There are some interesting avenues of thought regarding the concept of hypervisibility, some of which are relevant to my final project. Since I will be working on exposing the invisible, it is important to acknowledge the reasons for its invisibility. It is imperative to understand that invisibility is caused by distance in a much wider sense than only in regards to geography. This distance I talk about becomes anything that is not easily accessible, in Mattia’s words, it is ‘something that is already packaged in an existing narrative that prevents us from seeing what is there’. This is hypervisibility, an instance in which one story is spoken so loudly that the other stories become invisible. Initial research into the subject revealed strong links of hypervisibility to racial issues, a possible entry point to developing investigative frameworks that could function just as well in the socio-ecological domain.
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Unfinished worlds: What would happen if the worlds we construct don't present a totalitarian idea of what a world is?
These worlds are speculative places, spaces for research and interpretations.
This week’s lecture and discussion with Rachel Falconer brought some unexpectedly interesting ideas. Unexpected because I am fairly skeptical about the concept of extended reality. This is possibly partly due to my lack of knowledge of the field and its particular interests explored through various creative lenses. My practice was always “analogue” - deeply rooted in embodiment and physical presence, in ‘being here’ - experiencing worlds first hand. But perhaps I was not thinking far enough when thinking about extended realities.
There were two particular artworks Rachel showed during her lecture which made a powerful impact on my perception of this creative technological field. The first of the two was a performative multi-player VR installation SYMBIOSIS by the Dutch experience design collective POLYMORF. The multi-sensory / multi-media nature of the work, its conceptual framework and the way this in fittingly translated into the final experience makes for a wholesome speculative tour-de-force in post-Anthropocentric world-making.
The second work that left its mark was Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s VR piece AQUAPHOBIA which explores the speculative - yet possibly inevitable - transformations of landscapes as a product of climate change. The visually arresting digital reconstruction of Louis Valentino Jr. Park and Pier in Redhook, Brooklyn is created by combining “past and future geological periods” and accompanied by a dystopian narrative recited by a “morphing aquatic entity” following the user as they explore this dark, fascinating, part-inviting, part-hostile world of tomorrow.
Both of these projects have a very specific quality that I was sceptical exists within the current field of extended realities. Symbiosis and Aquaphobia are touching, sensual, visceral, feral - they both extended towards the non-human and imagine possibilities. Both are proud of their speculative uncanniness, even the unease that emerges as their (by-)product.
Perhaps precisely this unease plays an important role in invoking a more acute awareness of the problem in question. Rather than rational knowing, the knowledge becomes felt - knowing by feeling. In fact, Steensen’s Aquaphobia directly uses the fear of water “as an entry point to transform perceptions of our relationship to future water levels and climates”.
As a little side note, I would also like to post this video of Resurrection Lands, a playable virtual experience exploring trans blackness and its specters by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley. I am only including this work marginally as it doesn’t directly concern my practice but I still find it fascinating and very important.
"The body is our general medium for having a world.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Studying works of some of the artists I admire, I always found it fascinating to observe the circular nature of their practice. There are exceptions to the rule, of course, yet my feeling is that more often than not, the fabric with which they weave their stories and artworks stays the same. As an artist in the making, for a very long time, I found it difficult to pick one particular direction. I was worried that making the choice, I am giving up all the other possibilities. It took me another few years to realise that choosing a particular direction doesn’t mean giving up anything. It only means that there is always going to be a common thread between the works, but the artistry would be in distinguishing between them by looking at the same problem through a different lens, shaping it into a different form, twisting it and turning it upside down, re-purposing it and its parts.
And so Maurice Merleau-Ponty found his way back into my practice after years of seemingly being absent. Merleau-Ponty, through the sound art lens of Salome Voegelin, was at the epicentre of my bachelor dissertation exploring possibilities of listening to the inner movements of the body. This deep-sensing practice, made possible through proprioception and sensory modality, would reappear in different form. While the sensing still happens in the body - through the bodily sensations created by emotions - what is being sensed is not physically present but rather exposed as existing in geographically remote locations. I am aware that this concept seems fairly abstract but it is my aim to develop its particulars in the upcoming research project. I will be researching and using data about food waste, exploring the various aspects of the problem and working towards creating an artwork reflecting these findings in such a way that it clearly and concisely outlines it and - most importantly - makes it emotionally impactful - touching.
