Author: cgerrish

Unemployed philosopher

Feeding on a Collection of Channels (57 Channels and Nothin’ On)

Published December 14, 2009 by cgerrish

It’s slipping into time out of mind, that knob with 13 positions that lined up with the VHF broadcast television channels. The first time I really understood it, there was only signal available at four of the dial positions. The other channels broadcast a static pattern that was called ‘snow.’ One had the sense that there could be signal coming through these channels and through the extended set of numbers available through the UHF dial as well. The reality was the vast majority of the channels provided only snow. In Sweden, Denmark and Hungary snow is called ‘the war of the ants.’

The channel is a very powerful metaphor. When cable-based replaced over-the-air broadcast as a means of delivering video signal to a television the number of channels carrying signal exploded. The increase in the number of channels fundamentally changed the distribution of programming. Where in the past, three or four channels bore the responsibility for the whole range of human endeavor from news and public affairs to sports, to comedy and drama— now each of these domains could have their own channel. And so we see a sports channel, a news channel, a cooking channel, a movie channel, a comedy channel, etc.

One effect of this expansion mirrors that of professional sports leagues. When a league goes from 12 teams to 24 teams, the talent pool is diluted. Now imagine the quality of play if Major League Baseball were to expand to 500 teams. On the one hand, we might talk about the economics of abundance and how in this new democratized environment, anyone can have a professional baseball team. But there would be a fundamental shift in how we valued viewing baseball games and the importance of baseball in general.

Baseball has a method of dealing with this problem. The teams and players are assigned to leagues, and the leagues roughly approximate levels of talent. League size is collared by the relationship between the availability of talent and the quality of the on-field product. There’s the major leagues, triple A, double A and single A. And then there are the various international leagues. Talent rises within a league until it moves to the next level. Vaudeville worked in the same way, there are many interconnected networks that have this kind of relationship. Economies of talent form within these pools, when talent reaches a certain level it is pulled up to the next level.

The proliferation of cable television channels has changed the value of a channel. When there are 500 channels to choose from, the channel itself ceases to be important. Even with 500 channels, it’s often the case that there’s nothing on. In the early days of cable televsion, 57 channels seemed like a huge number— this may have been the first time that we noticed that even with 57 distinct channels, there was rarely anything worth watching. René Giesbertz takes inspiration from Bruce Springsteen’s song ’57 Channels and Nothin’ On’ to explore what the experience of layering the sound of 57 television channels one on top of the other.

As cable television begins to migrate into the Network, the channel begins to merge into the feed. We move from having too many cable channels to an infinite number of data feeds. The dial is expanded to an infinite number of positions and the cost of broadcasting on one of these channels is minimal. The breakdown into finer and finer categories of broadcasting continues. Bathroom scales broadcast weighing events by user, shoes collect and broadcast running data, Twitter captures and broadcasts a whole range of miscellany. When the cost goes low enough, there’s no reason that everything that can emit state and event data shouldn’t be equipped to broadcast via a unique feed.

Just as the channel is meaningless when there are 500 of them, feeds are meaningless when there’s an infinite number of them. Aggregating data at the feed level doesn’t amount to much in an abundant feed economy. It’s the equivalent of aggregating cable television at the channel level. We don’t watch channels or read feeds, we’re interested in specific items. We surf from item to item, looking for signals along the way to tell us what’s important, what’s valuable. The channel, or feed, encasing the item in a sequence is a low-value clue in a rich information environment. The dial is no longer an adequate navigation interface where we have instant, direct random access to each and every item/program.

While the new metaphor hasn’t come completely into focus yet, the real-time web begins to point the way. There are two primary modes of interaction with items: now and later. We either interact now in real-time, or we defer until a later real-time. The third mode is elimination of an item from the consideration set. Rather than endlessly switching channels, we need an environment rich with signals and pointers to tell us whether or not something is going on. And perhaps even more important, we need to be able to tell when there’s nothing happening. Whether there are 4 channels, 57 channels, 500 channels or an infinite number of channels— it’s still quite possible that, in this real-time moment, there’s nothin’ on.

