The Anti-Pragmatic Manifesto

- I will make things myself sometimes even if it ends up being more expensive and odd.
- I will not do the dishes until there is a full load.
- When inspiration strikes, I will write down the idea, regardless of where I am and how stupid and/or rude it makes me look.
- I will have breakfast for dinner sometimes.
- I will let the house go to hell while I read a great novel.
- I will have parties even if I can't afford it.
- I will be poor so I can squander time.
- I will buy balloons, flowers, or ice cream for no reason, with whatever change I have in my pocket.
- I will procrastinate, especially if it means that lightning has time to strike and make the end result more brilliant.
- I will bring home huge boxes from work so I can make forts with my children.
- I will drop everything when I'm sick (bugger everything else).
- I will do impractical things that make me happy, like keeping chickens and a garden in the city.
- I will always be late if it means not yelling at anyone.
- I will find any reason to dress up, just because I like to.
- I will continue using and teaching real-world skills, like making bread or sewing, even though they are outdated and unnecessary at the moment.
- I will not stop creating, even if no one ever buys my creations (in my case, writing).
- I will continue to make puns, even if it makes others groan.
- I will sing, because singing should be part of life, even if it's terrible (especially if it's terrible).
- And lastly, I will always, always, choose being silly over being cool, because silliness is much cooler in the long run, anyway.

That's all I can think of at the moment. Any suggestions?

The Song of the Passenger Pigeon

A mystery. My father told me a story about my grandmother, who grew up on a tiny island in the south end of Lake Erie: he said once, when she was very small, she was out in the fields with her father. She remembered this particularly because she wasn't often allowed out with him; it was a big deal.

So they were standing there, and the sky darkened, filled with birds. The birds stretched for as far as the eye could see and literally brought darkness into the day - for minutes upon minutes. She remembered asking her father what they were, and her father replying, "Passenger Pigeons."

This story fascinated me throughout my youth, because my own father then would explain to me that the last passenger pigeon, named Martha, died alone at the Cincinnati Zoo when my grandmother was seventeen.* The idea that the birds could go from that kind of crazy-populous to the lone bird dying while zookeepers stood and watched helplessly, just blew my mind. And something about my grandmother's story had a dreamlike quality: the two figures standing, holding hands, out in the field, while with a noise like a whirring, chattering storm, thousands and thousands of birds pass by.

It appealed to me, as it appealed to me that my grandmother grew up in a time without radios or cars, and then watched as first cars, then radios, then television and space travel, and finally, personal computers came to be. That plain old lady never ceased to stun me; in her I saw the most amazing kind of mortality, reflected as it was in the vast experience of age, and all the people left behind. What a life! And - how adaptable people are!


And yet, one of the reasons that the passenger pigeons did become extinct was because people didn't adapt, they didn't learn when to stop. They didn't look, or listen, or care. Here is a description by John James Audobon of a roosting-place, where the hunters waited to slaughter these graceful, gentle, slightly comical-looking birds:

"Many trees two feet in diameter, I observed, were broken off at no great distance from the ground; and the branches of many of the largest and tallest had given way, as if the forest had been swept by a tornado. Every thing proved to me that the number of birds resorting to this part of the forest must be immense beyond conception. As the period of their arrival approached, their foes anxiously prepared to receive them. Some were furnished with iron-pots containing sulfur, others with torches of pine-knots, many with poles, and the rest with guns. The sun was lost to our view, yet not a Pigeon had arrived. Every thing was ready, and all eyes were gazing on the clear sky, which appeared in glimpses amidst the tall trees. Suddenly there burst forth a general cry of "Here they come!" The noise which they made, though yet distant, reminded me of a hard gale at sea, passing through the rigging of a close-reefed vessel. As the birds arrived and passed over me, I felt a current of air that surprised me. Thousands were soon knocked down by the pole-men. The birds continued to pour in. The fires were lighted, and a magnificent, as well as wonderful and almost terrifying, sight presented itself. The Pigeons, arriving by thousands, alighted everywhere, one above another, until solid masses were formed on the branches all round. Here and there the perches gave way under the weight with a crash, and, falling to the ground, destroyed hundreds of the birds beneath, forcing down the dense groups with which every stick was loaded. It was a scene of uproar and confusion. I found it quite useless to speak, or even to shout to those persons who were nearest to me. Even the reports of the guns were seldom heard, and I was made aware of the firing only by seeing the shooters reloading.


"...The Pigeons were constantly coming, and it was past midnight before I perceived a decrease in the number of those that arrived. The uproar continued the whole night...Towards the approach of day, the noise in some measure subsided: long before objects were distinguishable, the Pigeons began to move off in a direction quite different from that in which they had arrived the evening before, and at sunrise all that were able to fly had disappeared. The howling of the wolves now reached our ears, and the foxes, lynxes, cougars, bears, raccoons, opossums and pole-cats were seen sneaking off, whilst eagles and hawks of different species, accompanied by a crowd of vultures, came to supplant them, and enjoy their share of the spoil.
It was then that the authors of all this devastation began their entry amongst the dead, the dying, and the mangled. The Pigeons were picked up and piled in heaps, until each had as many as he could possibly dispose of, when [hundreds of] hogs were let loose to feed on the remainder."

The birds were so abundant that another man describes this:

"In 1805 I saw schooners loaded in bulk with Pigeons caught up the Hudson river, coming in to the wharf at New York, when the birds sold for a cent a piece. I knew a man in Pennsylvania, who caught and killed upwards of 500 dozens in a clap-net in one day, sweeping sometimes twenty dozens or more at a single haul."

If one man in a day can catch and kill more than 6,000 birds, it is no longer hunting; it is a kind of inflation, mass ornicide. The Victorian Taxidermy site, to whom I owe many thanks for their fascinating and incredibly informative page on passenger pigeons, discusses some of the causes for the birds' extinction. Since they were known to double - or even quadruple - their numbers in a single season, it would take some doing to overcome that quantity of population. Not unreasonably, it's believed that a combination of factors caused their demise. For one thing, they needed vast quantities of old-growth forest to roost and eat in, which by 1900 was rapidly dwindling (imagine how much food they ate! That's a whole nother question). Another factor was the relentlessness of the slaughter. As the VT site says, "The pigeons were subjected to shooting on the widest and most devastating scale. They were never free from persecution at any time of the year. They were hunted in spring at the beginning of nesting which was most disastrous, where the fat squabs were always considered a delicacy, later young birds in summer were much sought after, and finally adults were taken at all times. The pigeon had no peace."


Lastly, and most curiously, there is a theory that the pigeons simply didn't do well in decreased numbers. They were used to a living environment where they didn't need to be cautious; their numerousness made them indestructible. Not only were the birds in lesser numbers just as easy to catch as they'd been in larger numbers, but in psychological terms, they didn't function well. It's possible they felt vulnerable, and simply gave up breeding: they were stressed, and their breeding-places were as unsafe as everywhere else.

Oddly, looking at the history and the statistics, I've found my grandmother couldn't have seen passenger pigeons flying over in that number. The last recorded kill of wild passenger pigeons was when she was two years old. They hadn't flown that thickly since before she was born.

So where did the story come from? Did a large flock of birds fly over and prompt her father to tell her about seeing passenger pigeons when he was young, causing some kind of false memory? Did her father incorrectly identify some other kind of numerous bird? Or did she in fact see the very last flight of the birds? One of the last recorded collections of birds was reported in Ohio, at the right time and not far from her island, though it seems very unlikely they would be as thick as she describes. But I will never know, for she died thirteen years ago at the age of ninety-seven, and I can't ask her. She was always a nature-lover, communing with birds and shore. My elder daughter bears her name.

