3quarks from both sources (LONE FEED)

And Another ‘Thing’ : Sci-Fi Truths and Nature's Errors

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 04:20:00 +0000

In my last 3quarksdaily article I considered the ability of science-fiction – and the impossible objects it contains – to highlight the gap between us and ‘The Thing Itself’ (the fundamental reality underlying all phenomena). In this follow-up I ask whether the way these fictional ‘Things’ determine their continued existence – by copying, cloning or imitation – can teach us about our conception of nature.

Seth Brundle: What's there to take? The disease has just revealed its purpose. We don't have to worry about contagion anymore... I know what the disease wants.

Ronnie: What does the disease want?

Seth Brundle: It wants to... turn me into something else. That's not too terrible is it? Most people would give anything to be turned into something else.

Ronnie: Turned into what?

Seth Brundle: Whaddaya think? A fly. Am I becoming a hundred-and-eighty-five-pound fly? No, I'm becoming something that never existed before. I'm becoming... Brundlefly. Don't you think that's worth a Nobel Prize or two?

The Fly, 1986

In David Cronenberg’s movie The Fly (1986) we watch through slotted fingers as the body of Seth Brundle is horrifically transformed. Piece by piece Seth becomes Brundlefly: a genetic monster, fused together in a teleportation experiment gone awry. In one tele-pod steps Seth, accompanied by an unwelcome house-fly; from the other pod emerges a single Thing born of their two genetic identities. The computer algorithm designed to deconstruct and reconstruct biology as pure matter cannot distinguish between one entity and another. The parable, as Cronenberg draws it, is simple: if all the world is code then ‘all the world’ is all there is.

Science fiction is full of liminal beings. Creatures caught in the phase between animal and human, between alien and Earthly, between the material and the spirit. Flowing directly from the patterns of myth Brundlefly is a modern day Minotaur: a manifestation of our deep yearning to coalesce with natural forces we can’t understand. The searing passions of the bull, its towering stature, are fused in the figure of the Minotaur with those of man. The resultant creature is too fearsome for this world, too Earthly to exist in the other, and so is forced to wander through a labyrinth hovering impossibly between the two. Perhaps Brundlefly’s labyrinth is the computer algorithm winding its path through his genetic code. As a liminal being, Brundlefly is capable of understanding both worlds from a sacred position, between realities. His goal is reached, but at a cost too great for an Earthly being to understand. Seth the scientist sacrifices himself and there is no Ariadne’s thread to lead him back.

In her book on monsters, aliens and Others Elaine L. Graham reminds us of the thresholds these ‘Things’ linger on:

“[H]uman imagination, by giving birth to fantastic, monstrous and alien figures, has… always eschewed the fiction of fixed species. Hybrids and monsters are the vehicles through which it is possible to understand the fabricated character of all things, by virtue of the boundaries they cross and the limits they unsettle.”

Elaine L. Graham, Representations of the Post/Human

Hybrids such as the Minotaur or Brundlefly are meeting points for disparate categories of representation. They symbolise the tragic limits of human perception. Unable to grasp the world in and of Itself (nature) we colonise it with ever more fabricated representations and imitations (culture) which only result in distancing us yet further from The Thing Itself. One such category of fabrication, a favourite in science fiction, is ‘code’. Brundlefly is a Thing caught on the threshold between, what in geek-terminology we might call, wetware and software. Cronenberg’s parable plays into the hands of every techno-fearing luddite: a monster born from our desire to reduce nature to science; to simplify lumpy, oozing, unpredictable flesh in the patterns of an efficient genetic code.

We are all the tragic Brundefly because whilst we see beauty and endless creative potential in the natural world around us, we find it impossible to quantify those same categories in the reductive models we have devised to describe them. To describe nature, whether genetic codes unwinding or bees busying around their nest, we gasp at its “creativity”, ascribing its endless variation a human-like attention to detail. But as Richard Dawkins alludes to below, the most creative force in nature is the absolute opposite of perfection: it is in fact error. The world that science has modelled for us is a world riddled with mistakes, failures and run away coding errors. In order to ‘create’ nature must, as Alexander Pope said of the human, err:

“Think about the two qualities that a virus, or any sort of parasitic replicator, demands of a friendly medium, the two qualities that make cellular machinery so friendly towards parasitic DNA, and that make computers so friendly towards computer viruses. These qualities are, firstly, a readiness to replicate information accurately, perhaps with some mistakes that are subsequently reproduced accurately; and, secondly, a readiness to obey instructions encoded in the information so replicated.”

Richard Dawkins, Viruses of the Mind

It is beneficial for life that errors exist and are propagated by biological systems. Too many copying errors and all biological processes would be cancerous, mutating towards oblivion. Too much error management (redundancy) and biological change, and thus evolution, could never occur.

Simply put, exchange within and between natural systems has no value unless change, and thus error, is possible within the system. What science fiction allows us to do is peek into a world where nature’s love for error is switched off, or allowed to run rampant. What would be the consequence of a truly ‘perfect’ natural process, devoid of error? In John Carpenter’s The Thing we see the result of such a process: a nature perfect by our standards, but terrible in its consequences.

Blair: You see, what we're talking about here, is an organism that imitates other life forms, and it imitates them perfectly. When this thing attacked our dogs, it tried to digest them, absorb them, and in the process shape its own cells to imitate them. This, for instance...That's not dog, it's imitation. We got to it before it had time to finish.

Norris: Finish what?

Blair: Finish imitating these dogs.

The Thing, 1982

John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) is a claustrophobic sci-fi masterpiece, containing all the hallmarks of a great horror film. As in The Fly, the film depicts a sinister turn for the body, where the chaos of the replicating, cancerous cell is expanded to the human scale and beyond. In The Thing we watch as an alien force terrorises an isolated Antarctic outpost. The creature exhibits the awesome ability to imitate its host, devouring any creature (or human) it comes across before giving birth to an exact copy in a burst of blood and protoplasm. The Thing copies cell by cell and its process is so perfect - at every level of replication - that the resultant simulacrum speaks, acts and even thinks like the original. The Thing is so relentless, its copies so perfect, that the outpost's Doctor is sent mad at the implications:

Blair: If a cell gets out it could imitate everything on the face of the earth... and it's not gonna stop!!!

In The Thing it is we, the human race, who are trapped between realities. A twist in the truth that highlights our own liminal nature. If, as Dawkins suggests, evolution is about the imperfect copy, then, like the tragic Brundlefly, or the towering figure of the Minotaur, the characters in The Thing are torn between two equally horrifying worlds. In one, the alien Thing aims for perfection, cloning its hosts cell by cell until, like The Ship of Argo, an entirely new, but identical world remains. In the other, the beauty of nature, in all its intricacy, is the result of a billion years of ugly mutation.

Which process is closest to the truth? Which result is more hideous? I have not the authority to say. In science fiction every improbable event is balanced by the existence of an equally improbable reality. The Thing Itself, the world beneath phenomenon, and the Things that inhabit it, have always been impossible to comprehend. Where science fiction takes us, kicking and screaming, is right back to the real world, our knuckles a little whiter from the journey.

by Daniel Rourke

If you enjoyed this essay, you may also like:

'The Thing Itself' : A Sci-fi Archaeology

Ranciere's Ignoramus

A Diatribe from the Remains of Dr. Fred McCabe

Inside Code: A Conversation...

Communicating the Body \ Interpreting the Code

Speaking About Ants, Superman and Centaurs

'The Thing Itself' : A Sci-Fi Archaeology

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 04:05:00 +0000

Mid-way through H.G.Wells’ The Time Machine, the protagonist stumbles into a sprawling abandoned museum. Sweeping the dust off ancient relics he ponders his machine's ability to hasten their decay. It is at this point that The Time Traveller has an astounding revelation. The museum is filled with artefacts not from his past, but from his own future: The Time Traveller is surrounded by relics whose potential to speak slipped away with the civilisation that created them.

Having bypassed the normal laws of causality The Time Traveller is doomed to inhabit strands of history plucked from time's grander web. Unable to grasp a people’s history – the conditions that determine them – one will always misunderstand them.

Archaeology derives from the Greek word arche, which literally means the moment of arising. Aristotle foregrounded the meaning of arche as the element or principle of a Thing, which although indemonstrable and intangible in Itself, provides the conditions of the possibility of that Thing. In a sense, archaeology is as much about the present instant, as it is about the fragmentary past. We work on what remains through the artefacts that make it into our museums, our senses and even our language. But to re-energise those artefacts, to bring them back to life, the tools we have access to do much of the speaking.

Like the unseen civilisations of H.G.Wells’ museum, these Things in Themselves lurk beyond the veil of our perceptions. It is the world in and of Itself; the Thing as it exists distinct from perceptions, from emotions, sensations, from all phenomenon, that sets the conditions of the world available to those senses. Perceiving the world, sweeping dust away from the objects around us, is a constant act of archaeology.

Kant called this veiled reality the noumenon, a label he interchanged with The-Thing-Itself (Ding an Sich). That which truly underlies what one may only infer through the senses. For Kant, and many philosophers that followed, The Thing Itself is impossible to grasp directly. The senses we use to search the world also wrap that world in a cloudy haze of perceptions, misconceptions and untrustworthy phenomena.

In another science fiction classic, Polish writer Stanislaw Lem considered the problem of The Thing Itself as one of communication. His Master’s Voice (HMV), written at the height of The Cold War, tells the story of a team of scientists and their attempts to decipher an ancient, alien message transmitted on the neutrino static streaming from a distant star. The protagonist of this tale, one Peter Hogarth, recounts the failed attempts at translation with a knowing, deeply considered cynicism. To Peter, and to Stanislaw Lem himself, true contact with an alien intelligence is an absolute impossibility:

“In the course of my work... I began to suspect that the ‘letter from the stars’ was, for us who attempted to decipher it, a kind of psychological association test, a particularly complex Rorschach test. For as a subject, believing he sees in the coloured blotches angels or birds of ill omen, in reality fills in the vagueness of the thing shown with what is ‘on his mind’, so did we attempt, behind the veil of incomprehensible signs, to discern the presence of what lay, first and foremost, within ourselves.”

Stanislaw Lem, His Master's Voice

In HMV and Lem’s better known novel, Solaris, the conviction that an absolute true reality exists under the dust of perception leads humanity down ever more winding labyrinths of its own psyche. For Stanislaw Lem the human mind exists in a perpetual state of archaeology, turning away from Itself in search of truth, but time and again finding Itself confronted as the very Thing that underlies the reality it is trying to decipher.

To transcend phenomena, to clear away the dust, one must, according to Kant, think. Thus his Thing Itself, derives from the Greek for 'thought-of' (nooúmenon) and further implies the concept of the mind (nous). Kant’s Thing Itself is accessed through pure thought. A clear enough mind, devoid of the bodily shackles of pain, pleasure or emotion, might see without seeing, sweeping away the perceptual cobwebs by guile alone. What Plato referred to as the only immortal part of the human soul, reason, becomes through Kant the dominant principle by which The Thing Itself may be reached.

In the short space I have allotted myself here, I have not the time, or the guile, to fully analyse the Kantian noumenon. Needles to say, countless thinkers, from Nietzsche to Wittgenstein, Hegel to Agamben, have grappled with the suppositions and presuppositions made to cohere and then crumble by Kant’s addiction to reason. What interests me about science fiction, and most readily about the works of Wells and Lem, is the attempt made to search for 'The Thing Itself' beyond the mind; beyond the human altogether.

Science fiction allows the creation of an imaginary set of conditions by which the human being may break their most burdonsome shackle: their own mind. Human timescales, bodies, forms of thinking and perception: each of these must be circumvented if one is ever able to grasp The Thing Itself. Kant’s principle of noumenon embodies a discourse on the limits of perception that has remained relevant to philosophy for millenia. The paradox of the archaeology – the arising – of an underlying reality is the defining principle of a thousand sci-fi tales.

For Stanislaw Lem our limitations become obvious once we are confronted with the existence of an intelligence which is not human. Lem’s novels seek to connect us with the absolute ‘other’: that most alien of Things, ourselves. Reality, for Lem at least, is composed in an indecipherable language. Humanity lives in an eternal stasis, unable to circum-navigate the new realities it constantly 'discovers' for itself. And in the end we find ourselves limited by the brains that think us, unable to distinguish the twinkle-twinkle from the little star:

“There exist, speaking in the most general way, two kinds of language known to us. There are ordinary languages, which man makes use of – and the languages not made by man. In such language organisms speak to organisms. I have in mind the so called genetic code. This code is not a variety of natural language, because it not only contains information about the structure of the organism, but also is able, by itself, to transform that information into the very organism. The code, then, is acultural...

Now to go straight to the heart of the matter, we begin to suspect that an ‘acultural language’ is something more or less like Kant’s ‘Thing-in-itself’. One can fully grasp neither the code nor the thing.”

Stanislaw Lem, His Master's Voice

A Diatribe from the Remains of Dr. Fred McCabe

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 04:25:00 +0000

About a month ago in handling the remains of one Dr. Fred McCabe I found rich notes of contemplation on the subject of information theory. It appears that Fred could have written an entire book on the intricacies of hidden data, encoded messages and deceptive methods of transmission. Instead his notes exist in the form of a cryptic assemblage of definitions and examples, arranged into what Dr. McCabe himself labelled a series of ‘moments’.

I offer these moments alongside some of the ten thousand images Dr. McCabe amassed in a separate, but intimately linked, archive. The preface to this abridged compendium is little capable of preparing one for the disarray of material, but by introducing this text with Fred's own words it is my hope that a sense of the larger project will take root in the reader’s fertile imagination.

The Moment of the Message: A Diatribe

by Dr. Fred McCabe

More than ten thousand books on mathematics and a thousand books on philosophy exist for every one upon information. This is surprising. It must mean something.

I want to give you a message. But first. I have to decide how to deliver the message.

This is that moment.

I can write it down, or perhaps memorise it – reciting it in my head like a mantra, a prayer chanted in the Palace gardens. And later, speaking in your ear, I will repeat it to you. That is, if you want to hear it.

I could send it to you, by post, or telegram. After writing it down I will transmit it to you. Broadcasting on your frequency in the hope that you will be tuned in at the right moment. Speaking your language. Encoded and encrypted, only you will understand it.

I have a message for you and I want you to receive it. But first. I have to decide what the message is.

This is that moment:

This is the moment of the message

From the earliest days of information theory it has been appreciated that information per se is not a good measure of message value. The value of a message appears to reside not in its information (its absolutely unpredictable parts) but rather in what might be called its redundancy—parts predictable only with difficulty, things the receiver could in principle have figured out without being told, but only at considerable cost in money, time, or computation. In other words, the value of a message is the amount of work plausibly done by its originator, which its receiver is saved from having to repeat.

This is the moment my water arrived at room temperature

The term enthalpy comes from the Classical Greek prefix en-, meaning "to put into", and the verb thalpein, meaning "to heat".

For a simple system, with a constant number of particles, the difference in enthalpy is the maximum amount of thermal energy derivable from a thermodynamic process in which the pressure is held constant.

This is the moment the wafer became the body of Christ

The Roman Catholic Church got itself into a bit of a mess. Positing God as the victim of the sacrifice introduced a threshold of undecidability between the human and the divine. The simultaneous presence of two natures, which also occurs in transubstantiation, when the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, threatens to collapse the divine into the human; the sacred into the profane. The question of whether Christ really is man and God, of whether the wafer really is bread and body, falters between metaphysics and human politics. The Pope, for all his failings, has to decide the undecidable.

This is the moment black lost the game

A ko fight is a tactical and strategic phase that can arise in the game of go.

Some kos offer very little gain for either player. Others control the fate of large portions of the board, sometimes even the whole board, and the outcome of those kos can determine the winner of the game. For this reason, finding and using ko threats well is a very important skill.

This is the moment Robinson Crusoe becomes the first, English language novel

According to Abel Chevalley, a novel is: "a fiction in prose of a certain extent”, defining that "extent" at over 50,000 words. Some critics distinguish the novel from the romance (which has fantastic elements), the allegory (in which characters and events have political, religious or other meanings), and the picaresque (which has a loosely connected sequence of episodes). Some critics have argued that Robinson Crusoe contains elements of all three of these other forms.

This is the moment Sarah Conner takes control

A paper clip is usually a thin wire in a looped shape that takes advantage of the elasticity and strength of the materials of its construction to compress and therefore hold together two or more pieces of paper by means of torsion and friction. Some other kinds of paper clip use a two-piece clamping system.

In fiction, a paper clip often takes the place of a key as means of breaking and entering, or, in Sarah Conner’s case, as means of escape.

This is the moment they found the missing piece of DNA

In northern Spain 49,000 years ago, 11 Neanderthals were murdered. Their tooth enamel shows that each of them had gone through several periods of severe starvation, a condition their assailants probably shared. Cut marks on the bones indicate the people were butchered with stone tools. About 700 feet inside the cave, a research team excavated 1,700 bones from that cannibalistic feast. Much of what is known about Neanderthal genetics comes from those 11 individuals.

This is the moment Bill Clinton lied (to himself)

A microexpression is a brief, involuntary facial expression shown on the face according to emotions experienced. They usually occur in high-stake situations, where people have something to lose or gain. Unlike regular facial expressions, it is difficult to fake microexpressions. Microexpressions express the seven universal emotions: disgust, anger, fear, sadness, happiness, surprise, and contempt. They can occur as fast as 1/25 of a second.

This is the moment I strained my iris

Idiopathic is an adjective used primarily in medicine meaning arising spontaneously or from an obscure or unknown cause. From Greek idios (one's own) and pathos (suffering), it means approximately "a disease of its own kind."

This is the moment everything changed

In ordinary conversation, everything usually refers only to the totality of things relevant to the subject matter. When there is no expressed limitation, everything may refer to the universe or the world.

Every object and entity is a part of everything, including all physical bodies and in some cases all abstract objects. Everything is generally defined as the opposite of nothing, although an alternative view considers "nothing" a part of everything.

This is the moment of another message

In information theory the value of a message is calculated by the cost it would take to repeat or replace the work the message has done.

One might argue that a message’s usefulness is a better measure of value than its replacement cost. Usefulness is an anthropocentric concept that information theorists find difficult to conceptualise.

Inside Code: A Conversation with Dr. Lane DeNicola and Seph Rodney

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 04:25:00 +0000

posted by Daniel Rourke

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to take part in a panel discussion on London based, arts radio station, Resonance FM. It was for The Thread, a lively show that aims to use speech and discussion as a tool for research, opening up new and unexpected angles through the unravelling of conversation.