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Intentionally Unintentional, Exactly Inexact, Clearly Ambiguous

Published December 11, 2009 by cgerrish

intention_spiral

This train of thought attempts to wrestle with how we arrive at precision with a mode of expression that is inherently imprecise. And what precision could possibly mean in this context.

When we work with coding languages, our view of human language and interaction can become skewed. We sometimes believe that the qualities of a constructed language can be transferred to, and enforced within, an organic language. At the point where social interaction and computing models touch, languages of different kinds meet and intermingle to form unexpected combinations. Can we use language in the manner of Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty? And when we try to use it in this way, what happens?

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,'” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t – till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!'”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,'” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again.
“They’ve a temper, some of them – particularly verbs, they’re the proudest – adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs – however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”

As we read and write into the Network, we often look at how this activity leads to the fulfillment of our needs, wants and desires. The gestures we make in this direction are scraped up, processed through our identity and fed back to us around the edges of our viewport. The person is defined by the role of the consumer, life is limited to the transactions that will cause the state of the world to be re-organized such that it quenches our desires.

We can imagine there might be an intention economy, some way for us to write a requirements document for whatever it is that we want. This document would then be published to the Network and vendors would surface at exactly the right moment with exactly the right product or service. The primary benefit seems to be that we wouldn’t get sales offers that are completely inappropriate. Theoretically, we would see a lot less advertising, and the ads we do see should be a good match for our intentions. However advertising is only minimally about making the offer, it’s primarily about the production of desire. In this prospective scenario of intentions, the roles of salesmanship (the power to close the sale) and marketing (the power to create desire in the consumer) only change slightly.

spiral-time

This idea of unequivocally expressing an intention assumes a great deal of exactitude. When do we exactly that we arrive at our true intention? Is it right away, or is there a journey to get there? When we express our intention the first time, how close are we to the mark? Do we trace the path of a spiral moving round and round toward the center of the target? Is there a static version of our intentions (our desires) that lives outside of time and is awaiting a perfect invocation through language? Or are both language and desire shifting and fluid within the dynamics of the flow of time? Perhaps it’s more like learning to dance to the music of time.

As I visited the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco to see the Emerald Cities exhibition, it occurred to me that the Jakata Tales depicted in so much of the art of Siam and Burma got at the same question. These tales depict the previous lives of the Buddha—his lives prior to being born for the last time to become the Buddha.

Bhutanese_painted_thanka

The Buddha became the Buddha after iterating through hundreds of lives. Perfection doesn’t come with a single try, nor is it the meticulous re-enactment of a pre-existing template. Can we expect to easily toss off perfect expressions of our desire? Are there unequivocal formulas we can deploy to place a standing order to fill the holes we perceive in our lives?

From a commercial perspective, advertising exists to align our desires with the set of products and services that have already been manufactured and are ready for sale. Dreams and desires for the most part are pre-fabricated and ready for occupancy. Industrial modes of production flatten desire into the kinds of shapes that can roll off an assembly line. When we advocate changing the polarity from what the vendors want to what we want, we find ourselves in the position of customers for the 1909 Model T— we can have the car painted any color we like, as long as it’s black.

How is it that when I use a word, it doesn’t mean exactly what I intend it to— neither more nor less? Where does the extra meaning come from? It’s as though when I deploy words out into the world, they’re only outlines that are waiting to be colored in by the listener. Meaning emerges through the overlapping follow clouds of a series of directed social graphs, as the words travel from node to node, their context, the world of their context changes. The set of possible connections expands and contracts, new avenues flash into view and fade away as the words travel on. It’s like following the stories of the characters of a road movie instead of those of the towns they pass through.

Denise Levertov wrote a poem about the activity of writing contrasted with the activity of reading a poem. Imagine these two moments of a poem as it travels through the world, connecting with the poet from the inside out and the outside in:

Writer and Reader

When a poem has come to me,
almost complete as it makes its way
into daylight, out through arm, hand, pen
onto page; or needing
draft after draft, the increments
of change toward itself, what’s missing
brought to it, grafted
into it, trammels of excess
peeled away till it can breathe
and leave me—

then I feel awe at being
chosen for the task
again; and delight, and the strange and familiar
sense of destiny.