_________________________________________
*(We have incredibly long generations in my family, so don't be horrified; I promise I didn't have mine at age 60 or something. Having one's children at a venerable age seems to have been fashionable with my ancestors long before it became commonly popular. My grandfather was born in 1876, no less; just think of it as genetic seven-league boots.)

The Wonder of the Golden Proportions

Ever hear of the Golden Mean? Neither had I, until I was supposed to teach a graphic design course, and started (you know me) to do research on what, exactly, I should be teaching. It's one thing to be able to design things, and quite another to have to teach it to others.

A lot of what I found, gestalt theory and the principles of visual weight, and so on, were really interesting; but the Golden Mean was what really caught my fancy.

(NB: Math following. Don't be scared, all will be clear [and un-mathlike] in the end, I promise. I hope)

The Golden Mean, also known as the Golden Ratio, was developed as a proportional measurement by the ancient Greeks, as a way of making the most pleasing artworks. It was felt to be semi-divine, in that it seemed to show up in Nature as well. The ratio, an irrational number, began as 1.6180339887... and continued onward, pretty much forever. It is found by working out the following algebraic equation:

Essentially, if you take a line that is 1 long, and go from there, you will find that the above equation will work out to that same irrational number, which, when used as a proportional device, allows you to produce varying lengths of lines that are smaller and larger. But I'm not going to explain how, because though I really, really love math, I don't do well with equations, which are difficult for me: at least, to express the near-mystical magic that shows up in numbers.

So: now you have a bunch of varying line lengths. So what?

Well, let's see: take one of these lines and make a square out of it (putting four of them at right angles to each other, remember? I sometimes blank on these little leaps of logic). Then, starting at the center of one side, measure to one corner and draw an arc downward:


Aha! Now we start to have something. If the length of the square is 1, then the length of the rectangle (shown as the Greek letter phi here) is, of course, 1.6180339887... well, you get the point: the Greeks were smart. We call this shape the Golden Rectangle, and you can find it everywhere in Greek and Renaissance art (and elsewhere! Stage height proportions, window shapes, chair backs, believe me, they're everywhere. They are quite pleasing to the eye).

(If you really want to know the equation looks like this:)
(but don't ask me to explain that part).

Golden rectangles in the proportions of the Parthenon

Okay, onwards. I know this is looking like a lot of math, but bear with me here. Now we come to this guy named Fibonacci, born c.1170, who is considered "one of the most talented mathematicians of the Middle Ages" [wiki]. This is the man responsible for the introduction of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system when all of Europe was doing math in Roman numerals (I strongly urge you to read his link, above: it's fascinating). He used what is now known as the Fibonacci sequence - actually a pre-6th-century Indian concept - as an example in his famous and apparently brilliant book about math, Liber Abaci, or Book of Calculation, which is why we have it now. In any case, the Fibonacci Sequence, as it is now known, leads to all kinds of interesting events.

Try this. Draw a square, measuring one unit across (make it a small unit, like a centimeter, or perhaps the distance between binder-paper lines - otherwise you will need big paper). Now draw another square exactly the same right up alongside it (so they are sharing a side). Now, say you take the line along the top of both squares and use that to draw a bigger square, which of course is two units on a side - right? Okay, now moving clockwise (or counter-clockwise, like the picture below) around this construction, draw another square along the side where the edge of the big square and one small square align. Keep going clockwise and keep drawing bigger and bigger squares. The length of each consecutive square should make a sequence, like this: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89... (by now you've probably run out of paper). Viola! Your own personal Fibonacci sequence, right there in your own home! And...lookie there. It sure looks kind of like...is it? Pretty close to a Golden Rectangle, isn't it?


Okay, okay, you say. That's kind of neat. But aren't we just wanking with numbers?

Well, perhaps. But check this out. You can draw an arc, starting with a point at the middle of the two first squares where they touch the third square. The arc goes from corner to corner of each square, so that the two squares together make a semicircle. Then, by expanding the arc and drawing one in each square, working around the structure, you can build a lovely spiral:

This Fibonacci spiral does not have the two original squares visible

This spiral is one that closely mimics the Golden Spiral, based on the Golden Mean, above. The main difference is that the Golden Mean goes in both directions, both up and down, whereas the Fibonacci spiral only goes upwards from 1 (though you could take it down if you were into math, I'm sure). Both are considered logarithmic spirals, which are found everywhere in nature. Jakob Bernouli, a mathematician from a great family of brilliant people, called the logarithmic spiral spira mirabilis, or "the Miraculous Spiral," so called because the size increases but its shape is unaltered with each successive curve. This kind of spiral shows up in shells, in hurricanes, in the shape of a cat's claw or a wave; galaxies and flowers all work with logarithmic spirals. The Fibonacci sequence can be found many places as well, such as in the ancestry patterns of bees, the branching of trees, the whorls of a sunflower and the fruitlets of a pineapple.

Technically, though, the Fibonacci spiral has a slight wobble; it is not perfect, so not really a proper logarithmic spiral.

Which brings me to something which I find absolutely wonderful: if you chart that wobble on a graph, it begins to look as if it is ocillating around something, some specific number. Guess which number?

You guessed it. Now tell me there's no mystery in numbers.



(For a nice, step by step, even better mathematical explanation of this, check out this site. It certainly got me going.)

Genius Loci: the Spirits of Place

Three years ago, I moved from a city famous for its shipping docks to a place in the country. Not only "the country," but the valley where I had grown up. I'd lived for years and years in cities all over the world, and coming back here was a wish that had long gone unfulfilled.

Several things struck me on my return. One was the incredible certainty, which took my city-bred children two years to comprehend, that you can walk in any direction in the country. You are not confined to streets and paths. You may, if you wish, simply set off and go cross-country without worrying about the neighbors (mostly). Though you do have to worry about poison oak.

The other thing that struck me is how different this, the place I live now, is from the place I grew up, only two miles down the road. Microclimate? Or different spirits?

When I was in graduate school, in the unnamed industrial city where I ended up living for ten years, I resided in a rather unhealthy part of town for awhile. I had needed to find a place fast, between my arrival from London and the beginning of classes, and I ended up in one of those divided older houses, with young Rottweiler lovers in both the other apartments, all very nice people (but). The front garden had a six-foot-high, black spiked steel fence around it, with a gate that clanged when people walked through it. There was a small, miserable tree outside the gate, which small (and not-so-small) urban boys worked very hard at, trying to get a stick to play with. Sticks, apparently, are de rigor for boys, regardless of their class and upbringing, and these particular boys were starved for lack of them.


As time went on, the tree acquired a lean. Each spring, it put out fewer leaves. Finally one day, I found it lying on the pavement. We had a suitable funeral, and I pondered how much paved places wring the life out of one's soul. I found myself desperate to walk on grass, and I began planting things in the small, unkempt, barren yard inside the barbaric fence. Despite the dog droppings from the other residents' dogs, and the thrash-metal barbecues they liked to hold in the middle of the yard, where people didn't seem able or willing to watch their feet, I did manage to grow a small selection of bushes and vines. I gave some sweetpea seeds to a junkie woman once, and she almost cried, saying she didn't know what to do with them, holding them like they might break or get lost.

Needless to say, this affected my studies. I found myself reading about gardens, every kind of gardens; and eventually, inevitably, I came across books about the grand English gardeners - Capability Brown, William Kent, and the like. Their "modern" style of landscape gardening was all about improving on what nature should have been, rusticating things and making the views look more natural than natural. They were deeply interested in the idea of the genius loci, or spirit of the place: a location's distinctive atmosphere, the thing that makes it wholly itself. They worked with the way the landscape was already shaped, sometimes introducing new elements or rerouting streams into man-made lakes, all with an eye to emphasizing what was already there. Trees were planted in apparently random, asthetic clumps. Distant fields of sheep were incorporated seamlessly into the foreground by use of Ha-has (I love those to death). This style was the beginning of what came to be an obsession with the Picturesque, meaning, "like a painting."

