make something which experiences, reacts to its environment, changes, is non-stable...
... make something indeterminate, which always looks different, the shape of which cannot be predicted precisely...
... make something which cannot 'perform' without the assistance of its environment...
... make something which reacts to light and temperature changes, is subject to air currents and whose function depends on the forces of gravity...
... make something which the 'viewer' handles, with which he plays and thus animates...
... make something which lives in time and makes the 'viewer' experience time...
... articulate something natural...

Hans Haacke, Cologne, 1965

Thu, Apr 12, 2007  Permanent link
Categories: favourite_quotes

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Keeping SpaceCollective Media Relevant

In June 2009 I mapped the protests in Iran with fervor and anxiety. It is possibly the largest collection of public video and images tracking the protests almost minute-by-minute. They are all on Hypercities, a mapping platform developed by Dr. Todd Presner and his research group at UCLA Digital Humanities.

The Arab Spring prompted me to revisit the Hypercities collection and I realized many of the YouTube videos have been removed or accounts hosting them have been closed rendering portions of my narrative mapping obsolete. I noticed the same problem on SpaceCollective. Many of us here believe what we put on the World Wide Web is there for prosperity and forget that some of the media is actually reliant on others who may not see the space of the web as we do.

Therefore I'd like to propose to the SpaceCollective community to archive the work we post, meaning that we download videos and images we are linking in our posts, to our own servers–better if it is all on the SC servers–so that we don't end up with posts like Spaceweaver's Are We Real?. Of course we are still obligated to keep the content and the reliability/responsibility element is still there, but we are at least on the same page in this community and more likely to keep our media live.

There are a few sources out there, one that I've used is KeepVid. Keel free to use the comments to suggest alternatives, options and recommendations.

Mon, Aug 1, 2011  Permanent link

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"What is Art?"

I've been teaching non-art/design undergrads for a few years and the one question I get every single year, innocently, is "What is art?" My responses have been philosophical and abstract, probably leaving them as baffled as before they asked the fateful question. In a way, I avoided answering the Question. This year, I've found an answer: Sergei Parajanov's The Color of Pomegranates (1968). The film is sublime. It is the perfection of poetry, composition, form, texture, and color. Most importantly, as a response to the Question, it is tangible because it is sensual, and it is politically contextualized, which makes it profoundly emotional (a bit more difficult for younger generations to grasp, but dramatic nonetheless).

Parajanov paid for his films with his life. Read this again. Parajanov paid for his films with his life. What is art but that which is lived? Who is an artist but one who commits to his/her vision in face of imprisonment, torture and death? Who is an artist but one who makes the ultimate sacrifice to say and make what needs to be said and made? I am crying. No, weeping. Is it for the loss of artists like Parajanov? Is it that we live in a world that violently, both makes and kills beauty? Maybe it's for myself because if Sayat Nova and its becoming art are what art is, I don't have the guts to make art.

Comments welcome on how you have responded to this question.

Wed, Jun 22, 2011  Permanent link
Categories: rant art Parajanov

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Architectural Organ I / Skin
Project: Polytopia

In-progress–feedback welcomed.

[Drawing upon cultural anthropology, my current research–a continuation of Tentative Architecture–is focused on the evolution of the relationship between technology and the human with the aim of creating cross-over points into dimensions and ecologies referred to as 'utopia', whether technological, architectural, or social. I am interested in finding the balance of the integration of technology and the human body beyond a gimmick or technofetish. Currently I am preparing a series of Architectural Organs (skin, hair, nails)—physical properties of our existing condition which can become architectural elements through a range of transformations.]

Ecologies of the Machinic Phylum

The Fold
By using three keywords that Marcos Novak's concept of Transvergence is situated upon—ontology, immanence and allo–I began questioning what is to find the response this is. What is being? What is becoming? What is other? I follow this with "What if?". "What if?" is the question of the speculative; it is what transforms the philosopher's "What is?" to the scientist's "This is." My work, therefore, should not be mistaken for a utopia only latent with "What ifs"; it is the process of 'tomorrow' becoming 'now'. In this quest I have honed in on the fold and its potential for developing new possibilities for modes of existence and occupation of space, in the form of architectural organs–origami-like extensions of our body; an actual organ of skin. Where are fold (n.) and folding (v.) positioned as responses to these questions and speculations of change? Why a fold? What is a fold anyway?

To fold is to hide; to unfold is to reveal; a fold therefore, holds both opposite actions (hiding and revealing) within one dimension of the fold line. Spatially, the area where my interest lies in, the one dimensionality of the line reveals and hides the capability of two-dimensional planes becoming a three-dimensional form. A fold is a multiple of potentials waiting to be realized. Therefore, a fold, a Deleuzian being-as-becoming, the line-as-plane-as-form, exists on a plane of immanence, latent with possibilities. The key to existing on this plane is desire.

 Folding is the act of including and excluding, of containing both the inside and the outside, this and that. One desires to fold and unfold, or in other words, to pursue potentials. Italo Calvino’s city of Chloé best illustrates the desire of the potential, what Rosetta Di Pace-Jordan explains as the “dynamism latent in all matter”, and in Chloé, the dynamism latent in all relationships. Chloé both includes thousands of possible relationships between its inhabitants, as well as excluding them—the well being of the city based on the exclusion, or folding-in and leaving out, rather than un-folding and playing out. 



A fold, or a ptychosis, as applied in medical English, is the behavior of becoming something other. A single becoming the double, becoming the multiple, exemplified in embryonic folding, where each fold yields another part to the single disk of the organism, multiplying its parts by continually folding over itself. This process is that of a machinic phylum, where folding of heterogeneous parts–ectoderm (outside) and endoderm (inside)–creates a new entity. In Origami, just as in embryonic folding, the combinations of transverse and longitudinal folds arrive at different forms. However, different from embryonic folding, origami has a homogenous base, which through a dynamic process ends in a static form. In Latin, fold (v.) and arrive (v.) are both plico, an active tense. Once a fold arrives at a point, that point should only become a departure point to another form.

