Writers don’t write from experience, though many are resistant to admit that they don’t. I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.

The concept of the project I find useful. Something you do in the present, and can remember doing in the past, and expect to do in the future, in order to create something. A work of art which need not be in the arts per se, but something human worth doing.”
…
“That’s existentialism, yes?

… she always found it odd to see canvas used as the medium, a bit like looking at scrimshaw or other antique exotica. When you had the world and your body as canvases, why deal in squares of wallpaper?

“Natural vs Artificial”, “Man vs Nature” — those are real points of conversation. It’s important that we begin to see through that facade, to create new mythologies that don’t pose that kind of polarity, because it’s going to be a problem if people think it’s a real thing in the world.

How many articles are there now, about how computers and the internet are changing our brains, when actually we’ve been changing our brains for much longer than that — it’s only the most obvious, accelerated changes that are noticed, and the rest pass by as if they never happened. As if we were “natural” before computers, natural before the 1950s, before the 1800s? When? Where is the line? As if these artificial things are not a part of nature…

as if We Are not Nature Itself, Creating.

Stories like Avatar (or Fern Gully, if you like) have their points, and those are important. But we need new stories — stories that contain a different point of view: that of artifice as a manifestation of nature.

science111:

1. dip a spoon of gallium in a glass of hot water

2. make a bubble with smoke instead of air

3. dissolve the tablet in weightlessness

4. set fire to the  energy-saving lamp

5. push two identical clouds of smoke

6. create a vacuum in the empty tank

7. set fire to the smoke from the candles

8. overturn the glass with smoke

9. pour the hot solution in a plastic cup [x]

(via toomuchisneverenough)

We have entered a post-post-studio age, and find ourselves with a new studio model: the transdisciplinary. Artists and designers are now defined not by their discipline but by the fluidity with which their practices move between the fields of architecture, art, and design

They look like Pollocks…

But actually, these are two simulations of a whole cortical column, and 1000 pyramidal cells (a type of neuron) during a network simulation (blue cells are silent, red cells are firing), respectively, left—›right.

via EPFL, at Henry Markram’s Human Brain Project.

Kurtzweil AI:

a number of scientists have expressed serious reservations about Markram’s project.

Some say we don’t know enough about the brain to simulate it on a supercomputer. And even if we did, these critics ask, what would be the value of building such a complicated “virtual brain”? Some researchers say it is premature to invest money in a simulation while important principles of brain function remain to be discovered.

Haim Sompolinsky, a neuroscientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said: “The rhetoric is that in a decade they will be able to reverse-engineer the human brain in computers. This is fantasy. Nothing will come close to it in a decade.”

But those who say “it’s fantasy” and “never” have consistently been proven wrong. Although I agree with Sompolinsky, I do hope he will be, as well.

Meanwhile, despite all this, Itskov and the 2045 project…

Something greater?

BioShock: Infinite

Finished this title today. It was not what I expected — from the amazing previews, I’d gathered only that it’d be a fun Steampunk adventure. And it was that, in part…

But… well, if you’ve played BioShock games before (I hadn’t), you’re probably laughing at me now. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Mostly, the level of darkness was totally unexpected, although not unwelcome. In the end, it was so much more AWESOME than anything I thought it’d be.

The criticism of video games put forth most often, by those hopeful that the genre can mature but not yet convinced it has, is that games (especially popular games) — partly because they are games, foremost — lack substance: a story with morals and difficult questions, something to think about after you’ve finished shooting everything in sight. BioShock: Infinite has exactly that.

Possibly because I don’t game that often, I’m not yet numb to the level of intensity that built up in this one. It reminds me of T.S. Elliot’s lines:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

I’m sitting here with this feeling of mental overload. Similar to the kind felt after consuming more respected, traditional content: viewing a piercing art film, a heavy documentary, reading an enlightening-if-difficult book… or, thinking about quantum mechanics.

This last is an actual, primary theme in BS:I, alongside those of jarring racism, elitism, fundamentalism, bigotry, religious zealotry, violence and resulting questions of guilt and forgiveness, and forgive me if I’ve left any off the list but holy shit. Even this is a lot to take in over just a few hours, and I’ve never seen real issues like these addressed in a game (not including the indie realm), and this much in-your-face, loudly and apologetically, at that. It’s as if, for once, an account team somewhere didn’t care if a major company released something “politically incorrect” in a non-comedic, non-ironic way…

That’s too many ellipses already. I’m just shocked and impressed, let’s leave it at that.

zoom

Mars 2580: Buddhist Temple on Mars

Relative Perspective

Usually, my personal outlook stems either from the all-encompassing bottom-right of the top image, or from somewhere towards the bottom of the bottom image. (!) Meaning, all else is relative to those scales, in both size (obviously) and importance. This practice helps me live.