A ha-ha from below...and above

In its original context, genius loci was the Roman term for the literal protective spirit of a place, this being a common enough conception: think of the roadside shrines in Japan and Bali, India and, long ago, in pre-Christian Europe and Britain. Small statues stand in particular places where people pass through, and as travelers come and partake of the spring or the resting-place, they leave offerings, or simply ask for the blessing of the little god. As time went on, this idea of local gods was no longer considered important. Formal gardens, with geometric layouts and little hedges, became the mode; the genius loci was relegated to a few classical statues placed at discreet intervals or in niches; the concept was lost. However, with the Enlightenment's interest in classical asthetics the term came around again, in the form of an allegory or a metaphor.

The poet Alexander Pope wrote, at around this time:

"Consult the genius of the place in all;
That tells the waters or to rise, or fall;
Or helps th' ambitious hill the heav'ns to scale,
Or scoops in circling theatres the vale;
Calls in the country, catches opening glades,
Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,
Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines;
Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.


After Capability Brown died, his naturalistic style was replaced by the Romantic version of the same thing: gothick ruins, hermitages, and ivy-covered grottos were all the rage. Brown's flexible and mild-mannered genius loci was transformed, via a veritable injection of anxiety, into a more exciting (if faux) Spirit which offered a "sublime thrill" to explorers of the dark and wild gardens of the new era.

For a really brilliant sideline to this, I recommend Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, one of the best plays I have ever seen or read. If you like the things I have been discussing in this blog, you would love this play, all about mathematics, love, chaos theory, Byron, history, death and, of course, landscape design. Mr. Stoppard evokes beautifully the lady of the house's distress at plans to remake her beloved Brownian grounds into something in the Romantic mold, with a ruined tower and creepers.



Another form of landscape arrangement, Feng shui at its base is a form of place-spirit analysis, simplistically speaking, with elements of geomagnetism, astronomy, cardinal direction, and geographical formation working to align human dwellings to the Universe. The ancient Chinese managed, with a minimum of fuss, to deconstruct a somewhat theological concept down to a science of energy flow and geological meaning. Curiously, some of the principles of Feng Shui can be found in many of Brown's gardens.


But to get back to this idea that there are little gods, presences that occupy a place, that give it its character: it is my deep and abiding feeling that perhaps many modern places feel soulless is because they ARE soulless. Think of shopping malls, where the entire landscape has been mashed into shape, flattened into generic-ness.


Think of those bad parts of town: do they have landmarks? Trees, large stones, hills? For the most part, and I dare you to come up with examples otherwise, ghettos and slums are in the flat parts of town. They're the most paved parts. They have the fewest, or the smallest, trees. How about those projects, where the poor are crammed into faceless apartment blocks, with weedy, untended, unused yards? The landscape has lost its face; the genius loci has fled, taking its protection with it.

Okay, I'm being political here, but it's not impossible to fix. Look at this wonderful piece of "intervention", or public performance (?) art, by a group called Rebar. The piece is called Park(ing). Rebar claims it is "Providing temporary public open space in a privatized part of town."




After Rebar did this first piece, other people PARK(ed) in cities all over the world. It's one of the coolest ideas I've seen for combatting urban depression. A portable genius loci!

In concept, I think genius loci can be a lot like mana, as I discussed in a previous post: the more a place is used, polished, loved, allowed to be itself, the more it will create itself, allow itself to grow a soul.

And these souls, these spirits can be very, very small, the genius loci of a waterfall or a knoll or even simply a hidden, sweet corner of an alley (under the fire escape, behind those potted plants). Some, of course, are vast, like the ones at Yosemite Valley, where staff work tirelessly keeping the local genii locii (?) from getting trampled.

In the valley where I live, there is a grave, quite old and all alone, tucked into the corner of a side-valley. Whoever it is who died and was buried there is now a small spirit of that place. People who don't know her, riding past on their horses, leave small handfuls of dried grasses and other things, to thank her for being in that place, making it special. Then there's the huge oak tree on a knoll, high above the valley, all alone, with a trunk the width of a king-sized bed. It stands, shading the mushrooms and irises who grow there, and its massive limbs house some kind of spirit, I am certain - though some long-ago fool carved the word "SUE" into the bark, thus naming the poor spirit for generations to come.

In any case, I think the current craze for small fountains and hidden benches in tiny urban gardens is an attempt, albeit unconscious, by the residents to invite, gently and hesitantly, some sprite or minor god to come and settle, to sit and stay awhile. You build a fountain to delight their ears, put in some fragrant roses in brilliant colors; like hummingbirds, fleet and delicate, they'll come to smell, to listen, to look at the lovely lines and shades you've made with your planting choices. In the end, if you're lucky, you'll make the place comfortable enough and beautiful enough that one of those vanquished spirits might, with a little coaxing, consent to stay.

They need us as much as we need them.

Androids and Un-Aliveness

"Every time an inventor tries to simulate life mechanically, he is in fact accentuating his own mortality." This quote comes from the introduction of Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life, by Gaby Wood.

I found this marvelous book in the Acknowledgements section of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which is a primer of sorts for kids about a fascination with clockwork, and the history of cinema. I highly recommend it, both for adults and older children. Not only are the copious illustrations excellent, but the story is created out of the kind of connection-building, drawing-lines-between-several-apparently-unassociated-things thinking that makes a work of fiction really fascinating, mostly because it could so easily be true: the places are right, the facts are right; everything runs alongside each other, so why shouldn't it be true? To take these facts and serendipities and bring them magically to life in a way that is better than any truth is the best kind of storytelling.


Although I haven't yet read Edison's Eve, the Introduction available via the "see inside" link on Amazon, unlike most of these Amazonian links, allows a very detailed and interesting look into what must certainly be a very interesting tome. Beginning with a description of "The Writer" and "The Drawer" - the two automata whose videos I showed three posts ago - she moves on to a meditation on the magic and fear involved with the creation of something which might, ultimately, replace us: human automata, or androids. She begins with Sigmund Freuds’ description of “ ‘the Uncanny,’ the feeling that arises when there is an ‘intellectual uncertainty’ about the borderline between the lifeless and the living. It is triggered in particular, Freud wrote, by ‘waxwork figures, ingeniously constructed dolls and automata.’ A child’s desire for a doll to come to life may become, in adulthood, a fear.”

From here, Ms. Wood skips along through the Spanish Inquisition, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, automata in ancient texts (!), and alchemy, to the moment when she begins her story...

“...at a later, critical moment: when the ambitions of the necromancers were revived in the well-respected name of science. In the eighteenth century, an interest in anatomy, advances in the design of scientific instruments, and a fondness for magic tricks meant that automata were thought of as glorious feats of engineering, or philosophical toys. As Umberto Eco has put it, the inventors of that period ‘substituted mechanics for the forces of evil.’ And yet...the rational scientists who constructed these celebrated objects ofen harboured ambitions beyond the bounds of reason...The madness left over from darker times was all the more disturbing for being hidden beneath the mask of enlightenment.”

She goes on to a fascinating discussion on the philosophy of creating un-humans, from the association they have with death (being un-alive) to the philosophical implications of the lingo used in modern-day robotics and, curiously, in the places where these modern-day automata tend to fail.