We are continuously experiencing series of arrivals and departures at and from points; our lives are broken into milestones and anniversaries. We are in a constant mode of unfolding and changing, our single body becoming multiples in the compounded unfolding of its future. Our body is therefore analogous to the fold. However, we go through this dynamic process with a static, homogenous base: our body. So the question now shifts from 'what is a fold?', to how can a folded form (our body departing and arriving at various points in space-time) continue embodying the dynamism that initially created it? How can our bodies become a machinic phylum for the realization of architectural organs? What are the heterogeneities that must be synthesized?



Industrial Ecology to Social Ecology to Anarchic Ecology
We are on-course for the realization of architectural organs. Over the last 150 years, our relationship with technology has shifted focus from production at any cost, to human-centered design, to environmentally conscious design. The final step is a shift to a fragmented and sustainable, autonomous design, a shift which has already begun.

Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times is a seminal piece of the folding of the human into technology, the first machinic phylum of modern times. Filmed in 1936, it is the futuristic and extended vision of the events set off a century earlier with the second Industrial Revolution and the introduction of factory modernization to the domestic realm. This is a period when the technology takes precedence over the human, where production came at any cost to the environment; child labour was rampant, and worker rights were unheard of. The deep red sky and smoke stacks of Monet's paintings are not romantic reminiscing of the city, but factual impressions of the coal grime across the landscape and lives of citizens. Like Chaplin's film, Fritz Lange's Metropolis (1927) is created at the height of Scientific Management: The machinic efficiency of the human body, not for the benefit of the human, but for the production of profit–the "economic efficiency" of Taylorism, better put, the efficient production of an economy of profit at the expense of the human worker. Christine Fredrick's Scientific Management of the Home, by introducing the concept of efficiency for the female worker in her duties of housework, completes the cycle of profit production, with profit consumption.

There is a contrarian shift within the same time-period, of efficiency becoming more human centered. Frank and Lilian Gilbreth, inspired by Taylor's work focus on the production of efficiency towards the production of welfare: a folding of the human onto technology. In their scenario, the human is still part of the machine, but the process of production is not at the cost of the human. This shift of focus hastens through the mid-century as more human elements are folded onto the technology, arriving at the second machinic phylum and Henry Dreyfus' Designing for Humans (1955) which sets the standards for the study of human factors: the sensibility and attention to the human element of technology, where humans are not the heterogeneous parts of a factory, but as in Marshall McLuhan's terms, the mechanical technology becomes an extension of the human body.

This folding and re-folding of the human and technology has unfolded itself to a flat sheet of creases, ready to be re-folded with new terms: The environment. Once resolving the relationship of the mechanic modernization with the human, our focus shifted to the well-being of the human environment, Earth. We realize we have enveloped her in the same archaic ways as when we were enveloped by the machines of industrialization. In Social Ecology and Revolutionary Thought, Murray Bookchin points out that the dysfunctional relationship between human and nature stems from the dysfunctional relationship between humans, “To state this thought more precisely: the imbalances man has produced in the natural world are caused by the imbalances he has produced in the social world."

The point of view of this essay is completely Western. In China, unfortunately, factory citizens are the inhabitants of corporate cities, perhaps, one can say, true integration of human into machine. Therefore, it is naive to say that our shift in focus to the environment means we have resolved the social imbalances; it only acknowledges them. We exist on two parallel dimensions: one where we still exist within the first machinic phylum, the other where with much struggle we pretend to have moved out of it but in reality we have not, because we consume it.

As we continue to fold in and out of the creases of the past to find new folds for our future, we have come upon the third machinic phylum, the folding of technology onto the human. Here we are tearing into two separate, yet related paths: the use of mobile technologies as prosthesis, and the expansion of embedded networks, a tethered prosthesis of the human to nature, and a reversal of our embedding into the factory. Whereas a century ago Scientific Management made the human–to its detriment–more efficient for the production of profit, embedded networks, through activating nature, make it more efficient in the production of knowledge for its own sake. Embedded systems also activate architecture by folding in multiple layers of interaction between systems–the systems of the different operators of the space and the bodies occupying it.

With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning. Motor power places gigantic forces at his disposal, which, like his muscles, he can employ in any direction… and the dwelling-house was a substitute for the mother's womb, the first lodging, for which in all likelihood man still longs, and in which he was safe and felt at ease. […] Man has, as it were, become a prosthetic god. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown onto him and they still give him much trouble at times.

–Sigmund Frued Civilization and its Discontents, 1930, pp 42-43.

For sixteen years Freud suffered from the pain of a prosthetic jaw and palate, put in place as a result of cancer. His prosthesis was placed onto him, rather than, as he writes in this self-reflective piece, "grown onto him." At some point, the heterogeneities of human and technology, having switched forces repeatedly over time, eventually find equilibrium. This will be the fourth machinic phylum: the folding of technology and human into each other. This is the point where technology is no longer a prosthetic, where metaphors of architecture as prosthesis for nature or body no longer hold true. This is when, as Arakawa and Gins arrive at, that we become Architectural Bodies, a reconfiguration of the organism-person-surround.

We are, however, debilitated through our own history and stopped dead in our tracks. Archaic notions of beauty, narrow views on gender, misconceptions of race, and misunderstandings of philosophies of existence, must be re-evaluated through a process of unfolding, meaning that every scenario should be allowed to play out in order to evaluate its effects on our progress: every idea of beauty, every variation on gender; every identification and valuation of self and not others, with reference to an empirical religion.

Tue, May 24, 2011  Permanent link
Categories: architecture, utopian, controlled_nature, BwO, nature, biomimmicry, other_earth, social ecology, smooth space/striated space, bionic, cyborg_organ, landscape, alternative_space
Sent to project: Polytopia

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LandscapeTechne

I wrote this a while ago for the LandscapeTechne exhibit catalogue at Little Berlin gallery in Philadelphia.

