Monday, June 23, 2003

 
lives of (th)robbing myth

Inca may have used knot computer code - Steve Connor - The Independent - 23 June 2003
Gary Urton, professor of anthropology at Harvard University, has re-analysed the complicated knotted strings of the Inca - decorative objects called khipu - and found they contain a seven-bit binary code capable of conveying more than 1,500 separate units of information.
... If Professor Urton is right, it means the Inca not only invented a form of binary code ... but they used it as part of the only three-dimensional written language. "They could have used it to represent a lot of information," he says. "Each element could have been a name, an identity or an activity as part of telling a story or a myth. It had considerable flexibility. I think a skilled khipu-keeper would have recognised the language. They would have looked and felt and used their store of knowledge in much the way we do when reading words."

The Quipu, an Incan Data Structure
"A quipu is an assemblage of colored knotted cotton cords... The colors of the cords, the way the cords are connected together, the relative placement of the cords, the spaces between the cords, the types of knots on the individual cords, and the relative placement of the knots are all part of the logical-numerical recording."
Marcia Ascher

Mathematics Elsewhere - An Exploration of Ideas Across Cultures
Through engaging examples of how particular societies structure time, reach decisions about the future, make models and maps, systematize relationships, and create intriguing figures, Marcia Ascher demonstrates that traditional cultures have mathematical ideas that are far more substantial and sophisticated than is generally acknowledged. Malagasy divination rituals, for example, rely on complex algebraic algorithms. And some cultures use calendars far more abstract and elegant than our own. Ascher also shows that certain concepts assumed to be universal - that time is a single progression, for instance, or that equality is a static relationship - are not. The Basque notion of equivalence, for example, is a dynamic and temporal one not adequately captured by the familiar equal sign. Other ideas taken to be the exclusive province of professionally trained Western mathematicians are, in fact, shared by people in many societies.

Charles C. Mann - Science Magazine - Cracking the Khipu Code
Knotted string communication, however anomalous to Euro-American eyes, has deep roots in Andean culture. Khipu were but one aspect of what Heather Lechtman, an archaeologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology, describes as "a technological environment in which people solved basic engineering problems through the manipulation of fibers."
... But this grander view of khipu as written narrative also has its critics.
... Conklin, for instance, agrees that the khipu were charged with meaning, but he worries that the analogy to computer language may not fit. "The Andean concept of duality is different than ours," he says. Whereas each 1 or 0 in a binary display is completely independent, the Andean dualities "are like the ebb and flow of a tide: opposing, interacting aspects of a single phenomenon." In his view, understanding khipu will require finding "a way other than our independent zero and one to express Andean dualism." Still, he says, Urton's work "is the first attempt to push khipu forward since Leland Locke."

Code of the Quipu - William R. Corliss reports
"A quipu appears to the uninitiated as a meaningless jumble of strings. To an Inca quipu reader, though, the positioning and colors of the secondary and tertiary strings appended to the primary cord all have meaning. The knots along each string also convey messages. Quipus incorporated, in a sense, three-dimensional notation, as opposed to the two-dimensional text on this page."

Understanding Moore's Law

Concomitant Information from The Dawn of Magic
"Despite his extremely prudent approach, Professor John Alden Mason, Curator Emeritus of the Museum of American Antiquities of the University of Pennsylvania, does open a door to the realms of fantastic reality when, in his book The Ancient Civilization of Peru, he speaks about the Quipu. The Quipu are cords tied into complicated knots, and are a feature of Inca and pre-Inca civilizations. They appear to be a form of writing, and may have been used to express abstract ideas. One of the best known specialists in the matter, Nordenskjold, thinks that the Quipu were used for mathematical calculations, horoscopes, and various methods of foretelling the future. The problem is a vital one: there may be other means of registering thought than writing.
Let us take the matter further: the knot, on which Quipu is based, is considered by modern mathematicians to be one of the greatest mysteries. It is only possible in an odd number of dimensions; impossible in dimensions of even numbers - 4, 6, 2 - and the topologists have only been able to study the simplest knots. It is therefore not improbable that the Quipu may conceal knowledge that we do not yet possess.
Take another example: modern thinking on the nature of knowledge and the structure of the mind might be enriched by a study of the language of the Hopi ...
The really 'modern man', in the sense that Paul Morand and we ourselves understand the term, discovers that intelligence is a unity manifested in different structures, just as man's need for shelter is universal, expressed in a thousand different architectural forms."
The Morning of the Magicians - Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier (Mayflower, 1971)
Originally published in Paris by Editions Gallimard in 1960

Simon Patterson
"Best known for his reworking of the London Underground map, The Great Bear (1992) Simon Patterson makes art which centres around the playful subversion of familiar classification systems. He draws unexpected and extraordinary connections between people, facts and ideas by fusing recognisable visual forms with incongruous conceptual associations. That these achieve their own kind of legitimacy shakes our faith in common logic, opening the door to a universe governed by curiosity and imagination. Simon Patterson was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1996."

