Sorry sports fans, I got really busy. I've got a show at the end of February and a cult classic session before that, so frequency here may decline.
Or, as the law of inverted priority structures (aka procrastination) stipulates, I may write here INSTEAD of doing any work. Oh well.
I've been working with a vocoder. No satisfactory results yet.
An artist friend of mine is doing a project that I am very interested in. The concept is very simple; to arrange a dinner on St. Valentine's Day where romantic partners will be eating in separate locations, but connected via video conferencing. The following video is a rough demo of what the event will be. When I was watching the video I noticed some very interesting things about how the partners were pretending to be in the same space. My rational mind instantly started to object, but I was still able to believe in the fiction. There is always a lot of suspension of disbelief when chatting on-line, and it is more noticeable when you can see the other person, but the setting of the dinner table seems to focus this project explicitly on the subject of manners. What are virtual manners? To what extent is social reality an agreed-upon fantasy that makes us blind to unsavory aspects of physical reality? To what extent does being polite alienate us from our animal nature, from our sexuality, from our presence in the moment, in the real world?
You know the word "Qwerty," right? It's really fun to spell!
Well, Qwerty, of course, is an abbreviation of the phrase "Qwertyuiop Asdfghjkl Zxcvbnm." This phrase gets 1,690 google hits as opposed to the much less refined "Qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm" which get 30,100 hits.
Well, I was hanging out in an office and I couldn't escape. I learned to pronounce the phrase and then I chanted it several hundred times and I think I've memorized it.
Synesthetic Superscam is here for YOU!
TODAY'S REVOLUTIONARY CLASS AS A WAVE.
TODAY'S REVOLUTIONARY ACTION AS PLAY.
("We must confront vague ideas with clear images.")
Jean Luc Goddard's 1967 "La Chinoise" is about a group of french communist students who are living in an abandoned apartment, the living room of which they have converted into a kind of temple to Mao, the revolutionary ideal, and violence. The film's narrative is less important than its style; collaged fragments of bold, uncompromising text, Chinese propaganda posters, Andy Worhol influenced pop images of famous figures, primary colors filling monolithically flat planes, and violent modern commodities (this style resembles Guy Debord and the situationists which later influenced Malcom McLaren and the Sex Pistols). (Great list of slogans from May 1968 from wikipedia.)
The content of the following may be a little hard to follow, though take heart; I think it would be for anyone who is not a scholar of Post-Leninist European Communism, Maoism, or the French student uprising of May 1968. However, take a look at this to understand the film's visual style;
Hello? Transformer gun/radio anyone?
The film takes an ambiguous critical look at the students; they are at once portrayed as very serious communists who are intellectually curious, have mastered the literature, are attempting to practice their theory, and are willing to make sacrifices for their cause. But on the other hand they are not workers, they are young students who talk about their summer job of picking peaches as though it were just a lark. They are portrayed as spoiled, overly interested in fashion and appearances, careless with the lives of themselves and others, and ideologically both uncompromisingly rigid and overly willing to avoid nuance in favor of a romanticised simplicity.
As the summer passes, the students' cell fractures and dissolves over ideological issues. In fact, what initially divides them is that one of their own criticises their ideology when he sees it becoming too romantic and unrealistic, too dreamy and extreme. This character is thrown out, his former comrades chanting "revisionist" and booing him inhumanly, as though he were a public speaker (although they are all inside a nice private living room), refusing to engage him in dialogue. As the romantic engagement with the idealised perfection of the revolutionary spirit increases, one of the characters, in pitiful emulation of the tragic tortured artist myth, commits suicide after painting expressionistic rainbows all over the walls of the living room. Does the artistic frame of mind somehow corrode revolutionary political ideology? And if so, is this a bad thing?
In the end, the group breaks up when the owners of the apartment return and school starts up again. In a key dialogue a professor convinces the leading woman not to throw a bomb in a class to close the university (it's a singularly unamerican scene; it takes place on a train and the student loudly declares that she is a terrorist, but without any of those helpful "if you see something, say something" signs around nobody seems to notice). However, this is not before she shoots two people, a Russian communist bigwig (seen as a corrupt traitor to the true spirit of communism) and an innocent bystander. There is a bit of ambiguity here; the violence and its effects are not shown, and the students seem to have avoided any consequences for their actions. However, despite the fact that the students were just playing around their summer of ideological extremism has had very real effects.
This is where I draw a tenuous connection:
Certainly all this violent revolutionary fervor and dedication to intellectual exploration of communist theory is the furthest thing from the minds of young americans in my generation. There is no class consciousness among american workers and certainly no connection between students and workers. Throughout history young people have invariably been called egocentric and hedonistic, but this is a generation that, while interested in politics, has clearly chosen not to make any personal sacrifices to protest the war, human rights abuses, political authoritarianism of the current administration, the ever deepening alienation of modern life, or the destruction of the environment.
I was once speaking with an old-school die-hard communist who insisted that there was no such thing as class in america. Her point was that equality of opportunity and social mobility made it possible for the individual to transcend class. My argument was that the existence of a social class is not contingent upon the members remaining in that class, as a wave consists of a pattern of energy with which individual molecules are associated only for a short time. 
The "student class" was not important to Marx in his day, but is clearly an example of a class that is temporary for its members, yet still a constant sociopolitical force. Not that it is much of a force these days. So my question is, is there any potential for the current student class to be a force for social change, revolutionary or otherwise?
My answer has a lot to do with the behavior seen in "La Chinoise." The students are only playing, but their actions have real effects. In some ways, the insularity of the group brings to mind the oft-repeated observation that the internet has a propensity to create "echo-chamber" communities; forums where like-minded people compete to agree with each other. Indeed, the Maoist students' love of pop music and fashionable clothing, urge to romanticise their own lives, and state of moneyed unemployment all resemble the lifestyle that is propagated by my generation's primary environment; the internet, particularly online social networks. Most importantly to the internet analogy, the student commits a violent act in anonymity and escapes all consequences. But there is a positive side to all this, the current generation, while it is having huge trouble addressing current sociopolitical problems in art, music, and other creative disciplines, clearly values creativity and self-expression. The fact that everyone has a band up on myspace (even if it is the completely fake band of their made-up electronic doppelganger as represented by a busty pink-eyed avatar) raises a question we have heard before; does the artistic frame of mind somehow corrode revolutionary political ideology?