LandscapeTechne. The crafting of a landscape. It begins with the irreducible landscape of nature. There is a rich history of landscape art, from Romantic paintings to Ansel Adams' photography and Robert Smithson's deformations in dirt, just to name a few that easily come into anyone’s mind when pressed on the topic. In all, and within this exhibit, landscape, among its many identities and roles, is a toolset, a carrier, and a medium. Technology has been crucial for many artists in the process of knowing and crafting the landscape. Its role in the landscape has been one of compression—rail and telegraph compressed days and months worth of landscape to minutes and hours; of extension—still photography or Muybridge's motion experiments; and of abstraction—creating layers upon layers of narrative and reality upon the concrete reality.

Every landscape is thus a multiple of potentials waiting to be realized. Therefore, a landscape, a being-as-becoming, exists on what Deleuze calls ‘a plane of immanence’, latent with possibilities. The key to existing on this plane and unlocking its potentials is desire. What is the desired knowledge that is guiding these techni? Because, by Aristotle's account, technê is concerned with bringing into existence things that could either exist or not. It appears as a very casual position where being or not being of those things have no effect beyond their own existence. But as artists we appropriate everything at hand, not just landscape and technologies, to bring 'something' into existence, repeatedly.

Craft-like and practically applied knowledge is called a ‘technê,'. (Wikipedia) Many early accounts of technê in Greek philosophy identify it with acts that are of necessity, such as farming, sowing, and other home and land management skills. Being that most of these skills are no longer a necessity for the general population, what is the necessity that pushes the artist to practical and philosophical technê?

In modern philosophy, 'need' is also a driving force for creating. In Production of Space, a level-minded expansion of Situationist thought, Henri Lefebvre defines the spatial practice of 'appropriation' where nature is modified to satisfy human needs. "An existing space may outlive its original purpose and the raison d'etre which determines its forms, functions, and structures; it may thus in a sense become vacant, and susceptible of being diverted, re-appropriated and put to a use quite different from its initial one.”

Lefevbre's space is a space that does not pre-exist us, but is simultaneously created and defined by social, economic and political forces. They are all fake spaces, fake social constructs, and re-appropriation shakes them up, with the goal to create new spaces for action and interaction. In the works presented in the LandscapeTechne exhibit, the space, however, is the pre-existing space of the natural landscape. It is diverted from its initial expanse of timeless space, to measured and coded space-time of each artist’s ideology. As Lefevbre asks, “What is an ideology without a space to which it refers, a space which it describes, whose vocabulary and kinks it makes use of, and whose code it embodies?" The spaces of the works may be the irreducible expanse of the natural landscape, reiterated over and over by each artist into their own unique narrative, but the ideologies coded into each refer back to the constructed spaces of the everyday, which are mostly mediated by technology, from mass media to mobile media.

The natural landscape is where one goes to in order to hear oneself and to find a balance away from our everyday lives in the urban landscape. In the United States, we have the privilege of massive amounts of space, weighted down with thousands of different time speeds in a phase space, or liberated from time altogether, however you wish to feel it. Isolation—absence of others, lack of sound pollution and no burden from pre-segmented existence in time—gives us a sense of freedom and it is only when we are free, and voluntarily in isolation can we have "the liberty to know oneself.” (Robert Adams) The natural landscape is therefore an amalgamation of other landscapes—for an artist, the landscape of the body and the mind, upon which the they construct yet other landscapes: mythical, emotional, psychological, physical—real and virtual.

Humans design, craft and make, and the references for making are outside and within our selves. The ultimate crafted landscape, however, is the landscape of the self. Artists first craft themselves and the qualitative measures of who they are as an artist, and this knowledge in turn crafts their work by appropriating acquired and existing toolsets. Though the spaces in LandscapeTechne are not detached from their parallel spaces of here and now, their creators have successfully been able to detach themselves in order to navigate between them and to take us along. Our desire for other spaces is just as strong as their need in delivering it. The need and the desire are one, and inherent within all of us.

Sun, May 22, 2011  Permanent link
Categories: landscape, alternative_space, utopian

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Human Document Project_Reflections
Project: Polytopia

Between 30 June - 2 July, a group of researchers, scientists, scholars and an artist met at the Korea Institute of Technology in Saarbruchen, Germany for the Human Document Project. The three day event, organized by Dr. Andreas Manz, was an intensive programme of presentations, brain-storming sessions and more presentations (followed by good food and drink).

The two main questions of the three-day session were 1. How to preserve a document on humankind for one million years? 2. What would that document contain? Each presenter came in with ideas which were then re-hashed into new ideas by the collective.

My presentation was titled Utopian Phase Space. I'll skip the intro part on my background and work—which can be found here on SC and on my website—and give you a transcription of the rest of my talk and proposal.

(sub title: design_story)... My work, like most art and design tells stories. Art and design have been carriers of much of our history through thousands of years as paintings, pottery, poetry and so on. A well-designed object, either carries a unique story, or completes an existing story, or allows the viewer/user to generate their own fantastical narrative. Art and design create an experience of a certain quality that resonates with our beliefs, interests, and experiences. What is the story we tell our future and what qualities does that story invoke in our future readers? My “challenge”, especially for myself, is what temporal human qualities (ie non-verbal communication) do we preserve, and how do we document and preserve them, so that they can be re-lived in a million years? (And I have some ideas for different ways of "re-living")

(sub title: goal_resurrection) Most important: How do we convince our Future Founders, that humans are worth resurrecting to share those experiences? With the latest scientific developments such as animating E-coli bacteria with tens of thousands of years-old mammoth RNA—in effect resurrecting dead matter—or computing life into bacteria from computer generated and synthetic DNA, the question of resurrection will be a common dilemma, if not an everyday decision, in the future of intelligent, sentient beings. So what can we do today to design a plan for becoming highly desirable Gods, so that Future Founders will want and resurrect us of their own free will? Kind of sinister.

(sub title: future founders) But before we think about what we leave behind and how we preserve it, we have to think of who will be experiencing it. Who are our Future Founders? What state of civilization will they be in? In one million years, we can have whole civilizations from stone-age to space-age, one thousand times over and over again!

I think this question is the most important question for all of us here to answer. It will determine what we say, and how we say it.

Now with my background in architecture, design and media; my interest in Utopias; and my influences by science fiction, what plan of action can I devise?

