frag/MINCE
April 2012
42 posts
Too late.
Spiritualized - Too Late
My momma said when she got so concerned
Don’t play with fire and you’ll never get burned
Don’t touch the flame and you’ll never find out
My momma said that’s what loves all about
But its too late, Ive made up my mind
Love always shows when there’s eyes it can blind
Too late, something Ive learned
Love lights the flame when there’s hearts it can burn
My momma said if you cant find a friend
Don’t get too close cause you know it may end
Don’t get too deep cause you know you’ll regret
Heartache and pain in love that’s what you get
But its too late, Ive made up my mind
Love always shows when there’s eyes it can blind
Too late, something Ive learned
Love lights the flame when there’s hearts it can burn
And to his dedicated baby what more can I say
I wont love you more than i love you today
And i wont love you less but Ive made my mistakes
Stay away from love dear if that’s what it takes
But its too late, Ive made up my mind
Love always shows when there’s eyes it can blind
Too late, something Ive learned
Love lights the flame when there’s hearts it can burn
Too late, Ive made up my mind
Love always shows when there’s eyes it can blind
Too late, too late
Love always shows when there’s hearts it can break
“Cyborgs are both political reality and mythical, discursive subjects. As N. Katherine Hayles suggests, “cyborgs are simultaneously entities and metaphors, living beings and narrative constructions” (“The Life Cycle of Cyborgs: Writing the Posthuman,” 152). The cyborg functions both really and fictionally as a way of reconfiguring identity in an era of emergent biotechnological possibilities and fractured subjectivities.”
—cyborg (via wildcat2030)
Generative Protest: The Emergence Aesthetic of Occupy Wall Street
I wrote this last fall just as the fervor around Occupy Wall Street was waning, so I never really got a chance to publish it. In the spirit of May Day and the supposed reawakening of the movement here is my appraisal of Occupy Wall Street in relation to generative art and emergence. Let me know what you think.
Perhaps the most striking, and contentious, feature of Occupy Wall Street has been its ever-evolving, amorphous nature. In my eyes, the most interesting way to approach the quality of the movement in relation to a culture of people demanding to be heard is to think about OWS as analogous to a self-propagating generative system of emergent thought and behavior. From its inception the self-proclaimed leaderless movement has refused to limit itself to a specific ‘top-down’ hierarchy of organization. Instead, it is more the product of a decentralized network of individuals participating in an ongoing conversation through which actions and ideas naturally emerge according to consensus. As it continues to expand, the dialogue is bolstered by its organic adaptation, and subsequent evolution, to various sub-movements and localities.
The original ire aimed at Wall Street becomes a single node in a more complex network in which the original parameters of the movement itself begin to evolve with its own growth. Its inclusive variety rather than stifling discourse and creativity through a predefined system of thought instead leads to a proliferation of ideas and actions. The protest, then, elicits generative behaviors predicated on a loosely designed set of parameters that evolves responsively to its present moment. The results is a variety of different causes being taken up in surprisingly different ways.
Generative Aesthetics
To take this analogy further and to make it much more simple, let’s take into consideration some tropes that are often representative of generative systems.
One of the most simple and well known is the cellular automata. A cellular automata is a fixed grid in which cells alternate between ‘on/off’ states in accordance to a set of rules and in relation to their neighboring cells. The result of these restraints is a series of surprising, yet finite patterns within the limits of the grid. Since the cells are ‘dumb’ they can never evolve beyond the grid and are only aware of their immediate neighbors. It propagates with limited expressivity and the cells can never ‘learn’.
Examples of Conway’s Game of Life
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcuBvj0pw-E
Coincidentally, and in fact, even literally, this idea was appropriated in 2000 by the artist Matthew Fuller into the public performance art piece Human Cellular Automata . He took one of the more famous instances of the CA, Conway’s Game of Life and replaced cells with entities that are actually capable of co-evolving with their environments – humans. As he explains, it operates by keeping the crowd “networked, communicating and aware of itself.”
In his book on artificial life and art, Metacreation, Mitchell Whitelaw expands upon Fuller’s initial statement, explaining,
“when computation is (once again) a human operation, it is opened to the flows of experience and social space. At the same time, performing this formal rule set — playing at being a computer — is an exercise in human connectivity, group awareness, and emergent dynamics.”
Video explaining OWS General Assembly
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odFygPMwbIM
What does this sound like? Think about the correlation to this explanation and to both OWS’s use of the human mic and the General Assembly. All people are equally capable of speaking up, at any place, at any time, to change the sway and direction of a conversation and even the entire protest. The human mic reverberates through crowds and can shift a group’s entire dynamic. As it moves to different spaces it not only spreads ideas but cultivates them among its participants as they are parroted. It continually connects people, through the emergence and evolution of ideas, in a hyper-aware manner.