Narrative Threads: Accounting and Recounting in Andean Khipu
Edited by Jeffrey Quilter and Gary Urton
Preface by Jeffrey Quilter includes the comments
"Knotted strings, perhaps too reminiscent of macram� wall hangings, do not appeal to Western artistic tastes as do the brush strokes of a Maya scribe or limestone blocks carved as if they were butter. This point could be a departure for discussion of the whole issue of the Western distinction between art and craft, but it is more worthwhile to emphasize that khipu express their own form of beauty once one is familiar with them and that such beauty is in their tactility - an aesthetic realm severely underappreciated in the visually oriented West, where "Do not touch" signs are all too prevalent."

Humility 101 - Stephen S. Hall (New York Times, Sunday 1 December, 2002)
The ''standard model'' of the history of science locates its birth around 600 B.C. in ancient Greece, where the dramatis personae typically include Pythagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, Aristotle and other sages, who laid the modern foundation for math and the sciences. It was this foundation, buried during the Middle Ages, that was rediscovered during the Renaissance. What were the peoples of India, Egypt, Mesopotamia, sub-Saharan Africa, China and the Americas doing all this time?

String theorist
Thomas Cummins, Dumbarton Oaks Professor of the History of Pre-Columbian and Colonial Art, calls Urton's research "provocative."
"His work on khipus is at the cutting edge of trying to understand how the New World's largest empire was able to run without the symbolic tools we associate with empirical control, that is, a system of writing or glyphs," says Cummins.

Slashdot - Incas Used Binary?
The data is not in the string but in the joins between strings.

A Slinky That Lights the Sky
"NASA's Polar satellite has revealed one of the power sources behind the gossamer glow of the aurora: Alfv�n waves, oscillations in Earth's magnetic field that resemble the quivering of a Slinky toy."

Can We Understand Non-Linear History?
"If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion."
Joseph Brodsky

December 20, 2002, Science Friday - Hour Two: Ancient Roots of Modern Science
You've probably heard about the math and science of the ancient Greeks. Some ancient scientific thinkers, including Aristotle and Ptolemy, are well known. But what about people and ideas from the rest of the world?

Anthony Grafton - Science Across Cultures
"Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, medieval Islam and the Meso-American peoples devised astonishing mathematical techniques and created amazing technologies. But it's ridiculous to say that modern scholars and teachers have ignored these. For the last century at least, historians of science have been hard at work, recreating from cuneiform texts the mathematics and astronomy of ancient Mesopotamia and retrieving from the massive textual and archaeological record the science and technology of China."

Andrew Hagen - Roots of science, non-Western and Western
"Many cultures have achieved knowledge, but few have managed to place one foot in front of the other, and to continually build in steps upon already existing knowledge. Moreover, many cultures achieved some measure of knowledge, and then lost that knowledge for one reason or another. This is tragedy. When the Incan library and the Alexandria library burned, the contributions of generations went up in smoke."

What is a khipu?
"A khipu consists, minimally, of a main cord from which pendant cords hang. (Pendants of pendants are called subsidiaries.) Knots tied in the pendant cords and other modifications of the pendant are the commonest data-bearing or significant features. Inka functionaries used cord records for censuses, inventories, tribute records, and documents about transactions; Spanish courts also accepted them as documents of record in early colonial times."

Mystery of the Quipu
Quipu means knot in Quechua, the native language of the Andes.
Archeologists are now suggesting that authors used the quipu to compose and preserve their epic poems and legends.

Tuesday, November 5, 2002
"History is generally presented as an orderly progression, with, for instance, the Jews inventing monotheism and Christians inventing codified damnation and salvation. The history of Zoroastrianism and the content of the Dead Sea Scrolls suggest that things are not so simple. Similarly, we were taught in elementary school that everyone thought the Earth was flat when Columbus set sail in 1492. Yet Dante, writing nearly two-hundred years before that, very precisely and accurately described the Earth as a sphere. History is not an orderly accumulation of knowledge. We as a race have actually discarded things that we once knew."
Gnosis - Morgan N. Sandquist

On transcranial magnetic stimulation
"At the beginning of the 19th century, the splendidly named Gottfried Mind became famous all over Europe for the amazing pictures he drew of cats."

non-linear narrative meta-blog
heckler and coch

Could brain damage, in short, actually make you brilliant?
*A**NT FOR A DAY
Set words and phrases are not the swords of liberation

Poetry, art and architecture
Poems on the Underground has been copied by public transport systems in New York, San Francisco, Dublin, Paris, Stuttgart, Stockholm, Oslo and most recently Helsinki.

Brooke Singer - Against Data Determinism in a Networked World
"They Rule" utilizes the vast resources of the web by linking its data bits to other, outside web sites that offer more information and the possibility for further research by viewers. The network of meaning is ever-expanding through the web. Also "They Rule" has utilized the viral quality of the web for broad dissemination.

Mr Beck's Underground Map - Ken Garland
The London Underground�s wayfinding system is an extraordinary example of directional signage.

Anna Oliver - A reading of Simon Patterson's piece The Great Bear
"The Great Bear brings together layers of information and obfuscation, working as a map in that it enables the viewer to locate themselves in relationship to other 'things', but in this case the relationship is not with underground stations but with cultural icons."

Sculpture - Andrew Senior
This quipu takes the form of a map of the New York City subway system ...