Any technology whether living or not has lots of parts of it that have histories that are out of our control.
We only think about the intent while we create these technologies but we often forget to consider the the consequences that these might have.
The important questions are:
How can we assemble stories from non-institutionalized data?
How are these data gathered and by whom?
In which context is the data gathered, processed and made visible?
This week’s lecture and discussions brought to light some incredibly engaging concepts that are directly tied to my research interests and are potentially crucial for forming an outline of my second term practice-based research project. Chiefly, these are the philosopher’s A. N. Whitehead’s notion of reality as “any description of the unity [requiring] the many actualities; and any description of the many [requiring] the notion of the unity from which importance and purpose is derived” and the idea of the undesirable consequences of technologies as starting points of creating artworks.
I already mentioned the speculative nature of my practice in one of the previous entries and it is reassuring to see it come up as a recognised conceptual framework when it comes to computational arts. While two weeks prior I mentioned it in connection to a multi-media installation piece I am already working on, this time it sparks inspiration for a completely new speculative work.
There was a particular point Mattia made about an artwork not necessarily having to question the existence of a problem - as it is obvious the problem is there - but rather focusing on how this problem can be experienced in connection to everything else. To elaborate, this means that exploring the problem from a certain perspective and rendering it accessible and legible to the audience is as equally valid as inventing something that does not yet exist. In fact, I believe at this point in history, this approach is much more interesting from both the socio-political and artistic perspective as it engages with the realities that we find ourselves in and gotten used to. It highlights the importance of questioning of what we know and granting agency to make meaningful change.
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A few interesting ideas and conceptual avenues materialised during the group discussion with some of my peers this week. Within the overarching themes of computational art as critical practice and the concept of disobedient technology emerged a curious semantic duality between the hacker and the maker. I found it interesting to think of these two terms critically and unpack the underlying aspect of those two roles. What about this distinction as a food for thought and further discussion.
Makers fits themselves into the power relations of technology.
Hackers don't fit within these relations and seeks to confront them.
I argued that the word ‘confront’ is particularly significant in the potential description of the hacker. My belief is that it is this very quality - being prepared for confrontation due to the nature of (re)making / hacking that takes place - that is the major distinguishing factor between the two. While makers are keeping to their respective comfort zones and conforming to the mainstream, hackers are seeking to intervene - critically (and playfully) - with these mainstream frameworks, operating at the margins.
But perhaps even more fascinating is the way these frameworks are structured and intertwined. At this point some particularly curious questions arise:
What kind of narratives and images are embedded in the technology and in the design of technology?
Who benefits from it being designed that way?
Are there consequences?
How is this choice mattering - becomes material?
I will leave these questions simple pinned here, open to discussion and pondering. A few things are certain even without the need for immediate answers. As an artists / hacker (in the sense of the word I outlined above) we should seek to individuate and unpack the 'hidden' aspects of technology and assert that critical making values the process as much - if not more than - as the final ‘product’. We do not necessarily need to focus on producing something that is better but rather we need to make sure we produce it differently.
This form of making is also a form of learning.
And as we make differently, we are also learning differently.
Critical making is a form of research that produces knowledge.
The case for material semiotics in speculative research-based practice
Computational Arts Research Week 11
Some days ago, I had a conversation with my partner about a particular project I am developing, now in the research stage, both practice-based and theoretical. This work is to materialise as a multi-media installation using movement, sound and computation with a focus on deep ecology and object-oriented ontology.
This performative environment assembles materials and objects to be sonified using DIY electronic devices activated various sensors within the space and worn on the body. During the conversation, I was challenged by questions about the intentions underlying the project and how they are translated to the audience eloquently and effectively. Personally, the themes I am working with and the way I approach them through practicing free improvisation with objects are clear to me and so are the narratives with their implications and consequences. Of course they are, after all, it is a narrative that is built on my personal history, experiences and values. But in what way can I make those legible to others without making definite conclusions? First step would be to address the work for what it really is, a speculative artefact not asserting universal truths but rather poising questions, offering alternatives, looking at the world from a different angle.
