on demand at Lulu.com, or you can download a free, full-text PDF of the book right here. I encourage you to browse, study, and print the free PDF, but the tactile book is a joy to hold.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a piece exploring the ideas of the futurist Gerard K. O'Neill, who designed far-out but ultimately quite pragmatic environments for human habitation in space in the mid-1970s. In that article, I touched briefly on the notion of the "Overview Effect," a phrase coined by the writer Frank White to describe the profound insight — characterized by a sudden awareness of life's interconnectedness and the frailty of our planet — experienced by astronauts gazing down at the Earth from space.

Frank White is the author of The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution, a book that has completely changed the way I think about our planet and its position within the larger systems of the Universe. The book is an amalgam of space history, environmentalist philosophy, and starry-eyed futurism; it weaves White's observations about the nature of systems, the future of space travel, global communications, and cosmic spirituality with interviews with dozens of astronauts from all over the world. In short, it should be mandatory reading for all passengers aboard the Spaceship Earth.

Frank White was gracious enough to lend his time and considerable mind to a battery of my questions, the full transcript of which is below. It's long, but I promise it will blow your mind.

[I'm greatly indebted to Jonathan Minard, of deepspeed media and the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, for his help in brainstorming many of these questions.]

Part One: The End of the Space Age

Universe: Following the retirement of the shuttle program this summer, some have labeled this the "end of the space age." Others argue that it's simply the age of human exploration that's over, and that robots are the path forward. How do you respond to these assessments?

Frank White: I would suggest that both assessments are incorrect. Space exploration is a global enterprise with increasing private involvement, and the end of one program for one national space agency is neither the end of the "space age," nor of human exploration.

Media reports have linked the shuttle program with space exploration in a way that obscures some of the more positive aspects of the new US space policy. For example, it encourages more private investment in space at a time when more private companies, like Virgin Galactic, are making those commitments. It also encourages more international cooperation, extends the life of the International Space Station, and sets our sights on Mars, which many space advocates consider the most logical next objective for human exploration.

The dichotomy between human and robotic exploration is also unnecessary. The two complement one another, especially if we want to not only explore but also begin to create human communities off the Earth. It is not an either/or choice.

Universe: The establishment of permanent habitation in space is no longer a question of technical feasibility, but political and social will. There are those who believe humans must explore space to avoid extinction and those who deem it foolish to waste resources on projects distracting us from our responsibilities at home. How do you see the two sides of the argument for and against space settlement?

Frank White: I understand the two sides of the argument, but I consider human evolution to be the imperative behind our expansion into the universe, and I think it will continue. By this, I mean evolution in terms of politics, sociology, economics, and other aspects of human society, not just biology. The key to the question is, "What do we consider our home?" If it is the solar system and beyond, then space settlement is not a distraction. And even if our home is the Earth alone, there are many elements of space exploration and settlement that have already been beneficial to the Earth. For example, most people would agree that the Overview Effect triggered or at least enhanced the environmental impulse. This has proven to be beneficial to the Earth in ways that would have been difficult to predict in advance. The same can be said of how the Overview Effect has influenced our views on war and peace, also to the benefit of the people on Earth.

I find it somewhat puzzling that when we talk about problems on Earth, such as the so-called "population problem," we never include the dimension of our larger environment, i.e., the solar system and beyond. And when we talk about the "energy problem," only a few people are willing to even consider the promise of satellites that could beam solar energy to the Earth. We discuss almost every major human problem as if we were confined to one planet, rather than being on "Spaceship Earth," which is a part of the solar system, galaxy, and universe.

Universe: Are the goals of caring for the biosphere on the one hand, and on the other of establishing artificial ecospheres in space, necessarily mutually exclusive?

Frank White: No...this is a choice as well. In my book, I talk about the Human Space Program as a "central project" for all of humanity. It involves establishing a planetary civilization with a high priority on protecting the biosphere as well as a commitment to exploring the universe as a global (rather than national) enterprise. The Human Space Program could become a unifying force for humanity as we expand beyond Earth. We can create any future that we choose to create as a species. Caring for the biosphere can be in conflict with creating new ecospheres, or the two goals can be in harmony with one another.



Part Two: The Whole Earth Image

Universe: Do you think the Overview Effect might be less potent for a generation of people raised on the "Earthrise" image, which by now has been reduced to a symbol? Would a second generation of voyagers need to travel further afield to experience the same impact as the original Apollo astronauts did — is it just the shock of the utterly new perspective that jars us, or something essential about seeing the home planet?

Frank White: Here, it depends on what we mean by Overview Effect, i.e., is it a seeing a picture or is it having a direct experience? As my colleague at the Overview Institute, David Beaver, points out, the two are not the same, and we have perhaps been lulled into believing that they are. In my book, I quote one of the astronauts (Alan Shepard) pointing out that he had studied many pictures before he flew, but nothing could have prepared him for what he actually saw. I personally recall the moment when the Apollo 8 crew turned their camera back to show us the Earth, and the impact was tremendous. So pictures and videos did have an enormous impact in the 1960s that perhaps is not the same today. However, I believe that the direct experience and high-quality simulations of it will still be powerful, even for the younger generations who take Apollo missions and Earthrise for granted.

I should also mention something that Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell pointed out to me when I interviewed him for my book: those who are most open to the experience will benefit the most from it.

Part Three: "We Are One Species With One Destiny"

Universe: Do you believe it's necessary for us all to experience the Overview Effect for ourselves? What would happen if everyone on Earth had chance to undergo this experience? How would our culture be changed?

Frank White: I would like so see as many as people as possible have the experience, either directly or through simulations. According to innovation theory, you only need about 20 percent of a population to adopt an innovation to create significant change, so I don't think everyone needs to have the experience to trigger a paradigm shift. Once that occurs, I believe we would be much more environmentally aware, see ourselves more as citizens of the universe, rather than of different nations, and be far more committed to building a peaceful planetary civilization. I suspect that if astronauts' experiences are any guide, those who have the experience directly will also want to go back into space.

