Technobiophilia: The innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes as they appear in technology
derived from 'Biophilia': The innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes (Wilson, Edward O. Biophilia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. p23.)
The New Natural
Symposium Semiconductor, Prof. Sue Thomas and Squidsoup Saturday 25th May 10.30am-5pm
SVA, 4 John St, Stroud GL5 2HA
Installation
Friday 24th-Sunday 26th May 11am-4pm
Goods Shed, Stroud GL5 3AP
Modern technology and the natural world are often seen in
opposition, the former perceived as either destroying or at
least disconnecting us from the latter. So what of a new
relationship, a new approach towards the natural world that
reconnects us in ways only possible through the use of
technology? The New Natural will bring together three
people whose work explores different aspects of this
question. A day of presentations at 4 John Street, a film
installation in the Brunel Goods Shed, interwoven with
good food and finishing with an open discussion led by
Rob la Frenais of The Arts Catalyst.
The New Natural is presented by Heart of Wonder in collaboration with
SVA, and supported by Alias.
Tickets £12 including lunch and refreshments
£20 for weekend inclusive of evening events. Booking is essential as places are limited
01453 751440 or email office@sva.org.uk
The beautiful Next Nature website is packed with intriguing pictures, plus they publish a substantial book of essays and images and an iPad app. Lots to look at and think about in relation to nature and technology.
Hello World: travels in virtuality was first published in March 2004 by Raw Nerve Books. At that time it could only be produced in print and pdf formats but now, nine years later, it has entered its home territory of cyberspace.
The Hello World blog was launched in 2004 with the original publication of the book and was live through 2004-5. Today it's a memorable archive of some of the things we were talking about in those years. Start reading it here.
Hello World was converted to Kindle by Zak Mensah of Tribehut. An E-pub edition follows soon.
If you're not sure what biophilia is, this short video excerpt featuring Professor Stephen Kellert and others explains it succinctly. Good to see Google in there too. The full-length film is available for purchase. Biophilic Design
The Architecture of Life See also the film's website.
I've just discovered this audio of the Professorial Lecture I gave in April. Don't know when I'll get around to editing it into the images, so here are the slides again to look at as you listen to the talk.
Well, I know that Adam Curtis has a very cynical view of this poem, but I still enjoy it. Full text below.
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
I like to think (and the sooner the better!) of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky.
I like to think (right now, please!) of a cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics where deer stroll peacefully past computers as if they were flowers with spinning blossoms.
I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.
Almost forty years ago, geographer Yi-Fu Tuan used the concepts of ‘carpentered’ and ‘noncarpentered’ to distinguish between natural and built environments. He said “The carpentered world is replete with straight lines, angles and rectangular objects” whilst nature and the countryside “lack rectangularity”. He believes that these differences can have a powerful impact on the way we perceive and measure our environments. (Tuan, Y.-F. (1974). Topophilia. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. pp. 75-76)
I've been thinking about the fact that one of the problems of cyberspace as a biophilic space lies in its dependence upon rectangularity. We are squeezed into cyberspace through carpentered screens on hard-edged devices. However, Sharp’s Touch Wood SH-08C cellphone is an attempt to address that problem and last year they promoted it with this mesmerising video*. Sadly the phone is only available in Japan and in a limited edition. Intriguing though. Read more about it at Geek.com.
* Ironically, the machine featured in this video is actually highly-carpentered (!) but in a biophilic kind of way. See what you think.
Many thanks to everyone who came to my Professorial Lecture last night. We had good conversations afterwards, and there were some interesting comments on Twitter too - see #technobiophilia
I've uploaded the slides here, and audio will follow soon. I've added two more slides at the end with some links I used in the lecture plus a brief bibliography for those interested in finding out more about biophilia.