(sub title: brain) I am going to focus on designing, and I am using art and design somewhat interchangeable right now. In his upcoming book on Art and the Conscious Brain, leading neuro-scientist, Antonio Damasio, places art as a necessary function of the brain. He positions art in line of brain’s functions: the first is homeostasis; the second is the mind-making, third is the making of consciousness, fourth production of the self and finally is culture art, as a side effect of cognitive capacity, and a necessity which creates socio-cultural homeostasis. Humans create. That’s what we do.

One of my favorite philosophers, Vilem Flusser, has written that, "Design is the joining together of great ideas to escape (or design) our way out of unwanted circumstances and to instead live artfully and beautifully."

And every time we design—basically create culture—we also create an obstacle in someone else’s path—and Flusser masterfully makes an etymological connection between design and trickery.

What I am getting to and proposing is, using design to fabricate a desirable culture that begs to be re-lived.

In the Xenogenesis series, by McArthur and Nebula award winning author, Octavia Butler, the last remaining humans are saved and preserved in an organic suspended animation, by a race of interstellar travelers, the Oankali. The Oankali have three genders: female, male and ooloi (who are actually a gender-less third-party which accommodate mating between the Oankali genders and the human race.The Oankali are gene-traders. Their ooloi act as a repository of genetic information of all the species they come into contact with. They refine stronger genes and eliminate the weaker ones as well as genetic diseases. The ooloi also control human reproduction, basically by eliminating it, unless mediated by an ooloi, to avoid genetic diseases that occur in human-to-human mating. The other reason for the ooloi preventing human reproduction is to fix what they call the “great contradiction”: intelligence in the service of hierarchy; basically our hierarchical behaviour over-riding our intelligence and compromising our species well-being.The ooloi have the ability to read the qualitative aspect of humans. Not quality in terms of eye colour and body type, but cognitive and emotional qualities. Qualities that are accumulated over time, qualities which are influenced by culture—as well as making culture—qualities one gains from life experiences, as well as qualities which are inherent in humankind. But the ooloi have human specimens that assist them in their reading and understanding of humans.The problem that lead to the ooloi maintaining humans but not allowing them to reproduce, is because they were aware of humans through the human’s unaltered history, and the immediate and unmediated experience of the human’s existence among them.

This is a science fiction story, but opens up many discussions.

As we are, quite frankly and in my humble opinion, we won’t leave a great impression on other sentient and intelligent beings. We have many great achievements that leave me in tears and awe, but they are too few in the grand scheme of things.

I admit that my idealism and Utopian ideas, are rooted in my flaw—like many other Utopians—it stem from a negative point of view.

Therefore the first problem I see is us, humans.

However, what we have going for this situation, is that one million years from now, there probably will not be any human specimen—as human is defined now—for any Future Founder to judge and analyze and test and decide what to do with. And there could be humans or humanoids and I can go on many speculative routes, but will leave it for later….

The second problem is the history we have created thus far, and the speculation of the kind of history we will most likely have in the future. History has been a linear progression, documented during its current time and before our eyes, analyzed in hindsight and ignored all together only to be repeated in the future. It has also been an organic progression, behaving as a networked organism where each system (each country, each regime, etc) has affected other systems, resulting in unexpected outcomes. History is also made of individual stories, many that overlap, many that are repeated and quite often forgotten or bundled together, and many that are unique, stories that through conjunction with other strong, individual stories have changed culture and the course of civilization.

(sub title: history_utopias) We should take this chance of extended time—this time to pre-analyze—to construct a new story. We will build this new story in the same manner our current history is being built, by building it up with individual stories. But these individual stories should all be the unrealized Utopias. We take advantage of the enormous amount of time from now until then, to make our Utopias from the current “nowheres”, to a quite possible network of “somewheres”. This grand fabrication is a phase space where all possible Utopias are represented as existing alongside each other. But we will provide no conclusion. The story is open ended, with multiple possibilities, all exciting in their hope and visionary. But which possibility actually came to pass? We won't tell. And the anticipation of wanting to know, is an old tactic… (Bible, Quran)

Oops. I just made a full circle and brought us back to where we are with 'holy books' of made up stories…

(sub title BwO_cyborg organs) I see all of the upcoming brainstorming and discussion as an opportunity to devise a plan to live our posthuman lives as cyborg organs, and as what N. Katherine Hayles describes as “an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction”… what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call, a body without organs. What I will boldly change in Kate’s position—and chalk it up to my oh, inexperience and optimism—is “material” to “immaterial”…. an Immaterial entity…

After the presentation, I led a group assigned with brainstorming the documentation and preservation of "art and feelings". (To speed up the brainstorming process and to get results, we unanimously decided on a few givens.)

Our considerations were:
Who will be addressed?

Increased intelligent humans
Advanced culture and society
Better technical means of interpretation
At minimum, more or less like us

How much can be stored?

Assume considerable data storage space
Evolving document

For 'Arts' we discussed:
Accessibility:

• Facilitate understanding


• Style and comprehensiveness



Instructions
Keys and Legend (ie visual library, iconography)
Language level

... and Content Scenario (What is the content and how can it be it selected):

• Wiki-like


• Spectrum of examples



High-brow (Michelangleo)
Low-brow (Backstreets of Rome)



• Voting system



Public on-line voting



• One example per technology



pottery, painting, textile



• Digital art object


• Abstract text description, devoid of artist’s ego

For 'Feelings' we discussed how to:

• Document Emotions



Scientific studies, ie on facial expressions; psychological, anthropological, neurological, etc.
Art, poetry, plays, documentary



• Induce Emotions



Psychopharmaca



• Experience Emotions



Augmented reality
Multi-media and multi-sensory experiences
Embedded systems

Our general recommendation for Art was "broad but not deep representation" so as to not taint perceptions of future founders of these works; and for Feelings, "deep through background stories"

... and ultimately, the final proposed document for Art and Feelings is an Epic Narrative presented as a multi-media and multi sensory experience, documented in text for reproduction purposes. This recommendation was guided by the works of Sol Lewitt and Allan Kaprow as precedents, specifically projects which are text-based instructions for replication of their work by anyone, at any given time.