Universe: The Overview Effect is often compared to spiritual experience, to the altered states of consciousness experienced by people in various modes of spiritual trance or religious ecstasy. Do you see a relationship between the Overview Effect and more terrestrial transcendence? Is the Overview Effect a shortcut to a state it might take a meditator a lifetime to achieve? Further, if these distinctions are blurred, is space a religion?

Frank White: This is an area of great misunderstanding, in my opinion, and it is something that I covered in some detail in my book. There is nothing automatically spiritual about going into Low Earth Orbit or to the moon, any more than there is anything automatic about going into a great cathedral. In both settings, there is certainly an opportunity for a spiritual experience, but no guarantee, and I don't think it is a shortcut to the kind of permanent transcendence that a meditator might achieve. One of the astronauts whom I interviewed for my book (Don Lind) specifically took issue with the idea that going into space is a religious experience, and I dealt with that at some length.



We find that when the Overview Effect is characterized as a euphoric experience that produces an epiphany, it is most often linked with Edgar Mitchell's Apollo 14 flight. Edgar is a member of the Overview Group and is an advocate of better understanding of the Overview Effect, so he is definitely connected with the Overview Effect.

In writing my book, I was so impressed with his description of his experience that I gave it a different name, i.e., the Universal Insight. While the Universal Insight is similar to and related to the Overview Effect, in that it is a change in awareness that results from space exploration, it is different in that it refers to an identity of oneness with the universe, rather than the planet.

Those of us working on this issue at the Overview Institute think that a shift in cognitive understanding regarding the Earth is by far the more common experience. For example, the realization that there are no borders or boundaries on the Earth seems typical, as does heightened environmental awareness.

Universe: Some scholarship suggests that so-called "near-death," or "out of body" experiences can be effectively triggered by gravity-induced loss of consciousness. Does the Overview Effect have a relationship to gravity, or any other physical force?

Frank White: Yes, it is definitely related to zero gravity. While we have focused our attention primarily on the view of the Earth from space and in space, the fact that this perspective happens while the person is in zero gravity is an integral part of the experience. Most of the astronauts I interviewed for my book commented on the lack of gravity as being central to the uniqueness of their experience. In fact, one of them, Charlie Walker, specifically related the lack of gravity to the feeling of euphoria that he and other astronauts did have in orbit. We need to conduct more studies of this aspect of the Overview Effect.

Universe: The Overview Effect has, by virtue of our space programs' inherent brevity, only been experienced as a short-term revelation. How do you imagine the Effect might manifest, develop, or sustain in an individual living in a space colony or station for an extended period of time? In someone born in space?

Frank White: That question actually began my quest to understand the Overview Effect. As I recount in the book, I was flying cross-country and gazing out the window at a time when I was extremely interested in O'Neill's space settlement ideas. It occurred to me that people living in space settlements would always have an "overview." They would know intuitively what philosophers and sages have been trying to tell us for millennia: we are one species with one destiny. The borders and boundaries we draw on our planet are really in our minds, not on the Earth itself. After that flight, I resolved to write the book, and to interview as many astronauts as possible, to determine if there was indeed, an "Overview Effect."

The Effect is clearly going to be stronger for a person who has spent more time experiencing it, and especially someone born in space. They are clearly going to have far less of an identity with places on the surface of the Earth, and they are also likely to experience the next stages in evolution in consciousness, which I call the "Copernican Perspective" (identification with the solar system) and "Universal Insight" (identification with the universe).

Universe: Do you believe that there's a teleological argument to be made to explain humanity's diaspora into deep space? Does nature preordain us to become spacefaring?

Frank White: I have no scientific or empirical evidence for this, but I do think human beings are predisposed to explore, and I have called it the "exploration imperative" elsewhere. I link that with evolution, because evolution happens when a species explores. Biologically, it occurs when a species is isolated from the main gene pool so that mutations can gain a foothold. I think the same thing can be said for social evolution, as we see with settlements in North America, South America, and Australia. New political forms and social norms evolved as a result of exploration and settlement in those cases.

More generally, I have advanced the "Cosma Hypothesis," which is a broader version of the "Gaia Hypothesis." By that, I mean that if the Earth is a living system (Gaia) then so is the universe (Cosma). As humans move out into the universe and evolve, then the universe evolves. Insofar as we are part of an evolutionary process, there is a teleological basis for space exploration. Perhaps we are designed to spread life and mind where life and mind are scarce.

I would also mention that this has been another "aha moment" for me. I have come to realize that we usually tend to justify space exploration in terms of how it benefits humanity. I believe we should also ask ourselves how it benefits the universe as a whole. As we have become more environmentally aware, we have gone from exploiting the Earth to thinking that we ought to care for it and be good stewards of it. If we had that attitude toward the larger environment of the universe, it would be much easier to justify.

[Mr. White would like to emphasize he speaks for myself as author of The Overview Effect, rather than on behalf of the Overview Institute.)

Learn More:

Frank White is cofounder and project manager of the The Overview Institute, a nonprofit organization that seeks to share the experience of the Overview Effect with as many people on Earth as possible. The Institute's "Overview Declaration" is worth reading.

Mushrooms and their mycelium are quiet allies that are essential for our healthy existence. They are enigmatic, have a sense of humor, and socially as well as spiritually, bond together all that admire them. They have much to teach us.
-Paul Stamets

If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self a part of nature's larger whole.
-Terrence McKenna

A few weeks ago, I was sitting at my kitchen table, having coffee, when I suddenly noticed a new development in my bonsai plant. At the foot of the pygmy pine was sprouting, of all things, a mushroom. The physical recoil this realization triggered in me is beyond description. I nearly spilled my drink in my impulse to first spring away — then draw towards — this fungus. How had this happened? My god, how do mushrooms work?