One of the ideas Ms. Wood brings up is the idea that machine intelligences having no perception of the passage of time - this being one of the basic tenets of human consciousness. They can count the minutes and hours, sure, but they do not "understand" what is happening: why or how or even the fact that it is true that things change through time. Robots and automata also, and this is key, don't age as we do, and thus mortality is a concept which does not apply to them - which makes them all the more frightening. They are about creating life where there is no life, and it feels strange, feels, as Freud points out, strange and wrong.

This question, of humanity and its replication (or failure thereof), is a constant in our modern (ie, industrial) culture. Think of all the literature, films, and so on that explore the idea of adding and subtracting humanity - sometimes even exploiting our fear of its lack:

- Frankenstein, both literature and movies
- Dracula, ditto
- The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
- The movie Metropolis
- I, Robot
- Zombie movies
- The Iron Giant
- Bladerunner, obviously
- Terminator
- X Men 1

...to name only a very few obvious ones.

Much has been made of the link between alien/martian invasion stories/movies and the Cold War fear culture, which in some sense is another side of the same coin, as they were all political stories about making an Enemy (collective noun), less than human. The Stepford Wives, which doesn't really fit into this Cold War category, is nevertheless basically a political allegory with a feminist slant, and therefore less about the humanity of the individual people than it is about the creepy price of perfection.

Ms. Wood speaks of how mechanical know-how turned, at the end of the eighteenth century, from an exploration of making machines more human, to the exploration of making humans more machine-like. It seems to me that with the machine age, fear of the un-alive human began, bit by bit, to take precedence over fear of witches, magic, and other fears of the unknown.

Which is not to say the thrust to make humans and machines interchangeably blurred has not been seen as good - as a progression from obscurity to greatness. Back in the 1920's, as part of the Efficiency Movement, Lillian and Frank Gilbreth strove to find ways to help make workers' movements more efficient by examining special films of people working (using, for the first time, little lights attached to their hands which tracked their movements). Their goal was to reduce the number of motions involved in a task. At the time this was seen as a way to make their jobs easier and better, but in latter years there has been a lot of discussion about how this thinking has led to a cultural environment where workers are expected to behave efficiently at all times, like machines...or automatons.

Efficiency can be taken to extremes, though. A performance artist called Stelarc, claims that the body is obsolete. His work is all about the idea of becoming post-human. Third Arm, for example, takes the idea of a prosthetic limb and goes a step further: what if the technology was actually used to give us extra limbs? Another work, Stimbod, looks at voluntary and involuntary control of our bodies. Using a touch screen, viewers can program a series of motions and gestures which, when executed, then electrically stimulate the artist's muscles to perform those same motions...So then the man becomes the automaton.

(Smackings of William Gibson, and the amplified bodies of The Sprawl Triology here)!

Stelarc's obsession with the body, and improving on the body's basic design, is paradoxical and ultimately controversial: if one is a creationist, then the body is sacrosanct - it is as God(s) created it, and not to be improved upon. Evolution, on the other hand, says that things are always being optimized for the current circumstances - and yet, isn't the 4-limbed model one that has been proven to be evolutionarily efficient? And what happens when prosthetics become more of us than the original? The Tin Woodsman, for example, didn't start out that way. He was a flesh-and-blood man, a woodsman who gradually lost all his limbs (and eventually head and torso as well) to his own axe, and thus to the replacements made of tin; and after all of it, the thing he longed most to regain was his heart.

So the question is, really, not whether we will create artificial intelligences that take over the world, or whether we will create machines which start as our servants and end as our deathless masters, but really, whether we will, like the tin man, subsume our own human workings to the point where we can no longer find our own hearts.

Much of this, of course, comes down to humans' inability to stop tinkering with things. The world as it is today is a product of this inability, as are many of our bodies' illnesses. The desire to cheat Death brings with it a chance that we will, in effect, invite Death in to be part of our lives - not only as a by-product of the very processes we have invented to cheat death, but in a form of deathlessness, a type of being that extends existence without taking into account an ultimately human trait: the sense that our lives are passing, that every minute is a gift, that we have only so many days to seize.

Connections: the Book

At the risk of giving away all my secrets, I want to recommend James Burke's book, Connections. It's based on this brilliant TV show he did for the BBC in the 1970's, about the history of invention. Some of you may be familiar with it.

The great thing about this series of videos, and even more so about the book, is that he doesn't take a historian's view of the sequence of events. Instead, he follows a roundabout, storyteller's route, drawing lines between this person over here having this idea and that person over there taking one aspect of that invention and running with it - in a completely different direction. There is a long and wonderful discussion of navigation and lodestones, another section discusses Guericke's work with vacuums and how this led to research into the composition of air, and eventually the investigation of light passing through gases, and thus on to the cathode ray and television.

The book draws connections between vacuums and weather, atomic energy and the Norman Conquest, ploughs and gunpowder. It discusses, among other things, water clocks, Gutenberg's printing press, Vaucanson's automated duck, and the Jacquard loom (which I plan to discuss sometime soon, so don't read the book - okay?). Clockwork, the evolution of the telescope, and the timber crisis fromt the sixteenth-century glass industry: it's all in there. In fact there are things here (and images too) that you never heard of, that will just blow you away.

Life in a silver-mining town, late 1500s - including those who are underground

I cannot recommend this book (and the video series) highly enough. The main advantage of the book is that you can leave it somewhere in your house that you frequently go to sit or lay quietly (near the toilet or the bed, for example) and it will keep you awake at night as you peruse the amazing ideas and connections laid out in it, like a particularly well-designed maze.

Automata in the Ancient World

(Image of Hephaestus courtesy of Classics Unveiled)

There were golden handmaids also who worked for him,
and were like real young women, with sense and reason, voice also and strength, and all the learning of the immortals...
- The Illiad, Book 18

I just finished reading an article by Noel Sharkey in New Scientist (a British science magazine, totally worth the exhorbitant yearly subscription), which expanded on Mark Rosheim's wonderful and interesting book, Leonardo's Lost Robots.

Mr. Rosheim's research on Leonardo da Vinci's work suggests that da Vinci's lion automaton (see Wired article here) was powered by a clockwork cart, which was steered via a mechanism "controlled by arms attached to rotating gears." In Rosheim's opinion, it would have been possible to control the lion's movements by changing the position of the arms, which means the automaton was not only clockwork, but programmable. Which is a big deal.

Inspired by Rosheim's work, Mr. Sharkey, a professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield, decided to investigate some questions this raised: was da Vinci influenced by an earlier design? How far back in history can we trace programmable robots?

Mr. Sharkey is careful to point out that "programmable" means a machine capable of taking instructions. The instructions (the "program") can be written, or they can be hard-wired. The important thing is that the instructions should be able to be changed without taking the machine itself apart. So, for example, an old-fashioned metal-drum music box is reprogrammable because you can take the drum out and put a new one in.

This is what Sharkey says about his search:

"In search of answers I followed the technology back through medieval Europe to the Islamic world, where I have found evidence of an even earlier programmable automaton, made in Baghdad by the brilliant 13th-century engineer Ibn Ismail Ibn al-Razzaz Al-Jazari. He created a veritable boatload of programmable robot musicians effectively a floating jukebox designed to entertain nobles as they drank and lounged at royal pool parties.

"Picture of the internal structure of an automata for serving and arbitrating drinking sessions."
- Courtesy of JC Heuden at Virtual Worlds

Yet the trail doesn't stop there. It led me even further back past the automata of the Byzantine court and ancient Rome to ancient Alexandria. It was here that Hero, one of the greatest Greek engineers, constructed a programmable robot that pre-dates da Vinci's by 1500 years. Its control system turns out to be unique; more like knitting than a computer circuit. Nevertheless, there is clear evidence linking Hero's design to the programming languages used in, say, Honda's latest humanoid robot Asimo."