It’s nice to be human. It’s nice to have a cool brain that’s capable of noticing all of this. (Or, even just this much?) But unfortunately, our species’ culture is — extremely generally — one that encourages a mental scope ranging from something like a centimeter to a few kilometers. (Metaphorically, but maybe literally as well.) Anything outside of this in either direction is deemed irrelevant, or worse, pretentious.

I’ve been incredibly stressed and angryfor the past few weeks… and finally realized, it’s because I allowed something roughly the size of an A4 sheet of paper and with all the longevity of a fly to become — in my mind — as big as the universe.

It’s disgusting. It doesn’t matter. (Read: { I think you’re all fucking mad. }) “Our” priorities are stupid; it’s important to figure out how not to participate.

I’m aware of being idealistic, but it’s really annoying that selling people stuff, handling money, and providing non-enriching entertainment are all so massively rewarded… while searching for / contributing / creating / researching anything remotely transcendent is not only hard to do, but often puts one in a position of struggling to live.

Why did the Greeks seem to have so much more time and respect for the latter? Ha. Ha.

zoom

{ Better Explained }:

How do you draw an elephant?

• Pencil the structure using ovals, rectangles, and so on
• Ink the final result, taking the lines you want
• Erase the underlying pencil structure, revealing the elephant

…

Is tracing different from drawing? You bet. Tracing is mimicry — we don’t know why a line is there. We just start in one corner and work our way around. Sure, we might make a pretty elephant — but can we draw one with a different trunk? Standing on two hind legs? Probably not.

Math is similar: we “teach” by tracing a student through the steps of a proof. But there’s an underlying pencil structure that was in the mind’s eye of the proof’s author that we’re not seeing. We’re walking the student along the drawing (“Here is the head, here is the trunk, here is the leg”) without show the mindset that created the proof (“The head is an oval, connected to a larger oval for the body; the legs are cylinders, which we smooth out.”).

If we’re lucky, the student generalizes the steps and creates their own pencil structure.

…

Sometimes we create “nice-looking elephants” through trial and error. Later on, we realize there’s a common structure that can simplify future efforts. True learning is about discovering and exploring these structures, not simply generating the pretty elephants.

••••••

OS:

I love Better Explained. I wish they covered more topics, but I feel like I’ve been looking for this my whole life — the intuitive explanation.

Funny; it reminds me of another { 3rd grade story }: besides that it was a group project wherein we had to write something long-ish, the context is irrelevant. The two girls I was sitting with were editing what I’d written, and were trying their hardest to convince me that my paragraph was too long (or too short?) because “paragraphs are 5 sentences long”. Someone had taught them that, without explaining the point that a paragraph depends on how long it takes to convey a thought. A creative writer knows that a paragraph can be a single word or three pages, as necessary.

For the longest time, I inwardly face-palmed thinking about that. Who was to blame? A bad teacher, or students who couldn’t grasp subtleties and abstractions? But… how can I laugh at them now? Truly, my entire mathematical experience (up until recently) has been exactly this way. I’ve been tracing mathematical elephants.

[Credentials] can cause intellectual ossification.

To illustrate that point, Mead told the story of how Charles Townes, the inventor of the laser and maser, took his ideas to the leading quantum-mechanics nabobs at the time, Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg:

“They both laughed at him, and basically said, ‘Sonny, you just don’t seem to understand how quantum mechanics works.’ Well, history has shown that it wasn’t Charlie who didn’t know how quantum mechanics works, it was the pontifical experts in the field who didn’t know how it worked.”

zoom

acalc:

olena:

acalc:

How Netflix is turning viewers into puppets

Does the prospect of being a puppet make you uncomfortable? It does me. The article talks about the almost unimaginable amount of data Netflix collects and analyzes based on your activities for the purpose of capitalizing. Their House of Cards is an initial result of that ‘algorithmic focus group’. And the article hints at how this is becoming more and more prevalent across all of society. After reading this, it’s obvious that traditional TV fiction is done. It’s over. Time to go home. The future is the Internet, and it starts with Netflix.

But, all in all, it’s kind of depressing what this thick, data-driven approach portends. What good are movies, shows, video games, and other modern media if they’re increasingly created—directly or indirectly—from empirical observations of endless data? Where goes the potential of art? How do you transform as an individual by being constantly accommodated—even if it’s a niche accommodation—and not being challenged? In prior times, some of these things could be made with an appreciable amount of creative risk and freedom, and they were unexpected, spoke to something in the collective consciousness. But if the end game is to know the audience so thoroughly that you can creatively anticipate and accommodate their every whim and desire, the possibility of art ceases. If accommodation becomes the norm, people will lose the desire to seek out the experimental and adventurous things generated from minds incompatible with their catered kingdom.

That’s one aspect of the modern Internet that I have always kind of loathed: the physics at work that makes us the rulers of our own skull-sized kingdoms, to paraphrase David Foster Wallace. And to paraphrase another person, we continue to paradoxically spend our time together but alone.