As it turns out, the soil of my potted bonsai was rich with mycelium. Mycelium is the fungal "root," if you will, the vegetative body of the organism, which can net, spread, propagate, and convey nutrients over great distances, eventually sprouting fruiting bodies — mushrooms. This meant that no matter how many little brown mushrooms I plucked out of my houseplant, more popped into place. Thus began my journey into mycophilia.

Being a fickle bedroom hobbyist, I sacrificed the bonsai, relinquishing 1,000 years of Japanese history to my fungal visitor. After all, what is more ancient, more venerable, than a mushroom? Fungi were the first organisms to come to land, and survived the cataclysmic asteroid impacts of geological history — visitors to our planet 420 million years ago would have encountered a landscape dominated by 30-foot-tall prototaxites, fungal pillars dwarfing the surrounding landscape. And, lest you think this kind of cyclopean 'shroom has gone the way of the dinosaurs, the largest known organism on our planet today is a 2,400-year old, 2,200 acre honey mushroom mycelium in Eastern Oregon.

Furthermore, we're more closely related to these behemoths than you might imagine: even though the animal kingdom branched off from its fungal counterpart some 600 million years ago, we still share over half our DNA with fungi. Historically, culturally, and biologically, we are incredibly close to mushrooms. That closeness can be exploited to our benefit: many powerful antibiotics against bacteria come from fungi, while anti-fungal antibiotics tend to harm us, precisely because of our intimately interlinked relationship with mushrooms. Some scientists posit reorganizing traditional biological classification to include a animalia-fungi superkingdom called "Opisthokontum."

Far-out scholar Terrence McKenna, in his book Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge, took this connection further, arguing that the so-called missing link between our ancestors and language-using, symbol-toting Homo Sapiens (or Homo Spiritualis, as he puts it) is not an evolutionary phase but an interaction with entheogens — namely, "magic" mushrooms. McKenna argued that early man, foraging for food in the African grasslands, would have inevitably consumed varieties of fungal hallucinogen, triggering the semiotically complex transcendence (and the various perceptual advantages) of the psychedelic experience. It's this psychosymbiotic mingling with the "vegetable mind" of the natural world that triggered those things which separate us from the animals: use of symbols, language, ritual, and abstract representation. Over centuries, this experience would have been ritualized, this dip into the howling Tao codified; what remains today are merely symbols, hidden in plain sight in many of the religious traditions of the world. This theory, now dubbed the "Stoned Ape Theory of Human Evolution," is fascinating — and I whole-heartedly recommend McKenna's book, which is essentially a natural history of the human relationship to drugs.

American mycologist Paul Stamets, in his 2008 TED Talk, Six Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World, argues that the structure of mycelium is a neuromicrological network with universal properties. In the image below, I've placed an electron micrograph of fungal mycelium next to an image of dark matter. Beneath that, a visualization of the network structure of the Internet by Hal Burch and Bill Cheswick, courtesy of Lumeta Corporation.





Can you tell the difference?

Stamets, who calls mycelium "Earth's Natural Internet," puts it this way:

I believe the invention of the computer Internet is an inevitable consequence of a previously proven biologically successful model. The earth invented the computer internet for its own benefit, and we, now, being the top organism on this planet, [are] trying to allocate resources in order to protect the biosphere.

Going way out, dark matter conforms to the same mycelial archetype. I believe matter begets life, life becomes single cells, single cells become strings, strings become chains, chains network. And this is the paradigm that we see throughout the universe.

Stamets, being a mycologist, understands the fundamental structure of information, of the physical universe itself, as adhering to a "mycelial archetype." To him, everything is mushroom — while McKenna, his visionary counterpart, reads the history of human culture through a mycophilic lens. Of course, both men experimented extensively with the mental states associated with ritualized consumption of a certain variety of mushroom, but this shouldn't lessen the impact of their profound, macrocosmic reading of the humble fungus (although it's interesting to think of mushrooms as doing their own psychedelic PR).

Mycelium, an intertwined network of cells permeating virtually all land masses of Earth, is not something to take lightly. It literally engulfs the soil beneath us in a sentient web, rising up beneath our footsteps, hungry for nutrients. There is something beautiful and horrifying, ancient and keenly technological about these organisms, a complexity it may take a psychedelically-informed, non-institutional mind to fully appreciate.

In any case, it beats a tiny tree.

"All things move and nothing remains still" — Heraclitus



The history of astronomy can be read as a story of better and better vision. Over the centuries, we have supplemented our vision with technology that allows us to see further and more clearly; while ancient astronomers, who relied only on their naked eyes to perceive the universe, managed to make star catalogues and predict comets, Galileo, pressing his to a telescope, saw all the way to the moons of Jupiter.

Optical telescopes and the human eye are fundamentally limited; early astronomers were forced to gaze into telescopes for hours on end, waiting for moments of visual stillness long enough to allow them to quickly sketch drawings of the features they were simultaneously trying to understand. Between a telescope (incidentally, "telescope" is Greek for "far-seeing") and the celestial bodies beyond, the Earth's atmosphere itself is in turbulence, the optical refractive index bleary — which presented early astronomers with a view of the universe that was blurred, twinkling, always in flux. This is because the sky is not transparent. Thermal currents passing through the Earth's atmosphere cause air density (and hence the refractive index of air) to vary, to warble like a desert mirage. Light does not pass through this unaffected. Quite the opposite, in fact — thermal currents are like thousands of lenses floating around in the air. We call this phenomenon "astronomical seeing," and it's why stars sparkle, why even the moon seems to be swimming in water when peered at through an optical telescope.