Of course, to be honest, being the one artist in the group, and being the leader/moderator of the group, I pushed forward this idea of abstract, text-based work which is devoid of artist ego. It is simply a description of, for example, what a paintbrush is and how it was used. No artist names, no styles names, no affiliations. 1,000,000 years from now, who cares who Matisse was; I'd fear we'd be creating fake gods all over again.

To learn about other presenters and solutions, you can visit the HuDoP site.

For the future session, tentatively set to be sometime in 2012 at Stanford University, I strongly urge artists, poets, philosophers and futurists of the SpaceCollective community to participate. Of the many artists that Dr. Manz had invited to create a balanced mix of participants, I was the only one to respond and attend. It is very important for our group to set an imaginative and out-there standard to be achieved. I thoroughly enjoyed the sessions, but felt in the end that the solutions were too pragmatic. (though you can say I'm too crazy to want to be resurrected as a cyborg organ!)

Mon, Sep 13, 2010  Permanent link
Categories: utopian, BwO, human_document_project, cyborg_organ
Sent to project: Polytopia

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"If you could clone yourself, would you?"

... Erin asked. "Yes." I said, without hesitation.

We each began fantasizing the benefits of having our own second 'me': She would not be second to me, she would be a duplicate 'me', equal in every aspect. I don't want her for her organs—I can grow those individually. I want her for her mind, her abilities, all the things that make me 'me' and which I want more of. She would be in charge of tasks I only trust myself with because she would do and decide as I would. I also trust her to be meticulous in her craft and detailing. Being another me, she obviously has the same interests I do, so I can send her off to read a book which we would download later in the evening, either through physical jacks or more poetically, synching through our dreams. She could work while I party... we just hit a bump here... She's me and I'm her; no one is the boss of anyone. So we both work and party.

The imaginary relationship works for me, but what happens when my clone learns of her mortality. We don't carry anger from knowing we die, because there is no one to be angry at or to blame. But for my clone, I am her Creator (along with the scientist cohorts who made it possible), so she does have someone to be very mad at for making and bestowing her with human finitude. Is it the same anger harbored by teenagers towards their parents? Will we enter a version of Blade Runner, she and I, duking it out one rainy day? Aside from the problems that may arise between me and her on this one detail, I have a partner who would very likely leave me and me to each other and walk out. So the question shifts to "At what expense would you clone yourself?" How do we confront questions of mortality and morality? Is the second 'me' too close for comfort? Will it be confusing as to who is who and which does what? Will I fall into a self-absorbed, perfect relationship with myself?

Probably. That's why we need robots, not clones. A clone is the same kind, a twin really, just one delayed in its conception and birth. With robots, on the other hand, we would expect there to be a level of detachment because of the materiality of the robot, as opposed to the flesh and consciousness of our clone. But let me give you a three very real examples how that won't work either.





Yes, Paro, the healing robot seal. I met Paro in 2005. I was petting him and gently testing his reactions when a group of 9 year-olds came running over and almost immediately began taunting and teasing him. His movements were bewildered, his cries were for help. I was distraught. Paro was not having fun and his responses were so real, that I wanted to scream "Stop!" but didn't and just walked away. I still carry the guilt of not helping Paro...

Paro's purpose is exactly that, to generate and foster emotions, though not the emotions I had due to the specifically cruel circumstances Paro and I met.

Aiko, in pop-culture terms, is aspiring to be a 'skin-job'. Aiko's web of sensors beneath a soft skin can be very confusing. The confusion is that we know for a fact that what we are experiencing is not a life-form, yet somewhere between our eyes, our brain and our emotional response to what we are seeing, information gets confused. Or we allow ourselves to be fooled, a momentarily lapse into another reality. Realdolls are also such example. They are realistic looking dolls, and though without any of the sensory interaction as Aiko, here is a testimonial "that says it all":

January 10, 2010

The reasons why I decided to buy a doll were various: I was (pretty happy) single, but once I realised this doll could really make a difference to a life of solitude, I started searching the net. I came out by Abyss... I didn't doubt anymore... made my choices and ordered a doll... Then the waiting period...

When you are fully committed to a purchase like this, it's a long time, but the customer service is no less than perfect.

The day she arrived I wrote the following passage to Debra and Amanda:

"She is so much much more beautiful then I expected from the face-picture taken on her birthday. I read testimonials, saw documentaries, etc. but it is really astonishing how this is possible. She's here now for approx. 4 hours and everytime I walk in the room I get a little scare as if someone's really sitting there. Which means she gives me the feeling of company from the first minute , and I could never really believe that that could be possible. Maybe you remember I told you that I was afraid my cat would feel tempted to set his claws into her flesh and you said the cat in your atelier didn't show an ounce of intrest in the dolls. Well, believe it or not, from the moment Lily sat on my couch, my cat came to her and gave her little knob-heads as if she was a real person. That says it all."

We are some days further now and I can say: it is getting better and better. The things you discover... The things you can or must do: go shopping for her, taking care of her (washing, powdering), dressing her up, moving her,... Kissing her, caressing her, cuddle her, laying next to her, holding her hand, brushing her wig,... too much to mention :-)

Not to mention her design and her looks. When you see her 'in person', all pictures furfill their expectations. In fact, no picture can capture her beauty and her sweetness. I am so happy to have her with me!

Thanks to Abyss and to all of its staff... [ed.] Thank you for making this possible!

In a separate conversation on this topic, soCinematic brought the Uncanny Valley to my attention, the area where extreme likeness to a human, but not a human, is met with repulsion. He supplemented it with this graph as well:



Erin pointed out that regardless of all the sci-fi narratives of humankind destroyed or enslaved by AI, we are on an inevitable path to developing these very gadgets of our demise. I disagree that we are moving towards developing better AI with any more determination than we are in keeping ourselves in a stagnant place, not moving forward in our emotional development. The problem is when we position highly advanced beings (man-made) across from humans which have really had no significant change in the past 8000+ years, other than getting taller and fatter (though I read somewhere that we're getting shorter again).