It's a chance to think about how we feel at home in cyberspace and will probably be more of a brainstorm than a straight presentation. #thehomeandtheworld
Henry David Thoreau's 1854 meditation on living beside Walden Pond, near the town of Concord, Massachusetts is regarded as a crucial element of American national identity. His plan was to live alone in a house he built himself, a mile away from any neighbour, and to earn his living by manual labour, so he retreated to the woods in 1845 and remained there for twenty-six months. Since the publication of Walden, its lyrical nature writing has been used in rallying cries against the incursions of technology. As a result, Thoreau has become something of a poster-boy for withdrawal from the technological life despite the fact that by the end of his experiment, according to historian Leo Marx, he seems to have come to the conclusion that the realization of the golden age “has nothing to do with the environment, with social institutions or material reality” and that therefore “the writer’s physical location is of no great moment” after all. [1]
So Thoreau's attitude to technology may have been far more ambivalent than many might imagine. In fact he might well have appreciated a new project under development at the University of Southern California where Tracy Fullerton and her team are working to bring Walden right into the computer. 150 years ago Thoreau wrote “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach”.[2] At USC they are creating a videogame which simulates his experiment by “allowing players to walk in his virtual footsteps, attend to the tasks of living a self-reliant existence, discover in the beauty of a virtual landscape the ideas and writings of this unique philosopher, and cultivate through the gameplay their own thoughts and responses to the concepts discovered there.” And all in a real-time 3D environment which replicates the geography of Walden Pond and the surrounding woods and where the designers aim to “reinforce the messages of Walden” by embodying the actual experiment in a game which encourages the player to exercise reflection and insight.
Ambitious but very exciting. I'm really looking forward to trying it out when it's ready.
A while ago I was invited to contribute to In the Flesh, a collection of essays about the body edited by Kathy Page and Lynne Van Luven. Each writer could choose their preferred limb, organ etc. I selected the pancreas, and I'm blogging about it here because it compared the virtual bodies we use in cyberspace with the invisible inner workings of our physical selves. The result was an essay called "And Inside, Silence" and it begins like this:
I spend a great deal of my time online, which means I sit down a lot while my body does nothing much at all but type, think, and shuffle around on an office chair. There was a time, when the World Wide Web was young, when I and quite a few others lived the life of the mind through the Internet and were so entranced by it that we dared to hope the brain would transcend the body. Through the power of virtuality and imagination we connected in the deepness of cyberspace. Then, years before the noise and colour of places such as Second Life, text-based virtual worlds such as LambdaMOO drew us into deep silence. On those screens there were no pictures. Words typed on a plain black-and-white screen represented your entire self. It was there that I forgot my body and learned to be virtual, where the most physical thing I ever did was put my hand against the glass at a moment when someone else was doing the same on the other side of the world, and our imaginations filled in the rest.
I was on a train yesterday morning so missed the debate on the BBC's Today programme regarding a new report written for the National Trust by Stephen Moss. His fellow Guardian writer Aleks Krotoski had criticised the report the same day, and so Today brought them together to debate the topic. I knew nothing about this until this morning when I saw a tweet from Matt Edgar referring the programme to my work on geeks going camping. In truth, I found myself agreeing with both of them.
I empathise with Aleks' irritation at what she seemed to see as the same old same old technophobia, and I agree when she writes
It is absolutely natural that the uncertainty that surrounds the behavioural transformations of our evolving relationship with screen-based media is confusing and fear-inducing. As with anything new, we are in a period of furious social scrutiny as we re-negotiate the boundaries of our relationship with the machine.
Her main complaint in this case is that the research behind Moss's report is not scientific enough. Although I've read some of Louv's writings I don't know enough about his work to agree or disagree on that.
The title of this blog and book has evolved over the years but now I have settled on Technobiophilia: nature and cyberspace. This means a new url too. The old one www.wildsurmise.com still works but www.technobiophilia.com can also be used too.
I now have a new date for my Professorial Lecture, postponed from last November. It will take place at 6pm on Thursday 26 April 2012. Tea and coffee are usually available from about 5.30, the lecture lasts an hour, and then refreshments are provided afterwards.