It wasn't long before Galileo and his fellows had seen as far as their technology — and their vision — could reach. In the years to follow, new far-seeing tools popped up as needed: X-ray telescopes, gamma ray telescopes, high-energy particle telescopes, even telescopes floating in space. As time progressed and our science grew more refined, we tried wavelengths previously unnoticed; we paid attention to new qualities; when we thought we'd seen it all, we looked again, our vision evolving beyond biology as we began to "see" with technology.

The inevitable result was that though the physical universe never changed, we did, because we looked differently.



This different-looking triggered perhaps the most important conceptual leap in the science of the 20th century: the realization that there is more to reality to what can be seen. The years between 1880 and 1930* saw massive upheavals in the way science was conducted — during this period, we moved from the strict empiricism of Newton to the reliance on unobservable and theoretical constructs that dominates the discipline today. We began to peer into previously unseen worlds; we parsed the structure of the atom and discovered elementary particles. Once we were there, our physics no longer had bearing. We needed to invent and codify new ways of seeing, ways not dictated by observable phenomena; and so our understanding of time and space gave way to general and special relativity, quantum mechanics, and alternative geometries. The intellectual legacy of this radical change — and its relevance to my point here — is in the primacy it lends to subjectivity, to not only the instruments of seeing, but those who peer into them.

Astronomy, too, zygoted in the early 20th century. Photography solved the problem of hand-drawing findings between patches of blurry sky. Infrared, radio, X-ray, and finally gamma-ray astronomy came to prominence, filling our coffers with surreal images of a previously invisible world. We used spectroscopy to study stars; our sun was found to be part of a galaxy, and the existence of other galaxies was settled by the great Edwin Hubble, who identified many others, rapidly receding from our own, at impossibly large distances. We created the model of the Big Bang. We stumbled upon cosmic microwave background radiation. All of a sudden, the story of the universe as we knew it vaulted out of the visual world and into a rich and million years-long narrative of unseen forces and galaxies so distant they bordered on theoretical abstractions. Like science itself, visual perception of the cosmos evolved from the physical to the theoretical; when we speak of "seeing" astronomical images, we're talking about a highly mediated experience, captured by mechanical sensing devices, where invisible qualities are color-coded into something the human eye can register as information.

The eye is almost universally a symbol of intellectual perception; in Taoism, in Shinto, in the Bhagavad Gītā, the eyes are the sun and moon. Is it any wonder that the ancients conflated astronomy and astrology? That those who look out at the universe have so often been mystics, seekers, and seers? We speak of "visionaries" in all fields as people who are capable of seeing furthest — beyond the blurred intermediary of the physical world and straight to the heavens.


Optical, radio, X-ray, and WMAP all-sky images. Images via online sources, animated GIF by yours truly.

*As an interdisciplinary aside: this period was simultaneous with the rise of modernism and abstraction in the arts. Could this movement from the pragmatic and visible to the invisible and conceptual be attributed to a common zeitgeist? Could it be that the early 20th century saw an unprecedented amount of cross-pollination between the arts and sciences, leading to a moment of cultural fertility?

Ed: This is an essay I wrote for my friends at the World Science Festival, riffing on the central themes of this years' event. If you prefer, you can also read this piece on the World Science Festival site. And, if you're in New York between the first and fifth of June, you could do much worse than popping into the Festival and getting a load of panel discussions like The Dark Side of the Universe, or Science & Story: The Art of Communicating Science Across All Media.



Science communication is difficult.

It can be crippled by the complexity of its own subject matter. It can be steeped in jargon, too dense for its readership, or, conversely, too simplistic to satisfy its critics in the scientific community. It can lack warmth, or be too paranoid about its empirical rigor to engage in the metaphoric flights — the quick shifts from microcosm to macrocosm — that cue readers to an emotional engagement in any subject. The problem may lie in an inescapable tautology: to fully understand a scientific, taxonomic, objective conception of the natural world is to be so steeped in scientific idiom that poetics become impossible.

And yet, there are those who are capable of communicating the invisible phenomena of science to the public. These people are essentially bilingual. The Sagans, the deGrasse Tysons, the E.O Wilsons; Angier, Attenborough, Carson and Greene; the radio producers, writers, filmmakers, documentarians, and public speakers; these are our human bridges, our storytellers, fluent in both big and small. It's a specific skill, to be a gifted science communicator — that rare person who can straddle two divergent worlds without slipping into the void between the so-called "Two Cultures," someone with hard facts in their mind and literary gems in their rhetoric. They must accomplish the humanization of abstract ideas without pandering, make science poetry without kitsch. Even at their best, they can be silly — think of Carl Sagan, in his burgundy turtleneck, proclaiming, "in order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." It may seem absurd to draw such a huge subject down to Earth in such a literal way, but what Sagan taps into is the necessity of these seemingly silly flourishes.



See, science is big. It's driven by the desire to understand everything!

The immensity of such a project necessitates that science be undertaken not by one group of men and women in one time, but all men and women for all time. The final goal always eludes us: to understand this, we must first understand this, but to understand that, we must understand this, ad infinitum. Scientific knowledge is won by climbing the shoulders of giants; but these giants are a never-ending stack of matryoshka dolls. In fact, the very notion of there being a final point in science has become so abstract as to be almost irrelevant; the more we know, the more we know that we do not know, and the end of the game is nowhere to be seen. And, perhaps, there is no end game.

To a scientist, this endless narrative satisfies. The balance of properties and theories that define the natural world, the physical Universe, or the underpinnings of mathematical reality are elegant and stirring; knowledge, and the search for more of it, is a raison d'être. For those of us not wired the same way, the greater narrative of science can be overwhelming, if not inscrutable. We need stories with beginnings, middles, and ends. We need things to relate to, objects to hold onto, characters to laugh and cry with. We need to synthesize abstract ideas through allegories, metaphors, and images.

