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”.