I swear this wasn't a setup. But you know, I had to come across something to cap the post the other day about art and museums and breaking down walls. I'd heard about this video called "Exit Through the Gift Shop" and I knew it was about street art. I guess it might be a hoax. It oughta be a hoax, but it doesn't really matter. It's about art, and not-art, and the guerrilla artists becoming all proprietary and snotty about what counts and what doesn't.
It's fun to watch. You should watch it! I'd thought I was going to have to pay to rent it, online or via DVD, but I found it free for the price of a few Geico commercials on hulu. What a world!!
Meanwhile, I downloaded the first chapter of this new book I learned about on the Colbert Report called All Things Shining written by the chair of philosophy at Harvard. I don't know. Maybe that was a hoax too. The guy didn't seem all that sharp, and when I downloaded his first chapter on my Kindle (someday I'll get up the nerve to find the pirate edition on bitTorrent, but I'm still way too boxed up for that) I thought Oh, so is that all you have to do? You stretch out a thought which might merit a sentence into a page or more, and you allow the reader to skim the entire chapter without ever really reading it in maybe 5 minutes or less. I mean why would I want to buy such a book. It's just a sluice for things I've already thought, and without footnotes fer Chrissakes!
After a while on the Colbert show though, he started to make some sense. Colbert was plenty funny, especially when the guy said that the trouble with our fallen age is that we've banished all the gods. He explained that the sacred is what you wouldn't laugh at, which you've got to admit made a pretty good setup line for Colbert.
But you know there's the thing. Art verges on the sacred, but it's always ironic these days. You don't exactly laugh at it, but you're never sure if you're being had. And if you're an art collector you'd better be a tastemaker too, or you could really be made a fool of. I mean, you never really know, do you? Maybe this guy will lose his chair at Harvard for pandering to the hoi polloi the way that the guy who wrote Love Story did way back when they used to let dogs into Yale.
I didn't really get the sense he'd be recruiting a lot of serious undergrads to the school, unless they were wanting to join the Hasty Pudding crowd, but anyhow none of this is what I really want to write about today. I already write until I'm blue in the face about this stuff, and sure, you know, I love David Foster Wallace and I love that the world of highbrow art is ending and that there's nothing cool to be a part of anymore without risking being an uber-dweeb. Except maybe saving little children in Africa.
Like, I mean Kevin Costner's a dweeb no matter what he does and so when he wants to sell the world an oil-spill eating machine we all just figure it's a hoot and what's he doing pretending to be an expert? All he wants to do is to make lots of money from the money he's already made.Who has the time to fact check it all? Google's mostly mum, reflecting only the echo chamber of too much data to parse the real from the just plain silly.
What I really want to talk about is the Grand Hoax. The Jesus Hoax and the Confucius Hoax and the oh my God it all takes so long to load now that you have to wait for Google to catalog your ads and stats and the multimedia flashy stuff to load and it's almost not worth it to even try to fact check.
But you know, Jesus was a man who came along at about that time when thought was turning into literature and solidified that whole thing about human agency. Alphas and Omegas and ultimately the very idea of an ultimate God who was the Inception of be-all and end-all but very definitely the embodiment of agency. Or the disembodiment of agency, take your pick.
But you know, Confucius, who I like in some ways better, was doing the same thing but not going all ultimate about agency. In fact you might say he was more about conformance to natural law and the whole idea that this could be done society-wide, and not just individually like the Taoists were all about. Not being mono-Gods Confucius and LaoZi never did have to duke it out about who is ultimately right.
So I want to make of the two opposing dudes some kind of yin-yang. A global humanity yin-yang where on the one hand you're all worried about agency and origins and endings and on the other you're more worried about the social conscience and how to conform to it, and they both find their chicken/egg origins at about the same historical time of coming to actual consciousness when words were written and what we call thought now first started to happen.
We stopped just murdering and killing and disembodying excellence the way that that Harvard philosopher seems to want to go back to (at least he's not all philosophizing about language and nevermind the meaning). We started to worry about the proper and moral and decent way to live and invented all these hoax-like orthodoxies about it which got written down and codified and mostly became big excuses for killing on a vaster scale, but at least we weren't going to laugh about it. Or gloat in it.
Maybe it's time for another great transformation. Maybe we really can get serious again and find something all shining that isn't art with its tongue in its cheeky cheek. Maybe we get that grand titration yin/yang thing spinning so fast that we stop worrying about truth and illusion and right and wrong and who's on first and they both kind of come together in a man-as-god-ha-ha-only-kidding kind of way that doesn't involve so very much inhumanity to man.
Well you know, I'm just another Mr. Brainwash. My cup looks like a giant version of those miniature goblets you use for eyewash, from which maybe you drink a runneth over Mory's cup and be merry. I don't know how to stretch out a decent thought that might be worth a sentence into a whole page. But I can work it out.
Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Distributed Anomalies
I am struck by Google's announcement this morning - or some reporter's discovery - that they will offer high-definition tours of various art galleries, mostly clustered for now on the East Coast. This promises to break down museum walls, and expose their collections to a vastly larger and more varied audience of viewers.
For certain pieces, the online viewer will be privileged to inspect the work from an extremely close-up vantage, perhaps taking time beyond what might be comfortable in the actual museum. One imagines students and art historians now having the chance to brush up their sense of that piece they might already know about. One imagines the viewing public enriched.
Over the weekend, result of the usual random confluences which determine any life's path, I traveled into downtown LA to immerse myself in the "Suprasensorial" exhibit at the Geffen Temporary Contemporary and now seemingly permanent extension of the MOCA. This installation featured flashback pieces brought north from the more Southerly and more Latin Americas. These represented by now historic attempts to break down the wall between appreciator and artist: to remove the object from its frame.
In what could only be called a literalistic rendition, museum visitors were even invited to immerse themselves in a swimming pool, bathed also in light and video. Right beyond this piece's wall, I tried to follow a gallery talk about the exhibit; above the din of swimming children splashing over the wall, and through the ever-dropping transmission of a portable wireless sound system, my head swam and promised to ache.
It could have been a useful talk, but the flashing catalog of images from the original installations at least gave me solid grounding in what I was about to experience. These were conceptual conjectures thrown to me, and nothing much of talent to them. Nothing much outside the heads of their creators and so I would be the artist, the actual creator. I would make of my own experience something other from everyday living.
For those my age, there was nothing new about these retro works. The term "contemporary" was bizarrely shifted, as I wandered among neon and schematic "rooms" filled with primary colors, in fashions once so favored through Plexiglas gels along 70's lines. Yellowing CRT screens would react to my presence or I could penetrate the rain storm of hanging vinyl strings. Just another day in the life. Even boring in its way, in contrast to a contemporary shopping complex.
What has happened to such art? Had it always been displaced to South America, and would the notion of releasing art from its framed containment now remain itself framed in a perpetuated state of coming into being?
All art is now performance art, right? And the audience has the right to remain passive, despite and because of all the interactive technologies, so called, deploying themselves across the planet. Participatory art will always remain stillborn. Or anonymous.
Time was that gonzo theater audiences might be dragged out into the street as part of the show. I even remember a literal net being cast over those of us in an "audience." Animal offal revealed by hatchet blows, blood dripping from A.I.R. loft's over-sheetrocked walls back when they themselves, these lofts, blurred the boundaries between art and work and life.
Down in New York's new SoHo, I remember visiting a video installation within which was the actual living object of the realtime display. I watched him languidly wiping his ass, glad that there was no smell which escaped the space-capsule-sized enclosure where he carried on his day-to-day.
And so Google now allows and even encourages us to stay as far from the fray as possible, and who would argue that this is not wondrous and grand. That we may appreciate those things once reserved for the higher classes, just as we may freely download classic music and displace the money-making back up onto the stage where it belongs. Disclosing only as much of our secret desires as might be repaid by marketing placements on our screens.
Rupert Murdoch wants to place the stopper back into the online free download drain now to reserve his exclusive profits. You will pay to look under his tent for special morsels: salacious gossip or privileged news.
Even as the walls come down all around and about us, reminding us of what happened once so long ago when Chinese students spilled out from their academies. Following on the inspiration of that anonymous tank-boy way back on Tiananmen containment square,we thought all the walls would topple.
Tunisia, Egypt with Russia looking longingly on, but never here. Never where the performance art has now infected government and we wait to be administered to. While the action spills out into the streets elsewhere over the globe. Instigated by homebound tweets and Facebook outrage. Empowered.
And we wait. We want our entertainment now. We want our education free, along with libertarian unbound information. But what will we do with it? Will we only watch? Will we only arise when the radiation which knows no boundaries, the CAT scans which accumulate without record beyond our faulty recall, the endless ways that we can and must and will find to probe for to burn away to endlessly power and slap with the label green those things which derail all promises of eternity.
Snow storms blanket our sleeping recumbent receptive and ever reclusive minds. Unbound. Snowbound. Rebounding main. There would be an awakening, but that we are all so receptive to it.