Popular science communication is defined by such literary gestures. For years, students of astronomy struggled with the concept of an expanding universe without a center (a notion which violently bucks against reason). Cosmologists, however, came up with an image — a metaphor — which lightens the load: imagine that the universe is an expanding balloon, and the stars and objects in space are dots drawn on the surface of this balloon. From any one star's vantage point, all the other objects in space are moving away from it, but without any perceivable pattern. The more distant points would appear to be moving faster. Apart from being a devastatingly simple image that conveys more information that entire astronomy textbooks, it's also an elegant metaphor. It accomplishes the same things as the most successful of literary metaphors: a world of feeling and information, the very chaos of physical reality, in one image. It translates profound abstraction (the universe) into something we can imagine holding in our hands (a balloon).



Good science communication molds complex ideas into human-scale stories. It turns a discussion of the cosmos' impossible scale into inflating balloons. Or into Sagan, sitting at his dinner table like a medieval king in corduroy, a steaming apple pie at the ready.

The moon is a rock.

But it's also Selene, Artemis, Diana, Isis, the lunar deities; an eldritch clock by which we measure our growth and fertility; home of an old man in the West and a rabbit in the East; the site of countless imaginary voyages; a long-believed trigger of lunacy (luna...see?). It's another world, close enough to our to peer down at us; to it, we compose sonatas. It can be blue, made of cheese, a harvest moon; we've long fantasized about its dark side, perhaps dotted with black monoliths or inhabited by flying men.

The moon is a totem of great importance in all religions and traditions; in astrology, it stands for all those things which make this fine scienceblogs readership develop facial tics: the unconscious, parapsychology, dreams, imagination, the emotional world, all that is shifting and ephemeral. According to the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, as the light of the moon is merely a reflection of the light of the sun, "the Moon is the symbol of knowledge acquired through reflection, that is, theoretical or conceptual knowledge."

All of this to say that while the moon is a rock, it's also an idea.

And, as an idea, it appeals to artists. The moon, however, remains beyond the reach of artists by virtue of what makes it interesting to them: namely, its moon-ness, a perfect storm of mystery, opacity, and unreachability.



So just how do you implement the moon in your practice when it's 240,000 miles away? As an artist, how do you stake a claim somewhere inside of the patriotic military-industrial research bureaucracy that controls the purse strings, and thus access to our nearest celestial bodies? There doesn't seem to be a direct entry. If you're part of the original Moon Museum posse, you go in the back door, sneaking your work illicitly onto the heels of a lunar lander. If you're Belgian artist Paul Van Hoeydonck, you meet astronaut David Scott at a dinner party.

Van Hoeydonck is responsible for the only piece of art on the moon, a tiny memorial sculpture called "Fallen Astronaut." The piece is interesting for several reasons. For one, it presents us with a clear understanding of the kinds of technical limitations that moon artists must work under. Limitations, of course, can be instrumental to an artist's practice — a broke Basquiat painted on window frames and cabinet doors — but space art's parameters border on the draconian. In the design of the piece, Van Hoeydonck was restricted to materials that were both lightweight and sturdy, as well capable of withstanding extreme temperatures. Since it was to be a memorial to deceased astronauts, it couldn't be identifiably male or female, nor of any ethnic group. The somewhat questionable result: what looks like a metal Lego lying face-down on Mons Hadley.

Like the Moon Museum, Fallen Astronaut was an unofficial venture; the statuette was smuggled aboard the Apollo 15 lunar module by the astronauts themselves — Scott and Jim Irwin — without the knowledge of NASA officials. Its "installation" was unorthodox: in laying down the sculpture and its accompanying plaque, Irwin and Scott performed a private ceremony on the lunar surface. "We just thought we'd recognize the guys that made the ultimate contribution," Scott later said. Notable: "the guys" include eight American and six Soviet astronauts, a surprisingly apolitical act of solidarity in the midst of the Cold War.



Scott and Irwin were committed to the sanctity of their memorial; when Scott plopped the piece onto the lunar dust, Irwin covered the act with inane radio chatter to Mission Control, and they didn't announce the memorial until after their return to Earth. Even then, the astronauts kept Van Hoeydonck's name private, hoping to avoid any commercial exploitation of the piece. Van Hoeydonck, undoubtedly hoping to further his career, later violated the unspoken sacredness of Fallen Astronaut by attempting, in 1972, to sell hundreds of signed replicas of the piece at $750 a pop. We'd all recoil in horror if Maya Lin tried the same thing with the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial, but I'm almost tempted to give Van Hoeydonck a pass. After all, the Fallen Astronaut itself is just a totem, and a toylike one at that.

I see this story as something of an inversion of the usual artist-scientist dialectic. Van Hoeydonck, here, was essentially an engineer. All he did was design a tin man to technical specifications, but it was Scott and Irwin who made the visionary decision to perform an unnecessary act of beauty on the chunk of rock orbiting our own. It was the astronauts who snuck the statuette all the way to the moon and secretly installed it. They understood that beyond being a rock, the moon is an idea, and that actions performed on the moon by human beings are instantly imbued with meaning, historical significance, and some kind of indefinable holiness. Scott, Irwin and NASA balked at Van Hoeydonck's commercial enterprise, and the artist eventually retracted it, instead donating various replicas of Fallen Astronaut to museums and keeping the rest to himself, un-monetized.

While it's ordinarily the artists who defend the formal importance of ideas for their own sake, on Apollo 15 it was, well, not the scientists — but the military-trained, engineer-pilot, non-artist astronauts who did. Which perhaps goes to show that the experience of space, the perspective-altering transcendence of the so-called "overview effect," ultimately turns us all into poets.

This is the first in a series of posts about art, the moon, and art on the moon. You would think this would be a fairly limited subject, but...