The core issue is our inability to emotionally cope with clones/robots/transhumans/etc and, of course, with questions of mortality. I understand and have argued for human emotion, mainly it's result, empathy. But to close the first Valley, and to jump over the second Valley, we need to advance emotionally, without losing our unique ability to empathize. Our ability to understand and connect with other beings is so important that, for example, the Japanese have a specific word for the sense of connectedness between humans (and only humans): ふれあい (fureai). This kind of specificity in language blocks our emotions from extending to fit future scenarios. Even now, it would be incorrect to use the word fureai in relation to the RealDoll, while the emotions felt by the human opposite a RealDoll can easily be extended to meet emotions expressed to a real human companion, as in the testimonial above.

The bigger problem, aside from specificity in language and underdeveloped emotions, is that we have questions of morality, ethics and religious beliefs bogging down science and progress. From the above examples I gather that we have the capacity to emotionally advance. I will get to what I mean by emotional advancement and why in our trans/posthuman pursuit it is important to alter and enhance affect, and only by achieving advanced emotional states can we advance morally, ethically and in return evolutionary. By moral and ethical advancement, I mean that moral and ethical questions must lose their grip on our decision-making process. The reason they raise questions, and usually at the start of an uncharted or unconventional process, is because we cannot emotionally handle the very situations they question. We must change ourselves to meet advanced emotional states. And, in order to do so, morality must change. But what are the measures we should go by to advance (or shrink away) morality? I agree that science can answer those questions. (Mr.Harris makes good points but he can sound imperialistic and pretentious.) However, science alone cannot be used; it's objective and morality is subjective.

Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions




Morality is more of a concern now that we know life from synthetic matter is possible, as well as possibly life from dead matter. This debunks any basis for the existence of a God that has us functioning on fate, and in return rewards and punishes based on our decisions.

But the point I want to get back to is how should we emotionally progress before any new life-forms are introduced to our midst, whether clone, robot, resurrected, or synthetic? How do we deal with human, but human of another kind? With life of another kind, we don't encounter the uncanny valley between two peaks—we start off in an endless valley of the uncanny where a human corpse may be more comforting when faced with the other.

Beyond physical and cognitive enhancements, as well as genetic enhancements which deal with disease and appearances, the future 'me' must possess objective emotions.

Now, I began this post end of March 2010 and had the bulk of it written in a day. It is July and I have been stuck in this corner, which I have placed myself in single-handedly: objective emotions. I will try and follow up in a future post on how do we achieve a balance with objective emotions. For now, the moral of this post is: "ditch morality, advance emotionally."

Fri, Jul 23, 2010  Permanent link

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Language as Virus
Project: The Total Library

I rarely share CNN stuff; they suck in journalism. But this little window into Shishmaref, Alaska is interesting.

There is a concern of dialects and languages being lost, and as a result, cultures being lost. Of 4000 or so spoken languages, we have about 2500 left, some spoken by as little as one person, and when that person is gone, the language is gone unless it was successfully transmitted.

However, at the same time that we are losing ancient languages and cultures, we are gaining new ones. This is either happening the way it has happened for centuries, which is by the fragmentation of social and cultural groups that leads to dialects; or in more creative ways such as completely new construction—which also has historical roots—such as Esperanto, Klingon and now Na'vi. Are the linguists and scientists too worried with loss of old languages (and cultures) to realize the new emerging ones? But the concern for loss of language extends to regular people too, speakers of a particular language, not just scientists. Let's take current English as an example. In the comments of the io9 post linked above, one person says "Work on America speaking better English first." And a few comments are exchanged on what is really about the action the limitations of technology have taken on changing our language, primarily SMS and IM by altering our spelling, and now tweets that require new abbreviated grammar, which also incorporates the new spelling, all compounding the transformation of informal written English.

As both student and teacher, I have always been meticulous of proper spelling and grammar. I am even picky with tweets, SMS and IM and spell everything out (yes, I face space and character limitations too frequently because because is not bcuz). However, after reading and re-reading De Landa's chapter Memes and Norms in A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, I am more convinced of allowing English to be changed through our use of technology. Technology is adding new words (blog) and redefining old words (blackberry). As we are becoming more intertwined with and defined by our technologies, why can they not define new grammar and new spelling? As De Landa puts it, 'the sheer weight of numbers decides its ultimate fate.' He provides Norman French and Roman Latin as examples where though one was the language of English aristocracy, and the other was regulated and forced through the language of law and religion, neither were able to 'take over as the language of the masses', because the masses were speaking their own languages and dialects and they outnumbered the ruling classes. So we can enforce proper spelling and grammar by attaching consequences to it like the Romans did—with grades instead of arm power—or we accept that the growing number of English speakers are adopting new spelling and grammar. This is not a new idea, it's called Spelling and Language Reformation.



Ed Rondthaler illustrates redundancies of English spelling.

I think I may have written somewhere on SC, about my anxiety over losing languages; saddened over the switch from blackberry to Blackberry. I still feel sad when I learn of nature words omitted from the Oxford English Dictionary for Children. How can children be taught to care for nature and environment when they do not know or understand the words that define it?

Omitting words and redefining word spelling are different though. Marcos Novak disagrees; he asserts that 'changing spelling, changes meaning therefore completely changing the language because the connection to the root word is lost'; the original word may as well be omitted from the language. I disagree on the premise that society and humanity are constantly changing and cannot be defined by old words and older meanings. As technologies create more modes of interactions and emotions, our old language will not have enough words for describing and expressing ourselves. In turn we create new words and redefine old words. As we evolve, we advance our language. But if we are adamant about tying everything to proper root words as they were being used in 800AD, 1600 or even 1980, will we not face a problem of inadequate expression? A while back some members of SpaceCollective began brainstorming new word definitions—in a way, reclaiming the language to fit our current needs and modes of expression. (I can't locate the post and it's string of comments. If you do, please create a synapse.) Etymology is vertical and hierarchical, while redefinition is horizontal and mesh-like. The vertical is a slice through strata with diversity across time, while the horizontal stitches together from a larger cultural sample where time is not varied, but common (or has little variety, ie. 15 years, not 150 years). A word which was relevant at one time, is not relevant at another time. Loyalty to the root is therefor not feasible as it slows down emotional and cognitive evolution.