We can usefully address this question by talking about escapism in art, but there is a deeper question at stake here. Can a revolutionary class be motivated by the desire to play and express their individuality creatively?
My answer is yes, and I base this on two ideas you may have seen before on this blog. The first is based on the wonderfully (and perhaps dangerously) freethinking Luis von Ahn's revolutionary idea of using people's urge to play during their free time to accomplish useful tasks. He created games that took annoying tasks like labelling images and deciphering garbled text in scanned books, and turned them into fun games or biproducts of routine tasks (Google Image Labeler and reCAPTCHA). These are only humble beginnings, but they point to a new paradigm where compassionate designers use computer networks to make it possible to take advantage of people's natural propensity to to enjoy solving problems. This will be a democracy of governance by the interested, but also by the very bored. As evidence that I am not completely alone in this opinion I would like to cite the untitled essay by Kevin Kelly, published by the annual "World Question Center" which claims that new forms of democracy are appearing on the horizon, ones which will resemble wikipedia and myspace more than anything (the essay is worth reading!). In this new form of government "both the weakness and virtues of individuals are transformed into common wealth, with a minimum of rules and elites" and which "has made a type of communitarian socialism not only thinkable, but desirable." I submit that these forms of government will languish as ideas unless they are supported by a revolutionary class, and that the only way that a majority of americans could ever function as a revolutionary class is if we expand the definition to include a steady yet ever-shifting wave of playactors who are attracted to justice because it is interesting... and FUN.
The final question, and it is a tough one, is; is the type of senseless, anonymous, and unpunished violence seen in the movie a narrative trick of Goddard's, or is it endemic to this type of play-based, temporary revolutionary class? Is there a systemic flaw in this way of effecting social change? I don't dream of utopia, but I wonder; does the potential for positive change outweigh the dangers? How can the system be created by a revolutionary class, rather than by the ruling class bent on exploiting our labor, our humanity, and the planet we live on? Finally, we return to the agonizing question of when, if ever, is a violent act justifiable?
I leave you with a scene from the film that shows these serious revolutionaries at their silliest:
BTW - I haven't checked to see if this film is available at all, but I guess I should end this review by stating that I did, in fact, like this film...
H- is making an effort to revive the dialogue on his multi-party creative commons and crit site The Extended Pizza Network. A lot of people have posted recently and if the dialogue gets going the way it did earlier, well, that would be awesome.
I posted something there so that I could get some feedback about some text I've been working on for my recent project.
I really should be working today, but I'm NOT! Baaaad!
There is a link to the video game maps page on the EPN. If I were going to try to learn to paint these are the colors that I would like to paint with:
Click to enlarge.
I'm a bit of a texting monster and the automatic word organizer predictive texts thing is pretty useful, but it's like a monster word confuser, huh? I tend to keep the rovocab down to like basic english levels, so words like "yr" and "huh" figure big. I'm not sure if all the companies use the same software (probably not) but I have verizon666 and it promotes serious doublethink. Some basic words like if/he, home/good or in/go always trip me up. But one that really strikes me is book/cool. It is so preposterous that they assume Americans want to talk about books more than they say "cool." I mean, right? But, sometimes I find myself actually thinking "thats book!" (If indeed one can think a phrase that is missing an apostrophe - but that's another post...) So, sitting just now, I realized that enables a 21st c. 1984 conformity-togetherness mass-mind techno cyber oh wow man far fucking out man experience (21-84 C.T.M.M.T.C.O.W.M.F.F..O.M.E). So like, if me and about a million billion other people have the same stupid program driving us nuts, then someone else must have the compulsion to say "thats book" as an alternative way to express approval, so...
"Oh fugnuts. I wanted to be on the mug. *goes and sulks in corner* Glad he liked it though! Thats book!" With pix;
"yup thats book bbq"
"thats book, u looking forward to christmas? xXx"
"Chololate pocket on your phone was ringtone channel to ringtone funny thats book. 903sh, but a great fun! Often these heat sensitive i..."
"Wrap up my head zoloft imitrex but thats book. Copy of what hcp this opk. Extreme cap liquid weight loss pills urimax is used to terazosin gelonida..." (great - I'm glad I have synchronicity with complete incoherency.)
This is the most explicit; "Someone I met the other day said that the 'kids' (he must've thought we were much older than we are) were now using the word 'book' instead of 'cool' because that's what comes up first on predictive texts..."
And people have even appropriated and commodified the idea; "Thats book, that's totally book...." (From the myspace of a library in New South Wales.)
I only found one example where the apostrophe was used (although it used quite a few predictive text oops in a row); "Yeah I could, but he you foot want to that's book too." (Kind of trying too hard. I guess usually the kind of person who appreciates nonsense phraseology is not an i dotter or t crosser...).
This was a bit hard, but I found three people (ok; one genuine person, one glam-shot, and one avatar) who have had the same super-obscure thought that I had. Again, it's the conformity that makes this possible. Oppression is a great force in drawing people together! Of course probably some of these were just typos. 90% or so of fools were just failing to type "that book" correctly, lots of "that's book value," waaaaaaaay to much crap about the bible, and a surprising amount of "that's book smarts" (pretty much the worst thing you can say about someone these days, shudder...)
So. Aren't you glad that I'm conducting this research for you? If I weren't doing it for free you'd probably have to be paying someone to do it for you, huh?
BTW - What the hell is Neil Young talking about in that song "After the Goldrush?" (Free download here.) It's about an alien invasion right? Planetary defense and evacuation? Back me up here cause google images isn't. I mean, usually alien pix are the easiest thing to find...
So, it's hard going to sleep. I feel like I need to write to you, but what the hell?