The Thread's host, London Consortium researcher Seph Rodney, and I were lucky enough to share the discussion with Dr. Lane DeNicola, a lecturer and researcher in Digital Anthropology from University College London. We talked about encoding and decoding, about the politics of ownership and the implications for information technologies. We talked about inscriptions in stone, and the links we saw between the open-source software movement and genome sequencing.

Here is an edited transcript of the show, but I encourage you to visit The Thread's website, where you will shortly find a full audio recording of the conversation. The website also contains information about upcoming shows, as well as a rich archive of past conversations.

Inside Code: Encoding and decoding appear in contemporary context as a fundamental feature of technology, in our use of language and in our social interactions, from html to language coding and literary symbolism. How, and through what means, do people encode and decode?

This transcript is shared under a Creative Commons License

Seph Rodney: I wanted to start off the conversation by asking both my guests how it is that we get the kind of literacy that we have to decode writing. It seems to me that it’s everywhere, that we take it for granted. It seems that there’s a kind of decoding that happens in reading, isn’t there?

Lane DeNicola: Yes. I would say that one of the more interesting aspects of that are the material consequences. Whereas literacy before was largely a matter of human knowledge, understanding of a language, all the actual practices involved was a surface to mark on and an instrument to do the marking, whereas today, a great deal of the cultural content that is in circulation commonly involves technologies that are considerably more complex than a simple writing instrument. Things that individuals don’t really comprehend in the same way.

Seph: What are the technologies that are more complex? What’s coming to my mind is computer code.

Lane: Exactly. Apple’s Garage Band might be one example, these tools that many of us encounter as final products on YouTube. One of the things on the new program at UCL we have tried to give a broad exposure to is exactly how much communicating people are doing through these new forms, and how they take the place in some instances of more traditional modes of communication.

Seph: You’re calling it communication, and one of the things that occurred to me after talking to Daniel, and exchanging a few emails, was that he calls writing, at least, a system of exchange. I was thinking, wouldn’t that in other contexts be called communication, and maybe ten years ago we would have called it transmission? But why is it exchange for you?

Daniel Rourke: I just have a problem with the notion of communication because of this idea of passing on something which is mutual. I think to use the word exchange for me takes it down a notch almost, that I am passing something on, but I am not necessarily passing on what I intend to pass on. To take it back to the idea of a writing system, the history of writing wasn’t necessarily marks on a page. The technologies that emerged from say Babylonia of a little cone of clay that had markings on the outside, they said just as much about the body and about symbolic notions as they did about what it was the marks were meaning to say. So that’s why I use exchange I think. It opens up the meaning a bit.

Seph: Yeah. It doesn’t presume that there is a person transmitting and a person that’s receiving, necessarily? And it also says something about, what I thought was really fascinating, that there is so much more in the object than just the markings on a page. About how the materials tell us something about that particular age, that particular moment in history.

Lane: Yeah. Even in a contemporary context it may have been the case that the early days of the web were all about hypertext, but the great deal of what you call ‘exchange’ that is happening today, how are you going to qualify a group of people playing World of Warcraft simultaneously in this shared virtual space – calling that communication is a little bit limiting. In fact it is experienced much more as a joint space, or an exchange of things, more than simple information. It can be thought of as an exchange of experience, or of virtual artefacts for example.

Seph: That can happen certainly in simulated game play, but it also happens in the decoding of texts. Objects that come to us from antiquity. There is all this material to be decoded that’s wrapped up in the artefacts. It is also, how much we decode and what we decode has something to do with our moment in time.

Daniel: I think it might be worth picking an example out of the air, when we are talking about this.

Seph: OK

Daniel: I’ve become fascinated by the archive of Henry Folger, he was a collector who became obsessed with collecting everything about Shakespeare he could get his hands on. This was in the 1920s and 30s I think. At the time there was a lot of need for every library around the world to have the object, whereas today we can digitise it and distribute it, back then if you didn’t have access to the thing itself, then you didn’t have the thing at all. Henry Folger became known for collecting the same Folio, tens and tens of times. In fact he became a laughing stock because he had tens and tens of the same ‘Last Folio’ of Shakespeare. People of course asked him, why did he need to have these things? Surely it was better to distribute them, but actually after his death, having all of these Folios in the same place, when people came to study them they found that they gained more information by comparing the Folios that were apparently the same. Comparing the marks that differed across Folios; one printing press had made an error here; how this piece of paper had been re-used, and therefore turned over, to print on the other side. And by decoding across the many Folios that Folger had collected they managed to piece together information about Shakespeare’s works that you could never have gained if all the Folios had been in 40 research libraries around the world. They had to be together, they had to be next to each other.

Seph: And the fact that there were differences, even though ostensibly there was just repetition, there were differences amongst the repetitions? It brings to mind immediately the Rosetta Stone, an ancient traffic sign that says the same thing in one language and the same thing in another language. A repetition, but clearly a key difference.

Daniel: The thing about the Rosetta Stone is that there was already knowledge of one system, and then they could transfer it, but I suppose it becomes interesting, especially in things like digital anthropology, where similar comparisons need to be made. You sent around this link about an old satellite system that they had managed to get more information from, by comparing and contrasting data, than it was originally intended for?

Lane: Exactly. There’s almost a sub-genre of information technology today that I think you could call information archaeology. We’ve had several decades with computers and rapid changes in the kind of technology involved, and as a result we are losing the ability to access nearly as much data as we are collecting in some fields. The idea of people being able to retain older media, in the case you mentioned, there was only one two-inch tape drive left in the world that was capable of reading the media involved. So the project had garnered some kind of innovation research funding and they had done a proof of concept just to show that yes, we can use this one device successfully to retrieve the data from, what I believe was a 1960’s Nimbus Satellite. It has strange consequences in fields outside of paleography.

Seph: This obsolescence of objects is strange because it seems like, if the object is the height of technology at the moment, when it becomes obsolete the chances of us being able to decode what was encoded using that technology seemingly nosedive. But paper, stone, these most simple materials – it seems like those things we can continue to decode for ages.

Lane: There are questions here that are quite political in nature, but there are also questions that historians have about how something is going to work, when this proportion of our exchange, our communication and mutual experience, is happening in these forms that require opaque technologies in order to decode them.

Seph: When you say opaque, you mean?

Lane: Something that the average person couldn’t cobble together a simple instance of. Most digital technology, for example. Although there are counter-trends, like the open source software movement.

Seph: Where you create a platform, essentially, that allows anyone who uses it to add to it.

Lane: Exactly. They’ve kind of formalised it at this point. In the early days of open source it was very much about sustaining open exchange of things like source code. They realised fairly quickly that they needed something a little bit stronger, and that was where organisations like Creative Commons came into play. This is an organisation that provides a specific set of licences that legally preserve the right of users of a piece of code to re-mix it, re-modify and re-distribute it, as they wish. Some people refer to it semi-jokingly as a ‘copy-left’, whether it’s a piece of source code, or a piece or data like music and so on, essentially making it available for public re-mixing, whilst ensuring that attribution of the original author is ensured. It’s all built on this paradigm that exchange needs to happen and needs to be retained as a right for everyone.

Seph: Right. In essence exchange needs to be broadened out, so that the technology can actually stay viable.

Lane: Yes. Exactly.

Seph: I guess to suggest that for technologies to continue, to not become so obsolete that there is only one piece of equipment in the world that can decode, they need to have a lot of participants.

Daniel: And with open-source, the hierarchy also gets taken out to a degree. You don’t have the guy on the pulpit who can read the Bible and the people down in the church who are listening. With open-source it’s the people down in the church, basically, who control the code. As much as it lives, it evolves and is successfully passed on, rather than being decided by some authority. I don’t mean to build a figure-head here, but a lot of code is owned by corporations...

Lane: We won’t name any names.

Daniel: No.

Seph: Would we get in trouble for that? Of course this is the thing that has gotten Microsoft in a bit of trouble, right, with the EU? They made moves, allegedly, with their software that locks out certain people and locks in certain add-ons and software that must be used with Windows. It seems to be an effort at control, right? I’m not sure how this connects to literacy, but if you are controlling or trying to control how much your information disseminates you are making the opposite move from what we have been talking about.

Daniel: I think there is a comparison to be made. I’m thinking in terms of the difference between the French language and the English language. Every year the French authorities come together to decide what new words will be accepted into the French language, whereas English has always been allowed to bloom and blossom. Of course there’s benefits to both of those, like Microsoft controlling its source code means that when people buy a PC it’s going to work, because all the software or hardware has been designed by the same company. Anyone who has had to go into a lecture theatre and wait 20 minutes whilst the person at the front figures out how things plug in and why it’s not working. That’s one of the problems with open-source. So there’s benefits to both: to open-source because we can all partake in the code, but we have to forego some kind of standardisation.

Seph: It’s interesting that in writing, and I don’t know if this is true further afield from writing like computer code, that there’s this impetus to limit who has a certain kind of literacy or who has the power to decode and encode. It seems for writing that there doesn’t seem to be those kinds of limitations?

Lane: We haven’t brought up the term encryption; there are certainly situations where an individual wants to preserve a text, but only maintain a limited kind of access.

Seph: One of the complaints people make about ‘high-theory’, especially in literary studies, is that the language is so coded that the average person, if there is such a thing, has a hard time making heads or tails of it. There a gate is being set up where you say, well you have to know this much to come through.

Daniel: I think maybe looking at the system involved is important. With theory, do you want to argue that it’s a closed system? That universities foreground their own existence by perpetrating this coded language that we all exchange with each other, where we get funding opportunities and hold conferences.

Seph: I’m not sure I would go as far as to say it’s closed, it’s restricted.

Daniel: But it does open out at certain points. I do think it’s important for people in academia to see their work in its practical means, but whether that has anything to do with the authority of the page or the authority of speech, I am not sure.

Lane: This is making me recall some of the anthropological work that I have read on magical writing. Michael Taussig, for example, authored a book on the magic of the state. There is a whole genre on writing, writing practice and its association, in a number of cultures for millennia, with magic and magical power. It’s commonly acknowledged enough that it’s almost a joke that there’s a similar paradigm in the minds of a lot of programmers. That is, they have an esoteric, a kind of arcane knowledge, and that the literacy involved is sometimes associated with a specific language, but just as often with abstract programming principles. The exclusivity of that kind of writing is something that can bind them as a community. I have seen that many times first hand, but then there have been revealing things written on that too, mirroring tiny Melanesian communities that practice this kind of magical writing.

Seph: What does magical writing look like?

Lane: The term refers to a number of different phenomenon. There’s a colleague of mine in the states that wrote about a very small community that kept track of its dead by writing their names in a book. There were repercussions to not having a particular ancestor’s name written in the book, it had consequences that were woven into the culture. There was a specific person who was allotted the responsibility of writing the names in the book. You don’t even need to look that far afield. European traditions exist, for example, where spell casting abilities get traced in one form or another to the inscription of sigils.

Seph: Sigils?

Lane: Iconographic runes for example, proto-lettering. But it’s the whole process of representation that people see as a magical human capacity. This idea of transforming thought into a material form.

Seph: And that dovetails with your research Daniel?

Daniel: I’d like to think so. I’m thinking of Walter Benjamin and his short essay on Mimesis. He tries to go back and pick apart what reading was. That before we were reading letters we were reading the world, in a sense. When you sacrificed an animal you would ‘read’ the entrails and you could say whether it was going to be a good season. That’s the kind of magic capacity, to see patterns in the world, that at that point we would have thought had been coded by God or nature for us to find and pick apart. It’s only a small leap from that to saying, nature has given us the entrails to read, well what if I make this mark and I say this mark represents the rain or something. Then you’ve got the step towards the rune or the hieroglyph.

Seph: It’s a huge step that we make when we do that, when we take a mark and say this represents the animal, what do you think that allows us to do?

Daniel: What it forces us to do is to separate the world from ourselves, or ourselves from the world, to some extent. Perhaps when reading the entrails we don’t distinguish as much as we do when we read a mark on a page what meaning is and what world is, seeing them inherent in the same moment. To write something on a page and say it represents love or my name, suddenly our symbolic notions are pushed one step further, we are distinguishing ourselves from nature, from the world around us, from the language that we speak.

Seph: It sounds like the bad part of that is that we become more abstracted, that we begin the process of abstracting ourselves from ourselves. Saying, I can be represented by this stick figure, or this name in a ledger somewhere, or even represented by a statistic. But there’s got to be a good part as well.

Lane: In the field that I come from they often refer to writing as the original technology, and discuss Western civilisation as predicated in large part on writing and the written word. There’s a whole, in part false, but compelling dichotomy between cultures that privilege writing in some form and cultures that are primarily verbal, where stories are passed down verbally from one generation to the next. There are these clear advantages, depending on your stance. The ability to have texts preserved in a way that limits the latitude of the re-interpretations over time has very important consequences. Like you say, that disconnection that is happening, so that a given sequence of thoughts of articulations are taken away from their author, and persist in time and are looked at and forced into being interpreted in a new kind of way. That is the trade-off.

Seph: So encoding things and reading that code allows us to gain distance from things. It allows us to move away from them symbolically, and move away from them in time, and still in some ways preserve them. Daniel, in one of our emails to each other you had raised this question as to whether at any level of reality coding/decoding stopped working as a paradigm. Do you think there is a point where decoding/encoding doesn’t work anymore?

Daniel: To ask that question I have to contemporise myself, I have to locate myself in the present day. We’ve been talking about this separation, where the symbol starts to determine how we look at the world, the main paradigm of today perhaps would be the computer, or science, both of which have become very much combined in the science of genetics. In the news recently was the story of the entrepreneurial scientist Craig Venter, who announced to the world that they had created synthetic life from code on a computer. We could have spent the entire hour talking about the moral implications of this, and the political implications of him presenting this knowledge in the way he did, but underlying it is the very simple notion that life is able to be decoded. That to its very fundamental constituents we can pick it apart. Now, I’m not going state my opinion – whether I am a materialist, do I see something more ‘important’ in the world – I don’t know. But there are a lot of implications for free-will, especially people of religious inclination have been up in arms about this announcement. Embedded with it is the idea, from Craig Venter, that the world could be completely picked apart to its constituents, that we could rebuild things from the ground up.

Seph: The way we want to. Absolutely. Not talking about the moral implications, but it seems that one of the things we are risking in synthesising things, life, in this very commercialised, dead on the table sort of way, is we are risking despair.

Daniel: They tried to inject some kind of symbolic value back into this by encoding some words from James Joyce within the DNA of the organism.

Seph: Giving it a literary credibility?

Daniel: Yeah. I don’t know if that’s supposed to show that all scientists have got a literary heart deep within them.

Seph: A humanist side.

Daniel: A headline grabber.

Lane: I read an article on a geneticist in the states who procured some relatively cheap gene sequencing equipment off eBay.

Seph: Really? That’s an amazing sentence. Relatively inexpensive and off eBay!

Lane: Still in the thousands of US dollars, but comparatively pretty cheap. And, he had done this because he had previously been working for, I think, a large pharmaceutical company and he had access to the most advanced equipment, but as a result of him leaving the company he didn’t have access to it anymore and he was interested in a project of his own devising. He has a daughter who has a particular genetic malady and he wanted to sequence her genome with the idea that it could provide basic information for later therapy, potentially. So he, in effect, was initiated this do-it-yourself DNA community – if you could call it a community at this point. But in a sense, it’s like open-sourcing gene sequencing. It really muddles that whole question of, on the one hand, a trepidation built into the whole process of manipulating our own genes, but that’s a separate layer from the question of the commercialisation of the process. And the copyrighting of the ‘human text’, so the speak. I think primarily you’re talking about the pharmaceuticals industry as the leading industrial sector that has an interest in patenting specific sequences from a genome, for things like targeted drugs. An emerging and exploded new direction for the pharmaceuticals industry. Essentially, you’re talking about the copyrighting of a text.

Daniel: And the ability perhaps to put that online, to upload it to your website and let everybody see it.

Seph: To do what you will with it. The question that comes to my mind is well, then if you do create a kind of, let’s call it a ‘community’, like that, is it the kind of community – one of these I am more comfortable with – that’s like Wikipedia or is it a community like the comments page on YouTube. Do you know what I mean?

Lane: That you get the dregs along with it?

Seph: Yeah. Or an informed, scholarly position.

Daniel: I think in the long run it’s probably much more important that this information is shared around the right parties, but that’s where the question of morals comes up again. We are worried now about terrorists getting hold of radioactive material, and making a ‘dirty bomb’. It’s possible that if you can buy a genetic sequencing kit of eBay that in the next ten to twenty years people will be able to organise and design bacteria or viruses that could specifically attack certain ethnicities. These are some of the possibilities that the decoding of the genome allows us to do in the future.

Seph: Who gets access to the encoding scheme then, seems like a really important question?

Lane: Not just from the commercial angle. Usually the way the discussion of copyrighted texts begins is with the interest in motivating creative work. So the major content providers, whether it’s television production studios or what have you, their argument is if you don’t have incentives for people to produce creative work then you’re not going to have the same calibre of work being done. This is tantamount to an argument for some kind of mechanism being in place to preserve texts as property, in a kind of abstract way. That’s more at the commercial level, but there are other parallel concerns as well.

Seph: In other words, incentives like, the author gets some sort of payment or remuneration at some point for her work or efforts. Isn’t this the issue with Craig Venter. He was working with the major operation, a government funded project, that began looking to decode the genome, and then he broke off from it, saying that they were doing it too slow, that they he knew a faster way to do it. He got funding, and because he is obviously a very clever man, made it commercially viable.

Daniel: He didn’t quite beat them though. I think it was very close.

Seph: His model is, you need to make it commercially viable to get investors. For it to work you essentially need to make a profit. To go back to what we were talking about at the beginning, one of the things that earlier technologies in some ways avoid is precisely that paradigm of commercialism. Presumably when they made marks in rocks or on papyrus they weren’t doing it because that was their wage earning job?

Daniel: There is a huge hierarchy in text-technologies. I mean, every Egyptian Pharaoh had a scribe. The workers that built the pyramids wouldn’t have been able to read the hieroglyphs necessarily. So there have always been hierarchies within textual technologies. We think of text now as the freest system of communication that there is, but in pre-literate societies where education wasn’t available to everybody the text was just a mass of squiggles on a page that only the priest had access to. In that very move, the church could claim authority over the text, because only they could read it out. I don’t know if we should be mapping that directly onto Craig Venter and his commercial enterprise, but there has always been an attempt to gain control of information technologies from their outset. Always.

