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Three years ago I gave a talk to some students on narrativity. I didn’t pick the topic and it was hard work. I ended up explaining that narrativity is the degree to which a specific element within a given structure advances the goal of that structure. In a story, narrativity is the ability for specific elements to move the story along.

In a cross-media form like an Alternate Reality Game (link is to a .pdf – it is concise and an excellent introduction) the specific technologies employed in the various actions can be understood as having levels of narrativity – specifically, the relationship between the goal of a specific action and the technology used to reach that goal, and how those elements work together to reach the ultimate intention of the project.

As an example, the ‘beginning’ of the Alternate Reality Game “i love bees” featured a brief shot of a url at the bottom of the last frames for the trailer for Halo 2. As the ARG was part ad campaign for the upcoming release of Halo 2 this was an appropriate choice, and as the game required keen observation skills placing it in such a way made it available, primarily, to keen observers and, as the game required people willing to participate, showing just a URL, briefly, would require someone with the necessary motivation to go home and visit that sight. The fact that the URL was hard to see required, perhaps, a few viewings of the trailer so that both persistence (another trait essential to a successful ARG), and a willingness to spend money on entertainment (an essential trait in a potential consumer…) were also required. Jane Macgonigal’s choice to snail mail jars of honey with letters (spelling out “i love bees”) inside of them to a highly active ARG player (here for more details) thereby announcing the game to a wider audience let people know that the project would be highly cross-media, etc. Each of these technologies was used to advance specific elements of the overall narrative of the project in a highly skillful, very intelligent way.

Over the intervening years since my talk, and inspired by seeing this interview with physicist Lee Smolin (middle of page), where he talks about some string theorists favoring a discussion of area over volume, my thinking on the narrativity of objects has developed into a metaphorization of objects as surfaces, where each specific surface conveys different concepts/different information, more efficiently than other surfaces.

I’ll explain:

Imagine a chladni plate with, instead of salt or sand, different three-dimensional objects on it. As different frequencies vibrate the place, different objects on the plate respond to those frequencies by vibrating more or less. At any given frequency one or more objects will vibrate more than others – those objects can be understood as optimal forms to convey those specific frequencies. If, instead of frequencies you imagine ‘vibrating’ the plate with certain elements of a given story or project, you get the idea.

During a class last semester I described this as Multi-Surface, Cross-Media Computing, and I feel it is an important concept to wrap one’s head around if the goal is a cross-media application – ARG or otherwise. Some students seemed stuck on the word ‘surface’ and thought I was suggesting that this sort of activity was ‘superficial’ and, hence, shallow. I wasn’t.

I also feel that this sort of narrativity/resonance exists within objects that are not explicitly designed for this purpose.

I think that the objects we embed in our environment resonate with the concepts that are important to our culture. The web is such an ‘object’ or ‘surface’.

Even further explanation:

Imagine again the chladni plate, and this time it is wrapped around the surface of the earth and we, and everything else in our environment, is resting on it. This time, our ideas are what make it vibrate and our ideas are passing through our feet. As before, there are objects on the plate, and as before some objects vibrate harder – let’s say twice as hard, than others in response to the different frequencies (ideas) rippling from our minds, through our bodies and across the plate. The ideas we’re feeding into the plate are varied, obviously, and many ideas are rippling across the plate at any moment, just like at any moment people’s minds are considering all sorts of things. In my analogy people’s thoughts are ‘freely’ their own, so they run the gamut of whatever people happen to be thinking about at any time.

After a while we would begin to make connections regarding thoughts we had and objects that responded strongly to those thoughts. As consummate tinkerers, we would begin to build and assemble things that would respond to various thoughts/vibrations. Sometimes these objects would be designed specifically to respond to a specific idea, and sometimes that would work. Sometimes there would be unexpected consequences in the form of the object vibrating to some frequency that we hadn’t really been paying attention to.

If the object that vibrates to this unfamiliar frequency vibrates long and loud enough we’d have no choice but to pay attention to it and an aspect of our paying attention to it would produce a change in our focus and behavior. We would probably stop what we were doing and try to understand what was making this thing hum. Some people would explain it, and other people would listen and think about the explanation and test it out by incorporating it into other things. Eventually we would ‘understand’ it well enough to use it, at which point it would have been classified and probably named.

In this example the ‘new’ object would have a high level of narrativity for a concept that has evolved to be utterly real, prominent (it responds to a strong vibration emanating from us) and useful, but that seemed to emerge from our collective tinkering, and was not explicitly understood and designed first in our heads, and then projected into the environment where it was embodied in a specific resonant object solely via our explicit intentions. We certainly had a lot to do with it but its origins were not explicitly predicted by previous understandings.

If we were smart enough to accept the ‘new’ thing, listen to it, and integrate it into our collective toolkit our collective experience and future tinkering would be enhanced.