What Sharkey found was that Hero, who had designed everything from the aeolipile (the world's first steam-engine, see picture above) to "a vending machine that dispensed a shot of holy water in exchange for a coin," had designed a mobile theatre, complete with Dionysus and some female worshippers, all automata, which came in on a sort of self-propelled, self-guided cart. Sharkey saw the similarity to da Vinci's lion at once. But when he looked in Hero's Peri automatopoietikes ("On automata-making"), it became clear: this theatre was actually programmable -- using string for the programming language.

As Mr. Sharkey describes it, "Hero's idea was so elegant that even as I read it, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end." Not only did Hero come up with a way of making a machine work in complex, programmable ways, he had essentially invented a programming language. And it's all with the kind of stuff you could put together in your basement. I found it all absolutely fascinating, but too long to recount, so you can read more in this reprint of the New Scientist article if you're interested. And here is a guy from New Scientist who decided to try it:

It's really interesting to me, finding that our mechanical-thinking personalities as humans go back so far. We tend to think of ourselves as the pinnacle of evolution, as if the ancient Greeks didn't have the brains to figure out simple mechanics. We look back and say, "My goodness, how on earth did they build those pyramids?" When in fact, the human brain hasn't changed in a really, really long time. It's only the available materials, the access to information, that have changed: the evolution of technological materials and our knowledge about what kinds of materials work, and the ability for information to move around in a sparsely-populated world full of war and danger - not the actual abilities of our minds. Think about it: Hero's book was probably read by, at best, a few hundred people over the course of several hundred years. Perhaps the reason we find it all so amazing is the way the ancients figured ways to be mechanical despite the lack of materials and access to information.

Take, for example, the article in the New Yorker recently (5/14/07) about the Antikythera mechanism (wiki), a fully-formed bronze clockwork mechanism from the first century BC:

"The device is remarkable for the level of miniaturization and complexity of its parts, which is comparable to that of 18th century clocks. It has over 30 gears, although some have suggested as many as 70 gears, with teeth formed through equilateral triangles. When past or future dates were entered via a crank (now lost), the mechanism calculated the position of the Sun, Moon or other astronomical information such as the location of other planets." - Wikipedia

When it was first opened in 1902, it was noticed that the Antikythera Mechanism had gears with precisely-cut teeth of different sizes, and looked like the mechanism of a clock, which was deemed impossible "because scientifically precise gearing wasn't believed to have been widely used until the fourteenth century - fourteen hundred years after the ship went down." No one wanted to believe it - and so the thing was put down as a sort of astrolabe - and left at that.

The interesting thing about this article, aside from the wonderful detective tale showing the slow unveiling of this device, is the unusual supposition that "early civilizations were much more technically adept than we imagine they were." In fact, let me quote a paragraph:

"Looking back over the first fifty years of research on the Mechanism, one is struck by the reluctance of modern investigators to credit the ancients with technological skill. The Greeks are thought to have possessed crude wooden gears, which were used to lift heavy building materials...but historians do not generally credit them with possessing...gears cut from metal and arranged into complex 'gear trains' capable of carrying motion from one driveshaft to another...It's almost as if we wished to reserve advanced technological accomplishment exclusively for ourselves."

The article goes on to describe how ancient inventors and their descriptions are the cause of much disbelief and furor among scholars, many of whom point to the lack of physical evidence. Hero's works are described by critics as "fantasy," for example. And yet, here is a perfectly fine specimen of ancient technology, sitting in a museum for a hundred years, gathering dust, while people argue about it in a desultory way (with a few, noticeably ignored, exceptions).

There is a quality to this kind of argument, among perfectly reasonable history- and science-types, which smacks to me of the Self-Justifying Three: Manifest Destiny, Social Darwinism, and Positivism. Manifest Destiny was a peculiarly American argument used in the 19th Century to excuse the displacement of indiginous peoples. It ran like this: the (white) American people are virtuous, and have a mission to spread this virtue, as manifestly destined by God (the destiny can be seen in how we are already spreading)...See the excellent, circular logic? Social Darwinism believes that extreme inequalities in wealth are due to the fact that anyone who's got the right stuff will become rich, therefore the poor must be inherently lazy and stupid, and that's why they're poor. Positivism is still alive and well today, and it says that everything is improving through science, i.e. continually getting more rational (read: better - remember "Better living through chemistry?") Apply all this to the ancients, and we have exactly the kind of assumed superiority that gets us nowhere.

"This painting (circa 1872) by John Gast called American Progress is an allegorical representation of Manifest Destiny. Here Columbia, a personification of the United States, leads civilization westward with American settlers, stringing telegraph wire as she travels; she holds a schoolbook. The different economic activities of the pioneers are highlighted and, especially, the changing forms of transportation. The Indians and wild animals flee." [wiki]

Think about it: why do people always say that Leonardo da Vinci was "ahead of his time?" It's true that he was brilliant, but doesn't that statement imply a certain belief that those people back then were incapable of creation to the degree he worked, that they were not only ignorant but, somehow, less than modern people?

The problem is confusing intelligence with knowledge, and knowledge with information. How many of us remember the "smart" kid in school, the one who knew everything? In reality this kid wasn't much smarter than other people, it was simply that he or she kept all the facts at his or her fingertips. On the other hand that other kid, the quiet one in the corner who never said anything? That kid was actually mechanically brilliant, but no one noticed it because it expressed itself as spending all her time "playing with" her Erector Set (aka Meccano). We have all done it, thinking that knowledge is the product of intelligence - and also that information is knowledge.

The truth is that knowledge is the assembly of information, and it is only through intelligence that we are able to convert knowledge into a coherent world view. If we saw it in terms of Lego (since I'm on a toy theme here), information would be the individual lego blocks - useless on their own. Knowledge would be lego blocks assembled into discrete chunks, which allows the legos to be carried around and exchanged - but they still don't mean much, other than the cachet of personal wealth, until you add in that secret ingredient: intelligence. Then, all of a sudden, you can make all sorts of things happen that have never been done with legos before.

In the world of education, it is becoming more and more commonly believed that intelligence comes in many different flavors, and that, contrary to IQ tests and other ways of quantifying smarts, intelligence has to do with ways of perceiving, ways of processing knowledge. If you look at the fact that there are more than ten times the number of people alive today than in da Vinci's time (and less before that), it is no wonder that this innate intelligence did not catch fire, and Hero's steam-powered aeolipile (for example) remained a curiosity.

After all, he was unable to broadcast what he did except in the most limited way, lacking a printing press or a postal system.

Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), who rebutted the presiding Cartesian view that all things must be verified through observation by observing that "the realms of verifiable truth and human concern share only a slight overlap, yet reasoning is required in equal measure in both spheres" [wiki], said that history is cyclical. His analysis was that civilization repeats the same cycle every time: a "divine" age, where culture relied on metaphor to understand the world; a "heroic" age, feudal and monarchic and dependent on idealized figures, and the final age, which is characterized by democracy and reflection on the world via irony (which era do you suppose we are in?). "...in this [final] epoch, the rise of rationality leads to barbarie della reflessione or barbarism of reflection, and civilization descends once more into the poetic era" [wiki]. Needless to say, he got a poor reception for his ideas, because no one wanted to believe that civilizations always rise and fall again. Everyone wants to believe that they are the pinnacle of history, and that it will carry on this way forever.

