imaginarylife

An augmented reality system that makes walls transparent could prevent road accidents.

I recently watched the film The Road and have been haunted by it’s eeriness ever since. Anyone with the slightest amount of eco anxiety should not watch this film. But as the anxiety started to fade, a melancholic yet beautiful tone remaned, something like this video I was introduced to today. (Thanks Brian) It’s maker, Dutch/Californian artist Bas Jan Ader, was last seen in 1975 when he took off in what would have been the smallest sailboat ever to cross the Atlantic. He left behind a small oeuvre, often using gravity as a medium, which more than 30 years after his disappearance at sea is more influential than ever before. See his website http://www.basjanader.com/ and order a DVD collection of his films on http://www.hereisalwayssomewhereelse.com/

I’m reading another complex and beautiful Richard Powers novel, ‘Galatea 2.2′. In it, a writer is assisting a cognitive neurologist who is trying to model the human brain by means of computer-based neural networks. The writer’s job is to talk to the computer, to ‘educate’ it, in order to construct in its memory that endlessly sweet web of connections which makes for a ‘world’ and from which we humans speak, so that one day the computer may be able to comprehend human language and talk back. Its a virtually impossible task (and one mirrored in similar conversations – semi-impossible or beautifully present – taking place in the worlds of the people around him: an autistic boy, an old woman slipping into dementia, first lovers in a foreign country, a deeply loved professor sinking into death with unbounded dignity) because what makes us human is an infinite yet particularised mosaic of little somethings and nothings, inexpressibly weighted, the somethings balanced against the nothings. Balanced in ways that defy gravity.

Here’s a slice of the ticker-tape sweetness of that computer’s education, the mimicking of the endless immeasurable context that is consciousness:

“…We told her about parking tickets and two-for-one sales. About tuning forks and pitchforks and forked tongues and the road not taken. We told her about resistors and capacitors, baiters-and-switchers, alternating current, alternate lifestyles, very-large-scale integration and the failure of education to save society from itself.
We told her about wool and linen and damask. We told her about finches and feeders, bats and banyans, sonar and semafores and trail markers made of anything the living body might shed. About mites and motes, insect galls and insecticides, about mating for life or for a fraction of a minute.
We taught her about the Securities and Exchange Commission. We told her about collectors who specialize in Depression-era glass. About how people used to teach their children about the big hand and the little hand. About defecation and respiration and circulation. About Post-it notes. Registered trademarks and draft resistance. The Oscar and Grammy and Emmy. Dying of heart disease. Divining with a fresh-cut alder rod.
We told her how the keys on a piano were laid out. About letterhead. Debutantes balls… We showed her the difference between triforium and clerestory. We traced the famous pilgrims’ routes through time and space. We told her about spoilage and refrigeration. How salt was once worth its weight in gold. How spice fueled the whole tragic engine of human expansion. How plastic wrap solved one of civilisation’s nightmares and started another.
We showed her Detroit, savaged by short-term economics. We showed her Sarajevo in 1911. Dresden and London in 1937. Atlanta in 1860. Baghdad. Tokyo, Cairo, Johannesburg, Calcutta, Los Angeles. Just before, and just after.
We told her about revenge and forgiveness and contrition. We told her about retail outlets and sales tax, about ennui, about a world where you hear about everything yet where nothing happens to you. Bar-codes and baldness. Lint, lintels, lentils, Lent. The hope, blame, perversion and crippled persistence of liberal humanism. Grace and disgrace and second chances. Suicide. Euthanasia. First love. Love at first sight.”

And somehow, mixed in with all this and perhaps precisely because of it, I’ve just discovered the social networking site Twitter, a site where communications are limited to two lines of text. An ‘idiotic’ site, or so i thought. But when such limitation is taken up by the right person – such as the MIT researcher and ‘futuremaker’ John Maeda – it becomes a free-floating source of temporary context, some kind of innocent high-speed mesh of intelligence and simplicity.

Here’s a slice of the ticker-tape sweetness coming from Maeda:

The art of asking questions, is art.

Subtlety is a kind of dust in the room of life that shouldn’t be confused with just dirt.

The computer is now an abacus of many minds.

Time doesn’t fly. It travels leisurely by foot.

“If you can think, you can draw.”

Herbert Simon likened how we think to a pair of scissors. The brain is one blade, the other is the environment in which the brain operates

The sound of your heart isn’t a sound effect.

Watching waves break is non-stressful because you know you can look away at any time … and won’t miss a thing.

