how to tie your shoes

17 ways on this site.

Publique!

I just heard from someone who said they thought that reading my blog would be an invasion of my privacy. Now, you can feel that way if you want to, but it is not required. This is all public stuff, just maybe not a full-on part of the advertizing world. FameIsMagic and I were squeeking about this at a bar sometime in the distant past; it's just that one has to put all one's private things up in public for all to see these days. No. Yeah. All I want are hits hits hits and after that comments, and after the voracious biographer at the end of history can gnaw on my bones.

My spam mail says, "Make your tiny lace a true symbol of your power."

Polyworld

Check our this video on evolutionary design of artificially-intelligent neural-net computers.

This is an interesting google techtalk by Virgil Griffith. It's a little raw, but the ideas are exactly what I am interested in recently (there may be some parallels to the project I was sharing below). There are also some pretty amazing visuals.

When I was watching this I was asking a bunch of questions about the fundamental assumptions of the project. Perhaps this is just because I am an artist and want to use these ideas for my own work, but also I feel as though these ideas can be so much more than just a way to study artificial intelligence. First of all, this simulation is run in order to understand how neural-nets function. Of course this makes it possible to "tweak" the system and set the stage for efficient evolution, but it strikes me that the tweaking was not wide-ranging enough - that chance should be used in the tweaking of the environment as well (because intelligent-design is usually bad design). But also it seems that understanding these systems may be irrelevant to their final use. They aren't made to be understood in the way that traditional computing systems are understood. After all, nobody looks at traditional digital computers and looks at how the random errors in their code function to make them more fit (or at least nobody did until the development of neural-net computing). Then, I don't know why these kinds of algorithms need to be run on computers at all. What if we looked to Von Ahn's "wet ware" concept and tried to create detailed and self-correcting algorithms that used humans as the nodes or agents? How can we use this simulation as a plan for both using our brains more efficiently and structuring society more democratically? These concepts are not immediately useful to the development of artificially-intelligent computers, but it seems to me that they are already useful in some way.

Artistically, these areas have been explored to an extent (for examples, read here), but most of the work seems to be an aesthetically-enhanced version of the "life" screensaver. I am searching for ways to use the ideas from simulations like Polyworld, not to replicate its look or even function. The use-value may be entirely outside the realm of computer simulations. Perhaps they will be performative, perhaps the art will simply seek to explain the process, perhaps the work will be some kind of an adaption of algorithms taken from these experiements, but adapted to new circumstances.

Finally, it seems as though our fucked-up society (so well-spoken today...) is flailing around (like an unevolved virtual agent) for a new way of seeing itself. Seeing is the first step to understanding and taking action. Part of our perception of ourselves is the metaphor we use to define ourselves. I think this project and many other developments in evolutionary studies, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence research are leading to establishment of a new analogy by which to judge ourselves.

One of our goals as artists is to give people something new to see. We accomplish this not by creating an image that has never been seen before, but by leading the viewer down a visual path that sneaks by the locked gates of perception, allowing them to see the commonplace in a revolutionary way.

Artificial deadlines!

You don't force a tree to grow!

You don't pull the chick from the egg!

You don't transfer the wave closer to the shore!

How can any pleasing shape result in the application of gross pressure and cut-off points? No no! Impossible!

brussels sprouts

This is the recipe I use.

Anne Laplantine

I am just going to post these videos by the artist and musician Anne Laplantine. This work deals with some difficult political issues, and asks some tough questions about the role of the artist, but I think it is worth looking at and thinking about. I don't want to give my interpretation of the work here so as not to stand between you and the work. I should warn you that there are some violent images in these videos.

I should also say that you can't experience this work fully without visiting Laplantine's YouTube page. Some of these videos are responses to other videos, and often this relationship is as important as the work itself. I can't show how this works here and this page ends up being a little decadent in that it focuses on only part of her work (specifically the more finished work, especially ones with her songs). So check out her page.

cho seung-hui

touched

eric in automn leaves

dancing

the forest

Can you do me a favor?

silence is

asleep

me war

fight fights

dear world

dicipline

the forest

just for fun

do you believe in magic

in my hands

progress report

A few entries ago I was talking about a process-based drawing experiment that I was planning to carry out with several unsuspecting 'victs and uh, here's the loot. This weekend I've been working on a second experiment that will explore the ways in which this process can be fine-tuned.

