Art & the Machine

Machine anthropomorphism and empathy (that Ikea commercial I was talking about)

To harken back to a theme from earlier in the semester, former Apple designer Scott Summit produces custom 3-D printed limbs with the philosophy that each limb should be unique to the person, return them as close as possible to their original form, and also be beautiful in its own right. His team’s method involves 3d scanning the surviving limb (when there is one) and using a mirror image of that data to formulate the shape of the prosthetic. In the process, the limb is fully customized with tattoos, material choices, formal alterations, among other possible changes, all with the ultimate goal of imbuing an otherwise exclusively utilitarian object with the person’s personality.

class and race factor into our access to privacy.

This is a really interesting concept of using a combination of AI and complex math in order to predict where poachers and illegal loggers are going to attempt to work. The math and science of it is a bit over my head, but it boils down to the computer taking into effect a lot of different variables including current patrol paths to predict areas that would be ideal for poachers. This information is then used to adjust patrol routes, as live patrols are the most widely used to catch poachers this could help a great deal. I absolutely love this application of the technology, computers helping catch poachers and illegal loggers, awesome, but there’s a part of me, the par that’s seen Minority Report, that fears the other possible use for this technology. Right now it seems hard for this iteration of the technology to be abused, but applied to other to other aspects of crime and pushed to preemptive measurements, a definite punishment for a crime not committed vibe is definitely felt for me.

This is about scientists looking to birds in order to better develop drones. They've built a wind tunnel that allows the bird to maintain flight while in a confined area therefore able to be studied. They can regulate the wind, create turbulence, and control the angle of the turbulence. This will allow them to study how the birds shift their wings and control movement under different circumstances. This data will be applied to the flight of drones and will hopefully enable them to work better under more unpredictable wind circumstances. I am again fascinated with this idea of lookign to nature to help solve our technological problems. Again, why reinvent the wheel, or flying device, when nature has perfect functioning examples of this already existing?

Looking deeper into Stelarc’s Ear on Arm project I found out it took him roughly 10 years to find the team of plastic surgeons who would actually are to do the job. Initially I didn’t think this was too weird, as a surgeon who would want to put an ear on a guy’s arm. Stelarc himself commented, “‘The medical community is essentially a very conservative community and medical practice is about curing people and repairing damage,’ he said. ‘It seems trivial and unethical, in the sense of a waste of time and effort, to construct an extra ear on the arm of an artist who is perfectly healthy.’" So yeah, saving lives is more important than throwing an ear of a guy’s arm, but how many elective surgeries are already being performed anyway. In a study done in the USA put out in 2014 by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons 15.6 million cosmetic procedures were performed, up 3% from 2013, which totals to $12.9 Billion dollars spent on plastic surgery. Comparatively the number of Reconstructive, or medically relevant, Procedures was only 5.7 million which puts the cosmetic surgeries just under three times the amount. So really, Stelarc wasn’t fighting with ethical implications of society; these statistics prove there are plenty of plastic surgeons out there willing to perform elective cosmetic surgeries. So he was really not fighting the medical community for reasons of triviality or the unethical. What seems here to be the case is more of a struggle against societal norms. So thinking in this regards, how much different is it to throw a surgical implant under Stelarc’s arm as opposed to under someone’s chest?

“In a more recent example, Western media reduced the frustration of an angry Egyptian youth, and the complexity of Egypt’s internal politics, to the question of whether the removal of Mohammed Morsi constituted a coup or not (Shalaan 2013; Tadros 2013; Trager 2013). Instead of focusing on the reasons behind the on-going uprising, despite the successful removal of Hosni Mubarak and the election a new president in the person of Mohammed Morsi, Western media focused mostly on the lack of democratic understanding of the lay Egyptian man.”

An essay that seems almost patronizing in its airy, commonsensical theorizing of everyday spaces, bodies, and gadgets — its basic proposition is that “material thresholds are the limits that determine the potential affects an object can generate, which in turn define what that object is.” But this attempt to expand affect theory’s scope of study (i.e., to make it object-oriented) turns out to be an unusually careful and well-articulated reconsideration of banal physical processes (unlocking a lock, hearing sound from speakers) that reorients notions of ontological status and offers grounds on which to theorize the everyday through critical-theoretical or phenomenological lenses. It should be noted that Ash, the essayist, defines “technology” with the breadth of an anthropologist: “technical objects,” “inorganically organized objects.”

A synoptic look at the (optimistically still-mutable) trajectory of technological progress (mainly the developed world’s). Infuriated by its accuracy, I have little else to say.