Going Underground - What tourists [in London] really need is a real proportional geographical tube map. Then you can see just how close Covent Garden and Leicester Square stations really are!

Mark Glaser's Guide to the Blogosphere
6.19.2003

CBC Radio - Quirks & Quarks - April 26, 2003
In his book, Lost Discoveries - The Ancient Roots of Modern Science, Teresi gives many examples of how the history of science should be rewritten, to acknowledge the unheralded breakthroughs from the non-European world.

Lost Crops of the Incas:
Little-Known Plants of the Andes with Promise for Worldwide Cultivation

Cache of Seal Impressions discovered in Gilund, India
Clay, nature's soft and plentiful sealant, has been used by people for millennia to keep containers closed. Seals, on the other hand ...

Signs of the Inka Khipu
In an age when computers process immense amounts of information by the manipulation of sequences of 1s and 0s, it remains a frustrating mystery how prehistoric Inka recordkeepers encoded a tremendous variety and quantity of data using only knotted and dyed strings. Yet the comparison between computers and khipu may hold an important clue to deciphering the Inka records. In this book, Gary Urton sets forth a pathbreaking theory that the manipulation of fibers in the construction of khipu created physical features that constitute binary-coded sequences ...

Lao Tzu - Tao Te Ching - Chapter 80
"A small country has fewer people.
Though there are machines that can work ten to a hundred times faster than man, they are not needed.
The people take death seriously and do not travel far.
Though they have boats and carriages, no one uses them.
Though they have armor and weapons, no one displays them.
Men return to the knotting of rope in place of writing.
Their food is plain and good, their clothes fine but simple, their homes secure;
They are happy in their ways.
Though they live within sight of their neighbors,
And crowing cocks and barking dogs are heard across the way,
Yet they leave each other in peace while they grow old and die."

Craig Tepper writes ... In Philosophical Investigations [Wittgenstein] suggested that it helped to picture language as a rope woven of many strands *none of which* ran its entire length ...

'Earliest writing' found in China
Signs carved into 8,600-year-old tortoise shells found in China may be the earliest written words, say archaeologists.

Static-Material Cultural Memory Media - Andreas Goppold
The use of plant and animal fibers accounts for the oldest cultural implements of humanity, which are likely to have co-originated with stone tools. The problem with proving this hypothesis is that as organic material, fibers usually haven't survived the time spans that stone tools endure. There are no one-million year old ropes and braidworks to be found in the fossil strata [475]. Just because of their durability, stone tools are the leitfossils of the paleolithic ...

William James Sidis - The Tribes and the States
"The weaving of wampum belts ... was a sort of writing by means of belts of colored beads, in which the various designs of beads denoted different ideas according to a definitely accepted system, which could be read by anyone acquainted with wampum language, irrespective of what the spoken language was. Records and treaties were kept in this manner, and individuals could write letters to one another in this way."

Reconceptualizing Educational Psychology: A Pragmatic Approach to Developments in Cognitive Science
In thought as in fiber, "the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fiber runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibers."
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1973, page 67.) This is similar to the "rope" metaphor used in James's Pragmatism (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1991, page 64.) This may not be mere coincidence as Monk, in his Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Free Press, 1990, page 478), reports that James is one of the few philosophers that Wittgenstein read and approved of.

Alibis and consistent lies - Jonathon Delacour
James Agee ... a spy, traveling as a journalist
Walker Evans ... a counter-spy, traveling as a photographer

The Future of Personal Computing
Who's Transforming Whom?
Kirk Kirksey says - "I'm going to repeat myself for emphasis. Transforming technology only occurs when the Aesthetics of Technology and the User Illusion are aligned."

Comic strips and cubism - Jonathan Jones
Many books have been written about the intellectual origins of Picasso's Cubism. Ancient Iberian sculptures, African masks, the philosophy of Bergson and even - although they knew nothing at the time of each other's work - Einstein's theory of relativity all help to understand the revolutionary transformation of visual experience that Picasso initiated in Paris in the years before the first world war.
But as Stein relates in The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, there was another visual influence on which Picasso fed voraciously when she first knew him in Paris in 1906, when he was pushing towards the most revolutionary artistic discovery since the Renaissance: a comic strip called The Katzenjammer Kids.

Jim Lowe - The Katzenjammer Kids
"In the days before radio, television, computers, theme parks, and video games, mass popular entertainment was a new concept."

Techne & Psyche - perspectives on technoscience and the cultural psyche
According to physicist Alan Lightman, "once we observe an object, we cannot disentangle ourselves from it. The observer and observed are tied together in an inseparable knot."
Dolores Brien

Alan Lightman

"Chinese, as a written language, was born not as a means of communication between men, but as a way of consulting the gods. 'Should I make war on the neighbouring state or not?' 'Will I win the battle or not?' A king wrote these questions on a flat bone which was then pierced with a red-hot needle. The divine answer appeared in the cracks caused by the heat - one had to know how to read them."
Tiziano Terzani - A Fortune Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East
(Flamingo, 1998, page 8)

William Gibson - Up the Line
"The story of film begins around a fire, in darkness. Gathered around this fire are primates of a certain species, our ancestors, an animal distinguished by a peculiar ability to recognize patterns.
There is movement in the fire: embers glow and crawl on charcoal. Fire looks like nothing else. It generates light in darkness. It moves. It is alive.
The surrounding forest is dark. Is it the same forest our ancestors know by day? They can't be sure. At night it is another place, perhaps no place at all. The abode of the dead, of gods and demons and that which walks without a face. It is the self turned inside out. Without form, it is that on which our ancestors project the patterns their interestingly mutated brains generate."

