Consider Bookhling

There is a passage in the book Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell that I’d like to share with you. It’s nothing significant, but within the context laid out in the world of the book, I found them much too rich and beautiful to keep to myself.

“…Strange walked away and became one of the many black figures on the piazza, all with black faces and no expressions, hurrying across the face of moon-coloured Venice. The moon itself was set among great architectural clouds so that there appeared to be another moon-lit city in the sky, whose grandeur rivalled Venice and whose great palaces and streets were crumbling and falling into ruins, as if some spirit in a whimsical mood had set it there to mock the other’s slow decline.”

One of the primary construct within the book’s world is the fairy road, which is closer to a whole world hidden within unseen corners of the reality rather than simple network of roads. Detailed descriptions and the depth of setting the author have devoted to the idea of fairy roads are rather pronounced throughout the course of the book, and every moment of it is memorable. Due to such extensive setting, even relatively simple passage as above, which might even come out mundane when read in other books take on certain profound qualities that forms a whole world on its own, like a sort of literary metasystem transition.

When a book opens a door within itself to be more real than is possible, the result is unreal. Even simple matter of nuances and styles open the door to a great number of interpretations, and such mechanic is not limited to literary works. Just as I instinctively note every description of the shadows and formations of birds within the world of the Jonathan Strange and Mr.Norrell, other mediums might lend significance to other little things, like the whispers of cicada or even the colors and musical tones within the artificial world.

When such understanding of artificial worlds have taken place, it is interesting to note just what kind of ‘mechanism’ an artificial life form can lend to the conventional understanding of reality.

I’ve looked at some exhibition of Hans Bellmer’s works. His sculptures of human form are quite intriguing to say the least. I’m beginning to find the whole medium of ‘dolls’ to be interesting in the light of artificial life and its pursuit.

Hans Bellmer is mostly characterized by his work on various deformed sculptures of human using ball-jointed dolls in mostly unusual and inhuman positions/circumstances. His works almost always exude a thick milieu of sexuality about them, especially disturbing to some people since the topics of his depiction of human forms are mostly prepubescent girls.

It is supposed that Hans Bellmer first took such direction as a revolt against the Nazi cult of the perfect body-being idea, by creating a form that is far away from the idealized portions of conventional mind yet emanates certain quality of attraction on the primordial level, which takes the form of sexual attraction.

The very action of creating deformed things that in fact more closely resembles certain innate qualities of humanity than platonic and heroic gestures of the conventional study of human form itself is interesting, in that life-like quality of human body had been detached from the physical format of the body itself. Of course, in this case the trait that connects Hans Bellmer’s dolls to life is the instinctive connection between the dolls and its audience that strikes a cord in the heart of the observer as a quality that immediately resembles some quality of the humane, despite its definitely inhumane, perhaps even cruel forms. Sort of manifesting paradox, which is itself a very life-like property if I say so myself.

While hovering around the works of Hans Bellmer, a thought crossed my mind. What if there is a doll that appears so life-like that it resembles a human being in every way, on every scale of observation? Would it be considered as a living thing? How much does a human perception of life weight in when determining something is alive or not? If Hans Bellmer’s creations can appeal to the human senses, what is the criteria for something previously inorganic to appear as if they were alive to a human being? Would it be possible for such an artificial construct to be so close to what we define to be human, to the extent that it is perceived as more human than human?

In the end it seems that our perception of life is that life resembles us, not the other way around. At the sensory level, it is the matter of communication, not necessarily through any formal language, that determines the trait of life in casual observation.

Would it mean that the bridge between art and science lies in the matter of communication? A communication between the world and what we consider to be the substance of humanity (whatever that might be)?

I’ve been reading up on the concept and practice of the upcoming Will Wright game called the Spore. It is basically a game of artificial life management, where certain designer creature made by the player can be controlled by the player to adapt and semi-evolve into more advanced forms, eventually forming cabals and civilizations until they are star-faring and space colonising force in the galaxy. There are numerous number of galaxies in the game (each composed of many, many solar systems) each inhabited (possibly) by other user created creatures all in process of evolving.