This connection among individually expressive people that are still otherwise self-aware of themselves and their membership among a group is similar to the typical generative aesthetic of the ‘flock’. In a flock, individual elements all behave discretely yet without disruption to the rest of the group. OWS is much like a flock insofar that different people have different agendas yet its organization allows for each of them to be accommodated and supported.
Examples of “Flock” aesthetics
Closely related to the concept of flocking is an idea of emergence. We have mentioned several times the notion of “emergent” ideas, thoughts, actions or behavior. With a flock we have myriad discrete objects eliciting individual behaviors that generate complex interactions when among a multiplicity. Their cumulative expression is at most incidental to their micro-behaviors yet they each can be integral to the resulting whole. This is known as ‘emergence’ and it is not so much a characteristic of a body of objects as it is a process where the interaction of the objects result in new observable properties that are irreducible to the individuals.
The plurality of actions and ideas that emerge from the consensus based movement are a result its distributed and non-hierarchal membership. Just as the flow of conversations supported by the human mic and the general assembly cannot necessarily be predicted neither can how the protest itself manifests nationally, or even globally.
The People United, Will Never Be Restricted
Now, let’s return to the more basic non-human CA and contrast that one with the human one. Depending on the complexity of a system, a CA can exhibit enough variety that it can essentially at least simulate emergence. But for the sake of argument imagine that the simpler CA’s are analogous to what OWS is in opposition to. Imagine a ‘democratic’ or ‘capitalist’ system as the parameters in which any pattern of thought that emerges from it is representative of that title. All thought, then, is restricted.
Let’s expand on this using another analogy from generative art: the genotype/phenotype. Early examples of computer animated generative art , including the work of Karl Sims and William Latham, were inspired by biological or genetic processes and would create a code that acted as a blueprint for a specific type of outcome. A genotype is the genetic make up of something that results in its “phenotype” or the observable characteristics of a living organism. Each result is unique but always retains a familial similarity. The genes of an apple will always result in an apple, even if every apple doesn’t look exactly the same.
Examples of Work by William Latham:
http://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/~mas01whl/themes/return.htm
Occupy Wall Street desires a non-deterministic breeding ground for ideas where the genetic makeup itself changes along with what is produced. In short, they want a system that continually generates unclassifiable fruits of action and thought. The more defined a system is, the more determined its outcome will be. Instead of continually producing the same ‘democratic’ or ‘capitalist’ or even ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ results it desires something that is not limited to a single economic or governmental system but is equally representative of the ideas of each participant even if the product is incidental to each. Think about it as continuously programming new softwares within an open source programming language rather than being limited to the features of proprietary software.
Matt Pearson perhaps puts this notion best when comparing Generative Art, in his book of the same name, to an ant colony,
The role of the queen is as perfunctory as that of every other ant with a job to perform within the greater whole. There is no trickle-down command; the ants’ organization is from the bottom up. It is grass-roots. Emergent.
Do Occupiers Dream of Electric Streets
Initially it appears problematic to say that OWS is built on top of a system such as a CA that is characteristically limited in its ability to express itself. However, depending on the complexity of the initial code and what it is programmed to do, it can tease out more potential aesthetic results than could otherwise be predicted. OWS is obviously predicated on the freedoms built into a democratic and economic systems that allows it to persist yet butts heads with its very existence at the same time. However reigned in, OWS ‘code’ rather than strictly defining its formal results instead dictates its ability to continually evolve. If a system has adequate access to new dynamic environments and people it should be able to ‘evolve away’ from its original CA.
That being said, If there were to be one work of art that was both literally and figuratively representative of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Scott Draves’ open sourced/crowd sourced project Electric Sheep makes the most sense. The art work propagates itself through screen savers stored on people’s computers. Its form evolves according to either a voting system or a users own interaction with the code itself. “Sheep” created by different users interact with each other and breed new results. It continually evolves and adapts itself to various levels of participation among a distributed network of users. The emergent ‘sheep’ are constantly surprising, the result of a specifically designed code that is also open-sourced. It is an ongoing project where user interaction and evolution never cease. New sheep continue to grow as long as code continues to run and people continue to interact with it.
Videos of Electric Sheep:
Protest on the Digital Frontier
This is not the first time (and probably not the last) that Occupy Wall Street has been analogized with a digital trope. Douglas Rushkoff has stated that it is not a protest but a prototyping for new ways of living. Alexis Madrigal thinks OWS is more interesting as an API with a set of instructions that can be called according to what is required of a particular protest. Both of these ideas somewhat miss the point, though. Its not the resultant prototypes that are important nor a set of predefined instructions that can be dynamically appropriated and combined that are interesting. It is the co-evolutive self-propogating nature of the movement the continues to produce those prototypes and those different instructions that must not end nor be stifled.