If we chose tell it what it is rather than listen to it by, for example, giving it a bizzaro nonsense description like, I don’t know, ‘alternate reality’, or ‘augmented reality’, or ‘virtual reality’, or ‘cyberspace‘ then our future tinkering and experience with and around it would be complicated…

As an aside, I just got this via email from transmediale that mentions their upcoming event which features a talk by Timothy Druckery (who I work with at MICA:

From ‘real’ to simulation, from simulation to virtualisation, the
assimilation of the reality function has haunted the continuing debates
about images and intelligibility. This, of course, is predicated on the
assumption that there is a stable, describable, ‘real’ that shares an
objective affinity to the world. Shattered by psychoanalysis, quantum
physics, semiotics, cybernetics, and, increasingly by computation, the
fiction of the ‘real’ is the indispensable conspiracy. This talk will
take aim at the ‘reality principle’ as the core tragedy of a culture
inebriated by a desperate illusion.”

A few months ago I heard the author Nassim Taleb say, “we are better at doing than understanding.” I feel that my analogy describes an evolutionary process based on, to put it simply, ‘doing’ (or, more accurately, ‘tinkering’) and then, when the sound gets loud enough, so to speak, and we can’t ignore it any more, applying an empiric (how things really are) point of view to understand the story we are collaborating on.

To me, we seem wired to pay attention to significant change. Sometimes the quality of the paying attention is a change in our tinkering (when the kettle squeals you go turn it off), and sometimes it requires intellection and understanding (choosing a candidate to vote for). I feel that the web has become loud enough (strong frequency) and it is one of those times when empiric (seeking to see things as they are) understanding is appropriate so that our tinkering can be more in tune with what our culture is trying to express.

I feel that the proliferation of streaming media is, as Caleb Waldorf declares in his work The Artificial Moon and The Post-Human and as I mentioned in my previous posting, presenting a different model of temporality, and I feel that if we consider that model empirically we will notice that other objects on our collective plate are resonating to the same frequency.

Here is, to me, is another example, from the offline world:

New Hair Follicles Created For The First Time, Mouse Study
Science Daily — Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have found that hair follicles in adult mice regenerate by re-awakening genes once active only in developing embryos. These findings provide unequivocal evidence for the first time that, like other animals such as newts and salamanders, mammals have the power to regenerate. A better understanding of this process could lead to novel treatments for hair loss, other skin and hair disorders, and wounds.

“We showed that wound healing triggered an embryonic state in the skin which made it receptive to receiving instructions from wnt proteins,” says senior author George Cotsarelis, MD, Associate Professor of Dermatology. “The wnts are a network of proteins implicated in hair-follicle development.”

Researchers previously believed that adult mammal skin could not regenerate hair follicles. In fact, investigators generally believe that mammals had essentially no true regenerative qualities. (The liver can regenerate large portions, but it is not de novo regeneration; some of the original liver has to remain so that it can regenerate.)

In this study, researchers found that wound healing in a mouse model created an “embryonic window” of opportunity. Dormant embryonic molecular pathways were awakened, sending stem cells to the area of injury. Unexpectedly, the regenerated hair follicles originated from non-hair-follicle stem cells.

“We’ve found that we can influence wound healing with wnts or other proteins that allow the skin to heal in a way that has less scarring and includes all the normal structures of the skin, such as hair follicles and oil glands, rather than just a scar,” explains Cotsarelis.

By introducing more wnt proteins to the wound, the researchers found that they could take advantage of the embryonic genes to promote hair-follicle growth, thus making skin regenerate instead of just repair. Conversely by blocking wnt proteins, they also found that they could stop the production of hair follicles in healed skin.

Increased wnt signaling doubled the number of new hair follicles. This suggests that the embryonic window created by the wound-healing process can be used to manipulate hair-follicle regeneration, leading to novel ways to treat hair loss and hair overgrowth.

These findings go beyond just a possible treatment for male-pattern baldness. If researchers can effectively control hair growth, then they could potentially find cures for people with hair and scalp disorders, such as scarring alopecia where the skin scars, and hair overgrowth.

This research was funded in part by the National Institute of Arthritis, Musculoskelatal and Skin Disease and the Pennsylvania Department of Health. Other co-authors in addition to Cotsarelis are Mayumi Ito, Zaixin Yang, Thomas Andl, Chunhua Cui, Noori Kim, and Sarah E. Millar, all from Penn.

Cotsarelis and Ito are listed as inventors on a patent application related to hair-follicle neogenesis and owned by the University of Pennsylvania. Cotsarelis also serves on the scientific advisory board and has equity in Follica, a start-up company that has licensed the patent from the University of Pennsylvania. Cotsarelis was also a co-founder of Follica.

These findings are published in the May 17 issue of Nature.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

To repeat: “Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have found that hair follicles in adult mice regenerate by re-awakening genes once active only in developing embryos. These findings provide unequivocal evidence for the first time that, like other animals such as newts and salamanders, mammals have the power to regenerate.” To me, this seems to resonate with with Caleb’s statement “as real time media took over at the turn of the 21st century, a paradigm shift occurred in which humanity realized that time had ceased to exist. With everything happening all at once and available to everyone, the idea of linear time lost hold. Time became a flat surface and history no longer existed. At this moment, what had long been seen as the paradox of time travel was no longer viewed up as illogical and the concern with traveling back in time to change things in the future ceased to be of concern.” I understand that the context of Caleb’s quote is fictive, but I feel he raises a very real implication of current technology.

