Part of an Essay by Ada Lovelace

Tuesday, 5 January 1841

...What is Imagination? We talk much of Imagination. We talk of Imagination of Poets, the Imagination of Artists &c; I am inclined to think that in general we don't know very exactly what we are talking about. Imagination I think especially two fold.

First: it is the Combining Faculty. It brings together things, facts, ideas, conceptions, in new, original, endless, ever varying, Combinations. It seizes points in common, between subjects having no very apparent connexion, & hence seldom or never brought into juxtaposition.

Secondly: It conceives & brings into mental presences that which is far away, or invisible, or which in short does not exist within our physical & conscious cognizance. Hence is it especially the religious faculty; the ground-work of Faith. It is a God-like, a noble faculty. It renders earth tolerable (at least should do so); it teaches us to live, in the tone of the eternal.

Imagination is the Discovering Faculty, pre-eminently. It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science. It is that which feels & discovers what is, the real which we see not, which exists not for our senses. Those who have learned to walk on the threshold of the unknown worlds, by means of what are commonly termed par excellence the exact sciences, may then with the fair white wings of Imagination hope to soar further into the unexplored amidst which we live.


Mathematical Science shows what is. It is the language of the unseen relations between things. But to use & apply that language we must be able fully to appreciate, o feel, to seize, the unseen, the unconscious. Imagination too shows what is, the is that is beyond the senses. Hence she is or should be especially cultivated by the truly Scientific, -those who wish to enter into the worlds around us!

Excerpted from Ada: The Enchantress of Numbers by Betty Alexandra Toole

FUTURITY
A Musical by The Lisps

January 9th and 10th at the Zipper Factory in Manhattan.



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Dear Sarah Palin,

Thanks for reigniting a culture war. Thanks for turning this presidential contest into a spiraling race to the bottom. Thanks for lying to the American people over and over and over. Thanks for showing us that you don't care if it's a lie as long as it serves your purpose. Thanks for being demeaning and sarcastic, and setting a new tone of vindictiveness. Thanks for refusing to take questions from the media or voters for nearly two weeks after your nomination. Thanks for lying about your record on energy. Thanks for lying 27 times (and counting) about your record on the "Bridge to Nowhere." Thanks for lying about your record on earmarks. Thanks for putting out a press release about your daughter's pregnancy and then calling the press sexist when they cover the release. Thanks for degrading community organizers who are some of the hardest working and most selfless people in our country. Thanks for degrading Habeus Corpus, which is one of the most sacred pillars of our democracy. Thanks for completely ignoring and effectively denouncing the idea of the separation of Church and State, which is another pillar of our democracy. Thanks for opportunistically praising Hillary Clinton while cynically denouncing nearly everything she has spent her life working for. Thanks for claiming that "God" wanted you to build a gas pipeline. Thanks for saying that the war in Iraq is "God's work," and invoking the specter of religious violence and holy war. Thanks for plunging Wasilla into millions of dollars of debt and raising the sales tax (which is one of the most regressive taxes there is). Thanks for firing people that don't agree with you and abusing your power as Governor. Thanks for going along with a whole slew of smears and attack ads (many of which are filled with blatant lies). Thanks for lying about selling your state's plane on Ebay and then billing the state for $93,000 in airfare during 2007 for you and your family to fly. Thanks for billing the State for your travel per diem while you were at home in Wasilla more than 30 times. Thanks for lying about Obama's authorship of legislation. Thanks for opposing major legislation for health care, education, and seniors. Thanks for slashing funding for Passage House, which is a transitional home for teenage mothers.

Thanks for offering to change Washington, but I think that what you're offering looks much worse than what George W. Bush has already done.

Thanks, but no thanks.

If we want change in America we'll build it ourselves.

Sincerely, César

Donate to Barack Obama and Vote on November 4th!
Please Forward.

Dog Under Porch


Dog Under Porch is an anthology of work from members and friends of the Bard College MFA community. It was published by Little Socks Press 2008

Download it HERE.