Is this an interesting practice in the field of artificial life? I doubt it on the player side, since everything is basically controlled on semi-micro level management for the most of the game. However, for the computer managed downloaded user-created creature population, how such creatures play out will be very interesting to see, and there might be many people who would spend their time observing what other creatures do and react to instead of nurturing their own (now that I think about it, I hope Will Wright paid much attention to the effects of weather and geography to the determination of the creature behavior/culture). I know I would spend much of my time doing that. A sort of infinitely malleable aquarium.

I am quite disillusioned with the approach taken by the computer-based artificial life community. While there are quite a few noble pursuits out there, most of them doesn’t seem to have a clear idea of what an artificial life is, or should be. The general trend of the day is calling a thing an artificial life study for lack of a better term, rather than the intention of the thing, whether it be a search engine algorithm or a type of number generator. That is the reason why I try to stay away from the computerized practices of artificial life, instead opting for physical modelling based on replicable complex systems-based experiments happening in physical medium. Just so that there is no misunderstanding, I do believe that a type of artificial life can be achieved by the practice of computer programming. It is only that what most people seem to be doing at the moment is closer to a debate on how many angels can sit on the head of a pin, and I believe such lack of ingenuous ideas stem from lack of physical and experimental basis for the study of the actual phenomena of life. It is very depressing when the crossing of the line between the art and the science through the means of artificial life is mostly expressed through computer generated patterns of ‘organic’ looking things when there are practically infinite range of possibilities using variety of medium available to us at this moment. Life, I believe, doesn’t have to be convinced.

Will Wright’s design of the Spore is somewhat reminiscent of the disillusionment I’ve described above. The program of the Spore, at least the foundational idea of it, is very simple. Actual complexity that enriches the ‘game experience’ to the point that it is of interest to someone actively pursuing artificial life stems from the complexity of the human interaction with that simple basis. It is structured in such a way that the infinite variety of options open to those simple building blocks inevitably give rise to a type of complexity that can not be predicted in any algorithmic pattern. Thus, he is attempting to create a complex system not by act of coding a complex system, but by involving pre-existing complex system of complex environments (human beings) to simple deterministic systems. When certain feedback forms between the two wildly different systems, the outcome is nigh unpredictable, giving rise to depth and variety that cannot be replicated by any hard-coded complex system at this juncture.

Perhaps this idea of metasystem transition can be applied to variety of other platforms/mediums in the search for artificial life. I think I can already draw a rough outline of how such structure and resulting interaction is fundamental to formation of various complex systems, including the system of complex plasma.

Nature of nostalgia suggests a few profound things about the true nature of human recognition and memories. For example, sometimes I feel an almost irresistible nostalgia to the days I can objectively say as one of the worst humanely possible conditions one can encounter. The horror, the anxiety, the sadness and the utter feeling of powerlessness. All is subdued within certain lights and certain strange winds, the quiet swaying of trees and the touch of cool twilight wind which turns the whole horrible experience into a perverted romance, making me long for the day even for a single moment. As such, the nature of memory and nostalgia is quite peculiar. I think except under very limited circumstances the nature of memory might as well have only a superficial resemblance to the conventional ‘copy of reality’ sense we get from the analogies comparing human brain and its functions to that of computers. In fact, first hand experience with a human brain (I have one in here, I assure you) makes me think what we consider to be specific and clear-cut functions of brain might not be as clear cut as usually believed, although I do not quite believe that the structure and function of the brain is entirely holistic as some proponents of the theory seem to suggest. It is more like one function complementing each other in a sort of linked reaction, one thing always verging on the territory of the other, physical and mental reaction accompanying the other (physical pain and memory?) for no sound physiological reason. In such perspective, it is not that memories and processing capabilities come together to build a conscious system, but the conscious system forms aspects of memory and processing ability as the original system gradually becomes specialized with time/evolution.
If certain quality of emotion and reaction can be expected regardless of actual physical situation being experienced, such as an aesthetic thrill or a dramatic flair in situations of distress or sadness, then what does that tell us about the nature of human experience on the more profound and general level? Would that mean human perception and reaction is entirely separate from the physical circumstances we subject ourselves to? Wouldn’t that mean that the sense of beauty exists separate from the ‘beautiful thing’ being observed at the moment, and that while certain quality for evoking a response may be present in objects, there is no staying power in such evoked responses since the response have nothing to do with the quality of the physical object, its ‘being’ in the first place? If that is the case, then it is impossible for things in this world to remain beautiful forever, in the eyes of everyone, of everything. It would basically limit the quality of this strange thing called ‘beauty’ strictly within the realms of cognisant system, biological or not.
However, even if that is the truth, what can I make of it in connection to certain philosophies behind the beauty of photography and abstract expressionistic art, where certain moments or (rather hazy) units of human response in front of the object-world are sought out as sort of atoms of human experience and thought? And even human brains and manifesting trait we refer to as consciousness is basically a physical system. As a would-be physicist, how should I understand certain strange quality that is receptive only to a special type of system, despite having originated from same materials? Would this be a sign of a nonergodic universe?