For certain pieces, the online viewer will be privileged to inspect the work from an extremely close-up vantage, perhaps taking time beyond what might be comfortable in the actual museum. One imagines students and art historians now having the chance to brush up their sense of that piece they might already know about. One imagines the viewing public enriched.
Over the weekend, result of the usual random confluences which determine any life's path, I traveled into downtown LA to immerse myself in the "Suprasensorial" exhibit at the Geffen Temporary Contemporary and now seemingly permanent extension of the MOCA. This installation featured flashback pieces brought north from the more Southerly and more Latin Americas. These represented by now historic attempts to break down the wall between appreciator and artist: to remove the object from its frame.
In what could only be called a literalistic rendition, museum visitors were even invited to immerse themselves in a swimming pool, bathed also in light and video. Right beyond this piece's wall, I tried to follow a gallery talk about the exhibit; above the din of swimming children splashing over the wall, and through the ever-dropping transmission of a portable wireless sound system, my head swam and promised to ache.
It could have been a useful talk, but the flashing catalog of images from the original installations at least gave me solid grounding in what I was about to experience. These were conceptual conjectures thrown to me, and nothing much of talent to them. Nothing much outside the heads of their creators and so I would be the artist, the actual creator. I would make of my own experience something other from everyday living.
For those my age, there was nothing new about these retro works. The term "contemporary" was bizarrely shifted, as I wandered among neon and schematic "rooms" filled with primary colors, in fashions once so favored through Plexiglas gels along 70's lines. Yellowing CRT screens would react to my presence or I could penetrate the rain storm of hanging vinyl strings. Just another day in the life. Even boring in its way, in contrast to a contemporary shopping complex.
What has happened to such art? Had it always been displaced to South America, and would the notion of releasing art from its framed containment now remain itself framed in a perpetuated state of coming into being?
All art is now performance art, right? And the audience has the right to remain passive, despite and because of all the interactive technologies, so called, deploying themselves across the planet. Participatory art will always remain stillborn. Or anonymous.
Time was that gonzo theater audiences might be dragged out into the street as part of the show. I even remember a literal net being cast over those of us in an "audience." Animal offal revealed by hatchet blows, blood dripping from A.I.R. loft's over-sheetrocked walls back when they themselves, these lofts, blurred the boundaries between art and work and life.
Down in New York's new SoHo, I remember visiting a video installation within which was the actual living object of the realtime display. I watched him languidly wiping his ass, glad that there was no smell which escaped the space-capsule-sized enclosure where he carried on his day-to-day.
And so Google now allows and even encourages us to stay as far from the fray as possible, and who would argue that this is not wondrous and grand. That we may appreciate those things once reserved for the higher classes, just as we may freely download classic music and displace the money-making back up onto the stage where it belongs. Disclosing only as much of our secret desires as might be repaid by marketing placements on our screens.
Rupert Murdoch wants to place the stopper back into the online free download drain now to reserve his exclusive profits. You will pay to look under his tent for special morsels: salacious gossip or privileged news.
Even as the walls come down all around and about us, reminding us of what happened once so long ago when Chinese students spilled out from their academies. Following on the inspiration of that anonymous tank-boy way back on Tiananmen containment square,we thought all the walls would topple.
Tunisia, Egypt with Russia looking longingly on, but never here. Never where the performance art has now infected government and we wait to be administered to. While the action spills out into the streets elsewhere over the globe. Instigated by homebound tweets and Facebook outrage. Empowered.
And we wait. We want our entertainment now. We want our education free, along with libertarian unbound information. But what will we do with it? Will we only watch? Will we only arise when the radiation which knows no boundaries, the CAT scans which accumulate without record beyond our faulty recall, the endless ways that we can and must and will find to probe for to burn away to endlessly power and slap with the label green those things which derail all promises of eternity.
Snow storms blanket our sleeping recumbent receptive and ever reclusive minds. Unbound. Snowbound. Rebounding main. There would be an awakening, but that we are all so receptive to it.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
The Last Man: the Travesty of Attribution
No real surprise here, Mark Zuckerberg is Time's Person of the Year. Yes, sure, you could say that Facebook changed my life. In some technical sense, without it I wouldn't be on the West Coast and I wouldn't be "in a relationship."
Time magazine, again predictably, distinguishes the Man from the person depicted in the recent and very good film about Zuckerberg at Harvard. Many of us already know that even a documentary about someone's life is not that life. Even an article in Time, reported first person, is not reality in any sure sense of the term. But larger than Life is what the attribution is all about. A person, finally, who has no life apart from his public one. A person whose life is over, with nothing left inside.
More than anything else, Time's tradition is a recognition that we in the West want nothing more than to attribute things, ultimately to God, and perhaps along the way to folks who can drop out of things the rest of us would almost kill to be admitted to. It goes without saying that Zuckerberg is a "coding genius." I rather doubt it. But the narrative requires it. There's a clue in there as to veracity.
I once taught the History of Science to a bunch of gifted kids. I was committing a form of abuse in that I was way too busy trying to run the school to pretend that I could devote any serious time to preparing and teaching an actual class. So most of the sessions were bull sessions, and the only one excited, really, was me.
Taking advantage of my privilege to approve whatever the hell I wanted to do, I also remember having a really hard time getting the students to risk any conjectural position for the sake of opening a discussion. They must have been utterly stymied by what it was I wanted from them. Well, that's my excuse for doing all the talking.
And surely no-one shared my intellectual excitement when I offered up the example of 'who invented firearms anyhow?' It's very hard for us Westerners to rid the world of our models for reality where "ideas" are born on some inner side of the boundary of our minds. And then we impose these ideas on the world around us. We express ourselves, and we manipulate the dull stuff of reality until it takes on some shape that couldn't and didn't ever appear in nature without us.
But you know, before there were firearms, there were fireworks in China. Bamboo tubes filled with gunpowder, and plugged on each end. It doesn't take too much imagination to picture one of those stoppers popping out before the bamboo bursts and changing a non-directional percussion into the launching of a deadly projectile. This would not be so much an idea made real as it would be the discovery among artifacts of a new design which might require tweaking if ones goal were to enhance the deadliness of the projectile.
Zuckerberg is no inventor either. He found himself, like some boy who pulls a sword from a stone, at a certain place and at a certain time and exercised coding skills which - contrary to Time's assertion - lots and lots of people could exercise far better than he could. But they weren't where he was - Harvard - and they didn't see the nature of student socializing.
Perhaps like a blind man hearing sounds that no-one else pays any attention to, Zuckerberg decided to embody, in the form of Internet-based code, a machine to facilitate the vectors for socializing that he saw being excercized all around him.
And suddenly we're all back in touch with people we once knew in high school, or in college, and we're pushing the limits of those 150 or so people we have room for in our hearts as friends. But you have to wonder if serendipity is enhanced, or if, once again, we've found a way to channel serendipity, to boost the odds and to make it easier to roll the dice of everyday life to get a kind of seeming serendipity. Blind again to the really strange stuff happening all around us beyond the circle of those who already know us, or once did.
I don't have any strong opinion on the goodness or rightness of what Zuckeberg gets credited with. I think he's a little bit young to be called "Person of the Year" without at least doing that mirror thing Time did a couple of years ago, and crediting the rest of us with needing to be provided with the insights he apparently had about us.
Hell, if we keep pushing the paradigm, Time will have to declare a Baby Person of the Year, and as always, it will be coming up on Christmas where the choice becomes politically mandated. But really now, a couple of thousand years ago it was also the time and not the Man alone which was right for the Crossroads of humans coming to consciousness.
Even artists talking about their work (I've taken an unscientific poll across the years of my entire life so far) can't resist using terms which can be translated back into something approximately identical to 'expressing an idea.' Ultimately, this is an ego move, designed so that we can take credit for the accident of our talent, and our lucky position among social capital which made it possible to manipulate our environment in ways that fellow travelers in these cushy environs will appreciate.
I always listen for the artist who gets the Taoist notion of the uncarved block. The one who recognizes that the "intentional fallacy" is the stumbling block of the entire Western experiment. Artist as expert about the artist's own work is as idiotic as finding in Palin, Stern or Beck some intelligence just because they happen to command an audience. There's nothing there. There's emptiness and a robotic habit to apply the same technique to everything until it doesn't work anymore.
And that won't mean that the person has lost her touch. It just means the world of mankind has grown beyond it. And in the case of the plastic artist, the work really is worth more than the person. It endures as something which always was beyond its creator.
One might easily suppose that if Zuckerberg hadn't coded Facebook, someone else would have. Those other fallen-by-the-wayside attempters can kick themselves for being just a bit off from what we the people really wanted, or they can do what most of us do and be glad that we're not quite the emptied vessel which the accomplishment of perfect expression would mandate that we'd become.
It's OK to be normal, I hope. Being gifted is generally a liability. I mean, if you're a talented violinist, that means you're almost certain to be a failure at being the one people pay money to hear. Should you stop playing?