Seph: It seems that one of the things we have been saying is that that effort to gain control over technology, and to limit who gains access to literacy in that technology, is not necessarily a bad thing?

Lane: Right. I am kind of compelled to mention, as we are here, that copyright as it’s known began in London. Book publishing, and the right to reproduce a text, was granted by the crown and the whole idea that a text, in the abstract, could be property – rather than the copies of a text. The idea that that abstract entity could be property began here, when the major book publishers in London were beginning to suffer a drop in their profits because other printing presses were beginning to open up. The printing press was proliferating and as a result people were able to produce things much cheaper. They realised that this was going to cause them a problem, that the authors who they were compensating were not going to enjoy any of the money from their works. When copyright came around, I think around the early to mid 1800s, it was about preserving the creative incentives for the authors. There was a limit put on the amount of time the copyright could be enjoyed by the publishers. I believe it was originally 20 years, but that’s gone out of the window since then. Certainly in the States it has been extended, especially in the case of Walt Disney, to beyond 95 years.

Seph: Property – and by that we mean private property – is in itself not a thing, but a relation, a community. It is only private property because I recognise your right to have that pen next to you, to own it.

Lane: Right.

Daniel: I think the Walt Disney example is an important one. Not only do they extend the ownership of their icon Mickey Mouse every 20 years, or so, but isn’t it also the case that all the Disney films were borrowed off someone? Taking the stories of others and using them themselves. But as soon as any outsider wanted to use the image of Mickey Mouse in an art object, or in anyway, they slammed down on them as hard as they could. So there are different degrees of ownership, and community, depending on how important you see your own ownership as being.

Seph: It’s funny that in talking about encoding that we’ve gone from the text, to genetics, to moral implications, to commercialism and ownership. I suppose ownership is a good place to get to because of the political implications of encoding; of what it is to have the ability to encode something and then again decode it, to make it make sense, to share it; to allow it to proliferate. Maybe one of the great strengths about writing is that it is not under control. It really is everywhere, and in everything. Is that going too far?

Daniel: I wouldn’t want to claim that writing is any different from say a digital code. Not everybody can code in PERL for instance, but everybody can now get a YouTube video and convert it, using a program into another format, and add some titles on the bottom saying “this is my daughter, 1995” and then send that to someone else. I don’t understand the history of these marks on the page, why the letter ‘e’ is the shape it is, or what in Chinese, for example, is the history of this ideographic symbol. I don’t understand that, but I have the power to use it for my own means, to make it express. I think that is the same in all of these technologies, when they get to the public the public will use them at different levels of encoding, in a sense.

Seph: And that seems to somehow ensure that the technology will continue.

Daniel: Yes.

Lane: Yes.

This transcript is shared under a Creative Commons License

posted by Daniel Rourke

The Opposition Paradigm (Together Again for the First Time)

Mon, 17 May 2010 04:15:00 +0000

figure i : he stands opposite his rivals

You are the only one who can never see yourself apart from your image. In the reflection of a mirror, or the pigment of the photograph you entertain yourself. Every gaze you cast is mediated by a looking apparatus, by an image you must stand alongside. The gaze welcomes itself as a guest. The eye orders you to sit at its table, to share in the feast of one's own image. The image stands beside the real, all the while eating at its table, stealing morsels from the feast it enables. The image is not reality, but the image is the only gesture you have in the direction of reality.

From the Greek pará-noos, he who suffers from paranoia has a mind beside itself. He is convinced that his partner conspires against him: a belief in turn organised by a conspiring mentality. I am confident that you are reading my mind: a position founded by my supposed reading of yours. The paranoid stand beside themselves; a part beside itself as part, conspiring against the whole. Paranoia is a kind of paradox, from the Greek pará-doxon, it stands beside the orthodox.

figure ii : he is beside himself

From the Greek pará-sītos, the parasite is a figure who feeds beside, an uninvited guest who eats at the host's table nonetheless. I display my feast openly, in order that my status be established to the community I consider myself a part. The world outside never ceases at its attempt to gain access to my table. Here I consider to offer them a seat, to share my feast. Here I cast a hand skyward, signalling my absolute negation of their status as a guest. The boundary between my feast and theirs is drawn. As the host I set the conditions under which my body stands beside. My body is entire, but it is also part. I stand beside my community, a conglomerate of bodies, each themselves parts of a greater whole.

The parasite inhabits the host, breaching the boundary of the body in order to organise a new ecosystem around their own, distinct, metabolism. The parasite feeds on the body of its host. Some parasites alter their host's body chemistry, perhaps affecting a biological shift from male to female, from alpha to drone, so that the parasite's offspring have a better chance at survival. In order that the parasite enter the next stage in its life-cycle, it is often unimportant that the host survives.

figure iii : his faithful companion is always at his side

From the Greek pará-digme, the paradigm is literally "what shows itself beside". Parasite, paranoid, paradox constitute a class of forms, standing beside one another, each in relation to the whole. They constitute a paradigm that organises the manner of their know-ability. To overturn the paradigm, one must stand beside it, constituting a reordering of knowing from the outside in.

These are the figures set beside each other: the host and the guest; the mind and its image; the belief as its own antithesis. But these are also a series of relations, figured by a paradigm. It may well seem natural to consider the host and the guest, the mind and its image – indeed the words come in pairs, set side by side on the printed page, or expressed as isolated figures of breath by the speaking subject. Once a relation is figured it becomes difficult to consider the isolated, the individual in opposition. After all, biological evolution has shown countless times, again and again, that an uninvited guest can become an accomplice; that a parasitic burden can become a treasured constituent of one's own body. Parasitism is often indistinguishable from symbiosis. Buddhism teaches that the greatest oneness can only come when the division between mind and self-image has been obliterated. To defuse one's paranoia, it is necessary to stand outside oneself, to places one's state of mind beside itself as paradox, to break the condition of division.

Welcoming the parasite to your table requires you to see your body as their body. At the feast we coalesce, my guest and I. Overturning our differences through the manner of their know-ability. True symbiosis stands beside invitation. True symbiosis is a politics aware of its own difference; a paradigm shown beside itself (together again for the first time).

figure iv : some of the things read (side by side)

What is a Paradigm? (essay) by Giorgio Agamben
The Parasite (book) by Michel Serres
Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading (chapter) by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

by Daniel Rourke

Communicating the Body \ Interpreting the Code

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 04:21:00 +0000

by Daniel Rourke

Pharaoh Khufu intends to secure his riches beyond the grave, and into the afterlife. He captures the greatest architect known in his kingdom, and forces him – through a threat to his entire people – to build him an impenetrable tomb: a Pyramid no thief can plunder. The architect sets to work, knowing that upon completion of the tomb he himself will be sealed inside with the dead Pharaoh. How is it possible to build the most secret catacomb, a labyrinth impossible to breach, without passing on its secret through the workers who build it?

In the classic Hollywood film, Land of the Pharaohs, such a conundrum is posed. The architect needs a team of workers that Khufu can trust, to construct the mechanism by which the tomb will close itself off to eternity. The Pharaoh has the solution: the workers he gives the architect have had their tongues cut out. In exchange for their devotion the slaves will accompany the architect and Khufu to the afterlife. No secret will pass their lips.

How do we pass on a message in a world with impenetrable borders? And in turn, how do we determine its secure transmission? The codes we devise become useless at certain horizons: if the slave cannot speak, he cannot exchange; if a being from another land does not know our language, it cannot understand us; if a message is encrypted, one must also pass on the method to crack it.

Sometimes the codes we devise to enslave, become apparatus in their own demise...

The tongue-less slave is still a liability in a literate society; in turn, a literate slave is a still liability in a digitised society. At every stage in the development of communication technologies human subjects have been relinquished power of one kind, only for a power of another kind to evolve and liberate them once again. The human body is the central locality for all information exchange. Even today, with our writing technologies, our radios, computers and nano-particles, it is the human form that dictates all particulars of scale and substance. What matters now is not the tongue – an organ reduced of its power by hieroglyphics and alphabets – yet in order to silence, corrupt regimes and over-zealous governments still effectively mutilate their subjects. In the West, information monoliths such as Google and Wikipedia help us mediate the space between discrete, complex reams of data. It is as if, in the modern age, to spite its people all China needed to do was cut off the equivalent of their tongue, building up around them a labyrinthine firewall that determines their silence; that reduces their identities to the status of tongueless slaves.

Sometimes to properly conceal something, one must devise a better way to encode it...

Page Du Bois, in her book, Torture and Truth, posits the human body as the primary node of information exchange. She recounts a tale in Herodotus' Histories. Histiaeus shaves the head of his most trusted slave and tattoos on his scalp a message urging his alley to revolt. Once the slave's hair grows back he is sent on his mission. If captured he is incapable of betraying his master: he does not know the message, nor could he understand it if he saw it. He merely knows to tell the receiver to shave his head upon arrival, a fact that would be hidden from any third party who attempted to intercept the message. This one extra layer of protection is an act of encoding; a slight of hand in the trick of communication. The slave is the medium of transmission: his knowledge is the code necessary to decrypt the message, rather than the message itself.

During the time of Histiaeus the human body was the focal point of most human action. We hunted, or worked the land by man power. We conversed, exchanged, delineated and deranged our culture with the hand, the tongue, the eye – all within the small horizon of the single human form. We worked in man-power before horse-power, steam-power before nuclear-power – each shift delineating a phase transition in information states – there can be no Chief without a Chiefdom; no King without a Kingdom. If I was the master of the tattooed slave (let's not believe for too long that this is my wish) I would extend Histiaeus' coding trick even further: sending the message on the scalp of a slave whose whole body has been tattooed, allowing the hair to grow over the part of his body where the true message lies. In any system of exchange, noise has the greatest power to conceal - whether intentionally or not. Making full use of the medium of transmission is the mark of a truly uncrackable system.

But as the distribution of our information systems grows wider – from the tongue, through the quill, to the printing press, and the internet – the importance of the body as a foundation for action remains. What method of distribution would we use to communicate with an intelligence completely alien to our own? Waggling your tongue at them may express a desire to communicate, but it would not transmit your message. Handing them a printed and bound book, perhaps replete with pictures, photographs and diagrams, might spark their interest for a moment, but no deep understanding between you would emerge. At present, organisations like SETI rely on very simple repeated patterns in their broadcasts to the stars. But a sequence of well timed dots and dashes can only express the existence of an intelligence - it is incapable of delivering a particular message. SETI broadcast these simple sequences because if any alien race were to intercept our messages they would, by definition, be incapable of interpreting the message from the code, or the code from the background noise inherent in our transmission. How do you determine what a tongue is trying to express if you don't even know what a tongue is?

Sometimes the method chosen to encode something, determines the impossibility of its comprehension...

In 1972 NASA launched the Pioneer 10 probe into space. Its objective was to study “the interplanetary and planetary magnetic fields... the atmosphere of Jupiter and some of its satellites,” subjects that required a distant communication hub – a device cast further from the human body than any before it.

After plotting its proposed trajectory through our solar system NASA researchers noted that in a matter of a few decades Pioneer 10 would become the first man-made object to pass the orbit of Pluto. It was decided that to make symbolic use of this opportunity the probe should be fitted with a message: a way for an extra terrestrial civilisation to retrace Pioneer's steps if ever one were to come across it. The resulting golden plaque, now streaming through the outer Oort Cloud of our solar system, is one of the most anthropocentric objects ever created. As art historian Ernst Gombrich noted a few years after its launch, the multiple scales and symbolic indicators etched onto the plaque would be almost impossible for a true 'alien' intelligence to decode. Alien minds encased in alien bodies wouldn't even be able to separate the code from the message:

“Reading an image, like the reception of any other message, is dependent on prior knowledge of possibilities; we can only recognise what we know. Even the sight of the awkward naked figures in the illustration cannot be separated in our mind from our knowledge. We know that feet are for standing and eyes are for looking and we project this knowledge onto these configurations, which would look 'like nothing on earth' without this prior information. It is this information alone that enables us to separate the code from the message; we see which of the lines are intended as contours and which are intended as conventional modelling. Our 'scientifically educated' fellow creatures in space might be forgiven if they saw the figures as wire constructs with loose bits and pieces hovering weightlessly in between. Even if they deciphered this aspect of the code, what would they make of the woman's right arm that tapers off like a flamingo's neck and beak? The creatures are 'drawn to scale against the outline of the spacecraft,' but if the recipients are supposed to understand foreshortening, they might also expect to see perspective and conceive the craft as being further back, which would make the scale of the manikins minute. As for the fact that 'the man has his right hand raised in greeting' (the female of the species presumably being less outgoing), not even an earthly Chinese or Indian would be able to correctly interpret this gesture from his own repertory.”

Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion

In communication terms sharing the same kind of body is identical to living the same kind of code. Communication needs at least two parties, it needs a message, and more likely than not it needs a medium of transmission. At all points on this schema there is the potential for corruption, for noise to seep into the system. But lest we forget that without the same binary matrix, no computer would be able to interpret any other. The body too is a coding matrix. It represents a shared scale, it is composed of the same states of matter and bound within each of its cells one will find very similar coiled structures of DNA, encoding the sequences that determine each body's shape, status and character. On Earth the bodies that result from these codes are incredibly similar, whether what results is a fruit fly, a horse or a human. We are slaves to these codes. And everything we intend to say, everything we fail to say, everything that our masters try to restrict us from saying, exists as a consequence of the bodies that compose us.

Sometimes the message only lasts as long as the system it upholds...

The architect and the silenced slaves make their way to the centre of the Great Pyramid, carrying the body of Pharaoh Khufu as they descend. As the labyrinth clamps shut behind them – a code designed to wipe out all evidence of itself as the catacombs collapse – one question looms large: what exactly were the riches the architect and his companions worked so hard to protect?

"At the extreme limits of empiricism meaning is totally plunged into noise, the space of communication is granular, dialogue is condemned to cacophony: the transmission of communication is chronic transformation."

Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science and Philosophy

by Daniel Rourke

Raising Neanderthals: Metaphysics at the Limits of Science

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 05:30:00 +0000

A face to face encounter, devoid of the warm appeal of flesh. The eyes are glass, a cold blue crystal reflects the light in a way real eyes never would. A muzzle of hair, perhaps taken from a barbershop floor or the hind quarters of an animal. The painted scalp peeks through the sparse strands: there is nothing here one might caress with fumbling fingers, or, a millennia ago, pick between to lovingly tease out a louse or mite. The figure balances uneasily on stumps for legs. Its waxen surface bears no resemblance to skin. It is a shade saturated of living colour. In another shortened limb the figure holds a wooden spear, with a plastic point designed to take the place of the authentic stone tip. Under its beaten brow this creature forever stands. He is a spectacle, a museum attraction. He is not human, he is 'other'. He is not man, he is Neanderthal.

Encounters like this, hashed together from memories that span my childhood and adult years, represent the closest many of us will come to meeting a Neanderthal. Encounters built upon out-dated science and the desire of museums to authenticate experiences which, in reality, are as far away from 'true' anthropology as those glass eyes are from windows on the soul. In a recent Archaeology.org article a question was put forward that made me think again about these encounters:

Should we Clone Neanderthals? : I could not help but probe the proposition further.

In my own lifetime our understanding of these absolute 'others' has gone through several revolutions. What once were lumbering apes, incapable of rational thought, speech or the rituals of religious reverence, have become our long lost evolutionary cousins. Research from various quarters has shown that not only were Neanderthals quite capable of vocal expression, but in all likelihood they lived a rich, symbolic life. They had bigger brains than we did, or do, and were probably burying their dead with appeal to an afterlife 50,000 years before our ancestors left Africa. They cared for their young, lived in well established social groups and apart from their prominent brow and less mobile, stocky build, resembled humans in most other aspects. More recent evidence seems to show that far from being a completely separate species, it is quite possible that ancient humans interbred with Neanderthals. This astounding revelation, if it were ever verified, would mean that many of us – if not every one of us – carry within our genetic make-up a living memory of Neanderthal heritage.

But Neanderthals are more than scientific curiosities. They are the embodiment of the 'other', a reflective surface via which the human race may peer upon themselves. Human myth is filled with lumbering creatures, not quite human but every bit an echo of our deepest fears, our vanities, our failings, our memories prone to fade in time. With Shakespeare's Caliban, the feral beast of Prospero's burden, and William Blake's depiction of Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king who myth says was reduced to animal madness, being only two in a long list of sub-human characters. Along with these mythic creatures the Neanderthal has achieved the status of a linguistic archetype, carrying the weight of our inhumanity when admitting our limitations is too much to bear. For a very long time after their discovery Neanderthals were named as the very embodiment of our ineptitudes. To be violent, or brutally instinctive was to be Neanderthal Neanderthals stood as a fiendish remnant of the days before language, fire or social grace, before the borders between man and nature had been breached by the gift of free-will – a gift bequeathed to us, and not to them.

This vague notion of a 'gift' came to me after reading the article about the possibility of cloning Neanderthals At first I read with a certain distance, the same reading I might have given to an article about cloning dodos, mammoths or dinosaurs. Soon though, it was clear that "bringing Neanderthals back from the dead" was a far more metaphysically slippy statement than similar ones about long extinct birds or mammals.

Although concise and engaging the article bounds between two wildly opposed positions when it comes to representing Neanderthals On the one hand the scientists interviewed seem to understand Neanderthals as entities worthy of 'human' rights and freedoms:

"We are not Frankenstein doctors who use human genes to create creatures just to see how they work." Noonan agrees, "If your experiment succeeds and you generate a Neanderthal who talks, you have violated every ethical rule we have," he says, "and if your experiment fails...well. It's a lose-lose." Other scientists think there may be circumstances that could justify Neanderthal cloning.

"If we could really do it and we know we are doing it right, I'm actually for it," says Lahn. "Not to understate the problem of that person living in an environment where they might not fit in. So, if we could also create their habitat and create a bunch of them, that would be a different story."

Extract from article: Should We Clone Neanderthals?

On the other hand, much of the article is made up of insights into piecing together ancient – and therefore fragmented – DNA sequences, and the benefits a Neanderthal clone might be to human medicine:

“Neanderthal cells could be important for discovering treatments to diseases that are largely human-specific, such as HIV, polio, and smallpox, he says. If Neanderthals are sufficiently different from modern humans, they may have a genetic immunity to these diseases. There may also be differences in their biology that lead to new drugs or gene therapy treatments.”

Extract from article: Should We Clone Neanderthals?

The article does a very good job of considering the moral implications of these outcomes, and on many levels I agree with them. But when it came to the metaphysical significance of cloning a Neanderthal the article, like so many other articles about science, stayed largely silent.