Art on the moon has been happening for a long time.

In 1969, a coterie of American contemporary artists devised a plan to put an art museum on the Moon. When NASA's official channels proved too dauntingly bureaucratic, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, Forrest "Frosty" Myers, Claes Oldenburg, and John Chamberlain weren't deterred. Instead, they managed to sneak their "museum" — in reality a minuscule enamel wafer inscribed with six tiny drawings — onto the leg of the Apollo 12 mission's landing module, Intrepid. Of course, NASA has no official record of this intervention, but the New York Times ran the story several days after Apollo 12 took off.

The museum, which looks like a paleo-modern computer chip, includes a drawing of a wavy line, courtesy of Rauschenberg, a doodle of a mouse by Oldenburg, John Chamberlain's template pattern, and a piece by Warhol that the Times in '69 called a "a calligraphic squiggle made up of the initials of his signature," but is obviously a penis.



It seems to me that the artistry of this "museum" is as much about the gesture of sneaking it, illicitly, onto the leg of the lunar lander, as it is about the drawings themselves. The Moon Museum is a cosmic happening, an outer-space intervention, a performance piece with no human (or Selenite) witnesses. Whether or not it even exists is a point of contention; it bears a mystique that an official NASA presence would have irrevocably squelched. Which is perhaps what separates artists from those who seek the cosmos for scientific or technological reasons. To them, the objective may not necessarily be about the quest for knowledge, but rather the desire to play with and articulate Mystery, capital-M. Space inspires awe, feeling, and perspective — the currency of the arts.

As much as the fierce nationalism of space history would suggest otherwise, space also belongs to no one. No nation, no species, and no ideological subcategory of humanity. Obviously astronomers, scientists and engineers have had the most serious crack at the interpretation of the vast impersonal Universe beyond our atmosphere — but mystics, myth-makers, and shamans were at it for centuries beforehand. Of course the prevailing rhetoric since the Enlightenment has been to distance the rational sanctity of science from the taxonomy-barren mish-mash that came before it, but our interdisciplinary age, it seems, should allow us to appreciate the importance of one without devaluing the other. This isn't a new idea: even NASA gave Laurie Anderson an artists' residency.

As we expand our boundaries beyond the limits of our planet, the idea of "Moon Arts" or "Space Arts" won't seem any more sci-fi than regular old Terrestrial Art. Reality is fodder for exploration and creativity, so who's to say that artists, once they secure passage to orbit, the moon, Mars, and beyond, shouldn't have as much of a say in our understanding of space as the people who sent them there?

Footnote:

Incidentally, the Moon Museum wasn't the only rogue intervention on the Apollo 12 Mission. Pranksters back at Cape Canaveral snuck laminated, fire-proof Playboy Centerfolds into astronauts' Al Bean and Pete Conrad's checklist booklets. The bunnies, which had captions like "Seen any interesting hills and valleys?" and "Survey — her activity," were the first American women in space.

In 2004, some robotics geeks and sci-fi fans built a functional robotic likeness of Philip K. Dick. It looked like Dick, dressed like Dick, and was completely autonomous. Capable of operating without the intervention of its makers, it could track people coming in and out of a room with face-recognition software, greeting those it knew. It could listen to conversation, and, using complex algorithms, could respond verbally using speech synthesis.

This “robotic portrait” was as much an art project as it was a feat of engineering. For several years, the android made public appearances — at conferences, comic conventions, Artificial Intelligence organizations, and so forth. In 2006, it mysteriously disappeared in transit to Mountain View, California, where it was to meet with some Google employees. Speculation abounded. Horrified, I imagined the android out in the world, having a hellish time of consciousness. Strange and poetic as it was, the story could have ended here.

And yet, the Philip K. Dick android has now been rebuilt. Behold!

The new android is being referred to as “New Phil.” Its vanished predecessor, “Old Phil.” To recap: a man who spends his career writing about about androids dies. Twenty years later, an android is made in his image, effectively bringing him back to life. That android disappears. A new one is built; at this point we’re three degrees of separation from the original. I can’t help but fantasize about a future model (New New New Phil?) becoming self-aware, and immediately being convinced that he is the real, original Phil. I mean, it literally reads like an actual Philip K. Dick story — life imitating art, imitating life.

The brain-boggling postmodern meta-irony is not lost on its makers, thankfully. On translating this particular writer — and not, say, Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov — into an android, they explain, “An android of Philip K. Dick is a sort of paradox. It’s certainly what Hofstader would call a ‘tangled hierarchy.’ This is something that you don’t get by making an android out of any other science fiction writer.” They point out that Dick didn’t just write about androids; he wrote about people thinking they were androids, or androids thinking they were people, and everything in between. The terrible crux of Dick’s canon often hinges on the question, “what is the difference between being human, and being programmed to believe you are human?”

Still, it’s hard to guess what Dick, who died in 1982, might have thought of his robotic likeness. In a 1975 essay called, “Man, Android, and Machine,” he wrote:

“Within the universe there exist fierce cold things, which I have given the name ‘machines’ to. Their behavior frightens me, especially if it imitates human behavior so well that I get the uncomfortable sense that these things are trying to pass themselves off as humans but are not. I call them ‘androids,’ which is my own way of using that word. By ‘android’ I do not mean a sincere attempt to create in the laboratory a human being. I mean a thing somehow generated to deceive us in a cruel way, to cause us to think it to be one of ourselves. Made in a laboratory — that aspect is not meaningful to me; the entire universe is one vast laboratory, and out of it come sly and cruel entities which smile as they reach out to shake hands. But their handshake is the grip of death, and their smile has the coldness of the grave.”