So, it's not Zuckerberg who can or should be credited with changing the Face of civilization. That was already well underway. He gets to be the focal point, and in a build-up to what Baby Jesus did, he gets to be both more and less than what the rest of us are.
Money is getting ready for post-oil reality, flowing into personalities, flowing into machine embodiments of ideas which never could occur in nature. But it is the nature of Nature to prevail. It is the nature of man, as animal, to disappear with nary a trace left behind. It won't be the words we spread on Facebook which endure. It won't be ethereal friends which take us home.
Time magazine, again predictably, distinguishes the Man from the person depicted in the recent and very good film about Zuckerberg at Harvard. Many of us already know that even a documentary about someone's life is not that life. Even an article in Time, reported first person, is not reality in any sure sense of the term. But larger than Life is what the attribution is all about. A person, finally, who has no life apart from his public one. A person whose life is over, with nothing left inside.
More than anything else, Time's tradition is a recognition that we in the West want nothing more than to attribute things, ultimately to God, and perhaps along the way to folks who can drop out of things the rest of us would almost kill to be admitted to. It goes without saying that Zuckerberg is a "coding genius." I rather doubt it. But the narrative requires it. There's a clue in there as to veracity.
I once taught the History of Science to a bunch of gifted kids. I was committing a form of abuse in that I was way too busy trying to run the school to pretend that I could devote any serious time to preparing and teaching an actual class. So most of the sessions were bull sessions, and the only one excited, really, was me.
Taking advantage of my privilege to approve whatever the hell I wanted to do, I also remember having a really hard time getting the students to risk any conjectural position for the sake of opening a discussion. They must have been utterly stymied by what it was I wanted from them. Well, that's my excuse for doing all the talking.
And surely no-one shared my intellectual excitement when I offered up the example of 'who invented firearms anyhow?' It's very hard for us Westerners to rid the world of our models for reality where "ideas" are born on some inner side of the boundary of our minds. And then we impose these ideas on the world around us. We express ourselves, and we manipulate the dull stuff of reality until it takes on some shape that couldn't and didn't ever appear in nature without us.
But you know, before there were firearms, there were fireworks in China. Bamboo tubes filled with gunpowder, and plugged on each end. It doesn't take too much imagination to picture one of those stoppers popping out before the bamboo bursts and changing a non-directional percussion into the launching of a deadly projectile. This would not be so much an idea made real as it would be the discovery among artifacts of a new design which might require tweaking if ones goal were to enhance the deadliness of the projectile.
Zuckerberg is no inventor either. He found himself, like some boy who pulls a sword from a stone, at a certain place and at a certain time and exercised coding skills which - contrary to Time's assertion - lots and lots of people could exercise far better than he could. But they weren't where he was - Harvard - and they didn't see the nature of student socializing.
Perhaps like a blind man hearing sounds that no-one else pays any attention to, Zuckerberg decided to embody, in the form of Internet-based code, a machine to facilitate the vectors for socializing that he saw being excercized all around him.
And suddenly we're all back in touch with people we once knew in high school, or in college, and we're pushing the limits of those 150 or so people we have room for in our hearts as friends. But you have to wonder if serendipity is enhanced, or if, once again, we've found a way to channel serendipity, to boost the odds and to make it easier to roll the dice of everyday life to get a kind of seeming serendipity. Blind again to the really strange stuff happening all around us beyond the circle of those who already know us, or once did.
I don't have any strong opinion on the goodness or rightness of what Zuckeberg gets credited with. I think he's a little bit young to be called "Person of the Year" without at least doing that mirror thing Time did a couple of years ago, and crediting the rest of us with needing to be provided with the insights he apparently had about us.
Hell, if we keep pushing the paradigm, Time will have to declare a Baby Person of the Year, and as always, it will be coming up on Christmas where the choice becomes politically mandated. But really now, a couple of thousand years ago it was also the time and not the Man alone which was right for the Crossroads of humans coming to consciousness.
Even artists talking about their work (I've taken an unscientific poll across the years of my entire life so far) can't resist using terms which can be translated back into something approximately identical to 'expressing an idea.' Ultimately, this is an ego move, designed so that we can take credit for the accident of our talent, and our lucky position among social capital which made it possible to manipulate our environment in ways that fellow travelers in these cushy environs will appreciate.
I always listen for the artist who gets the Taoist notion of the uncarved block. The one who recognizes that the "intentional fallacy" is the stumbling block of the entire Western experiment. Artist as expert about the artist's own work is as idiotic as finding in Palin, Stern or Beck some intelligence just because they happen to command an audience. There's nothing there. There's emptiness and a robotic habit to apply the same technique to everything until it doesn't work anymore.
And that won't mean that the person has lost her touch. It just means the world of mankind has grown beyond it. And in the case of the plastic artist, the work really is worth more than the person. It endures as something which always was beyond its creator.
One might easily suppose that if Zuckerberg hadn't coded Facebook, someone else would have. Those other fallen-by-the-wayside attempters can kick themselves for being just a bit off from what we the people really wanted, or they can do what most of us do and be glad that we're not quite the emptied vessel which the accomplishment of perfect expression would mandate that we'd become.
It's OK to be normal, I hope. Being gifted is generally a liability. I mean, if you're a talented violinist, that means you're almost certain to be a failure at being the one people pay money to hear. Should you stop playing?
So, it's not Zuckerberg who can or should be credited with changing the Face of civilization. That was already well underway. He gets to be the focal point, and in a build-up to what Baby Jesus did, he gets to be both more and less than what the rest of us are.
Money is getting ready for post-oil reality, flowing into personalities, flowing into machine embodiments of ideas which never could occur in nature. But it is the nature of Nature to prevail. It is the nature of man, as animal, to disappear with nary a trace left behind. It won't be the words we spread on Facebook which endure. It won't be ethereal friends which take us home.
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Subversive Shorts!
None of us can know our own personal deficits. They are blind spots; lacunae, to borrow the title from a recent Barbara Kingsolver novel I admired. (I'm now savoring her nonfictional take on living close to the land, reading it slowly in imitation of the manner of eating which will provide the best reward, local and global, as she celebrates.)
We can know our deficits only by a kind of emotional triangulation from among the feedback we receive, trying to filter out that which is motivated by the lacunae in others; sometimes these are projections which might have nothing at all to do with us. We can try to modulate the ways in which we discourage useful feedback. Our resistances and sensitivities and bluster and anger. Our touchiness.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle must be the most intelligent book I have ever read. It uncovers much of what is really going on with our food culture. Just now, shopping at the local food co-op, I was distressed to learn from how far away my veggies had been shipped. But at least the Co-Op does provide that information now. I have been informed, and that's a start. The books wasn't meant as entertainment, but it's written well. Eat your spinach. As though it wasn't, well, yummy when well prepared and not repetitive to the point of evermore!
There is no delegating out my responsibility to make good choices, though good enough will nearly always be quite good by my lights. I have no real direct experience with the kind of fresh and lovingly raised food that Kingsolver celebrates and grows and worries over. I want to know why she will devote only a year and not a lifetime? Slowly. My standards aren't that high.
Last night I was among the ever more flush audience at Subversive Theatre for opening night of the "B" lineup, the "Brecht" series of their annual festival of short one-act plays. I liked them all. I don't know how to hoot as do the insiders, but I clapped loudly, only later learning that I should see the "A" or "Artaud" lineup if I want to see the good stuff.
The place felt cool; more comfortable than I remember. I remark on the irony now, that this theater has purchased an air conditioner, even as one of the shorts - a post-apocalyptic play set in the future when air conditioning is illegal and ice, bizarrely, is the erotic toy of choice - might make it seem a Hummer of a buy. There are no perfect, no pure, no ideal choices. There is no escaping irony. None.
How would I know? How would I know which of these short plays and how, degraded women to make an ideological point? I could tell that some did to some women present. I can tell the difference among didactic and entertaining and emotive. There is no accounting, none, for personal reaction, though.
There was only one play which really moved me that way, theatrically and not in my mind alone: three characters, the mother and father of a soldier deployed in Iraq, at a coffee shop to meet his sweetheart. She would be travelling through Turkey, abandoning her Olympic hopes, to assist her lover in his escape from the travesty of this so-called War. The father celebrated his own service medals and couldn't face the shame of his only son, the deserter. The mother handed over her St. Christopher medals, finally resisting instruction from her Man - direct orders actually. She remained behind to sip her tea. Sending her husband home, startling when the barrista called her name in stentorian fashion. The absent husband's coffee finally ready post-departure. In her name. Old habits. Die hard. Go AWOL. With difficulty. The girl's parents care only for her Olympic glory. Echoes of the gods of the first piece.
The Medals play was the main course for me, meaning that it moved me to understand in a way which had a chance to change me. I recognize these in-formations of my own self. The ways in which I am inhibited from making change in the world around me. Barked orders, timid forays, checking my moves against the norms.