Opening a vein - Mark Bernstein
It's time for weblogs to grow up, to move beyond their obsession with authenticity and to get over the panic that accompanies any hint that a weblog writer might not be exactly what they say they are. Who is?

Redreaming the Plain: an e-journal about sustainability
As Footscray poet/artist, Le Van Tai, writes: "Most people have only one birth and one death: one birth-time in childhood, one time of death in old age when the body returns to the earth and the spirit goes far away on a new journey. Refugees' experiences of living and dying are different ..."

The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain - Maria Rosa Menocal
"It is no exaggeration to say that what we presumptuously call 'Western' culture is owed in large measure to the Andalusian enlightenment ..."
Christopher Hitchens - The Nation

Vortal Crossroads
Series on Knots and Everything
One purpose of this series is to continue the exploration of many of the themes indicated in Volume 1. These themes reach out beyond knot theory into physics, mathematics, logic, linguistics, philosophy, biology and practical experience. All of these outreaches have relations with knot theory when knot theory is regarded as a pivot or meeting place for apparently separate ideas. Knots act as such a pivotal place. We do not fully understand why this is so. The Series represents stages in the exploration of this nexus.

Billy Bragg Underground Map

I Manifold
"When Faust, in a line immortalized among schoolmasters and greeted with a shudder of astonishment by the Philistine, says 'Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast!' he has forgotten Mephisto, and a whole crowd of other souls that he has in his breast likewise. The Steppenwolf, too, believes that he bears two souls (wolf and man) in his breast and even so finds his breast disagreeably cramped because of them. The breast and the body are indeed one, but the souls that dwell in it are not two, nor five, but countless in number. Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads. The ancient Asiatics knew this well enough, and in the Buddhist Yoga an exact technique was devised for unmasking the illusion of the personality. The human merry-go-round sees many changes: the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years to unmask is the same illusion that the West has laboured just as hard to maintain and strengthen. "
Hermann Hesse - Steppenwolf (Penguin, 1972, page 72)

Rube Goldberg Gallery
The unnecessary can also be the mother of invention

Olmec cylinder seal
"While some archaeologists question whether the artifacts actually bear writing, not merely symbols, von Nagy said a bird depicted on the excavated cylinder seal has lines leading to two logographs coming out of its beak. Like the bubble leading from a cartoon character�s head, those lines followed by the logographs indicate words, he said."

Virtual Logic - The Calculus of Indications

"There is an unconscious appositeness in the use of the word person to designate the human individual, as is done in all European languages: for persona really means an actor's mask, and it is true that no one reveals himself as he is; we all wear a mask and play a role."
Schopenhauer

The Clouds Should Know Me By Now: Buddhist Poet-Monks of China
"Beyond a presentation of poems about the natural world, this collection offers possible examples of what in Chinese has been called shih-shu, "rock-and-bark poetry." In 1703 one of the poets translated here assumed this term for a nom de plume, and craftily hid his identity behind it. It is uncertain how widely the phrase circulated, but shih-shu were colloquially written, mildly irreverent poems, not simply skeptical of city-folk hustle or merely celebratory of reclusive hours spent in savage wilderness settings. Rather than being brushed on silk or paper, shih-shu were written on scraps of bamboo, scratched into bark, on rocks, or pecked into cliff faces. The notorious practitioner of this genre, and maybe the originator of shih-shu, is the poet Han-shan (possibly seventh century), who is known to American readers as Cold Mountain."
Andrew Schelling

Trusting Mind - Dharma Talk by Bonnie Myotai Treace, Sensei
The world is vast and wide. Why put on your robe at the sound of a bell?

That the self advances and confirms the
myriad things is called delusion.
That the myriad things advance and confirm
the self is enlightenment.
Dogen Zenji - Genjokoan

Accord

A special transmission outside the sutras,
not founded on words and letters,
directly pointing to the human mind,
seeing into nature and attaining Buddhahood.

These are the so-called Four Principles of the Zen sect, and are traditionally attributed to Bodhidharma, probably not correctly. The tenets do have ancient roots, however, and can be traced to a fifth or early sixth century commentary on the Nirvana Sutra, slightly before Bodhidharma's time.

The Course of Things


posted by Andrew 6/23/2003 04:31:00 PM

Friday, June 06, 2003

 
gripping tyre, hidden driver

Nessun Dorma

Greetings, self-organizing systems!
Kevin Kelly - Out of Control - Chapter 23 - Wholes, Holes, and Spaces
In one fell swoop 35 years ago, Dr. Weyl outlined my whole 1994 book on the breaking science of adaptive, distributed systems and the emergent phenomenon they engender.

