v1.1 - Complexity, Art, Software

I had the opportunity when making this exhibition at Mona to work… on the first augmented reality piece that I’ve worked on. It’s kind of a layer that sits on top of almost all of the exhibition experience. So, the sculptures and the experiences in every room are enriched by this augmented reality layer. Not only is it like a kind of experiential thing but I’ve also addressed what it means to be walking with a device in your hand - …an i-device like an iPod - and also what that device does and what the hardware that augmented reality necessitates means for a viewers relationship to the museum and your experience of being in the museum

~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXXPj-iWVIM&t=31s

Here on this side of the room in the con second part of the exhibition products for formalized organizations. You get kind of a look into a couple of management strategies - agile being one of them and Holacracy (sic) being another - which enable this type of emergent space to exist within larger much more formalized organizations like the GCHQ or Zappos or even Apple.

~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEnu7ZhR3T4&t=48s

A gabled, autogenerated YouTube transcript:

What is the purpose of philosophy? Well, the model critical realists often draw upon is one that was given by the british empiricist and political philosopher John Locke and this is the notion of “philosophical underlabour”. Locke says “the commonwealth of learning is not at this time without master builders whose mighty designs and advancing the sciences will leave lasting monuments to the admiration of posterity”. He is particularly thinking of Newton and of course not everyone can be in Newton. So “it is ambition enough to be employed as an underlabourer in clearing the ground a little and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way of knowledge”. In other words, philosophy is not concerned with grand system-building master science foundationalism or first principles. It doesn’t contribute to knowledge of the world directly. Instead it works with special sciences and is tasked with clarifying concepts and removing impediments to knowledge. In other words it is about eliminating linguistic confusion - solving problems thrown up in the course of non-philosophical investigations. It is, in some respects, what Wittgenstein called “preventing language from going on holiday”.

Now, so far this isn’t too from from the positivist conception but critical realism takes it a step further. Philosophy is also more than this. The role of philosophical reflection is not only linguistic, it is also practical. In fact, I would suggest here a definition that under-laboring is concerned with articulating the conditions of possibility of practice - looking at the theory behind practice, presupposed by practice and employed within practice.

Now, what do I mean by this the phrase “conditions of possibility”. It is taken directly from Emanual Kant and his notion of “transcendental argumentation”. Now, in his first critique, Kant had one problem: to understand how empirical science is able to come to universal knowledge. This is the same problem that [that temple and popper] tried to take up as well. That, given the world is only presented in particular and individuals like particular events, particular social groups, particular people, Kant wanted to know how we move to universal knowledge like the kind articulated by Newton and the laws of physics. He did this through what he called “transcendental argumentation”. This is a logic which is not inductive or deductive but a kind of reverse ducted deductive argument which, instead of moving from premise to conclusion, moves from a conclusion to premise.

So, only the classic example for Kant (and I’m sorry it’s a little bit abstract but …): given that space and time are universal qualities we don’t experience directly, Kant decided they must be conditions of possibility of experience - they must be the categories found in the mind which arrange and structure our experience - they are the conditions of possibility for any knowledge that exists in the world. So critical realism takes this broad sort of form of logic and, instead of asking about asking it in the Kantian sort of sense, changes it and asks the question “what must the world be like for our thought and our practice to be possible and meaningful?”.

So transcendant argumentation, again, is concerned with the question what are the conditions of possibility for X where X is some significant central or pervasive feature of our experience or practice. Now, insofar as it’s concerned with asking this question, critical realism can, in fact, be understood as a form of [pragmas been] pragmatism which is concerned to articulate the conditions of possibility for our practices to be meaningful. What must the natural world be like for scientific experiment [and to take phases in] meaningful activity? What must the social world be like for our activity to be possible and meaningful? “What must social structures be like to make sense of our practices - or must human agency be like to make sense of our experience?”, Here critical realism is is profoundly influenced by Marxism and the question or the problem that Marx states that all social life is essentially practical or mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find a rational solution in human practice and the comprehension of this practice. Critical realism is very much in this tradition trying to understand human practice and trying to comprehend the conditions of possibility for that practice. In other words, we begin with practice and practices and activity and reflect upon and investigate the conditions of possibility which make sense of and allow us to comprehend our practice clarify in our language and during the process hence clearing the grounds…

