Academics Cartesian Minefield Material/Digital Science! Technology
by Justin
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How I learned to stop worrying and love the hive mind
Having returned from ‘A Billion Gadget Minds’, a day-long workshop at the Swedenborg Hall, I seem to have spent much of this week thinking about computational/cognitive culture(s). Fellow Goldsmiths alumnus El Fortunio gave the workshop a comprehensive write-up (omitting only the intrusion of samovar-wielding theologians), but there were a couple of talks that had sufficient resonance to garner further unpacking and analysis.
To begin, here’s the workshop’s official blurb:
‘A growing body of research, including literature on cognitive anthropology, software studies and cognitive capital suggests that whatever is called ‘thinking’ occurs amidst mechanisms, habits, codelike systems, devices and other formally structured means. If intelligence, far from being a property of ‘the human’, is an informal and provisional function of the ensemble of mechanisms and relations that comprise a social field, then we need to explore the co-relation of cultural and experiental practices, thought and intelligent devices.’
– A Billion Gadget Minds, 21/10/2010
In other words, how can we open a space in which speak of the radical heterogeneity of intelligence; a distributed, plural intelligence, (sometimes) existing outside of the brain’s biophysical substrates? We’re talking human-computer interaction, Napier’s bones, smart homes, and iPhones.
[future shock] “oops”
How does this video make you feel, at a bodily/emotional level? One early answer, courtesy of El Fortunio:
‘watching it did feel like a camera tumbling through some gigantic blob of human experience’
He’s right; it does; and I think there’s something interesting (and potentially fubar-laden) going on here. Some strange combination of Vernacular Video, Network Realism, and Remix Culture.
Fiction Material/Digital Pop Culture Publishing Speculations Technology Writing [future shock]
by Justin
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[future shock] Network Realism
Care of (unwitting?) bookfuturist James Bridle, I give you ‘Network Realism‘. This, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly what I was attempting (with mixed success) to get across in the final chapters of my MA dissertation:
‘Network Realism is writing that is of and about the network. It’s realism because it’s so close to our present reality. A realism that posits an increasingly 1:1 relationship between Fiction and the World. A realtime link. And it’s networked because it lives in a place that’s that’s enabled by, and only recently made possible by, our technological connectedness.
(…)
This writing exists on a timeline, but it’s not a simple line back-to-the-past and forward-to-the-future. It’s a gathering-together of many currently possible worldlines, seen from the near-omniscient superposition of the network. The Order Flow of the Universe. Speculative Realism, Networked Fiction: Network Realism.’
– James Bridle, ‘Network Realism: William Gibson and new forms of Fiction‘, 25/10/2010
Here, an admission – networked realism is what I’ll be churning out this autumn. It’s the narrative form of the much-implied secret project; the perfect literary accompaniment for atemporal culture and our shiny new, post-Newtonian network politics.
More details to follow, in glimpses and dribbles.
Academics Material/Digital Politics/Economics Pop Culture Technology
by Justin
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Steven Johnson: Innovation & Anarchism
photo credit: Phil Hawksworth
There’s a seriously nifty interview with science writer Steven Johnson in today’s Guardian. Not sure how I feel about his occasional echoes of the technology tree from Sid Meier’s Civilization, but the notion of an ‘adjacent possible’ is really rather wonderful. Some choice extracts:
‘to 1950s viewers, Johnson argues, complex TV shows such as Lost or The Wire would have been borderline incomprehensible, like some kind of avant-garde art, because certain ways of engaging with the medium hadn’t yet been learned.’
The co-evolution of technology and cultural form was one of the precepts of my Goldsmiths MA. So the level of personal resonance should be of no great surprise…
‘the best way to encourage (or to have) new ideas isn’t to fetishise the “spark of genius”, to retreat to a mountain cabin in order to “be creative”, or to blabber interminably about “blue-sky”, “out-of-the-box” thinking. Rather, it’s to expand the range of your possible next moves – the perimeter of your potential – by exposing yourself to as much serendipity, as much argument and conversation, as many rival and related ideas as possible; to borrow, to repurpose, to recombine. This is one way of explaining the creativity generated by cities, by Europe’s 17th-century coffee-houses, and by the internet.’
In other words, “maximise your exposure to randomness.”
See also: The real reason for Germany’s industrial expansion.
Emotions occupy space
‘For example, emotions, with their palpable mingling of physical turmoil and racing thoughts, have become a hot topic, engaging not only philosophy but also psychology and the neurosciences. The increasingly cross-field use of neurological research, such as the data from functional magnetic resonance imaging, has grounded the idea that (in some sense) emotions occupy space, just like physical objects. More important for my point here, emotions bring about physical alterations that we consciously experience. Insofar as they are the means by which we discover certain value-laden aspects of the world we live in, the agitations they occasion give our bodily responses a capacity for knowledge that is sometimes overlooked.’
– Carolyn Korsmeyer, ‘Ideas of the century: The turn to the body‘, TPM
Politics/Economics Pop Culture Visual Culture [future shock]
by Justin
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[future shock] Animated News!