I feel that we have tinkered ourselves into a very interesting place where some potential forms are being realized that haven’t been prominent in a while, and we need to work to observe and understand these changes and potentials just enough to inform our tinkering so that we can benefit from the interaction of, specifically, two different temporal models existing simultaneously.

a brief note: Some people view evolution as a fight to the death, survival of the fittest, and winner take all. I see it as an interaction among elements within an environment where conditions favor the proliferation of different forms at different times – and nothing is ever, truly obliterated. Some form [species, etc.] may be dissipated to the extent that they exist as a potential outcome of a combination of other elements, but nothing ever literally and thoroughly ceases to exist. To me (and others, I’m sure), evolution can occur in elements other than genetic materials, and can affect change in any environmental property [gravity, speed of light, etc.]. I feel that there is an evolution of ideas that goes on in our species and what I’m writing about now is but one example.//

The potency (the degree to which the form can generate change) is in the synergy that results from the interaction of the two, their co-presence, their simultaneity – not in the struggle for dominance by one over the other, not in the illusory either/or, winner take all format. We’ve certainly lived through a lot of that, haven’t we, and how has that worked out for most of us?

I think we can manage this interaction of simultaneous and different synergistic elements if we carefully manage and balance our tinkering and thinking.

Now we’ll see if I take my own advice.

Up up up up

I’ve been having some wrist and hand issues lately from spending a lot of time on the computer and in an attempt to feel better I started using a speech to text program. When I turn it on, it often provides me with a few random words prior to the words that I intend to enter (ex. The “Up up up up” at the start of this post). When I started to quote Caleb Waldorf from his work The Artificial Moon and The Post-Human the first things I saw on the page were these:

Too cool Caleb Waldorf (No kidding. What I said was “to quote”, but I couldn’t agree more…)

Anyway:

Waldorf writes: “as real time media took over at the turn of the 21st century, a paradigm shift occurred in which humanity realized that time had ceased to exist. With everything happening all at once and available to everyone, the idea of linear time lost hold. Time became a flat surface and history no longer existed. At this moment, what had long been seen as the paradox of time travel was no longer viewed up as illogical (speech to text wrote: a logical entity) and the concern with traveling back in time to change things in the future ceased to be of concern. Ultimately there was no longer a past or future for humanity.”

I love this idea, and the piece is rich with other concepts and I hope you check it out. In brief the idea is that post-humans went back in time to create the moon as a map for us to understand them, and ourselves. The piece uses some information on the physical relationship of the earth and moon I’ve seen before in, among other places, Who Built the Moon, by Christopher Knight and Alan Butler and is also infused with the concepts of Lacan.

When I read this quote I immediately thought of Tolstoy’s remarks about history and historians in the epilogues of War and Peace – these quotes are from the second epilogue, chapter 3:

The only conception that can explain the movement of the peoples is that of some force commensurate with the whole movement of the peoples.

So long as histories are written of separate individuals, whether Caesars, Alexanders, Luthers, or Voltaires, and not the histories of all, absolutely all those who take part in an event, it is quite impossible to describe the movement of humanity without the conception of a force compelling men to direct their activity toward a certain end. And the only such conception known to historians is that of power.

To me, this implies that our will to monumentalize individuals, to make super heroes out of selected people, exemplifies the critical fault at the root of historical perspective. The historian wrestles to, as Tolstoy writes several times in the epilogue, “answer the question no one asked” – the historian attempts to elucidate the cause and effects that drive events from his/her lone perspective – and the creation of a super human who galvanizes an entire population and induces them to follow him or her is an analogy to what the historian himself is trying to do. This story, this method of understanding the world, seems embedded in our culture as a dominant narrative form, and we repeat it in various media, at various scales, persistently. When we repeat it we re-learn it, and we tend to analyze our experiences along the lines of the dominant analytical model.

To me, this model relies not only on the idea of super heroes, but also on the understanding that most of us exist to essentially serve a single dominant power at every given moment. This form seems embodied in our sense of time as an arrow moving from past to future, where the past is understood in the historical terms described above, and the present is at the service (‘duty now for the future’) of a future whose goals are determined by, inevitably, a higher authority that we may never even speak with or meet. This temporal/historical form effectively destabilizes our individual connection to the present because the past and future are managed officially by other, ‘higher’ powers than ourselves. The people are essentially farming the present for the officers of the state (or whatever agency defines a given cultures past and aspirations [future]).

A proliferation of real-time media means the web would be alive with, predominantly, broadcasts of what is going on right now, constantly, from many, many people. “Webtime” would equal right now always, and each visit to this web would give one access to the complexity that comprises the present, and would, as Tolstoy’s idea implies, permit each (or at least many) of us to report on our experience while interacting with others engaged in the same effort. This participatory, collective, and simultaneous ‘history’ would belie the narrow, linear, remote historical/temporal lens that we tend to understand and analyze most events through. A highly available web of predominantly real-time, and, one assumes, interactive ‘broadcasts’ may indeed alter our current model of historical/temporal perspective so dramatically that it would become one available method of understanding, and not the sole option. Perhaps this is the direction we are evolving towards.

