Hello World

Shared Topographies

Cris Bevir has asked a question about shared topographies and my interest in Robot Stories

I've only just discovered this film and it looks fascinating - haven't seen it yet and don't know when it will come to a cinema near me, in the Midlands of England. I'm really looking forward to it.

I've been interested in robots and androids for a long time and will post more about that later. The first essay I ever published was about robots and teenage boys - but more of that anon.

Cris - can you tell us more about your interest in the film?

Arts and Crafts

Page 6

The New Media Movement

Digital society connects many areas - science, academia, commerce, arts, politics, entertainment, education - yet there is still no single banner which unites them all. We are however, united by our very connection – the internet itself. The 19th Century British Arts and Crafts Movement was inspired by Ruskin and Morris to look to Nature for its forms and philosophies. Today, many of us add to Nature the potential of digital technology, finding within that combination a potent force for enrichment and empowerment. I wonder, therefore, whether we too are part of a Movement? And so I tentatively offer this volume to the New Media Movement, which might exist, and to all of you who might therefore consider yourselves to be part of it.

The New Media Movement has its own arts and crafts too, as well as a great sense of humour! Jay Maynard's homemade Tron costume, for example, has been doing the rounds in the past few weeks and attracting some affectionate responses to his rather cookie homage to this excellent film. I reproduce his picture here in the hope that he won't mind since it is a popular image across the web at the moment! For a full account of the making of his costume, see his website.

Dreaming of SETI & NETI

Page 14

The language we have given our computers mirrors the language of slumber – hibernate, sleep, suspend. I’m surprised we don’t have command called ‘dream’ – after all, there is an equivalent, which is when you run a programme in the background. That must be the nearest a computer comes to dreaming. Or perhaps it’s dreaming when it's running a task like the Seti search for extra-terrestrial life. Most people only make use of a tiny percentage of their computers’ capacity, so applications like seti@home live in the spaces. While you sleep at night, your computer reads signals from deep space and looks for alien life forms. That sounds pretty much like dreaming to me.

Now your computer can dream of other machines too. Today's Wired News carries a piece about, not SETI, but NETI.

Neti@home is named after the University of California at Berkeley's SETI@home project, which uses volunteer computing power to search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

SETI distributes data collected from a high-powered radio telescope in Puerto Rico to millions of computers around the world, borrowing their processing power to analyze the data for potential evidence of extraterrestrial communications or activity.

"With NETI, we're searching for network intelligence -- intelligence about the way the Internet works so we can make it work better," said Simpson.

NETI to Examine Net's Strengths By Michelle Delio, Wired News | 02:00 AM Apr. 27, 2004 PT

The storage capacity of my skull

Page 18

It’s as if my knowledge is extensible. Before the internet, my head contained most of what I knew. The rest was stored in my bookshelves, photo albums, video tapes, and filing cabinets, but if I learned something in the traditional sense - a foreign language for example -the majority of the words were stored in my brain whilst I kept the rest in reserve in a dictionary. In day to day terms, I made an effort to remember peoples’ phone numbers. I knew the recipe for goulash. I had various travel routes memorised and stored away for easy access. And if some new piece of information came along, I just filed it away for future use and retrieved it when I needed it. Occasionally data would drop out of my head, never to be retained, and sometimes I remembered things I would really rather have forgotten, but the total amount of knowledge I could hold was limited by the storage capacity of my skull. What does that add up to? A couple of litres or so. OK, I had a couple of litres of data.

It seems it's even less than a litre. According to The Guardian:
"The number of things you can hold in your mind at once has been traced to one penny-sized part of the brain."
See Memory bottleneck limits intelligence Thursday April 22, 2004, The Guardian

Passwords

Page 169

What happens in that minute moment of passage between the flesh and the virtual? That border. That membrane. That slippage. That mantra – magic word – spell – password -

That password.