Before I come back to the notion of the 'gift' I mentioned before, I'd like to reconsider the article with a few simple questions:

1. What would it mean to give life to an extinct creature, let alone one whose mental capacities are as varied and dexterous as our own?

The likelihood is that early human groups had a part to play in the extinction of our closest cousins, as we still do in the demise of many other, less human, creatures. Our propensity to distinguish ourselves from the natural world that supports us is one intimately bound to our notions of identity, of cause and effect and – perhaps most fundamentally – of spiritual presence. Where the Neanderthal differs from other extinct species is at the status of 'other'. By being so similar in kind to us the Neanderthal cannot help but become a mirror for the human race. Of course it is impossible to know how early humans and Neanderthals reacted to each other all those centuries ago. But the outcome would suggest that humans did not run to help their evolutionary neighbours as their life slipped away. To us they must have seemed both alien and kin. Something to fear, not because of their absolute difference, but because deep down we knew how they viewed the world. And if it was anything like the way we did, we were better rid of them.

Further more, to bring Neanderthals into the world as scientific curiosities – which they would be by necessity – is to deny them the status of 'human' from the beginning. Not only would a Neanderthal grown in a test-tube be the embodiment of 'other', they would also be a walking, talking genetic tool-kit, replete with the needs of a person, but the status of a slave.

2. How much of what we decode and reconstruct is just DNA?

Genetics is an impressively successful science, giving us insights into the living, breathing world at a range of detail unknown to previous generations. But I don't think it is too cynical of me to throw caution upon its 'truth' value. Genetics is not a truth about the world. Instead, it is a highly paradigmatic model that scientists use to understand abstractions of reality far removed from the every day. Of course this gross generalisation is worthy of a long discussion in itself, and one better balanced by whole swathes of research designed to outline the weak points of the genetic paradigm, as well as advance our understanding of it. When the issue at hand is better medical care, or the development of advanced crops for the third world, we should keep these issues in mind, moving forwards cautiously as long as the benefits outweigh our reservations. When it comes to bringing to life an entire species, and one in whose original demise we probably played a part, a blind trust in scientific models is much more likely to lead us into a moral cul de sac we may never escape from. Although the article talks at length on the problems associated with cloning (such as birth defects and multiple infant deaths) it fails outright to consider what genetics, and thus 'cloning', actually represents.

Any creature that we did 'raise from the dead' would be as much a result of contemporary scientific models as it was of mother nature.

...and with both those questions in mind, a third:

3. What happens to our vision of ourselves once the deed has been done?

This final point, leaking naturally from the other two, is founded on what seem on the surface overtly metaphysical concerns. But I hasten to show that through applying the rhetoric of 'human rights' onto creatures that were born in a laboratory, nothing but confusion can arise.

It pays here to visit two theorists for whom the questions of the 'gift' and of the 'tool' are highly significant to their philosophies.

From the writings of Georges Bataille we learn that nothing humans make in utility may be given a status above a tool:

“The tool has no value in itself – like the subject, or the world, or the elements that are of the same nature as the subject or the world – but only in relation to an anticipated result. The time spent in making it directly establishes its utility, its subordination to the one who uses it with an end in view, and its subordination to this end; at the same time it establishes the clear distinction between the end and the means and it does so in the very terms that its appearance has defined. Unfortunately the end is thus given in terms of the means, in terms of utility. This is one of the most remarkable and most fateful aberrations of language. The purpose of a tool's use always has the same meaning as the tool's use: a utility is assigned to it in turn and so on...”

Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion

For Jean-Joseph Goux the act of 'giving' is always a statement of otherness:

“The impossibility of return reveals the truth of the gift in separating it from the return and, most of all, in showing it as an act carried out for others. This service toward others must be the only reason for the kind deed.... It is only as a superior level in the gradation of the regimes of giving that the gift without return can be thought. This mode of giving imitates the Gods. We have two extreme positions on the moral scale, “The one who brings kind deeds imitates the Gods; the one who claims a payments imitates the usurers.””

Jean-Joseph Goux, Seneca Against Derrida

To consider the cloning of Neanderthals as an act of utility (i.e. for the benefits their genome would be to human medicine) is to, by definition, subordinate them to their 'use-value' - denying them outright the status of human and the rights to which that status is associated. On the other hand, to consider the act of cloning as a true 'gift' to the Neanderthals is to push our own status as the 'givers' towards the divine. Either the cloned Neanderthals are tools for us to use as we wish or their life is their very own and one instantly removed from any right we claim to administer it.

Of course it is impossible to imagine the cloned Neanderthals' 'gift' as being one we would honour unto them without any claim of return. In the modern world such creatures, born in our laboratories, would at least be the legal property of the institution that bore them. At the very worst the cloned Neanderthal would grow up under the lights of a thousand television cameras, only to be cut open and dissected in front of the very same zooming lenses when it came of age.

There is a much deeper problem at play here, one that I believe science has no possibility of solving. Once our technologies are capable of bringing sentient life into existence, whether that be a Neanderthal or a cognitive computer, that very same technology becomes instantly incapable of representing the life it has created. Simply put, it is at this point that scientific rhetoric collapses as a field of enterprise, and only the patterns and considerations of philosophy and religion become relevant. As Bataille and Goux show, the only entity capable of truly giving – asking not for return, the only metaphysical concept capable of acting upon the world without utility is a divine being, neither of this world nor capable of being represented in it. Not for one moment does this philosophical enquiry suggest that such a being exists, what it does do is draw firmly into the sand a metaphysical line beyond which 'we' cannot cross. It is not that humans won't be technically able to bring such living entities into the world, it is more that, at the very moment we do so 'we' – as a concept – cease to be. In religious terminology the relationship we might have with such beings is similar to that between the shepherd and his flock. At the moment we bring Neanderthals into our world they become our most significant responsibility, exploding to infinity any notions we may have carried before about our own place in the cosmos.

I have no idea whether I would like to see Neanderthals walking the planet alongside us, or whether their memory should stay that way, long into our future. What I do know is that this philosophical parable is one that science, and the modern humanity it supports, would do well to become more aware of. So often it seems that our scientific rhetoric is incapable of providing us with solid enough foundations for the acts we commit in its name. Perhaps in a world of continued, man-made extinctions, of climate change and ever increasing human populations, perhaps in this world science needs a Neanderthal-cloning moment to awaken it to the implications of its continued existence.

“...philosophy seeks to establish, or rather restore, an other relationship to things, and therefore an other knowledge, a knowledge and a relationship that precisely science hides from us, of which it deprives us, because it allows us only to conclude and to infer without ever presenting, giving to us the thing in itself.”

Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands

Avatar: We're Not in Kansas Anymore!

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 05:25:00 +0000

by Daniel Rourke According to the film industry, to director James 'billions at the box-office' Cameron, Avatar is the first 'true' 3D movie. It takes the experience of cinema to the next (natural?) level, and it does it in a way that makes the movie industry gasp. According to the industry, Avatar is the 3D film that other film makers will be watching for years to come; Avatar is the Citizen Kane of 3D cinema. It is at this point that I could repudiate this position, arguing plainly, perhaps with examples from cinematic history, why Avatar is not a revolution, why beneath its faux-3D visuals it is the same old same old, re-wrapped and re-branded for the computer game generation. But, the truth is that I think Avatar is a triumph of film-making. Not because of its technical bravado or simple, effective characters, but because of something that Hollywood seems to have forgotten about itself: the mythic potential of cinema. Although Avatar is definitely not the Citizen Kane of 3D cinema, it might just be its Wizard of Oz. At its best Hollywood can be transformative. It can speak through its audience, mirroring the concerns of the generations. At its worst Hollywood is little more than a series of plucked-off-the-shelf set-scenes stitched end-to-end. Recent Hollywood vehicles that made a mockery of the art of film-making include Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Spider Man 3, Transformers, Indiana Jones IV and – dare I suggest it – both recent renditions of James Cameron's estranged Hollywood franchise, Terminator III and IV. Watching these movies is like being force-fed visual gruel. A luke-warm dribble of grey matter concocted to approximate the flavour and consistency of much richer, organically grown, cinematic equivalents. These films, each in their own way, do away with characters and conflicts, replacing them with up-and-coming stars and plot devices. Instead of scripts these films have sound bites, instead of cinematography and vision these films are filled with chase scenes and montages designed to pull the viewer from one meagre set-scene to another. Of course it is unfair to generalise about all modern cinema. There are plenty of superb films that come out each year, and for every great film of the 2000s it is possible to find 10 awful films from the 'Golden Age'. What my argument centres around is a specific kind of film, the kind that we attach the label 'Hollywood' to, whether it was imagined and produced in Los Angeles or not. Films like The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars: A New Hope or E.T.. Films of mass appeal that culminate in a kind of cultural hysteria. Films that grow to encompass the mythos of their times. Dorothy's adventure through Oz is a great example of where a specific film and the mythos of cinema came together. In an over-hauling of the spectacle of cinema Dorothy's journey to Oz mirrors the technical leap the film was built around. From the black and white plains of Kansas Dorothy is literally swept into the colourful land of Oz. Dorothy is taken from the cinematic old and brought into the cinematic new, her mythic tribulations aren't just those of a fictional girl: they are the tale of cinema, of audience anticipation and the new wonders that Hollywood would show us if only we followed their Yellow Brick Road. In Avatar James Cameron and his team have orchestrated a modern Wizard of Oz. Whilst following the mythic story arc of all great Hollywood blockbusters, Avatar maintains a pace and attention to necessary detail completely absent from the films listed above. What's more, and this is perhaps Cameron's cleverest slight of hand, the story that Avatar tells mirrors the unique experience that it wishes upon its audience. It is not just the residents of its utopian planet 'Pandora' that are perceptively transformed: we the audience are almost literally taken with them. The transformative insistence of the story plays out most readily when the hero, Jake Sully, speaks into his daily video diary. At one point, via admittedly clunky dialogue, he tells us face on, that the utopian life he has built on Pandora has superseded his human life as the "most real" of the two. Here Cameron's fictional tale attempts to reach out from one 3D world to another. Here Cameron says to the audience to give themselves up, as readily as they can bear, to the mythos of cinema. For me this is the pivot of Avatar's success. Not for a moment do I believe that its computer generated beauty, and single-dimensional characters are the components that raise the film above 3D spectacle. It is the insistence, inherent in every frame of Avatar, that one give oneself up to the experience that drives James Cameron's newest franchise. Myths are stories that transcend the simplistic dichotomies of truth and fiction, of the contemporary and the eternal. A successful myth will embody a relationship between its structure and characters that mirrors aspects of human nature we all instinctively recognise. The truths of a mythic tale are transcendent truths, that is, they are as true in single contexts (e.g. this character is evil) as they are true eternally and in all situations (i.e. as human beings we all carry within us the capacity for evil). Avatar tells us nothing about human nature that we didn't already know. Indeed, its character types and conflicts can be found again and again throughout the history of story telling. What Avatar does do is remind us of the mythic value of cinema itself, a myth that film producers and Hollywood executives would do well to utilise each time they plan their blockbusters. The mythic truth of Avatar is this: that cinema is THE story-telling tool of the modern era. To use that tool; to abuse it for the benefit of film stars and profit margins alone is sacrilegious to the form. Avatar, and films crafted with similar care and attention, should be emulated by Hollywood not for their potential for profit, but for their ability to deliver to us the myths of our time. It is sad to note that Avatar's success at the box-office will probably usher in a whole new generation of 3D spectacle from which rich story arcs and mythic character types will be amputated. A good myth demands to be believed in, for its receiver to suspend every ounce of their disbelief in order that its 'higher truth' may shine through. As you watch the Baftas and Oscars this week, consider Avatar's (possible) success as a parable. Like The Wizard of Oz, Avatar is a film that is asking to be bettered, a film that carries within itself the mythic ingredients necessary for the true Citizen Kane of 3D cinema to emerge. Here's hoping Hollywood responds to Avatar's mythic resonance, rather than its box-office statistics. Here's hoping that 3D cinema can bring us more of the amazing stories that Hollywood can proudly claim it has already delivered. by Daniel Rourke

On Seeing (an Imitation)

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 05:04:00 +0000

by Daniel Rourke

“Mimesis here is not the representation of one thing by another, the relation of resemblance or of identification between two beings, the reproduction of a product of nature by a product of art. It is not the relation of two products but of two productions. And of two freedoms... 'True' mimesis is between two producing subjects and not between two produced things.”

Jacques Derrida, Economimesis

As the day drew closer to its end so I strained my eyes to compensate. A milieu of symbols littered my computer screen, each connected to a staccato breach between breath and tongue. And in conjunction, fused one to another in a series, these symbols formed words and concepts, visions and ideas to which I felt an obligation.

I was designing a book, turning a text into a form through the processes of a computer design interface. The semblance of a page confronted each turn of my wrist or tap of finger, until the virtual book lay splayed open, its central fissure dilating as the words grew bigger or shrank to barely perceptible pricks of black. By manipulating the interface I could expand letters until they inked out the screen, or, in turn, spiral to infinite distance, turning definite symbols into the pixels of a cloud.

This process of making occurred at a virtual distance to me and yet, as the nights rolled onwards, this work was limiting my ability to see.

The doctor examined my right eye. I had iritis, a strain of the pupil with no particular cause, except perhaps for its over-use: for one's over-reliance on its mechanical operation. Being that my right eye was the strongest of the two it had over-compensated at each dimming of the day, allowing my left eye to relax as the symbols of my book whirled on. The strain resulted in a blood-shot appearance accompanied by a searing, throbbing pain. It hurt to see, and even more so to look. It hurt because looking was its cause.

Standing at the base of the Southern tower I arced my neck back as far as I dare. As the horizon descended into my stomach I could just about perceive the towers' tallest corners, pinching at sky. How many coins did it take to build these things? And how many steps was I expected to ascend in order to get to the 'observation deck'?

In exchange for my tiny coin I fathomed a giant network called 'New York'. From up here everything was horizon: the imaginary boundary between earth and sky that moves in respect of one's position.

In 2001 the two towers tumbled. How profane their figures seem now. How could it be that these prisms, designed and built in the 1960s, opened and occupied in the 1970s, witness of boom in the 80s and bust in the 90s, would come to stand for all the tumult and turmoil, striving and hope of our newest century?

The precision of the prism – flat, grey surfaces observed in isometric space – will forever be bound to these charismatic towers built of steel, concrete and capital. That they now stand as symbols effaces their identity in time or in space. They will always be contemporary, so long as cities are built and planes soar the skies above them. Looking back at them it is now I that stand on the horizon. Yet, howsoever I alter my vision, the towers stay solid and fixed to their position, being at one and the same time the landscape, the illumination and the roving eye.

Idiopathic is an adjective used primarily in medicine meaning arising spontaneously or from an obscure or unknown cause. From Greek ἴδιος, idios (one's own) + πάθος, pathos (suffering), it means approximately "a disease of its own kind."

extract from Wikipedia

In 2006 Koizumi Meiro tore pages from pornographic magazines. Over images composed of two erotically entwined women he painted tones of grey. The resulting collages speak of capture, of closure and the banal. They are severely a-erotic, displaying none of the titillation that their originary magazines wished upon their audience. The women's heads have been disembodied, or more precisely, have been relocated onto the bodies of twin prisms. Does Meiro's objectification of these women mirror the objectification they suffer under the guise of the erotic gaze? Perhaps. What draws me into the images though, and what emerges most strikingly as I look upon them, is a haunting sense of recognition. This simplified, perfect horizon, these strutting prisms of grey mirror the defining twin icons of our era. Captured, closed off and made banal to my mind by the passing of time, by their over admittance into the symbolic syntax of the new century.

My recognition is itself an imitation, such that seeing and looking are intertwined.

A focal point rushes to meet me, like a pupil contracting as the first band of sun breaches an ever distant imaginary line.

In the 1940s the Southwest Pacific Ocean became of fundamental strategic importance for both the Japanese and American forces. After establishing bases on a range of Melanesian and Micronesian islands the US Military settled into the routines of war.

To the native peoples of these islands the military presence signified a complete over-turning of the natural order. Within a few months the beaches and grasslands were transformed into encampments and runways, and as the war effort ensued the skies above must have seemed filled with the buzz of alien craft. The native people came to know American society through the exchange of commodities and the gestures of an unknown tongue. As planes soared overhead and countless ships descended over the horizon the islands became saturated with cargo of all kinds, from cans of coca cola to livestock the likeness of which the islanders had never seen.

Much has been written of the so called 'Cargo Cults' which later emerged on these islands. Strange rituals still carried out today seem to hark back to those informative years when Western civilisation first imposed itself on the native Micronesians. Islanders build imitation planes and runways from straw and dirt; act out military processions with bamboo guns slung over their shoulders. In order to bring back the abundance of cargo that used to land on their islands the native people appear to be imitating the conditions under which its arrival used to occur.

Ritual obtains a value at the meeting point between the thing imitated and the imitation. Ritual is action, but it is also object. It is natural because it is always a copy; repeated whilst never attaining perfect resemblance; repeated to bring into order the miasma of our visions.

With work there is always consequence, both intended and in excess. For the tribal communities of the cargo islands the dividing lines between nature and ritual, between alien technology and the routines of war must have seemed identical. A resemblance, a dividing line, that was worthy of imitation whether it brought cargo or not.

We cannot know what they saw. We can only imitate an idea of their seeing by analogy with the kind of seeing we consider in ourselves.

Upon the arrival of the American Military in the Southwestern Pacific there was a lot more to see than had been seen before.

“Why should we be at all interested in perceiving the obscurity that emanates from the epoch? Is darkness not precisely an anonymous experience that is by definition impenetrable; something that is not directed at us and thus cannot concern us? On the contrary, the contemporary is the person who perceives the darkness of his time as something that concerns him. Darkness is something that – more than any light – turns directly and singularly toward him. The contemporary is the one whose eyes are struck by the beam of darkness that comes from his own time.”

Giorgio Agamben, What is The Contemporary?

The eye-drops soothed the burning pain, but they also gave me chronic photo-phobia, such that stepping out into daylight was excruciating. I needed to let my eye rest, and this meant shutting off its ability to work. Whether the light was dim or bright, whether the object of my attention was near or far, the muscles around my pupil lay dormant. I considered the world through a pupil locked at its fullest expanse. The light gushed in.