The truth is, even when people came up with great ideas, they might not have had the means to disseminate information. And even if they did, the ideas had difficulty going far. And even then, you were always in danger of running into a dark age, when all your ideas were burned or lost or, well, suppressed.

So here we are, with our internet and our intense crowding, where ideas fly around like bees. When someone invents something it is disseminated within minutes. Can you see the advantages we have over the ancients? We must be careful we do not assume an evolutionary advantage over those who have gone before - that we, with all our gear, are actually more intelligent than our ancient forebears, who when you think of it, did the most amazing things with the materials at hand. Perhaps the sign of a truly advancing culture is one who can overcome the urge to diminish those who have come before. Perhaps, when articles like this come out in the New Yorker and other popular broadcasting mechanisms, we have some hope; a Rennaissance of sorts.

Or perhaps we should be on the lookout for that coming Dark Age.




Links:

July 31st the History Channel is running a show on Ancient Robots, in which they have interviewed Mr. Sharkey. The dates for this in the UK start, I think, on the 24th - look it up depending on your area. I have no idea about the rest of the English-speaking world, sorry...

Thanks to the Automata/Automaton blog for the unexpected link to YouTube!

Why Scrooge McDuck is better than Bill Gates

Rant alert: some ranting may appear in the content below.

Okay, that title may seem off-topic. After all, as the book How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic points out, Disney comics are all about imperialism, and we know that Wunderkammern are not. Right?

Well, not necessarily. Looking at the Age of Exploration, and how it ushered in both science (in its modern form), and imperialism of the worst sort (read: Conquistadors, Dutch East India Company, British Empire, and our good old American "military advisors"), it is clear that there is a flip side to the kind of wonderous mentality I have talked about in previous posts. After all, some of the most interesting things found in Wunderkammern were things co-opted, wrested or wheedled from people in other parts of the world.

However, as a longtime reader of Donald Duck and his elder (and weirder) relative Scrooge, I beg to qualify.

When I was a kid my father collected comic books. Not a lot of them, but he had a few, some of them really interesting. He let me read his Donald Duck comics, mostly written by Carl Barks, which was probably a mistake, as they were no longer pristine after I had read them twenty times. I will say, though, that they certainly made an impression on me.

Many of the best stories are about Uncle Scrooge's quest for owning the most valuable things in the world. So in that sense, they are indeed imperialist, and assume a sort of outdated sense of the white duck's right to take things from other, differently-colored, less "developed" people around the world.

However, there is something very important to be said for Scrooge: when he wants something, he goes there himself to get it, even though he is an old duck with a fabulous fortune at his command. His adventures are what make him worth reading about.

Now, I need to take a moment here to talk about pulp fiction. The (non-sexual) pulp fiction, by definition, was full of wild adventures, explorations, discoveries, and tales of strange occurrences. There is an interesting reverse correlation between the exploration of the (un)known world and the rise of pulp fiction: the more we knew about our world, the more wild the stories in the magazines, as if people's imagination craved more the less there was to wonder about. (the Hollow Earth book, in a previous post, has a nice section on pulp fiction, by the way). In general, pulp fiction was for adults; but some of the best comics of the day followed the pulp format, including, in a slightly classier and more humorous way, the Donald and Scrooge comics.


As in pulp fiction, Scrooge's amazing geographic discoveries are mostly not-real or thinly disguised (though he does visit the Yukon to find his lost stash). But, like a true pulp hero, he goes into it willing to lay his own safety on the line for greed. And, unlike the standard pulps, which lack a sense of humor, we know all about his personality: he is a cantankerous, greedy boogerhead who chisels his own nephews and often screws up. He is, within the comic format, pretty realistic - and we like him because he's so annoying, greedy, etc, and therefore real.

Bill Gates, on the other hand, is anything but a pulp hero, annoying or not. He is a total cipher. We wonder, in fact, if he could possibly be not-real, like Scrooge's locales. He's probably as rich as Scrooge; you know that old adage that if Bill dropped a $500 bill it would not be worth his time to go back and pick it up (of course, if he were Scrooge, he would go back for a dropped dime)? He doesn't seem to be as greedy as Scrooge, but who's to say? Maybe his wife knows. Ultimately, he seems nice enough. And, well, terribly bland.

Which brings us to this: Bill Gates, while smart and pretty savvy, was also lucky. He came along at the right time. He worked pretty hard. But he's a new breed of wealthy, nothing like the old dubloon-wielding explorers who went out in search of their fortunes: he happened on his wealth. I get the sense he doesn't really know what to do with it. Look at pictures of him: have you ever seen anyone so boring?

But Scrooge - Scrooge is hands-on. Like Indiana Jones and his pulp treasure-hunting ilk, he is larger than life. He actually bathes in cold cash (don't you kind of wish Bill Gates did that?). He loves his money, not for what it will buy or what it means in the larger context; he just loves it for itself. He is a collector, obsessed with his collection. He almost can't help himself; his office is a Wunderkammer devoted to wealth. He is incredibly superstitious, and has numerous lucky talismans that he guards jealously. He is a believer in wonders.

I have a weird vision of Bill Gates, in his inevitable unimaginative checked shirt, trying to rescue the Lost Crown of Gengis Khan from the Abominable Snowman. Do you think he would escape? Or convince the Snowman that he had caused a miracle? Would he throw down bundles of rubber and bounce from one to the other to escape Mombie the Zombie? No, he probably wouldn't believe that Mombie was a zombie. But then, if Bill Gates were Scrooge McDuck, Mombie would be wearing a tie, and be a tax-collector.

Bill Gates is the personification of How to Make Being Rich the Most Boring Thing In the World. Face it: people think that being rich is fun (imagine yourself bathing in that money!). And, if you're creative, you'll be thinking that "fun" would be a lot like Scrooge McDuck's adventures, except maybe with some interesting ways to give money to crazy artists or something. But the truth is, as a modern rich person, you would need to hire an army of accountants to find things to do with your money. Hell, you probably never even see your money in cold, hard cash (remember Harry Potter's bank vault?). I'll bet Bill Gates hasn't seen more than $2000 of his money all in one place before. His kind of money is invisible to the naked eye. It's conceptual. It's being groomed and moved around and taken care of by experts, so that it will keep growing - exactly like modern science: compartmentalized, optimized, and managed. All Bill Gates has to do is sit around and give talks and start foundations which largely run themselves, and maybe decide if his advisors have good advice.

Perhaps I am influenced by my upbringing, drinking Horatio Alger with my mother's milk, believing, like Nathaniel West's Lemuel Pitkin, in my divine right to be rich (60% of Americans believe deeply that they will be extremely rich someday). We can be anything we want, if we just work hard enough! Get dirty, put your nose to the grindstone. Got to get in there and roll up our sleeves, put some elbow grease in; then we'll make it big. I'm going to be President when I grow up!

But... it's hard to admire a stuffed shirt. Think about it in terms of storytelling: which is more exciting, a movie about a bank heist, where people walk off with a suitcase full of money, or a movie about boardroom politics? Why is Pirates of the Caribbean, and pirates in general, so popular right now (hint: treasure caves, cool clothes, physical danger)? Why isn't it cool to comb your hair and sit in an office moving money around? Yawn.

Have you ever seen a picture of Bill Gates with his sleeves rolled up and a shovel in his hand? Have you ever seen him get dirty? I can't even imagine it. Scrooge McDuck, on the other hand, gets dirty, and wet, and hit on the head, and schemed against, and lost, and all manner of explorer-type predicaments. And: he swims in his money. In fact, his money vault is nearly 100 feet deep. He still has every coin he ever earned - and he can recognize each of them, tell a story about it. Which to me is the ultimate goal: my ideal home is one in which every little thing, every dish and every object on the shelf, has a story behind it.