People who had booked for the previous date have, I think, already been re-invited. It's not showing on the DMU website yet but you can watch for it here or email them. The title and abstract are the same:
The Future of Cyberspace
The act of entering cyberspace was, along with the entering of outer space, one of the most profound experiences of the twentieth century. In 1969, humans landed first ‘on’ the moon (July), and then ‘in’ cyberspace (September) with the connection of the first two nodes of the internet. Today the mountains of the Moon remain neglected and unexplored, but cyberspace has evolved into a deeply familiar habitat whose geography has been shaped by those who built and used it. This lecture will explore the evolution of the landscape of cyberspace from its creation as an unpopulated wilderness through its exploration, colonisation, cultivation, settlement and growth, and offers some predictions for the future of this most exotic place.
After much thought, my editor Katie Gallof and I have this week finalised the title of this book. It will be called 'Technobiophilia: Nature and Cyberspace' and will be published by Bloomsbury Academic some time in 2012/13.
Sue Thomas Writer and Professor of New Media De Montfort University
For many years Sue Thomas has been inspired by this quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) “Is it a fact – or have I dreamt it – that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?”.
Her first novel, ‘Correspondence’, a story of AI, passion, and transformation, (“packed with thrilling ideas” – Entertainment Weekly), was short-listed for the 1992 Arthur C Clarke Award, and her most recent book is the 2004 cyberspace travelogue ‘Hello World: travels in virtuality’. “Her writings fuse the surfaces, textures, histories and interactions of our bodies and minds” (Robin Rimbaud). She is now working on ‘Nature and Cyberspace: Stories, Memes and Metaphors’, a study of the relationships between cyberspace and the natural world.
Sue has been fascinated by computers and the internet since the 1980s. In 1994 she founded the trAce Online Writing Community, a very early example of global social media. At De Montfort University she devised and directed Amplified Leicester, a city-wide experiment funded by NESTA, and the influential Transliteracy Research Group.
Sue Thomas http://www.suethomas.net/
Enjoy Your Cyberspace http://vimeo.com/28826780
Enjoy Your Cyberspace http://vimeo.com/28826780 See also http://vimeo.com/26959315
Next month I'll be in California to do further research on my book and give two talks. The first, on 'Nature and Cyberspace', is at the Technology, Knowledge and Society Conference at UCLA 16-18th January. The second is on 'Amplification and Biophilia in a Networked World' at the Institute for the Future, Palo Alto, on 24th January. It will be a special pleasure to go back to IFTF, where I gave a talk a few years ago. I'll also be doing some research during the trip, and very much hope to visit the new Kleinrock Internet History Center at UCLA, located in the room which hosted the very first ARPANET node.
The term ‘biophilia’ was coined by biologist Edward O Wilson, who believes that human beings constantly and often subconsciously seek connections with other living entities. He first conceived his hypothesis in 1961 during a field trip to Surinam, but it was twenty years before he finally published his thoughts in a book of the same name. He defines biophilia as 'the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes' [1] and sees evidence of the biophilic tendency everywhere, from childhood fantasy to repetitive patterns of culture across most or all societies. In his view, such examples are 'too consistent to be dismissed as the result of purely historical events working on a mental blank slate' and he even suggests that they may 'appear to be part of the programme of the brain' [2]. There have been numerous studies of the biophilic tendency, and research in hospitals, prisons, workplaces and schools has produced remarkable data to show that many human beings undergo transformative experiences not only from being outside in nature, but even from simply viewing it through windows and on screens.
In 2005 I set out to follow a hunch that cyberspace is permeated with the language of nature. Six years later my notebooks are groaning with proof that I was right, but until very recently I still couldn't explain why we do this. However, I now suspect that the biophilia hypothesis might hold the key. Furthermore, as my forthcoming book will show, cyberspace is as drenched in biophilia as any other human environment, and that leads me to tentatively propose a new term built on Wilson's original theory. I call it technobiophilia, 'the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes as they appear in technology'. It's a somewhat clunky word and perhaps rather too stylised for its own good. I may yet change my mind about using it, but for the moment I'm offering it up as a way of getting to grips with the phenomena I'm working hard to understand. And time is pressing - the manuscript is due very soon....
I'll be talking about this for the first time at the Institute for the Future, Palo Alto, in January 2012. More information to follow.
