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.

Saw this message on my way to work and it reminded me of something Allison Okamura – a mechanical engineer and computer scientist with a focus on Haptics at Johns Hopkins, told me concerning the physiology of grasping and holding.

Upon taking something in hand an interesting pattern of clenching, relaxing, sensing the object slipping (via the ridges/folds on the walls of an organ called rugae, in this case the organ is our skin, the specific location the fingers and hands), then clenching and relaxing, sensing the slippage, repeat, until we no longer wish to hold on to the object any longer.

It occurs to me that much of our nervous system functions along the same line – we respond to changes in state, and if there are either no observable changes in state, or if the changes in state become either noise or a drone (a pattern of change that doesn’t vary) then we don’t notice them.

So, “it” whatever “it” is, is “there” (experienced), because it “bothers” (or calls attention to) us.

So, “it” is an experience of change, and depending on other variables “it” can be: time, love, hunger, art. “it” is a quality of change, and our bodies are dynamically and persistently linked, and a participant in, these fluctuations.

I remember reading something by Dr. John C. Lilly where he mentioned that after prolonged time in a sensory deprivation chamber subjects would emerge without a sense of their name, age, where they lived, etc., and it was only after about thirty minutes out of the tank that this information returned to them.

To me, this indicates that who and what we are is the result of a persistent coupling, a pinging, of the environment that occurs, metaphorically, with each heartbeat – as if “we” are periodically dissipated and reassembled, and the resulting self is always dependant on the fluctuations of whatever we share our space with. The probability that the majority of the dissipation/reassemblage cycles among all of the elements within our environment will have a consistent quality that we experience and express as: time, history, identity, etc… persistence = resonance, in other words, and resonance has specific qualities that we term: time, history, identity, art, love, etc. Perhaps…

The point is that some graffiti I saw on my way to work made me think that we live in a dynamic environment comprised of degrees of change whose forms and experiences seem may be based on probability and a resulting resonance.

Julian Barbour, in his book the end of time, refers to our environment as configuration space.

A friend of mine’s brother, Tim, has some phobias.  One of them is about stairs and escalators.  When anxious he refuses to use them.  My friend (Bea) often asks her brother to let her know if he’s feeling uncomfortable. He seems more willing to express his phobia verbally, and in advance of encountering stairs/escalators, when they are alone together.  Surrounded by strangers, like at a mall, he seems unwilling to tell her he’s feeling anxious, choosing instead to wrestle the anxiety on his own.  He often loses these contests, and an awkward, public moment of ‘aberrant’ behavior ensues.

 This has happened enough so that Bea has been able to observe and note both Tim’s behavior/response and the public’s behavior/response.  She characterizes both as ‘crude’ and ‘awkward’.  Tim suddenly stops or pulls away from the stairs or takes a few steps and then retreats, won’t look at anyone directly (even her), and then refuses to talk about what is going on. The public, by and large, do nothing, or simply get pissed-off, scowl, occasionally mutter some things to themselves, and also avoid any conversation or dialogue (like, “are you ok?”).  Both parties seem to want to just get past the awkwardness as soon as possible while acknowledging that the experience was not acceptable, and have nothing further to do with each other.

 Bea tells me that she’d like to try to anticipate these episodes but feels like she needs more information in order to do so.

 To me, this is an side-effect of decorum (appropriate behavior) and illustrates how rules governing proper behavior have the effect of arresting our own potentials for more detailed understanding of experience.

 Tim is responding to and expressing aspects of the agora.  His actions and experience have just as much to do with him and with everyone around him, as they do with the design of the spaces where these events occur.  There is, potentially, a wealth of understandings waiting to be explored in regard to behavior and environment that might benefit a significant group of people.  Instead, we end up with seemingly pat, clumsy, and hopeless responses.  When neither Tim nor anyone else will spend any time exploring those awkward moments in situ, the events remain vaguely defined (and experienced) by grunts and grimaces, instead of understood, described and explored by nuanced language.  Language is, obviously, a major tool for sharing and learning.  When we lack the words to express ourselves accurately we tend to become individuated from the collective – segregated by our inability to share our experience and thusly disconnected from others.

 It has been said that metaphors are the tools of knowledge.  Think about how many metaphors you have at your disposal for so many aspects of your experience and how using those metaphors allows you to broaden your understanding and experience of countless aspects of your life.  Think about how your ability to express your experience is related to your ability to engage with, and connect to others; an essential aspect of the human experience.  When experience can be accurately represented it can be shared and can be a basis for mutual understanding and integration.