But when I read or hear
a perfect poem, brought into being
by someone else, someone perhaps
I’ve never heard of before—a poem
brings me pristine visions, music
beyond what I thought I could hear,
a stirring, a leaping
of new anguish, of new hope, a poem
trembling with its own
vital power—

then I’m caught up beyond
that isolate awe, that narrow delight,
into what singers must feel in a great choir,
each with humility and zest partaking
of harmonies they combine to make,
waves and ripples of music’s ocean
who hush to listen when the aria
arches above them in halcyon stillness.

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Phone Gender: It’s Aphrodite In A Mini-Skirt

Published December 1, 2009 by cgerrish

AphroditePan

Driving across town the other day, I heard a Droid phone ad on the radio. The ad compared Droid’s capabilities to that of a relentless robot that accomplished tasks with power, speed and an implied ruthless inhuman amorality. And then there was a line that revealed a little more than was probably intended. Although in this day and age, it seems impossible that an unconscious thought could slip through in an advertisement. The radio ad states that the Droid isn’t:

Aphrodite in a miniskirt

For those of you keeping score at home, in Greek mythology, Aphrodite is the Goddess of love, beauty and sexual rapture. The phrase in the commercial is obviously referencing Apple’s iPhone. It appears that the gender of the iPhone is decidedly female.

In Greek mythology, Aphrodite is the goddess of love, beauty and sexual rapture. According to Hesiod, she was born when Uranus (the father of the gods) was castrated by his son Cronus. Cronus threw the severed genitals into the ocean which began to churn and foam about them. From the aphros (“sea foam”) arose Aphrodite, and the sea carried her to either Cyprus or Cythera. Hence she is often referred to as Kypris and Cytherea. Homer calls her a daughter of Zeus and Dione.

After her birth, Zeus was afraid that the gods would fight over Aphrodite’s hand in marriage so he married her off to the smith god Hephaestus, the steadiest of the gods. He could hardly believe his good luck and used all his skills to make the most lavish jewels for her. He made her a girdle of finely wrought gold and wove magic into the filigree work. That was not very wise of him, for when she wore her magic girdle no one could resist her, and she was all too irresistible already. She loved gaiety and glamour and was not at all pleased at being the wife of sooty, hard-working Hephaestus.

Apparently, compared to the Droid, the iPhone could be considered pretty, sexy even, but not very serious or useful. The iPhone is merely a decorative female. In the myth the Droid might be compared to Hephaestus, the husband selected for Aphrodite by Zeus. Although Hephaestus had emotions, and the Droid, as a robot, lacks them. A cursory glance at the communications sheath surrounding the Droid pegs it squarely as a teenage boy infatuated with science fiction. Due to his inexperience with the female of the species, Droid manufactures a fantasy that assigns the female a particular role within the science fiction narrative it inhabits.

In a follow up commercial, the iPhone is described as a:

Tiara-wearing, digitally clueless, beauty pageant queen

At this point, it’s fairly clear that Droid doesn’t have a date to the school prom and feels contempt for the social set. Droid will show the world that geeks are cool, that math and science rule. That being popular shouldn’t be based on how you look, how many friends you have or your sense of style— but rather on how many mechanical pencils you can fit into your pocket protector.

iphone_beautypagent

iphone_princess

Now, take a look at Google and Apple and think about what this narrative says about the respective companies. Apple has spent a long time developing its corporate messaging. Google has never had to. The Droid ads are an interesting view into the unconscious wishes of the Google corporation. In an age where becoming an adult is optional, Google could embrace this awkward teenage geeky science fiction persona for a good long time.

Nutty_Professor01

But deep down, the Google Droid is using all its powers to search for that potion that will turn the Nutty Professor into Buddy Love. And then thanks to science (fiction), that mini-skirt wearing Aphrodite beauty queen will find him irresistible.