In place of depth, of shade and colour, there now existed a miasma which my left eye alone could not navigate. The physical frames of everyday life were impossible to attenuate. It was as if upon being freed from the shallow glare of the computer screen I had stumbled into a space between signified and signifier. Everything was flattened to the status of an interface, but an interface that lead nowhere and manipulated nothing.

My book had been printed and bound. I could hold it in my hands, flick through its pages. In real space I could consider it, scanning its lines and paragraphs with my working eye. Wearing a make-shift eye patch or a pair of sun glasses I was able to avoid headaches and spatial confusion. But upon holding the very object whose making had rendered my right eye useless I was overcome with a different kind of dislocation.

Was this the book I had designed on my computer? It bore a resemblance, there was even a sense that my fingers had observed it before, the memory of its movements surfacing as I turned it over in my hands. But this sense did not transfer to the content of the book, to the meaning that emerged when words were read in conjunction, and pages, phrases, paragraphs and footnotes came to meet each other in endless variation. I recognised the words themselves, but I did not recognise from where they had come. I saw the book's space, time and content, yet I could not see its work.

Between seeing and looking which paradigm was closest to this work: the roving eye or the mind engaged in making?

by Daniel Rourke

“To go beyond is to communicate with ideas, to understand. Does not the function of art lie in not understanding?... Art does not know a particular type of reality; it contrasts with knowledge. It is the very event of obscuring, a descent of the night, an invasion of shadow.”

Emmanuel Levinas, Reality and Its Shadow

The Work of the Moving Image in the Age of its Digital Corruptibility

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 05:06:00 +0000

by Daniel Rourke "The cinema can, with impunity, bring us closer to things or take us away from them and revolve around them, it suppresses both the anchoring of the subject and the horizon of the world... It is not the same as the other arts, which aim rather at something unreal or a tal. With cinema, it is the world which becomes its own image, and not an image which becomes world." Giles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image Take 12 images and splice them end to end: a shaded length of acetate through which a bright white light is to be shone. This makes one second of film. The reel spools onwards, as the seconds tick by, and from these independent images (isolations of time separated in space) an illusion of coherence emerges.During a recent flurry of internet activity I stumbled across the work of Takeshi Murata. His videos, having made their way, legitimately or otherwise, into the mysterious Realm of YouTube, have achieved something of a cult status. Among various digital editing techniques Murata is one of the most famous purveyors of the 'Datamoshed' video. A sub-genre of 'glitch-art', datamoshing at first appears to be a mode of expression fine-tuned for the computer geek: a harmless bit of technical fun with no artistic future. But as I watched Murata's videos, from Monster Movie (2005), through to Untitled (Pink Dot) (2007) I became more and more convinced that datamoshing has something profound to say about the status of the image in modern society. Furthermore, and at the risk of sounding Utopian, datamoshing might just be to film what photography was to painting. Take a human subject. Any will do. Have them sit several metres from your projection, making sure to note that their visual apparatus is pointing towards, and not away from, the resulting cacophony of images. There is no need to alert the subject to your film. Humans, like most animals, have a highly adapted awareness of movement. Your illusion cannot help but catch their attention. As soon as the reel begins to roll they will be hooked. Cinema is all pervasive. Not just because we all watch (and love) movies, nor that the narratives emerging from cinema directly structure our modern mythos. Rather it is through the language of cinema, whether we are sat in front of a screen or not, that much of the past hundred years of cultural change, of technological and political upheaval can be understood. For Walter Benjamin, whose writings on media appeared almost as regularly as the images flashed by a movie projector, the technology of film fed into and organised the perceptual apparatus of the modern era. Soon the subject will tire of your film. This has nothing to do with their attention span, nor is it an indication that your film itself is dull. Rather, in a very short time the human subject will grow so accustomed to the cacophony of images that they will begin to consider it as a natural component of their world. The solution is simple. Over the coming decades, as new technologies emerge, incorporate them into your film. For instance, sound has long been important to humans. Why not use some? And while you are at it, throw in some colour, expand the size of your images, begin projecting 24 images a second rather than 12... But I am getting ahead of myself. First you will need a good story, or better still, a political aspiration you wish to impose upon your solitary viewer. Don't hesitate to let your imagination fly. It's amazing what can be expressed with 24 images a second. Benjamin was talking about mass production, about technological reproducibility and the impact that it was having on our notion of identity. What did it mean to be subsumed by material objects, each identical in kind to the last? The role of cinema in grasping this change was, for Benjamin, crucial. Like the illusion which emerges from 24 images projected each second the fragmentation of modern society only increased as the cohesion it promoted intensified. As the objects around us lose their uniqueness, being merely replicas of one another, so the human subject mistakes the closeness of perception for the authenticity of the object. Film was, and perhaps still is, a kind of expulsion from the present experience. In cinema reality becomes multiplied, an experience that seems to mirror the sublimation of perception under the contiguous clarity of the cinematic image. Once a film ends this mode of seeing carries onward into the world, pushing the present deeper and deeper beneath the apparatus of society. For Benjamin film, and more directly cinema, was the looking glass of our times. And as our times grew ever more complex in their appearance, so it was film which would stand as our totem: "Seriousness and play, rigor and license, are mingled in every work of art, though in very different proportions... The primary social function of art today is to rehearse the interplay [between nature and humanity]. This applies especially to film. The function of film is to train human beings in the apperception and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily." Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility Consider the frame of your film as a frame upon a world. Within its boundaries your human subject will experience depths of motion, of emotion, that explode their centered selves. Before long your subject will begin to mistake movement of the frame for movement within the frame, for is it not the case that as the movie camera follows its actors it isolates them within the repeated image? Watch as the horse gallops, each flick of the hooves moving it onwards in space and time. The horse gallops in relation to the moving frame: an isolated image of change for the single viewer to behold. Note how your human subject mistakes time for space, and space for time. Note how, before long, the horse's gallop elicits a knowing yawn beneath the viewer's lingering gaze. Perception has exploded, and the world will never be the same again. In cinema the image became multiplied, expanded and distributed. Through the machine of the projector images spooled, one after another; through the machine of Hollywood film was expressed, dispersed and made contiguos with the substance of society. It appears that now, in the age of the digital, video has replaced film as our noun of choice, and like the omnipresent images of the filmic event, it is now video itself which has become multiple. YouTube is to video what cinema was to the image. Instead of directors and editors, we now have video mix-ups and internet memes. Instead of montage we have 'channels', instead of Grand Opening Nights and Red Carpets we have 'Share this on Facebook' buttons and vast comments sections filled with debate, debase and debunk. In short Youtube, and distributive systems like it, have become the new frame within which the images of video, and their illusionary after-effects, are isolated and re-expressed, in endless repetition: "The cinematographic image is always dividual. This is because, in the final analysis, the screen, as the frame of frames, gives common standard of measurement to things which do not have one - long shots of countryside and close-ups of the face, an astronomical system and a single drop of water - parts which do not have the same denominator of distance, relief or light. In all these senses the frame ensures a deterritorialisation of the image."Giles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image By now your human subject should not only understand the language of film, they should live it. Over 100 years have passed since you began your experiment, and in that time film, by becoming cinema, has grown to such proportions that no aspect of human perception may escape from it. Like a stone-age baby brought up to be a chattering homo-sapien, your subject will, by now, be a walking, talking embodiment of the cinematic. You may fear this coming of age, and quite rightly, for rather than admiring from afar the power of the camera, of the edit and the montage, your subject will believe that their world was always this contiguous. The copy has been copied, beyond its means to produce unique moulds. Cinema has begun to simulate itself. The last image rolls now, the last flicker of light colours the retina. Today the great experiment ended. Digital distribution systems like YouTube are only possible because of a series of clever algorithms which compress the information contained within each video. Data compression, in a nutshell, turns 24 separate images a second into the minimal of information required to create a close approximation of those same frames sliding into each other. Why place every frame of a video online if within each frame, and shared amongst them, there exist aspects of the image which remain the same across contiguous moments? Compression is like the reduction of video into its component DNA. By reducing a video to the DNA required to compose each image half of the job of compression is done. The second, and perhaps, cleverer part of video compression is the addition of another segment of 'DNA' which tells video software how the movement between each image should be expressed. Datamoshing plays with these elements. It breaks the notion of separation between image and movement, indeed, it creates a new merging reference between the two. In the datamoshed video image and movement are blended, even interchanged for one another. Each unique image in the datamoshed video becomes a token of movement within a frame that extends far beyond the isolated moment. This text will be replaced In a datamoshed video an image from frame one of the video can leak, corrupt and interface with an image in frame 100. What's more, the movement DNA exchanged between contiguous frames can be made to jump ahead, or simply blend with a previous image. A digital video becomes to the datamosher a paint pallet of delicious colour and, in motion, one video may merge with another - the two forging a brand new step in an organic datamosh dance.As cinematographic subjects we have an integral understanding of the language of film. Although we know that the frames of cinema are separate, are mere instant images in an infinite whole, we crave the illusion of movement they create. Takeshi Murata's short film, Untitled (Pink Dot), corrupts the separation of image and movement. In an early frame we briefly notice Sylvester Stallone fire his gun, but as the resulting explosion rips across the frame his image is transposed into the fire, leaving a remnant of his figure to merge with the resulting miasma. Throughout this interplay, a pulsing pink dot draws our attention at the centre of the frame (also appearing to be connected with the pulsing noise transposed over the video). This dot, surely a symbol of our viewing, perceiving centre, is blended, in organic symbiosis with the datamoshed miasma. It is as if we, our viewing centres enraptured by the filmic event, have been consumed by its flow. Our cinematic instinct still perceives the figure of Rambo, of the flash of the machine-gun pulse, but as the explosive fire tears through the pink dot it is as if the perceiving mind has been melted through too. What would have Walter Benjamin and Giles Deleuze thought of datamoshing? of YouTube videos displayed on iPhones? of High Definition data files corrupted by pink dots and compression artefacts? These new technologies and modes of distribution play into our instincts in much the same way that film did 100 years ago. It occurs to me that reality has always been formed in feedback with our technologies, that as our art and culture express time and space in ever greater multiples so our minds are forced to complexify to catch up. The feedback which follows, through artistic expression and cultural contemplation, drags the human subject through their world at ever greater speeds. Cinema evolved alongside the most expansive century that mankind has ever seen. It allowed us, along with various other technologies, to isolate the complex present in ways inconceivable before. I don't wish to offer any branching philosophy here, nor talk at length on the perceptual or cultural importance of 'compression artefacts'. Instead I ask you to gather up your perceptive apparatus, and let it sift slowly through the various videos distributed throughout (and below) this article. There is something about the datamoshed video, in the way it takes advantage of the viewer's cinematic instinct, that fascinates me. And when I look up from the datamoshed video, blinking hard to make reality fall back into focus, the world makes a little more sense to my viewing, perceiving centre. To me reality feels more datamoshed every time I look up. To me the real world now looks like it might just have been datamoshed all along. by Daniel Rourke Videos featured in this article: • Silver by Takeshi Murata • Monster Movie by Takeshi Murata • Venetian Snares, Szamar Madar by David O'Reilly • A backwards version of Chairlift, Evident Utensil, by Ray Tintori, encoded backwards by YouTube user PronoiacOrg • MishMosh, by YouTube user datamosher • Untitled (Pink Dot) by Takeshi Murata

Mapping The Cracks: Thinking Subjects as Book Objects

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 05:02:00 +0000

by Daniel Rourke

In Part One of this article I wrote about the instability of the art-object. How its meaning moves, and inevitably cracks. In this follow-up I ponder text, the book, page and computer screen. Are they as stable as they appear? And how can we set them in motion?

Part Two

"There’s a way, it seems to me, that reality’s fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in. And the difficulty about... writing about that reality is that text is very linear and it’s very unified, and... I, anyway, am constantly on the lookout for ways to fracture the text that aren’t totally disorienting – I mean, you can take the lines and jumble them up and that’s nicely fractured, but nobody’s gonna read it."

David Foster Wallace, PBS Interview, 1997

17^th Century print technology was rubbish. Type could be badly set, ink could be over-applied, misapplied or just plain missed. Paper quality varied enormously according to local resources, the luck of the seasons or even the miserly want of the print maker out to fill his pockets. There are probably thousands of lost masterpieces that failed to make it through history simply because of the wandering daydreams of the printer's apprentice. But from error, from edit and mis-identification have come some of the clearest truths of the early print age. Truths bound not in the perfect grain or resolute words of the page, but in the abundance of poor materials, spelling mistakes and smudge. In research libraries across the globe experts live for the discovery of copy errors, comparing each rare edition side-by-side with its sisters and cousins in the vain hope that some random mutation has made it intact across the centuries.

Since the invention of writing, and its evolutionary successor the printing-press, text has commanded an authority that far exceeds any other medium. By reducing the flowing staccato rhythms of speech to typographically identical indelible marks we managed, over the course of little more than 2000 years, to standardise the reading consciousness. But in our rush to commodify the textual experience we lost touch with the very material that allowed illiteracy to become the exception, rather than the rule. We forgot that it is the very fallibility of text and book that make them such powerful thinking technologies.

Today text appears so stable that we almost don't notice it. We bathe in it, from moment to moment, on the spines of our books, the packaging of our breakfast cereals, the labels sewn fast into our clothes. We live it without a thought. In fact, we live it because it is thought, composing such a steady proportion of our lived experience that we fail to notice its constricting power over our imaginations. Of course we all speak, but even speech in the literate society has become stultified by the restrictions of the page, the paragraph and the sentence. Rarely does the speech of our leaders, of the world's most powerful politicians, exhibit anything more organic than a choice of when to pause for effect; when to express a comma, a colon or hyphen – each a technology of writing, rather than of free-thinking. Text is all-powerful, omnipotent and invisible. It infects how we think, speak and perceive the flow of time around us. Yet even as a way to break free from the constraints of text rises into view we baulk in pedantry and hark on about tradition. The unyielding space of the printed page has become the primary metaphor for those who fear where reading is heading: the Internet. But to truly understand the Internet's liberating power one must first look towards a great thinker who never read or wrote a word in his life.

Socrates decreed that writing would be the death of thought, becoming a crux to memory. He warned that text was 'inflexible', unable to answer back and that, as a consequence, writing would mark the end of a truly virtuous society in which public debate enhanced the thinking subject. His warnings obviously went unheeded, for were it not for the scribblings of his greatest pupil, Plato, his ideas would never have survived the long journey to your computer screen. Was Socrates short-sighted? Perhaps. But in our current time, of digital divides and books encoded in binary, Socrates' words seem remarkably prescient. Current debate surrounding the omnipotence of the Internet bears a striking resemblance to Socrates' concerns about writing. Just as Socrates proclaimed the authority of the spoken word, so today we hold stead-fast onto the shrivelled husk of a textuality that allows each of us to float aimlessly through literate culture.

In the decades proceeding Henry Clay Folger's death in 1930 his library became the prime resource for scholars of (arguably) the world's most famous playwright. Folger collected manuscripts. In particular he liked rare editions of Shakespeare's works, and he liked them so much he wanted to have them all. The First Folio is the earliest known print-run of Shakespeare's works, collated and published only seven years after his death. Folger's collection of nearly 40 First Folios became the laughing stock of the bibliophilic elite. Surely one copy of the Folio was enough for any research library, let alone a single collector such as Folger?

Folger's library enabled experts to consider First Folios side-by-side for the first time, garnering crucial information from the mistakes and mis-prints that were allowed to creep into the famous Folios by their 17^th Century printers. There were three different issues of the Folio, printed and bound by a handful of printers and their apprentices. From Folio to Folio edits are common, a missing Troilus and Cressida in one Folio leaves room for Timon, whereas in other, less 'complete' versions neither play make their way into print. Hidden within some ill-fated Folios can be found a crossed out ending to Romeo and Juliet on the reverse side of a print of Troilus that is missing its prologue. No Folio is the same as any other, meaning that the closest thing left to a 'perfect' collection of Shakespeare's works is the entire run of 400 Folios that still survive to this day, each noted for their individuality; each ready to expose their hidden mistakes to the careful eye of the scholar.

At the level of print, text has never been stable. And a good thing too, for if it were priceless knowledge about Shakespeare's plays would have been lost. The problem with the book and page today is that they have become frozen stiff, losing their dynamism as they spin off the production line. The value of Folger's Folios is not to be found in the meter of the language, or the subjects there imparted, but in the scratches, scuffs and tears scattered throughout like forgotten memories. Is it possible to inject some of this substance back into the mass-produced paperback? To allow authorship, once again, to become a collaboration between writer, page and the medium of transmission?

The internet is the obvious answer, but it is of course not that simple. For as long as we cling to the rigid structures of the printed page the internet will only act as a poor copy of the medium we so cherish. Academics, educators and politicians are quick to speak of the liberating potential of digital technology, but few of them make concessions for the web without first issuing a decree about the standards of reading to which we have become accustomed. In the last century perhaps the most important works of literature to have emerged were those that challenged the rigid flow of the printed narrative, asking us to question the inner realities we write and talk about. I am talking of works like Joyce's Ulysses, or Burroughs Naked Lunch, works that broke the book, even as they infected its forms with their liberating approaches to language and thought.

Like the new breed of art-objects I mentioned in Part One of this article, text is now moving towards a revolution in its status as 'thing'. In order to think beyond text, one must first begin to understand its distinctive character as both subject and object. A good place to start is with the art-object, the best examples of which encapsulate ideas that far transcend the lowly substance of the materials they are composed of. To ponder Duchamp's Mechanical Bride is to move beyond the foil and dust sandwiched between glass panes. Simply put, art-objects are objects that we mistake for subjects – and long may it be this way. This capacity to treat the material as a vehicle for a subject has long been missing from text and the book. When we reach out with our minds, beyond the divides of eye, page and text, we often forget the object-ness of the book, preferring instead to wallow in subjects that we consider the linguistic meaning of the text alone imparts to us.

Scattered throughout this article you will find examples of books which attempt to transcend their 'book-ness' by breaching the gaps between art and text. Some of these works would not have been produced in a pre-internet society. It is not that the internet is a form that text should aspire to, but perhaps that in living and thinking through a net-based society writers/artists have become able to consider the book-object in new and innovative ways. As soon as we could write down our speech, to inscribe it in stone or bind it onto the page, were became capable of speaking and thinking from the outside, like Gods looking down on their creation. Social networks, digital archives, computer screens, user generated interfaces, blogs, RSS feeds and tweets have, in similar fashion, allowed us to spin text out of order, to wrap thought around itself and let it bloom in fractal musings. New technologies have shown us that society is not rigid, that audio and video can be dismantled, distributed and dispersed on the winds of the world wide web. Books are about to start speaking back to us in ways that would have made Socrates and Shakespeare giddy to perceive.

