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Posts Tagged ‘art’

IS

Posted in existence, philosophy, politics, tagged , , , , on August 23, 2015| Leave a Comment »

“IS” creates. Its mere utterance, inscription, trace imbues existence. This IS. That IS. 1 IS. 2 IS 1 and 1. This IS different than that.

FIght to Exist

IS wordform is the trivial sign of the miracle act of creation. The giver of existence is merely Making It So. Made so by a finger pointing, a twitch of the eyes, a sentence declaring something is, action potential in the nueron, a bit flipped, a sum of numbers, movement in spacetime. IS. IS existence IS?

IS supercedes from the classic BEING and EVENT philosophy. There is no seperation of BEING from EVENT. Just as light is not a wave nor a partical. IS being split is a valid creation, all creations are, but the phrasing and philosophy of BEING and EVENT as the two actual, distinct creative gestures doesn’t mean they are.

IS in all its guises is the singular gesture, ex nihilo. And yet, really, the act IS NOT something from nothing. For nothing is a something. It is something from something. Nothing, redefined is SOMETHING in-distinguished from SOMETHING ELSE. There IS NOT some thing!

A word game? Hardly. IS can be experimented with and falsified. In fact, IS requires it. The completion of the IS is NOT. Negate it with another IS. This IS IS not THIS. Ad infinum. Do it without words, without thoughts. Merely observe in any perceptive medium and any perceptive tool. What “happens”? is happens.

This IS not satisfactory though. The meaning or import of IS to practical understanding should be established. Only through another series of IS can this be carried out. Paradoxically the truth of the IS cannot be established without an IS.

In fact.

Truth IS. Truth is the only concept that resists the IS, truth cannot be IS-ified. Truth IS true. This IS true. There is no basis outside of the truth that can objectify that IS statement. The true is primary to the IS. or IS it? IS anything true before the IS establishes it for evaluation? Truth is. IS truth? IS TRUTH? IS TRUTH. TRUTH IS.

In an newtonian world (and his associates Kant, Descartes, Lovelace, Darwin, Boole, Laplace, Jesus, Muhammad, Zeus, Curie) where IS and TRUTH are mere approximations, it doesn’t matter if we really know. ? It does. IS and TRUTH matters with more and more specificity depending on the relative stakes. To land humans in a rocket on the moon the recursion of physical mathematics and physical engineering needs a much more robust IS TRUE than two humans playing catch with a ball. The near infinite regress of IS TRUE of rocket physics pales in comparison to the IS TRUE of ALL OF KNOWLEDGE. In fact – if fact IS TRUE – ALL OF KNOWLEDGE cannot be established because IS TRUE goes on beyond all cardinal infinity. But yet, here we are. Something IS. Something is TRUE. some things are true. TRUE is. FALSE is not. FALSE IS not. FALSE IS NOT.

How much IS and how much TRUE one needs for existence… NOW THAT IS THE QUESTION.

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Programming Sucks

Posted in art, computer science, Computers, prediction, programming, tagged , , , , on April 19, 2015| Leave a Comment »

We have a problem.

As it stands now the present and near future of economic, social and cultural development primarily derives from computers and programming.   The algorithms already dominate our society – they run our politics, they run our financial system, they run our education, they run our entertainment, they run our healthcare.    The ubiquitous tracking of everything that can possible be tracked determined this current situation.   We must have programs to make things, to sell things, to exchange things.

punchcard

The problem is not necessarily the algorithms or the computers themselves but the fact that so few people can program.    And why?   Programming Sucks.

Oh sure, for those that do program and enjoy it, it doesn’t suck. As Much.   But for the 99%+ of the world’s population that doesn’t program a computer to earn a living it’s a terrible endeavour.

Programming involves a complete abstraction away from the world and all surroundings.  Programming is disembodied – it is mostly a thought exercise mixed with some of the worst aspects of engineering.   Mathematics, especially the higher order really crazy stuff was long ago unapproachable and completely disembodied requiring no physical engineering or representation at all.  Programming, in most of its modern instances, consequences very far away from its creative behavior.  That is, in most modern system it takes days, weeks, months years to personally feel the results deeply of what you’ve built.    Programming is ruthless.  It’s unpredictable.   It’s 95% or more reinventing the wheel and configuring environments to even run the most basic program.  It’s all set up, not a lot of creation.   So few others understand it they can’t appreciate the craft during the act (only the output is appreciated counted in users and downloads).

There are a couple of reasons why this is the case – a few theoretical/natural limits and a few self-imposed, engineering and cultural issues.

First the engineering and cultural issues.   Programming languages and computers evolved rather clumsily built mostly by programmers for other programmers – not for the majority of humans.    There’s never been a requirement to make programming itself more humanistic, more embodied.    Looking back on the history of computers computing was done always in support of something else, not for its own sake.   It was done to Solve Problems.   As long as the computing device and program solved the problem the objective was met.   Even the early computer companies famously thought it was silly to think everyone one day might actually use a personal computer.   And now we’re at a potentially more devastating standstill – it’s absurd to most people to think everyone might actually need to program.    I’ll return to these issues.