It is not enough to compare Occupy Wall Street, as many people have, to a hydra for to do so would to suggest the movement had a central body from which new heads would emerge. No, this is not a hydra movement but a ‘liquid one’ – whose architecture is more akin to the T-1000’s form from Terminator 2. It has no ‘original’ shape or form but it is capable of absorbing forms and subsequently taking them on in a rather complex way. These result in multifaceted combinations of dialogues and ideas that are both random and surprising leading to emergent actions that are adaptive to any movements, beliefs, theories, localities or people.
Noise vs Meaning
To conclude, it is important to understand that for as ‘random’ or ‘pseudo’-random as generative art may be, there is still a desire for meaning to be either intended or to emerge naturally. If the art work is over-determined it is uninteresting and lacks any dialogue with its participants or appreciators. If it is too random its ability to communicate gets lost in the resulting noise of the work. It has to find a “sweet spot” between order and disorder.
Occupy Wall Street can succeed at their continuous, emergent dialogue among a decentralized network of individuals as long as they do not dip into chaos. To succeed it must continue its process of producing and evolving meaningful protests that stand for specific causes that are championed equally by any number of its participants.
Politics and Engineered Virality
Noticed this quote that Kevin Slavin tumbled via food on the fire escape last night:
For the first eight years of our marriage, [Michelle and I] were paying more in student loans than what we were paying for our mortgage. So we know what this is about.
And we were lucky to land good jobs with a steady income. But we only finished paying off our student loans—check this out, all right, I’m the President of the United States—we only finished paying off our student loans about eight years ago.”
via The White House Blog
Slavin, rightly so, isolated the highlighted the obviously humorous statement made by Obama. My immediate response was to not only see its humor but also how it felt so intentionally wrought to achieve meme status. I can see it adorning any number of photos of the president on Quick Meme.
So while this specific statement may not have been consciously written, is virality something that is taken into consideration when writing public speeches? Or should it be? This extends beyond mere sloganeering but an adaptation of the same method to how the Internet works to spread messages today. It’s like a reverse-gaffe, as my roommate called it. It’s an intentional humor to your own political points as a means of getting people to latch onto them and spread them. Are speeches written with this in mind? Should they be?
Maybe campaigns will start sourcing their posters from Quick Meme.
omg New Aesthetic?
Part of the issue I take with criticisms of obscurantism in a hyper-connected era is that if you aren’t “actively” reading by engaging the linked content that is referred to then you are the one who is doing a disservice to the content.
Hyperlinks and Google exist as a means of activating reading as opposed to the passive reading of words on the page. Read non-linearly. Get lost down the rabbit hole. Discover what you don’t know by reading away from the article itself.
World Was In The Face Of The Beloved
World was in the face of the beloved—,
but suddenly it poured out and was gone:
world is outside, world can not be grasped.
Why didn’t I, from the full, beloved face
as I raised it to my lips, why didn’t I drink
world, so near that I couldn’t almost taste it?
Ah, I drank. Insatiably I drank.
But I was filled up also, with too much
world, and, drinking, I myself ran over.
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
Rainer Maria Rilke
1. Reject the Market, Embrace the Market by Jerry Saltz
And the art world is having a quiet, collective Archimedes-eureka moment. We’ve been in this tub of brackish water for a while, feeling frustrated with the business of art, sometimes hopeless and uninspired, wondering what can be done. Now people realize that if we’re all already in the tub (e.g., the system), we’re already displacing water. The spill-off will be as great as what goes into the tub. Everybody in!
This notion of both rejecting the market as well embracing it coincides with the same trend in artifice of another system – social media & media in general. The moment we have entirely given ourselves to a single artificial system not willfully per se, but because it has become invasively ubiquitous, we begin displacing the proverbial water.
We will all be pouring out over our ironic machinations in the form of a cultural glitch that is neither predictable or quantifiable. We will try to break free from the strangulation of a single definitive system of behavior and expression. We are defining ourselves into a corner and ultimately we are going to respond violently/vibrantly.
the irony of course it is the actual embracing of the artifice that will lead to the rupture. We become honest through our awareness of the invasiveness of the “system” we adhere to. That honesty-cum-awareness leads to an exhaustion of the system that manifests itself as a revolt where we shed off the original artifice we are honest about and take away the honesty alone.
This trend of ubiquitous artificiality giving way to something less definable is just as much representative of the “New Aesthetic”as is any specific technological innovation or work of art.
Younger generations will be less inclined to hide behind artifice, however, they will be more inclined to use artifice to open source themselves.