June 6 - 8, 2003 - PlaNetwork: Networking A Sustainable Future
Global Systems:
Over the last century, "systems thinking" has allowed scientists, environmentalists, philosophers and technologists to re-conceive the world in terms of holistic networks and emergent properties rather than traditional hierarchies of control. An ecological view of natural and human systems requires such a perspective. How might the Internet enable us to further develop a systems view of both our most pressing problems and their potential solutions?

Up To Half Of Earth's Surface Warming Could Be The Result Of Changes In Land Use
Most scientists think the global warming trend is largely the result of human activities, principally the emission of greenhouse gases from power plants, cars and other sources. Land use change, such as the conversion of undeveloped land to housing or agricultural use, has been seen as an important but much smaller factor in this trend. However, the findings of Kalnay and Cai may force a reassessment of the relative importance of these two factors.

Climate changes making planet greener
"Whether humans have contributed much to the greening trend remains unknown ..."

Rolling Back the 20th Century - William Greider - The Nation, USA, 12 May 2003
"We are a very wealthy (and brutally powerful) nation, so why do people experience so much stress and confinement in their lives, a sense of loss and failure? The answers, I suggest, will lead to a new formulation of what progressives want.
The first place to inquire is not the failures of government but the malformed power relationships of American capitalism -- the terms of employment that reduce many workers to powerless digits, the closely held decisions of finance capital that shape our society, the waste and destruction embedded in our system of mass consumption and production. The goal is, like the right's, to create greater self-fulfillment but as broadly as possible. Self-reliance and individualism can be made meaningful for all only by first reviving the power of collective action."

Only the well fed worry about tomorrow
"If our goal is to improve the world, reducing carbon emissions is most certainly not the most effective way. Kyoto basically costs three to seven times the global development aid budget on doing imperceptible good for the third world. In fact, for the same amount that implementing Kyoto will cost the EU every year, the UN estimates that we could provide every person in the world with access to basic health, education, family planning and water and sanitation services. Wouldn't this be a better way of serving the world?"
Bjorn Lomborg

Freeman Dyson - What a World! - The New York Review of Books, 15 May 2003
"The biosphere is the most complicated of all the things we humans have to deal with. The science of planetary ecology is still young and undeveloped. It is not surprising that honest and well-informed experts can disagree about facts. But beyond the disagreements about facts, there is another deeper disagreement about values. The disagreement about values may be described in an oversimplified way as a disagreement between naturalists and humanists."

The Life and Art of Samuel Bak
Bak refers to his work as an "assembling of broken shards," using the Kabbalistic concept of the broken vessel that must be repaired, Tikkun Olam (repairing the world).

Blair is in thrall to the myth of a monolithic modernity - John Gray
"The belief that modernisation is a unilinear historical process is not new. The neo-conservatives are only the latest in a long line of thinkers. Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill had very different visions of what it means to be modern, but they were at one in believing that it would be the same everywhere."

Tom Ryan - Baby, you can drive my car
In the opening shot of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, John Ford's moving 1962 eulogy to the passing of the Old West, a train chugs across a wooded landscape belching smoke into the sky.
It's a simple image, but poetic simplicity was always Ford's metier, and the painterly scene quietly introduces the film's central theme: should this "iron horse" be embraced as a welcome emissary of the future, transporting into the West a civilisation that will tame the wilderness and mould it into a garden? Or should it be seen as an unwanted intruder, contaminating the air and bringing with it a rapacious capitalism that will deface a virgin land?

Landscapes and life-worlds are always multitemporal

"The triangular tiles of Hidden Lion have covered all of Bembel Rudzuk's stone square, but the pattern has in its turn been so covered by people, by stalls, by booths and tents and awnings that the surge of its action is obscured by the action of every day; the twisting serpents, the shifting pyramids, the appearing and disappearing lions are mostly hidden."
Russell Hoban - Pilgermann (Bloomsbury, London, 2002, page 157)

Cosmopolis
Epigraph: "a rat became the unit of currency" - Zbigniew Herbert (from the poem "Report from the Besieged City" which DeLillo read at an event in New York City on Oct. 11, 2001.)

Car Stuff: The Automobile in Art at the Flint Institute of Arts
Saturday, July 12, 2003 -- Sunday, August 24, 2003
The exhibit includes Buick Painting with P

Buckminster Fuller: Illusive Mutant Artist - Victoria Vesna
In 1928, Isamu Noguchi planned to do a sculpture portrait of Fuller who suggested that he use the chrome, nickel, and steel alloy that Henry Ford had just used on the radiator grilles of the Model A car. Noguchi wanted to challenge the accepted method of using negative light (shadows) to produce definition, and the chrome, nickel, and steel alloy allowed him to experiment with this notion and create a surface that was absolutely reflective. It remains an early example of the use of industrial materials in art.