https://youtu.be/U5TIyheQk7c?t=1126

…what I find fantastic about this is precisely the open endedness aspect of the project the fact that it is it is a cauldron of creativity the fact that the limits are really the limits of the imagination of the designers of neural nets and therefore it’s not going to be the kind of argument that can be settled by logic alone it has to be settled by getting your hands into reality interconnecting those units creating new designs training them testing them and see what they can do in other words gonna be a lot about know-how not knowing how to design new neural nets so know how that level of the body is now beginning to interact with the first technological objects that actually can learn know how that can learn from experience and from that interaction Hume will be recovered and Hume will be in fact validated now I tell my students only as you are a very strict conceptual artist who all that he or she wants to do is things with words if you are just about any other kind of artist a musician a choreographer a painter someone who deals with colors with sounds with with intensities you are much better off with a theory of perception a theory of experience as human because humans all about those intensities and even your subjectivity when when you are in the in the process of creating a new work of art and you feel you lose yourself in the work of art well that’s also very human because humans your subject your ego they did your personal you’re more or less stable personality is something that emerges through habit is a kind of crystallization in a world of sensations not only external sensations but internal sensations feelings of pride and humiliation feelings of hatred and love feelings of sadness and joy and you we are psyched the psychic agency is simply a crystallization in a field of perceptions that is not ours and the way you can tell that is when you go into a delirium cabin fever or even a fever of 105 degrees I mean that’s one of the things I love about this it’s just how easy it is to get rid of the subject you know this turn on the button the fever button a little bit 105 106 and you’re in a delirium and when you’re in a delirium you now are fuzzy you are you don’t I don’t know who I am anymore but your sensations are there only now they are forming a wild delirium there’s so many ways of triggering that state sensory isolation chambers even an excess of alcohol that it gives us a sense of how our sensations are not really ours we’re inhabiting we as a psychic entity we’re having a body that has its own life and the sensations and if both internal and external have a life of their own we tend to think that there are hours because be a habit and routine we have given given them a certain territoriality we have we have made it ours but then when we begin to dissolve via a variety of methods we begin to rediscover how the sensations have a life of their own and how as artists we may owe them something how us artists you may it may be not the right thing for us to do to try to break you know slave all those sensations to language to words and affirm that it is the words that give them sense and coherence but rather to give them their own autonomy their own independence even if we use them to our own benefit so to conclude this talk where as Hume did not have a paradigm that was that was robust enough throughout the 20th century to make it into a viable option for our and for thinkers and therefore the 20th century was mostly neo-kantian today towards the end of the 20th century the beginning of the 21st we finally have found that paradigm that doesn’t mean that language is going to become irrelevant language is clearly very important but it’s going to be caught down to size and we need to right now rethink the role of intensities visual auditory the smell intensities texture intensities in our lives and in our art

~ https://youtu.be/a1lIXpu_MgM?t=3471

So far we’ve been focusing on making the thing work. We were doing that developer thing - assuming that once the thing works people will flock to use it. but they’re not. BenkoBot uses code and Trello users like Trello because it isn’t code.

There’s that. But also, it just doesn’t have a personality. There’s no brand. I think we need to really turn up the “botness” of BenkoBot so that even if people don’t want to use it at least they know where it stands. You make a bot and it’s your bot.

The BenkoBot logo is good. I think I can do something with that maybe. Of maybe a “great robots of history” sort of thing. Anyway, I’m going to start by changing the /setup page to be all about setting up your bot.

