J.W. Power was an Australian artist who, while at one time very
significant, seems to have fallen out of the history books. Born in
1881, he studied medicine at the University of Sydney, and then
moved to London in 1907 for further study. He was a military
surgeon during World War I, and after the war decided to become a
full-time artist, spending much time in Paris. He became a
member of the avant-garde group Abstraction-Création in
company with other leading artists in Paris, and was involved with
both cubism and surrealism.
Power left a large sum of money to the University of Sydney for the
purpose of making the latest ideas and theories in art available in
Australia through lectures and through the purchase of
artworks. The bequest eventually led to the establishment of
the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney as well as the Power
Institute within the University of Sydney. Power as an artist
is currently attracting attention, with a major Power exhibition, in
the form of a recreation of Power's solo exhibition in Paris in
1934, coming up at the University
of Sydney's art gallery.
My interest in Power comes about because in 1932 he published a
geometrically-based book (in Paris; both French and English versions
appeared). The English version has the title The Elements
of Pictorial Construction: A Study of the Methods of Old and
Modern Masters. I recently had a chance to examine
copies of both versions at the University of Sydney, thanks to
Anthony Green, Senior Librarian of the Schaeffer Library and Ann
Stephen, Senior Curator of the University of Sydney Art
Collection.
I also found that the whole work (in French and English) is
available online through the National Library of Australia (go to
http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/ and search for "elements of pictorial
construction"). However, the physical book has a unique
feature: six pockets at the back, each of which contains a
photograph of an artwork and one or more transparent sheets with
lines drawn on them, which are to be placed over the photograph
according to instructions in Power's text. These reveal
features of the construction of the work, according to Power's
analysis.
What is the basis of Power's work?
Power considers that he is recovering a method of construction used
by the Old Masters. He starts from the idea that all the
significant points in a masterpiece of painting are carefully
placed. He draws horizontal and vertical lines from each such
point to the edges of the painting, and considers in what proportion
the edges are divided, expecting this to be significant. Apart
from the midpoint of the edge, the Golden Section point
(approximately 0.618) is a natural choice, but Power introduces
others, including a point on the long side which is √2 or about
1.414 times the length of the short side, being the diagonal of the
square on the short side. Then Power has a method of
"transfer": for example, take the distance between the √2 point and
the end of the long side, and mark off this distance on the short
side. He even makes a second transfer of the remaining
distance on the short side back to the long side. The result
is a large number of horizontal and vertical lines (27
horizontal lines and 16 vertical in the case of the "Mond"
Crucifixion by Raphael, in Power's first detailed
analysis). Power also identifies an equal-sided nonagon
(nine-sided figure) connecting significant points within the
painting, and a hexagon surrounding the painting.
Power also has an idea of "movable format", the same configuration
appearing in different parts of the one painting. He applies this
to a Last Judgement by Rubens, with the movable
configuration consisting of a perspective drawing of a cone with an
inscribed square pyramid, which he sees as being used in
approximately eight different positions. Having a actual piece
of cellophane to move about is a great help! According to
Power, the positions are not arbitrary, but each is obtained by
rotating the configuration about a specific point, or a similar such
move.
There are some other ideas about construction in the book as well,
but the division of the edges of the painting and the "movable
format" are the most important.
What do I think of the book?
Power sticks very closely to his subject of construction and does
not consider colours in the book, let alone things like symbolic
content; there is a complete absence of mystical waffle. The
book is also clearly written and generally easy to follow.
However, in my view Power has not made a convincing case for what he
claims.
It is uncontroversial that large paintings were frequently first
done at small scale and then transferred to a wall or panel by some
process of drawing up a grid. However, as far as I know the
grid was made up of equally spaced lines (extant examples indicate
this). Also, although the golden section was known and used,
again as far as I know there is no historical evidence for things like
Power's √2 point, let alone his "transfers" of such points.
So if there is a lack of historical evidence, the evidence must be
internal to the works; indeed Power says: "[The Old Masters']
studies and sketches handed down to us show very few traces of these
methods, while the finished pictures show a great many."
My first comment is that Power's method is on the whole not
perceptually based. We know that a division of a line in a
ratio somewhere in the range 3/5 to 2/3 is perceptually attractive,
and this explains the photographer's "rule of thirds". But
there is no reason to suppose that the exact value 0.61803... of the
golden ratio is perceptually markedly better than say 0.625 (which
is 5/8). There is no perceptual reason for things like the
"transfer" of twice the short part of the golden section division of
the long side (which occurs in Power's analysis of Raphael's Disputa).