Oh, I mean that one short, but you know, it was that they were short which made them so easy to swallow. A kind of ratatouille when taken as a whole, or, no, different foods on a single plate, or no, courses, maybe as part of a gourmet dinner. My reach exceeds my grasp, of theater, of food, of what it is that will make people more certain in ways to do less harm.
Others among the shorts were meant more purely to enlighten. The vegetable side dishes. The vitamins. To teach the audience about our prison system, and how cruel it is to families. To teach about our petro-based agriculture. To demonstrate how that line to distinguish humanity from beastliness gets pushed ever farther back until we can justify even torture, on animal Prozac and Muzak and climate controlled comfort in their solitary feedlot pens. Not so unlike the assisted living facility where I recently moved my Dad. Why wouldn't you be happy there, Dad? You can't do anything for yourself. Anyhow.
It's hard to see all the distortions - how it might be that there is no choice but to raise animals this way for slaughter; to justify their suffering by making a fine and final distinction between animal and human. Kingsolver gently mocks the purity of vegetarians, since animal death is also implicated in vegetable growth in human cultivated plots. But many vegetarians might eat meat if the animal's end was that surprising to it; that unanticipated and the life was merely cut short instead of denied at the outset.
Which justification would you like for your daily bread? That it does, in fact, taste that much better when raised with love and locally and without having been distorted by breeding to make the long trip from grower to grocer? Or that you will feel better spending more and tasting less, always waiting for the prize in its true season. How much more would you spend?
I admired the cleverness of each of these pieces, but in the end, I guess, I still choose to be enlightened in a manner which entertains, which moves, which stops short of teaching, didactically, someone else's certainties. I would prefer to witness someone acting out what we all must go through to make the right choices; to fill in all our own gaps. Vitamins are only necessary in the first place because we breed out the complexities of the food we eat. I've been so informed.
I can have no idea how food might taste if we were to raise it properly, without industrial feedlots, allowing fuller genetic variation, and bringing harvests closer to their markets. I still rather suspect that the food I prepare with love still tastes that much better than the stuff I could prepare if limited to a radius of 50 miles in its true season.
I have this feeling that it's not all bad. That the present distortions will be rectified, that this is all the inevitable result of an oil-bender which can't last much more than the hundred years of its allotment. A mere human lifetime, give or take. I have a feeling that people will start to understand how our pleasures distort and destroy so many lives; animal, vegetable and even miracle by the displaced and outsourced decisions we leave to the marketplace. I suspect that we will learn to nuzzle one another again, and walk away from our wombs with views in which we hibernate to be born anew.
But I am absolutely certain that nothing will change without courageous re-presentations of what is going on. That line between pure entertainment and truly moving art has become so distorted now that theater must mock cinema, cirque du soleil enterprise in scope. Phantom of some former opera. So, I remain glad for Subversive Theatre, and for protests the world over, and for pure didactic instruction. I don't care if it's someone else's certainty, if they are moved to act. I am lacking in taste, I guess. My lacuna. I moderate my gluttony by small bites, chewed slowly, followed by drink and not only for the bodily satisfaction. I've been so informed.
We can know our deficits only by a kind of emotional triangulation from among the feedback we receive, trying to filter out that which is motivated by the lacunae in others; sometimes these are projections which might have nothing at all to do with us. We can try to modulate the ways in which we discourage useful feedback. Our resistances and sensitivities and bluster and anger. Our touchiness.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle must be the most intelligent book I have ever read. It uncovers much of what is really going on with our food culture. Just now, shopping at the local food co-op, I was distressed to learn from how far away my veggies had been shipped. But at least the Co-Op does provide that information now. I have been informed, and that's a start. The books wasn't meant as entertainment, but it's written well. Eat your spinach. As though it wasn't, well, yummy when well prepared and not repetitive to the point of evermore!
There is no delegating out my responsibility to make good choices, though good enough will nearly always be quite good by my lights. I have no real direct experience with the kind of fresh and lovingly raised food that Kingsolver celebrates and grows and worries over. I want to know why she will devote only a year and not a lifetime? Slowly. My standards aren't that high.
Last night I was among the ever more flush audience at Subversive Theatre for opening night of the "B" lineup, the "Brecht" series of their annual festival of short one-act plays. I liked them all. I don't know how to hoot as do the insiders, but I clapped loudly, only later learning that I should see the "A" or "Artaud" lineup if I want to see the good stuff.
The place felt cool; more comfortable than I remember. I remark on the irony now, that this theater has purchased an air conditioner, even as one of the shorts - a post-apocalyptic play set in the future when air conditioning is illegal and ice, bizarrely, is the erotic toy of choice - might make it seem a Hummer of a buy. There are no perfect, no pure, no ideal choices. There is no escaping irony. None.
How would I know? How would I know which of these short plays and how, degraded women to make an ideological point? I could tell that some did to some women present. I can tell the difference among didactic and entertaining and emotive. There is no accounting, none, for personal reaction, though.
There was only one play which really moved me that way, theatrically and not in my mind alone: three characters, the mother and father of a soldier deployed in Iraq, at a coffee shop to meet his sweetheart. She would be travelling through Turkey, abandoning her Olympic hopes, to assist her lover in his escape from the travesty of this so-called War. The father celebrated his own service medals and couldn't face the shame of his only son, the deserter. The mother handed over her St. Christopher medals, finally resisting instruction from her Man - direct orders actually. She remained behind to sip her tea. Sending her husband home, startling when the barrista called her name in stentorian fashion. The absent husband's coffee finally ready post-departure. In her name. Old habits. Die hard. Go AWOL. With difficulty. The girl's parents care only for her Olympic glory. Echoes of the gods of the first piece.
The Medals play was the main course for me, meaning that it moved me to understand in a way which had a chance to change me. I recognize these in-formations of my own self. The ways in which I am inhibited from making change in the world around me. Barked orders, timid forays, checking my moves against the norms.
Oh, I mean that one short, but you know, it was that they were short which made them so easy to swallow. A kind of ratatouille when taken as a whole, or, no, different foods on a single plate, or no, courses, maybe as part of a gourmet dinner. My reach exceeds my grasp, of theater, of food, of what it is that will make people more certain in ways to do less harm.
Others among the shorts were meant more purely to enlighten. The vegetable side dishes. The vitamins. To teach the audience about our prison system, and how cruel it is to families. To teach about our petro-based agriculture. To demonstrate how that line to distinguish humanity from beastliness gets pushed ever farther back until we can justify even torture, on animal Prozac and Muzak and climate controlled comfort in their solitary feedlot pens. Not so unlike the assisted living facility where I recently moved my Dad. Why wouldn't you be happy there, Dad? You can't do anything for yourself. Anyhow.
It's hard to see all the distortions - how it might be that there is no choice but to raise animals this way for slaughter; to justify their suffering by making a fine and final distinction between animal and human. Kingsolver gently mocks the purity of vegetarians, since animal death is also implicated in vegetable growth in human cultivated plots. But many vegetarians might eat meat if the animal's end was that surprising to it; that unanticipated and the life was merely cut short instead of denied at the outset.
Which justification would you like for your daily bread? That it does, in fact, taste that much better when raised with love and locally and without having been distorted by breeding to make the long trip from grower to grocer? Or that you will feel better spending more and tasting less, always waiting for the prize in its true season. How much more would you spend?
I admired the cleverness of each of these pieces, but in the end, I guess, I still choose to be enlightened in a manner which entertains, which moves, which stops short of teaching, didactically, someone else's certainties. I would prefer to witness someone acting out what we all must go through to make the right choices; to fill in all our own gaps. Vitamins are only necessary in the first place because we breed out the complexities of the food we eat. I've been so informed.
I can have no idea how food might taste if we were to raise it properly, without industrial feedlots, allowing fuller genetic variation, and bringing harvests closer to their markets. I still rather suspect that the food I prepare with love still tastes that much better than the stuff I could prepare if limited to a radius of 50 miles in its true season.
I have this feeling that it's not all bad. That the present distortions will be rectified, that this is all the inevitable result of an oil-bender which can't last much more than the hundred years of its allotment. A mere human lifetime, give or take. I have a feeling that people will start to understand how our pleasures distort and destroy so many lives; animal, vegetable and even miracle by the displaced and outsourced decisions we leave to the marketplace. I suspect that we will learn to nuzzle one another again, and walk away from our wombs with views in which we hibernate to be born anew.
But I am absolutely certain that nothing will change without courageous re-presentations of what is going on. That line between pure entertainment and truly moving art has become so distorted now that theater must mock cinema, cirque du soleil enterprise in scope. Phantom of some former opera. So, I remain glad for Subversive Theatre, and for protests the world over, and for pure didactic instruction. I don't care if it's someone else's certainty, if they are moved to act. I am lacking in taste, I guess. My lacuna. I moderate my gluttony by small bites, chewed slowly, followed by drink and not only for the bodily satisfaction. I've been so informed.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
A Quick and Mild-Mannered Review of Harvest at Subversive Theatre
For me, attending plays at Subversive Theatre feels as comfortable as going home, somehow. There's no sense of "going out;" no ritual of being seen (although I always see people I know). The productions are always expertly produced and cast, even if or when there may be things to criticize as somehow beneath the production values of better-funded more fully "professional" theater.
