My REAL website is here:

Thursday, February 15, 2007

this is an egg on a hot frying pan

I'm still down here. My mind races all day, and I think of things to say, but then i run out of energy at the end of the day. I spend a lot of the day trying to calm my mind down, to stop making plans, thinking things out, etc. It's easy when you are painting a wall, more difficult when you are painting a ceiling (like, trying to invent glasses that have a mirror in front of them so that you can look strait ahead and see the ceiling - neck pain man, oh man, it's a pain). I'm getting better at this when in bed or floating in the sea, but it's hard to have no mind when there are ants biting you, or when you are stuck in some awful uncomfy position, or there is oil paint dripping in your eyes. Any of a number of frustrations.

I am really happy that Henry's website is doing so well. I like his site better than this one right now - it is so stimulating. Well, of course, there are so many amazing people posting on it. I think that the conversations will become even more productive. Y'all shoulf visit there. I have been writing way way too much there. I can't seem to calm myself down, and I am certainly not thinking clearly. It's been challenging recently - the thoughts and the writing time don't line up. Fantasy man, it's like a world without end.

Even a list of today's fantasies would go on and on like a mandelbrot set. I mean, from the basic - if I spoke Spanish that would be AWESOME - to the complicated - how to build a jawbone on a robot that would have a loose hinge so it would move naturally - to the terrifying - mostly involving situations with spiders.

Sometimes I am able to write things down, but most of the fantasies - they go on forever expanding, getting smarter and smarter until they dissolve in infinitely small subfantasies. There is no such thing as a line drawn through a tree-shape, and I can either calm my mind and let all the points just hang there, or I can zip aroung like a bug bonking on a window, but there are no lines, and there is no money or patience to make a practice out of the dreaming. Oh man, the things I have figured out and forgotten, they are like mexican jumping beans.

I wonder if there were huge spiders wherever Buddha lived?

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

The real terrorists



AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

I went out to the toolshed behind my uncle Elric's house that he's building here to get some blue plastic tarps. And you know how toolsheds are. Creepy. Well, since everything is like superalive here it's just inevitable that toolsheds be horrific.
I lifted this huge armful of blue tarps up on my shoulders and carried it out of the shed and then felt something wiggly in that bad-wiggly way on my neck, so I threw it down on the ground and a dozen absolutely gigantic creepy freaky giant huge spiders ran out of it in all directions, and they were really big. And they ran at like 90% of the speed of light and they were running at me. After I escaped at 91% of the speed of light I went back and had to shake the tarp out, which resulted in a lot more shivering and stick-waving and running. I took this picture after. This is a baby.
I was thinking how humans are kind of like a toolshed-type animal. Like a muskrat or a blind cavefish. I mean, houses are pretty scary - they are like big polluted lairs, traps. People are pretty dangerous carnivores and they smell weird. I mean, sometimes I get pretty grossed out by people and start thinking of myself as the alien from an alien invasion movie. Well, only when I'm writing that movie. But I guess that's a separate post.
The thing about spiders is that seeing them is an intense experience. It tends to elicit an intense reaction from my monkeybrain (monkeys absolutely HATE snakes and spiders about as much as they love bananas, which makes sense when you think about where they live - in monkeyhouses). Like I was saying, it's almost like the visual information gets routed through a different path in your brain. That you are hyper sensitive to this kind of pattern of shape and movement because the monkeys that weren't got killed by giant snakes and spiders. Things like spiders, faces, letters, pornography - it all gets processed in a way that your brain and body have a kind of strong automatic way of dealing with them, often involuntary (try looking at a letter without recognizing it...) If you could make art that had as much imact on people as a spider crawling on their neck, oh man. I think people create art galleries as this kind of neutral place where you don't have to deal with insticts, well at least you know that what you are looking at isn't really a poisonous hungry animal. It's certainly not a tool shed. A lot of contemporary art out would pretty much creep out someone from just pre-industrial times, but it would have little impact on a chimp.
PS I know chimps aren't monkeys.

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Dominica


I am in the Dominican Republic working on restoring this old house that my Uncle Elric bought. I'll be here for a month or so, but I wouldn't be surprized if I keep on posting.
Um... This guy is the coach from the town I'm at. They won. It's a ig deal. I'm a big baseball fan.