OK. Space out;
Henry P. Stapp, a quantum physicist here at Berkeley, published the book "Mindful Universe; quantum mechanics and the participating observer" last summer, but it wasn't until yesterday that it appeared in the Berkeley library, where I just snapped it up.
I have been on a pretty serious popular science reading kick for the past two years, reading (with various middling degrees of comprehension) any book I can find on cognitive science, especially those that focus on consciousness. This may have either originated from or inspired various art projects that deal with these ideas (it's a chicken/egg thing...). Here's a partial list for the bibliotechheads in perhaps the order I was reading them;
"The Mind's Eye" by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett - I read my father's version of this a long time ago.
"The Meme Machine" by Susan Blackmore - This book is written is speculative in the most inspiring way.
"How the Mind Works" (and others) by Steven Pinker - This is the most accessible and engaging read and is very clear.
"Consciousness Explained" by Daniel C. Dennett - This is the book unfairly referred to as "Consciousness Explained Away," but it is a very clear read.
"The Physics of Consciousness" by Evan Harris Walker - This book is also a bit speculative and has a stylistic twist that is either inspiring or distracting, but it is a good read.
I've read a few more, and if you look this topic up you will see that there are hundreds of books on this topic and they often contradict each other. This is one thing that attracts me to this topic - nobody is quite sure what the answers to these questions are, or indeed what the right questions are. I am neither a physicist or a cognitive scientist so I can't tell you which are more accurate, although I can recommend which ones are more compelling (compelling doesn't mean true, of course). That said, I think that, as a human who has a consciousness myself, I have a decent chance of sorting these ideas out for myself. As I have claimed before, I think that what we call creative thinking or, in my specific case, "art practice" is a way of thinking that is different than either mathematics, logic, rational argument, etc. This mode of thinking uses a different spectrum of mental tools including creation, interaction with the chaotic real world, action as experience, performance, play, re-mixing, introspection, social dynamics, analogy, intuition, synchronicity, visual thinking, non-linear thinking, various highly-developed (?) schools of critical thought, etc. Thoughts are a result of the context in which they arise and I would claim that certain thoughts are ineffable. Therefore creative thought has something to contribute to cutting edge areas of investigation that is not available through other modes of thought. But at an even baser level, reading some of these books I was surprised by how often the language was stunted and graceless. This isn't just a nit-picky criticism; there is a loss of communication that seems to be a result of the pressure exerted from the use of insular logic. Moreover, the idea that truth is beauty is not just an artistic conceit; it is a fundamental force driving scientists' thoughts. They are trying to reduce the chaotic world into ever-simpler laws that enable us to understand the world and predict its workings. Indeed, a huge drive in 20th c. physics was to develop a grand unifying theory of everything.
I am not a primarily visual thinker (in the sense that some people report having an internal dialogue that is conducted in pictures alone rather than words) but images are important to my understanding of a concept. The authors of many of these books are engaged in a fascinating struggle to create visual analogies for the new and difficult concept they are trying to explain. Many of these concepts go beyond the common sense that evolution provided to our minds. Quantum physics is not a speculative theory, but many of its concepts are beyond common sense. It requires the use of the "imaginary numbers" that you may have studied at school (I clearly remember my math teacher advising me not to try to understand them, not listening, and failing the test). The first prototypes of quantum computers have already been built; they operate much faster than usual computers based on "classical physics" (i.e. old-fashion Newtonian physics) because they perform their calculation simultaneously in several different alternative universes that are the result of quantum uncertainty in the computer's heart (somewhat similar to the multiple universes in sci-fi movies like "Back to the Future 2" "Groundhog's Day" and "The Lathe of Heaven"). This is not a metaphor or esoteric mystical speculation; it produces measurable results.
So, the core of what interesting about theories of quantum consciousness is that it essentially requires a mode of thought that is related to creative thinking and to mysticism in that it isn't "common sense." Perhaps quantum theory may appear to be similar to a mystery cult; at its heart there is something that is outside our understanding. However, what is at its heart is not some bullshit about an all-powerful god, or the great disappointment that the universe is purely robotic. No. What it says is that our conscious observation is what creates that universe, that consciousness is inextricably linked to the basic physical laws of the universe. In the 20th c. physicists and cognitive scientists ignored this fact and tried to explain our minds in terms of classic physics, which was inspired by (and enabled) the fact that the 20th c. was a revoltingly antihumanistic time. The fact that our top thinkers continually deceived us (and our governments) into believing that the whole universe was nothing but a huge pool-table with hard balls bouncing off each other in a complicated but essentially predetermined and heartless manner. In the 21st c. the acceptance and exploration of the implications of the (century-old but still misunderstood) theory of quantum dynamics has the potential to inspire a new understanding of our intrinsic self-worth; that our mind is an essential part of the universe, that we actually exist. In the end we have to admit that most of us don't think in a way that conforms to "common sense" and that in fact "common sense" is a dead-end mode of thought. If we can be smart enough in this new way the 21st c. will be a humanistic era, a mystical time in which creative and analogical thinking play a central role.
I haven't finished "Mindful Universe" but I will say a few quick things. One is that it is a tough read; I think reading a book on quantum physics beforehand would be wise. Two is that the sentences are problematic. Three is that there are not enough illustrations (yet...). Four is that it offers the clearest explanation of quantum mechanics* that I have encountered and that the ideas advanced about the nature of consciousness are further along the path to truth than any other book I've read and will probably be a central part of humanity's self-conception by the end of the century.
(*Note that this means the concepts themselves, the prose is sometimes problematic.)
For the interested, here is Henry P. Stapp's homepage. It's just a list of links to various texts.
Earlier I was talking about how hard it is to write down the songs from my dreams, although I should have stated that I was frustrated only because earlier I had been so successful at doing this; the songs in Perceival and the dozens of other song-sketches I have on the floppy disks (!) that go in my PSR 550 are mostly dream-based. I say "mostly" because the process of reconstructing a song from a dream is similar to the process of writing a dream diary; a lot of the work is in reconstructing the sequence and logical connection between strange and memorable images. This is a clear imposition of the logical mind. Similarly, the songs are often very specific in certain parts; the timbre is such a big element - and timbre is the hardest thing to sketch out with the keyboard. Usually there is a choice between capturing the melody and the timbre, as there is not enought time (or perhaps concentration-power?) to get both down before the dream fades.