There is such an abundance of talented people, certainly in Buffalo, who would do almost anything for the chance to act on stage. You can apparently recruit them even for blatantly subversive productions. These are productions which are not only subversive of the oppressive norms of capitalist so-called democracy. But they are subversive of the norms of professional theater as well.
Although it's moving smartly in the direction of feeling almost like a conventional theater, the space has few of the creature comforts of homecoming. It remains plainly housed in a typical workshop warren as can be had cheaply among the surplus industrial factory space so abundant in Buffalo.
So, why do I feel like I'm coming home?
At its opening over a year ago, the space was almost impossibly uncomfortable. Noisy, echoing, and either far too cold or far too hot. Now, it actually begins to feel cozy. But they have started charging for tickets for shows which used to be stridently "free" (donations gratefully accepted). I guess I should be worried?
The production I saw last night of Langston Hughes' Harvest was, I felt, fully professionally produced, presented and acted. I missed Kurt's customary and fairly polished appeal to the audience for donations. I missed his explanation of the mission of this theatrical company. But then I feel like an indulgent parent, maybe, blind to what everyone else is wanting. I think they are smart in their new ways to grow an audience.
The play itself was plenty straight-up in its presentation of the capitalist dilemma from the point of view of those at the bottom of the supposedly naturalistic pyramid of suffering. The secret exposed: everyone at every level feels as though they suffer oppression coming down from above them. The farmers who oppress their pickers are themselves oppressed by the bankers and the taxman, and the sheriff who serves the farmers feels oppressed by the farmers themselves who finally, out of desperation to get their crops in or lose their shirts, take matters into their own hands with guns, and inevitably bloody results.
In nature, it is supposed, all creatures exist in a perpetual state of cringing fear, food insecurity, a pyramid of predatory eat and be eaten. The workers here must live out in the open under tents at best, subject not only to the serial and concurrent tyrannies of weather, disease, children to care for; but even romantic love and its inevitable outcome. If that weren't enough, these cotton pickers had to endure the predations of their betters. Betrayals from within.
Sad, but inevitably true, I guess. Cotton pickers are no different from the unfortunate frog getting eaten by the stately heron. Well, except that the players on this stage are all members of the same species. The divisions among them are presented as purely artificial and absurd. At the very top is a remote and absent FDR; earnest, but feckless at ground level. A professor stops by and in the end says something like "Oh, I see what you mean. I'll tell my students." He'd thought there must be some way for folks to meet at the middle and split the differences among their grievances, for surely the farmers had some too.
Although the play was presented authentically, from the period of its writing, there is no mismatch with today's lived reality. Sure, it feels primitive and almost simplistic in its staging, which is the way it was written. Stark. Plotting the lines of division, and then measuring the tensions across them.
One still wonders if the explosion is necessary. As of tectonic plates these days, whose power just builds and builds until the very earth shakes, each release triggering the likelihood of more. Might there be a different model?
Getting eaten in the state of nature is also the role of the outcast, the weak, the genetically deficient. In the family of man, as in more local families, these roles are reserved and limited, supposedly. Our fear of one another enacts only the act of flight and fright in the face of voracious and unthinking predators who are themselves driven by unanswerable hunger in nature.
Subversive Theater is a refuge from all of that. Not much money lifted from my pocket. Free refreshments. Easy conversation between the acts. And even the reduction to almost nil of the distance between the performance and its audience. I guess that's why it feels like coming home.
Relentlessly, this company asks us just what is and what can be art. Must it only exalt the already exalted, who will inevitably be the absent playwright? The absent God. The good and refined taste of the privileged audience. Or can it invite the audience in to the struggle for understanding which is still common at the root of all artistic production?
In the end, it is the state of nature which is artifice, generated in our mind in reminiscence of a time too recent in our own past. When Natives, who were only imitating us, would scalp and pillage. When bears would attack from the woods. That state has been so fully tamed now that to invoke it is to invoke a fiction whose only purpose is to let us feel more fully manly. Very much like blue jeans do, or SUVs or athletic contests or libertarian posturing as if it were the clear-eyed truth. Women dressed for nakedness as prey.
The stage on which we play out our very public fantasies has grown old. No wonder I feel at home in this superannuated warehouse space, built as if to withstand a bomb blast. Any size shaking of the earth. Although that too is an illusion. The only real safety is on the streets.
There is such an abundance of talented people, certainly in Buffalo, who would do almost anything for the chance to act on stage. You can apparently recruit them even for blatantly subversive productions. These are productions which are not only subversive of the oppressive norms of capitalist so-called democracy. But they are subversive of the norms of professional theater as well.
Although it's moving smartly in the direction of feeling almost like a conventional theater, the space has few of the creature comforts of homecoming. It remains plainly housed in a typical workshop warren as can be had cheaply among the surplus industrial factory space so abundant in Buffalo.
So, why do I feel like I'm coming home?
At its opening over a year ago, the space was almost impossibly uncomfortable. Noisy, echoing, and either far too cold or far too hot. Now, it actually begins to feel cozy. But they have started charging for tickets for shows which used to be stridently "free" (donations gratefully accepted). I guess I should be worried?
The production I saw last night of Langston Hughes' Harvest was, I felt, fully professionally produced, presented and acted. I missed Kurt's customary and fairly polished appeal to the audience for donations. I missed his explanation of the mission of this theatrical company. But then I feel like an indulgent parent, maybe, blind to what everyone else is wanting. I think they are smart in their new ways to grow an audience.
The play itself was plenty straight-up in its presentation of the capitalist dilemma from the point of view of those at the bottom of the supposedly naturalistic pyramid of suffering. The secret exposed: everyone at every level feels as though they suffer oppression coming down from above them. The farmers who oppress their pickers are themselves oppressed by the bankers and the taxman, and the sheriff who serves the farmers feels oppressed by the farmers themselves who finally, out of desperation to get their crops in or lose their shirts, take matters into their own hands with guns, and inevitably bloody results.
In nature, it is supposed, all creatures exist in a perpetual state of cringing fear, food insecurity, a pyramid of predatory eat and be eaten. The workers here must live out in the open under tents at best, subject not only to the serial and concurrent tyrannies of weather, disease, children to care for; but even romantic love and its inevitable outcome. If that weren't enough, these cotton pickers had to endure the predations of their betters. Betrayals from within.
Sad, but inevitably true, I guess. Cotton pickers are no different from the unfortunate frog getting eaten by the stately heron. Well, except that the players on this stage are all members of the same species. The divisions among them are presented as purely artificial and absurd. At the very top is a remote and absent FDR; earnest, but feckless at ground level. A professor stops by and in the end says something like "Oh, I see what you mean. I'll tell my students." He'd thought there must be some way for folks to meet at the middle and split the differences among their grievances, for surely the farmers had some too.
Although the play was presented authentically, from the period of its writing, there is no mismatch with today's lived reality. Sure, it feels primitive and almost simplistic in its staging, which is the way it was written. Stark. Plotting the lines of division, and then measuring the tensions across them.
One still wonders if the explosion is necessary. As of tectonic plates these days, whose power just builds and builds until the very earth shakes, each release triggering the likelihood of more. Might there be a different model?
Getting eaten in the state of nature is also the role of the outcast, the weak, the genetically deficient. In the family of man, as in more local families, these roles are reserved and limited, supposedly. Our fear of one another enacts only the act of flight and fright in the face of voracious and unthinking predators who are themselves driven by unanswerable hunger in nature.
Subversive Theater is a refuge from all of that. Not much money lifted from my pocket. Free refreshments. Easy conversation between the acts. And even the reduction to almost nil of the distance between the performance and its audience. I guess that's why it feels like coming home.
Relentlessly, this company asks us just what is and what can be art. Must it only exalt the already exalted, who will inevitably be the absent playwright? The absent God. The good and refined taste of the privileged audience. Or can it invite the audience in to the struggle for understanding which is still common at the root of all artistic production?
In the end, it is the state of nature which is artifice, generated in our mind in reminiscence of a time too recent in our own past. When Natives, who were only imitating us, would scalp and pillage. When bears would attack from the woods. That state has been so fully tamed now that to invoke it is to invoke a fiction whose only purpose is to let us feel more fully manly. Very much like blue jeans do, or SUVs or athletic contests or libertarian posturing as if it were the clear-eyed truth. Women dressed for nakedness as prey.