Now maybe because Scrooge get all the episodes of his life published for everyone to read, we know of all his trials and tribulations. Bill Gates is invisible, hiding behind security gates (sic) and darkened car windows (although, would you notice him if you saw him on the street?), so it is assumed he is as boring as he looks. I don't know anything about his life, do you? For all I know, he goes out into his garden and digs when he's mad at his wife, or keeps chickens that he loves and who poo on him when he picks them up. Or perhaps he secretly goes to central America and builds houses for poor people with his own hands, for sport; or spends his free time looking for leprechauns.

But I seriously doubt it.

The Intricacies of Holograms

In the 1970's and 80's holographic art was all the rage. People couldn't believe that a 3-dimensional object could be put onto a 2-dimensional surface. "You can see around it!" came the cries of children walking through science museum exhibits.

Now, with holograms on every credit card and in all those hideous shops full of cheap Chinese-made trinkets, holograms are not only ordinary, but, as the BBC paraphrases it, "[they] have become kitsch and naff." (see the picture below)


The problem with holographic art was much the same as the problem with computer art: people are too interested in the technology. Very rarely do technophiles make great artists (and vice versa), regardless of the hype. The holographic art of the 70's and 80's have much the same quality: they look like they were made by people saying, "Wow! Look what happens when I do this!" - which I suspect they were. There is little indication of consciousness of rigorous artistic critique.

And who can blame them? They were, so to speak, putting their toes into a sea that no-one had yet swum in. (I know, "swum" is not a word. But it should be.) So they were playing around! So what?

The problem is, of course, that with the asthetic bar so low, and with technology being the only barrier in the way to mass-production, we all got sick of the things. They were cheesy; they were everywhere. They lost their magic.

When I was younger, I had a friend whose father, Lloyd Cross, had been one of the top people in holography in the 1970's, and who was still sought as an expert on the technology. Visiting his house was odd; blackboards hung all over the kitchen, and several computers displayed models he was working on. At intervals, he would jump up and write something in chalk, or do something on the computer, and then sit back down again to his sandwich or his cigarette, to all appearances going on with a normal, slightly slacker, life.

Pondering the "Magical Thinking" post, and some of the comments I received about it, I remembered asking my friend to explain holography to me. He did, and it really opened my eyes to some amazing ideas. This last week, trying to think of some examples of truly magical science, I kept coming back to that conversation. Forget abstract discoveries in higher physics and very complex mathematics - buckyballs and dark matter come and go! - this single thing had continued to capture my imagination, in the back halls of my mind, for the last twenty years.


If you think about it, I'm not alone here. There is one thing which has always been a source of wonder and mystery, even among the scientific community, and that thing is light.

True, its cousins the particles are also pretty interesting (I was lying when I said forget about all that), but light itself is so common, a part of every person's life-experience, and somehow it still eludes our understanding. It plays peek-a-boo with us and seems to know what we're going to do before we do it. Is it a wave? A particle? Why does it squeeze through those gaps and spray itself around so? More recently, there has been discussion of light as a gas/liquid (see New Scientist, 7/02). It has a cheeky side, and it's not afraid to do tricks - both for us and on us.


This is what my friend described to me all those years ago:

1. Take a single laser beam, and split it in two. This is important, because all light used must have a single, perfectly sincronized wavelength. Therefore it must be a laser, and it must be the same beam of light.

2. Now, with the aid of very clean mirrors and lenses, one bit of this beam is widened and sent to bounce off an object.

3. The other bit of the beam is brought around to another side, widened, and brought in at an angle to the other half of the beam. The reflected beam of light from the object, and the uninterrupted beam of source light cross each other, causing an interference pattern, and this is what is captured on the film-plate.

4.When a light is shone on the film-plate, the interference pattern is revealed, showing us the exact reflected pattern of the object, with distances intact.

That's the essence of it (more in the links below). Now here's a bit of magic: cut a hologram up into pieces, and each individual piece will show the whole image. There will be less dimensionality, but each fragment will contain a tiny version of the complete image. I have no idea why this happens, but it's very cool.

Another amazing thing about holograms is that if you change the angle, or the wavelength, of your light, you can store information over and over again in the same place, because the interference patterns don't.. well.. interfere with each other. Instead they can lay next to each other like microscopic sardines, only intertwined, sort of.

When my friend described this to me, I went home with my head in a whirl. I began to think like our Baroque friends might do, thoughts such as "What if this isn't the only place in the world where interference patterns create images?" and "What if we could create hard copies of things like sounds that way?" "What if you could use this technology to make little building-blocks of information?" And on and on (by the way, this was before Star Trek's Holodeck, in case you're wondering).


Light-emitting sensors on nerve cells, courtesy of Dr. Gero Miesenböck
I was living with a friend who was deep into studying brain networks and neuron-firing at the time, and somehow the two blended in my tiny brain and I started imagining that our neural networks held interference patterns which created the images we saw so clearly in our mind's eye. More than that: the smells we remember, the sounds...all electrical interference patterns literally playing back those holographic memories that had been imprinted in those networks and pathways, interlaced from different angles and patterns to let our brains hold so very, very many memories.

Interestingly, in doing research for this post, I was reading Tweak 3D's description of how holographic storage works (see link below). One of the things they mentioned was this:
"However, as you keep recording more data pages slightly away from previous pages, the holograms will begin to appear dimmer and fogged up because their patterns must share the material's finite dynamic range and the data page is physically etched into the crystal. Eventually you will run out of space to store because the crystal has depleted all of its physical storage capacity..."

Sound like the brain of anyone you know who's lived a full and long life? Ever pay attention to how old people's older memories are sharper than their new ones? So maybe my theories are not so bizarre after all; maybe we die when our "finite dynamic range" is all used up...

So yes, I suppose there are still whole areas of science that elude the evolution toward mundanity. It's just getting harder to find the ones that get you thinking, make you want to explore.

Ikuo Nakamura, "Fossils", 2000
The only thing about this technology that is bothering me nowadays is that it seems to have become a technology. In other words, the asthetic possibilities (probably for the reasons above) are getting less and less interest, even as the technology gets easier and more artist-friendly. There are some people who are doing some interesting things with holography, but I would like to see more and better. Improving the technology is all very well, but what about presentation? What about capturing people's imagination again? That is part of an artist's job, and I wish I saw more people attempting it.

On a last (and totally unconnected) note, I found this image (below) and feel it could be proof that modern science can, indeed, create objects as beautiful as those marvelous inventions in the Cabinet. Though I might question how deliberate its beauty is, and alas, it is not something one can hold in one's hands and enjoy the use of.
Photomultiplier tube for detecting antineutrinos

A few place to find out about the science part of holography:

- Tweak 3D's article about holographic storage technology, with a good description along the way of how holograms are made.

- holoworld.com's Holography Links page, to what appears to be all things holographic.

Black Heart Gang, redux

Thanks to Souxfire, who has the blog Souxwire, a self-described "place for inspiration and introduction to a wide range of creations across disciplines and class," we have an excellent interview with Ree Treweek, the illustrator for the Black Heart Gang.



Wonderful stuff! Imagine a place where this could be true:
"The Household is completely powered by our old bath water which turns a giant cog in the centre of the universe. Soap is indeed one of the main industries of The Household - in fact after the 100 yrs of madness the Piranha birds eventually make their way to Soap world and become soap merchants."

Alternate worlds do not have to be complete. In fact, like Japanese gardens and houses, their vehicles can be designed to give us a selective view into another place - not the WHOLE view all at once, but carefully-chosen glimpses, making what we do see ever so much more enticing and beautiful. The Story of How, and Ms. Treweek's explanations of the world in which it (and its sequels) take place, only serve to pique the imagination - like the little details I was mentioning in the Oz books (in my previous entry).