Thursday, February 8, 2007

EXTENDED PIZZA NETWORK


EXTENDED PIZZA NETWORK (EPN) is the art-crit site that Henry founded. It is an attempt to create a place where we-all creative types can post images and ideas - especially ones that we are still actively working on - half-finished especially. This is an attempt create a kind of very informal on-line studio visit. More of a chat than a formal group crit, but we want it to be helpful, so it's not just a compliment contest. We're not trying to reach large numbers of people, just to create a kind of community. The adjective "revolutionary" does not apply. More like "nice." Well, "nice with fights." Cause Henry's my bro. But he's also my brother.

We're not stressing recruiting, but anyone can join up - if you have something you are working on, be it film, visual art of any kind, music, writing, whatever - we'd love you to join up. Please send an email to Henry (on the site).

The way it works is that we'll set you up so you can post, not just comment, and Henry will send you instructions for how to put up files - even large files like video. He's like some kind of nerd like that.

Wednesday, February 7, 2007

Meme abuse!

It seems like everyone has heard of "memes" nowadays - the term is a real buzzword because of so-called "viral videos," annoying email pyramid-schemes , and post and re-post blog-blob lists. Now I'm not William Safire (or William Shatner), but I think the term is being widely misused. This is upsetting because it has the potential to be a word that helps us understand how we think. I especially dig not the term "meme engineering" - which is usually used to describe the practice of making videos and advertisements so annoying that people can't help forcing all their friends to watch them. This really appeals to the unseemly shop-til-you-drop popularity-contest side of human nature. This theory has a lot more to offer than just "the person who is most willing to exploit others becomes the silverback..."

I was working with memes when I designed RELAY, the project in which I had people use words to copy a drawing over and over again. This was a flirtation with meme engineering, but what it really revealed to me is that we are still a long way off from understanding memes in the concrete, experimentally verifiable, and effective way we understand genes - nobody can do "meme engineering" because nobody understands the basics of the science. This is verified by the fact that NOBODY can predict what inane video will go global. Well, except for the Britney Spears stoned video. But it doesn't take a fucking meme-engineer to tell you that. The best meme engineering advice is the same a generic advertisement advice -food, sex, money, fame, bright colors, loud noises and repetition seem to engender a response in the monkeybrain.

Before I go any further, I just want to say that I am not a meme fanatic. Well OK, I am, but I have a lot of doubts that the theory is testable. It needs to get a lot more specific. We are still in the blood, black bile, yellow bile, phlegm stage at this point.

When Richard Dawkins coined the term in 1976 he cited as examples of memes, "tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothes fashions, ways of making pots..." These are all very accurate, and are exactly what the general internet public thinks when they say "meme" nowadays - an idea that propagates itself like a virulent strain of flu. The common use of meme actually means "extraordinarily successful meme." But the theory is much more subtle than this: The contents of thoughts can be regarded as a replicator that functions somewhat similarly to DNA. It follows the evolutionary algorithm: replication, mutation, and selection and therefore becomes more adapted to its environment - for the memes this means the human mind and our spheres of communication.

The clearest way to experience memes is to close your eyes and do a simple meditation - try not to think of anything - especially verbalized thoughts (this is how Susan Blackmore seems to have arrived at her ideas - which is her stroke of genius). If you are like me, thoughts will pop into your mind one after the other. Some of them are really halfassed - "When did 'Spawn' come out? I wanna see that." And I can brush them off. But others are really persistent and can sometimes distract me to the point where I actually get up and go do something. These would be the successful memes. So in fact, all of these thoughts are memes. Not ALL thoughts are memes - only ones connected to imitation and therefore language - sensations are not, but muscle-memory is. After all, most of the content of our language can be traced back to simple imitation (not all - the sounds of the words fit into a preinstalled grammar structure in the brain). The more distance you gain from your native culture, the more you see yourself as a product of your cultural environment - the large aspects of culture are collections of memes - a memeplex - so something like "I am lonely" or "I hate when cops tell me what to do" are memes. Artifacts made by imitation can also be seen as a physical expression of the information encoded in a meme - if I show you a hat you can copy it. If you're a hatter.