A lot of those tracks are still up on J- d-'s site. These represent tracks that are more finished, the other ones are tolerable to only me.
Writing about this made me remember something that I had forgotten I made. It is always nice to rediscover something. The following video was made from a song that came from a dream I had in Osaka. I remember quite clearly how strange the dream was. I can't write about it here, but the title of the song "tripping in a cardboard box" is a good enough entry point. I had this dream during a period where I was very disoriented, having trouble distinguishing dreams and reality. I guess I have been flirting with this state over the past couple of weeks. A lot of thoughts here, all out of focus, luckily for you, my long-suffering reader. Anyway, I had a lot of fun walking around in the woods in the Watershed and Rosedale Park near Pennington, collecting leaves and shooting footage for this film...
Just erased a big chunk of nonsense I wrote about my approach to melody. It is only rarely that I get embarrassed about being so selfish on these pages.
In my dream last night I was travelling south down route 31 to Pennington in a van with my pops and brothers (sorry moms, but you wouldn't have liked it anyway). It was the future, but everyone was a lot younger than they are now. Route 31 was almost entirely encased in huge angular tv screens that formed a kind of technicolor transport tube, sometimes I could see the fields that surround route 31, still being cultivated (I could see the soil plowed into rows in the cold autumn moonlight) but behind them, beyond the wood's edge, were huge star factories, warm yellow-orange lights arranged in grids in 3-D perspective drift as we glided by, flourescent white steam uprushing in the crystal clear air, reaching waaaaay up into the huge open sky). The screens flashed and formed interference strobe patterns as we rushed through them, dark rotten-pink, spring green, and bright yellow-white. They weren't advertising anything but their own presence, all working in sync, competing only with the moon. I was in the back seat with C-, who was being very very hyper and kept calling everything super-something. Like we're super-driving in a super-van etc. Pops and H- were being really loud and not paying attention to the road at all because they were bopping and singing along to a band called super-devo (which sounded suspiciously like my dad and brothers had recorded some devo covers, except Prince was playing the keyboards and they would only play one line from a song over and over). The song that I remember isn't really a devo song at all, though. I got it on a floppy disk in real life though!
Yay!
I was just reading Steven Pinker's article on morality in the New York Times magazine (I'd give you a link, but it's easy to find). The article has an understated greatness to it; Pinker's thought isn't revolutionary, it is very careful, conscientious and clear. It is written by a person who is highly rational, but not reductionist. In the article he reviews ideas about how evolution has driven us to be be composed the way we are morally, socially, and psychologically without simplifying things. Without asking us to step outside ourselves, he is able to give us some distance from which we can reassess the problem. This is what makes Pinker a humanitarian. He then applies these ideas to some of the moral problems we have created for ourselves, the impasses between different groups, including, pointedly, Christians and Muslims, and liberals and conservatives.
Reading this article, I was thinking about paths towards sociopolitical change; the revolutionary path vs the progressive path. I was thinking about this in relationship to issues in art. What role does ethics have in the creation, viewing, and criticism of art? How does Pinker's explanation of morality relate to the ethical questions we ask ourselves? (You may have to have read the article to understand what I am going to discuss here) I have noticed that artists as a group seem to have a moral sense that is skewed towards what Pinker labels a liberal moral bias in favor of justice and against pain. In fact, there is a strange moment where Pinker used performance art as an example where I felt as though he had made a decision to preclude artists as a group from his group of ideal readers (In the example given he tried to induce a sense of disgust by talking about performance art that sounded a lot like something by Coum Transmissions, precursor to Throbbing Gristle - something I would love to have seen). I am somewhat upset by this - I think that artists are more than just superliberals, but I need time to synthesize these two systems. How do you compare a general life-or-death social morality to the ethics of aesthetics? Pinker mentions the moral panic that ensued over medical advancements like blood transfusions, in vitro fertilization, and cloning, but what about the moral panic over groundbreaking art, theater and music? Both of these things continue today, but it raises questions about the difference between the ways modern and postmodern art relates to the generally-accepted morality; questions of revolutionary vs progressive change.
Readers of Supersilly Sillystraw will not be surprized that I am not drawing firm conclusions about this matter. An exposition on the various ethical questions within aesthetics would result in an entry that would be rather long, even by the low standards of brevity enforced here. But I would like to conclude by pointing out that Pinker's final quote was highly endearing to me, both because it was from Chekov, and because it can be read in a way that allows for the possibility that art can still be as important to our understanding of ourselves as science;
“Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”
This is a wonderful succinct gem which elucidates complicated thoughts I have about the moral dimensions of my own work. Art can be moral because there is an ethics in perception; a new way of seeing will open our eyes to new solutions to our problems and enrich our experience as humans.
For those of you who have been longtime subscribers, you may remember that a while ago, when Sloppyslurper Slurpysip was located in a different place, I spent a lot of time uploading all these experiments in machine translation (i.e. Google translation, Babelfish, etc.). (Looking back at them now, they are so beautiful: here's one about the mass mind project). Specifically, I was using machine translation not for its stated purpose of automated computer translation, but as a way of processing language, destroying language. I know that there have been poets who have looked at this process, but there are a lot of challenges that I think have yet to be addressed, perhaps because the right approach has not yet been found. I'd like to explain why this fascinates me.
I am interested in this process not as a way of creating language that is beautiful to the ear of the poet, but as a way of crossing a mechanically rational logic with a natural evolutionary logic to divine a new kind of knowledge that could never have been known before we had these tools and these methods. I think the word "divine" is correct, as by crossing the electromechanical and biological minds we are creating a synthetic third kind of mind of whose existence we are barely becoming aware of. This perhaps has the potential to become a transcendent gnostic process.