I'm not going to bother doing a good job explaining how this process worked - it's a chore. There are quite specific directions, and one of my challenges has been to simplify the process.

So, I drew (on one sheet of paper with pencil) nine diagramatic pix. Here's what those original collection of pix looked like (I redrew them in the same way on each of the sheets):

Each of these collections was associated with a phrase (which can be found on that previous entry)and the participant's job was to judge how well the pix served as an abstract metaphorical illustration for the phrase. This is a pretty odd task in the first place, and as you will see from the following examples, gross tuning is needed.

The participants were asked to select 3 pix that they felt were irrelevant or bad illustrations of the phrase, and ERASE them. They were also asked to choose the 3 pix that best illustrated the phrase and, somewhere nearby the original, copy the drawings, but in an "improved" way - a few simple changes to make the drawings better illustrate the metaphor. In the end how many drawings should there have been, dear reader? There should have been the same amount as in the beginning - nine. Then the paper was passed to a new person to repeat the process.

The point of this game is to see if it is possible to create an algorithm incorporating an obliquely-concerned "wet-ware" filter that will create drawings that have greater fitness in terms of a certain task. The goals are both to see what these drawings would look like and to see if and how this process can work. I say "obliquely-concerned" because if the concern were direct this would be a simple creative act. But through a strict set of rules the intentions of the participants are partially subverted. The process can't be described as fully automatic, or even objective goal-based, but neither can it be fully explained in the language of individual creative drawing. The challenge is finding a balance here.

There were lots of technical problems with this experiment.

The first was that the directions were too hard to follow (although my first urge is to blame the participants for not being bright enough, this is less attractive not because it is untrue, but because it is boring - of course humans are foolish... if approached wrong - the point of this experiement is to take advantage of human's uncanny ablitiy to occasionally be smart). Problems included people not erasing the original pix so that the total number started multiplying, and people whose drawings were more accurately described as completely novel rather than "improvements." So I have to make the directions clearer or maintain stricter control over the process (this is the more likely of the two choices, between dull simplicity, inevitable chaos, and authoritarianism I guess the last is the most relevant considering the world we live in).

The second problem with this experiment has to do with the tendency towards representational drawing. The goal of this excercise is to create images that say something new about the nature of these phrases, to explore the nature of abstraction, to create visual analogies that have something new to say, to see if there are any essential truths about the mind's ability to form nonlinguistic representation. However it seems that the natural urge is for people (in this case art students) to tend towards simple representative illustration. I don't have a knee-jerk reaction to illustration, but I think it is less interesting in this case because it creates pix that closely approximate linguistic communication - where the communicative ability of the drawings could be effected more accurately and efficiently by replacing them with words. In this case the excercise will result in the production of tautologies, inefficient, noisy ones at that.

I am working on a solution to this problem. I can't discuss it at this point.

Here are a few examples of the results. I have chosen the most successful as I want to show what this process could be, rather than the traps it can fall into (anti-entropic processes are more interesting than... that other shit):



As usual, click image for more details.

I am looking for advice or feedback on this...

Don't Forget the Amnestics

Are you plagued by troublesome thoughts?

Do you sometimes find yourself between two places?

Is "just being" unduly effortful?

Does the rate at which time passes not fit your needs?

The answer is waiting in a pill. Take amnesia all the time. It's easy easy easy. It's easy easy easy easy. Then you won't have to drive a car. Then you won't have to read books or watch movies. Then we can go fwd together, and go through, and sidewalks can be twice as thin, and dating services, and walls, and we can go fwd together fluently. I can't recall. I was not a witness. I wasn't there. Ant and Bee. Spider and Hogfish. This and that. It dissolves. In water. In tonic water. And it goes down smooth. Smoothly. Much love from the year time stopping observed, fireworks, applause, 2039.