It is a relatively simple matter to debate the nature of beauty on purely artistic or even physiological level because we lack a profound understanding of it. Humanity had been practicing the things of beauty for as long as anyone can remember, but no one seem to be able to tell what exactly we are practicing to what end, and each debate have boiled down into arguments decided on the merit of logical infallibility rather than physical evidence, which is quite distressing to me on so many levels. This complex switching between the realms of the physical and the not-as-physical in the sense that it cannot yet be explained from the traits of its original component, is the quality of beauty that I cannot help but to compare to the ever illusive nature of life, how it began and how it is to be replicated.

So many questions questions… And no answer, not even a clear distinction between all the tangled knots of the questions, all seemingly tied together to some strange end.

I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t fall asleep again, so I’m writing here. (again)

I happened to pass by a little debate in a corner of the internet regarding the validity of the digital art as one of the ‘true’ or ‘fine’ art. Now, I personally consider the digital art medium to be just as fine and true as any other art form, and I mostly see current difficulty of many digital artists as lack of a true vision on the part of the artists and unfamiliarity with the medium on the traditional art front.

The answer I have drawn myself for economic nature of the digital media would be simple. The rules and such that applies mostly to photography right now would apply to the digital arts just the same. And I believe no one now is crazy enough to argue about photography not being ‘real art.’ When magazines and such hires professional photographers (which is I believe how most of them make a living), they are not really paying for a little piece of negative that can be copied over and over and over again. They are paying for the unique perspective and characteristic talent the photographer him/herself had achieved with the medium of photography. In a sense, the industry is not buying ‘photography’, they are buying the essence of art contained in a medium, which in this case happens to be a photography. I believe the similar pursuit is natural, and indeed necessary, for digital art scene to make an impact on the traditional arts community. The only way to transcend the limits imposed by the infinite malleability of the medium (no matter how ironic it may be) is to drag the essence of the art away from its physical medium, to be freed from all the dpis, pixels and screen resolutions. In effect, the only way for digital art to truly walk into the realm of the common notion of ‘valuable art’, would be to trade the artist rather than the art object. The digitally created art object is in fact an extension of the artist him/herself, and we are buying little pieces of the artist, with his/her sharp eyes, lucid thinking and agile hands, rather than the jumble of bits and data that was created as a result of his/her effort. I see a street light outside my window. If asked to draw something outside, I will most certainly draw a street light. But will some highly talented digital artist see things differently? Will he/she draw something more when asked to draw the same scene outside the window? While we all share the same world to live in, we don’t necessarily see the same thing within that world, and that’s where the salvation of the digital arts lies.

The art is trying to drop from the canvas and smudge the world. The fetishes and sculptures are frozen in middle of movement, and will walk and speak when the waiting is over. And beyond all that shenanigan is art, that had been applied to many things yet not quite touched in any fundamental way for the duration of the human history. We’ve been trading art objects. We are trading artists now. Maybe in the future the art objects will tap us on the shoulder and ask what that was all about.