Would New Phil — or for that matter, Old Phil — embody this “coldness of the grave” to his namesake? I can’t help but think of Jack Bohlen, in Martian Time-Slip, servicing the simulacra in his son’s school and having schizoid episodes where he believes that every person is secretly a machine, a mechanism. The profound sense of disconnect that this vision lends to his reality, the Philip K. Dick android does to me.

Dick’s books have been endlessly adapted to the screen, and yet this bearded machine does more to bring the philosophical mise-en-abyme of his work alive than any number of Darryl Hannahs or Arnold Schwarzeneggers (be they lurking in rainy alleyways or gun-fighting in the red-tinged Martian atmosphere) ever could. I mean, it is Philip K. Dick: both visually and theoretically. It’s a physical embodiment of everything he feared, loved, rhapsodized on, got paranoid about. It’s a “living” paradox; it’s science-fiction reality, a powerfully strange sculpture.

A few months ago, I went to Cyborg Camp in my hometown of Portland, Oregon. Cyborg Camp is an "unconference," basically a room full of cyberpunks, mega-nerds, and aspirational coders that gather in an office building to talk about the "future of the relationship between humans and technology." This event deserves a separate entry, but for now I'd like to recall a particularly evocative thing: that the most heartbreaking thing I saw at Cyborg Camp was an adult man hopelessly tangled in a web of cables.

It was his own off-the-shelf wearable computing system, a gordian thing connecting his outdated Windows smartphone to a pair of personal video glasses via an unwieldy battery pack in his shorts. He was trying to show it off an audience eager to learn about "DIY Wearable Computing." Unfortunately, it was like watching a third-grader thread his mittens through his winter jacket sleeves.

"Talk about first world problems," I heard him mutter.

His computer system-cum-outfit was shitty. It was shitty in the way that most things light-years ahead of their time are shitty, because the rush to make them into reality precludes aesthetics. People dedicated to developing new technolgies are largely interested in them working — they can worry about looking good later. As a rule, technology is born ugly, then gets refined: compare the first Apple computers to the blemish-less glass of an iPad screen.

Wearable headset computers don't really exist to anyone but the people who actively wish for them; those people take matters into their own hands with Sharper Image and Made-in-China techno-junk. Such tangled-cable DIY cyborg hacks are entirely about function, and usually have no concern for design. That blind adherence to pragmatism may even be the defining characteristic of geek fashion. Technical sandals, video glasses, and LED-rigged shoelaces are functional and hideous, whereas fashion ("real" fashion, whatever that means) is beautiful and useless.

The point of this meandering introduction is that we are rapidly approaching an age where this general rule is no longer rock-solid. Consider the Emotiv EPOC. This is an actual, purchasable product: a "neuro-signal acquisition and processing wireless neuroheadset." When donned atop your dome, the headset's sensors tune into electric signals produced by your brain, effectively detecting your thoughts, feelings and expressions and allowing you to control a computer with your mind.

[Pause for effect]



This is the first commercially-available device of its kind. It is insanely ahead of its time. Have you ever even heard the word "neuroheadset" before?

And yet, the Emotiv EPOC neuroheadset is pretty beautiful. It's not an insane mess of multi-colored wires and scary-looking electrodes; it doesn't even have any wires at all — it connects wirelessly to your computer via a USB dongle. All things considered, it looks more like an expensive pair of headphones than a device that can read your mind.



The EPOC has three different ways of sensing your mental intent. The simplest is that it can monitor facial expressions. This means you can smile and your computer will automatically insert a smiley-face into your chat, for example. It has a gyroscope in the headpiece as well, so you can move your cursor by moving your head. Lastly, it can sense brainwaves — but to do that, you have to map the device to your particular mind by using crazy biofeedback software, concentrating on the idea of "left," "right," or "forward" (etc.) while looking at an orange 3D cube on your screen, while the EPOC analyzes your brain activity for each command. After this mapping is finished, EPOC users can ostensibly play Pong or Tetris telepathically.

As it turns out, however, the EPOC doesn't upset the beautiful-ugly, functional-useless dialectic much: the amount more beautiful it is than most first-generation technologies is about even with the amount less that it is functional. It's getting tepid reviews from realists, who argue that the EPOC is not the "mass market device for people looking for a turnkey telekinesis solution" that everyone hoped it might be. Rather, "it's an expensive toy for people to experiment with" and — despite being totally cool — is basically useless.

Regardless, the EPOC is catnip for nerds. If there had been one at Cyborg Camp, it would certainly have been the star of the show — regardless of whether or not it was a nice-looking object. After all, sitting in the conference room at Cyborg Camp, my most prevalent thought wasn't about the disproportionate presence of dorky video glasses and technical sandals, but one of slightly apprehensive wonder: "shit, these people are the future of everything." In my mind, the clout of the future is not wealth, but ability to navigate an increasingly digital world (as Douglas Rushkoff says, "program or be programmed").



We'll probably all be wearing computers in five years. And just as Luxxotica is making personal 3D glasses for rich people and even Karl Lagerfeld compares Facebook to Brancusi, there will be high-end neuroheadsets being made and modeled at Paris Fashion Week by athletic models in circuit board stilettos.

Talk about first world problems, right?

In case you didn't know, reality is science fiction.

If you doubt me, read the news. Read, for example, this recent article in the New York Times about Carnegie Mellon's "Read the Web" program, in which a computer system called NELL (Never Ending Language Learner) is systematically reading the internet and analyzing sentences for semantic categories and facts, essentially teaching itself idiomatic English as well as educating itself in human affairs. Paging Vernor Vinge, right?

NELL reads the Web 24 hours a day, seven days a week, learning language like a human would — cumulatively, over a long period of time. It parses text on the Internet for ontological categories, like "plants," "music" and "sports teams," then uses contextual clues to sort out what things belong in which categories, like "Nirvana is a grunge band" (see below) and "Peyton Manning plays for the Indianapolis Colts."