166

I'm not even sure if I'm counting right.

Anyway. Those images are coming. I'm pretty excited about them in that unpredictable things happened. Not in the images themselves, but in the process, in the relationship between me and the students "playing" my "game." The ones who didn't follow the rules, the ones who did not meet my expectations, and the ones who exceeded them. OK. They are on the way. I have "reviews" soon - sounds violent indeed. This pressure will show itself.

And I would like to say "thank you" to the two friends who were nice to me today, and the two strangers who treated me like a human. That really means a lot to me.

165th post

But who's counting the days til dooming drops?

I'm doing another in a series of endless useless experiments involving forcing forms through people's eye-brain-hands to change them to show something. This will be presented to a group of undergraduates to prove some arcane and decadent point in my mind about the thickness of shells and the location of secret air conditioners. It's a metaphor study, an analogy test. I'm celebrating a live token by picking it apart. Fucking bedrooms. Design flaws, seaweed blood.

This one involves a list of criteria. In my ploverpoint presentation I claim that this list "relates to states of mind experienced in communication." And I quote! So my question, my finely barbed and agitated reader, is; does this list in any way fit the description?

What other phrases may work?

Do you understand what I am getting at? Perhaps you understand better than me. Maybe you can share me, share me to me. It's fun to share before shearing. To let a cloud float down to earth.

Here presented in oops-sorted order (I drooped another domed liver on the ptarmigan, a penny in the hopper, the floor. Again, I dropped the papers). Here:

Go off on a tangent.
My mind is empty.
I really understand what you're saying.
That's what I believe.
I don't wanna talk.
Paying attention is such a chore.
It can never be expressed in words.
I couldn't disagree more.
My thoughts are racing.
My intuition tells me so.
I can't make up my mind.
It's just a vague idea.
Suddenly everything makes sense.
These thoughts are driving me mad.
Spacing out!
I just can't believe it's true.
I figured it out.
My brain's not working.
I can't find the right words.

Strobiscopic Sircumstance thanks you for your help.

messy room

These are images of how messy my room was when I was preparing for the show. It's a little cleaner now.




just for fun: electronics store

I've been writing a lot in my blog lately because the show is over, but I feel as though I can't get the distance to say anything too clear about what is going on in my mind. I wish I could always have this kind of clarity and purposefulness, but the constant pressure to create work, work that is constantly advancing, it seems to take some of the wind out of my sails.

mass mind

This article talks about some of the issues I am interested in:

swarming

developments

I posted my response to that review; I spent some time thinking about what position to take. I'm really interested in distance, so I ended up talking a lot about that. Dina is much more direct.

That said, I don't have much time to spare these days, so I don't think this is going to go too far.

back to the review

Skewered

Now seriously folks...

This is an image of the instrument I made that uses a servo motor to change the length of a skewer (and therefore the pitch and timbre). The position of the bridge (here the bump at the center of the CD case) is controlled by twisting a knob (which is just a simple potentiometer such as in a volume-control knob). This is just a learning excercise for me; it is just a cardboard model, and I'm not really interested in creating musical instruments at this point in my artistic practice. But I think the ability to use simple devices to control the motion of a physical object will be useful to me. I have plans to start making sculptures from my drawings - simple small toylike objects with a degree of interactivity that enables a certain kind of PLAY which relates to my recent interest in using play to process infromation on a pan-consciouness/actor-network level by using algorithms that capitalize on what Luis von Ahn calls WETWARE - i.e. decisions made by our brains that process information the centrality of which we are not aware of.

Rimba-rimbaaaaaaaaaaaaa - qurrrt; bloink! Bloink! P't-dddd'-ddd'-dd'-d-'!

This is a pretty bad image. In this instrument, my contribution in in the foreground. It is controlled with one set of two knobs you can see behind.