A little something I wrote last night when I couldn’t fall asleep. I think it might be interesting to some of you.

Does anyone remember the movie videodrome? If you haven’t watched it, I suggest you do. It’s an old movie but it still rides on the bleeding edge of the prophetic. The phrase ‘Death to the videodrome, long live the new flesh!’ will ring in your mind for a long time after you finish watching it. I believe I can still see the phrase being repeated in many places throughout the net and other media.

The prophetic vision of the betamax era movie had come and pass, but the poignant insight into the fundamental relationship between a mass-media society and humanity still rings true today, and it might still tell us many things when we view the lessons in the context of the abundance of mobile mass-storage media player such as the ipod.

Unlike some people out there, I do not view the popularity of the ipod as the popularity of the apple. The way I see it, ipod is the modern vellum that are capable of storing pages after pages of ‘moving information’ and ‘audible information’ in form of music and movies. The popularity of the ipod is in fact the popularity of a notion of being able to create a localized collection of information/media that connects us to not the physical network of electricity, but the emergent network of the cultural zeitgeist wherever we go. Even in the times of actual vellum information, the truth of the matter being written about was never the focus of the author/creator’s mind. There are numerous examples of medieval vellum codex beginning as something as innocuous as a collection of prayer texts or certain dispositions on the bible, or even a collection of herbal remedies, that gradually turns into a wild text concerning the supernatural, the arts, the philosophies and etc., anything and everything within the zeitgeist of the era capable of reflecting the thought of the author/creator of the codex. The fact is, a long collection of any media, text or music or herbal remedy, requires heavy choosing on the side of the creator. No matter how hard the author tries to keep things in objective light, the ‘objective’ facts being written on the pages are chosen among millions and millions of ‘objective truths’ out there in the sea of information (and yes. I do believe that some form of the sea of information existed at all stages of human history, far before the advent of electronic networks). The ending result must inevitably reflect the state of the author as well as the signs of the times, gradually turning the most mundane collection into something profound and fantastic (the Codex Gigas probably had a very humble beginning, but it’s now surrounded by legends of demonic deals of the monk who wrote it. Who’s to say that something like that can’t be true of some of our ipods a century later?), a little graffiti drawn at the corner of the world that turns the whole scene around (I just love the graffiti analogy. Maybe I’ll do a full post on this later).

The success of the ipod is, in fact, the success of such mindset. The success of web logging and podcasts are not in that they act as easy gateway to reach out to others (although it is a fundamental and integral part of the medium), but in that they might build up within the cultural zeitgeist (think penny-arcade. Those guys would never have drawn/written so much and so well within isolation, but it would be shallow to think that they began drawing and writing simply to show it to others) and have a connection with the sea of information at a very instinctive, almost Jungian way. As it was metaphorically suggested in the movie videodrome, this movement of human civilization goes beyond the physical brute-force way of ‘uploading’ a mind onto other medium (as is frequently depicted in pulp fictions). It is about the something within the basic fabric of human psyche that can only be fulfilled through meaningful activity that allows one to connect with a sense of humanity at a collective level, the something that dreads meaningless activities and drives people to despair or unreasonable act in defense of something one might consider meaningful. The collection of movies and songs within ipod gradually grows to encompass the footprint of the collector’s mind, and the pod itself, through sound and vision, recreates a strange world for the collector to immerse him/herself in at any moment, anywhere.

Where do we go on from here? If the appeal of the ‘ipod concept’ was about being able to immerse oneself in a world through a cascading medium, what would be the natural progression?

I’ve been trying to write a post regarding the parallel between the art and sciences, only to come to multitudes of conclusions and thoughts all contrasting against each other. So I thought I would write them all. Sort of collected sketches of my thought regarding the issue. Maybe I would be able to see some pattern in my divergent thoughts should I carry on doing it for a long time.