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Richard Foreman: The Presentation of Real Time

Published November 29, 2009 by cgerrish

MARIE: Oh, Idiot Savant— why stuff that provocative dental instrument into your mouth—impeding all possible “human speech”? (He takes it out. Pause)—Thank God, you’ve removed it.

IDIOT SAVANT: As a result, dear lady—am I no longer capable of saving us from magic words?

MARIE: But they occur very infrequently.

IDIOT SAVANT: Are we under attack, Madame?

MARIE: What makes chosen words— magic?

IDIOT SAVANT: Who among us is prepared for an explanation?

MARIE: (Pause, thinks) Me?

IDIOT SAVANT: Me?

It always pains me to miss any production by Richard Foreman. Unfortunately, this happens all too often as I am based in San Francisco, and he’s based in New York City. Whenever I plan to be in New York, one of the first things I do is check whether Foreman has something going on.

I orginally learned about Foreman’s work through the pages of a journal edited by Michael Kirby called The Drama Review. I still occasionally return to the December 1975 issue on New Performance & Manifestos which contains Foreman’s Third Manifesto for the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. It’s taken intensive reading and re-reading over many years to finally feel as though I can stand under the meaning of the manifesto.

Richard Foreman’s latest, and perhaps last, work for the theater is currently running at The Public Theater through December 20th and is called “Idiot Savant.” I’ve only experienced this work through the text of periodicals that have chosen to cover the event. This morning I finally got around to reading the New Yorker’s coverage. When the mainstream press writes about Foreman they have to budget at least half of the designated column inches to explain who Foreman is, what he does, and why it’s important and kind of entertaining. Without the establishment of a makeshift frame, a preface to the words describing the performance, the text that describes the performance would simply appear to be a recitation of a random flow of inner states and thoughts that occurred simultaneously with the performance of Foreman’s work.

Hilton Als, in his preface to his published thoughts on “Idiot Savant” quotes Foreman’s introduction to his 1989 play “Lava.”

“There are writers who despair that a gap exists between the self and the words that come, but for me that gap is the field of all creativity— it’s an ecstatic field rather than a field of despair…It’s the unfathomable from which every pours forth.”

The writer indemnifies himself with the construction of a frame within which to view and share the performance. The words of his text will need to cross a large gap, and in the end will not be a true representation of the events that unfolded on the stage on that particular night. The difficulty in trying to represent Foreman’s work is that Foreman’s performances don’t represent anything. They are the thing itself. There is no third thing about which both the performance and the writing about the performance can refer.

Foreman explains his approach in his Third Manifesto:

Most theatre, on the other hand, is dedicated to creating an “experience.” Sometimes that experience is thought of as an avenue to understanding. (For instance, an experience in a politically oriented play, which is designed to help one “understand” why workers do such and such, and the managers do such and such, etc.)

But an “experiencing” does not lead to the radical “understanding” I am concerned with. Here’s why. Experience of any sort is “recognizing.” I would not deny that anything called “art” has to end up in the thing called “spectator” as some kind of experience. But there is a difference between this last fact and the always misguided attempt to make the art experience be isomorphic with an OTHER experience-event.

We experience what we recognize—what we know. Even if the experience is the experience of “not-knowing” or “being confused” or anything else to which we can give a name. The task of art is to serve understanding… by trying to create a field which is isomorphic with what stands-under experience— which is not experience itself.

Now, what stands-under experience cannot be experienced, experience is not the mode by which we can know it.

What stands-under experience are the laws (processes) of perception and other laws-of-configuration of the universe.

My task is to make work, the structure of which is isomorphic with those laws. Then I will be standing-under experience.

Foreman’s work attempts to be present in the real-time moment. The gestures don’t refer to some other fictional reality, they are gestures that are happening right now. And to create something that can genuinely be perceived as new, the performance charts a course outside of the grooves of our comfortable, traditional, cultural narratives. Returning again to the Third Manifesto, Foreman contemplates the implications of physicist Paul Dirac’s work as it relates to the creation of performance works:

For instance: Dirac, Paul. His 1931 theory— (for me, the most useful MANTRA of our time). In which he postulates—

Space isn’t empty. It’s filled with a bottomless sea of electrons with negative mass (& negative energy). All available locations in space, filled with minus energy electrons, not interaction, no manifestation of their existence!