Recently programmers and linguists have put their heads together in a concerted effort to create mathematical formulae and algorithms that attempt to describe language in numbers to feed into our number-crunching machines. This astounding collaboration is one of the peaks of our present technological abilities, and one can only laugh at the fact that the main impression given by machine translated text is one of gross limitation, failure and absurdity. But this is perhaps because we are judging the text by human standards. Our cognitive demands for grammatical agreement and word order is not met, so we judge the text to be nonsense. But in this we are being unfair. We should judge the texts by the computer's standards, in which case we would see that to the perfectly functioning digital mind these texts are proof of a formula correctly completed, electrons shooting from power to ground. All the words are beautiful.
To the machines it must be our strange, organic, rule-defying and highly-redundant language that is dissatisfying. The fact that there are many different trees of language, each with its own branches of diverging dialects must be quite an ugly phenomenon to the chip-eye. Of course we know this to be untrue, that language is one of humankind's crowning achievements that has its own intrinsic worth and beauty, its own aesthetic system by which it is judged, but moreover it has its own secretly encoded knowledge which is implied in its etymology, its history, the knowledge that has been injected into the language through thousands of generations of humans who lived and died dealing with the challenges of communicating, warning each other about danger, gossiping about sex, insulting each other, forgetting words, misinterpreting subtleties, making up new words, rhyming, playing word games, speaking in tongues, teaching strict rules of grammar, etc.
If we cross these two systems of knowledge and standards of beauty two things will happen. First, there will be a decoding of knowledge that is hidden from us if we look at the text with either our human eyes or the chip-eye. Second, there will be a synthesis of the two systems of language aesthetics to create a new way of assessing the worth of the text, the eye of a greater judge. I can't explain precisely what I mean by "crossing." An analogy might be how a mathematical equation can be solved by performing the same operation on both sides of the equal sign. Mistakes are perfectly OK as long as it's balanced over the equal sign. In fact there aren't really any mistakes; some operations bring us closer to the solution, and some draw us away. In the same way, if two people are talking and they both make the same mistakes with their grammar they will not perceive any divergence from order. In fact, if they respect their mistakes a new language begins its life. This is true not only with grammar, but with agreed-upon facts. I can't tell if these analogies are useful, but I hope they point in the right direction.
There are two questions about this process. We are currently making inroads in the solution of the first, the second is perhaps one of those imponderables that drives theosophists, metaphysicians, and philosophers of science mad (and that provide them with their jobs...). The first question is; what does it really mean to "cross two systems of knowledge"? Of course we can talk about crossing two systems of knowledge from different cultures (i.e. French impressionists being influenced by Japanese ukiyo e prints), but this is surely the philosophically simplest way of approaching this problem. Consider what it means to synthetically and simultaneously understand both how the cat understands the mouse and the mouse understands the cat... Not to have both understandings, or reduce to commonalities, or to find compromises, but to naturally have both systems of knowledge. Naturally, not forced. I think this is where machine translation becomes interesting; our language is presented naturally to the machine. Then the machine performs its operations on its data and speaks back to us in its language. We then hear it and perform our operations on it with the language portions of our brain. Both minds are acting completely naturally, free and easy. Nothing is forced.
The second, imponderable question is whether it is possible for us to understand these texts. To appreciate them for their worth. If any mind can understand the workings of a mind different from it. Whether the ant can understand why it carries its load, whether humans can communicate with the mass mind. And this leads to a second question; if we can't understand the aesthetics of the higher order, how will we know when we have created something beautiful? If we don't understand the knowledge of the higher order, how will we know when we have said something true?
Regarding divination I would like to say something; while I think this process is an (admittedly feebly primitive) way of dealing with higher states of consciousness, I don't think that there is anything mystical about this. At least it should only be as mystical as the contemplation of the unfathomable mystery that is our own consciousness, our own understanding of beauty and knowledge. I would like to smooth the sand so that any small steps in the right direction will leave clear footprints.
Now, back to Earth. Please don't feel let down by the gulf between theory and practice.
I have been working on a project, which, as all the most fun projects do, has led me astray. I started off trying to create a text for a mass mind experiment of a sort, and ended up using google translation to destroy a strangely oversimplified script that came to me one night which dealt with transhumanism and gnostic crossing over. In pursuing this I strayed further and further afield. I made an interesting discovery which hinges upon a third level of misunderstanding. I tell secrets on this blog, so I'll let you know what it is, even though a secret revealed can seem like a small thing indeed.
My new method of machine translation divination uses the following algorithm. First, translate the original text from English to Japanese. Then copy that Japanese text and translate it from Chinese to English - this is where the new layer of synthesis enters; the computer translates the Japanese versions of the Chinese ideograms which are separated by almost a thousand years of divergence and cultural difference (additionally the computer assigns numerical values to the non-Chinese Japanese letters and translates some of these as well). Finally, copy this text and translate it from Japanese to English to clean up the remaining Japanese characters. This is the final text.
A word about the original text; considering our imponderable question re understanding the resultant synthetic text on the higher mind's terms, I think that the path to understanding lies through using an intuitive understanding of the original as a key to unlock the final text. Therefore, partially to show you all that I am not altogether serious in my posthuman misanthropy, I have provided below a translation of Mario Savio's famous speech from the free speech cafe here at Berkeley.
One more thing. For reasons that may be apparent if you consider what I said about the imponderable question above, I am not going to analyse the final text in an attempt to understand it for myself, for all of you, or for the benefit of the chip-eye. But I must say that "random" would be an inappropriate adjective to describe this text. It is an essential part of the process that the computer off in Mountain View (or wherever) that calculates this text has no free choice. It will always return the same result. It is this that makes the synthesis possible. It is always an accurate "reading." For example, the Wikipedia article I copied this quote from had a missing apostrophe, fill it in to witness the butterfly effect in action!
English original;
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you cant take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop!