The stage on which we play out our very public fantasies has grown old. No wonder I feel at home in this superannuated warehouse space, built as if to withstand a bomb blast. Any size shaking of the earth. Although that too is an illusion. The only real safety is on the streets.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Contact! PoMo AI (Artificial Intelligence)
This is yet another one of those quick bury that post! posts. Not that I find anything wrong with what I most recently wrote, but it is rather breathless, and I need to put my thinking back up on its shelf for my private inspiration. Perhaps that's where it belongs. I think lots of people looking for direction have these moments of private inspiration which provide it for them. Mine just happened to be in words.
So, that's my theme for today. After which I'll go back to writing about male vibrators and other silly things. My theme is writing, language, and artificial intelligence. My thinking about it relates most to Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, only in the sense that the reader is forced to leave the whole big question wide open, where it remains today, riding on top of the fairly complete incompleteness theorem. I know the book is old school, but I can't find anything to change the basics.
In fact most debates about AI still include this basic difference - it's almost a predilection - between whether in principle this will always be an open question, or if things can lead to closure. I am pretty sure we're not going to see until we see, so it will remain for me a fairly uninteresting matter of the limits to abstraction. And I'm just not sure how the limits to abstraction can represent the limits to reality.
But in the particular, I am fairly certain that humans, as the only example ready to hand, never did think until language developed. Specifically, I mean that what we call intelligence is no property of mind alone, but is rather a property of minds together, in communication. I suppose therefore that intelligence would have to be called an epiphenomena of the brain, rather than something which inheres in it.
Now I understand fully that there are lots of people much smarter than me who study this stuff every day as their professional, vocational, and passion-filled occupation. They study all these things to the point of tedium, and I respect their studies, I really do. They have what I don't, a collegial (or not) set of fellow workers, all of whom share a common language. They share a common vocabulary and grammar for usage, and they have developed that language collectively so that they may push its envelope of sense.
That gives them the ability, far superior to mine, to throw terms around like "epiphenomena" and be pretty sure they know what they are talking about. If I have any advantage at all, it is because I am not embedded in any particular school of thought, and so I might see things which can't be seen from the inside. A kind of forest/trees issue. The naked emperor story.
But I do understand that I too must make clear sense, which as I've said I really pushed the edge of myself in that last post.
I am among those people who are fairly certain that we will never find any fairy dust in the brain. No matter how you think intelligence works, there isn't any mysterious substance or structure or pineal-type organ which has yet to be revealed which gives the brain its spark. Such thinking harkens back to talk of "soul", toward which I hope my training in Chinese traditions has hardened me a bit. I prefer to use less mysterious terms like heart or center.
So, therefore, I am also on the side of those who figure sure, why not, we can create an artificial brain. I don't think it will have very much to do with computers as we now use that term, but there is incredibly interesting research being done on neural network style computing. Quantum processing and massively parallel processing will come on line to make our current megahertz seem paltry. And these will also begin to break down the limitations of boolean and digital logic.
Computers, therefore, or machines, or artificial brains, may even be able to deal with metaphor, and therefore start to feel. But not until or before they develop language, which means that they too must distinguish each from the other, and have something to say to one another.
Right now, we might think of such arrangements as a matter of networks and signals passing back and forth. But no thinking, no intelligence, will come from such communication, which is the thing I want to stake a claim on here and now.
When writing first started, I think it might be fairly clear that it was a matter of keeping score. You know, those hash marks with a line through them which count to digital "five". Four score and so forth equals, um, 20? No, they get bunched in fours, so 80! Lines on a stick, soon followed in the case of China, with cracks on shells and trying to bring some of the constancy of heaven's patterns down to earth where we could make sense of them. Looking for signs.
But let's dwell on the counting for a minute. Scores or counts can always only refer to undifferentiated and therefore, for memory purposes, identical items. If you want to know how many sheep you bought or sold, the score can pretty much only tell you the count, and nothing more than that. If you need to know the colors, you'd have to split the count into color categories, or add something to the hashmarks.
And if you want to remember individual sheep, you'd have to give them a name.
I've said before that the only kind of memory which endures is ways of knowing. Once you identify a shape, for instance, it's hard to unlearn what that shape means, if it means something to those around you. It's very hard to forget a face if it has a familiar name to go with it. But if you're going to partake in community, then you have to learn to recognize and to name those things which you will use in common. I think in some sense that's what language means.
I have three cats, and I don't think it would be too easy for me to forget what a cat is, or to recognize one at a thousand paces. Maybe in the dark, I might mistake a racoon for one. But I confess that I don't always recognize which is which. They're all from the same litter, after all.
Oh sure, one seems to have a different father, and so Stella's easy to distinguish from the rest. But at a distance, there seem to be many many Stella's out there. And her two sisters look pretty much alike. But if I pause, and sorry to say I actually have to dredge my memory, I can remember which one has the orange eartips, and call up their proper names.
I know that makes me a lousy cat lover, and that many of you would distinguish one among a thousand without any thought at all. But I doubt you're using more than just their faces, which, no matter how much you love cats, are nowhere near so expressive as the human face is.
Yeah, sure I've seen all those cute pictures of cats dressed up and seeming to have expression. I've also read Oliver Sacks about how humans can fail with facial recognition, or even mistake their wife for a hat, and still control their language. But exceptions often prove the rule. If nothing else, the biological human "machine" is immensely redundant and malleable. There are even perfectly conscious humans who were born with only one half of a functioning brain.
But I do think that before we can create our own machines that think, they will have to be distinguished enough, one from the other, so that they actually do have something to say and aren't just part of one big artificial brain. You might wonder if I read too much science fiction, to which I'd have to answer, no, I don't think I read enough. Even when I seem to write too fast. There's only so much time in the day after all, and I don't read as fast as a lot of people seem to, and frankly, the science fiction isn't always the most interesting stuff.
One big brain, no matter how big, really can't think. And machines which are isomorphic compatible - think armies of droids in some Hollywood thrilla - down to the level of their design specs, by definition, won't have anything to say to one another.
Well, until they build up differential experiences. But here already a time lag is essential. That's what differential experience means. And so there has to be a going apart and a coming back together, rather than the near instantaneous communication we expect from our computer networks.
So, they have to be autonomous, these thinking machines, and they have to be distinguishable each from the other when they return for communication. Perhaps they can wear the scars from their experiences.
The trouble with wearing the scars from their experiences is that they only get them after separation, and so there can be no recognition upon return because, just like Dad's memory now, it's all new!
So, the separation has to move in stages, building difference, building recognition, until you get something like a face emerging on each machine. There has to be something familiar before re-cognition can occur.
Sure, you could seriallize all the machines with numbers. That would be a perfectly good way to distinguish each machine. Except numbers, remember, don't do anything but count sameness. Like with my cats, you'd have to look up in your memory banks which is which, and again like with my cats, it has to beg the question about how much you really care.
Now caring, of course, is not often considered to be a quality of machines. But what else would it be to direct attention inward toward memory, as it were, unless some wired-in compulsion to do so. Which brings us right back to the beginning all over again, with everyone - every machine - now pretty much acting like every other.
You could catalog which machine cares for which other in some kind of giant sorting game, but it would seem pretty far from what we mean by thinking pretty quickly. More like a flock of birds or school of fish.
I think brain science has already determined pretty convincingly that our inward brain often makes decisions before our conscious self is aware that we "have" them. We also know that we process much more information than we could possibly be consciously aware of. Emotions seem to play a role here too, sorting among all the inward random brain impressions, to bring to the fore those which interest us. Those which might prove to be of some use, pretty much in the same way as those named shapes which we use together with our community.
And the community in the first place only works together because of some sort of caring. Some facial recognition, maybe, tying family members together more easily than a branding system. Sure, plenty of exceptions prove this rule, but I think you get the idea. And collections of families are also bound by familiar behaviors and traditions - things held in collective memory.
Eventually, this collective memory gets written down, and civilizations can endure, some few as long as China has. Although to call China China all through those years might be a matter of splitting some interesting hairs, since about the only thing that's remained constant has been the written language itself. And that took a whole lot of draconian diligence, and an almost obsessive concern with how history gets told and poetry crafted.
So, I'll leave it there, then. I'll hope to come back for the sake of amusing trifles now and then. In the meantime, I really must get to work cleaning out my house for the next guy.
Cheers!
So, that's my theme for today. After which I'll go back to writing about male vibrators and other silly things. My theme is writing, language, and artificial intelligence. My thinking about it relates most to Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, only in the sense that the reader is forced to leave the whole big question wide open, where it remains today, riding on top of the fairly complete incompleteness theorem. I know the book is old school, but I can't find anything to change the basics.
In fact most debates about AI still include this basic difference - it's almost a predilection - between whether in principle this will always be an open question, or if things can lead to closure. I am pretty sure we're not going to see until we see, so it will remain for me a fairly uninteresting matter of the limits to abstraction. And I'm just not sure how the limits to abstraction can represent the limits to reality.