The memes only "care" about their own self-interest - they are not around to help us. But they exist in the context of the survival of the human brain. The worst ones - i.e. "I can fly off this building if I just BELIEVE hard enough" - get eliminated pretty quickly, and useful ones - i.e. "Cooking potatoes makes them edible" - tend to flourish, but sometimes useless ones survive because they exploit our irrational nature - i.e. "step on a crack, break your mother's back." Memetics has a lot to say about language, about what it means to be conscious, about how free will is largely an illusion, and about how humans evolved. It has problems too - the information in a meme is not encoded in a physical replicator like DNA. This means that it is much harder to analyse. Due to our as yet poor understanding of how the mind works, there are very few satisfactory experiments that can be designed to test the theory in a way that moves it into the realm of "hard science."

Now that I have explaned the idea in more detail, I'd like to talk about another problem I have with the abuse of the term "meme." If used to describe a computer virus that automatically sends itself to your email contacts the term is misapplied because it is outside of the environment of the human mind - there are no factors for evolutionary selection. Things like massively popular video content are also borderline - they certainly copy themselves and are selected for by humans, but they don't change. Without mutation there can be no evolution. Of course, evolution doesn't mean a march towards perfection, but simple success in adaptation to environmental conditions. Evolution is a strange phenomenon - it uses energy to create a local anti-entropic tendancy (although the rest of the universe is still falling apart - boo-hoo!). When I created RELAY the drawings quickly and decisively "devolved" because there was little competition or selection. By recopying the drawings to make them presentable, I introduced an element of selection (chosing round circles rather than potatoes, correcting symmetry by chosing the "better" half) - and this seems to have generated the most interesting elements in the project - the indescribable element in the forms that "said" something about how humans communicate (not to say I was displeased with how it demonstrated entropy). But if it were an attempt to display "memetic engineering" it would be judged a failure. For that, we will have to see 3 things - a decrease in entropy as time passes, increasing efficiency or adaptation to a specific condition, and, of course, it would appeal more to people - it should be "popular."

In the meantime, I don't really care whether memetics is considered hard science or pseudo-science. It has given me a method of understanding my thoughts that I find highly accurate and revealing, and it has been fertile ground for my artistic investigations. I am writing this post because I would like other people to understand that this idea provides a simple alternative to a lot of superstitious ideas. I don't want people to confuse a fascinating theory with spam and fart jokes (though these have their place too...).

Some good starting points for further investigation:
Susan Blackmore's homepage is worth a look if only for the hair...
The Meme Machine on Amazon, where all kinds of wackoes go on for ages about their crackpot ideas - my kind of place.

Tuesday, February 6, 2007

to see without seeing (two)

Now I'm reposting the last post from my old blog so there aren't any errors (It's a new tradition!).
I also added some wikipedia links and copied the comments.

>

I have a minor medical condition - Strabismic Amblyopia - a developmental brain dysfunction that affects 1-5% of the population. Amblyopia is characterized by poor vision in an eye that is structurally normal – in other words, the problem is either with the optic nerve or the brain function associated with the affected eye. The visual system does not develop normally due to reduced use during development which leads to the brain “ignoring” the signals coming from this eye. Strabismic Amblyopia indicates that one eye was disfavored due to the fact that the eyes are not properly aligned. In other words, I have lazy eye ‘cause I’m cross-eyed.

So how does this affect my vision? Well, when I have my good eye open (my leftie), my brain pretty much turns off my bad eye. When I cover my good eye I can see out of my bad eye – which last I checked has 20/200 vision (it means I can just barely see the big E at the top of the chart). If this were my only eye, I would probably meet the definition of legally blind – especially because this condition cannot be corrected by glasses. The most annoying side effect of this condition is that it puts more stress on one eye, which has been making my vision worse recently. The second is that I don’t have any depth perception, so I can’t hit a baseball (even when it’s on the tee) or see stereograms or those fucking “magic eye” things. As if I’d even want to. The truth is, 3D vision is superfluous.