In other news, I am still processing the review of Howwa We Ana - However We Wanna. I am trying to take it seriously so that I can understand the way people react to the show (it is actually quite hard to get honest critical opinions on any work). But because the language used in the review is challenging for me - either because it is more academic than I am used to or because the basic stance expressed is so different from mine - I am having trouble with it. I'd like to read more by the critic to get an idea of his basic ideology so that I can use this as a reference-point. I am pretty upset not that this review was negative (it's great that anyone would think it was important enough to write about), but that there were no positive reviews published as I think the show was generally well-received. Oh well - I'm too busy to let it bother me.

Review!

Hey everyone! My show got reviewed! Yay!

OK. So it's (judgement removed by me as premature). Ouch!

But what are you going to do? Check it out:

Short Order Review: Requesting a Definition of Play

I sur

vived my crit!

opposition

When someone says I don't do something I do soomething. When Alexis says not to write i write.

Last night I had a beautiful dream. I had a record. It played landscapes. The kind of painting of landscapes I used to imagine I would do, working in the field in the summer, selling my paintings at flea markets and I could have short hair, sleeping in a tent, getting stoned with weirdoes and telling stories with structure, knowing what made that goo different colors and how the mix slowed the drying. I never did it. There was a record, like I said, and it had a fleet of glockenspeiels and xylophones, just like I always imagined I would lead a fleet of percussion instruments to make a beautiful music. Not an electric keyboard. I didn't do that either. What did I do? I don't know. The dream said it was the wrong thing. It was the garbage truck coming. Just a bad night of nerves. I could still sing the song in the shower, and it was beautiful, but that's an almost everyday occurance now - they arent' pretty after. They are designed to get me out of bed and expunge my nostolgia and sleepbuddies by the time a shower is finished. No they don't work fo that. But they don't work for anything else either.

And on an un related note, this is what I do for "homework" hahahahaha.

Chaliff Dance

I thought I would take the advice of pretty much everyone who came to "Howwa We Ana - However We Wanna" and put this video up on YouTube. Even though it looks kind of silly out of context, and the idea changes a lot, I figure it is best to err on the side of sharing things.

All the "Chaliffs" in the show were preceded by a text that took the form of a "chat" and served to explain the process by which the work was created.

Chaliff Dance

Eff: I will film myself dancing a made-up dance. Then I will write down its choreography and send you the directions. I will dress formally and it would only be right if you would, too. Oh - I don't send you the video - that would ruin it!
Dina: I am also going to choreograph a dance, film myself dancing my dance, and send you the written directions. Then I will film myself trying to follow your steps.
Eff: And I will film myself trying to dance your dance.
Eff: Wait - it's a little confusing. So, I dance my dance and you dance my dance?
Dina: We both dance our own dance, but only once at the beginning, then we dance the other person's dance by following each other’s written dance instructions.
Eff: I don't think they will get totally coordinated. Or even semi-coordinated…
Dina: They might, though. What music should we use?

it went well

I don't seem to get a whole lot of time to write these days - too bad - although it is natural I suppose.

The show went well indeed. The set-up was a little hectic due to the gremlins that always seem to be sitting on my back, but perhaps it is just because they know that I am their friend in the neverending battle against a future dominated by a fluid mechanical/cybernetic simulation that replaces all that is good and true. Or perhaps I just don't consider simplicity a virtue.

I can't really say that much about the show because it is too soon and I am still in a state of prelexical superposition waiting for things to stop making sense so I can understand them and bang them out. Say what?

I am very happy with the work. I think it is strange, stupid, obvious, subtle, smart, normalized. Unsetting opposites making my soup less clear. It's good. I don't know. It's a new angle so it is disorienting. My classmates and new friends have not yet seen the work as it is located rather distantly for Berkeley students, but they will be out there next week and this is something I care about most deeply. And another reason not to talk about it - I wanna stay cloud so that the light can come in in a different pattern. That would be nice.

I'm so sleepy it's like time lag. Or maybe this computer is busted. Whatev.

I plan on putting as much of the show as I can up on-line sometime soon. So we'll wait for that huh?