A highly available, real-time streaming, collaborative, interactive web would also reinvigorate the notion of the local, as more and more people would be broadcasting and interacting from their homes and are becoming more comfortable speaking for themselves as opposed to expressing themselves primarily through consuming someone else’s products. This would minimize the destabilizing effects of the ‘scalable’ economy – in other words, it would re-empower the local citizen as a local citizen, foster an appreciation of being authentic and local, and in so doing potentially ward off the wandering professional who, in our current model, has unseated so many locals (chain stores, movies, recorded music, mass produced, professional touring whatevers, etc.).

In any case, Caleb’s project got me thinking about the relationship of our sense of time, and how that sense is maintained by the technologies we develop and surround ourselves with. His piece also got me thinking about the evolution of things other than species – ideas, technology, etc. Rather than explore that further here I will take a moment and then post another entry.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ICcnE15UdY[/youtube]

When I was an undergrad studying music composition I worked, briefly, with the composer Samuel Adler. One day during a lesson he told me “artists, as a rule, do everything bass-ackwards”. I don’t recall the inspiration for his remark, but I do remember him raising his voice, shaking his head, and waving his arms as he said it. I came away with the impression that this sort of logic, for artists, was a part of our DNA and needed to be accepted and managed. Every once in a while I’ll catch myself doing something and remember Sam’s comment, and smile when I realize that, for me in that moment, there isn’t any other way, and it’s OK.

Recently a student in my interactive scripting class, questioned the importance of scripting cross-media events in pseudocode as we’d been doing all semester. She reminded me that she is an artist in art school (something I had reminded the students of a few times during the term), and she had already figured out a fine project without formally and abstractly writing down the logic.

I reminded her that a requirement of their final projects was, in addition to a completed project, a master script for the event(s) they had devised in pseudocode. This requirement struck her as useless given the fact that she had already conceptualized and begun to run her project without any pseudocoding: case closed.

I recalled this quote from John Dewey:

Scripting, I reminded her, can serve as a tool for analyzing the causes and effects within a project to permit the creator(s) to fine-tune them by revealing some of the inner workings of the piece abstractly.

When we can view the logic of a gesture we may understand it in greater detail, and realize that it is composed of various elements and nuances. Understanding our intentions from this view we may then seek various viable hosts for the different aspects and nuances that comprise the gesture and find appropriate media to support and reveal each element, then edit accordingly to insure that the overall intention is effectively conveyed via the ensemble of actions and media we have devised.

I told my student that scripting after the project is already worked out in one’s head is just as useful as the other way around, especially for complex works whose medium is, essentially, an ensemble of actions across a broad spectrum of methods and materials. Then, privately (and after many years), I recalled Maestro Adler’s remark and saw my DNA as a script that contains a nucleotide base we’ll call the function bass-ackwards().

Last year I heard Gregg Bordowitz give a talk and at one point he quipped about how disinterested he has become in artists engaging in what they claim is research.  He spoke about his time as a studio assistant for Joseph Kosuth and how Kosuth had often expressed the idea of art aspiring toward the condition and rigor of science.

At the time I bristled at that comment, feeling that research could certainly be carried out by artists and that suggesting otherwise was banishing art to the margins of modern culture, because we all can conduct research and the more of us engaging in and sharing our research the more detailed our understanding of the world becomes.  The boundaries separating science from art were impeding a deeper understanding of our experience.

Well, I love making art and enjoy studying research.  Whenever I make a new piece I inevitably benefit from the research of someone I’ve never met, and whose name(s) I will probably never know – if I’m building something electronic, working on a scent, traveling somewhere to install something, etc., but I have come to think that research is some concrete act with protocols, methods, goals, and happy accidents (I’ve been looking at Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, lately and he suggests that many scientific discoveries were, in fact, accidents that occurred while researchers were exploring something else – he cites Viagra as such a [happy] accident.  To me, the fact that these accidents occurred under controlled circumstances by actual researchers suggests that while one researcher’s specific hypothesis may be flawed, the process of scientific inquiry seems to nevertheless produce useful results – intended or otherwise).  I feel that by engaging in the study of other people’s work and by working myself in a cross-media/ensemble of actions style I am integrating the fruits of a real researcher’s research into my work and providing whoever encounters the resulting piece an opportunity to experience the integration of, for example, science and art.

Telling you that I am engaging in research, either explicitly or implicitly (the look, feel and form of a piece suggesting the work is visualizing/sonifying some data) is misleading and complicates the experience and ultimately confounds the mind.  I really don’t like that at all.  I don’t follow scientific methodology, I don’t do double-blind experiments, for example, and publish papers on my findings that include detailed instructions for another researcher to re-create and test my data.  Those, as I understand it, are significant aspects of what research is. Creating a Flash application, for example, that looks like some kind of map and claiming that map visualizes some ‘data set’ you’ve harvested and then not providing details to recreate your work and earnestly study it means, to me, that you are posing.  Sorry.  We now have many design tools at our disposal that can create the look and feel of research without any actual research present.