I’m not trying to get a license plate here, I’d like to point out a few features of the qualia of perception in my bad eye. I know the color vision in my bad eye is different than in my good eye – especially in the blue-green range (which my bad eye sees as much more grey) but this is a minor point. The interesting thing is that the images are not “out of focus,” distorted, dim, and don’t appear farther away (which is how 20/200 vision is often described by people with structural abnormalities). I can see everything crisply - I can only say that it is “harder to see.” That may seem vague, but I have always had trouble coming up with words for how I see in that eye. Things are just not as noticeable. Trying to see something is more work, it makes me frustrated, and things don’t seem as interesting.

To understand how my vision is impaired we must recognize how visual cognition is divided into a number of tasks handled by different physical areas of the cortex . For example it is hard to count things – I tend to do better if I fix my eye and stare at one point and get confused during saccades (the quick movements of the eye). I have good recognition for motion and brightness – if there were some test that measured acuity in these areas I think I would have pretty good vision. But I am terrible at face recognition and reading. If a group of random letters is written large, I can usually puzzle them out, but it takes a while. And I can’t understand what the font looks like, or remember it, unless I know I am being tested, and then, if large enough, I can check certain details, like if there are serifs, etc. When I see the page of a book, it looks like there are perfectly clear little letters - I just can’t make them out.

But the interesting part is, sometime in my teens I noticed something at the ophthalmologist’s - that is, if I guessed what letter I was looking at I would usually get it right, even though I couldn’t see it well enough to say what it was. This seemed to work best if I said the letters very quickly, without analyzing them. This is related to the phenomena known as blindsight – a condition that has the potential to further our understanding of consciousness. In this condition, patients who have a “scotoma” (blind spot) due partial destruction of the corresponding area of the visual cortex report not being able to see objects placed in this part of their visual field – they are not consciously aware of what is there. But when they are tested (for example - being asked if an indicator light is on or off) they do much better than chance. The patients are usually quite surprised by this, and can be taught to use their intuition to their advantage so they feel confident making guesses about objects in their scotoma, but they continue to claim that they cannot truly see these objects – there are no qualia of vision.

Blindsight raises the question – what is the difference between knowing something and being conscious of it? Most of the time you aren’t conscious of the things you know, for example, you aren’t thinking of where your car’s windshield wiper control is until right now, what kind of food your pet won’t eat, your grandmother’s first name, how to do the backstroke. Where was this knowledge when it wasn’t being thought of actively? Conversely, what about the things you are perceiving, but not conscious of – probably if you listen carefully right now you will realize there is some noise occurring in the background of which you had not previously been conscious.

I feel like my ability to guess the words I am reading with my bad eye is quite similar. I would not say I can SEE what they are, but from experience I have learned that I might KNOW what they are – I have trained myself to an extent to have faith in my intuitions. When reading this way I can, to an extent, use context to figure out what the words are without seeing each letter, the same as we all do when reading. But I have to continue quickly – long words give me trouble and if I stop to try to figure out a particular word I usually can’t – new words also give me fits, so it is much easier to read something with everyday language. I also tend to substitute in words and phrases that might make sense in the context – sometimes the words I put in have to do with other things that are on my mind. I’m not a big believer in the Freudian subconscious, but people say the strangest things, you know? Also, I have almost no ability to recognize when I am confabulating (which is part of the definition of confabulation – mistaking your guesses for facts). This is partially due to the fact that when reading this way I have very low comprehension of what I am reading – it doesn’t stick in my memory well and I can’t form a clear idea of what is being described. In school you may have stayed up terribly late trying to wrench your way through some dense and abstract text – Chomsky or something – and the sentences refused to make sense – that’s what reading “Dick and Jane” is like in my right eye. The whole process quickly becomes a chore, and if I go on I get a headache and find myself unable to resist “peeking” with my good eye (I am diagnosed lazy, remember?). After continuing like this for a bit, even the smallest blur of light in my good eye will seem much more real and beautiful than the whole of my field of vision in my bad eye.

