Automatons are Ancient

When people think "robots," and "history," it is probably quite common to think of the 1950s - pulp science fiction, B-movies, and Walt Disney. As an art historian interested in technologies and art, I have a visual catalogue of mechanical life forms that is immense. Before robots, androids, and cyborgs, there were animated creatures of all kinds. Not every example comes with an extant image, but there are written descriptions of machinic "life" that go back to antiquity. Chinese puppets given motion through quicksilver, engineered mechanisms by Ctesibius (early 3rd C BCE), the pneumatica described by Philo of Byzantium (late 3rd C BCE), which operated using air and fluid mechanics, Mannerist grottoes concealing curious theatrical mechanisms that would spring into action to delight visitors, the complex clockworks made by Swiss and German inventors --- these all predate the more familiar automatons of the 18th century, by the likes of Jaquet-Droz and Jacques de Vaucanson.

There is a nice overview in Barbara Maria Stafford's essay: "Revealing Technologies/Magical Domains," in Devices of Wonder. From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen (Los Angeles: the Getty Research Institute, 2001).

So, next time you ponder the future, simultaneously ponder the past. A fuller understanding of robots, androids, and cyborgs, comes from examining their histories.

Letting Go...

"Either we cross a new threshold, enter a new stage of hominization, by inventing some human attribute that is as essential as language but operates at a much higher level, or we continue to 'communicate' through the media and think within the context of separate institutions, which contribute to the suffocation and division of intelligence. In the latter case we will no longer be confronted only by problems of power and survival. But if we are committed to the process of collective intelligence, we will gradually create the technologies, sign systems, forms of social organization and regulation that enable us to think as a group, concentrate our intellectual and spiritual forces, and negotiate practical real-time solutions to the complex problems we must inevitably confront. We will gradually learn to find our way within a mutating, wandering cosmos, to become to the extent possible, its authors, to collectively invent ourselves as a species. Collective intelligence is less concerned with self-control of human communities than with a fundamental letting-go that is capable of altering our very notion of identity and the mechanisms of domination and conflict, lifting restrictions on heretofore banned communications, and effecting the mutual liberation of isolated thoughts."
-Pierre Levy, Collective Intelligence. Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace, from Prologue, p. xxvi-xxvii

What is it with French male theorists' inability to use the word humankind! Other than that, I'm intrigued by what Levy says. There are so many publications out there about the posthuman condition or our mutation into a new species, one irrevocably yoked to, inflected by, technological systems. However, I am always suspicious of utopian notions that are not accompanied by examples of what this might actually mean or what it might look like. Of course, it could just be me that even views this type of theorizing as utopian; for some people it is a nightmarish dystopia. I'd like to cautiously occupy a shifting middle ground, neither technophobic nor technophilic, neither repulsed nor seduced...

Merging

"Biology and technology evidence parallel tendencies toward collective, hierarchical processes based on information exchange. As information is distributed, it tends to be represented (encoded) by increasingly economical (meaningful) forms. This evolutionary process, whereby the most economical or meaningful representation wins, leads to a hierarchy of languages, encoding meaning on levels that transcend comprehension by the system's individual components - whether genes, insects, microprocessors, or human minds."
-George B. Dyson, Darwin Among the Machines. The Evolution of Global Intelligence, p. 8.

Collective intelligence, global brain, hive mind, networked consciousness...what does it mean when we make analogies between biological and technological systems? What is erased or required in order to make such comparisons? The idea of a networked intelligence spanning the globe and greater than the sum of its parts, "alive" if you will, is a seductive one. Is this the 21st century's version of God?

Global intelligence requires us to interrogate our long-held belief in unique selfhood. This selfhood has given the human species not only an evolutionary advantage, but also a destructive superiority complex. Can we relinquish it and embrace our interconnectedness not only with all life, but with all information systems? Will you accept "intelligence" if it is defined as a massive parallel processor? Are you ready to merge?