 Choosing to divide aspects of experience into acceptable and unacceptable (whatever that means) is one thing.   Not participating in the exploration of experience – direct, ‘real’, ‘first-hand’, experience like the episode described above, whether acceptable or not, is akin to arresting one’s (and one’s culture’s) own capability for intellectual growth and understanding.  Choosing a grunt or a scowl (or a ‘nothing’) in response to a complex public event involving another person in apparent trouble implies subservience to rules and regs over innate human empathy and curiosity.  Projecting this model forward, what sort of future do you imagine?

 We need better metaphors, and must work on developing nuanced expressions providing more accurate understandings of events and experiences we participate in to facilitate interaction with others. Such interaction inevitably fosters greater understanding and empathy, and often implies evolution and change.  The alternative is a developmental path (things change persistently, and our participation in this change has a palpable effect on the quality of our lives and on the forms our culture takes) of diminishing returns as we narrow our point of view and individuate from each other into a mash-up of misunderstood factions.

 Artists, Scientists, everyone thinks and models (as in builds things that embody key aspects of experience for the purpose of sharing and exploring them with others), and these models become discussion points that bring us closer as I, for example, find an aspect of what you’ve chosen to describe resonates with something true within me, that I haven’t been able to express, until now.

 I think about the areas of experience that I can readily discuss, and about the real but ill-defined aspects that I look forward to figuring out with you.  I imagine that if I accept whatever you express with empathy first, and judgment, if at all, later, we’re off to a decent start.

 Or maybe Tim could just medicate himself; apply a pharmaceutical on/off switch to any unacceptable behavior and smooth those rough patches, keeping us moving comfortably within a clear set of immutable parameters.

In a previous post I wrote about a few php scripts connected to an SQL database that produced a Class Tag Cloud where members of my class can anonymously contribute words or phrases while we dialogue, and the words/phrases they contribute end up projected on a screen for all to see. Words may be sent via phone or PC. The font size of the words/phrases are proportional to the prominence in the database, so, if someone contributes something to the class tag cloud and you want to emphasize the thought you would then submit the same word/phrase and that word/phrase would literally become larger on the screen.

Here’s a recent pic of the display:

I’m writing about this again because I’ve put it into practice lately and can report that it has been a valuable aspect of my classroom work, permitting the expression of notions, associations, and other ideations that tend not to bloom under the protocols of traditional classroom decorum – i.e., speak in turn, raise your hand, contribute proper sentences, etc.
While contributions to the class tag cloud do not have one specific, individual author associated with them I can’t call them strictly anonymous as sometimes it becomes clear who submitted them, and they have a agency within the group that, like their authorship, is shared. My experience tells me that this is understood by the class.

As an addition to the class tag cloud (which I do a screen capture of at the end of each class), last week I used Twitter and found it to be another valuable addition. The way we did it was that each class member signed up for the service and we all then took the time to issue the “follow_ x_ “ command for each classmate. At various times during our work the room fell silent as we were all focused on the sms flow around the group, then, one by one, the group became more vocal, and less twittered, and the form became more about speaking and tag clouding, and so on. It was, I think for many of us, a fine in-class experience.

For me, though, the magic occurred once class had ‘stopped’ and I continued to receive messages via Twitter from classmates throughout the week. The messages had a random quality but, as we’ve been discussing bohm style dialog and collective intelligence lately, the challenge of associating these messages as aspects of our respective and collective ‘here’ opened our work and class out in a way that I found beautiful. Twitter also provided the possibility and architecture for meetings (online and/or offline) to occur at any time, allowing the class to take a variety of forms throughout the week. Twitter also provides a method for students to let everyone know if they are running late, sick, near a store that has supplies that others may need, etc.

This experience with Twitter gave me the image of taking our Class Tag Cloud out for a walk – allowing us to know each other better, while exploring the relationship of environment to idea. I strongly recommend these tools and welcome your feedback.

Below are the scripts with instructions for the class tag cloud, they require the creation of a simple database table (in the examples below called ‘cloud’) comprised of two fields: ID (int, auto-increment, primary key), and Words (var chars, at least 25 characters long).

Here is how to make your own class (y) tag cloud.

1. Create a database table (use PHP ADMIN or MYSQL wrapped in PHP, for example) called cloud with two columns: ID and words. Make ID your primary key, and make it an int, that auto-increments. Make words a varchars with a length of at least 25 chars.
2. Create (or download below) a script called code.php. You’ll need to replace the ‘database_name’ in the scripts below with your database name (database name is not the same thing as the table name), along with your username, and password. If you make other changes (name of mysql table and/or columns for example, or if you change the names of the scripts below you will have to make changes within the body of the scripts to reflect those changes!!! Use search and replace to make things easier!
3. When you first launch tag_cloud_input.php (input) you will see some errors because there is nothing in the table. Enter a word and the errors will disappear. To view the tag cloud open tag_cloud_display.php. tag_cloud_input.php is formatted to work on cell phones as well as a desktop.
4. NOTE: the scripts below all work. I have commented out a lot of added functionality (principally a way to keep track of the most recent six words – on the input page I’ve boiled it down to the most recent three words, with the most recent in black, then gray, then white.) I’ve left the scripts as is, with the comments, in the event that you’d like to explore this history on your own.