Thus far, 2010 seems to have been dominated by media artifacts of such world-historical contingency and raw peculiarity that – following any kind of close examination – they cause your brain to effervesce all over the floor.
Above, I give you the video equivalent of Iceland; dripping with futurity and latent fubarosity (where ‘fubar‘ = ‘the formal official metric unit of contemporary weirdness’). Let’s break it down.
The Big Society?
‘The Big Society could turn out Victorian, Feudal, Democratic Socialist, Swiss, even Anarcho-Syndicalist. It could draw influences from anywhere. But it is unambiguously a move off the traditional left-right axis of politics and I believe this is why we are all so confused by it.’
– Vinay Gupta, on the Tories’ halting attempts to define a new politics
‘My aim is to bake a cake that actually can consume itself, because that – in a sense – is what the fourth sector is doing. We’re baking a self-eating cake.’
– Nicola Murray MP (Rebecca Front), The Thick of It
Hacking Browne?
‘So, new marketing plan, courses of such critical intensity and theoretical purity that working for the man afterwards would be inconceivable.
As such the loans would never be repaid, and graduates would surely form anarcho-syndicalist non-profit collectives for rich fulfilled lives.’
– Dr. Joss Hands, reacting to the Browne Review of HE Funding and Student Finance
Material/Digital Politics/Economics Real Life Speculations Travel
by Justin
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The Iceland Notes
Not sure if I’m going to get around to finishing these for a few weeks yet, so I thought I’d post what I have. I was in Iceland from the 7th-19th September, in a half-assed attempt to avoid the psychic whiplash that would have resulted from me moving straight from postgrad halls in London back to the fields of rural Sussex. As a travel experience, it defied my expectations in all kinds of strange and unexpected ways. Here are some of my reflections:
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The Iceland Notes, or What I Did On My Holidays
(Part One of Several)
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So, you say you want to understand the emerging contours of the twenty-first century? Look to Iceland.
Fingers on keyboard. It’s 11.20 on a Saturday in mid-September, and there’s a small beer on the table – sitting unobtrusively to the right of my Chinese-made, grease-caked Lenovo ThinkPad. I don’t remember buying it. The beer that is; not the laptop.
Tomorrow afternoon, I take a bus to Keflavik and, from there, fly back to the United Kingdom in a half-empty plane, held together by insulation tape and Icelandic bloody-mindedness. The United Kingdom: a polity which, in a strange echo of the Holy Roman Empire, is anything but. The United Kingdom: a body politic with its collective breath held in anticipation of a socio-economic buggering – delivered enthusiastically by a coalition government of an entirely novel and interesting shade of malevolence.
Muted by my body’s desperate attempts to metabolise last night’s tidal swell of Viking beer, this nevertheless stands as a partial, halting answer to the eternal question; usually delivered with a near-imperceptible tilt of the head – ‘So, what are you doing in Iceland?‘
I take a quick swig of the beer. Though not overtly horrible, drinking-before-lunch and drinking-to-stave-off-a-hangover align in a way that floods my spine and stomach with a powerful sense of foreboding.
So, what am I doing in Iceland?
Ultimately, it all comes down to TINA – that lynch-pin of the Thatcher-Reaganite consensus and, later, of neoliberal globalisation: ‘There is no alternative.‘ My hypothesis: Iceland offers an alternative: albeit muted, partial, and – for the most part – virtual. But however much it is limited by the shrink-wrap legalese of Iceland’s IMF loans, there’s definitely something going on. Others have tasted it on the air; finding themselves lured as if by a siren to this volcanic outpost populated by knitwear hipsters, trolls, and abnormally small horses (not ponies). Though they would surely deny it, these exiles are the collapsitarians, and, for now, this is their Big Rock Candy Mountain.
However hungover I am currently, there’s a woman to my left who is surely an order of magnitude more so. She stirs beneath her jacket, shuddering slightly. I take a second mouthful of beer as a gesture toward focus.
Failure.
Bear with me; I’ll return to you later.
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The Icelandic National Concert and Conference Centre. Major icon/dream of pre-crash Iceland, with construction continuing at a much-reduced pace. Currently due to open in Spring 2011.
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Time passes and the hangover fades. I’m now at Keflavik – Europe’s most beautiful airport – a full 30 minutes before my flight departs. I’ve stocked up on natural bath products, Nordic t-shirts, and dried fish. Starting to sense that this trip might be what games researcher Jane McGonigal refers to as an ‘experience grenade‘: the fuse is lit, and I’m working through ideas, keeping them circulating until the explosion.
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Dymaxion dreams
‘Fuller, born in 1895, is best known for his geodesic domes, but his ultimate hope was that the three-wheeled Dymaxion – which looked like a VW camper van crossed with a pinball flipper – would fly, allowing Americans to leave the highway vertically and touch down at lightweight aluminium homes, scattered wherever they fancied by a fleet of Zeppelins.’
– Jonathan Glancey, ‘Norman Foster’s back-to-front car,’ The Guardian, 05/10/2010