Here is where material semiotics (Law, 2019) starts fitting in. Law makes a case of re-establishing the concept of 'the social' to be inclusive not only of humans but also of other materials that together 'pattern' themselves into 'weaves, webs and networks' and he calls for exploration of the 'consequences of their patterning'.
Not only can we observe deep ecological overtones and inclination towards object-oriented ontology but - for the purpose of my inquiry into strategies for developing speculative artworks revolving around those concepts - it is also plausible to utilise Law's approach as the possible framework of thinking of delivering my goals. Through a scrupulous investigation into the particular elements of the work and the way in which - 'such processes of weaving are achieved or fail in practice; where those threads come from; their character, and what they exclude; their productivity or performativity, including the ways in which they shape the elements that make them up; the agendas that they carry; the multiplicity of the different realities that they enact; how they interact, conflict with, or ignore one another; how they colonise or are colonised by other webs; how they produce domination; and how such forms of domination might be resisted' (Law, 2019) - it is possible to design the work in such a way as to deliver its message with clarity and depth which is not universal but which is nevertheless truthful to its intentions.
How do we create an artefact that exists both as an artwork and a computational object?
How do we negotiate the boundaries of such work and the way it manifests?
For our group project Echoes from the Semiospheres [further addressed as ‘Echoes’], we decided to take a multi-media approach to exploring plant intelligence while contemplating on possible implications such speculative work can have on our understanding of worlds | ecologies and relationships that constitute them.
Echoes is then an amalgam of scientific, conceptual and practice-based research into the communication systems of plants manifested as a website incorporating visual references, written research materials, conceptualized procedural composition and its sonification, and documentation of the process. In this way, the final object becomes an environment, a world inhabited by entities that irrespective of their origin are active agents forming | formed by relationships within this world.
While outlining our objectives and possible directions we often encountered the topic of ethics. In our case, the ethics of engaging with plants. We feel it is imperative that we approach our agents with solidarity, as subjects rather than objects, teeming with aliveness. Agency that is not necessarily equivalent to ours, as we are existing across certain differences. Agency that acknowledges solidarity despite those differences and one that comprehends the true meaning of kin. Agency which, one step at a time, retreats from the cancer of anthopocentrism [capital letter omitted for obvious reasons].
During our first conversations about the group project, we are finding common ground and discussing the overlapping concepts that would form the rough outline of its boundaries. Ecologies and networks are at the centre of the debate, the conceptual frameworks that could lead to artefacts manifested as sound artworks.
How can we develop work that would tell a story about emergence of worlds, or perhaps, about being in the world we are co-creating? And do we - as humans, animals, plants and inanimate beings - create those worlds at all or are our relationships the fabric from which they are created?
These conversation have me rethink the very foundations of some of the keywords I like to use when talking about my interests and my practice. One of the question I ask myself is: Where are the boundaries of my ecological thinking?
I am realising that my point of view on the subject has always been strongly based on instincts, feeling into what could potentially be ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ resulting in both binary and biased pattern of evaluation that doesn’t acknowledge the insights across discourses.
Our conversation is heading in the direction of the fungal and plant world, towards the obscured networks and arcane systems of being - communication, inter-connections. Obscured and arcane because we as humans have lost touch, we turned the other way, we became self-obsessed. I wonder what can we find out about the liminal space of human estrangement from nature? How did the cavity of ignorance ripped our worlds apart? How can we rediscover - or better yet discover anew - our world as a home that is shared and where everyone has a right to belong?
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Community & Communal Behaviour (eg. swarm intelligence)
Communication
Networks & Ecosystems
Emergence
Listening Strategies (inward | outward)
The list is not final and there is no prescribed order to it. All the keywords are as equally important, each playing a role in creating a world made up of realities, potentialities and even fantasies. I am taking on the role of the conductor, a patient listener assembling those worlds from fragments of knowledge and experience that I have access to.