The Garden of Forking Paths

The Mask of the Prophet: The Extraordinary Fictions of Jules Verne - by Andrew Martin
Oxford & NY: Oxford UP, 1990 - reviewed by Arthur B. Evans
Science Fiction Studies - no. 54 - Volume 18, Part 2 - July 1991
Martin's often brilliant analysis of [Verne's] novels in the light of Bonaparte and Borges succeeds in revealing the latent tension in Verne's narratives as the author strains to reconcile the irreconcilable: i.e., the bourgeois (Napoleonic) ideology of positivist codification/closure, imperialist expansionism, and strict uniformity of narrative discourse along with its symbiotic yet subversive (Borgesian) counterpart of decategorization/open-endedness, libertarian individuation, and ironic self-parody. In Martin's terms, the former characteristics constitute the hegemony of "Empire," the latter represent "Revolt," and the "Masked Prophet" -- or "The Prophet of the Mask," as Martin suggestively titles his final chapter -- is both the author himself and the Voyages Extraordinaires as literary artifacts from a specific historical era, both of which are disguising themselves to be something they are not. Moreover, as mediators of this ideological and narratological tug-of-war, Verne's novels also symbolize, in a more general sense, the tension-filled dialectical nature of literature itself: i.e., the perpetual interplay between the innovative and the normative, between creation and canon:
"The narrative of the rise and fall, the expansion and fragmentation of empire encapsulates the destiny of all concentrations of power -- political, intellectual, and linguistic.Verne is a condensation of the forces that issue in the great system-builders of his era (Comte, Balzac, Marx) and the de-systematizers (Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Roussel), the metaphysicians and the ironists. The narrow obsessions of the Voyages Extraordinaires attain almost unlimited symbolic power, generating an encyclopaedia of the forking paths of the future, a labyrinth from which we have still not emerged. To speak of Verne is thus in some way to speak of all literature."

Jean Baudrillard - Ballard's Crash
From the classical (and even the cybernetic) viewpoint, technology is an extension of the body. It is the evolved functional capacity of a human organism which allows it both to rival Nature and to triumphantly remold it in its own image. From Marx to McLuhan, one sees the same instrumentalist vision of machines and of language: relays, extensions, media-mediators of a Nature destined ideally to become the organic body. In this "rational" view, the body itself is only a medium.
Inversely, in its baroque and apocalyptic treatment in Crash, technology is the deadly deconstruction of the body - no longer a functional medium, but an extension of death: dismemberment and mutilation, not in the pejorative vision of a lost unity of subject (which is still the perspective of psychoanalysis) but in the explosive vision of a body given over to "symbolic wounds," ...

a time for fear
"... Birds, mammals and insects make the most of urban living in ways so imaginative and unexpected that it's like a silent environmental revolution. London's eeriest Nature Reserve: Abney Cemetery in Stoke Newington, home of blackbirds, mistle thrush, warblers, tawny owls, kestrels (all those rodents!) among the wrecked Victorian grave stones and a gutted church. A Grey heron fishing in a roadside pond near Stamford Hill. Birds of prey hovering above the marshes, along rail tracks and roads, elegant angels of death. Urban foxes, a renegade, motley breed compared to their country brethren, scraping through inner city surburbs, raiding bins, dodging dogs. Swans in regal clusters on the Lee Valley Canal. St James's Park and its mad menagerie of exotic ducks and ghost-faced pelicans and special gulls who can swoop in from 300 metres away to catch bread mid-air ..."

George Steiner
"Proust's only successor is Joseph Needham. A la recherche du temps perdu and Science and Civilization in China represent two prodigiously sustained, controlled flights of the re-creative intellect. They exhibit what Coleridge termed "esemplastic powers," that many-branched coherence of design which builds a great house of language for memory and conjecture to inhabit. The China of Needham's passionate recomposing -- so inwardly shaped before he went in search of its material truth -- is a place as intricate, as lit by dreams, as the way to Combray. Needham's account, in an "interim" essay, of the misreadings and final discovery of the true hexagonal symmetry of the snow-crystal has the same exact savor of manifold revealing as the Narrator's sightings of the steeple at Martinville. Both works are a long dance of the mind."

"Life code" similarities establish relationships between species
"There has been this notion since Aristotle's time of this great chain of being with humans at the top and then less complex life at the bottom. But while that might seem intuitive to some people, it doesn't appear to be borne out by the data."
Dr Wildman

Byron Belitsos - The Coming of the Kosmos
"Since the days of the ancient Greeks, we have learned that the universe has a secret impulse toward the evolution of more inclusive wholes, what Wilber calls holarchy (as opposed to hierarchy). The profound Western tradition emerging out of Pythagoras, and later Plato, named it the Great Chain of Being; equivalents are found in the wisdom traditions of the East as well -- in fact, in all esoteric traditions. In the terms used by one of Wilber's immediate forbears, Teilhard de Chardin, the Kosmos contains layers or concentric spheres of being: the cosmos (the physiosphere), the bios (the biosphere, or Gaia), the psyche (Chardin's famous noosphere), and theos (the divine domain of the Gods described in the world's great religions). But the Kosmos has depth as well as extent: All spheres in the Great Chain must be understood from the inside out (the inner intuition of meanings and values) AND from the outside in (the scientist's perception of outer facts). Blend these, and what you get might be called integral depth-perception."