Yes,

But Netflix is not a place for art, just as TV is not a place for art (was it ever?), just as any regular movie theater is not a place for art. We have to remember that.

This isn’t about the internet — there are other places online and “out there” to find real, creative work that has nothing to do with targeting, etc.

Corporations will always do what they do (until pretty soon when, you know, they can’t because we’re all fucked over and out of resources), but I don’t agree that “If accommodation becomes the norm, people will lose the desire to seek out the experimental and adventurous things …”.

Every day, someone out there tries to cater to me. How many times have I pressed the “No, this Ad is not relevant” button on Hulu? Countless. And Hulu will never understand that anything they throw at me, I will not find relevant, because I don’t give a shit about any of it.

That’s the point and role of art, and the artist. By nature the artist is a contrarian, by nature art defies accommodation.

But that’s the artist. The real problem is { teaching others the value of art }, and propagating the notion that they should go look for things that make them uncomfortable. Hasn’t that long been the problem, even prior to this “information age”?

Yes, accommodation is commonplace. I was trying to suggest more of a systemic accommodation in what is traditionally considered artistic mediums, something like an evolution that creeps up over time, a kind of sudden ubiquity—like cellphones or the Internet—that becomes part of the fabric of the everyday. There will be people who see it happening and resist it, but eventually it becomes the cultural status quo, and people in general lose the ability to introspect on what’s going on; and once the previous paradigm cedes to the past, it more than likely becomes at most an historical curiosity.

Netflix might not be a place for art in general, but that doesn’t preclude it from containing art. They still offer some of the greatest cinematic works known to the world. Also, when I wrote that, I had a TV show in mind that I would classify as art: Twin Peaks. Others can make arguments for other shows—I’m personally not a huge fan of the medium—but Twin Peaks, being borne significantly from the mind of the auteur David Lynch, has that certain magic that I’ve spoken about on numerous occasions.

As for teaching others the value of art, yes, I believe I agree in principle with that being the real problem. I just don’t know how much being exposed to the principles and potentials of art through anything approaching an academic lens actually carries over throughout any given individual’s life. I honestly don’t know if there’s a solution outside of a component of abstractly ‘feeling’ art in the world. And if that’s the only solution—that art applies to those who are somehow innately receptive to art—then I believe systemic accommodation has the ability, over time, to anesthetize that facility—if not outright undermining it.

But my ultimate point still remains: that systemic accommodation leads everyone into their separate, subjective ‘skull-sized kingdoms’. Art loses—completely—all objective measure (or any hope of reaching that) and only means something subjectively. It leads people deeper into their private universes, and I think there are social/cultural ramifications for that.

I see. I can’t disagree (nor wish to) with your main point. We already see so much of that through democratization — I feel like a broken record repeating this, but there’s truly a flattened plane when people in general begin to believe that next-to-nothing holds objective value. Everything is the same. But is it really? Not that this is black-and-white; it has its usefulness.

And when you say systemic accommodation, I can take it you mean on this large of a scale, where it’s increasingly difficult (for anyone not predisposed to looking for something else) to happen upon something new by accident.

As for teaching the value of art as a solution to spread receptivity of it, I agree again about the academic lens not being a good tool. I’ll use my own experience: I thought of physics as just another subject to “get through” through most of school. Stupidly enough, I only got interested in it after investigating pseudoscience. Through the “academic lens” (if this is what you mean) the sublimity, importance, Hell, grandeur of it all was entirely lost. Schools mostly don’t cater to passion as we’d like to think, but to a practical, productive work-force.

It has to be something else.

Maybe this something else will be a much-needed and long-awaited revolution for culture just as, say, Khan Academy was for education.

*PS:

Just one more thing;
Part of why you’re right about the spread of this type of accommodation is exactly at the root of that word.

On some level, I don’t know if anything will ever help this being the attitude of most people, especially if we don’t take care of other issues first.

And it isn’t because they’re lazy sheeple, but because so many, in this system, work too damned long and hard to want to go home and make themselves uncomfortable some more. A desire for uncomfortable experiences and ideas are likely a mark of someone privileged to have time for those things, or someone faced with those things in life so much that they become a main concern.

But I say that totally loosely. I don’t know what it says about kids in the suburbs, for example. I think a lot of that audience lives in a certain style of comfort that abhors anything “weird”, different, uncomfortable. They have time, money, and say that they’re bored so often. So why don’t they seek those things? A lack of exposure to them in the first place, a community that discourages them, etc…

And in the population who can handle it in the first place (have the stability to do so — time, money, quality of life), should they? Or is it some unseen necessity of cultural systems that things like art, philosophy, and high math and science should be left to the relatively few? After all, there’s study upon study of people with minds for those things also having a propensity for depression, etc.

I think I’ve digressed quite a bit; just something I wonder about sometimes.