It features work by:

Dorothy Albertini
Cesar Alvarez
Alisa Baremboym
Sylvie Baumgartel
Anselm Berrigan
Linh Dinh
Cecilia Dougherty
Amit Dwibedy
Corrine Fitzpatrick
Marley Freeman
Lucas Geronimas
Jeremy Hoevenaar
David Horvitz
Julia Klein
Ann Lauterbach
Jeanne Liotta
Joshua Lovelace
Alfredo Marin
Anna Moschovakis
Laura Neuman
Brett Price
George Raggett
Isabel Sobral
Chris Stackhouse
Ann Stephenson
David Levi Strauss
Deirtra Thompson
Stephan Westfall
Matveii Yankelevich


Untitled by Alfredo Marin



One Small Step for a Man by Jeanne Liotta


No title. No author.

Dystopia Watch

The remote stun bracelets in this gizmodo post are exactly like what Octavia Butler describes in her book Parable of the Talents. In the novel "collars" are used to enable modern day slavers to subjugate their victims. The slavers are able to remotely "lash" their victims and inflict brutal pain. Very creepy.

Audio Surveillance
and the Phono-Centric Fabulousness of Tom Levin

photo cred

1. "Audio-Surveillance in Narrative Film manifests as a narrative excess"
Which as I understand it means that the depiction of surveillance in film, creates a network of possibilities for the viewer/characters. The collection, storing, manipulation, use, misuse, and erasure of the collected data becomes an undepicted but revlevant "excess."

2. Listening as Menace.

3. The sound of rewinding = "The materiality of the signifier"

4. Though the representation of digital is not phenomenally accessible (we can't perceive the media with our senses) , "I insist on the materiality of the digital" ( and it's nearly impossible to get rid of).

5. Error conditions specific to transcriptions are harnessed to signify specificity of new media. (We have such a bright future of errors and artifacts)

6. "A sign is any thing that can be used to lie." - Umberto Eco

7. Tom views himself a working for the "Production of surveillant literacy"

8. Shape Your Data Shadow

9. I'm watched therefore I am.

10. A short history of voicemail.

Notes for a Talk on Technological Singularity

1. On Wikipedia: "The technological singularity is a theoretical point in the future of unprecedented technological progress, caused in part by the ability of machines to improve themselves using artificial intelligence."

"Statistician I. J. Good first wrote of an 'intelligence explosion', suggesting that if machines could even slightly surpass human intellect, they could improve their own designs in ways unseen by their designers, and thus recursively augment themselves into far greater intelligences. The first such improvements might be small, but as the machine became more intelligent it would become better at becoming more intelligent, which could lead to an exponential and quite sudden growth in intelligence."

2. If you are unfamiliar with the idea of technological singularity check out this video on ted.com by Ray Kurzweil. And this series of articles at IEEE Spectrum for a more mediated set of views.

3. Inventor, Scientist, Dietary Supplement fanatic Ray Kurzweil is the tech singularity's most feverish advocate. He works to extend his own life in order that he might live to the days of medical immortality (probably before 2040 in his view). And he's got a cryogenic account lined up if that doesn't work out.

4. While learning about The Singularity from Kurzweil is a little like learning about Jesus from an Evangelist, (maybe it's the eternal life fixation) he seriously knows his stuff. He has spent a lot of his resources trying to prove his idea of the exponential technological evolution/growth that has been happening since we were solitary proteins floating in a primordial goo.

5. The main criticism for "Singulatarians" as they call themselves seems to be that they are unabashed techno-optimists. And that they don't focus on the dangers of what they propose, but only the virtual and cybernetic joys. Also that it ignores the complexity of nature's engineering feat. V.S. Ramachandran says “God is a hacker, not an engineer," and you can't reverse engineer a hacker. Also there is the unresolved question of consciousness. The most cited rebuttal to the idea of a Tech Singularity is Jaron Lanier's One Half Manifesto from Wired Magazine, though it's 8 years old now. This is how he articulates framework, which is in his view all wrong, of the Singulatarians who he calls "Cyber-Totalists":

a. Cybernetic patterns of information provide the ultimate and best way to understand reality.
b. People are no more than cybernetic patterns.
c. Subjective experience either doesn't exist, or is unimportant because it is some sort of ambient or peripheral effect.
d. What Darwin described in biology, or something like it, is in fact also the singular, superior description of all creativity and culture.
e. Qualitative as well as quantitative aspects of information systems will be inexorably accelerated by Moore's law.