Art is the inexplicable urge to manifest feeling, intent, or question as a specific experience outside the artist’s mind.

Teaching is the rare profession where the customer isn’t always right and needs to be told so appropriately.

small is not only beautiful, but memorable.

and here’s something flagged by William Gibson about an hour ago, ‘tokyo sky drive’.
watching this, I know I’m never going to make it back to any monastery…

till next time

shenyen

“When spring came, when every crow announced its arrival by raising his cry half a tone, I took the green train of the Yamanote line and got off at Tokyo station, near the central post office. Even if the street was empty I waited at the red light—Japanese style—so as to leave space for the spirits of the broken cars. Even if I was expecting no letter I stopped at the general delivery window, for one must honor the spirits of torn up letters, and at the airmail counter to salute the spirits of unmailed letters. I took the measure of the unbearable vanity of the West, that has never ceased to privilege being over non-being, what is spoken to what is left unsaid.”

(from Chris Marker’s film, Sunless)

She is standing two steps beside me. We are re-characterising the world. We are tracking the transformation of beauty into exact science. Or so i like to think. But then she does something like this:

I wake up each morning to find busy bees in the L.A. night leaving gems like that in my twitter box. Its like what that one square metre of space next to the front door – where the mail would land – used to be before the white envelope culture took it over.

I live alone – everyone does, one way or another – but the walls of my castle are broad: bands of strangers stroll the battlements or camp out overnight in ten minute segments, wrapped in shawls of golden languages and unique, precise worldviews. More super-barrio than superhighway, it is a new kind of talking and listening, raggedy, discontinuous and a kind of heaven, where the mind can feel distributed yet focussed. I’m happy here..

As a Buddhist monk I no longer use the word ‘battle’, and if I still have a fondness for reading the Art Of War its only to better appreciate the strategies of up and coming artists as they edge their way in from the periphery, from tiny gallery to magazine reviews to mid-career museum retrospective, or FIFA’s breathtakingly semi-conscious attempt to reposition the world cup as a kind of secular kalachakra.

Did you know there are kids – I mean here in our American-European cities – who have never heard of Bugs Bunny or the Soviet Union? (In 20 years we’ll be able to add ‘universities, newspapers, national anthems’.) Their world is changing so fast. Those plastic toys they play with which you think of simply as dinosaurs, they’re actually Winicottian transitional objects representing the whole of culture up to 1992.

We drive ourselves to exhaustion trying to be productive and ‘a little bit famous’ while our 9 year old kids shuffle dreamily around the house, productively playful and famously anonymous. Their one-sock-on-one-sock-off world is awesome in its simplicity, and so new it doesn’t even have a name. But yes: “ordinary is no place to be…”

I think what the web is secretly saying is ‘forget about fame: its just an electronic slum, a leftover from the pre-1980s world of 4-channel tv, soon to be replaced by towerblock forests of web-feeds and URLs.’ Watching the X Factor show highlights just before xmas I couldn’t help thinking of the helicopter evacuation of the US embassy in Saigon in 1974… Its the end of a world, not the start of one; a nostalgia for fame. “And when all the celebrations are over it remains only to pick up all the ornaments – all the accessories of the celebration – and by burning them, make a celebration.” (’Sunless’)

A typical night of immersion: I read essays on the mathematician Godel while listening to music from Sweden and Santa Fe (the Swedish music brought to my attention via a secondary review from a reviewer of a book on Godel, creating a beautiful strange loop), wander through the last few years’ work of www.raqsmediacollective.net, watch old Russian folk-tale animations and electronic art pieces on Youtube, see a thought-provoking photo on www.designforhaiti.com

… set up a list of future feeds into my Twitter site that extends into the next two months. They will be released at the times given for each tweet, down to the very day-month-year-hour-minute – if i wanted i could make it look like radioshenyen is the monk who never sleeps!

… friends in London take actionmonk photos according to specifications and post them to me in minutes (check ‘em out on www.yfrog.com / radioshenyen) while someone who lives half an hour away phones to arrange a meditation sitting for tomorrow. But it takes me forty minutes to walk to the garbage drop-point and back. high-speed super-slow.

I’m working slowly through hours of good responses by 168 ’smart ‘uns’ interviewed by Edge magazine (www.edge.org) about ‘how the internet is changing the way we think’

I’ve saved the best till last: I watch this video over and over – about the 1982 Brazil world cup team – 5 minutes of immaculate editing and awesome beauty (no, seriously..) made to honour the passing of team manager Tele Santana when he died in 2006. Even the incidental details in this video would have made a medieval painter proud. Check out the Scottish (?) goalie walking back towards his goal like someone in the corner of a Breughal painting.