So we are dealing with Power's geometrical ingenuity rather than
perceptual givens, and Power has provided an array of lines and
construction methods that I suspect can yield a good approximation
to any ratio. The question is then whether the Old Masters used
geometrical ingenuity in a similar way. It is not out of the
question for a Renaissance master to be playing mathematical games
in a painting, certainly with the golden section, but Power has not
made a good case for the Old Masters to be playing his
mathematical games. There is a range of geometrical ideas that
Power could have discussed and didn't. Power doesn't provide
the derivations for all of the lines in his analyses, but it is
notable that he doesn't discuss equal divisions beyond the midpoint:
there is no mention of thirds, quarters, fifths, etc. It
is also notable that there is essentially no mention of the
possibility of the same configuration occurring at different scales
within the same painting. In geometrical terms, Power is
concerned far more with congruence than with similarity. And
there are always further possibilities: for example Power introduces
ellipses but doesn't mention their focal points.
The "movable format" idea is intriguing; certainly for a swirling
composition like the Last Judgement by Rubens, something
like it appears more appropriate than fixed horizontal and vertical
lines. However, I found the use of a pyramid drawn in
perspective problematic. Power is not attempting to construct
a three-dimensional model of the space implied by the painting; he
is simply moving the perspective drawing of the pyramid as a flat
object around the surface of the painting. This makes nonsense
of any perspective within the drawing of the pyramid. On the
whole, Power isn't much concerned with perspective. Raphael's
Disputa has lines near the bottom whose spacing is determined
by perspective, not by the sort of division that Power is interested
in; Power doesn't consider these lines in his analysis.
I think that Power has driven his methods much too far, seeing
things that are not there; I suspect that similar methods could
provide quite different analyses of the same painting. The
choice of significant points and lines is of course up to the
judgement of the interpreter, and I am reluctant to challenge Power
on this, but in Raphael's Crucifixion, for me the nail
through Christ's feet is a prominent point in the painting; Power
doesn't mention it, though he does mention other less prominent
points. Then I could draw diagonal lines through the angels'
feet and the nail to the faces of the kneeling figures, and start
looking for similar triangles, and so on. If it is possible to
give two quite different geometric analyses of the same work, both
are likely to be illusory. I was somewhat more convinced by
Power's discussion of cubist construction, since in cubist work it
is reasonable to find both simple geometric shapes and the use of
plan and elevation as described by Power.
As an aside, although the title The Elements of Pictorial
Construction brings to mind Euclid's Elements of Geometry,
Power is not using Euclid's methods (and does not claim to use
them). The nine-sided figure Power finds in Raphael's Crucifixion
cannot be constructed exactly by ruler and compass. Also Power
has not read all of Euclid's Elements: he refers to the
"dodecahedron and icosahedron, the proportions and structure of
which had then [by the later Renaissance] been worked out".
But the dodecahedron and icosahedron are discussed by Euclid.
It is interesting to consider what has happened in mathematics since
Power's time. Power's geometric viewpoint comes across today
as far too rigid. Power was not a professional mathematician,
and it is not fair to the history of mathematics to take him as
representative of his era, but certainly an emphasis on more
qualitative approaches such as topology has become stronger.
Topology was already well established by the 1930s, but may not have
been accessible to people in Power's position, or
may not have been seen as relevant. However, D'Arcy Thompson's
On Growth and Form, published in 1917, might have caught
Power's attention. Since Power's time a major impetus away
from simple formulas has come from the computer. Chaos theory,
fractals, and things like strange attractors and percolation theory
have all given us new geometric objects that are quite different
from the cubist cone and cylinder; although these new forms have
been given solid mathematical underpinnings, the computer has helped
in the discovery and investigation of the phenomena. And in
general the absence of simple formulas in an area of investigation is much less of an
obstacle than it was.
Showing posts with label Humanities and science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Humanities and science. Show all posts
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Is Electromagnetism a Fascist Theory?
Unfortunately I'm not joking.
Last week I attended the 2012 conference of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand in Sydney. The final presentation was by a distinguished American curator, Dr Helen Molesworth, on the work of Josiah McElheny, an American artist who uses traditional glass-blowing techniques to make large, more or less abstract sculptures. Dr Molesworth's presentation was well-crafted and very interesting and engaging. McElheny has referenced science, in particular cosmology, in his more recent work, and towards the end of her presentation Dr Molesworth referred to the possibility of a "Theory of Everything", and said she didn't want a Theory of Everything: it would be fascist.
At the drinks and nibblies afterwards I asked Dr Molesworth if the theory of electromagnetism was fascist. She said she didn't know: she didn't have enough information. This startled me, and I said that the name "Theory of Everything" was a physicists' in-joke (referring as it does to a single theory that would bring together gravity and quantum mechanics), and that it certainly wouldn't produce a theory of the psyche or a theory of art. I also tried to say that the value of a scientific theory was to be found through observation, deduction and explanatory power, not political attitudes, but I don't think I explained myself well; she disagreed with what she heard me as saying.