My title for this post, Language as Virus, is not from William S Burroughs' quote, "Language is a virus from outer space." I have not even been able to locate the context of that quote. (the internet may seem like a good place to look for something, but sometimes it is too big to find what you are looking for.) I came about the title when I began thinking how words are formed and accepted between a group of people, and drew a literal parallel with a virus, an agent that replicates through a host body. This also came about from reading the opening paragraph to the Memes and Norms chapter:

Human languages are defined by sounds, words, and grammatical constructions that slowly accumulate in a given community over centuries. These cultural materials do not accumulate randomly but rather enter into systematic relationships with one another, as well as with the human beings who serve as their organic support.

In the case of our ubiquitous technologies, who is the virus: (the) language (of technology) or technology itself? Are we the hosts, or is our language the host? Are we the agents of change through the language or is technology changing us? My mind went wild thinking of the cycle: We create mimetic systems; they take control; we become mimetic systems; we take back control, and the cycle continues—a popular sci-fi plot. However, the "they" are not the machines, the robots, etc. it is the language, the vowels, the consonants, the syllables. Soon we will speak code. The break down and baring of language to shorthand logic for everyday communication and transmission of information is inevitable. We already do that through email and text messaging where all words are reformulated to codes and eventually broken down to two numbers. We are already internally vocalizing the same complex-to-simple shift when reading w/ r u 2day? (Is SMS written or spoken language?)

Language is communication. Language is culture. Language is poetry. Language is a hand-woven silk rug. Language is a hunting scene painted on the wall of a cave. They all communicate a story about their originating and executing culture. The 'etymology' of these languages are varied; we cannot trace them to a common or single poem, rug, painting, etc. So why should we insist on tracing our spoken and written language to a single common word, an instance in time, so long ago that we cannot even identify with?

Fri, Dec 18, 2009  Permanent link
Categories: language, code, rant
Sent to project: The Total Library

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Society for Utopian Studies

"Progress is the realization of Utopias." -Oscar Wilde

I have never ever held any 'pay' memberships other than the gym. Professional memberships that cost $$$ like AIA, IDSA, ASID or AIGA—never thought about it. Super Pro memberships that cost $$$$ like ACM—never ever thought about it. Why? I don't see the point of joining the fraternity (okay, ASID is a sorority. That's about it.) But this one...

I joined.

I am disappointed in me for not knowing earlier about The Society for Utopian Studies. I have been fantasizing about my Utopia (Other Earth) where all knowledge and technology are free and readily accessible to everyone. In the real world—the current dystopia of a looming 40% fee hike across University of California—I imagined my utopia manifesting itself in an interdisciplinary Department for Utopian Studies. Or even bigger, a Ministry. Forget foreign policy. Let's study the collective ideals of humanity and see how we can make it a reality. It makes sense given the various forms utopias (and dystopias) manifest themselves: art, architecture, social studies, literature, economics, theology, psychology.... and on and on.

The reality of our day-to-day lives is that we are all striving towards our ideals. It is also what leads us to conflict because every person's utopia is always someone else's dystopia. Though it would be more productive to say we should not force our utopias on each other, the fact is that we would probably be at peace if we were not imagining utopias at all and just went on our daily lives playing, sleeping, eating bon-bons and sexting (less human contact involving emotional stuff = less emotional problems).

Did I just turn on myself?

Thu, Nov 19, 2009  Permanent link

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Web Compartmentivity
Project: The Total Library

I wrote this post last December but didn't publicly post it here. I don't why, other than I immensely hate facebook, I was ranting and thought I'll keep it to myself.

But, appearing in this past year, there are already solutions to what I perceive to be internet problems (ie CargoCollective, Behance Network and Google Wave are three solutions). Social networking needs to move into a broader collaborative environment for generating meaning, as well as moving away from information consumption to knowledge building. I don't want to hear of 'user-generated content'. Content doesn't always contain meaning; it is a neutral word and neutrality in the space of the internet is what allows it to deviate from full integration with the greater human network.

The internet, or World Wide Web as it is affectionately referred to but rarely actually called by, was meant to connect without boundaries and borders, everyone and everywhere. Everyone was hotly pursuing unique and personal web and email addresses. YourName@hotmail.com and YourName.com were the catch of the day. Web addresses had permanent 'open house' for all to enter and visit and they were growing by the day. If you were a 'creative' you had your own dot com address and if you were not, you were on Tripod, Geocities, Angelfire or something of the sort. Site designs were personalized on the low-end with centre-justified mutli-coloured fonts and flashy animated gifs, or on the high-end with flashy Flash interfaces which come as presets and tools in new versions of Flash these days, or are just coded in a snap in a variety of other software and languages. Regardless of looks and limits in terms of who was online, and minus members-only forums, everyone was welcome everywhere.

Type the address and click Enter, the World Wide Web is an undiscriminating portal.

This trend of personalized websites and addresses became more and more sophisticated and by the dot com bust, if you Google a band or DJ, local or international, you would find their website; if you Google a friend you may have found them as well. You were also likely to not find your long-lost friends and classmates. You could pay up and use FindYourClassmates.com or some other people-finder web service, or you could use orkut and a select number of other newly minted "social networks." Your web just got cast bigger and wider because now you can find those who never had the personal web space nor the Tripod or Angelfire public spaces. Simultaneously blogs and vlogs start popping up and the web is getting bigger because every mom is now blogging about their toddler's eating habits and their family vacations and DIY home projects.

The web is out of control! All the people you find, all the information all the happenings!

But one day, you are forced to make an account before you can view a friend's profile, or read a blog or view pictures. You're closed off unless you join. What's the harm, so you make a friendster profile—but soon switch to myspace because you don't like friendster telling you who you can or cannot be on the web. You make a profile for yourself (and one for your cat for shits and giggles). Soon after you're barraged with friend requests (even for your cat from some obscure band trying to create a fan base). Well, you have the myspace so why not try the next popular marketing trick, facebook. This all a blast because you are re-connecting with friends you didn't even know you have!

We are under the illusion—or is it delusion?—that our network has grown.