Women Artists and Science

I recommend visiting the Richmond Art Gallery by May 17th to view an exhibition curated by Deborah Koenker (http://richmondartgallery.org/). Two artists, Brenna Maag and Ingrid Koening, have examined the relationships between art and science, but in very different ways.
Observation of Wonder is an installation consisting of two parts. Maag has created a domed structure, Conservatory, which is magical to experience. Standing inside the 9' high dome, viewers can examine over 700 hand-crocheted doilies from the artist's collection. Within the striking patterns of the doilies attached to the interior walls, the viewer can see that this anonymous women's labour consists of beautiful patterns and mathematical complexity. It is commonplace for people to view doilies as anachronistic decor, but looking at so many examples removed from their usual context, reveals their stunning intricacy and the skill involved in making them.
The other part of Observation of Wonder is Taxonomy, in which Maag made a series of cyanotype prints to document the doily patterns. Each doily shows up as white on dark blue and resembles a specimen from nature. The cyanotype process --- which involves placing specimens on chemically treated paper that is light sensitive --- is a form of imaging without a camera that was used in the 1840s by Anna Atkins, a British botanist, for documenting botanical specimens. Maag's invented classification system for the doilies plays on the Latin names in the scientific principles of taxonomy that order plants and animals. The doilies are thus placed in families with double Latin names to denote genus and species. For example, doilies that reference star-like patterns are placed in the family Stellatusaceae (stella means star in Latin).
Maag poetically brings together domestic labour, patterns of nature, mathematics, and scientific ordering.
Ingrid Koenig's Navigating the Uncertainty Principle attempts to chart the complexity of the everyday through drawings and paintings that demonstrate the beauty of abstract concepts, such as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Koenig asks how these underlying laws are at work in our daily lives. Her detailed drawings and paintings are alive with dense mark-making denoting the forces of electromagnetism, molecular processes, and the circulation of air currents. No objects are immune; movement is everywhere and invisible phenomena are given a presence that, rather than remaining on the level of abstract science, is interwoven with subjectivity. Gravitational forces and explosive pressures become metaphors not only for uncertainties over our own sense of place and self, but also over the current crises of the world.
Both women artists use science to inform their work, and though their motivations diverge dramatically, their works nevertheless resonate beautifully together. I'll never look at doilies or supposedly "static" objects the same way again.

Learning and Extension

"Chaos theory and self-organization and social network theories suggest that we acquire learning competences from forming connections between disparate ideas and fields in which links between them represent survival in an interconnected world. Amplification of learning, knowledge, and understanding through the extension of a personal network into a global network is the epitome of a new learning culture" - Mel Alexenberg, ed. Educating Artists for the Future. Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology and Culture, p.15.

This is one reason I am so committed to a unique degree that will facilitate these types of connections in a way that fuses the history of technology and its impact on all the disciplines, a reinvigorated humanities that fosters connections with pure and applied science, social science, the visual arts, and that embraces applied options for those students who want to be cultural content providers, new media artists, and new media authors.

Summer Reading List Number 1

I am in the midst of all of these books, but hope to finish them during the summer. I will comment on them periodically. They relate to courses I teach already, such as "Art and Technology" (AHIS 215), and to courses in the works, such as the 300-level courses "Museums and Collecting: The Rhetorics and Rituals of Display" and "Aesthetics and Theories of Vision" (these titles aren't set in stone yet). The following books are in no particular order.

Da Costa, Beatriz, and Kavita Philip, eds. Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and
Technoscience. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press, 2008.

Barker, Emma, ed. Contemporary Cultures of Display. New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1999.

Liu, Alan. The Laws of Cool. Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Jones, Caroline A., ed. Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Visual Arts Center; Cambridge, Massachusetts and
London, England: The MIT Press, 2006.

Ruinous Collaboration

I mean ruinous in the good way, the way that demolishes oppressive forces and wrecks unethical enactments of power. I was thinking of a book I've been reading for a course I'm developing: "Art, Activism, and Citizenship." The book is Empires, Ruins + Networks: The Transcultural Agenda in Art, edited by Scott McQuire and Nikos Papastergiadis.

Here is a quote from page 19: "Historically, collectives tend to emerge during periods of crisis; in moments of social upheaval and political uncertainty within society." While it is arguable that trauma can actually be quite constant, and that there are, sadly, hotspots of conflict and pain all around the globe most of the time, there is some merit in this notion of uprising as a response. But how about uprising as a strategic intervention prior to things reaching the crisis point? An emerging critical mass might not always succeed in terms of their motivations, but there is an ethical imperative in the very attempt to voice dissent. Another quote: "Terror begins when the voice of the other is denied, displaced or disfigured" (p. 7). Misrepresentation is a real danger.

Given the potential of collaboration to be ruinous, how, then, to bring this to the classroom level, often so remote from the blood and guts of capitalism, colonialism, terrorism? How to get students to work productively and collaboratively (when they so often sigh and roll their eyes when forced into group work)? Projects have to be hands-on, relevant to the current climate, and applicable to their concerns. Any collaborative project should have clear goals and measurable outcomes. If it makes a difference, if it changes the class dynamic, if it invigorates and energizes debate and renews commitment to a just cause, then it should be shared widely with other students and instructors as a model for projects in diverse disciplines.

Network, networking, net worth.

Sandroid