But in the particular, I am fairly certain that humans, as the only example ready to hand, never did think until language developed. Specifically, I mean that what we call intelligence is no property of mind alone, but is rather a property of minds together, in communication. I suppose therefore that intelligence would have to be called an epiphenomena of the brain, rather than something which inheres in it.
Now I understand fully that there are lots of people much smarter than me who study this stuff every day as their professional, vocational, and passion-filled occupation. They study all these things to the point of tedium, and I respect their studies, I really do. They have what I don't, a collegial (or not) set of fellow workers, all of whom share a common language. They share a common vocabulary and grammar for usage, and they have developed that language collectively so that they may push its envelope of sense.
That gives them the ability, far superior to mine, to throw terms around like "epiphenomena" and be pretty sure they know what they are talking about. If I have any advantage at all, it is because I am not embedded in any particular school of thought, and so I might see things which can't be seen from the inside. A kind of forest/trees issue. The naked emperor story.
But I do understand that I too must make clear sense, which as I've said I really pushed the edge of myself in that last post.
I am among those people who are fairly certain that we will never find any fairy dust in the brain. No matter how you think intelligence works, there isn't any mysterious substance or structure or pineal-type organ which has yet to be revealed which gives the brain its spark. Such thinking harkens back to talk of "soul", toward which I hope my training in Chinese traditions has hardened me a bit. I prefer to use less mysterious terms like heart or center.
So, therefore, I am also on the side of those who figure sure, why not, we can create an artificial brain. I don't think it will have very much to do with computers as we now use that term, but there is incredibly interesting research being done on neural network style computing. Quantum processing and massively parallel processing will come on line to make our current megahertz seem paltry. And these will also begin to break down the limitations of boolean and digital logic.
Computers, therefore, or machines, or artificial brains, may even be able to deal with metaphor, and therefore start to feel. But not until or before they develop language, which means that they too must distinguish each from the other, and have something to say to one another.
Right now, we might think of such arrangements as a matter of networks and signals passing back and forth. But no thinking, no intelligence, will come from such communication, which is the thing I want to stake a claim on here and now.
When writing first started, I think it might be fairly clear that it was a matter of keeping score. You know, those hash marks with a line through them which count to digital "five". Four score and so forth equals, um, 20? No, they get bunched in fours, so 80! Lines on a stick, soon followed in the case of China, with cracks on shells and trying to bring some of the constancy of heaven's patterns down to earth where we could make sense of them. Looking for signs.
But let's dwell on the counting for a minute. Scores or counts can always only refer to undifferentiated and therefore, for memory purposes, identical items. If you want to know how many sheep you bought or sold, the score can pretty much only tell you the count, and nothing more than that. If you need to know the colors, you'd have to split the count into color categories, or add something to the hashmarks.
And if you want to remember individual sheep, you'd have to give them a name.
I've said before that the only kind of memory which endures is ways of knowing. Once you identify a shape, for instance, it's hard to unlearn what that shape means, if it means something to those around you. It's very hard to forget a face if it has a familiar name to go with it. But if you're going to partake in community, then you have to learn to recognize and to name those things which you will use in common. I think in some sense that's what language means.
I have three cats, and I don't think it would be too easy for me to forget what a cat is, or to recognize one at a thousand paces. Maybe in the dark, I might mistake a racoon for one. But I confess that I don't always recognize which is which. They're all from the same litter, after all.
Oh sure, one seems to have a different father, and so Stella's easy to distinguish from the rest. But at a distance, there seem to be many many Stella's out there. And her two sisters look pretty much alike. But if I pause, and sorry to say I actually have to dredge my memory, I can remember which one has the orange eartips, and call up their proper names.
I know that makes me a lousy cat lover, and that many of you would distinguish one among a thousand without any thought at all. But I doubt you're using more than just their faces, which, no matter how much you love cats, are nowhere near so expressive as the human face is.
Yeah, sure I've seen all those cute pictures of cats dressed up and seeming to have expression. I've also read Oliver Sacks about how humans can fail with facial recognition, or even mistake their wife for a hat, and still control their language. But exceptions often prove the rule. If nothing else, the biological human "machine" is immensely redundant and malleable. There are even perfectly conscious humans who were born with only one half of a functioning brain.
But I do think that before we can create our own machines that think, they will have to be distinguished enough, one from the other, so that they actually do have something to say and aren't just part of one big artificial brain. You might wonder if I read too much science fiction, to which I'd have to answer, no, I don't think I read enough. Even when I seem to write too fast. There's only so much time in the day after all, and I don't read as fast as a lot of people seem to, and frankly, the science fiction isn't always the most interesting stuff.
One big brain, no matter how big, really can't think. And machines which are isomorphic compatible - think armies of droids in some Hollywood thrilla - down to the level of their design specs, by definition, won't have anything to say to one another.
Well, until they build up differential experiences. But here already a time lag is essential. That's what differential experience means. And so there has to be a going apart and a coming back together, rather than the near instantaneous communication we expect from our computer networks.
So, they have to be autonomous, these thinking machines, and they have to be distinguishable each from the other when they return for communication. Perhaps they can wear the scars from their experiences.
The trouble with wearing the scars from their experiences is that they only get them after separation, and so there can be no recognition upon return because, just like Dad's memory now, it's all new!
So, the separation has to move in stages, building difference, building recognition, until you get something like a face emerging on each machine. There has to be something familiar before re-cognition can occur.
Sure, you could seriallize all the machines with numbers. That would be a perfectly good way to distinguish each machine. Except numbers, remember, don't do anything but count sameness. Like with my cats, you'd have to look up in your memory banks which is which, and again like with my cats, it has to beg the question about how much you really care.
Now caring, of course, is not often considered to be a quality of machines. But what else would it be to direct attention inward toward memory, as it were, unless some wired-in compulsion to do so. Which brings us right back to the beginning all over again, with everyone - every machine - now pretty much acting like every other.
You could catalog which machine cares for which other in some kind of giant sorting game, but it would seem pretty far from what we mean by thinking pretty quickly. More like a flock of birds or school of fish.
I think brain science has already determined pretty convincingly that our inward brain often makes decisions before our conscious self is aware that we "have" them. We also know that we process much more information than we could possibly be consciously aware of. Emotions seem to play a role here too, sorting among all the inward random brain impressions, to bring to the fore those which interest us. Those which might prove to be of some use, pretty much in the same way as those named shapes which we use together with our community.
And the community in the first place only works together because of some sort of caring. Some facial recognition, maybe, tying family members together more easily than a branding system. Sure, plenty of exceptions prove this rule, but I think you get the idea. And collections of families are also bound by familiar behaviors and traditions - things held in collective memory.
Eventually, this collective memory gets written down, and civilizations can endure, some few as long as China has. Although to call China China all through those years might be a matter of splitting some interesting hairs, since about the only thing that's remained constant has been the written language itself. And that took a whole lot of draconian diligence, and an almost obsessive concern with how history gets told and poetry crafted.
So, I'll leave it there, then. I'll hope to come back for the sake of amusing trifles now and then. In the meantime, I really must get to work cleaning out my house for the next guy.
Cheers!
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Fools Rush in . . . Farewell to Jack Kemp
I want to tackle the big ones. I want to try the truth and beauty equation. Here's the plan: Beauty stimulates copulation, apparently. Copulation, when it's productive and not perverse, apparently has a lot to do with the processes of evolution. Controversially if you ever read Stephen Jay Gould, human intelligence seems like some pinnacle to the same evolutionary processes. So, in at least this minimal sense, intelligence and beauty seem like they might be linked.
I'm thinking here that faceless animals don't copulate for anything like beauty. And I'm thinking beauty somehow overpowers pheromones and other organizers of ant farms to power aspects of human reproduction.
And I have to accommodate, somehow, my absolute aversion to the stupid racist notion that beauty and intelligence are coupled. That winners always deserve to win. That's way way way too right wing for me, Jack. Lady Luck almost always deserves almost all the credit. Nor will I fail to notice that women do seem to trade on beauty; that there is some correspondence between social rank and hotness in this endphase capitalist dystopia. Which we will never see as such, because we live within the castle walls. Let them eat cake, indeed.
Sure part of this is that with enough money, almost anyone can be made to appear pretty good. Especially when the styles approach masquerade for daily life. Or when simple health equates to looking good in jeans, and when health is bought for money too. When you add to the dollings up, the bodily buffing up, you really can get something going. Not to mention airbrushings, and taking care about when and how you appear in public. Although it must be a lot of work, for certain. You have to give effort its due.
But let's just say, for starters, that the thing with beauty is that it turns your head. From there, doesn't there have to be something more? Or is it like the linkbacks here in the blogosphere, which I don't really care to get? The beauty gets you more starters. And how come so many really beautiful women are willing to trade on that? Shouldn't it really just give you the strength not to? The confidence to go for something more than what you can get so easily? Or does risk always go along with nothing left to lose?