Japanese translation;
時間があるときには、マシンの操作になるので、憎むべき、そんなににより心臓の病気では、カントに参加することは、受動的に参加することはできません。さえ、そして君は遺体の上に置いてくださいギアとする車輪は、レバーの上、その上のすべての装置、および停止することに就くべき！
English translation from Chinese (very similar to below...):
Time when the earth and the nation, is, Solomon treesンtheir operation Lo you willでtheir hate ever humiliating, Are you better than Lo Lo their heart is illで, KafンLot Lo participated in Able! Things is by moving Lo! Participate therein and the turn isでAnd letん. Me Him, And Jun is the body of Our Home! But most do!ギAllah! Things and the wheels are, Has the browserバ, And on earth to speak of their devices,おO mankind! Stop Able to do things on the most humiliating!
Cleaned up translation from Japanese:
Time when the earth and the nation, is the Solomon trees on their operation Lo you will in their hate ever humiliating, Are you better than Lo Lo their heart is ill, Kaf-Lot Lo participated in Able! Things is by moving Lo! Participate therein and the turn is, And let me. Me Him, And Jun is the body of Our Home! But most do! formic Allah! Things and the wheels are, Has the browser version, And on earth to speak of their devices, Please O mankind! Stop Able to do things on the most humiliating!
Amen!
PS - I would be happy to see any texts that you generate using this process!
I just figured out that "I-Be Area," the video I blogged about the other day because it was reviewed in the NYTimes, is currently being uploaded to YouTube. I'm not sure if the whole thing is up yet but there are quite a few up there. Also, you can go to Ryan's Trecartin's YouTube page to see his older videos.
Playlist of I-Be Area videos from Ryan Trecartin's YouTube page.
I decided to write something about "I-Be Area" while my mind is still fresh. I'm not sure if I am on-target with this, but I recall when I saw Ryan's older video "A Family Finds Entertainment" that I was so excited, and at the time I couldn't really explain why to myself or the friends who I forced to watch it. I would, however, urge you to watch the video for yourself before I make it boring with my words.
"There are so many things to be, Sally.
I know! And I don't want to be ANY OF THEM!!!"
At some point when I was living in Tokyo I transcribed the entirety of AFFE and was translating it (with help) into Japanese. I never finished, but in the course of listening to the dialogue over and over again I had a lot of time to think about how language and "voice" was used, so I'd like to talk a little bit more about that here, in the context of explaining why I think these videos are so fascinating.
"... your life, but better! With edits!"
There is a certain addictive mystery to these videos because the way it was created (shot and edited) is constantly in our faces yet paradoxically unknowable. Our ability to adopt one comfortable position in relationship to the work is completely defeated by the video's constantly shifting frame. Is that acting or are those people really freaking out? Are those people abusing Ryan because he told them to or is it as out-of-control as it appears? Is it OK that they are breaking that thing? Pushing that person around? Do they dress like that in real life? Why were those lines chosen and what was cut? Is that an affected spasmodic outburst of insanity or should we really be concerned? The constant and obtrusive editing makes us wonder whether the narrative is being driven by the chance occurrences that emerge from the happening-like shoot/parties, or whether Ryan has manipulated them effectively enough to serve the ends of a structure he planned out beforehand.
"I'll make two endings one happy and one really sad - where you fall off a building next to a dolphin that really hates you."
Perhaps the most immediately striking thing about these videos is the visual overload - the hard-to-define yet very specific color and patterning seen in the costumes, the makeup, the sets, and the special effects, all driven by a hyperfast, multi-view, decorative editing style (the Times goes on about this if you're interested). But I think there is something else going on that is just as important, which is the use of language. There are several interesting things happening here and I think they go beyond Ryan's experimental personalities, private obsessions and subcultural scene and start to reflect upon much larger themes; how we communicate in our society and how we are constructing our selves in the information age. Things important to kids like me!
"Don't talk in repetition young people..."
First of all, there is a tension between the improvised and scripted lines, between naturalness and artifice. At first we notice the ingenious, off-the-cuff back-and-forth that seems to be completely unscripted, amazing us that that something so specific could be captured on film, barely intelligible, hovering on the edge of the believable. Only after we recover from our shock do we then we notice the group chants and calls. The certain style in the way a number of characters deliver their lines that seems to be gleefully exaggerating the potentialities of the simply written line, making fun of the limitations of scripting through ridiculous diction and off-kilter timing. In fact, a number of different times Ryan or another actor repeated their lines - several "takes" of the same scene - as though Ryan could not decide which version of reality was best and chose to keep them ALL. Conversely, more than once I started to feel uncomfortable when a convincing improv lapsed into the kind of self-conscious, effortful mode of address that would usually be CUT from a reality show or stand-up comedy show in an attempt to construct a character who is always funny, always brilliant (i.e. during the speech that begins, "I have a channel that's called, 'That's so Ramada Omar...'"). It seems that Ryan's friends/actors seem to understand this completely, that they are comfortable with their discomfort, that showing the cracks in the personas they present to the world is not only a sign of deep trust and humility, but cute.
"If one of those girls does something profound and we're not there to catch it on tape because you're lazy..."
As a viewer I sometimes feel that Ryan's editing decisions are a little hard to swallow; my ego says no and pulls back, confused, embarrassed, saying, "he should have cut that..." But if I loosen up a little (it's easy - the hypnotic colors and movement), accept that the editing decisions were intentional and begin to watch the video with my critical guard down then these decisions becomes revelatory; I realize that I too am trying to become someone other than who I am, that my own attempts to become are both a tragic betrayal of myself as one I-Be Space dies, and a natural process of copying, of adopting pieces of the beautiful people I see all around me, of becoming another person. Then I can laugh and move forward in my life.
"Relocate to someplace funky."
By exemplifying artifice, the language is implicitly embodying the explicit themes discussed by the characters; who am I, who do I want to become and how do I construct myself? What if I could change my name? What if I could drop everything, everything about myself, and go start a new life in Brazil? What if I could choose my own parents, and switch them at will? What if I was a sexy girl with a big belly? What if I had red hair, yellow eyes, and green skin?
"We basically practice all day long. It's exhausting. And UNIQUE TO US!"
But there is another tension that keeps me on my toes, which is that, while the video partially functions as an exercise in seeing my own selfish center more clearly and enabling me to deconstruct it (or at least have a laugh...), it also functions as a devotional act of ego worship.