We should encourage books to crack wide open, and let the internet wash between their pages. We should rejoice as the forms of text and print come crashing down around us. Let's rebuild our textual culture from the thinking subject up.

by Daniel Rourke

Mapping the Cracks: Art-Objects in Motion

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 04:04:00 +0000

Part One

by Daniel Rourke

"The spacetime of the lightcones and the fermions and scalar are connected to the chocolate grinder. The chocolate grinder receives octonionic structure from the water wheel."

- Tony Smith, Valdosta Museum Website

In 1927 Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass was broken in transit. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, Duchamp's title for the piece, depicts a mechanical Bride in its upper section and nine abstract Bachelors in its lower. Duchamp took oil, lead, varnish and dust and sandwiched them between panes of glass. The Bachelors encounter their Bride in the presence of a large, gorgeous, chocolate grinder whose drums revolve in motions which seem to reach up, across the divide, to touch the ethereal Bride in her domain.

In 1936 Duchamp 'fixed' the broken Bride by repairing, rather than replacing, the shattered panes of glass. He claimed to like it better that way.

Today progenies of Duchamp invest time, thought and often a great many dollars in their own artworks. The successful ones amongst them package those artworks up in foam, plaster and cellophane to be moved, shipped and re-exhibited in multiple gallery spaces again and again. Without dwelling on the commodification of the artwork I want to build my own scheme for understanding these movements. I want to rest a little and draw the lines of desire that artworks traverse; the paths they take that human intent had nothing to do with; the archives they carry within themselves. For every map there are points we must plot, spaces and places in real space and time that require isolation and signification. We grab a GPS device and codify the crossroads where St. Martin's Place meets Trafalgar Square, marking carefully the precise angle via which Madonna on the Rocks will be fed through the clamouring crowds into the The National Gallery's mouth. Artworks live in motion, just as readily as they live in the gallery. In the dark recess of transit they sketch a hidden, secret life away from the viewing eye, becoming not 'art', but 'object' – traversing the gap between these concepts as they travel.

The Bride now rests out her Autumn years in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, waiting for gravity to release her chocolate grinder once again from its sandwich of (un)shattered glass.

Through Plato's writing we know that Socrates maintained a deep mistrust of the art as object, distinguishing three realms through which art must move before it was realised. In Book X of The Republic Socrates develops the metaphor of the three beds. The ideal bed, made by God, the carpenter's bed, a mere imitation of God's idea, and the artist's bed, again made in imitation, but this time of the carpenter's creation. The art-object is twice removed from 'truth'. It is a model of a model; a mimetically charged, displaced falsehood. Like a black-hole emitting virtual particles in space, the realm we long to peer upon is always hidden, allowing only those particles escaping from the object to catch our gaze.

Ever since Socrates we've aimed to stretch, like Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, across an invisible divide into the realm of the absolute. Like Duchamp's Bachelors, ever removed from their beloved Bride, it is the network, the movement of the Earthly chocolate-grinder, that throttles our attention. We believe in an 'other' place, attempting to represent it in our paintings, our sculptures, novels and poems but we will never reach it - transfixed as we are on the material realm around us. Should we instead forget the Bride, and concentrate on the cracks beneath-which the chocolate-grinder forever whirls? Forget the 'ideal' bed and ponder on the imperfections the carpenter ensures in his work, as the hammer and nails meet in a blur?

* I will not talk here of the other exhibits in Altermodern – and elsewhere – that took me on similar discursive journeys. I will instead lend you a series of hyper-links, a network of possibilities, for you to travel.

A new breed of artist believes so. They make art that realises a network of possibilities, rather than a final imperfect solution. Artist's such as Walead Beshty, whose Installation of FedEx Sculptures echoes, in its shattered cubes, the 1927 incident when Duchamp's Bride was disfigured.

Beshty's FedEx Sculptures are a series of shatter-proof glass cubes broken in transit. What makes these boxes different from mere badly wrapped art-objects is the intent behind their destruction. The boxes are shipped by FedEx, rather than professional art-object shippers, from Beshty's studio to each new gallery. Their constant destruction sketches their character as meaningful objects. Each crack a palimpsest of movement, of random intent gathered in transit - between exhibitions. The boxes were exhibited as part of Tate Britain's Triennial, Altermodern, * earlier this year, where I had the opportunity to see them. Peering through the cracked panes, into the voids contained within each cube, I felt like a cartographer tracing lines made by movement and time to the source of an endless ocean.

Like the shattered panes of Duchamp's masterpiece, or the unique voids contained within Walead Beshty's FedEx Sculptures, time and movement have oft been deceived by our perceptions of art. For every artwork, whether considered whole or disfigured, is riddled with tell-tale cracks.

Throughout his second voyage to the Pacific (1772-75) Captain James Cook was accompanied by William Hodges, an ambitious artist whose landscape paintings would serve as a living archive of the expedition. Hodges was amongst the first people from Europe to see the Rapanui monuments of Easter Island, to sail The Cape of Good Hope or shake hands with the Maori of New Zealand. Hodges’ keen memory for light and atmosphere were responsible for much of the romanticism an enthused Europe would languish on Captain Cook’s expeditions.

Some of Hodges’ more unusual paintings were recently x-rayed in the lead up to an exhibition of his work at London’s National Maritime Museum. As well as revealing a wealth of archival information about the artist’s processes, x-ray images of his View in Pickersgill Harbour, Dusky Bay exposed something far more spectacular. There, beneath the painted surface of the luminous rainforest canopy were two giant, white formations stretching up and out of a black swathe of ocean. Hodges, for reasons we will never fully understand, had chosen to paint over the first ever visual record of the Antarctic. The icebergs, having hidden for over 300 years under layers of oil paint, were freed by the roving, radiographic eye of the x-ray machine. The canvas usurped by its own regolithic layer; the history of the event ebbing over an invisible event-horizon like separated virtual particles.

Understanding that the archive is not contained solely in the document does not come naturally. To fully sketch the mimesis of art-objects we must devise better ways to peer beneath their surface. As I write this I am aware of what I am trying to say, and what I am actually saying. There is a gap between, a significant chasm that this text will never bridge. The art-object carries with it a history of its making, a memory of its movement. The art-object is vast in its potential to be seen and re-seen. Whether by accident, or intent, there are always cracks on the surface of an art-object. Some of these cracks may only be breached with new technologies – such as the x-rays that pulled across the void William Hodges' lost vision of the Antarctic. Some of these cracks are allowed to creep onwards by artists who long for their art-objects to develop lives of their own.

In this article I have concentrated on the movement inherent in art-objects. Scupltures and paintings are traditional fodder for this kind of exploration. But what of the text? How is the modern writer, aware of the networks of intent that spiral from her art-writing, best to shatter her work into life? How can we make the text move and encourage it to crack? And how will we read its movements upon its return?

This is a question I currently ponder. A question I hope to explore in Part Two of this article (to be published on Monday, 2nd of November).

by Daniel Rourke

On Being in Japan and Elsewhere

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 04:05:00 +0000

by Daniel Rourke

Japan. That's where I am. With the rice-triangles and the tatami-mats and row upon row of vending machines. In a country where serving others is paramount, and where holidays are something that other people do, I find myself being served - on holiday... I am the ultimate gaijin 1 and every ticket I buy and photo I take seems to confirm this. I came to see Japan. But now I realise that the culture of seeing has been commodified into an experience in itself, and perhaps not an experience any of us are capable of moving beyond alone.

Please don't misunderstand me. I love Japan. I lived here from 2004 until 2006, teaching English on the outskirts of a medium sized city on the island of Kyushu. The experience enriched me, precisely because it tore me from my anchors. Because it helped me understand where I had come from. On the surface Japan behaves like the perfect machine, with all its components functioning within designated parameters. And what's more, that machine just seems to work, with hardly anyone screaming to get off. The Japanese are a nation in a very different sense to us Brits. And for a small-town, West Yorkshire boy like myself, being part of that nation, that huge entity, all be it for only 24 months of my life, is still one of my most humbling experiences. But even as I gush about Japan being here can often feel like toiling through an endless urban labyrinth. With little of cultural merit to distinguish the pachinko parlours from the snack bars and multi-storey car parks Japan can seem grey, shallow and everything but refined. But when it surprises you, whether you're picking blueberries in the mountains or being served delicate morsels of fish in the private room of your ryokan, Japan redefines the word privileged. I feel privileged to have lived here, I feel privileged to be travelling through it. Yet, keeping hold of that feeling is not always easy. The problem is not completely a Japanese one. Worldwide tourism has moulded, cast and set into faux-stone souvenirs the types of experiences we can access. Even those attempting to wind their own path through the deserts of Mongolia or the jungles of Brazil will occasionally find themselves face to face with a toll-booth and turnstile scrawled in badly translated English instructions. The forces of the free-market mean that being somewhere has come to mean "being near this particular cultural commodity". Any 21st century traveller who believes that they can get to the authentic heart of an experience will have to pay for a ticket somewhere along the track. Had the restless 17th century poet Matsuo Bashō known that his musings on the River Ōi would be turned into a set of commemorative face flannels he might very well have never set out on the road to Fuji:

In a wayIt was funNot to see Mount FujiIn foggy rain 2 Like Bashō I aim to plant myself in a place, more deeply than at the toll-booth and souvenir shop. But with every photograph I've taken of a monument, of a neon high-street or sunset, I've moved further away from this essential desire. Lest we forget the verb 'to be' whenever we are trying to be somewhere, somewhen, somehow. The Japanese seem particularly keen on the token of the experience. Whether it is the photo of themselves issuing the 'V' sign in front of Mount Fuji, or the gift-set of sweet rice-cakes they take home as omiyage 3 for their grandmother. At first I thought this was nothing more than tourism top-trumps. A way to out-do your neighbour with 20 'sugoii!' 4 points over her holiday snaps. But unlike the Westerner's conception of the experience gained, the Japanese live to share their commodities with each other. Suddenly holiday photos are more than a way to put cousin Seth to sleep, they are a ticket for every member of your family, of your friendship group, your work mates and arch-enemies, to take a little bit of your experience for themselves. The machine of Japanese society is oiled by holiday snaps and boxes of seaweed crackers stamped with the silhouette of Hello Kitty. Before I lived here I read that the Japanese spend the same equivalent of their GDP on omiyage as America spends on law-suits and litigation. In this sense, the commodity of 'being somewhere' has far greater value for Japanese society than the mere personal. If we in the West were offered the chance to swap all our law-suits and lawyers for seaweed crackers, I hope we'd at least consider it. Perhaps the value I grasp for in my lived experience would be better shared than savoured for myself. Is it possible then to have an experience without commodifying it? I'm not sure if it is. Whether through my photo collection or the stuttering inadequacies of my language, I find it increasingly difficult to pinpoint what it was about an experience that lingers within me. As the smorgasbord of human experiences is extended, enhanced, mixed and matched between cultures and languages, what there is to take away with us seems increasingly shallow. Turn on The Discovery Channel and be instantly smacked around the face with the token beauty of the world. Travel there yourself, whether by tourist boat or chartered jet, and wallow in the sense that where you are right now is not where you normally find yourself. Without meaning to paint the entire Japanese nation with one brush, I do feel that they have got something right with their tourism tokens. They have brought in from the outside the gamut of experiences the world has to offer. They have reduced them to a pocket souvenir, or a sliver of flavour that lingers on the tongue, and shared them around for everyone to make sense of. The idea that we should all escape our lives for a while, should buy a reduced price ticket and lose ourselves on a pristine, simulacrum of a beach somewhere, bothers me. The only time I have ever felt distant from myself was when I was at the mercy of a culture who take pride in the commodities of their experiences. Who exist to share them. To really believe for one moment that I can find something, out here, that is true, that is mine and only mine is a little naive. When I finally get back on my flight, disembarking at Terminal 2 of Heathrow, only then will I once again be living the absolutely individual experience that is my own. For it is only through my removal and return to London that my deepest experiences are founded. If I am going to be anywhere, I may as well be where and what I am, and not what my plane ticket promises me I can be:

Coming home at lastAt the end of the year,I wept to findMy old umbilical cord 5

Notes 1. 'Gaijin' is the Japanese word for a foreigner, or, outsider.2. Poem taken from, The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton, one of Matsuo Bashō's journeys as recounted in The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches.3. A souvenir or gift that represents something about a trip you have taken. Omiyage usually takes the form of a foodstuff that is 'unique' to the place visited.4. 'Sugoii!' roughly translates as Great! or Brilliant!.5. Poem taken from, The Records of a Travel-worn Satchel, one of Matsuo Bashō's journeys as recounted in The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches.

by Daniel Rourke

Desire Paths: Reading, Memory and Inscription

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 05:35:00 +0000

by Daniel Rourke

The urban landscape is overrun with paths. Road-paths pulling transport, pavement-paths and architectural-paths guiding feet towards throbbing hubs of commerce, leisure and abode. Beyond the limits of urban paths, planned and set in tarmac or concrete, are perhaps the most timeless paths of all. Gaston Bachelard called them Desire Paths, physical etchings in our surroundings drawn by the thoughtless movement of human feet. In planning the layout of a city designers aim to limit the emergence of worn strips of earth that cut through the green grass. People skipping corners or connecting distinct spaces vote with their feet the paths they desire. Many of the pictures on the right (from this Flickr group) show typical design solutions to the desire path. A delimiting fence, wall or thoroughfare, a row of trees, carefully planted to ease the human flow back in line with the rigid, urban aesthetic. These control mechanisms have little effect – people merely walk around them – and the desire path continues to intend itself exactly where designers had feared it would.

The technical term for the surface of a planetary body, whether urbanised, earth covered or extra-terrestrial, is regolith. As well as the wear of feet, the regolith may be eroded by wind, rain, the path of running water or the tiny movement of a glacier down the coarse plane of a mountain. If one extends the meaning of the term regolith it becomes a valuable metaphor for the outer layer upon or through which any manner of paths may be inscribed. The self-titled first Emperor of China, Qín Shǐhuáng, attempted, in his own extravagant way, to re-landscape the regolith of time. By building the Great Wall around his Kingdom and ordering the burning of all the books written before his birth Qín Shǐhuáng intended to isolate his Kingdom in its own mythic garden of innocence. Far from protecting his people from the marauding barbarians to the West or the corrupting knowledge of the past Qín Shǐhuáng's decision to enclose his Kingdom probably expanded his subject's capacity for desire beyond it. There is no better way to cause someone to read something than to tell them they cannot; no better way to cause someone to dream beyond some kingdom, or attempt to destroy it, than to erect a wall around it. As we demarcate paths we cause desire to erupt beyond them. The regolith, whether physical or ethereal, will never cease to degrade against our wishes. Paths that signify freedom and power to some may, to those under their jurisdiction, signify just the opposite. The corridors of schools and prisons are good examples of this. Paths built as a leverage of control can, in the hands of a rebellious student or prisoner, become desirable avenues of opportunity. The line of desire in these cases is laid directly over the enclosed path. Desire becomes subversion and the means of flight - a way to reverse the roles of power. In a central scene from the 1991 film, Terminator II, Sarah Conner attempts escape from the high-security asylum in which she has been incarcerated. For a patient, deemed to be dangerously unstable, an asylum is a rigid tangle of limits, barriers, locked-doors and screeching alarms. Sarah Conner's escape is notable because of its affirmation of the paths of the asylum. Far from moving beyond it, Conner uses the rigidity of the system to aid her movement through the building. From the very beginning of the scene Conner's dancing feet, her balletic violence, inscribe into the sterile, linear regolith of the asylum a pattern of the purest desire. A paper-clip, a broom and a container of bleach – all systematic of order and closure – become in turn a lock-pick, a weapon and a kidnapping ploy. A key, usually a symbol of access and movement between limits, is snapped in its lock and instantly becomes a barrier. Only upon the arrival of The Terminator and her son, John, does Sarah's freedom over the asylum finally ebb back towards the traditional limits of fear and isolation. These dualistic notions of the path, where control and desire can overlap and even change places with one another, are beginning to become integral to the online text. As a blog reader you are no doubt aware of the article as a network of possibilities, as a loose guide to your writerly desire, rather than a strict parent. In time the definition of the path as a memory through web spaces and digital texts will lead us to see all movement as inscription and play. Where reading an article leaves on the surface of its regolith another faint trail of breadcrumbs. A single inscription, criss-crossing with a million more, each exactly similar but also entirely unique. Paths engineered by a writer do not destine the realities of readership. Rather, a text can be seen as a surface reality, a regolith formed from substrates of reading, memory and cultural inscription. Reading carves furrows into a text through which the writer's world can be glimpsed, all be it momentarily, in the lattice of possibilities beneath. Like a demi-god the writer themself is a mythos, a patchwork of the possible, spiralling away from the reading eye. Whether a reader follows an intended path, or begins to draw desire paths of their own, all depends on the limits they believe the writer set for them.Upon a close reading of Genesis 11:1-9, Athanasius Kircher calculated that the Tower of Babel could not have existed as described, for it would have torn the very Earth from its axis. Kircher's non-figurative examination on the myth seems comical, but by taking his reading as purely literative our interpretation suffers from the same limiting logic we attribute to him. Like Adam's grasping of the forbidden fruit the attempt by humanity to build a path to heaven was thwarted by their growing proximity to God. The apple embodies the limits of our God-given knowledge; the Tower of Babel our infinite aspiration to walk outside paths other than those God intended for us. There is something infinitely creative involved in the act of demarcation, something forever open about the figure of closure. Athanasius Kircher's demonstration should perhaps be seen as a parable of the highest mythic truth: that however hard we try to walk beyond a given path, we will always tend to inscribe another in our wake. by Daniel Rourke