Tim and I did this the other night when we first talked about the idea of the AR Pokemon Go type type thing for Contour556 in 2022:

• We started with the hard boundary “Contour556”. I drew it and then said, in a ritualised fashion. “Contour556. This is a hard boundary because… we’re either in or out.”
• I drew ”device capability” with a dotted line. I said “This is a fuzzy boundary because… there are many devices and capabilities are changing all the time”
• Tim said “available time”. I drew it as a dotted line and said “This is a fuzzy boundary because we don’t know how much time we will have”
• I drew “deadline” as a solid line and said “This is a hard boundary because it’s a hard deadline in 2022”
• I drew “Canberra” as a dotted line and said “This is a fuzzy boundary because the theme of the artwork has to be about Canberra (Tim said ‘Does it??’)… but it’s very broadly interpreted by most people”
• I drew “AR” and said “This is a fuzzy boundary because there are so many different ARs - location, image marker, SLAM etc.
• I drew “Pandemic” and said “This is a fuzzy boundary because we don’t know what it will be like in 2022 but we need to account for many possibilities”

We then went into the centre and I explained my idea for Pokemon Go at Contour556 - how everyone knows Pokemon Go and we serious AR artists try to ignore it. But we can play with it instead. When I mentioned creatures Tim immediately started thinking about the modelling involved in making good characters. That led to a new boundary:

• I drew a dotted line and said “Modelling effort is a fuzzy boundary because we could have different sorts of characters - from Toy Story to 2D or particle clouds

That led to a discussion about different characters we could make. We came up with some interesting characters that would be easy to model:

• 2D aliens that live on a wall
• Particle clouds
• Low polygon creatures
• Existing models

I turned the dotted line into a hard line for “modelling effort“ and said “This is a harder boundary now because we’ve narrowed it down.”

I had the idea that refining the idea might be a process of hardening up boundaries. First i put in stickies for the things and people inside the area of possibility created by the boundaries:

• People
• Creatures
• Instagram
• Buildings

We talked about it being on Instagram and I made the “device capability” a solid line and said “This is now a hard boundary because it’s whatever works on Instagram and nothing else”.

I added to the area of possibility:

• Scooters

We thought abut what other boundaries we could harden up:

• “Canberra” became a hard boundary because the creatures will be site-specific
• “AR” became a hard boundary because it’s now whatever works on Instagram

We started listing buildings and then added some to the area of possibility. We talked about the NSA being in charge of the land. I added a sticky for it and then we had to finish. I would have made that into a boundary if we hadn’t stopped.

When we talk about the phylum Chordata we’re talking about a style. Isn’t it vertebrates a kind of style? You can tell them apart immediately from the phylum Arthropoda which is insects. And insects in all the incredible variety of forms form a style.

And so what Deleuze would say is styles didn’t need us to come into being. It’s the other way around. Nature has styles and it is we humans that need to learn from that because we are part of it. We are made out of flesh and blood we are one of those styles. In order to assert our singularity, our uniqueness, our difference, it is important of course that we need to start considering all the different forms of difference - difference in variation difference, in intensity difference in in the kind of differential calculus that I just said - that exist in nature, that power nature, and try to use it.

A lot of times we use those things unconsciously. We are simply good artists that don’t know how to explain what we do. But we can. We can tell about intensities. We can tell whether a painting strikes us, or is powerful or, on the other hand, is subdued because it’s subdued on purpose. And you’re playing with intensity. It’s not necessarily using that vocabulary.

Now the last thing that Deleuze would want to do is impose a particular ideology on art because artists are the search process. They are the kind of probe head at the tip of the search and so Deleuze always kind of let them pass. Proust and Kafka are the creators. He followed them. Rather than say “oh well I’m better than Kafka and Proust” he quotes them as people who saw - who drove humanity in a particularly intense direction. He wrote a couple of books on cinema. He wrote about Francis Bacon and painting. He writes quite a bit of about music in a thousand plateaus with Felix Guattari. So for him artists are the… cutting edge of this process.