6. Nano Technology is key. Cybernetics. Turing test. Dumb Software. Wetware?

7. Man this gets confusing.

8. I have a hard time not seeing Kurzweil's point. And though a million science fiction authors have warned us about the possibility of self-replicating, self-improving, and self-aware AI Kurzweil seems to have a very pure optimism.

9. One thing is for sure though, nobody is going to stop the exponential pace of technological advancement, and AI is going to be at the center of the great ethical debate of the 21st century.
According to Kurzweil's pretty compelling speculation robots will be as smart as humans AND self-replicating before I get the senior citizen discount at the movies.

10. What is the relationship between the development of AI and human evolution? I think in a twisted way they are fundamentally the same. Humans took evolution into our own hands with the first rock we used to crack a nut. Not to mention when we started fires and made wheels, invented languages, writing, and machines. All of these are clearly an external evolution that has been exponentially advancing since the beginning.

11. I find the difference between an iPhone and a computer installed in your body or clothing very minuscule.

12. I have to admit I'm guiltily looking forward to full-immersion brain-based virtual reality.

13. Uploaded skills, language and consciousness will be handy.

14. It's when they air around us becomes materialized intelligence that starts expanding out into the universe, colonizing space. That's when my understanding breaks down. My friends say the air already is intelligence. Ok, but this is going to be different.

15. Reminds me of the dictum from Octavia Butler's Parable of the Talent's: "And the Destiny of Earthseed, Is to take root among the stars."

16. We may not be long for this world but not in the way Al Gore thinks.

"Music is more than an object of study: It is a way of perceiving the world. A tool of understanding. Today, no theorizing accomplished through language or mathematics can suffice any longer; it is incapable of accounting for what is essential in time- the qualitative and the fluid, threats and violence. In the face of the growing ambiguity of the signs being used and exchanged, the most well-established concepts are crumbling and every theory is wavering. The available representations of the economy, trapped within frameworks erected in the seventeenth century or, at latest, toward 1850, can neither predict, describe, nor even express what awaits us. It is thus necessary to imagine radically new theoretical forms, in order to speak to new realities. Music, the organization of noise, is one such form. It reflects the manufacture of society; it constitutes the audible waveband of the vibrations and signs that make up society. An instrument of understanding, it prompts us to decipher a sound form of knowledge."

- Jacques Attali from Noise: The Political Economy of Music

Thoughts on Cybernetics

Cyborg Lincoln By annihilist

1. Humans have a hard time imagining post-linguistic civilization.

2. Cybernetics have a popular myth:

• a. Metal (cold, hard, sharp, dangerous, sterile, durable, unbreakable)
• b. Unfeeling (computer)
• c. Destructive/Facist (weapons oriented)
• d. Viral/Power Hungry (human)
• e. Dualistic (hardware/software)
• f. Digital

3. Robots made of wood are nonthreatening. What about:

• a. Flesh (bone, organs, dead human matter)
• b. Plant Matter
• c. Elemental Particles
• d. Glass
• e. Plasma
• f. Plastic
• g. Mud (dirt)
• h. Water

4. What is the technology that will replace language?

5. When humans start interfacing with one another wirelessly ("telepathically") first it will be through a chat room template; Then direct mental language interfacing; then pure thought exchange. Humans will develop acute skills of mental compartmentalization in order to maintain privacy. Eventually privacy (deception) could fade away but it will more likely just vastly complexify.

6. Why is there an idea that man-made consciousness will be similar to human consciousness?

7. When computers gain the parallel processing power, pattern recognition, and self-contemplation of adult human brains they will likely devise their own language.

SPECULATION

Rodney McMillian, Untitled, 2007.