I am fortunate to be on the advisor’s panel to a local science center that includes numerous scientists and researchers.  During a meeting last Spring we were shown an animation created by a leading university about the inner workings of the body on a cellular level.  The animation, replete with what sounded like a score composed by John Williams, looked marvelous.  At the conclusion some members of the panel applauded.  Several members of the panel did not applaud and instead expressed concerns that the animation was inaccurate in regard to some essential elements of cellular interactions within the body.  Specifically in regard to the copious ‘open spaces’ within the body as portrayed in the animation.  One scientist referred to the animation as potentially dangerous for young learners because it looked too much like proper science – and would embed faulty images in a young mind that could ultimately complicate further study.  The same person went on to say that such images, for the same reasons, could only slow down public assimilation of current and future understandings.  He then expressed his love and belief in art, and a wish that artists would be artists, and to express their understandings of scientific data metaphorically, and to then have science centers present those metaphoric understandings along with accurate images of scientific facts.  His thinking was that both are equally important.  I thought that was a fine idea.

I’m in favor of integration of experience, but I feel that when artists create visualizations/sonifications of what amounts to questionable data (I’m speaking about artists whose work is clearly and intentionally about some data, yet the data is inscrutable, un-repeatable, too personal, mysterious, otherwise useless, etc.) and that is the sole intention of the project, they are, in effect, working to further complicate our experience and understanding and probably squandering resources and time to do it.  It also occurs to me that inscrutable info-art fetishizes the idea of knowledge = power, and falsely places the artist in an imaginary power position in the context of ‘actual’ researchers and scientists, and the audience in the position of those subservient to the imperial and ever so complicated data-set.
Any culture prizing, hoarding, and essentially worshipping information about seemingly every aspect of our experience, as we seem to, must feel, deep down, that they don’t know very much.  It is as if the digital patina is making us forget all of the heuristics (the rules of thumb) that we have collectively come to know (without explicitly having to learn them) about being human over the past 10,000 years, and we are clumsily trying to re-learn everything.  How often have you experienced a digital work and thought later how fundamentally simple the premise was yet how complicated and resource intensive the implementation?  Perhaps artists can work to maintain the availability and presence of that diverse body of heuristic, collective understandings and in so doing provide a balance to the reams of useful but increasingly alienating and often complicating information piling up all around us.  Just my opinion.

or, what i didn’t do over my summer vacation…or, this is what happens when you stew over things.  i’ve been talking about and mulling over what follows since june.  i need to put this down and keep going.  i’m very interested in the ideas.  i’m just not going to practice stew no more.

so,

my father called to tell me that he heard something on NPR about how insects emit frequencies that resonate sympathetically with the plant life around them in such a way that certain plants become transmitters of specific frequencies emitted by bees and other insects.

i’ve been spending much more time in the woods this summer and, around the time of my father’s call, had been climbing trees.  the tree climbing began when it was necessary for me to use a tree to get over a fence in a park i frequent.  once in the tree i realized that without much trouble i could ascend further and, well, now i enjoy climbing trees…

anyway, i noticed that when my body is pressed onto a limb (in my case, often holding on [er…hugging] in fear), how much i could feel the movements of the trees, the leaves, and, by extension, the vibrations from the surrounding air and earth.

while in a tree i remembered a deep listening exercise i learned from pauline oliveros i’d practiced with my students that involved focusing one’s attention on the nearest and then farthest perceptible sounds. deciding to adapt this exercise by focusing on the movements within the tree, i closed my eyes and, after a while, felt an increase in the lower frequency rumblings. i realized that i was about fifty feet from some lightrail tracks and assumed that a train was about to pass.  looking up i glanced out and waited for what felt like too long – and i momentarily thought i was sensing something else when the signal increased dramatically and the train finally passed.  i estimate that i sensed the train about three minutes before it arrived.

later, i saw a flock of birds lift off from a neighboring field and quickly get into formation and realized that the medium of air, for them, offers an awareness of and palpable connection to the group, a collective, essentially ‘haptic’ data stream, that is similar to what fish must experience underwater.

i climbed down from the tree and looked around.  i saw a lot, heard a bit less, smelled even less, and felt very little.  the souls of my shoes impeded the vibration around me – i had been cut off from the complex,  infrasonic percolations and patterns that the tree seemed to connect me to.   i walked back through the woods and returned to the paved path, walking while thinking deeply.  within ten minutes or so was almost hit by a cyclist who was trying to pass me that i didn’t sense coming at all.  i remembered a friend telling me how hunting was meditative because hunters need to become utterly still so as not to reveal their presence.  i thought about all the layers of insulation we put on all the surfaces we interact with and how those layers are complicating so many necessary and persistent interactions.

i thought about the tsunami from a couple years ago and how the vast majority of deaths were human. from what i’ve read,  most other animals retreated from coastlines and headed for higher ground hours before the waves hit.