I chose electromagnetism as it is a successful example in physics of the unification of previously disparate phenomena, and it would be part of a Theory of Everything, but I didn't explain this during our brief conversation.
I don't want to make too much of this, as it was a noisy environment and not a good time for serious discussion. I hope that we were talking at cross-purposes, but surely even to consider that the theory of electromagnetism might be fascist is to be grievously confused about the nature of theories in physics.
I was regrettably reminded of one of the silliest episodes in post-modernism, the (by now widely quoted) statement by the otherwise respected feminist scholar Luce Irigaray about Einstein's equation E = mc²:
Is E=Mc² a sexed equation? Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possible sexed nature of the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged that which goes faster.
I have seen attempted defences of this sort of writing along the lines that although the people writing like this appear to be using scientific terms, they actually have different meanings in mind for the words. I have not seen the source for the quotation from Irigaray above, but it is hard to give it any reasonable interpretation.
I did find a related article by Irigaray, "Is the Subject of Science Sexed?", Cultural Critique No.1 (Autumn 1985), pp. 73-88. In this Irigaray comments on a range of sciences, from psychoanalysis through biology to mathematics and physics, and by the time she gets to mathematics it is clear that she is using terminology from the subject without understanding it.
There is of course room for a serious study of what scientists do, what biases they bring to their work, who funds it, what questions are studied and what are not, and so forth, and indeed many scientists themselves are very much concerned about these questions. But statements like Irigaray's had the effect of bringing the whole area of so-called science studies into disrepute, and calling physical theories "fascist" does not help.
Last week I attended the 2012 conference of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand in Sydney. The final presentation was by a distinguished American curator, Dr Helen Molesworth, on the work of Josiah McElheny, an American artist who uses traditional glass-blowing techniques to make large, more or less abstract sculptures. Dr Molesworth's presentation was well-crafted and very interesting and engaging. McElheny has referenced science, in particular cosmology, in his more recent work, and towards the end of her presentation Dr Molesworth referred to the possibility of a "Theory of Everything", and said she didn't want a Theory of Everything: it would be fascist.
At the drinks and nibblies afterwards I asked Dr Molesworth if the theory of electromagnetism was fascist. She said she didn't know: she didn't have enough information. This startled me, and I said that the name "Theory of Everything" was a physicists' in-joke (referring as it does to a single theory that would bring together gravity and quantum mechanics), and that it certainly wouldn't produce a theory of the psyche or a theory of art. I also tried to say that the value of a scientific theory was to be found through observation, deduction and explanatory power, not political attitudes, but I don't think I explained myself well; she disagreed with what she heard me as saying.
I chose electromagnetism as it is a successful example in physics of the unification of previously disparate phenomena, and it would be part of a Theory of Everything, but I didn't explain this during our brief conversation.
I don't want to make too much of this, as it was a noisy environment and not a good time for serious discussion. I hope that we were talking at cross-purposes, but surely even to consider that the theory of electromagnetism might be fascist is to be grievously confused about the nature of theories in physics.
I was regrettably reminded of one of the silliest episodes in post-modernism, the (by now widely quoted) statement by the otherwise respected feminist scholar Luce Irigaray about Einstein's equation E = mc²:
Is E=Mc² a sexed equation? Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possible sexed nature of the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged that which goes faster.
I have seen attempted defences of this sort of writing along the lines that although the people writing like this appear to be using scientific terms, they actually have different meanings in mind for the words. I have not seen the source for the quotation from Irigaray above, but it is hard to give it any reasonable interpretation.
I did find a related article by Irigaray, "Is the Subject of Science Sexed?", Cultural Critique No.1 (Autumn 1985), pp. 73-88. In this Irigaray comments on a range of sciences, from psychoanalysis through biology to mathematics and physics, and by the time she gets to mathematics it is clear that she is using terminology from the subject without understanding it.
There is of course room for a serious study of what scientists do, what biases they bring to their work, who funds it, what questions are studied and what are not, and so forth, and indeed many scientists themselves are very much concerned about these questions. But statements like Irigaray's had the effect of bringing the whole area of so-called science studies into disrepute, and calling physical theories "fascist" does not help.
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Human, Transhuman, Posthuman (Part 2)
Recently I attended the "Humanity+" conference in Melbourne
(http://hplusconf.com.au/). This is the second of two posts about the conference.
In my previous post I discussed some presentations at the Humanity+ conference that were closely related to current science. This time I will discuss some presentations related to art.