PS: Lately the term 'biophilia' has been popularised by Bjork's new album/app of that name, and indeed there are certainly strains of technobiophilia to be found there too.
My Professorial Lecture has been postponed. The date, 30th November, was set months ago but now it clashes with possible nationwide industrial action. I feel this creates too many conflicts and complications so would prefer to find a different date. We are looking for an alternative some time in Spring 2012, and meanwhile I'd like to thank everyone who signed up and hope very much you'll be able to make it on the alternative date. I really appreciate your interest in the talk, and will announce the new date as soon as it's decided.
Every professor is asked at some point to give a Professorial Lecture. I've been invited to present mine on the evening of 30th November 2011. I'm really looking forward to it and I'd like to extend a warm welcome to all friends and colleagues. Admission is free but you need to register via this page.
The Future of Cyberspace
The act of entering cyberspace was, along with the entering of outer space, one of the most profound experiences of the twentieth century. In 1969, humans landed first ‘on’ the moon (July), and then ‘in’ cyberspace (September) with the connection of the first two nodes of the internet. Today the mountains of the Moon remain neglected and unexplored, but cyberspace has evolved into a deeply familiar habitat whose geography has been shaped by those who built and used it. This lecture will explore the evolution of the landscape of cyberspace from its creation as an unpopulated wilderness through its exploration, colonisation, cultivation, settlement and growth, and offers some predictions for the future of this most exotic place.
I've come to this discovery rather late. It was first discussed in March 2011 when Steven Levy's new book In the Plex came out, but it's still worth a mention. I've written before about the importance of watery imagery in the internet industry and this is a great example.
Matt Rosoff explains in a post for Business Insider that Google is 'supernervous' about the threat from Facebook, to the point that 'Last year, Google engineer Urs Holzle -- who was one of Google's first ten employees -- sent around an urgent internal memo warning that Google would be crushed if it didn't figure out its social strategy.The team named their social project "Emerald Sea" after this painting of a wave knocking a ship over -- Google was the ship -- and then recreated that painting outside the elevators where they worked.'
Opinions please re important cyberspace storytellers! In his 2004 book The Digital Sublime, Vincent Mosco listed the important cyberspace storytellers, or 'bricoleurs', as Negroponte, Gates, Gore and Dyson. (Yes, it seems a rather dated list for 2004! Not to mention 100% USA and 75% male.)
But it leads me to ask: who would you say are the important cyberspace storytellers today? Who frames the experience of the internet in a way which makes sense and inspires you for the future?
In September I'm giving one of the keynotes at Ethicomp 2011 in Sheffield. I'm going to take this opportunity to talk about what will be the prologue chapter of my book - the watery internet. Here's the abstract:
“We plug into the data stream as casually as we plug into an electric socket” writes Chris Anderson. J.P. Rangaswami calls Twitter “zillions of tiny rivers connected yet apart” and David Terrar describes it as “a twisty canyon with a fast flowing river.” Thomas Vanderwal proclaims it to be like “a flood and a creek”. Indeed, people use the metaphor of a stream not just for applications like Twitter but also for larger flows of data. In 1995, however, the data stream was not seen as a rushing river but as an esoteric place for meditation. According to the Buddhist magazine Shambhala Sun, cyberspace is frequently
My talk at Virtual Futures 2.0/11 was about the 1995 Conference, my first VF, where I fell into the virtual space of LambdaMOO. But as I prepared my presentation and looked back at the crazy identity games people played there in the 1990s, current events in 2011 seemed to be running parallel with issues I haven’t given much thought to for quite a while. So when the Knowledge Centre at Warwick University asked me to write a short piece for their website as well as the talk, I put this together.
Update: Just remembered I said I'd post a link to some LambdaMOO resources. Here they are.
This June the redoubtable and energetic Luke Robert Mason has revived Virtual Futures, a series of ground-breaking conferences held at Warwick University in 1994, 1995 and 1996. I was invited to be a plenary speaker, which I was delighted to do since, like many others, my writing and research completely changed direction as a result of attending VF1995.