The subtle parallel between the art and the sciences are readily available everywhere I see. Modern practices of art, such as some of the experiments of the abstract expressionists from coincidences and random outcomes of color and pattern to Tara Donovan’s styrofoam and foil constructs, the similarities in goal and practices of the medium abound everywhere. The fetishes and gods emerge out of their woodwork and stony silences frozen in their attempt to walk and talk among their worshippers and creators, the blotches on canvases look as if they would soon drop on the world into an ever spreading smudge. All pieces seem to be wanting to walk out into the world and speak of things in their hearts, but what really is life in the eyes of their artistic creators? Is the life-like qualities of the results and practices of art wholly intentional or something merely accidental, an evolutionary dead end in pursuit of something else? What is the trait of life that ties itself to the art in so many fields and actions, regardless of their truth?

I’d say the artist’s description of life is a system in eternal transition without destroying self. Constant change while maintaining unique characteristic that defines itself is the universal trait of life-like things most closely related to their artificial cousins. Tara Donovan’s pieces are formed of simple elements repeated ad nauseum, a process that begins to turn them into something different, while still maintaining and even exploring the nature of its components, to the extent that the new forms begin to act as a strange extension to the nature of the original components. This is a process startlingly similar to some of the approaches taken by artificial life students and certain schools of modern music. Such characteristic is instilled in the basic fabric of the modern art. Take a look at Hans Hoffman. The powerful brushstrokes and colors lend weight to the painting and the energy and form are coalesced into something powerful, and yet soft and almost random while being able to maintain certain thematic vision, a quintessence of the painting capable of metamophosise the colors and the masses into refreshing waterfalls and flowers of a ravine.

The significance of the life in art as being a system in endless state of transition while being able to maintain itself is in the meeting between the medium and the definition such interpretation can provide us. Modern arts, through its tireless search for form and beauty, have provided us wit an understanding that certain things are able to maintain the illusive trait of ’self’ while going through a total disembodiment of its usual medium and composition. The integrity of the medium combined with the definition, the ‘being’, at the horizon between a thing and its definition lies the concept of life from inanimate.

Now, think of such a construct, not drawn on canvas but beating and breathing, walking among us. A graffiti on the fabric of biosphere.

Number 28 is an art piece created by Jackson Pollock. I just wanted to jot down parts of a comment by Clement Greenberg on that piece I came across recently. The art at question here is referred to as polyphonic in its composition, knit together with multiplicity of identical or similar elements. He describes the painting as repeating itself without strong variation from one end of canvas to another and digress with beginning, middle, and the end.

The terms Greenberg used in describing the painting is quite interesting to me, in that they might as well be used to describe music, writing, or some complex artificial life system. Perhaps the multiplicity of the nature of ‘art’ without medium is more readily obvious than I first imagined.

Below is a note I wrote while walking through a Metropolitan gallery one day. This is a note on art written by a physics student, so… Keep that in mind

The Greek visions of what makes an art piece life-like is well embodied in the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea. I believe the Greeks tried to find the most concentrated and abstract combination of lines and figures (while maintaining human shape) in order to form the most aesthetically pleasing, idealized life figure possible. While such classical arts can be regarded by many as boring, in the sense that if you’ve seen a few you’ve practically seen them all, it does provide us with interesting food for thought as to how the ancients went about creating life-like things in devotion to their vision and religions. Maybe it is possible to hypothesise that the practice of dividing the reality into certain perceptible and universal patterns and then recombining them into fully developed forms is a practice inherent in an intelligent mind. Such explanation might help in explaining certain traits displayed by humanity that were often relegated to a specific cultural zeitgeist or (god forbid) racial trait. Within such cultural environment it is easy to see how art and mathematics must have grown together hand in hand, to find the most ‘beautiful’ combinations of shapes and lines distilled into a axiom, a sort of unifying principle beyond human perception and the urge to create.