In its self-taught exploration of Internet English, NELL is 87 percent correct. And the more it learns, the more accurate it will become. According to a paper called "Toward an Architecture for Never-Ending Language Learning," NELL has two tasks: to read, and to learn from that reading — to "learn to read better each day than the day before...go[ing] back to yesterday's text sources and extract[ing] more information more accurately."

Like the premise of a dystopian sci-fi story, Read the Web is wonderful-terrifying. Wonderful, because we've designed a computer to teach itself, because it's a case study in life-long learning, and because the results will certainly be useful. Terrifying because it's difficult to look at a massive computer coming up accurate pronouncements like "bliss is an emotion" without feeling a shudder of horrible gravitas. That said, I am shuttering my fearmongering sci-fi mind and embracing NELL's mission, just one in a fascinating new field of research aimed at helping computers understand human language, using the Web as a key linguistic resource. The idea of a "Semantic Web," an Internet as comprehensible to computers as it is to humans, has been in the computer science and AI discourse for years, with good old Sir Tim Berners-Lee carrying the leading torch. In a 2001 article for Scientific American, Berners-Lee wrote that "this structure will open up the knowledge and workings of humankind to meaningful analysis by software agents, providing a new class of tools by which we can live, work and learn together."

Upon discovering this project, I had tons of questions about NELL: could it read other languages? Who gets the data in the end? Does it have parental controls on? So I did what I always do in such cases, which is immediately write to the people in charge in the hopes of gleaning some information from them. In suit, here is a brief interview with the very gracious Professor Tom Mitchell, chair of the Machine Learning Department of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and Burr Settles, a Carnegie Mellon postdoctoral fellow working on the project.


UNIVERSE Q&A WITH TOM MITCHELL AND BURR SETTLES OF CARNEGIE-MELLON UNIVERSITY

Universe: At the moment, NELL is learning language and semantic categories in English, which would mean that its learning is limited to the output of the English-speaking world. Are there any plans to expand the program to different languages?

Professor Tom Mitchell: Interestingly, NELL's learning methods can apply equally well to other western languages as they do to English (as long as the language uses the same character set as English). We started with English because, well, we speak English. And also because that is the most-used language on the web, and we wanted NELL to have access to lots of text.

Burr Settles: In principle, the technology driving NELL is language-independent, so there is reason to believe that, given a corpus of Spanish or Chinese, it could learn equally as well. In fact, I suspect there are some languages it would perform even better with; for example syntax and orthography are generally more consistent in Spanish than in English, so the Spanish NELL might learn much more quickly and accurately.

Universe: Could an advanced NELL-like computer teach itself another language?

Burr Settles: Quite possibly. For example, imagine that NELL learns a lot about The French Revolution from English-language documents, and also knows (because we say so, or maybe because it read so!) that Wikipedia pages have corresponding translations in other languages. If NELL assumes the facts available on the English- and French-language Wikipedia pages for The French Revolution are roughly equivalent, then it could use its Knowledge to start to infer patterns, rules, word morphologies, etc. in French, and then start reading other French-language documents.

This isn't unlike the way humans can easily pick up certain words (concrete nouns, prepositions) when traveling in foreign-language countries. I know, because I just got back from two weeks in Spain, which is why I'm absent from that fabulous New York Times photo!

Universe: When will NELL stop running?

Professor Tom Mitchell: We have absolutely no intention of stopping it from running. NELL stands for "Never Ending Language Learner." We mean it, though of course we need to make research progress if we want to give it the ability to continue learning in useful ways.

Universe: Is NELL reading the web indiscriminately, or have you set it loose on particular corners of the Internet that are more conducive to language-learning (say, Wikipedia)?

Professor Tom Mitchell: NELL primarily uses a collection of 500,000,000 web pages that represent the most broadly popular, highly referenced pages on the web. But it also uses Google's search engine to search for additional pages when it is looking for targeted information (e.g., for pages that will teach it more about sports teams). So it's not in some corner of the web, but all over it.

Burr Settles: Currently, NELL reads indiscriminately. Of course, it tends to learn about proteins and cell lines mostly from biomedical documents, celebrities from news sites and gossip forums, and so on. In future versions of NELL, we hope it can decide its own learning agenda, e.g., "I've not read much about musical acts from the 1940s... maybe I'll focus on those kinds of documents today!" Or, alternatively, we could say we need it to focus on a particular document. Previous successes in "machine reading" research have in fact relied on a narrow scope of knowledge (e.g., only articles about sports, or terrorism, or biomedical research) in order to learn anything. The fact that NELL learns to read reasonably well across all of these domains is actually a big step forward.

It has been interesting to hear the public's response to NELL. There are many jokes about what will happen when it comes across 4chan or LOLcats, for example. But the reality is, those texts are already available to NELL, and it is largely ignoring them because they are so ill-formed and inconsistent.

Universe: Say NELL learns the English language well enough to be a Shakespearean scholar. What happens to the data then — do Google and Yahoo and DARPA get access to it?

Professor Tom Mitchell: Yes, and so will everybody. Already we have put NELL's growing knowledge base up on the web. You can browse it, and also download the whole thing if you like. Furthermore, I am committed to sticking to this policy of making NELL's extracted knowledge base available for free to anybody who wants to use it for any commercial or non-commercial purpose, for the life of this research project.

Universe: Lastly, the name NELL is a joke about the Jodie Foster movie, right?

Professor Tom Mitchell: Well, no. I didn't really know about that movie...but I just took a look at NELL's knowledge base, and it appears to know about it. Take a look. There, the light grey items are low confidence hypotheses that NELL is considering but not yet committing to. The dark black items are higher confidence beliefs. So it is considering that NELL might be a movie, a disease, and/or a writer, but it's pretty confident that Jodie Foster starred in the movie...