Abstract The text-based virtual world of LambdaMOO was set up in 1990 by Pavel Curtis, a software architect at Xerox PARC. It began as a technical experiment but soon became a social experiment preoccupied with questions of community management in an online society where privacy and freedom were considered equally paramount. Anonymity was fiercely protected, along with one’s right to take any form or identity – an apparent contradiction but just one part of the heady anthropological mix to be found there. And unlike the richly-featured graphic worlds like Second Life, LambdaMOO was confined to plain text, making it a digital heaven for anyone who enjoys spinning words to create new environments and personas. My own first encounter with LambdaMOO was at a workshop run by Australian cyberfeminist and performance artist Francesca da Rimini (aka Gashgirl) at Virtual Futures 1995. It inspired my cyber-travelogue ‘Hello World: Travels in Virtuality’ (Raw Nerve, 2004) and I’ve been returning there recently to collect landscapes for my forthcoming book ‘Nature and Cyberspace: Stories, Memes and Metaphors’. Visit it yourself by pasting this into your browser telnet://lambda.moo.mud.org:8888 and following the onscreen instructions. (Telnet is a special protocol – you may need to get help to enable it on your machine.)
I had some interesting responses to my talk 'Why do geeks go camping?' Jag Goraya told me about Geeks in the Peaks, a weekend geek camping event in the English Peak District. He wrote "We're fully subscribed this time round, but it usually happens twice a year (May/June and early September), doubling the opportunity for enjoying some geeky camping. :-)"
Lisa Barron wrote about it alongside Bill Thompson's talk in Alt Digital, and Claire Welsby of LIfe|Art|Us has a very enjoyable blog post with an iPad portrait of Howard Rheingold working in his garden. I followed the link to Flickr, which led to this movie of the process.
I really enjoyed speaking at FutureEverything in Manchester last week and, indeed, met quite a few UK geeks who go camping :) Thanks very much to Imran Ali, who invited me, and to Drew Hemment, the magician who has made this impressive event happen annually for 16 years in a row.
I believe there will be a filmed interview available soon but for now here are links to an audio interview and a pdf of my slides.
This summer I'm doing two future things - FutureEverything in Manchester, which I guess is mostly about the present, and Virtual Futures in Warwick, which is mostly about the past. Not a futurefuture conference yet then!
Anyway, Virtual Futures will be a great opportunity to revisit the most inspiring conferences I went to in the 1990s. My talk 'I fell into LambdaMOO at Virtual Futures' will reflect that and I'm really looking forward to reminiscing.
Doug Engelbart and Tim O’Reilly by way of gunny sacks and mattress vine
Google OpenSocial with American naturalist John Muir and President Roosevelt
Network bandwidth with the Atlantic Ocean
Twitter with zillions of tiny rivers
and Howard Rheingold with all kinds of trees
At the FutureEverything conference visionary speakers explore the interface between technology, society and culture. According to The Guardian, the entire FutureEverything Festival is 'crammed with geek cool'. It runs from 11-14 May 2011. Find out more.
"The city is filled with an invisible landscape of networks that is becoming an interwoven part of daily life." So say YOUrban about their wonderful project Light Painting Wifi which paints wifi trails with light accompanied by haunting music. I've always been very conscious of the gauzy soup of wifi in which I move around my house, around the city, even out in the fields. This project makes wifi visible in a very beautiful way and the video below is just one of several which illustrate it.
New media academic David Gauntlett created these two Lego gardens to illustrate the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. David recently gave a talk for us and showed this slide, which I was keen to look at more closely.
The unfortunate Web 1.0 gardeners are separated by high fences, whereas in the Web 2.0 garden everyone collaborates and shares :)
This image is Figure 1 in his new book Making is Connecting, which is published on 4 March 2011. A must-read for web-gardeners everywhere. I'm wondering, though, what a Web 3.0 garden might be like...
Sharing this excerpt and image from Martin Dodge's now defunct Mappa Mundi website, full of fascinating articles about technology, history, and the future of cyberspace.