On occasion, a high-energy cosmic ray hits one of these “ghost” electrons and imparts its energy to it. So the ghost electron is then bumped out of the sea of non-existence and becomes a normal electron with positive energy and mass.

But that leaves a “hole” in the sea where it had been. The hole is a negation of negative mass, so is positive mass (also positive change). This hole (DIRAC predicts in ’31) would be a new kind of particle, having mass equal to and charge opposite to a normal electron (which is +mass and -charged.) An anti-electron.

But (he predicts) the anti-electron will be very short lived because a normal electron will soon be attracted to the “hole,” fall into it, and the two oppositionally charged electrons will immediately annihilate each other.

Most of the writing about Foreman’s work notes that the “subject” of the work hasn’t changed over the years, it’s always “about” the same thing. Of course, this is because it isn’t “about” anything, it “is” that thing itself— and since it isn’t a story, it’s not recognizable as one.

The pattern of creation described by Dirac describes both the activity and the subject of Foreman’s work. In Chapter 16 of Foreman’s text The Amateur Genius he writes:

The Amateur Genius was on a street where the brick surface of the wall confronting him did sparkle, desertd as the street was on the Sunday that it was; and The Amateur Genius tried to think about the brain roots that twisted into a very real antispace, spaced into the careful click that widened as idea on idea perfromed mutual erasure so that the writing The Amateur Genius did (and upon his very brain The Amateur Genius did write).

“—Write not the ideas,” spoke The Amateur Genius. “The ideas perform mutual erasure.”

“Write rather the brain-stem rush. So when that is written nothing is written. Or rather, the writing speaks so the weakened eye speaks a kind of internal stress and strain out of which pop the grapefruits of, dare I say it, a second world, a third world— (there are grapefruits that do thinking as well as other sweetness).”

Foreman toils endlessly to get to the present moment, the being of the act of creation, not a representation or a narrative about a thing, but the thing itself. The theatrical performance provides a rare opportunity to experiment with focused attention and the real-time moment. The work done by Foreman, Schechner, LeCompte, Breuer, Growtoski and others on the theory and practice of presentational performance provides a rich ground for understanding our newly emergent networked media environment.

When Hilton Als attempts to write about a Richard Foreman performance, the difficulty of his task mirrors the difficulty traditional journalism faces with the real-time network. We’re used to media reports that represent a series of events. The quality of the report is based on the degree to which the text is isomorphic with the event. With the speed-up to real-time and the connectivity of the networked media environment, we become participants in the thing-itself as it unfolds in time. You can hear the critique of this state of affairs from the perspective of the traditional press: There’s no objectivity, the representations are not accurate, they don’t match the reported, and checked, facts.

We should have concerns about this new media environment, this new stage on which we stand, but they aren’t those of objectivity and representational accuracy. The participant can have no standing in either of those causes. The journalist who situates himself outside the event—within a field of objectivity—intends to be invisible, to withhold both his presence and influence on the event itself. He believes that only through this distance can he produce a text that is isomorphic with the event itself. The journalist’s ethics have to do with accuracy of representation; the participant’s ethics have to do with what one chooses to do with an active or passive role in the action as it unfolds. Do you accelerate the action or oppose it? Do you ignore it or silently contemplate it. Do you route it to a private or public group? Do you produce a work in reaction to it? (Note how this is fundamentally different than the idea of the citizen journalist).

The common thread between Foreman’s performances and activity on the real-time network is that neither represents something else. They’re both the thing itself. It’s this shift from representation to presentation that opens a new world of possibilities (“dare I say it, a second world, a third world…”). Getting the hang of the new physics and economics of this space may take some time. The ethics of real-time mean that you’re a participant in an unfolding event— you aren’t invisible— and your actions (or lack of action) have consequences.

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