i went home and did some research and found out that most terrestrials use the surface of the earth as we use our vast communications systems.  elephants (Vibration as a Communication Channel: A Synopsis, Peggy S.M. Hill), for example, have what amounts to water beds on the souls of their feet that amplify the earthly rumblings.  their proboscis feature a sensitive infrasonic transducer near its’ end.  other terrestrials, frogs for example, can inflate their chests to amplify vibrations rippling across the surface.  still other species use their lower jaw to receive the same signals. i thought about how essential it is for all ectotherms (‘cold-blooded’) to be on the surface as much as possible.  birds and insects seem to be tightly coupled with their environment as fish are to water.

i thought about myself, at that moment, standing in my shoes in the woods and surrounded by sights, sounds, and scents, i felt numb.  it occurred to me that, as walkers on the surface, we’re in between crawlers and flyers – who both seem holistically integrated into the environment via sophisticated physiological attributes that allow them to ‘outsource’ much of their ‘understanding’ of the world to the world itself, and exist in a state of collaborative interdependance.  not so for us. we see the world as a collection of discrete particles and objects, and understand our experience as the intersection of these discrete components.

i remembered some research i’d done on walking, and how to build robots that walk, and how inefficient the ASIMO is, for example, and how some researchers were using passive dynamics (Steve Collins, University of Michigan) to make walking machines efficiently (no batteries required), and how one researcher wrote that our gait is, essentially, a controlled fall.  another friend, working a design job for a shoe company, shared with me the fact that higher the shoe lifts the body off the ground the greater the skeletal distress it causes.

to me, we seem alone in the otherness.  we seem cut off from the complex interactions, the array of causes and effects, that regulate and balance most life on this planet. where other tree dwellers developed tails to help them maintain balance and connection, we descended, stood up on two feet, and grew a huge frontal lobe, and have been in a controlled fall ever since.

as endotherms our senses are tightly integrated for survival.  endotherms, often hunters, need an accurate picture of their environment in order to eat.  as endotherms with huge brains and a physiological disconnection from the feedback relationships other species live in, our models of the world seem often to have the specificity of dreams or hallucinations – and are just as effective as those figments of the imagination, especially in the long term.  our  inevitable  ‘data processing’ within  our peculiar physiological system and environmental relationship contributes to this ‘otherness’ by adding what seems to be a significant delay in our interactions, causing us to value our mental model over that which is being modeled.  we are a sort of endothermic apotheosis.  a radical and extreme form of an endothermic organism.

we have evolved to this point.  and evolution is the sum of all the complex interactions that comprise this reality and is far bigger than any ‘one’. in other words, our form is just as natural as any other form on this planet, yet we are so poorly integrated and so profoundly ‘othered’, i wonder how it is that we have survived?  well, we haven’t been here for that long….

it occurred to me that we have a fixation and awareness of our own death, and from what we deduce, other species do not share this awareness.  hard to prove.  yet, given our position in this world as the dreaming, giant-brained, odd men out,  it seems fitting that we would be ‘aware’ of our own situation, and, by extension, our inevitable, demise, doesn’t it?  we are fascinated by death, we ritualize and worship it.  it occurs to me that our medical technologies, for example, designed to extend life (stall death) are actually retarding our evolution, and in doing so complicating other environmental systems.  it further occurs to me that much of our technological development tends to complicate and ultimately slow ‘things’ down by elevating levels of energy exchange in trivial developmental areas while producing significant toxic by-products that many of us are unaware of.  mechanized travel, mass-production, the internet, etc. we seem to be actively, ignorantly, and sometimes gleefully accelerating our own demise while telling ourselves that we are either headed for some profound convergence (religious, scientific, technological) or ‘simply’ doing what needs to be done to survive in this world, unaware of the real effects.

perhaps our essence is persistent, inevitable conflict.  i really mean it: inevitable, persistent conflict.  no ‘permanent’ solution is possible.  we are driven (another conflict) to manage (another conflict) every situation yet don’t have significantly detailed models  to see the real causes and effects of our actions on the environment that we are aspects of (but we have the tools to create better models.  john yau said, in the introduction to a film on donald judd, that after the a-bomb metaphor is dead, and what we need are ways to see the world as it really is.  how many of us have responded to the information age by relying on forms and rituals that fall under the category of what kurt vonnegut refers to as ‘persuasive guessing’ ?[your guess is as good as mine]).

does this seem bleak? i’ve been living with these thoughts for about three months now and my stress level has lowered significantly – and i have some ways of measuring. the connection to the all is authentic and natural; our presence and participation are inevitable.  the signal we get is just really noisy, and the interplay of my will to create mental models of ‘my’ environment coupled with the dynamism of the environment and the fact of minimal, individual influence over pretty much anything (when you, and/or your friends make bizarre decisions about something important: relationships, work, etc., ask them why they did it.  you will be surprised how often they say, honestly, ‘i don’t know‘ – i’ve been doing that all summer and it has been very interesting, it suggests to me that there is a sort of brownian e–motion at work and even one’s ‘private data’ isn’t under one’s control) makes for some complex, but somehow often pleasant surfing.

my friend beth, after a 22 hour trip from delhi to baltimore, commented drowsily that while traveling through india with a friend over the past month: “we were often, in fact, avatards from secondworld”.

the discovery of a 140 year old supernova reminds me of julian barbour’s remark (can’t recall where i heard it…) concerning so-called “deep” time – the age of the earth, for example. to paraphrase he said that we know how “old” the earth is by studying rocks that exist right now.

this image, btw, is a careful composite of a 1985 radio image (blue), with a 2007 x-ray image (red) of the ‘same’ event/location.

more information

“the past isn’t even past” Faulkner

..a methodology for othering ourselves from the present?