Scripts for INPUT/DISPLAY>> You’ll need these two scripts (code.php and tag_cloud_input.php) to input words into the tag cloud, you’ll need the tag_cloud_display.php to display the tag cloud. When you first launch the input script you will see some error messages followed by a text input box and a submit button. This is normal as there is nothing in the database yet. Once you place a word in the database the errors will dissapear.

 A few weeks ago I was in Crete (ok, I was actually in rural Virginia but I found the above photo and…) wandering around.  I noticed how the silhouette of most of the trees I saw seemed analogous to the movement of the sun across the sky: a curve.  At first I thought that the trees seemed to be a memory of that movement, but when I heard an approaching flock of geese and looked up to see the undulating curve of their collective movement I realized that the trees I was looking at were all alive, and their silhouettes were developing as were the flock of geese overhead, in concert with the movements of the sun (along with many other dynamic sub-systems).  At that moment I realized that the sun was literally a part of the tree, and that my understanding of them as being separate but related was flawed.

 It occurred to me that in an environment comprised of relationships any truly useful description of form must account for all of the physical aspects of a given object (or, more accurately, focal point within an environment), which must include each formative connection without which the object would not exist.

 Extrapolating this understanding of form into my own experience of the tree I realized that my experience of the object(s), how it appears to me, is more than my ability to identify it (tautology), and inspect it visually. Specifically, the affect associated with my moment in the mix of elements was equally an inextricable element of that form, without which “it” would not be.  Affect is physical.  Affect is complex.  Affect may be analogous to the relationship of the sun to the silhouette of the tree in that the timeframe of the relationship may not be easily observable as a linear, cause and effect sequence, but the relationship is essential, and, as such, must be accounted for.

 It seems strange to break fields of relationships, of which our mind and experience are physical components, into arrangements of discriminate parts/things, of which our experience is clearly an aspect but seems somehow limited to “simply” identifying an object as a discriminate component within a set of discriminate components – something I referred to in a previous post as “first-order”, or “target-level” sensing – a useful aspect of what we are but, perhaps, the cornerstone of an interpretive system that produces a grossly oversimplified model of the world that reduces complex relationships within which we are deeply engaged, to clumsy, yet “workable”, and certainly repeatable, tautologies that give our lives the quality and agency of spectators at every level.  I think its time to let ourselves off the leash.

 

I heard a talk by the founder of secondlife on the longnow site, and early into his talk he posed the question: “what might happen if we digitize everything.”

I wonder what that question means, and how could we possibly digitize everything? I assume he is referring to creating simulations of offline elements that would exist in secondlife. With this in mind I began to think about the experience of manipulating simulations on a desktop computer and this quote came to mind:

When people say “interface”, they usually mean VIRTUALITY.

By “virtuality”, I refer to the opposite of reality: the seeming of a thing, anything. Most things have both a reality (nuts and bolts) and a virtuality (conceptual structure and feel). A building and a car have a physical reality and a virtuality– a conceptual structure and feel. The only thing that doesn’t have a virtuality is something you’re not supposed to know about or feel– like a fishhook (till it’s too late).

We don’t usually design software interfaces, we design software virtuality. The only time you design a software “interface” is when a program already exists with very specific functions, and you are just deciding how that function is to be shown to the user. But if you are designing or deciding that function– which is more usually the case– then you are designing its conceptual structure and feel, or its virtuality.

–Ted Nelson.

When Nelson equates the use of the word interface with the word virtuality I think he’s saying, to expand on his examples, that buildings and cars have a physical and virtual aspect, but those aspects are intertwined at essentially every scale, so that one wouldn’t describe the doorway of the building as the interface mediating the system of bricks, steel, and mortar with the system of using the resulting space. The idea is that the physical elements within the form of the building have an experiential quality of what may be described as buildingness that can be described as its’ virtual aspect but that cannot be literally separated and transposed onto another form, or literally removed from the building itself for inspection. The physical and virtual are descriptions of a complex relationship between elements within an environment that include us.