I discovered the ants

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 06:22:00 +0000

by Daniel Rourke I discovered the ants trailing like gunpowder across my kitchen floor. Before I had time to think I had vacuumed up a thousand. Yet they kept coming, tending to resurge where last I had punished them; coursing like a rainless cloud on the exact same trajectory each time. Somewhere unseen to me a billowing sack of protoplasm with the head of a Queen was giving birth to its hundredth clone of the day. But unlike its brethren this clone would never grow towards the daylight. A dark shroud of worker ants would drag poison into its womb: a deadly meal upon which the nest would feast. In my local supermarket was an aisle devoted to domestic murder. Sticky traps infused with cockroach friendly aromas; circular baiting baths filled with a saccharine mosquito-drowning dew. Tablets for prevention, sprays for elimination and piles upon piles of bug-nets, bug-bats, bug-bombs and bug-poisons. I bought a box of Raid ant bait. The compound eyes and hideous mandibles of a cartoon ant stared back at me from the package. This caricature, designed to demonise the ants, instead expressed their human-like determination. A determination that I would use against them. A determination bound up and offered to them like a spoonful of Trojan horses. The French tourist attraction Lascaux II is like the 1980 family movie Superman II because: It’s a translation of archetypes, a kind of ode to idealism. Some people claim that it is better than the original. The special effects are dated, but they still pack a punch. It cost millions to re-produce. All it is is editing. In 1963 Lascaux cave, a network of subterranean tunnels scrawled with some of the earliest known Upper Palaeolithic human art, was closed to public scrutiny. Since its discovery in 1940 around a thousand visitors had trampled through the site per day, bringing with them a toxic mix of exhaled CO2 and greasy, groping fingers. In 1983 the Lascaux II replica was opened to the public. The tourist attraction contains a faithful recreation of the textured surface of the original cave upon which 75% of the precious art has been meticulously copied. In the late 1970s Richard Donner, a talented director best known for his earlier film The Omen, was fired by the producers of the Superman franchise. Donner’s attempt to craft and create two Superman movies back to back had become hampered by production disagreements. A new director, Richard Lester, was drafted in to piece together the unfinished second film from remnants that Richard Donner had left scattered on the cutting-room floor. Lester’s Superman II was released in 1980. Richard Donner’s name was absent from the credits. The original Lascaux cave rests in darkness again now, killing the time its simulation has reclaimed from toxic breath and greasy, groping fingers. The addition of a ‘state-of-the-art’ air conditioning system to the Lascaux complex is thought to be responsible for a virulent, black fungus now invading the site. Experts are looking for a solution to the new problem they helped introduce. Richard Donner finally released a ‘faithful’ version of Superman II in late 2006, a version for which Richard Lester received no credit. The two films contain around 75% of the same material, in vaguely different orders. Most fire ant bait is an insecticide and an attractive ant food (generally processed corn grits coated with soybean oil) combination. Baits are taken into the colony by ants searching for food. The bait is distributed to other members of the colony through the exchange of food known as trophallaxis. Although several fire ant baits are available, there are two main types: insect growth regulators and actual toxins. Hydramethylnon bait (Amdro®, Siege® and Maxforce®) is a toxin (slow acting stomach poison) that disrupts the ant’s ability to convert food to energy. Spinosad bait (Eliminator® Justice™) is a slow acting biorational toxin derived through the fermentation of a soil dwelling bacteria. Abamectin, the toxin in Raid® Fire Ant Bait is also the result of the fermentation of soil dwelling bacteria. Fipronil bait (Chipco® Firestar™) is a slow acting toxin that disrupts the insect’s nervous system through contact and stomach action. Fenoxycarb (Award™ and Logic®), or methoprene, (Extinguish™) and pyriproxyfen (Distance® and Spectracide®) are all insect growth regulators that prevent queens from producing new workers. Abamectin (Clinch™, Varsity™, Ascend™ and Raid®) bait acts both as an insect growth regulator and a toxin. One key to the efficiency of baits is that the insecticide gets to the queen. [i] (The stage is very dark. The sound of breathing can be heard, and then the scrape of a foot against something solid. The darkness holds in this state for a few more moments. The breathing dwindles to a spoken whisper, low and indistinct. These noises echo from within a narrow space. They grow closer as they repeat. The audience waits. A flicker of light erupts from below stage right. It swells and diminishes like a heart-beat. The stage is modelled on the inside of a cavern. Its edges fill all angles of the stage except the obligatory missing section. It is through this absence that the audience watches. Two men clamber up from a tiny recess in the simulated stone. An older man carries a flame set upon a gnarled tree root. The dank odour of tar drifts out from the flame as the men catch their breath. There is only an iota of light. The audience waits.) Older man: Though the radiation from kryptonite is detrimental to all life, it is especially harmful to Kryptonians such as Superman. Man: Kryptonite is the ore of kryptonium, and usually has a green hue. Older man: Although in its red form, kryptonite is perhaps at its most unpredictable. Man: Red kryptonite is especially volatile. (pauses, looking at his companion) No two chunks of red kryptonite have the same effect on Superman. (The two men drift. The older man's lantern casts the only light in the theatre. A series of hand outlines, shaped in ochre powder, are met by the men's gaze. In turn they each press an outstretched hand to one of these, muttering under their breath. After this ceremony they find seating spaces and buckle into crossed legs. As well as his flame the older man carries a small, leather pouch over one shoulder which he now sets down. The men are dishevelled and dirty with tar smoke.) Older man: Red kryptonite turned Superman into a powerless giant and a dwarf. Man: (thinking at first) Turned him into a terrifying Kryptonian dragon. Older man: Red kryptonite drove Superman insane for a period of forty-eight hours. Man: Made Superman unable to see anything green; grow incredibly long hair, nails, and beard. Older man: Grow fat; gain the ability to read thoughts; grow a third eye in the back of his head. Man: Lose his invulnerability along the left side of his body. Older man: Split into an evil Superman and a good Clark Kent. Man: Become apathetic. Older man: Be rendered unable to speak or write anything but Kryptonese. (The older man opens his pouch, passing his companion the lantern. He pulls out handfuls of twigs, moss and dried fungal remnants and begins to build a fire.) Man: Grow an extra set of arms. Older man: Become clumsy. Man: Swap bodies with the person nearest him. Older man: Transfer his powers. Man: Rapidly age. Older man: Go through multiple personality changes. Man: And have his skin rendered transparent... Older man: ...overloading him with solar power. (By now the fire has been built. The younger man lights the fire. As it begins to burn the light of the stage naturally increases. The cave walls are covered with ancient depictions of horses, reindeer, mammoth and bears, as well as the outlined hand-prints.) Man: (thinking again) Red kryptonite made flames shoot out of Superman’s mouth and endowed him with the power to make his wishes come true. Older man: (weary) Transformed Superman into an infant with the mind of an adult. Man: Robbed Superman of his super powers and afflicted him with total amnesia. (From the fire the older man now draws a length of charred wood. He stubs the stick into the ground, and pinches at its end, blowing away the cinders until only a charcoal tip remains. The older man attempts to stand, eventually requiring his companion’s assistance. He walks the length of the cave, touching his fingers against the animal depictions. Coming upon the naive likeness of a human amongst the animals he taps it in recognition, and begins to mark the figure with his charcoal tool. His marks are simple strokes, but they highlight the human form until it is transformed into something quite different. His companion speaks as he continues to draw.) Man: Is that everything? (The older man continues transforming the painting. From its head he draws a set of antennae. Its torso he elongates into a tear-shaped thorax, adding new limbs onto the extended body. He finishes, stepping back. The human now resembles a giant ant, defined in charcoal against the surface of rock.) Older man: Red kryptonite once endowed Superman with the head and antennae of a giant ant.[ii] Ants! Giant fucking ants! Millions of them, with spiny knees and quivering mandibles trickling with deathly secretions. They advanced upon Earth, taking Tokyo at first, seeming to rise up as one black monolith and wash across the terrified metropolis below. They came from the moon - or perhaps from outer space - although tales of cracks in the Earth opening to an ant-shaped hell beneath could not be founded on rumour alone. From Asia they advanced West, pulling behind them the glistening entrails of human civilisation in one terrific globule. To cross the Himalayas they congregated along its flank in layers, cemented one upon the other with human gunk, until a sheer wall of arthropod crept like a heavenly bridge, up and over the mountain peaks. By the time they reached Iraq they had crushed five hundred armies beneath their scurrying limbs. The viscous mass of human dead they trailed behind them now teemed with the remains of fighter jets, gun turrets and ten thousand war tanks - all minced together in the goo. On a dusty plain, not far from the city of Baghdad, the horde began to gather. Within hours a vast swathe of earth and human cement had been erected into a cone-shaped tower of Babel. The human armies kept their distance defending what little remained of the terrified populous; cursing their inevitable slip from the top of the food-chain; peering back into the evolutionary quagmire from whence they had risen. From the entrance of their Biblical tower the insects extended, like a waiting procession, along the walls of Babylon. With their antennae pushed up high and their thoraxes lowered onto the hot desert ground it was then that their Queen appeared in the sky. In her tree-trunk sized jaws she carried a great, green meteorite, which she set down at the gates of her new ant city. The rock emanated from within a pulse of fire which seemed to re-energise the ant millions; causing their many limbs to chatter against one another; causing the whole of Earth to tremble in anticipation. There are many contradictory tales of what happened next. Some say that the green rock cracked, tearing apart the Earth with its power. Others claim that the Queen ant shed an outer skin, revealing beneath a pair of golden wings. The most accepted story though, and the one to which I subscribe, is that slowly the Queen rolled the green rock in through the gates of the tower, her army following behind her, until the entire swarm had disappeared into the awesome nest. Today the new Babel tower glints in the sun, its upper-most pinnacle piercing through the thin desert clouds. It is said that one day, when the ants have waited out their restful sleep, our waking nightmare will drive them from the tower once again. But I don't believe that, knowing that in time all monuments must crumble to the earth which bore them. Instead I listen carefully for the pulse of the Queen's cargo. Turning my ear to the trembling sky. Waiting for it to speak of the journeys on which it has travelled. Hoping that somewhere, out in the depths of outer space, the ant Queen is revered as the saviour of her alien race. By morning the upturned plastic mushroom was empty of its poison, as piece by piece the ant bait had been dragged, carried and manoeuvred into the nest. In places a fine yellow dust now stained the kitchen's cracked linoleum. A dust composed of corn grits soaked with delicious, deadly poison.END [i] Extracted from University of Arkansas web archive.[ii] Dialogue text compiled from online sources: Superman wiki, Wikipedia& SupermanHomePage. by Daniel Rourke

A Bomb Won't Go Off Here

Mon, 18 May 2009 04:15:00 +0000

by Daniel Rourke A bomb won't go off here... (Click to enlarge) Y: I like the use of the past tense. Saying “weeks before” sets up the seen* as a narrative. X: Oh yeah. Y: It’s almost like the story’s not ended, like we now are still part of the story. X: And that there’s people there all the time. Y: That they are always on this street. X: Yeah, in that little square. And they’ve always all got long, blondish hair. Shopping. Y: Does it mean that a bomb might go off somewhere else? X: That’s exactly what it means. It means that a bomb’s not going to go off here, but it is going to go off somewhere else. Y: Somewhere where people aren’t more suspicious? X: Not people: shoppers. Y: Somewhere where shoppers aren’t more suspicious. X: There’s no such thing as people – there’s just shoppers. Y: By reporting someone studying the CCTV cameras to the police the shopper didn’t become anything of greater value than a shopper. They managed to stay as a shopper and yet still act in a way which protected the rights of all shoppers everywhere. X: That is the best thing you can be for society. A citizen is secondary to a shopper. For the good of the country there is nothing better than a shopper who reports suspicious looking un-shoppers. If you’re an un-shopper, and you are in a shopping precinct, then you’re not there for the good of the country. * A play on the words ‘seen’ and ‘scene’ is alluded to here and for the remainder of the conversation. ------------------ Y: There’s a couple of things I’m a bit worried about in this seen. One is the location of the photographer who took this picture - and I’m not talking location in space, but actually location as a member of society. Nobody there is watching them. Nobody is aware of their identity as a photographer, giving them the perfect identity of the perfect terrorist. They are un-seen. They are in fact making the seen. There wouldn’t be a ‘seen’ without them. The other thing that I am worried about is the woman in pink on the left there. She looks a bit suspicious to me. She isn’t shopping. X: She is shopping! She’s a shopper. You don’t have to worry about her. Y: She doesn’t look like a shopper, she looks like a looker. She looks like a studier. She is studying the seen. X: Yeah, but she is looking at the seen with a sense of: “Yes, this is ours and we have to protect it.” Y: But do you not think that the location of the pink lady on the left is very similar to some of the shadowy figures that Salvador Dali placed within his works? Where the viewer – the shadow of the viewer – is located within the frame. X: [gasp] The pink lady is us! Y: The pink lady on the left is meant to be us, looking on the happy seen. X: The undisrupted – the un-bombed seen. Y: She’s thinking: “A bomb won’t go off here, because weeks before I reported a viewer – similar to myself – studying this seen.” X: Yeah. And it’s not just that that one ‘shopping in’ of one suspicious non-shopper protected the seen from that one occasion of being bombed – it has prevented that seen from ever being bombed. Y: A bomb will never go off here, because sometime before this photo was taken a shopper – perhaps the woman in pink on the left – reported someone studying the CCTV cameras, who wasn’t this photographer. X: No. Not this one. Y: This photographer is more interested in studying the shoppers than they are in studying the CCTV cameras. Although the CCTV cameras are in the seen. X: I am guessing that this suspicious person who was studying the CCTV cameras – and not shopping – was suspicious because they were just in the middle of town, in the middle of the day, on a week day. Why weren’t they at work? Y: Well they were. They were doing their job. Terror. X: This place, it’s a very pedestrianised, a very... Y: ...bland. X: A very bland town. A town where shoppers live. If this was a really beautiful city centre, like Bath Spa, if this was a beautiful Spa town, there would be people taking pictures all over the place of a nice Georgian building here, a nice Georgian building there. I am worried because how am I supposed to tell, when I next go shopping, who is taking pictures in a bad way and whose taking pictures in a good way? Y: It’s obvious that this seen suggests to us - the lady in pink on the left - that from now on one should shop in as bland locations as possible, in places which visually, aesthetically, have nothing going for them whatsoever. Because it’s only in a place like that that one can be absolutely sure that anybody taking photographs of or near CCTV cameras are doing so for terroristic purposes. X: Yeah. ------------------ Y: I’m a bit concerned about the notion of not relying on others. X: You can’t rely on other shoppers. They are only concerned about the next bargain, in the next shop. You - as the good shopper, who is so expert at shopping that you can get your shopping done and have time to notice what suspicious things are going on around you - you can only rely on yourself to do that. It’s up to you to protect everybody, but mainly yourself and your own shopping. Y: There is something about the notion of shopping that completely revolves around the individual. It’s that freedom that we get in a capitalistic society to choose what we want from a selection of identical goods in a series of identical shops, it’s being able to wander through the streets making the choices that define you. But there is something very much related to that in the action of the terrorist. Yeah, ok, every shopping centre, every CCTV camera is the same, but the terrorist has the right to choose which shopping centre or CCTV camera to bomb. They reduce the individual even further to a state of nothingness. There is the freedom to shop, but there is no freedom in being bombed. X: But there’s no freedom in not being bombed. We are not being bombed, and they are not being bombed, but the last thing they are is free. Y: They are not free from not being bombed. X: No. Y: They are trapped by the fact that... X: ...by the fact that they are not being bombed. But if they were bombed... Y: That would be true freedom. The London Metropolitan Police's new campaign is available online for all concerned citizens to study at their leisure: Counter Terrorism Posters. by Daniel Rourke

Obama’s Address to the State of Non-belief

Tue, 05 May 2009 15:31:00 +0000

“We know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus - and non-believers.” Barack Hussein Obama, 20th of January, 2009

(Originally published at 3quarksdaily) As a British citizen I watched the inauguration speech of America’s 44th President with a warm but distanced interest. But as someone who was brought up in a non-religious family, and has thrived without a belief in a deity, I listened to Barack Obama’s words with fascination, concern and hope. Obama’s message to his nation and the greater world was one of inclusion. A broad ranging speech during which America’s new leader threw his arms wide around those who believe in America, and even wider around those who perhaps do not. The matter of ‘belief’ resonated throughout Obama’s address: the belief in God, the belief in America and the belief in Obama himself. Yet in regard of that single word a debate among ‘non-believers’ has sprung up. A debate as to whether Obama’s nod to the millions of Americans who call themselves non-theists, atheists or agnostics should have been wrapped up in such a semantically negative phrase. To pick apart the significance of the phrase ‘non-believers’ it pays to look at the word ‘atheist’: a label which is often analysed by theistic and nontheistic communities alike. A common etymological error connects “a”, from the ancient Greek for “without”, and “theism”, denoting a belief in God. Thus, an a-theist is considered to be someone without a belief in God. The true etymology of the word though is better derived from the Greek root “atheos” meaning merely “godless”. Thus athe(os)ism is closer in kind to a “godless belief system”, rather than “without a belief in god/gods”. This analysis, although tiresome, is worth attending to in regards Obama’s inclusive rhetoric, because as a minority non-theists are some of the most pilloried in American society. In an infamous 2004 study, conducted by the University of Minnesota’s department of sociology, 39.5 percent of those interviewed stated that atheists “did not share their vision of American society”: Asked the same question about Muslims and homosexuals, the figures dropped to a slightly less depressing 26.3 percent and 22.6 percent, respectively. For Hispanics, Jews, Asian-Americans and African-Americans, they fell further to 7.6 percent, 7.4 percent, 7.0 percent and 4.6 percent, respectively. The study contains other results, but these are sufficient to underline its gist: Atheists are seen by many Americans (especially conservative Christians) as alien and are, in the words of sociologist Penny Edgell, the study’s lead researcher, “a glaring exception to the rule of increasing tolerance over the last 30 years.” - link The suggestion that an atheist’s concern for their country is of a different quality to that of a believer is enormously telling. Has the common misunderstanding of atheism as a lack of belief come to be associated in America not just with God, but with morality, patriotism and an empathy for others? A 1987 interview conducted by Rob Sherman with George Bush senior seems to attest to this. Whilst in the office of Vice President, Mr. Bush stated: “I don’t know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic. This is one nation under God.” A comment that has rung in the ears of nontheists ever since. It is this apparent mis-conception about non-belief that makes Obama’s comment seem all the more thoughtless. Surely, in a speech of such fine rhetoric, so minutely crafted to chime with the thoughts and feelings of an entire nation - and of a world beyond - a phrase weighted as strongly as ‘non-believers’ should have been handled more carefully? It is doubtful that it was included as an afterthought; doubtful indeed that Barack Obama and his team of talented speech writers did not deliberate over its usage and inclusion in the most important piece of oratory they had ever crafted. How many Presidents of the last century have talked of ’non-believers’ in such patriotic tones? How much recent American policy has cited atheists and agnostics as integral to the character of the nation; as a minority worth even calling attention to? A closer look at the phrase is necessary, I believe, to truly grasp its significance as one of the most subtle shifts in political rhetoric the Obama team has yet delivered. Another extract from the inaugural address begins to clarify our semantic quarrel: “On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.” Here Obama asks for the narrative of American life, of American policy, to be redrafted. A call to a young nation to “pick [itself] up, dust [itself] off, and begin again” the work of building its identity. Obama’s call for America to unite under its founding principles is a definitively secular call; a call to the American State to be once again separated from any religion, just as its founding fathers had intended. For too long the identity of America has been infused with a kind of Christian grand-narrative, a sense that if God had placed mankind on the Earth to achieve greatness, and if America was the world’s greatest nation, then God must have always intended for the Christian story to also be the American story. This dangerous ethos, often echoed in the rhetoric of the Bush administration, is arguably responsible for the current tension between America, the Islamic world and beyond. This dangerous ethos, once reassessed through the eyes of a secular nation, bears more relationship to a fundamentalist doctrine than it does to a moral bedrock for American policy. By placing ‘non-believers’ at the end of a list of religious denominations Obama and his team were speaking not to the religious beliefs that unite Americans, but the moral and social bonds that tie them together as communities. When we look at the Christian community, at the Jewish community, at the Muslim and Hindu communities, the sharing of ‘beliefs’, becomes much more irrelevant. Two distinct people may call themselves Christian, but as a Protestant and a Catholic their core religious beliefs will be very different. By citing the non-believer community in his “patchwork” identity Obama was talking of the irrelevance of any particular view of God in the constitution of the American nation. His message to the Muslim world to ”seek [together] a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect” was a message to all to put particular beliefs in Gods aside and get on with the common goal of restitching our patchwork world. A message to: “Tie up your camel first, then put your trust in Allah.” - link As a non-American, I can believe in similar ideals. As a proud atheist I can attest to the fact that not believing in a God does not mean I don’t have beliefs. After all, every one of us - Atheist or Agnostic, Christian or Muslim, Jewish or Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, Baha’i, Shinto or Rastafarian - are non-believers in something.