I know money is plenty hard to get, but the trouble with getting it by selling your looks or your skills or your talents is that you have to keep working harder and harder and always to deal with your insecurities that maybe he'll go elsewhere for what you once sold him. The Man. Old age should be relaxing. Unless, like me, you've dodged responsibility your whole life. Then you get what you deserve. Which is to work your way in to your dotage, armed only with what you never had, or lost in its true season.
How about this: Beauty just stimulates the rest of us to copulate more? It's like a leadership role; like President Obama for instance, it sets a direction for our sweaty aspirations. Who would ever want that level of responsibility at this particular moment? But he stands up there, quite apparently keeping his good humor, and it kind of makes you want to work in that direction, doesn't it? We'll set him straight eventually on the privacy stuff, and on the GNU public license, but in the meantime, what a beautiful mind, and it doesn't hurt a bit that he's quite black. It just makes him that much more believable, since no-one's been grooming blacks for long enough to have him descend from dynastic privilege.
Intelligence begets intelligence for sure, but not in the genetic sense, where everything regresses toward what's mean. It's the sharing which allows great things. Sometimes the showing off. The chasing after what might be better, and wanting to get there first. And at least a kind of working out from the kind of insecurity which provokes girls into flashing their tits as the one thing they know will get the guys attention, and maybe slow them down along the chase. Or cheer them on, stimulating the steroidal jolt. Or so it should. And guys should get over it already. Why not pick someone for better reasons than that everyone else wants her too? Save that for politics and shows. Alpha males must get fatigued from being everybody's target.
I do remain convinced that there is still a direction for evolution, but that it's not the one we're thinking. I'll have to do a lot more study, but I even think that intelligence is something more than something meta- riding like fluff on top of the survival of some fittest. There is this pattern re-cognition in the brain which makes it that much more likely that we can learn to avoid the pitfalls. Then something like invention, where we can take what we discover, and repattern it with tools, into something to give us huge advantage over what teeth nature can provide over eons of trial and mostly error. Tooth and claw into the wilderness, now beaten back by levity and light. Stirred but never shaken.
The gaffe we make right now is to mistake our proudest tools for that mind which made them. We act as if we invent what we discover, and as though our instruments can recognize patterns without us. They can't. They can only sort and filter among larger sets than we can handle all fleshy and alone.
All machines are nothing more (or less) than elaborated levers to extend our power; our reach; our grasp. Information technology is nothing different, except that by replacing mind with brain in stupid overtheorizing about intelligence as though it were an isolatable thing, we've managed yet again to become hoist by our own petard, childish bootstrap style, into thinking that machines can think. (I swear I remember being read a childish story, about a boy who'd dreamed of flying that way, by lifting himself up by his bootstraps, or maybe I even tried it myself, though I could find no reference anywhere to either)
Mind is interactive, and depends on Proper Names at its centers, to propagate throughout the brainscape. Tools can help. Pen, paper, books and ethereal keys. There is some touching attachment, or should be, to the tools we like to handle. But these are not the same thing as human to human touch. And human touch should not be mediated by machines. Mind, sure. But mind is nothing without heart. And heart depends on more than depictions and other virtual renderings.
There was (at least) one intriguing part to that "What the Bleep" film wherein they demonstrated, sort of, that the eye will literally not see what it has not learned to. Their example was Native Americans not even able to see that Columbus' ships were on their horizon, because they had no category for ships. And perhaps there was also every sort of wild hallucination from which such things as ships might be difficult to distinguish. The shaman had to be consulted, and once authorized, then they could see!
Now, we've tamed the hallucinations, and created instruments to measure every kind of alien intrusion, even beyond the range of our native senses. Which only seems to guarantee that the thing we must remain blind to is ourselves, enslaved to us. We have no authority for that one.
We reward winning always most extravagantly. The beauty queens. Captains of industry. Superstars. Inventors. Discoverers. Monopolists. Gamers of our hearts. Vicariously, it's where we want to be, and really think we should be. We give a nod to Sherpas, provided they climb high enough themselves.
But recently, in our American time, we did learn that it is wrong to use other human beings for our service to the winners. Humans should not own other human beings, this much we know for certain. But for a good enough price, and if the bargain is straight up, winners might be able to rent their slaves, perhaps at an hourly rate. Perhaps for better and for worse. Beauty betrays the terms. It would be more honest, wouldn't it, if the money were to change hands more boldly and the terms were more straight up? Though none of it, except for the money, seems worth the paper it's written up on.
Still, we dream of machines at our service, which can provide us colder drinks and more pure mixes, and no dirt upon our souls. Except that they foul the earth, finally, with non-digestible transmuted waste which concentrates our most toxic qualities, most toxic of all of which might be our insecure desire just to be served in the first place. As if God were meant for me personally. As if there can be that pinnacle from which all dirt has been banished, but the air remains breathable. As if.
And so, upon this Internet, we are certain we must remain anonymous, cloaked and firewalled away from those who would pry our secrets, or even worse, steal our very identity. I am, at least still for a moment longer wanting to remain anonymous. Wanting to abstract my words so perfectly that they can true all hearts away from cosmic dreams of removal from all dirt and germs that would digest our bodies, sometimes before we're quite ready for that earth to earth return on investment.
But think of this. What if we actually were accountable for all our searches? What if it weren't just Google sneaking into my thoughts and offering up advertisements according to what I've been thinking, and reading and writing and historically searching. What if we called that what it is; an unconscionable invasion of privacy no matter what they promise to do or not to do with my identity. This Googling of my soul, which I shall not abide very much longer. This tapping of my phone lines without my knowing. This unaccountable theft of our commons.
What if I were to true my searchings with other identifiable souls who might also hold me accountable for my misplacings of mouse among rodents; black holes among non-celestial ethers. What if, in other words, humans were to contact other humans who would be held accountable for transgressions? A sort of alternate Internet of love instead of greed and fear and embarrassment. Where DNS sought out, first, actual names of actual people, and less particular and more abstracted, their place of business, and after that, what they like to do with their time.
What if we were to start a movement where instead of being afraid to announce where I live and how to contact me, I were to publish almost everything about myself, and you did too? What if I let almost everyone see into my life if they really cared to, and what if that turned out to be the very best defense against identity theft because no-one could hold your secrets, as they now do, even from you? You would be publicly you and I would be publicly me, and my holdings would be there for anyone and everyone to count and every transaction would leave a bright red trail, so that you could even leave the door unlocked again like they do in Canada where they must still somehow know their neighbors, even still.
What if names were geographically located too, and after that ideologically, for civil civic purposes so that we might debate without hating one another? What if intersections among actual people were tracked, and texts and pictures and things to buy were catalogued where they belong according to the interests of the parties who want them. What if we were to find that some right wing interests actually do cross lines with left wing? In reading his obituary, I find that Jack Kemp doesn't seem such a bad guy, although when I met him in person he had some sort of vocal diarrhea worse than mine and jumped all over the place and never made any full sense. Such a champion of all Richies Rich.
But I can buy the idea that creativity and industry both are released by some rewards for them. I can also buy that some of the best and truest words were never motivated by anything at all, other than some beauty in their utterance. The best of art is never known because its baseline requires getting out from the contest, and in to that kind of beauty which kindles far away and off from any field. Why can these things not both co-exist? There are more kinds of beauty than those which provoke our loins and pocketbooks. There are other ways to arrange our co-existence on this planet than conquest, glory, and abstract removal.
What if we were to find that human metaphoric categories work ever so much more smoothly than machine-made approximations and that nothing we can ever invent will be a match for our own pattern recognition accomplishments. Certainly not for speed, where I can almost always recognize friend at 1000 paces, which helps at least to distinguish from unknown and possible foe.
What if the machine were realigned in service to all mankind and not, Sherpa like, only in service to the winners? And what if we were once again to risk riding in cars with strangers because most of our germs have already travelled the world around and our best defense is a kind of orgy of interinfection to build up our natural defenses against all viral mockings of our designs, since, I'm pretty sure, these interbreedings - tending in the end to brown I'm sure - guarantee more instead of less diversity, as long as diversity is not so much measured by the color of one's skin.
I am so tired of superstar talents. I am so tired of wanting that kind of supercharged beauty. I am so tired of overelaborated super intelligence which needs to be checked by something more from the manual arts. I am so tired of measures for intelligence, which, like contests for beauty only show up parochial prejudices and miss the breakthrough minds every time. I am so tired of stigmas made against everyone who's not a winner, for whatever it is they're supposed to lack. I'm tired of being a winner without portfolio too, and needing always to reinvent myself. It's all a crass stand in for beauty to transcend our baser cartoon-like common denominators. I'll sing for Leaves of Grass.
Lets have a demasquerade! Let's let each of us be himself, and accept that Mom will always love us, no matter what we do. Sheesh, I make about as much sense as Jack Kemp talking supply side. But not only is beauty in the eye of each beholder, and intelligence for each reader to decide, what we can do to improve upon nature cannot be simply to strip it bare and purify its essentials. There must be more to art that drives us.
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