Information Architecture Summit - Portland, Oregon 21-23 March 2003 Wrapup Part 1
Wayfinding and Navigation in Digital Spaces: Panel
Moderated by Rashmi Sinha, with a panel of Mark Bernstein, Susan Campbell and Andrew Dillon
Dorelle Rabinowitz reports:
After brief introductions, Rashmi started things out by saying that everyone was interested in a lively discussion, and that the panel was designed to bring different perspectives to the table. Mark clearly wanted to provoke audience reaction when he stated that he believes IA is a force of repression. Then he discussed "lies" like clarity, hierarchy, and search, and that the journey is just as important as finding what you are seeking. His key lesson from hypertext literature: prescriptions don't work, structure changes, and cycles are central: "the chorus of a song comes back and it's not a mistake."
Susan's position was almost in direct opposition, that structure is the experience, and that architectural metaphor should be used to guide design. She discussed different design methods (rule-based, patterns, and building blocks) and how these methods relate to different IA examples. Her message: Structure communicates meaning.
Andrew, on the other hand, was uncomfortable with metaphors, and questioned most IA's complete obsession with navigation (which leads to the similarity of so many sites.) The missing link: semantics. His argument: information is about so much more than space, it's about meaning, value, and imagery. It has a shape.
The audience responded to these provocative comments with many discussion points: We have inadequate tools to describe complicated experiences. Why is semantics being ignored (and is it)? We still struggle with dimensions. We talk about navigating when we mean understanding. Of course, time ran out while the panel was responding to these points.

Roy Ascott's Theories of Telematic Art - Edward A. Shanken
"Crucial to Ascott's theory and practice of Telematic Art is the transformation of the viewer into an active participator who collaborates in creating the work, which is never a static product, but always remains in process throughout its duration."

matt jones - on the shape of information
" ... I did a bunch of work when I first rejoined the BBC based upon Kevin Lynch's 1963 "The Image of the City", and how the sprawl of www.bbc.co.uk might become a more "imageable" datapolis.
Lynch's work enables me to reconcile the spatial and semantic approaches, precisely because it studies the semantics of urban space, and how we build our images of the city from them.
Andrew Dillon's presentation zeroes in on this approach as well I believe, with the final slide of the presentation presenting the diagram of a "semantic spatial model" wherein we process our experiences into a shape, a space built of semantic meaning. That great navigational driver of "consistency" does not necessarily support this, rather it is coherence and comprehension; a narrative that can be easily internalised, that is the goal."
matt jones

Rafael Capurro - Towards an information ecology
"We have been used to considering information as something that just exists in our lives, as the atmosphere of a democratic society. But information is not a triviality. It has taken three hundred years to open written knowledge to vast sectors of society. This was not only a technical but also an educational as well as a socio-political process ...
Language is not something added to society, but it is its very essence, i.e. our way of being."

Network Research 2003

"Architecture, whether the wall around Paradise or the Tower of Babel, exhibits the limit at which human and divine agency encounter each other. It registers in the visible world outcomes of that encounter which would otherwise remain intangible."
Gillian Rose

"We had entered an immense traffic jam. From the junction of the motorway and Western Avenue to the ascent ramp of the flyover the traffic lanes were packed with vehicles, windshields leaching out the molten colours of the sun setting above the western suburbs of London. Brake-lights flared in the evening air, glowing in the huge pool of cellulosed bodies. Vaughan sat with one arm out of the passenger window. He slapped the door impatiently, pounding the panel with his fist. To our right the high wall of a double-decker airline coach formed a cliff of faces. The passengers at the windows resembled rows of the dead looking down at us from the galleries of a columbarium. The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause."
J.G. Ballard - Crash (New York, Vintage, 1985, page 151)

The Migrating Brain
"Take two spring warblers, one that flies south for the winter and one that doesn't. Teach them to associate food with geography, then measure their brains. What do you find?
You find something very interesting: the two bird brains are different in an essential way. The migratory bird has a heavier hippocampus. And, the migratory bird is a lot better at remembering where the food was than its stay-at-home counterpart.
What does that suggest? One possibility is that learning to navigate causes essential changes in the structure of the brain. Does that in turn cause essential changes in thinking?"
Jay Ingram and David Newland

Social Memory - Cornelius Holtorf
"Traditionally, human memory has been seen as an archive from which specific items can be retrieved in the process of remembering. ... cognitive psychologists, brain specialists, and sociologists have recently proposed that human memory works radically differently from the traditional archive model and is in fact constructed in the human brain ..."

Train of Thoughts - book review
Roy Johnson

Windows and Mirrors
In Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency, Jay David Bolter and Diane Gromala argue that, contrary to Donald Norman's famous dictum, we do not always want our computers to be invisible "information appliances." They say that a computer does not feel like a toaster or a vacuum cleaner; it feels like a medium that is now taking its place beside other media like printing, film, radio, and television. The computer as medium creates new forms and genres for artists and designers; Bolter and Gromala want to show what digital art has to offer to web designers, education technologists, graphic artists, interface designers, HCI experts, and, for that matter, anyone interested in the cultural implications of the digital revolution.
In the early 1990s, the World Wide Web began to shift from purely verbal representation to an experience for the user in which form and content were thoroughly integrated. Designers brought their skills and sensibilities to the Web, as well as a belief that a message was communicated through interplay of words and images. Bolter and Gromala argue that invisibility or transparency is only half the story; the goal of digital design is to establish a rhythm between transparency -- made possible by mastery of techniques -- and reflection -- as the medium itself helps us understand our experience of it.
The book examines recent works of digital art from the Art Gallery at SIGGRAPH 2000. These works, and their inclusion in an important computer conference, show that digital art is relevant to technologists. In fact, digital art can be considered the purest form of experimental design; the examples in this book show that design need not deliver information and then erase itself from our consciousness but can engage us in an interactive experience of form and content.