During the group research project I am excited to explore new avenues and look at these spheres of interest from perspectives that do not come naturally to me or those that I might have missed. It is interesting to discuss what we have in common and where our interests deviate.
James is interested in storytelling and how we create worlds that are made not of entities but of relationships between them. Worlds as emergent networks of relationships and their embodiment. How do we represent different ways of thinking and be them? How can these be manifested as artefacts?
Maite is trying to challenge photography as an ‘objective’ story-telling medium through shifting her focus to its very materials origin - light. She believes that through working with the raw material the work can tell stories that are different, and perhaps more objective and inclusive.
Pietro adopts the ecological perspective and applies it to the field of sound art. His works are about creating non-linear self-regulating sonic environments challenging traditional compositional techniques and shifting agencies from human to non-human.
Similarly to Pietro, I am interested in sound as one of the mediums through which to explore our relationship with the world and in the creation of environments that have their own agency. I would take this further and say that we, as humans, can also be part of this collaborative presence if we take the deep ecological approach of solidarity with others.
I am grateful that James brought my attention to the idea of worlds not being created by us but by our relationships, something that I find intriguing although I can not yet fully submit to until I let the full extent of this thought sink in. When I talk about us, I mean all those that are part of the world, all those that are having those relationships.
On another occasion, James and I discussed senses and he reminded me of the fact that vision is the only sense that is external to us. Sure enough, this is no groundbreaking news but it is certainly all to easy to forget and I am grateful for the reminder. It also takes me back to my research of interoception which I undertook for my bachelor’s dissertation. It feels reassuring to realise that some interests are so deeply rooted that they keep orbiting back towards me and are being imprinted in my works and research over and over again even if in different form.
Grisha Coleman ‘echo::system’
Just last week I discovered a paper accompanying a multi-media performative installation environment echo::system by the American performance and experiential media artist Grisha Coleman. This multi-layered work is interesting to me as it approaches the space as an eco-system consisting of installation and performance with special focus on audience engagement. Coleman’s world is based on both real and imagined data ‘drawn from the cultural, historical and ecological information of the given habitat’ (Coleman, 2013, p. 205). It is weaved from a colourful variety of fabrics - the body, the technology, the space - and animated by their relationships. The underlying aim is to shift our focus to the world we live in and how we co-exist with it and, perhaps most importantly, to inspire positive action leading to making impact.
It is difficult to evaluate just how big an impression such an experience might have on those who participate and if it does, how it translates into their everyday actions leading to a large-scale impact. For that reason it would be beneficial to learn more about experience design and perhaps collaborate with someone who understands the underlying concepts so that the ideas are communicated clearly and understood as intended.
'I had also shown what changes must occur in the brain to cause states of waking, sleeping, and dreaming; how light, sounds, smells, tastes, heat, and all the other qualities of external objects can imprint various ideas on the brain through the intermediary of the senses; how hunger, thirst, and the other internal passions can also transmit ideas to the brain; what must be taken to be the sensus communis* in which these are received, the memory which preserves them, and the faculty of imagination, which can change them in different ways, form them into new ideas and, by the same means, distribute animal spirits to the muscles and make the members of this body move, with respect both to the objects which present themselves to the senses and to the internal passions, in as many different ways as the parts of our bodies can move without being directed by our will.' Descartes (p. 45-46)
*Sensus Communis: Common Sense
‘a sense held to unite the sensations of all senses in a general sensation or perception’ - Merriam Webster dictionary
Distinguishing between human and machine according to Descartes (p. 46-47):
The first is that they would never be able to use words or other signs by composing them as we do to declare our thoughts to others.
And the second means is that, although such machines might do many things as well or even better than any of us, they would inevitably fail to do some others, by which we would discover that they did not act consciously, but only because their organs were disposed in a certain way.
Descartes thinks in linear terms in terms of input and output.
Body as a deterministic machine.
Animals = Automata
ENTROPY
the consumption of energy needed to get to the final result
the amount of information needed to describe that present state
Considers the concept of time unfolding & rewinding.