When computers begin to feel it will be delusion alone that is uniquely human. There are so many layers to this. Here's a fake map for the development of intelligence from the beginning of life to the materialization of intelligence. We're at about 7.8:

0. Void
1. Animation of Life
2. Multiplication of Life
3. Complification
4. Relationship
5. Linguistic Stucture (meaning created)
6. Codification (referential)
7. Extension (externalized evolution eg: tools, technology)
8. Genesis of (man-made) self-replicating species
9. Explosion of Species
10. Materialization of Intelligence (permeability becomes a sensation)

It is so hard to imagine the materialization of intelligence without feeling like you are drowning.

riverplatetectonics

I just discovered Chris Leo's new blog which is re-inventing the english language.

"Numenous thoughts can’t see the fours through the threes. Their nebulous numeric looming just as easily gives way to numinous luminescent leaps as it does to breaches with faith. Never forget, neither Darwin, nor Galileo, nor Copernicus, nor Hawking ever renounced God. It’s God’s frenzied vocal advocates that renounce them first. In fact, they like God just fine and can't for the life of them understand how thier proofs contradict anything he says. If he made anything didn't he make the numbers as well?

numbers + numinis (Latin for “Divine Will”) = continuous fractions, wherein continuous means nothing short of continually continuous

-- Chris Leo

Kodwo Eshun on Rhythm (in modern music)
from: Swarm 3 "Abducted by Audio (Live)"

Thank you Mr. Eshun. I've been grasping at the Rhythm question a lot in the last few years and I was so elated to have happened upon some real insight.

"Part of the assumption that still exists in music is that futuristic music will somehow be beatless, somehow there won't be many rhythms, somehow it'll be weightless. It has a long heritage, going back from Holst's Planet Suite through to Kraftwerk, this idea that music will be transcendental and weightless, that somehow the beats will just slough off and we'll just kind of float through space astrally. But we know better now. After drum 'n' bass has retroactively switched us back on to the presence of rhythm, we know that the future will not only be just rhythmic, it'll be hyper-rhythmic. So in this sense when cyber-people keep talking about, "What's the fate of the body?", when they keep on moaning, "the body's going to wither away, the mind-body problem, it's so depressing," as far as I'm concerned rhythmic psychedelia is the opposite. The body's being triggered, the body's being switched on. Sensory perception is being triggered at a furious rate and, as far as I'm concerned, it's much more interesting to look at the idea of rhythm. Look at any piece of music writing and you'll notice an incredible absence about rhythm. So many people are unable to talk about rhythm. Music writers will talk about anything except what the beats are doing. It's actually very difficult. Rhythm is this terra incognita, it's this continent we've yet to land on. So you've got this strange dichotomy, what we call a gulf crisis: on the one hand, music is getting hyper-rhythmic, more rhythmic and psychedelic; on the other hand, the writing and the way we discuss it is more impoverished than ever. It's the most incredible thing."

"That's where I see music going: it's getting much more rhythmic, much more rhythmically psychedelic. We really have to start thinking about what rhythm does, how do we explain it, what is it, how does it work? The first thing to do is to acknowledge that rhythm isn't really about notes or beats, it's about intensities, it's about crossing a series of thresholds across your body. Sound doesn't need any discourse of representation, it doesn't need the idea of discourse or the signifier: you can use sound as an immediate material intensity that grabs you. When you hear a beat, a beat lands on your joints, it docks on the junction between your joints and articulates itself onto your joints, it seizes a muscle, it gives you this tension, it seizes you up, and suddenly you find your leg lifting despite your head. Sound moves faster than your head, sound moves faster than your body. What sound is doing is triggering impulses across your muscles."

"That's why drum 'n' bass talks a lot about the stepper, because sound is literally articulating you as a kind of exo-skeleton It's almost like your feet are gaining an intelligence at the expense of your head, or your arse, or your back, or your shoulders are gaining intelligence at the expense of your head. Anywhere you have a sense of tension, that's the beginning, that's the signs of a bodily intelligence switching itself on. And that's what rhythm is doing. You can foresee a point where the body is mutated by rhythm to the point where the head becomes completely superfluous, becomes this flabby muscle bouncing around, aimlessly lolling around, while your muscles go twenty to the dozen. In fact, of course, this already exists; its jungle. That's the whole point of it."