Exploring a visualization of the Internet by Young Hyun of CAIDA (by Martin Dodge)
The Internet is often likened to an organic entity and this analogy seems particularly appropriate in the light of some striking new visualizations of the complex mesh of Internet pathways. The images are results of a new graph visualization tool, code-named Walrus, being developed by researcher, Young Hyun, at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) [1]. Although Walrus is still in early days of development, I think these preliminary results are some of the most intriguing and evocative images of the Internet's structure that we have seen in last year or two.
A few years back I spent an enjoyable afternoon at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and I particularly remember a stunning exhibit of jellyfish, which were illuminated with UV light to show their incredibly delicate organic structures, gently pulsing in tanks of inky black water. Jellyfish are some of the strangest, alien, and yet most beautiful, living creatures [2]. Having looked at the Walrus images I began to wonder, perhaps the backbone networks of the Internet look like jellyfish?Read the rest
As this book develops it's becoming clear that it needs a slightly different name, one which makes the content more obvious to prospective readers. The Wild Surmise was originally the title, then it became the subtitle. But actually a better title and subtitle would be Nature and Cyberspace: stories, memes and metaphors. So I've changed the name of this blog too.
"Scientists and writers love to compare brains to whatever the cool new technology is. Your brain is a steam engine! Your brain is a telephone! A calculator! A computer! And now, in 2011? Your brain is like Facebook, of course."
I'm working on the Flora and Fauna chapter at the moment so thought I'd share this image of what is claimed to be the first ever computer bug, found by a technician working for the legendary computer scientist Rear Admiral Grace Hopper in 1947.
The First "Computer Bug"
Moth found trapped between points at Relay # 70, Panel F, of the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator while it was being tested at Harvard University, 9 September 1947. The operators affixed the moth to the computer log, with the entry: "First actual case of bug being found". They put out the word that they had "debugged" the machine, thus introducing the term "debugging a computer program".
In 1988, the log, with the moth still taped by the entry, was in the Naval Surface Warfare Center Computer Museum at Dahlgren, Virginia.
Courtesy of the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren, VA., 1988.
I don't usually much like Ronnie Corbett's endless punning, but had to laugh at this very clever skit, especially since, coincidentally, I'm writing a chapter about cyberspace flora and fauna this week!
This great image, credited to Cobraboy, was created in 1998. It imagines a glowing electronic Silicon Valley streaming all the way to the Pacific Ocean. For those who have never visited Silicon Valley, you need to know that the geography is nothing like this and in fact the Valley is separated from the Pacific by a string of mountain ranges. Presumably the artist imagined some kind of magical smoothing by the power of technology.
I came across it at Siliconia, edited by Keith Dawson. Siliconia is "the definitive collection of Siliconia on the Web. Siliconia are appropriations of names beginning with "Silicon" by areas outside Silicon Valley. A Siliconium can be promoted by local boosters or it can be assigned to an area in a press account. An ideal Siliconium will capture something unique about the regional character and when first encountered will bring a fleeting smile." Over a decade old now but still worth checking out.
As a small boy growing up in the Pacific Northwest in the 1930s, Douglas Engelbart loved to play by the creek near his home. He would draw threads from old gunny sacks, re-twist them in multiple strands, then knot together the resulting rope into a swing to carry him back and forth across the running water below.
Thirty years later when he invented the hyperlink, a twist of code swinging data from one point to another, his intention remained much the same. The hyperlink, he says, is all about addressability – “being able to find any given object in another document and just go there."
Session Title: Networks as Places in the History of Computing
Paper: Shaping the Landscapes of Cyberspace: West Coast Metaphors
Topic: This paper discusses the contribution of nature metaphors drawn from the West Coast / Pacific North West to the computer technology and the culture surrounding it. It focuses on the experience of two key individuals: Douglas Engelbart, inventor of many revolutionary technologies including the hyperlink and the mouse, and native of the Pacific Northwest, and Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media and initiator of the concept of Web 2.0. O’Reilly emigrated from Ireland to San Francisco as a child and his technology discourse is permeated with metaphors of the Northern California landscape.
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