Herb Simon, in Sciences of the Artificial, describes design as ‘concerned with how things ought to be – with devising artifacts to attain goals.’ Professionals, according to Simon, work to ‘transform an existing state of affairs, a problem, into a preferred state, a solution.’

Design, in any field, seeks to problematize a given moment by identifying a specific problem, and providing an artifact (an object) to solve that problem. Think about a button on a website, and all that goes into creating an atmosphere that leads one to click on that button, or a pill prescribed by a doctor, or any action undertaken to resolve a specific problem by taking a specific action that promises a resolution in the future.

The artifacts of design identify a specific problem by, essentially, contributing to an atmosphere for that specific problem to become prominent. The resolution of that specific problem suggested by the artifact (click the button, take the pill, etc.) seems to lead, inevitably, to another problem in another aspect of one’s experience, and so on. We seem to be temporally distending our lives into the past and future as we attempt to resolve the various problems we encounter at each moment, using the present as a weigh station.

Think about how often your sense of need is being stimulated, and how that sense of need seems to be only temporarily quelled by whatever actions to take.

In short, and for me, now, design seems to be a methodology for ‘othering’ ourselves from the present, and focusing our decisions within any moment towards a goal that exists in the future: design is based on an idea of ‘how things ought to be’, and is different from an exploration of ‘how things are’.

How things ought to be is a point of view that implies, and relies on, a temporal form composed of the past, present, and future, where the past leads to and influences the present, and where the present leads to and influences the future, exclusively.

How things ought to be requires clearly defined needs, and clearly defined goals, and seems to produce an individuated state of being.

Parenthetically, How things ought to be, as social policy, produces a group rife with frustrated members, whose attempts at resolving their needs simply produces more need, elsewhere.

How things are, on the other hand, requires close attention to the present, and a practice of integration of, and empathy for others’ experience – as others’ expression of their experience are essential aspects and observations of the shared space of now. The ‘goal’ of any methodology that explores the present is an increase in empathy first, and then an opportunity to consider the resulting integration second. As soon as one begins to judge, rather than work to integrate with, either one’s own or another’s expressions then one begins to see things within the context of how they ought to be. The practice of integration, evolving from a careful application of empathy, will inevitably produce unexpected results, but if one takes empathy as the primary method then the concrete results and goals are secondary. Think about it.

I’m reminded of a friend of mine who, in response to a dialectic argument, is fond of saying, usually at the moment of clearest polarity, “isn’t it both?”

To me, art making has the potential to be part and model of such a practice of integration (my previous post is concerned with this). In speaking with an artist friend who recently thought about switching galleries to help her sell more work, and then, after a frustrating meeting with the more ambitious gallerist, my friend realized that making work for pay wasn’t for her. She sells quite a bit of work, actually, but chooses not to aggressively market herself. I realized that when art becomes professional and its goals can be clearly defined and methodologies can be developed to produce repeatable results (tools and methodologies can be developed to produce specific results within specific timeframes, etc…) then the art has become an aspect of design. And that is fine, but, for me, the two exemplify differing and essential qualities of the human experience.

So, is it both? Yes, but I feel that many of us have tipped the balance, significantly, toward design (the presence of digital technology, with its emphasis on information and repeatability has accelerated this) and the result is a peculiar rush towards integration implied by the ideas of the www, but deployed via the methods of design – so that each gesture of integration is predicated on problemization, and each resulting connection inevitably becomes the next problem, and so on, so that here becomes an interface to elsewhere.

This reliance on the methodologies of design at this time, as we seem to be in a particularly integrative phase of cultural development, seems to be producing some odd cultural formations, as well as frustrating many integrative gestures, while slowing down our evolution towards a form that may be significantly different than our recent past. In order to bloom, this evolving form may require us to let go of the railing, surrender our dependence on clearly defined goals, and adopt a practice of empathy and integration that will permit us to move on collectively.

C.S. Peirce (1839-1914)

“..consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the objects” from C.S. Peirce, How to Make Our Ideas Clear

“…he had in mind that a meaningful conception must have some experiential ‘cash value’, capable of being specified as some sort of collection of possible empirical observations under specifiable conditions. Peirce insisted that the entire meaning of a meaningful conception consisted in the totality of such specifications of possible observations.” R. Burch, Charles Sanders Peirce, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.) The Standard Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2001 Edition).

The following thoughts come to mind:

Evolution has certain mechanical aspects described as adaptation and change manifest, observed, and studied in the form of physical attributes of a given subject (a species is the most common, but it seems that other phenomena may also be subject to evolution: i.e., the laws of physics). It seems to me that another aspect, or index of our evolution can be understood as the work we do collectively to understand the aspects of our experience that are not visible in the same way skeletal remains are visible.