This relates to the way I make art in several ways. First of all, the drawings I have been doing have almost no “depth” to them. I am just not that interested in it, to be honest. When I was younger I was a competent drawer, but I was really upset when a painting teacher (e.h.) described my work as “flat” – he had hit the nail on the head. The other thing is that most of my recent drawings are made of multiple black and white graphic units, “icons” I call them, that closely resemble letters. I’m interested in the meaning that comes from manipulating simple shapes into one unit – including an obsession with the number of different parts and variation of repeating elements and symmetry. These are exactly the things I have the most trouble cognitively analyzing with my bad eye. Perhaps I focus on these elements because – comparatively - I find them the most miraculous part of the vision in my good eye. Perhaps I just find these icons fascinating because my right eye is comprehending certain elements directly without experiencing them visually.

I hope I have not bored you with this explanation – I’ve been very detailed and personal. I’m not trying to get sympathy (I actually quite like my little abnormality), but relating my specific condition in order to get at the universal questions of what it means to be alive. I always write about “consciousness studies”… A field in which our knowledge has become much more specific recently through the use of rational analysis, the advances in brain science including increased knowledge in brain anatomy & the use of Electroencephalography, the questions raised by physics about the role of the conscious observer in the collapse of quantum superposition, and the exploration of consciousness through subjective means such as meditation and drugs. There are many answers to many questions in this field, but there is little consensus. The more we learn, the more clearly the mystery stands out.

[sic.]

Vellcome 2 1st Post - - - Ol' Blogg


I was keeping my blog on geocities, but <<< IT SUCKS!!!! >>> Sorry old pal, but we've got major issues!

Me Old Blog --- Synesthetic Superscam Sr.

As an inaugurative post I am going to lay down links to 6 of my old posts in an attempt to help me digg what I was doing right and wrong with the old blog. The second post will be the last post on my old blog (to provide continuity...)

i

At one point I figured out that information=entropy. Now I have no idea what that means, but I'll stick to my guns and say it's true. It doesn't surprise me at all when everything gets totally messed up, and this is science! Thing is, that's the same thing that makes it impossible not to watch every episode of "deadwood" on the DVD even though it's waaay after midnight. I'll explain if you keep tuned, ok? After all, my room's a mess. I don't know about yours. So:

art as information theory, a primer

ii

On Dec. 7th I launched the project GWAZDOR A.I. GAIA a.k.a. massmind pix etc. etc. etc. . There's a ton of noise about this, and I'll talk it to you sometime soon (it's really in the tubes for real, so just sittight). Because the words are so tough to comprehend, I posted them:

dialogue of GWAZDOR MASSMIND PIX EXPERIMENT

iii


Then I posted about the "dreammachine" I put on YouTube - A variation of an invention by Brion Gysin that I learned about thru William Burroughs. Thing is, it doesn't really work 'cause of YouTube's problematic Flash compression. Compression is hell! A better version of the dreammachine is online here. Well:

dream machine

iv

I also launched this video which I made with Flash and on my old psr-550. I am still keeping the secret. Thing is, nobody gives a shit. But this fits in - I want to know what people are thinking - doublecheck so we can agree upon common variables in order to calibrate our communication. This is actually not much of a post. I'm still learning:

It's my release party!

v

Then I got into 10 dimensional space. Well, it turns out we are all in 10 dimensional space already. No, I DON'T know what I'm talking about. But actually, nobody really gets it... This is also post that lit a virtual firestorm of virulent sockpuppetry. I guess there are a lot of fake people out there who have strong feelings about hyperspace! Checkit:

tesseract, of course

vi

I am pretty sure that machine translation is one of the most useful and underappreciated tools out there today. But not for understanding text from another language. It's pretty much useless for that. But I think it forms a webshape that is ultimately useful for automatic knowledge fabrication and divination. When I was in Tokyo I was literally addicted to running texts through the language-destroyer - I have hundreds of pages of pure mechanical nonsense that really lights it up for me. I posted a lot of crap made by machining texts back and forth between various languages, but I guess I haven't quite figured out how to make it appear as amazing as I know it is inside. Here is an example of some dialogue from Glypix by Gwazdor run through Korean:

“It was this… Oh-oh! To be like this… it was quite strange…”

And that's it for my old blog. Oh - I don't know if this one will be any better, but it might happen that way by accident. I don't intend to find anything special for you - I don't really have my finger on the pulse or anything. I'm just trying to understand some things out there that may have been around a long time but are still understood only vaguely.

Speaking about vague,

-f