"This is a house of love. I can tell. It smells popular."
The sets/situations seem to exist in large part as a way to encourage the characters to come up with addictively memorable one-liners that, while they may be a meaningful allusion to ineffable aspects of their personality, function primarily as a self-nomination to another 15 minutes of fame*. In fact, all of these characters are are chiefly concerned with themselves, their appearance, their sexuality, their status. The relationships between characters are driven by ego, and have a strange polarity to them. There are plenty of oppositional relationships, many arguments or physical fights where both participants rip each other to shreds with plenty of pouting and whining but without getting truly angry at each other because it is taken for granted that each will naturally act with complete selfish concern. But the supportive relationships are also driven by ego - the characters express extreme love, a near pathological drive to be close, but their motivation seems to be less unselfish love that a need to establish their status in a social network. The compliments they give each other are over-the-top, yet highly-qualified, staring deep into each others eyes and then gone. When your chief concern is constructing an artificial ego for your experimental personality it makes no sense to take time off to be unselfish and there's no time to waste "just being." So where is the "I-Be Area?"
"I am tempo-rary!"
I don't think it would be uncalled-for to say that all this egocentricity and experimentation with personality relates directly the way that people carefully construct their public faces for online social networking sites; in the video there are several direct references to virtual representations of online personality - i.e. avatars in Second Life, people surfing the adoption network videos. I don't think Ryan chose to rename Olivia "Amerisha" for no reason (not that his work is not internationally relevant); he's speaking to a way of life that sprung forth from silicon valley to define the culture of his entire generation.
"No one knows my mom. She's 98% lies."
By this I am not suggesting anything about Ryan as a person and I don't know if he would agree that he has created a socially-critical work. I am merely saying that he has latched onto something subtle about how we humans work in these electronic social-spaces. These virtual "I-Be Areas" are so new that we don't know how they will change the way we relate to one-another, only that these changes will be profound. Perhaps these relationships will be as extreme as the ones seen in this video - intense intense intense nonsense-spouting supersaturated evil girlboy glamour angels shifting between electrically-magnified synchronicity and impetuously cruel dissing, simultaneously reinforcing and nullifying their conceited sense of self.
"Listen, I know what my original wants to look like and I can't believe you tried to reverse-cycle me into that person."
But in the end this video rejects the histrionics of the techno-geeks who go on and on about the liberatory potential of the virtual. No matter how much my personality is defined by my position in society, no matter how I chose to represent myself to other people, no matter who I pretend to be myself, for all intensive purposes I can't stop being me. My life feels like something continuous. I still feel like I am the same me I was when I was a little kid dancing in my adoption video. And, more than in his previous work, in "I-Be Area" I see that Ryan is engaged in the same kind of struggle. He always brings it out of the virtual and back to the face-to-fake interaction, the body in motion, the sound of a voice, the kiss. This is what I think makes his work so touchingly humanistic.
"That is ME! I look like how I feel now!!!"
echo
echo
echo
*You have no idea how long it took me after watching AFFE to pronounce the word "yeah" with one syllable again...
"CUTE DOG!!!"
The affected madness of virtual crowds.
How to create the filters - be less rational about the formula. Thinking over paper is a cirlce-trap. See instead what works. There are catch-spots where it's easy to find dirt to sift thru. (Dirt = people, nicely.)
Again, the chorus effect has been confusing me sweetly for this time. I've decided to append this "false subculture" onto the experimentatal conditions, even if it makes it entertaining and poor to age.
Always with dream melodies I wake up thinking - it's so so beautiful, but it would be embarrassing because everyone already knows that one - it's so good - it's probably something from I don't know the eighties or something and then later I realize that it was an accapella song in nonsense syllables that code directly to my project - in no way a song from the eighties that everyone knows - and I've forgotten it. Frustrated indeed! It might just be the fact that the room is so cold that dissuades me from crawling out of bed. Lazy trash neck!
I'll be fine though - it's all a process of incubation and layering of frustration energy. It doesn't matter if it pays off. I have the image of first of all doing no harm, bunker image, violent images to be avoided by hiding. So it's good. Get vitamins, allow the bad ideas to starve.
Just sparkler-thoughts, no flow. But this is a fine way to be free, to not have a useful task. I wouldn't say "all quiet" but I wouldn't say anything else either.
NO! THIS IS NOT THE REVIEW I WAS TALKING ABOUT!
THIS IS!
---
"I think I just saw a highly advanced 3D text-message of my future self giving me the middle finger..."
New video premering, for me, in, of all places, NYTimes Video. This is just a snippet, but I've been wondering what he's been up to. The original "A Family Finds Entertainment" video introduced to be by B- H- via Henry are for me a model for partying, living vicariously, and channelling my incessant inner voices with accents. That video is found on YouTube right easy.
Anyway, check out "I-Be Area".
"Listen, I know what my original wants to look like and I can't believe you tried to reverse-cycle me into that person."
And here is a video that is not worth watching at all:
In my as-yet unpublished rant on the possibilities of communication that I somehow passed off as my final report in the underground research council that I am supporting I handed out an as-yet unpublished series of images of communication and the feedback from the group was that they looked like images of communication. These images were much more complicated and esoteric (what?) than the images below, but I thought I would start with the basics and show the several types of images of communication that appear in a google images search of the term, just so we can know what images we are taking for our launching-point. I am not going to offer much critical feedback on these images, suffice it to say that one of the main concerns of my practice as an artist and my commentary on this blog is that we need new visual analogies to come to terms with the functioning of 21st c. information society.
First and most common both online and perhaps in people's mind (more research needed here of course) are images of two people with some kinfd of symbol between them indicating the exchange of information. These have much potential for modification.
The second type of image is very similar to the above, but focuses not on the receiver and transmitter, but on the medium of communication.
The third type focuses on the network shape of communication. Like the second type, human figures do not figure large.
Aspects of the fourth type can be seen in some of the examples above, but it is distinct in that several different nets of communication are shown in Venn-diagram like interaction.