Second the natural limits of computation make for a very severe situation.   There are simply things that are non-computable.   That is, we can’t solve them.   Sometimes we can PROVE we can’t solve them but that doesn’t get us any closer to solving some things.    This is sometimes called the Halting Problem.  The idea is basically that for a sufficiently complex program you can’t predict whether the program will halt or not.   The implication is simply you must run the program and see if it halts.  Again, complexity is the key here.  If these are relatively small, fast programs with a less than infinite number of possible outcomes then you can simply run the program across all possible inputs and outputs.   Problem is… very few programs are that simple and certainly not any of the ones that recommend products to you, trade your money on wall street, or help doctors figure out what’s going on in your body.

STOP.

This is a VERY BIG DEAL.    Think about it.   We deploy millions of programs a day with completely non-deterministic, unpredictable outcomes.  Sure we do lots of quality assurance and we test everything we can and we simulate and we have lots of mathematics and experience that helps us grow confident… but when you get down to it, we simply don’t know if any given complex program has some horrible bug in it.

This issue rears its head an infinite number of times a day.   If you’ve ever been mad at MS Word for screwing up your bullet points or your browser stops rendering a page or your internet doesn’t work or your computer freezes… this is what’s going on.  All of these things are complex programs interacting with other programs and all of them have millions (give or take millions) of bugs in them.  Add to it that all of these things are mutable bits on your computer that viruses or hardware issues can manipulate (you can’t be sure the program you bought is the program you currently run) and you can see how things quickly escape our abilities to control.

This is devastating for the exercise of programming.  Computer scientists have invented a myriad of ways to temper the reality of the halting problem.   Most of these management techniques makes programming even more mysteries and challenging due to the imposition of even more rules that must be learned and maintained.   Unlike music and writing and art and furniture making and fashion we EXPECT and NEED computers to do exactly what we program them to do.   Most of the other stuff humans do and create is just fine if it sort of works.  It still has value.  Programs that are too erratic or worse, catastrophic, are not only not valuable we want to eliminate them from the earth.   We probably destroy some 95%+ of the programs we write.

The craft of programming is at odds with its natural limits.   Our expectations and thus the tools we craft to perform program conflict with the actuality.  Our use of programs exceeds their possibilities.

And this really isn’t due to computers or programming, but something more fundamental: complexity and prediction.    Even as our science shows us more and more that prediction is an illusion our demands of technology and business and media run counter.    This fundamental clash manifests itself in programming, programming languages, the hardware of computers, the culture of programming.  It is at odds with itself and in being so conflicted is unapproachable to those that don’t have ability to stare maddeningly into a screen flickering with millions of unknown rules and bugs.   Mastery is barely achievable except for a rare few.   And without mastery enjoyment rarely comes – the sort of enjoyment that can sustain someones attention long enough to do something significant.

I’ve thought long and hard about how to improve the craft of programming.   I’ve programmed a lot, lead a lot of programming efforts, delivered a lot of software, scrapped a lot more.  I’ve worked in 10+ languages.  I’ve studied mathematics and logic and computer science and philosophy.  I’ve worked with the greatest computer scientists.  I’ve worked with amazing business people and artists and mathematicians.   I’ve built systems large and small in many different categories.  In short, I’ve yet to find a situation in which programming wasn’t a major barrier to progress and thinking.

The solution isn’t in programming languages and in our computers.  It’s not about Code.org and trying to get more kids into our existing paradigm. This isn’t an awareness or interest problem.   The solution involves our goals and expectations.

We must stop trying to solve every problem perfectly.  We must stop trying to predict everything.   We must stop pursuing The Answer, as if it actually exists.  We must stop trying to optimize everything for speed and precision and accuracy. And we must stop applying computerized techniques to every single category of activity – at least in a way where we expect the computer to forever to the work.

We must create art.  Programming is art.  It is full of accidents and confusions and inconsistencies.   We must turn it back to an analog experience rather than a conflicted digital.    Use programming to explore and narrate and experiment rather than answer and define and calculate.

The tools that spring from those objectives will be more human.  More people will be able to participate.  We will make more approachable programs and languages and businesses.

In the end our problem with programming is one of relation – we’re either relating more or less to the world around us and as computers grow in numbers and integration we need to be able to commune, shape and relate to them.

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art and patterns

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on September 14, 2014| Leave a Comment »

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
art lives in the mind.

but there is no mind.

art lives in perception.

but there is no perception.

art lives as patterns.

there are patterns.

but there is no art.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

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Should Artists Get Paid?