As we try to develop meaningful conceptions, or increasingly accurate models of our experience perhaps we must learn to accept intuition and instinct as valid, empirical observations (in addition to other empirical observations). Yes, they are understood as subjective, and don’t perform well in the abstract world of the lab, but the issue may be that they are in fact collective and are an index of the here and now distributed among a group that, to be understood, require a method for expression and sharing, and this method will differ from the methods of fact based inquiry, but, to me, it is essential that we integrate this aspect of our experience. Presently we seem to prefer to simply dismiss them as subjective noise at best, and, at worst, to stigmatize them.

What is needed, I think, is a practice that incorporates the unknown as unknown (the intuited, instinctual, etc. as such, as opposed to converting them to facts) into any empiric understanding – in other words every meaningful conception doesn’t have to be based entirely on fact.

All of us understand the world via some mixture of the known (fact) and the unknown (intuition). We need to work to create models of our experience that are more accurate in their modeling of our actual experience – as opposed to systems which operate on how we think things should be. It seems that for some, the unknown is something that is proportionally, and perhaps rightfully, eliminated with the advance of factual information. The unknown is somehow the enemy of the known. I don’t understand that at all.

The unknown is an aspect of the known – one doesn’t exist without the other, and when we marginalize the unknown, when we ‘other’ it from our discourse we unwittingly limit our potential for deeper, more accurate and useful knowledge. I would argue that when we claim that we’ve figured it all out we’ve probably figured out a way to more successfully narrow our focus and ignore more. Our current culture of expertism seems to have stigmatized the unknown. How often do you hear a professional in any field, while discussing some aspect within their purview, admit to not knowing something or simply being wrong? How often have you spoken to someone traumatized into a radically: narrow, conservative, and homogenous lifestyle by the specter of the eternal faux pas in the omnipresent, deeply archived, and imminently searchable www? I had a long talk with an eloquent student on the train last week who expressed such concerns, “it’s not worth the risk of doing anything that might come back to haunt you, because everything you do is recorded, literally.” Whoa!

I wonder if we haven’t ritualized our marginalization of the unknown in practices like the lottery. Some casual research on my part suggests that the results seem impervious to intuition, instinct, and hunch – and seem very much to be the product of ‘pure’ luck, or, in other words, randomness – which is to say when the machine happens to spit out the same numbers you’ve managed to spit out, you win, and often the winners admit to either using the same set of numbers repeatedly, or using the quickpick option. Trying to intuit your way to the lotto jackpot, in other words, seems to be ineffective and teaches, I think, that playing hunches is for fools – or, at least, not how the pros do it. I should add that it may be the case that on smaller wagers (sports, for example) instinct and hunch may be effective – it seems though, that at the larger, lotto/mega-millions level one’s hunch seems not to work. To me, this indicates that we have figured out a system that, at specific scales, seems essentially immune to meaningful, instinctual observation. I wrote, ‘at specific scales’ – the systems, like the lottery, can be observed meaningfully and intuitively, but we choose to prize (literally) the scale that we can’t feel.

The intuitive, unknown, element of the lottery is its’ meaning, significance, message, affect, in general – its’ overall quality, or suchness within our experience at large. The “what does it tell us about our society and each other?” question that is an ongoing impetus for interaction and discussion, and doesn’t resolve to a specific set of numbers. The lesson of the lottery, perhaps, is that hunch based conjectures don’t have cash or real value, and as such, don’t work, so let the machine do it…. At least that’s what I’m wondering about today, and with our computer mediated culture I’m concerned that we’re becoming a bunch of fast-paced bottom-liners increasingly disinterested in what can’t be clearly: defined, repeated, transmitted, and used.

But we need our instincts and intuition, they are an essential aspect of who and what we are.

As I just heard someone say over the radio earlier today in regard to the Iraq war, “anybody can understand with facts, this war was sold to us via facts that turned out to be wrong, and we all bought them. Where are the people with good instincts, and why haven’t we been listening to them lately?”

Spring brings birds. Listening and watching a cardinal while waiting for a train I thought about how we (ok, I…) easily understand the song as the result of a decision the bird made to sing, an intentional act on the part of the bird that amounts to projecting sound out into the environment. The sound is an index of the bird’s will; the environment is an audience.

It occurred to me that the song of the bird could just as readily be understood as an action of the environment where its’ will is expressed by sound emitted from the bird – as if the environment elicits the song to satisfy some need of its’ own.

Maybe it’s both. Perhaps will is distributed between participant and environment, and expression is a connective gesture that we have learned to describe and understand as an event which breaks the environment into discriminate parts (imagine a bolt of lightning, an action, and an observer).

I think we tend to see expression, essentially, within a broadcast paradigm where the individual trumps and dominates an otherwise passive environment, where, in truth, the expression is a collaborative effort whose qualities (how we experience them) can be understood to reveal aspects of the persistent interrelations of elements comprising any given moment and place.

When we choose to ‘audience’ ourselves we are limiting our engagement with the present and quite probably slowing our evolving understanding of our experience and our world. When we ritualize the practice of ‘audience’ we are institutionalizing this slowing of knowledge, and quite probably becoming a collective drag on the other elements within our environment, but that may be a topic for another post.