It is important (to me, at least) to know there is such sideways thinking - magical thinking - out there in the world. Hooray for people who take their childhood ideas and turn them into art! Hooray for paying attention to dream-logic! And best of all, hooray for working hard to bring them to the rest of us in fully-developed, beautiful stories and imagery!

Magical Thinking

Warning: philosophizing ahead

One of the things I find most exciting about the 1600s and early 1700s was the lack of understanding about what science is supposed to be, at least in the modern sense. So many things hadn't been worked out yet; the world was taxonomically flexible, cosmologically open-ended; there were whole societies of people trying all kinds of strange experiments to find out how it worked. The "scientific process" was tipped on its end: you tried a lot of stuff and then made a theory based on the results. This made for some really interesting theories, such as the idea that when something died, maggots were (magically) born of the stuff that had once been living tissue. Or that frogs were created out of damp conditions. Or that being bitten by a tarantula meant a lifelong need to dance once a month.

The era was one of discovery: people were traveling the world as they had never done before, and tales and odd artifacts were coming back from so many strange and exotic places. Wunderkammern were an expression of this fascination with the exotic and the unexplored. People collected things, out of interest and to be fashionable, and arranged them in personal taxonomies based on perceived or desired groupings. It was out of these collections that modern museums were born, with their scientific taxonomy: a parallel evolution - alchemy to science and wunderkammer to museum.

I'm reading Quicksilver right now, part of Neil Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and it captures perfectly the sort of observation and experimentation that people like Isaac Newton were doing (and the thrashing around that lesser minds were doing in the name of discovery). Best of all it describes the complete open-mindedness of these people as they struggle to organize the Universe: Newton speaks of trying to see the order that God put into things, and the emphasis is on the beauty of Creation. I think we've lost a lot of that open-mindedness, that joy in the beauty of Creation (whatever version of it you like, it is as beautiful and complex as ever), as science has begun to believe itself more and more. Everything is worked out (except higher physics, which the average person simply can't follow), there is nothing left to discover. We are, in the postmodern sense, pushed back onto endlessly repeating ourselves.

Wouldn't it be nice to discover something new, something that changed the world as we know it, and discover we were completely wrong about everything? I think the present love of alternate realities is a human wish for the unknown to be, once again, unknown; for the Universe to stop being so infernally well-thought-out. Perhaps infernal is the perfect word; perhaps, after all, we are living in a species of Hell. From science to advertisers, they are every where, these people who want to tell us what is so. The more we know about things, the smaller our Universe gets. The only people allowed by present-day science to make new discoveries are experts in very narrow fields.


When I was a kid, I used to read the Oz books - over and over. My favorite one was Ozma of Oz, not so much because the story was so great (let's face it, the Oz books all have rather odd, meandering plots), but because there were all these amazing little details that led off in other directions - things that hinted at the other stuff happening offstage, either in history or in other parts of the strange world you were occupying momentarily. L. Frank Baum was brilliant at coming up with whole strings of wonderful ideas that captured children's imaginations, and it really didn't matter whether his books were exciting or the characters compelling: they were stimulating to the imagination. They gave kids these great, juicy hooks to hang their fantasies on. Because they were outside the box of the story, they helped you to get outside the box with your pretend-time.

To someone who writes fiction, it is interesting to look at the continuing popularity of the Oz books. What is it about these pretty weird stories which, as adults, we find less appealing? I would be willing to say it is their very hairiness, the way all those exciting loose ends stick out, all those details which don't need to be there but have been stuck in anyway and which capture us (if we're children). Children love to revisit things, worry at them, figure them out (much like the Natural Philosophers in the 1600s). I spent a lot of time thinking about that stovepipe coming out of the moon in the picture above. The story of Mr. Tinker, while extraneous to the plot, was terribly compelling to me:

"Mis-ter Tin-ker," continued Tiktok, "made a lad-der so tall that he could rest the end of it a-gainst the moon, while he stood on the high-est rung and picked the lit-tle stars to set in the points of the king's crown. But when he got to the moon Mis-ter Tin-ker found it such a love-ly place that he de-cid-ed to live there, so he pulled up the lad-der after him and we have nev-er seen him since."


Speaking of which, what about Tiktok, one of the first robots? In 1907, L. Frank Baum is imagining a clockwork man, with clockwork speech, a clockwork brain, and clockwork body - all wound separately, mind you - who is unswervingly faithful and honest, and because he is a machine he has no emotions. Hmm.

And who on earth could get excited about genetic engineering after being weaned to the concept of a lunchbox tree? Check this out:

The little girl stood on tip-toe and picked one of the nicest and biggest lunch-boxes, and then she sat down upon the ground and eagerly opened it. Inside she found, nicely wrapped in white papers, a ham sandwich, a piece of sponge-cake, a pickle, a slice of new cheese and an apple. Each thing had a separate stem, and so had to be picked off the side of the box; but Dorothy found them all to be delicious...


My dreams, during the time I was reading the Oz books, were unparalleled in my life before or since. I had a dream about skating through the telephone wires into Oz. I dreamt of a whole world I found inside a golpher hole across the street from my house. I met exotic creatures who ate glass but dreamed of water because it looked like glass but was so soft. And on and on.

The truth is, in today's prepackaged world, children's fiction must be slicked down so as to cater to the perceived need for clarity and functionality in story delivery. Extraneous details, like Mr. Tinker, are seen as unnecessary and distracting from the product being sold, ie, plot and characters. The oral history, once a messy, meandering and complicated style of delivery, has been replaced by television and movies, and people can't see or don't understand the benefit of hairy plotlines. Similarly, science eshews hairiness. Theories and proofs must be complete, self-contained packages which stand alone on their facts, adding onto the known construct of the world.



I would advocate a reality that is more flexible than that. Without descending into the arenas of either New Age Mysticism, Theosophy, Spiritualism, or the like, I'd like to propose a reality that expands further. How do we do that? I'm not certain.

Perhaps we need a different paradigm of reality. Perhaps we need to move into Magical Realism, Magical Scientism, Magical Logic. Perhaps we should allow our imaginations to run away with us, and look again into the beauty of that most complex mechanism, the invisible clockwork of the Universe.

Here are two definitions of Magical Realism, the roots of which stand in Latin American literature but which could stand for a more overarching truth:

"Magical realism turns out to be part of a twentieth-century preoccupation with how our ways of being in the world resist capture by the traditional logic of the waking mind's reason."
- Derek Walcott and Alejo Carpentier: Nature, History, and the Caribbean Writer

"realism is a kind of premeditated literature that offers too static and exclusive a vision of reality. However good or bad they may be, they are books which finish on the last page. Disproportion is part of our reality too. Our reality is in itself all out of proportion. In other words, Garcia Marquez suggests that the magic text is, paradoxically, more realistic than the realist text."
- Scott Simpkins paraphrasing Gabiel Garcia Marquez, Sources of Magic Realism/Supplements to Realism in Contemporary Latin American Literature

Perhaps, after all, imagination is the only thing lacking. Perhaps, if we can only find that door, that glimpse into how to do it, we can make the transformation, switch realities, open the world back up.



What do you think? Is the paradigm too big to shift? How do we get out of this big, reasonable, slick-sided hole? I welcome comments on this rant.

Thanks to Jon R. Neill for his inspiring illustrations and to Georges Melies, for his excellent vision of a trip to the moon, and all its wonderful details.
PS. check out the little toad in the picture above, waving the flag with the "O" on it.