The video is a measure of what ’sacredness’ should mean, regardless of – and way beyond – the fabricated limitations we place on the term. And i know of no western buddhist practitioners – individuals or organisations – who get anywhere near exuding this level of beauty in their sense of who they are and what they are doing. Including of course myself. And you will have to decide for yourself just how serious I am when I suggest that one shouldn’t even consider oneself as having a spiritual life if one isn’t asking the painful question ‘why aren’t I as beautiful as this video?’

And maybe that’s what this essay is all about: ‘how the internet is changing the way we think about the sacred’…

till next time

shenyen

An interactive video from Kokokaka.com. Hit the play button, wait until the video loads in your browser and then click any of the piano keys inside the YouTube video itself to play some music.

“It is in the nature of analogical worlds to provoke a yearning for the past… The digital will wants to change the world.”
– D N Rodowick, ‘The Virtual Life of Film’

“She cloaked herself in the blur of swirled phenomena…”
– Richard Powers, ‘Galatea 2.2′

In Hertzog’s documentary about people living and working at a research base in Antarctica, a scientist watches icebergs via satellite imagery as they make their final drift north to warmer climes and melting. He talks of them so lovingly, like they were baby seals, as if they were little kids growing up in some cosmic suburbia before being tempted away from mom and pop and disappearing into some distant metropolis. Another scientist – a biologist working on the sea-bed beneath the frozen ice – talks about going ‘down into the cathedral’… An American woman takes photographs of people who have been released from prison after serving several years for a crime they did not commit (conclusive new evidence appearing later being the reason for their release). The photos are either at the alibi location (the place where they had been at the time of the crime but were not believed to have been by the jury), or at the scene of the crime (a place where they had never been but which had stolen several years of their life)… Tauba Auerbach, an American artist, is designing mathematical symbols for a Cambridge University logician. Someone else is taking x-ray photographs of childrens dolls, used sneakers, flowers and even buses….

A six year old kid shows me how to change the skin on my email site so that I’m now accompanied by little ninja figures. Give them a couple of years and they’ll probably be climbing about the screen. A couple of years more and they’ll probably be climbing about the screen and reciting passages from Hagakure.

I’m out of the monastery and back in the ‘lab’, that discontinuous space that consists of the houses of strangers, a rolled-up copy of Artforum and TED.COM. And I’m wondering: if Nagarjuna was alive today would he be in some monastery in South India reading the same old texts (”old black Joe still picking cotton…”), or would he be, say, spending fifteen hours a day in some cubicle room in an anonymous-looking building in Columbia University researching cognitive neurology, teaching some computer to speak, writing fuzzy-edged algorithms while headphoned into Arabic rap?

Lama Yeshe: “To help mother sentient beings, you need magnetic energy. Maybe you can call it karma, it doesn’t matter. You have to have a way of making them stay, to connect with you. If you want to help other sentient beings you need, if I say it in a religious way, strong prayer and strong determination – repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly. Through building up such energy, that energy automatically catches sentient beings in a magnetic way so that they can benefit, without thought.”

I’ve told the monastery in France that I wont be going back. It was a nice place and all, and there’ll be times when I will miss it, but I know I couldn’t study there in the loopy but focussed way that I want to.

So where then do I watch the world cup? I have 154 days to sort it out… but hey, what is this electronic community thing for anyway if not for a litte feedback when you need it? So: if anyone hears of any interesting soft logic scenarios happening for next June, let me know.

till next time

Shenyen

Greetings from Imaginary life Pop up office currently in India

Schneier responds to Google’s Eric Schmidt on Security. Go for it Schneier, there simply is not enough discussion about this and so we are grateful for your book and blog.

Schmidt said:

I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines — including Google — do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.

This, from 2006, is my response:

Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we’re doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.

We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need.

[...]

For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that — either now or in the uncertain future — patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.

[...]

This is the loss of freedom we face when our privacy is taken from us. This is life in former East Germany, or life in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. And it’s our future as we allow an ever-intrusive eye into our personal, private lives.

Too many wrongly characterize the debate as “security versus privacy.” The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that’s why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.

Visual search technology coming to a mobile near you. If you have the right phone huh…Google Goggles is a visual search app for Android phones. Instead of using words, take a picture of an object with your camera phone: we attempt to recognize the object, and return relevant search results. Goggles also provides information about businesses near you by displaying their names directly in the camera preview.