Posted in anthropology, art, tagged , , , , on August 24, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Who’s Free and Who Isn’t (this is about artists) aka who should we pay aka The Free and Anti Free

An N+1 article grapples with the basic question, “should an artist get paid?” https://nplusonemag.com/issue-20/the-intellectual-situation/the-free-and-the-antifree/ It’s a decent question – that is, we ought to ask it and keep asking it. This article and so many like it definitely don’t answer it. The article isn’t poor quality. It’s thought provoking in that way where you want to chase down a lot of things. I don’t want to pick apart the article right now as it gets into class warfare, lots of history, media critique and more. I want to attack the question head on without the backdrop of all this other stuff – which I think is mostly just baggage.

The most important point of all is sort of an anti-point in life and existence. That is, none of us, nothing (no thing), deserves anything. The title of the article introduces the concept of SHOULD which is really just a form of “deserves.” Human language will never do this point justice but there isn’t any universal SHOULD. There are proximal “SHOULDS.” In some cultures, in some relationships, in some situations X SHOULD HAPPEN.

So no, artists shouldn’t get paid.

In this proximal culture, this western world of award shows and museums and ad agencies and media companies, should artists get paid? maybe. If they want to get paid they figure out how. Should they be paid a priori because they are doing art? maybe.

Why the waffle?

Really this question is bigger than art and artists. Does anyone deserve to get paid? should ___________ get paid? No. No, no category of people, persons, trades, classes SHOULD get paid. Do they? yes. Yes, some people get paid. Some categories of people with categories of skills get paid.

This distinction matters because there are FAR MORE starving manual laborers than starving artists. There are FAR MORE starving students than artists. There are a lot of starving people on the planet. There are lots of species of animals in very bad shape. The subclass of artists that are humans that are part of species on the earth is hardly unique.

what is art? that’s a relevant question at this point. It doesn’t matter. what is science? what is math? what is teaching? what is philanthropy? what is a job? what is work? Should WE Get Paid?

what do you do? Why do you think you should get paid? If you are a teacher you most likely have decided that you’re doing a good for society. If you are a social worker, same. If you are a business person you probably think you are “adding value” to the company or marketplace. Most likely you think you should get paid because those around you and those before you who did vaguely similar things think you should get paid and those people often “hire” those similar to them.

and then there’s art (and its cousins…) Art is the stuff that changes perceptions. Art is the concepts and ideas and forms and tools that don’t make sense. Pay only comes from a marketplace. Art is anti-market. It has an anti-market if it has anything at all.

So n+1 and those that worry about these sorts of things you can stop wondering if someone will pay or if capitalism or whatever category of being we’re talking about will assign commodity-based currency quantification to something that seeks, at its core, to never be defined.

Art and artists should forever seek ill definition, that’s the fucking point. If there is a point at all.

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the audience as primary role in art

Posted in anthropology, art, brain, branding, language, tagged , , , on January 19, 2014| Leave a Comment »

What is art?

Art isn’t anything.  It’s everything and nothing.  Art is pattern.  It’s narrative.  It’s expression.  Anything we do someone else could consider as art.

What’s most important is that someone else can experience us, this art, the source of art.   And art doesn’t suppose an audience in its creation.  We all create art, constantly, regardless of whether we think someone else will view it, watch it, hear it, taste it. And everyone we interact with directly or indirectly (though culture, rules, laws) influences our personal art.

Is there ART?  that is, is there something that we’d all say that’s a clear expression of art?  No.  No there isn’t.  Even when people start out with the intent to make art and they make it clear they are making ART it’s no more or less art than anything else anyone does all day.  Art is simply that which we do that becomes noticed.

The key is Does Someone Notice.  Even if that someone is YOURSELF.  Art is that thing that makes you notice, that makes you change your perspective.   That’s it.  and that’s everything.

Art’s role in life is to be noticed.  Art is about creating audience.  The more entities that notice a new perspective because of it the more relevant the art (in American culture terms).

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The Art of Technology Problem Solving

Posted in software, tagged , , on February 4, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Here’s a lovely piece about how curiosity has less CPU horsepower than an iPhone5.

The very cool thing I key on here is the clever solution to this incredible technical achievement of having a rover on mars doing all this science:

Each day, after the lander downloads the latest batch of data to the 100 scientists watching her movements, the team determines what they want her do next and make sure that their goals align with Curiosity’s capabilities. Then the software team writes the necessary script and sends it off via uplink. Because of the roughly 14 minutes it takes for the instructions to reach Mars, all of this has to be done within the window, when Curiosity is sleeping.

The technology is actually a dance.  A dance between all the information going between the red planet, Curiosity, the void, into the earth bound computers, into the scientists brains, back out into the computers, back to the void, back to Curiosity…. a musical remix ever evolving.   The team behind Curiosity didn’t attempt to program the be all and end all of Curiosity.  Instead they came up with some building blocks and a language to communicate and agreed to dance.

And the bigger idea here is that everything is connected.  To work on interesting, important, useful problems the approach is an interplay between humans, machines, software – it is rarely a steady state solution or even a discrete solution.

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