The Next Great Discontinuity: The Data Deluge

Tue, 05 May 2009 14:35:00 +0000

Speed is the elegance of thought, which mocks stupidity, heavy and slow. Intelligence thinks and says the unexpected; it moves with the fly, with its flight. A fool is defined by predictability… But if life is brief, luckily, thought travels as fast as the speed of light. In earlier times philosophers used the metaphor of light to express the clarity of thought; I would like to use it to express not only brilliance and purity but also speed. In this sense we are inventing right now a new Age of Enlightenment… A lot of… incomprehension… comes simply from this speed. I am fairly glad to be living in the information age, since in it speed becomes once again a fundamental category of intelligence. Michel Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time

(Originally published at 3quarksdaily · Link to Part One) Human beings are often described as the great imitators: We perceive the ant and the termite as part of nature. Their nests and mounds grow out of the Earth. Their actions are indicative of a hidden pattern being woven by natural forces from which we are separated. The termite mound is natural, and we, the eternal outsiders, sitting in our cottages, our apartments and our skyscrapers, are somehow not. Through religion, poetry, or the swift skill of the craftsman smearing pigment onto canvas, humans aim to encapsulate that quality of existence that defies simple description. The best art, or so it is said, brings us closer to attaining a higher truth about the world that remains elusive from language, that perhaps the termite itself embodies as part of its nature. Termite mounds are beautiful, but were built without a concept of beauty. Termite mounds are mathematically precise, yet crawling through their intricate catacombs cannot be found one termite in comprehension of even the simplest mathematical constituent. In short, humans imitate and termites merely are. This extraordinary idea is partly responsible for what I referred to in Part One of this article as The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. It leads us to consider not only the human organism as distinct from its surroundings, but it also forces us to separate human nature from its material artefacts. We understand the termite mound as integral to termite nature, but are quick to distinguish the axe, the wheel, the book, the skyscraper and the computer network from the human nature that bore them. When we act, through art, religion or with the rational structures of science, to interface with the world our imitative (mimetic) capacity has both subjective and objective consequence. Our revelations, our ideas, stories and models have life only insofar as they have a material to become invested through. The religion of the dance, the stone circle and the summer solstice is mimetically different to the religion of the sermon and the scripture because the way it interfaces with the world is different. Likewise, it is only with the consistency of written and printed language that the technical arts could become science, and through which our ‘modern’ era could be built. Dances and stone circles relayed mythic thinking structures, singular, imminent and ethereal in their explanatory capacities. The truth revealed by the stone circle was present at the interface between participant, ceremony and summer solstice: a synchronic truth of absolute presence in the moment. Anyone reading this will find truth and meaning through grapholectic interface. Our thinking is linear, reductive and bound to the page. It is reliant on a diachronic temporality that the pen, the page and the book hold in stasis for us. Imitation alters the material world, which in turn affects the texture of further imitation. If we remove the process from its material interface we lose our objectivity. In doing so we isolate the single termite from its mound and, after much careful study, announce that we have reduced termite nature to its simplest constituent. The reason for the tantalizing involutions here is obviously that intelligence is relentlessly reflexive, so that even the external tools that it uses to implement its workings become ‘internalized’, that is, part of its own reflexive process… To say writing is artificial is not to condemn it but to praise it. Like other artificial creations and indeed more than any other, it is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realisation of fuller, interior, human potentials. Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy

Anyone reading this article cannot fail but be aware of the changing interface between eye and text that has taken place over the past two decades or so. New Media – everything from the internet database to the Blackberry – has fundamentally changed the way we connect with each other, but it has also altered the way we connect with information itself. The linear, diachronic substance of the page and the book have given way to a dynamic textuality blurring the divide between authorship and readership, expert testament and the simple accumulation of experience. The main difference between traditional text-based systems and newer, data-driven ones is quite simple: it is the interface. Eyes and fingers manipulate the book, turning over pages in a linear sequence in order to access the information stored in its printed figures. For New Media, for the digital archive and the computer storage network, the same information is stored sequentially in databases which are themselves hidden to the eye. To access them one must commit a search or otherwise run an algorithm that mediates the stored data for us. The most important distinction should be made at the level of the interface, because, although the database as a form has changed little over the past 50 years of computing, the Human Control Interfaces (HCI) we access and manipulate that data through are always passing from one iteration to another. Stone circles interfacing the seasons stayed the same, perhaps being used in similar rituals over the course of a thousand years of human cultural accumulation. Books, interfacing text, language and thought, stay the same in themselves from one print edition to the next, but as a format, books have changed very little in the few hundred years since the printing press. The computer HCI is most different from the book in that change is integral to it structure. To touch a database through a computer terminal, through a Blackberry or iPhone, is to play with data at incredible speed: Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition… Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies. At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics… This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves. Wired Magazine, The End of Theory, June 2008

And as the amount of data has expanded exponentially, so have the interfaces we use to access that data and the models we build to understand that data. On the day that Senator John McCain announced his Vice Presidential Candidate the best place to go for an accurate profile of Sarah Palin was not the traditional media: it was Wikipedia. In an age of instant, global news, no newspaper could keep up with the knowledge of the cloud. The Wikipedia interface allowed knowledge about Sarah Palin from all levels of society to be filtered quickly and efficiently in real-time. Wikipedia acted as if it was encyclopaedia, as newspaper as discussion group and expert all at the same time and it did so completely democratically and at the absence of a traditional management pyramid. The interface itself became the thinking mechanism of the day, as if the notes every reader scribbled in the margins had been instantly cross-checked and added to the content. In only a handful of years the human has gone from merely dipping into the database to becoming an active component in a human-cloud of data. The interface has begun to reflect back upon us, turning each of us into a node in a vast database bigger than any previous material object. Gone are the days when clusters of galaxies had to a catalogued by an expert and entered into a linear taxonomy. Now, the same job is done by the crowd and the interface, allowing a million galaxies to be catalogued by amateurs in the same time it would have taken a team of experts to classify a tiny percentage of the same amount. This method of data mining is called ‘crowdsourcing’ and it represents one of the dominant ways in which raw data will be turned into information (and then knowledge) over the coming decades. Here the cloud serves as more than a metaphor for the group-driven interface, becoming a telling analogy for the trans-grapholectic culture we now find ourselves in. To grasp the topological shift in our thought patterns it pays to move beyond the interface and look at a few of the linear, grapholectic models that have undergone change as a consequence of the information age. One of these models is evolution, a biological theory the significance of which we are still in the process of discerning:

If anyone now thinks that biology is sorted, they are going to be proved wrong too. The more that genomics, bioinformatics and many other newer disciplines reveal about life, the more obvious it becomes that our present understanding is not up to the job. We now gaze on a biological world of mind-boggling complexity that exposes the shortcomings of familiar, tidy concepts such as species, gene and organism. A particularly pertinent example [was recently provided in New Scientist] - the uprooting of the tree of life which Darwin used as an organising principle and which has been a central tenet of biology ever since. Most biologists now accept that the tree is not a fact of nature - it is something we impose on nature in an attempt to make the task of understanding it more tractable. Other important bits of biology - notably development, ageing and sex - are similarly turning out to be much more involved than we ever imagined. As evolutionary biologist Michael Rose at the University of California, Irvine, told us: “The complexity of biology is comparable to quantum mechanics.” New Scientist, Editorial, January 2009

As our technologies became capable of gathering more data than we were capable of comprehending, a new topology of thought, reminiscent of the computer network, began to emerge. For the mindset of the page and the book science could afford to be linear and diachronic. In the era of The Data Deluge science has become more cloud-like, as theories for everything from genetics to neuroscience, particle physics to cosmology have shed their linear constraints. Instead of seeing life as a branching tree, biologists are now speaking of webs of life, where lineages can intersect and interact, where entire species are ecological systems in themselves. As well as seeing the mind as an emergent property of the material brain, neuroscience and philosophy have started to consider the mind as manifest in our extended, material environment. Science has exploded, and picking up the pieces will do no good. Through the topology of the network we have begun to perceive what Michel Serres calls ‘The World Object’, an ecology of interconnections and interactions that transcends and subsumes the causal links propounded by grapholectic culture. At the limits of science a new methodology is emerging at the level of the interface, where masses of data are mined and modelled by systems and/or crowds which themselves require no individual understanding to function efficiently. Where once we studied events and ideas in isolation we now devise ever more complex, multi-dimensional ways for those events and ideas to interconnect; for data sources to swap inputs and output; for outsiders to become insiders. Our interfaces are in constant motion, on trajectories that curve around to meet themselves, diverge and cross-pollinate. Thought has finally been freed from temporal constraint, allowing us to see the physical world, life, language and culture as multi-dimensional, fractal patterns, winding the great yarn of (human) reality: The advantage that results from it is a new organisation of knowledge; the whole landscape is changed. In philosophy, in which elements are even more distanced from one another, this method at first appears strange, for it brings together the most disparate things. People quickly crit[cize] me for this… But these critics and I no longer have the same landscape in view, the same overview of proximities and distances. With each profound transformation of knowledge come these upheavals in perception. Michel Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time

The Next Great Discontinuity: Part One

Mon, 04 May 2009 14:17:00 +0000

Grapholectic Thought and The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness (Originally published at 3quarksdaily · Link to Part Two) “There are things,” Christoph Martin Wieland… contended, “which by their very nature are so dependent upon human caprice that they either exist or do not exist as soon as we desire that they should or should not exist.”…We are, at the very least, reminded that seeing is a talent that needs to be cultivated, as John Berger saliently argued in his popular Ways of Seeing (1972) “…perspective makes the single eye the centre of the visible world.” John A. Mccarthy, Remapping Reality

From the Greco-Roman period onwards humans have perceived themselves at the centre of a grand circle:

The circle is physical: a heliocentric vision of the cosmos, where the Earth travels around the sun. The circle is biological: an order of nature, perhaps orchestrated by a benign creator, where the animals and plants exist to satisfy the needs of mankind. And according to Sigmund Freud, in his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, the circle is psychological: where a central engine of reason rules over the chaos of passion and emotion.

The history of science maintains that progress – should one be comfortable in using such a term – contracted these perceptual loops. Indeed it was Freud himself, (the modest pivot of his own solar-system) who suggested that through the Copernican, Darwinian and Freudian “revolutions” mankind had transcended these “three great discontinuities” of thought and, “[uttered a] call to introspection”. If one were to speculate on the “great discontinuities” that followed, one might consider Albert Einstein’s relativistic model of space-time, or perhaps the work carried out by many “introspective” minds on quantum theory. Our position at the centre of the cosmos was offset by Copernicus; our position as a special kind of creature was demolished by Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. From Freud we inherited the capacity to see beneath the freedom of the individual; from Einstein and quantum theory we learnt to mistrust the mechanistic clock of space and time. From all we learnt, as John Berger so succinctly put it, that “…perspective makes the single eye the centre of the visible world.” Of course my mini-history of scientific revolution should not be taken itself as a “truth”. I draw it as a parable of progress, as one silken thread leading back through time’s circular labyrinth to my very own Ariadne. What I do maintain though, is that all great moves in human thought have come at the expense of a perceptual circle. That, if science, sociology, economics - or any modern system of knowledge - is to move beyond the constraints of its circle it must first decentre the “single eye”.

Scientific rational inquiry has revelled in the overturning of these “great discontinuities”, positioning each of them as a plotted point on the graph we understand as “progress”. We maintain, without any hint of irony, that we exist at the pinnacle of this irreversible line of diachronic time, that the further up the line we climb, the closer to “truth” we ascend. “…Reason is statistically distributed everywhere; no one can claim exclusive rights to it. [A] division… is [thus] echoed in the image, in the imaginary picture that one makes of time. Instead of condemning or excluding, one consigns a certain thing to antiquity, to archaism. One no longer says “false” but, rather, “out of date,” or “obsolete.” In earlier times people dreamed; now we think. Once people sang poetry; today we experiment efficiently. History is thus the projection of this very real exclusion into an imaginary, even imperialistic time. The temporal rupture is the equivalent of a dogmatic expulsion.” Michel Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time

According to Michel Serres “time” is the common misconception that pollutes all our models. In the scientific tradition knowledge is located at the present: a summation of all inquiry that has lead up to this point. This notion is extraordinarily powerful in its reasoning power, bringing all previous data together in one great cataclysm of meaning. It has spawned its own species of cliché, the type where science ‘landed us on the moon’ or ‘was responsible for the extinction of smallpox’ or ‘increased the life expectancy of the third world’. These types of truths are necessary – you will not find me arguing against that – but they are also only one notion of what “truth” amounts to. And it is here perhaps where the circumference of yet another perceptual circle materialises from out of the mist. Progress and diachronic time are symbiotically united: the one being incapable of meaningful existence without the other. Our modern notion of “truth” denies all wisdom that cannot be plotted on a graph; that cannot be traced backwards through the recorded evidence or textual archive. Our modern conceptions are, what Walter J. Ong calls, the consequence of a ‘grapholectic’ culture – that is, one reliant on the technologies of writing and/or print. Science, as we understand it, could not have arisen without a system of memorisation and retrieval that extended beyond the limits of an oral culture. In turn, modern religious practices are as much a consequence of ‘the written word’ as they are ‘the word of God’. The “truth” of science is similar in kind to the ”truth” of modern religion. It is the “truth” of the page; of a diachronic, grapholectic culture – a difficult ”truth” to swallow for those who maintain that ’dogma’ is only a religous vice. Dialectic cultures – ones which are based in oral traditions – do not consider history and time in the same way as grapholectic cultures. To the dialectic, meaning is reliant on what one can personally or culturally remember, rather than on what the extended memory of the page can hold in storage. Thus the attribution of meaning emerges from the present, synchronic situation, rather than being reliant on the consequences of past observation: “Some decades ago among the Tiv people of Nigeria the genealogies actually used orally in settling court disputes have been found to diverge considerably from the genealogies carefully recorded in writing by the British forty years earlier (because of the importance then, too, in court disputes). The later Tiv have maintained that they were using the same genealogies as forty years earlier and that the earlier written record was wrong. What had happened was that the later genealogies had been adjusted to the changed social relations among the Tiv: they were the same in that they functioned in the same way to regulate the real world. The integrity of the past was subordinate to the integrity of the present.” Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy

In the oral culture “truth” must be rooted in systems that are not time-reliant. As Karen Armstrong has oft noted, “a myth was an event which in some sense had happened once, but which also happened all the time.” Before the written tradition was used to brand Religious inclinations onto the page the flavour of myth was understood as its most valuable “truth”, rather than its ingredients. The transcendence of Buddha, of Brahmā or Jesus is a parable of existence, and not a true fact garnered from evidence and passed down in the pages of a book. Meaning is not to be found in final “truths”, but in the questioning of contexts; in the deliberation of what constitutes the circle. If we forget this then we commit, what A. N. Whitehead called, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: “This… consists in mistaking the abstract for the concrete. More specifically it involves setting up distinctions which disregard the genuine interconnections of things…. [The] fallacy occurs when one assumes that in expressing the space and time relations of a bit of matter it is unnecessary to say more than that it is present in a specific position in space at a specific time. It is Whitehead’s contention that it is absolutely essential to refer to other regions of space and other durations of time… [Another] general illustration of the fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness is… the notion that each real entity is absolutely separate and distinct from every other real entity, and that the qualities of each have no essential relation to the qualities of others.” A. H. Johnson, Whitehead’s Theory of Reality

Our error is to mistake grapholectic thought - thought maintained by writing and print - as the only kind of thought we are capable of. I predict that the next “great discontinuity” to be uncovered, the one that historians will look back upon as “the biggest shift in our understanding since Einstein”, will emerge not from the traditional laboratory, or from notions computed through the hazy-filters of written memory, but from our very notion of what it is for “events” to become “data” and for that data to become “knowledge”. The circle we now sit at the centre of, is one enclosed by the grapholectic perceptions we rely on to consider the circle in the first place. In order to shift it we will need a new method of transposing events that occur ‘outside’ the circle, into types of knowledge that have value ‘within’ the circle. This may sound crazy, even impossible in scope, but we may have already begun devising new ways for this kind of knowledge to reach us. Continued in… Part Two: The Data Deluge

Writing (Hyper)text and Image

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 15:07:00 +0000

A Polyptychal Discursion: This text, designed with its own concerns in mind, diverges on many trajectories, crossing over itself, intersecting its arguments and statements with images and forms which question the traditional logic of the essay. This text will become enabled not through a writer's statements, but through a reader's response. A spiral of concepts ruptures the words, burrowing underneath the palimpsest, pulling you, the reader, into the written phrase.

Response is required of any reading. The internet is a form capable of allowing a reader's response to influence the writer's trajectory; to send the written back into itself, melding its writer and its reader as one critical engagement.

This text requires your writing.