What he would want is that when artists begin to talk about their art that they would have a better vocabulary. Instead of deconstructing things when … the word “deconstruction” they don’t even know what it means… So what Deleuze would want to do is yes, do art, but the moment you start talking about your art don’t go hide behind those funky words. Use words that mean something because the last thing we want artists to be doing is giving us these pseudo explanations of their art cast it in the latest terminology”

https://youtu.be/50-d_J0hKz0?t=3867

Using BenkoBot, make an AR kanban board that has a two way interaction with a Trello board.

Maybe because I’ve been reading “Aramis, or the Love of Technology” by Latour.

I’ve aways had Pokemon Go hanging over me when I make AR(t). I feel like I’m going to be explaining what I’m doing to somebody and they’re going to say “oh, you mean like Pokemon Go?”. Suddenly this morning I thought “what if we extend the frame?”. The Field of AR contains Pokemon Go. Rather than just ignoring the elephant in the room, why not bring that in as a component and play with it?

k-lord — Yesterday at 6:18 AM
ok. we have a channel. i’m making art and you’re making music. let’s do it :slight_smile:
[1] “Civilian Applications” is a great name for us because we make art with military technology: the internet and GPS
[2] Contour 556 is a year and a bit away. Let’s get something really good ready to go 6 months early
Things we know that work:
[a] We have half-way good GPS on phones - at least the phones know where they are
[b] When they’re standing still, phones don’t know what direction they’re pointing half the time - but they do if you’re moving. The location services on the phone assume the phone is pointing in the direction of travel
[c] Pokemon Go
Constraints:
k-lord — Yesterday at 6:38 AM
[d] The tech, especially on iOS
i’m sick of lists :slight_smile: here’s an idea
we make Pokemon Go, basically, for Contour 556. it’s all focused on the places and buildings in the festival area, especially around the lake. maybe we partner with the electric scooter people. That’s partly because people need to be able to cover a lot of distance but also because if people are moving we get way better location and direction
in fact, we partner with everybody. make it a totally integrated Canberra thing
fabulous beasts inhabit the special buildings and places around the lake. it’s like The Monster That Ate Canberra except there are lots of monsters
people can redeem monster sightings at the businesses in that area - if you capture a monster and upload it you get a token for a free thing, etc
also, the monsters all have cool music
aquatic monsters in the lake
dreamtime monsters at some special places - partner up with a Ngunnawal org

Instead of stupid, cute pokemon we could have amazing, diverse creatures with lives and connections to the community. Instead of capturing them, we do something else - like pay tribute to them like at a Shinto shrine. Different groups could be involved in the design of their creature and it’s backstory.

I think maybe because we’re coders - and maybe because we’re essentially building a better version of ButlerBot - we were shying away from the whole “bot” thing. It occurred to me this week that the “setup” process should really be the “set up your bot”, or even “my bot”, process.

When BenkoBot runs, I always get a shock to see things attributed to me because it was my API key and token that authenticated against the Trello API. I know I will feel much better about it when I see things attributed to the “BenkoBot”.

”The BenkoBot”. It’s the bot that did it, not me officer. Why don’t you ask him about that Trello comment?

I think it’s because Adrian and I are using the same Trello board a lot. We’re looking out for each other’s comments. Once I made a bot that commented “Well done getting this one through to Done” and Adrian assumed it was my personal comment and responded. Kind of awkward. Awkward is not a selling point.

I plan to set a constraint for myself: I use vanilla JS with the bare minimum of libraries - like Preact or React.

One practical reason is that the space is in flux and there are competing proprietary libraries for web AR. Not all of them will survive. The lesson from ManifestAR is not to build your art on somebody else’s platform.

Another reason is that the makers of the various competing libraries and products are doing the same thing. It puts me in the same space as them.

Also, I want to feel the limits and possibilities of AR on the web very directly. I want to work very deeply with the technology, not be caught up in trying to do the next shiny thing with AR.

UPDATE: It turns out there are a lot of useful libraries for working with location. I probably need to refine this constraint:

• I can use services, like Firebase because that’s the web these days
• I can use NodeJS or other Javascript libraries created by other people, as long as they’re not dependent on a service.