The virtual aspect seems to be the intersection of the conscious mind with the form at every scale where the form is still in tact, and this virtual aspect is inseparable from and essential to the identification of the form as a building. The same is true for the car – although that is probably more difficult to fathom now as so much of the car is becoming embedded with computerized extras that have designed interfaces – these are going beyond interior sound and hvac systems to computer assisted parallel parking and exterior lighting control. I imagine Mr. Nelson would feel the incorporation of such extras creates overt virtual experiences by separating the user from the center of the driving experience (the meaning and experience of the car are created at the intersection of the driver with the vehicle, which is to say that the user is a part of the physical and virtual aspects of the form, just as the building needs humans for the building to actually be a building).

By creating elements of the driving experience where the user is put in a position of being allowed access to certain aspects of the function of the car an interface condition is established as the user feels like they have become a component part of a system of control and feedback, whose behaviors must fit within specific guidelines. When you can clearly identify the interface between the physical and virtual you are in a digitized environment.

When you argue that the gas pedal or elevator are the interfaces to the car or building you have acquired the mental model of the digitized world. I think that when we talk about digitizing everything we are talking about a mental model of interoperability and interchangeability of component parts, at the core of which is an idea that things can, and perhaps should, be able to be broken apart into discriminate bits and then manipulated and recombined with other things, under the influence, gaze and will of a detached but powerful participant. When we follow this model we become components, too.

Which is to say that we can learn a lot from interactive 3d graphics and we can and will take those lessons into the offscreen world.

So, really, what is happening as we digitize everything?

I just read and re-read this interesting paper by Francis M. Duffy.  Rather than ruin it by describing it I suggest that you take a look.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Mental models resist change. People don’t like to change what they think they know. Given new information to consider, individuals will search their existing mental models to ensure that the new information is consistent with what they know. If the new information fits an existing mental model, the person accepts the information. Perhaps the information even expands or improves the person’s existing mental model. If the individual cannot link the new information to an existing mental model, he or she may construct a mental model to understand the new information or discard the information as irrelevant, unimportant, or wrong.”

And there are ideas at the end for addressing the implications of persistent mental models.

about ten days ago I walked past a classroom where the instructor was overheard starting class by asking individual students how they were: “morgan, how are you?” something about the tone of his voice made me think that he was sincere in wanting to know. i imagined him beginning his talk and then deciding to integrate the students into the discussion by simply asking them how they were. i further imagined him then discussion the students’ responses in relation to the class material. i have an active imagination.

as the classroom experience is often an exchange of unilateral transmissions by people comfortable speaking in public surrounded by people who aren’t, but who no doubt have a lot on their minds, i got to thinking about how to augment the classroom practice by giving the silent majority an opportunity to contribute without having to raise their hand first. to somehow make the ideas on the margins more available to the center.

in wondering how to augment the process by allowing the somewhat private and often fragmentary ideas often suspended in the minds of many in any group to become public, i realized that most of us have cellphones and/or access to the web in our labs (i’m now writing specifically about my work at my institute), so messaging into a projected tag cloud seemed like something to try.

i’ve written a few scripts over the past week and will use them in my classes next semester. the idea, again, is that as “we” talk, participants can freely and anonymously submit a word or phrase to the evolving tag cloud. the script scales font size to prevalence, so, one might want to amplify a certain tag, or add a new one. the most recent tag is in red. the interface for the tag cloud is in a few flavors, one for the desktop and one for the cell phone – i’ll get around to writing an sms version prior to the start of school.

here are some screen shots:

above: this would be projected in class.

below: current browser interface – works well on phones, provides recent cluster of previous three tags.

…lightrail, headed southwest, around 2pm. I noticed some interesting shadows and light movement on a wall I was facing when light passed through a window that had been scratched. I haven’t edited this at all. i held my cameraphone (nokia 6682) still while filming. i find it interesting to watch as a portrait of various elements and their movements within an environment that includes me, but focused on a surface that allows me to experience them abstractly. The information within the environment is focused on the wall, that wall is a sort of screen that permits me to observe some of the information in the space – the wall is also a “channel” in that it is capable of containing specific amounts or types of data – what i see on the wall is a subset of the information focused on my body, another surface, another channel. suddenly space seemed to be more about area than volume – an array of surfaces/channels, each with its own tuning that allows various elements to become focused/observable/information as they resonate “there”. a geometry not about space but about information? “light” as space, “temperature” as space, “density” as space…

last night, while headed home on the lightrail, i watched these on my phone and they created an interesting collage with the “live” elements within the train. there were many blurry moments, based in large part on the relationship of the recorded sound to the live sound. might be interesting to view this while traveling in other systems.

found this scene as is on the street in downtown baltimore