The web has allowed for everyone to have presence in the world, and to be reached and read and viewed and reacted upon. Social networking sites and blog sites have taken this connectivity one step further by allowing for everyone to have a "personalized" presence regardless of skill and technical capabilities. But three issues have emerged:

1_The meaning of true personalization is lost.
2_The web is compartmentalized and actually made smaller.
3_All information is secondary and tertiary. Primary sources are lost.

1_
I do not miss rainbow comic sans and animated gifs, but I do miss the obvious effort one made to create a website in an attempt at having a presence all their own. Despite the abundance of custom designed and coded websites, and personalized WordPress sites which veer far from standard WP, a massive majority of internet users link to standardized facebook/twitter/myspace profiles, the status quo of our online presence, masked as personal spaces of expression. The IKEA and DWR of the internet. A personal website (YourChosenTag.com) is hardy viewed unless it is the provided direct link on one of these social networking portals or if one makes a conscious decision to include a personal website in lieu of the social network profile.

Maybe I am nostalgic, but, HTML, CSS and Javascripting are languages of our time. I see no reason for every internet user* of 2009 to not know these fundamental communication vocabularies to create their own existence online, even if it means creating the 90's equivalent websites in the latest version of Dreamweaver. The knowledge and command of these vocabularies for self-expression, is equal to building our vocabulary for our spoken language and expressing our thoughts verbally. To be more eloquent, we will quote and borrow thoughts from others whom are well-established. However, we will never be fully realized unless we take full command of our spoken language and begin forming our own thoughts and combination of vocabulary to communicate in. Similarly, we will take a myspace page and customize it to a certain permitted degree in CSS in order to express ourself, but a myspace page for a band will never explore the full range of creative possibilities a band can possess when the knowledge of the markup language is limited to begin with, and further limited by the nature of the space within it is used in. LinkdIn and facebook leave no space for web languages to be exercised, and through their perfect, regulated aesthetic and order only reveal the flawed social constructs of regulation and order: the economic system (where you worked, at what capacity, on what corporate gig) and of empty, one-way relationships ("for any one listening" here is my status for today...), where for acceptance we voluntarily stereotype and order ourselves into groups and affiliations.

Updating news about oneself on facebook is about as impersonal as mass emails where an unknown number of recipients, maybe 5, maybe 500 are BCC'd. Though I hate CC's, I actually feel better with accidental CC's where I realize I am one of say 5 recipients 'chosen' to receive the news. I feel good to be thought of, it even feels better to know I was manually chosen; not only did s/he think of me, but actually went through a contact list of hundreds and clicked the radio button by my name. Just as the mass emailing, the facebook status updates have no intended target audience and no personalization of the subject. No, 'your network of friends' is too broad; every friend is different, and not every friend needs to know everything. As a result of receiving news in the passing, the system of empathy breaks.

2_
Costco offers everything you think you need and everything you never thought you need in large quantities. IKEA is the same. Both deal with consumption, one with comfort in excess, the other with lifestyle. If we limit ourselves to these two mega-stores which offer everything, we would miss out on the whole Mall and all the other offerings. Jeez, we'd even miss out on all the stuff Walmart has. Our shopping/browsing world gets reduced from the expanse of the Mall to the confines of the one or two stores. The isolation and shrunken space is furthered if we get catalogues and communication from only that one or two favoured stores. This claim needs a survey and I am speculating based on what I see around me. I used sit in a cafe, airport, school—anywhere with public internet—and I would look over and discover a new site someone was viewing. We all catch glimpses of each other's screens and a good part of what I see these days, and the past couple years, is a mini-web of a few million: facebook.

Social networking users (being a user is a key issue, as opposed to being a creator) are like the shoppers of Costco, IKEA, etc who hardly venture to other stores. Even if they do check somewhere else out, it is through a recommendation or link on facebook. That is equivalent to someone recommending a product at Sears instead of your favoured IKEA; you accept the recommendation, however, when you do step into Sears, you go straight to that product and don't look through any other floor. You may look around the immediate vicinity of the product you were referred to, but that's just about it. Considering the billions of pages that make the internet, it appears that many have become users of few pages, rather than discoverers and creators of a greater number.

3_
The other day my friend and I decided to go to an after party. I asked where is it? She said she didn't know. I asked where did you see it? She said it was on my facebook. She might as well have said 'I saw it on a taxi ad'. Though, not being on facebook, I did not even know about the party at all, but my friend who is a facebook user didn't have much information either. I think our party life would have been more hopping if we knew the primary source of the information, and if it was posted and advertised on a more open and accessible network. This incident was not isolated and I have faced it many times.

Information is easily shared and spread on the internet and as a result we are in a situation where news needs to be verified. It travels fast, gets re-posted over and over, commented on, reabsorbed, paraphrased, etc. Within less than a day, the original news source is not only lost, but the message is many times transformed. We have to pick and chose to find the right source and our task is harder online with the billions of webpages out there. But Google can only pull about 17% of those anyway**. To add to this dilemma of finding the right source, many of us get subjective selections of news through facebook posts. More often than not, all information in regards to a news worthy event, or a topic of interest, is right there on the Wall, requiring no need to navigate away from that facebook page. The act of 'navigating away' has long been a concern of web designers and marketers and we have seen many engaging ways of keeping people on a website, not allowing them to lose attention and move on to something else. facebook has brilliantly solved this by utilizing our trusted network, in addition to creating an easy interface for adding and sharing information. But the very sinister convenience of staying on one place and trusting your network means many times we do not seek the primary source of information. All information is therefore secondary.

Granted human knowledge is bazillionary in terms of the generations and number of mouths and minds it has passed through to get to us, but we still have primary sources of knowledge to refer to for building new knowledge. We shouldn't be using and absorbing information; we should be building and creating new knowledge and that ain't happening if we don't venture out into the World Wide Web without a safety net.

I want to get lost online and never come across a familiar index page.




* Okay, so I kinda know js.
** I read that somewhere online.

Fri, Nov 6, 2009  Permanent link
Categories: rant, facebook, anti-social networks
Sent to project: The Total Library

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