Thesis

Research: Inquiry space + inspiration list

Inquiry Space Concept Map

Week 1 assignment from Kari Love. Map the inquiry space. Mess is welcome, the goal is more threads than I can follow, so I can abandon most of them and pick up the rest later.

The map

This started as the in-class exercise on paper, and then another mapping session in On Becoming on the same subject.

Reflections

A personally motivating theme for me is intelligence in the world, or intelligent objects. Looking back, I have this sort of grounding belief in occasionalism, wherein the movement of every particle is continually willed by God. I find this explanation convenient because it answers the question of where fundamental forces come from, and I also appreciate the ontological squeeze it places on extra-physical powers. If we have this occasionalist world and an OOO deity, we can expect infinite computational power from physical reality. A quote I read in Out of Control said that the only problem with the world as a computer is that it is running somebody else's program, and I think that's pretty accurate.

That is to say, the world could be understood as a program in that it executes according to consistent laws. Those laws are nonetheless sort of mystical because their ultimate source is potentially not, you know, some physical system, but something more grounded in desire. We can take this mystical approach to matter, which says that our understanding is grounded in something fundamentally unknowable. Then we can think about the system space, or the space of potential action within a system, by taking parts of the system as individual actors that have desires, with desire meaning preferred actions. Gravity might make a ball roll down a hill. This is its preferred action, but I'm analyzing actors in the system individually in order to understand the space of possible outcomes.

Because of this, we can make complicated assertions about the world through an understanding of specific patterns within it, even when those patterns are impossible to translate into computers. The global weather system is, for example, one of the most complicated things we can look at. We can only go like 10 days out. It's a very difficult system to analyze, but it's not difficult to understand in terms of broad trends, right? Like, we can say there's more heat in the ecosystem as a whole. That being said, it's very difficult to know if it's going to rain 30 days from now, if it's going to rain all day, or this type of thing. It's a complicated system, and the best way to understand it is to observe it.

As a design methodology, or a methodology for creating meaningful art, the goal is to open up spaces where these types of world-encoded occurrences can happen, along the lines of generative art. Because we're working generatively, we can say: look at the system as consistent, but the outcomes are so diverse. And that's a wonderful thing about the world in general.

And where I think they are flex upon us as people is that we are separated mentally by the same mystic force of distance and space and physicality from ourselves and others. The mere existence of a physical body to distinguish my right and left hand and feel the difference in space between them, and the distance between the mind and the heartbeat, or disjunction — to not even begin to mention the subconscious, or split brain, or anything else. And then we enter the space of bridging this distance between ourselves and other biological systems of similar complexity.

That any of this occurs to any level is a living miracle. Working with this inspiration as a design material or language for exploration through sculptural objects. Creating things which interlace spatial occurrences, which link place in this way through ideas such as telepresence, or by creating spatially adept intelligent actors, or by extending our senses into new spectrums, or by spatially regenerating the content of a volume of air or water or solid objects — these can be windows into the sacred mysticism of reality, through the same awe as an oceanic landscape or a waterfall or a sunrise, or that huge bright sky we used to see at night.

Similar works by artists I feel capture this are Border Tuner by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, and the Eduardo Kac installations where you could drive a robot around through different landscapes. I also hold in high regard the work on intelligence by Rodney Brooks, particularly in regard to subsumption architecture; Lacan's view of the mind as oriented to desire, extending desire beyond the mind; and some of the stuff Kevin Kelly talks about with "neo-biological" systems. I feel that work in this direction is particularly relevant in the present moment, with the ease and accessibility through which creations of artworks that required a dedicated technologist in the case of Kac — or an entire university department in the case of Stelarc — can now be made by a single actor working in this direction of thought. At the same time, a major accelerant in that work is the ease of access to frontier models, a type of non-spatialized intelligence whose impact on the 3D world is yet to be determined, already poised to change the way we act in regards to computation as a whole.

Question

What shape should my balloons be?

Inspiration Repository

Same week, same due date. Collect inspirations, with at least one that takes advantage of being in NYC.

Books → themes

These are books I have already read that bear on this inquiry. Each one links to the themes drawn from its tags.

Reading expansion

An expansion of the reading above: AI recommendations, and the journal articles.

Recommendations

Journal articles

NYC

My NYC inspiration was going to Amant in East Williamsburg and seeing the opening of Sentient Earth. It was surprising to see cybernetics mentioned when referring to the Earth as both the Gaia hypothesis and then also the work of Lovelock, and then tying that into a critique of that through climate change as the denial of Earth as a regulating system. I enjoyed seeing the new media art that was there, like Nina Canell's Mother of Dust, where these pearls were rolling on a large conveyor belt and there was a big moving thing, and they were getting brushed along and bouncing and getting caught. It was very generatively motion-heavy.

My favorite thesis from last year was BaiRay, by Bairui Su and Ray Wang.