That word - mixture of upper and lower case, figures and numbers - which takes us through the moment of transition and breaches the borderland between flesh and imagination.

For many users the password is an opportunity to embed something private and dear to you in such a way that you have regular contact with it and no-one else need ever know about that thought or memory. Secret lovers past and present, deceased relatives, personal heroes – we encrypt their names into our private daily lives via anonymous and distant computer networks. From the heart, through the typing fingers, these magic words connect us with our most significant people and places.

And most of us have not just one password, but many. Bank customers, book-buyers, chat-room users, emailers - we all have multiple identities online.

An RSA Security survey found that maintaining online identities is becoming a burden for many people who, on average, use 20 sites that require them to register and then log on afterwards.
BBC Online
Tuesday, 20 April, 2004

Brain chips could help paralysed

Page 98

Scientists are to implant tiny computer chips in the brains of paralysed patients which could 'read their thoughts'.

US researchers from Cyberkinetics Inc are to be allowed to implant the chips underneath the skulls of patients.

The chips will map the neural activity which occurs when someone thinks about moving a limb.

Scientists will then translate those signals into computer code that could one day be fed into robotic limbs.

BBC News 17 April 2004

Read full story at the BBC news website.

Heat and the West Coast

Page 49

The West Coast of the US is the crucible of new ideas about virtuality and I wanted to be there. What began as a progressive technology has also become a progressive philosophy. I wanted to feel the heat of that thinking.

Several of my books have featured scenes or items that were invented at the time but later appeared to come into reality. In this case, the above paragraph was simply an exposition of my thinking about California. And yet in April 2004 I found myself signing up for a workshop at Esalen, my first, and of all the topics I might have chosen, I decided on Bronze Casting, simply because it was so far from my usual experience.

And here, without any planning or expectation, I found myself experiencing my first crucible. We built a firepit
and placed inside it a crucible filled with bronze, to be melted and poured into the casts we had made. Unexpectedly, I was working with a crucible, and as we sat around the fire together that night, high up on the cliffs in Big Sur, listening to the crackle of the burning wood and the boom of the Pacific waves below us, I certainly felt the heat.

Gypsum

Page 55

A week before I leave for Los Angeles I take a walk on the edge of the village where I live in the Midlands of England. I choose an ancient pack-road broad enough for two carts to comfortably pass, and fringed with a pot-pourri of hedging and trees, some of which are centuries old. Today is the first frosty day of autumn and the ground is hard underfoot, patches of mud encrusted with ice and spears of grass frosted by crystal. The bare foot-printed earth is also studded with fragments of silvery gypsum, each one glinting like a cheap jewel in the pallid autumn light.

From up here I gaze eastwards towards wooded hills tumbling gently away in a confusion of complicated greenery. This complexity is not accidental. It’s designed to hem the rough edges of a large and well-tended golf-course, and as I look more closely I can see swathes of smooth turf opening out beyond the young oaks and sycamores.

Just beside me, holes in a tangled hawthorn hedge reveal shapes moving in and out of view. Only segments. The hedge won’t allow entirety. One moment a tail, then a rump, then a head. Sometimes eyes looking directly at me. Also long gaps of nothing. There are light brown segments, and black segments. It is likely, but not certain, that they belong to different bodies. Gaps in the lower hedge allow more than the matted branches at head height. Occasionally a taller thinner figure – human – passes across the spaces in the distance.

Turn to the north, and my gaze is immediately tugged downwards to a flat glacial plain, every square metre seamed with newly-ploughed furrows at this time of the year, and the whole extent nibbled across by Fairham Brook, a meandering stream which from a distance is barely noticeable in the unfeatured landscape.

To the west, the village – a spread of post-war houses with greying roofs and white painted walls, each long garden lawned and trimmed with privet, and beyond them the older cottages coiled around the church spire like a snake in its nest. Just outside the village is the source of everyone’s pay-packet, catalyst for the building of the council estate once called Tin Town by the locals - a series of long single-storied sheds, powdered with white dust - the gypsum works.