The notion of difference without separability.
Linear Automation
INPUT-OUTPUT
one could rewind the linear process
Cellular Automata
COMPLEXITY AS A RECURSIVE ITERATION - FEEDBACK LOOP
epi-phenomena, emergence, and asymmetry
emergence vs. essentialism
in recursion temporality is no longer linear, it is a spiral - the entire process is creating information
each iteration adds more information
information generated becomes a step for more information being generated, then this information becomes a step for more information being generated, and so on...
reduction = destruction | one can't rewind/reduce the cellular process
used to study biological evolution
emergence as a unity which is contingent
it is here where we may start thinking that the difference between the human and machine is an artificial one because we are a product of continuous iterations
from simple to the complex through continuous iterations
us as organised systems based deep down on the very simple rules that begin the process of iterations to which we can not be reduced
the machine as a similar system | to which we can assimilate ourselves
Theo Jansen 'Strandbeests'
binary switches in uneven numbers can already generate a sense of aliveness
the circularity of INPUT & OUTPUT which is multiplied and therefore creates complexity
https://www.strandbeest.com/
Yuk Hui 'The Time of Execution'
'Execution is always teleological because to execute means to carry out something which is already anticipated before the action' [a priori] [...] 'The intuitive and simplest form of execution is linear, driven by the pre-defined structures.'
'The concept of feedback in cybernetics introduced a new temporal structure, one that was no longer based on a linear form but rather was more like that of a spiral. In this schema, the path towards the telos is no longer linear but rather one of a constant self-regulatory process which Siondon himself described as "an active adaptation to a spontaneous finality" (Simondon)'
'The paths towards the telos are not predefined, rather they are heuristics which are more or less like trial and error, like reason coming back to itself in order to know itself.'
Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, thinks we've lost sight of what artificial intelligence really means. His stubborn quest to replicate the human mind.
Above, I am sharing an engaging article on Douglas Hofstadter’s approach to designing software as consciousness. As much as I am fascinated by his work and by the advancements in this field of research, I feel unease that is important for me to voice.
The concept of designing machines to be more human brings out a burning issue from the outset from my point of view. On the very first page of her paper 'Figuring the Human in AI and Robotics' (2007) Lucy Suchman mentions 'cultural imaginaries' which are effectively constructs based on scientific data mingling with assumptions on human-ness. Suchman touches on the duality of these imaginaries that are both infused with the ideas of sameness and difference between human, animal, non-organic matter, technology, etc..
As much as such divisions are useful for creating human-like technology, they become controversial precisely because of having to use human as the ultimate ideal for computation. It is not a fault to get inspired by our own computational abilities, but did we at all consider what we could learn from the perceived 'other' in this equation, or better still, from the relationships that exist between us and the world that we are part of to include everything and everyone? Surely, this is no easy task because choices must be made and there is always the question of who makes those choices, but it is clear that focusing purely on human as a lone example and the model for such technologies is problematic and narrow-minded.
This is not a critique on Suchman, who takes an approach of diversity, if only across the human realm. In fact, her approach and her references to Donna Harraway are opening up a debate which aim to challenge the normative approach to Euro-American focus when it comes to conjuring up an image of human-ness. Exposing and criticising this normative post-colonial white-male centered ideal of human is a vital first move from what has been so strongly normalised and wired into our everyday realities. An attack on this greyscale vision of our human-ness can hopefully lead to asking further questions.
What does human have in common with their world and its inhabitants?
What does solidarity feel like and what kind of entity does it produce?
Could this entity be a more fitting model for creating technologies?
The return of the same leads somewhere else - generative
What are the dimensions of software?
We are always embedded in environments that shape us. We might believe we are losing agency by creating a new environment but in fact, the agency has a potential to grow in such case. Can we embed human agency within software?
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This, then, is the trillion-dollar question: Will the approach undergirding AI today—an approach that borrows little from the mind, that’s grounded instead in big data and big engineering—get us to where we want to go? How do you make a search engine that understands if you don’t know how you understand?
James Somers for The Atlantic
Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-would-teach-machines-to-think/309529/