Google Technology
PigeonRank's success relies primarily on the superior trainability of the domestic pigeon (Columba livia) and its unique capacity to recognize objects regardless of spatial orientation. The common gray pigeon can easily distinguish among items displaying only the minutest differences, an ability that enables it to select relevant web sites from among thousands of similar pages.

OO, Patterns, and Smalltalk
The idea of object orientation is to chunk the design space into objects, each with some well defined behaviour and responsibility, communicating with each other by message passing.

Apples and Pears - September 02, 1996
"The computer is a liquid thing that spreads and spreads, soaking into our business, life and culture.
... Apples and trees, bugs and viruses are changing words in a changing world. They have reshaped themselves with new meaning for a new age. We too need to learn to live like a chameleon, learn something of a new language every day.
Our words are changing and so must we." Gerry McGovern

What color is a chameleon on a mirror?
Kevin Kelly - Out of Control - Chapter 5 - Coevolution

"The important point about the chameleon on the mirror riddle is that the lizard and glass become one system. "Lizardness" and "mirrorness" are encompassed into a larger essence - a "lizard-glass" - which acts differently than either a chameleon or a mirror."

"Medieval life was remarkably unnarcissistic. Common folk had only vague notions of their own image in the broad sense. Their individual and social identities were informed by participating in rituals and traditions rather than by reflection. On the other hand, the modern world is being paved with mirrors. We have ubiquitous TV cameras, and ceaseless daily polling ("63 Percent of Us Are Divorced") to mirror back to us every nuance of our collective action. A steady paper trail of bills, grades, pay stubs, and catalogs helps us create our individual identity. Pervasive digitalization of the approaching future promises clearer, faster, and more omnipresent mirrors. Every consumer becomes both a reflection and reflector, a cause and an effect."

"The Greek philosophers were obsessed with the chain of causality, how the cause of an effect should be traced back in a relay of hops until one reached the Prime Cause. That backward path is the foundation of Western, linear logic. The lizard-glass demonstrates an entirely different logic - the circular causality of the Net. In the realm of recursive reflections, an event is not triggered by a chain of being, but by a field of causes reflecting, bending, mirroring each other in a fun-house nonsense. Rather than cause and control being dispensed in a straight line from its origin, it spreads horizontally, like creeping tide, influencing in roundabout, diffuse ways."

Geeks Without Borders - Steven Johnson
That's the thing about games without frontiers. You never really know when you're playing.

Stephen Bayley reviews Autopia
"There were three geniuses in the early history of the car. The first was Carl Benz, who made the first petrol-engined self-propelling vehicle that farted and spluttered its way around Mannheim, frightening the horses, in 1886. But Benz was an engineer, not an entrepreneur. The democratic - some would say commercial - possibilities of the car were first demonstrated by Henry Ford, a restless Michigan Irish farmboy. Ford was so successful in satisfying the fundamental human demand for mobility that by the Twenties, every American who needed a car had bought a Ford.
Demand slowed, so it was left to Alfred Sloan, who assembled General Motors from a rag-bag of garage businesses, to exploit the idea that if you made cars look desirable - paint them in colours, add features - then people would be excited into new patterns of consumption. When General Motors set up its Art and Color Division, under Cecil B DeMille's neighbour, Harley Earl, in 1927, an amazing new episode in man's aesthetic adventure had begun ...
Today, people learn about expressive form, about light falling on complex surfaces, about colour, shape and telling details, from looking at cars, not from enduring the inane antics of the Turner Prize."

Cybernetics Society Conference 2002 - Ranulph Glanville
"The form of conversation is not a set of linear commands but a circle. It accommodates difference and is, thus, a means by which we may discover the new."

Escapism
"It is the restless activity that produces the story line. Human beings have been and continue to be profoundly restless. For one reason or another, they are not content with being where they are. They move, or if they stay in place, they seek to rearrange that place. Migration and the in situ transformation of the environment are two major themes -- the two major themes ..."
Yi-Fu Tuan

"Since the goal of the French Revolution was not only to change the old government but to abolish the old kind of society, it had to simultaneously attack all the established powers, eliminate old influences, wipe out traditions, transform mores and practices, and in a way to empty the human mind of all the ideas on which obedience and respect had previously been based. From this came its singularly anarchic character. But now clear away all the debris: you will see an immense central power, which has devoured all the bits of authority and obedience which were formerly divided among a crowd of secondary powers, orders, classes, professions, families, and individuals, scattered throughout society. The world had not seen a similar concentration of power since the fall of the Roman Empire."
Alexis de Tocqueville - The Old Regime and the Revolution
(University of Chicago Press, 1998, page 98)

k-punk
...beginning in November 63 - with the Kennedy assasination, and a day after it, Delia Derbyshire's Dr Who theme broadcast for the first time.


posted by Andrew 6/06/2003 05:31:00 PM