The sky begins to fade and soon it will be dark. From up here I can just make out the eddying white dust along the margins of the road below, and the faint noise of heavy lorries entering and leaving the plant. There is a humming of machinery too, making a steady undertone to the rustling breeze and the goodnight calls of wood-pigeons. In the weakening light the pale gypsum glints up from the footpath and I stoop to harvest a lump from the soft mud. I rub off some powder with my finger-nail and blow the tiny glittering crystals out into the darkening air. Some stick to the skin of my palm and without thinking I lick them off. They scatter instantly on my tongue.

The Midlands village mentioned above is East Leake, on the Nottinghamshire/Leicestershire border. Borders, being not one thing or the other, or often both, have excellent potential for virtuality.

the kind of VR the brain produces all on its own

Page 43

In Walden, Thoreau describes how in his imagination he bought several farms, although in reality he never owned any at all. He explains how he worked so hard to imagine landscapes, buildings and harvests that he was able to fantasise entire sagas of negotiation, purchase and sale. Even without money or legal ownership of a piece of land he still ‘annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow’. In other words, his ability to simply savour a landscape enabled him to reap a valuable harvest – the sheer imagined experience of it. ‘I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few wild apples only. Why, the owner does not know it for many years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk.’ (1) If it existed in his brain, it was real.

Virtual Reality has always been a part of our experience. It is where we are when we think, when we meditate, when we imagine, when we remember. It is a place where we all have been and indeed where we will all end up. After all, what could be more virtual than the unvisited and yet fully imagined place we call Heaven? But let us define our terms. Maybe you’re thinking of people wearing gloves and goggles and navigating their way across an apparently empty room? Well, that’s not the kind of VR I’m talking about.

I’m talking about memory, imagination, hopes and inventions.

I’m talking about the kind of VR the brain produces all on its own.

(1) Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 76.

Inhabited space

Page 38

All really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home... the sheltered being gives perceptible limits to his shelter. He experiences the house in its reality and in its virtuality, by means of thought and dreams. (1)

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard wrote that ‘all really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home’. He described the interior spaces of the house – the attic, the cellar, the stairs – and the small spaces contained within it – drawers, chests and wardrobes; nooks and corners and cracks, writing ‘Our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word’. When the book was published in 1958, Bachelard was seventy-four years old. A year earlier, the Russian dog, Laika, had travelled on Sputnik 2 for seven days, and in 1961, a year before Bachelard died, Yuri Gagarin would make the first successful orbit of the Earth and return safely to the planet.

With Gagarin’s historic journey, our notions of space and the cosmos were changed for ever. Today space has grown even bigger because the coming of the internet has stretched it to mean the area covered by anything which can communicate with anything else, so that the most distant interstellar probe is as hooked into the web as the child in her classroom, and the geography they mutually inhabit is more related than we could ever have imagined.

Today we carry ‘our corner of the world’ with us wherever we go, and many of us have adapted to a life where we are seldom established permanently in one physical place. An email address has more permanence than the name of a street or building. So now we need a new book, The Poetics of the Network. Perhaps, indeed, this is that book.

The Poetics of the Network would use a different set of metaphors, in which nooks are exchanged for hubs; staircases for satellites, cellars for databases. We have an alternative mental geography now. The notion of an interconnectedness of all things has become an accepted conceptual framework for ecology, society, culture – even economics and politics. It seems that in our interconnected, technologised and information-rich world there is no longer such a need for ‘the house’ in its physical sense, since so much of that world now is miniature and portable. We are learning to be nomads again. The objects we own are foldable, replaceable or disposable. If they take up too much room, we can throw them away and buy exact replicas somewhere else. Some belongings don’t even have a material physicality – they are simply uploadable. We don’t need to store or carry them – the internet does it for us.

(1) Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958). 5.