However, when I think of Greek sculptures, I can’t help but to think of the Egyptian sculptures at the same time. The Greek and Egyptian comparison is a most peculiar and interesting thing in my eyes. The geographical proximity is one thing, but the strange amalgamation of similarities and differences, almost as if they were fully aware of what each other were doing at one point but took pains to ignore it, is simply intriguing.

While Greek sculptures featured prominently the beauty of lines and shapes into certain idealized format, the Egyptian sculptures are unique in their combination of writing and art, to the point that it is often difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. It is possible to say that the vast majority of Egyptian sculptures almost seem to act as a background provided for the ’story’ of the writing written on the sculpture, like how medieval monks illustrated their beautiful manuscripts with figures and strange designs to act as a backdrop for the written language. I thought at one moment that I could attribute such difference to the unique nature of Egyptian religion, but as I learned more I began to notice quite a few similarities between the Greek and the Egyptian methods of faith, and that in the end about the only difference I could attribute to religion came from geopolitical structure of the times, with the Egyptian empire under single rule and single ’state religion’ of sorts, while the Greeks remained as a collection of city-states (more or less). So religion by itself could not have been the deciding factor in the difference between the Egyptian and the Greek approach.

I consider most forms of art to inherently desire to be born into the world. As such, I view both the Greek and Egyptian sculptures as a serious practice at some form of metamorphosis, and I consider that while Greeks found relish in geometric nature and relation of forms themselves, Egyptians found attribution of meaning in inanimate things to be the straightest path to bringing their sculpture to the most life-like state possible. It amazes me how we don’t have any knowledge about ancient Egyptian practice of writing fiction, albeit in some hieratic form.

Common practices of metamorphosis might be upon oneself (masks), or the others (ceremony), or the inanimate (sculptures and such). Shaping god into sculptures represent at wanting to communicate directly with these natural/inanimate things by giving them a human face (interface) and worshipping them (controllable environment). In that regard there is one key similarity and difference between the Greek practice and the Egyptian practice. The similarity is that natural forces are often represented in combination of an animal and a human. The difference is in how the animal and the human come together in each of the cultures. In Greek sculptures the metamorphosis of the natural into human occurs by giving an appropriate animal a human face. In Egyptian sculptures the result is somewhat opposite, giving animal face a human body. What is the true difference between the two? I can’t say I have an answer at this moment.

I copied this one from my other blog, since I think this is important enough to be heard around the net, especially Met going students like me.

I spent almost half the day browsing through the fine collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One surprising change in museum policy new visitors should be aware of is that back packs are no longer allowed within museum galleries (since the whole museum is one giant gallery, this means no back pack allowed within the museum for all practical purposes). This caught me completely by surprise and I asked quite a few security guards regarding the specifics of the policy. Some of them were almost as surprised as I was, stating that backpacks were allowed as long as it wasn’t excessively large and in danger of toppling displays, while some others were wholly aggressive in telling backpacking visitors to hold their bags in their hands. Of course, all of them were very polite and cordial about the whole affair, and I dare say some of them actually showed genuine concern at forcing some people to carry their (obviously heavy) backpacks in their hands.

I was somewhat confused for a while regarding the precise policy with bags within the museum though, and the fifty people I’ve seen walking around with backpacks didn’t really help clarify the matter. I talked with one particular security guard at length about the issue, and he told me that some person with a backpack scratched a Rembrandt, a priceless artifact for the human civilization if I say so myself (although I can’t validate the truth of what he said, I do feel that there were certain grim accidents within the museum in recent days). So I must tell anyone thinking of visiting the Met to try not to bring a backpack into the place, or else check it in at the coat check-in, where they will be happy to hold onto your heavy coat and bag for you, free of charge. If a security guard asks you to hold your bag instead of wearing it, please don’t feel insulted, as you are not being singled out. The works in the Met aren’t pretty display pieces that can be restored or replaced when misfortune befalls them. They are singular heritage gathered over the course of human history, and we all should take a part in conserving them for future generations. In front of such an importance, mere discomfort at not being able to bring certain types of bag into the museum should not be a reason to threaten the priceless works of art.