Finally, and this should perhaps be called the zeroth type, there are images of individuals as nodes of communication. As this is the internet, these are often images of women with prominent breasts in various states of undress. But seriously, communication is driven by our relationship to the other, so a focus on the individual within the context of communication is one category of these images. It's just that the representation of the other naturally tends towards the type of images seen below in the unbalanced power relationship and anonymous sexualized image space that is the internet. 
As always, click on the images to look close-up. You will be missing out if you don't take a look at the English on that last one. And it is relevant, ladies. It says "Komyunikeeshon." I'm not denyng I'm a freak, but if you think of the weaving of the net and the addiction to filling up as referring to communication in the information age it becomes suspiciously relevant.
I'll try to dig that report out of the muck.
Here's an interesting video. I like three things about it. First of all, I like the way the simple graphical style is used with minimal Foley to enhance the message. Secondly, I like that the logic structure proceeds along an explicitly analogical set of steps, and that this logic structure incorporates repetition. Thirdly, I like how the creator admits that his theory is slightly out-of-line with the theories of higher dimensions accepted by the mainstream, although I would have preferred if the creators could have admitted their own fallibility within the content of the explanation. I understand that this could confuse an already confusing topic, but what good is teaching people something effectively if what you're teaching isn't true? They could have at least given a nod to other theories of higher dimensions. In fact the creators seem to be slighly overly-comfortable with fiction. Which I guess makes them science-fiction writers. That's good I guess. But if you visit their site, there's just no way they get millions of hits per month on a site devoted to these esoteric theories, no matter how flashy it is, even though it's a book that comes complete with songs for download and T-shirts to wear. Which is awesome. And it's always funny when popular scientists have their own theories and try to appeal to the pulic rather than to the academy in a peer-reviewed journal. Like the people are going to rise up and overthrow the old ideas of higher orders of spatial dimensions in favor of the ideas presented here. The people don't rise up for nothing - they wouldn't even rise up for free netflicks videos.
Miiiiiiiiiin-D!!!
Here is a series of articles that's right up my alley not only because of the subject matter, but because of its quietly innovative form. It asks scientists to talk about a time that they changed their mind. The answers are encouraging and surprizing in that these people who try so hard to be rational admit that they are fallible. It's not that this is a new philosophical concept, but the specificity is fascinating. I am pleased not that this disproves rationality as a useful manner of thinking (it doesn't), but that the answers reveal (some of) these people to be very humanistic and caring, as well as insatiably curious. Yay! Discovering the beauty of other people allows me to enjoys life.
There is a lot a lot of content here:World Question Center
strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes they are the same thing, but only if we forget what different used to mean, and we have. In my mind I want to know; what does it mean to be close to another person? Is it an illusion? Is it just a feeling? Is it a possibility? An inevitability? Can it be understood even a little? I don't even know how to approach this problem, how to ask questions about it. That complete confusion is a strength. And a weakness. In that understanding something about something means not understanding something else about it. The productive extreme position of unknowingness re the distance of others is made possible by the weakness of wanting to be alone, which is a strength too. People who are far away in yellow windows exert a strong pressure in the imagination. People whose breath lies on your neck are weak as statues, weak as dream diaries, weak as copy for publication. Weak as a flame that burns at cold room temperature, which is strong in that the whole world is flammable to it. Weak as mirrors are selves who move in perfect reversal in front of you, while strong ideas about self come from those who move least similarly, but these selves are others, and when you move into them you become an other, but you are still yourself. (It's simple kids - try it at home!) You can move into trees and flames and rocks and traffic flow as can a drink of water and vitamin pills move into you and then seem to know your best moves. And you can fade somewhat if you relax, and you can blend the slightest bit at the edges, but not like a person out of the sweet spot of focal distance in a photo. Not like that.
At this point we can ask ourselves, if the new physics of suchness makes more sense when informed by an animistic, pantheistic paganism than a self-centered autocratic omnipotent Jehovaism, then how can we change our analogies? One thing to remember is that each god is omnipotent but sharing in the way that the great god of all the oceans is all-powerful although there are also all-powerful gods of each sea, each inlet, each strange miniature canyon carved into the rock, and this last god is also great (although not the last). Indeed each wave has its own god and these gods move through the sea-god's being for a short rule, and yet the sea god rules himself. And each wave-god crashes against the line of pebble-gods and meets the god of short-lived thin white foam, and the god of undertow pulling legs out to sea, and the god of short-lived intersecting triangles in the sand, and the god of infinite sunsparkles still in each moment, and the god of daylong whiteglowing curlique tracer lines of each sparkle's path, and the god of the place where the sandy-green water turns dark blue (although it is an illusion). And then, though the wave is gone, the god is there still. And as each wave has a god, there is a god of waves and each knows only a tiny domain, yet is the final word in it.
In this way the tree that forks early in its trunk will reach high into the sky through two complimentary paths but even in its most extreme terminals will not produce leaves that cover eachother's access to the sunlight. In this way too, two slender outlying branches of the tree being tossed in the rough prestorm wind can clatter and rub against each other without knowing that they are one in body, that their rhythm is a product of vectors of strenth and flexibility within thousands of repetitions of their own forking selves. And in this way the walk at night reveals the appearance of light and shadow to be only a game for a strange and predetermined dialogue of divination that plays equally through the flat-projected quiver of the winter trees, flickering streetlights and the walker's mind in which the inky depths hold all histories of fear and danger and each particularly laid out glowing shape holds all possibility of hope and love. And conversely light holds fear of overexposure and darkness holds the comfort of invisibilty, and time moves backwards and forwards threading all possibilities through each needle-eye moment to compensate for the starburst of contradictions.
I promise I will dream of humilty but I have a thousand things to learn. I'm trying to gather these short-circuit sparks together to get this bulb burning pure, but I'm not sure how. Remember the rotting soldiers in their poison-filled mudpits and the softies on their satyricon sofas and say "good night, this is more entertaining than tv and less certain than thinking these things out myself." Good night!
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It's 2008 all over again!