Firstly, Stelarc's presentation, entitled "Meat, Metal and Code". For those who don't know of him, Stelarc (http://stelarc.org) is an Australian artist who has really pushed the boundaries of the body in art. He is also a very engaging presenter, with an extraordinary laugh. He took us through some of his works, from his third hand (an artificial hand he controlled with electrodes attached to his stomach muscles) and the stomach sculpture (which he swallowed: it then unfolded and transmitted video of the interior of his stomach) to more recent work, including work with exoskeletons, and the work Ping, where his body was controlled via the Internet by people clicking on an interface which resulted in Stelarc's muscles being made to move by electric shocks. Stelarc was wearing VR goggles that let him see (via webcam) the face of the person who was controlling him.
Stelarc also talked about, and showed us, his extra ear. The extra ear was originally intended to be on the side of his head, but he ended up growing a small-scale ear-shaped piece of flesh on the inside of one arm, on an implanted scaffolding of artificial cartilage. He also had a microphone and Bluetooth transmitter implanted into the "ear", but he developed a serious infection and the microphone and transmitter had to be removed. He plans to try again with them, and also to implant a small speaker in a gap in his teeth, thus completing a sort of human telephone circuit. There are also plans to inject some of his stem cells to create an earlobe, which is missing at present.
Stelarc also ran the Prosthetic Head for us, an avatar of Stelarc which one converses with, Eliza-fashion, by typing statements or questions. The Head is on a screen. It is based on a scan of Stelarc's head, has changing facial expressions, and talks via speech synthesis. An extension of this work is the Articulated Head, which he only mentioned briefly. This is mounted on a robot arm and has an "attention facility": it is capable of getting bored and turning away from someone interacting with it.
Recently Stelarc reprised his early suspension works, where he had large hooks pushed through his skin and was suspended by steel cables. He did one this March, after a break of more than 20 years, suspended over a four-metre-long statue of his arm with the extra ear. He did say that doing a suspension again wasn't one of his best ideas!
Stelarc had a disconcerting habit during the presentation of referring to himself as "the body" or "this body" or "the artist", though he did say "I" some of the time. In response to a question he said: "There is not an 'I' that owns this body. This body exists and interacts."
Natasha Vita-More (which I think is an adopted name; http://www.natasha.cc) describes herself as a designer, though she has evidently had a very varied career; at one point she did pre-astronaut training. She described her "Primo Posthuman" design for a re-engineered body, with choice of gender, improved skin with adjustable colour, and so on. She made this design in collaboration with various professionals, but as far as I can tell it is essentially a piece of conceptual art, without technical detail of the sort I described in my previous post. She also showed us other works, based in part on things like scans of the bone density of her body; to some extent they are meditations on the frailty of the human body—hers. She said she isn't interested in radical body modification for herself (as things are now), though she has had cosmetic surgery.
Her main work seems to be tireless promotion of ideas around trans-humanism, a movement to improve the human condition by scientific means, leading ultimately to humans being able to take charge of their own evolution.
A surprise was the talk by Stuart Candy (http://futuryst.com/). Candy is a professional futurist: his day job is as a member of the "Foresight" team of the big engineering and construction firm Arup. He also has an adjunct position at the California College of the Arts.
Stuart explained what he does as a futurist. He doesn't try to "predict the future": that is futile. He does develop a range of possible future scenarios; the challenge then is to try to move towards the scenarios that we prefer and away from the ones we don't want. He also considered that the scenarios are best presented as stories or experiences, rather than through tables and charts.
This is where the surprise came in, as these stories or experiences are essentially imaginative artworks. Candy studied at the University of Hawaii under the noted futurist Jim Dator. While Candy was there, the State Government of Hawaii launched a project to discuss Hawaii in 2050 and asked the University to assist. The result was four experiential scenarios. In one, which was more or less "business as usual", the audience attended an election debate between the candidates for the Governorship of Hawaii in 2050; the candidates were corporations, as legal personhood was assumed to have advanced to the point where corporations could run for office. In another scenario the audience was herded into a room by gun-carrying soldiers for an indoctrination lecture. It was supposed that a global economic collapse had essentially separated Hawaii from the rest of the world; parts of the U.S. Army based in Hawaii had taken over, cloaking their authoritarian rule with respectability by restoring the Hawaiian monarchy, which was overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup in 1893. In all there were four such future scenarios.
At the California College of the Arts, Candy has encouraged students to come up with projects like the "Genetic Census of 2020", where the students got people to spit into a test-tube, supposedly to ascertain their genetic profiles. Candy's point was that these experiential scenarios present ideas about the future far more engagingly than any number of graphs, charts and technical reports. He showed us some pages from a "Summary for Policymakers" produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It was full of dry graphs and charts, whose implications are in fact frightening, but which would have had far more impact on the policy makers if they had been supplemented with the sort of experiential scenarios Candy was showing us.
A change of pace was provided by a reading by Lisa Jacobson (http://lisajacobson.org/) of extracts from her verse novel The Sunlit Zone, which is being published this month. The novel is set partly in the year 2050, and the extracts we heard blended the everyday with occasional startling elements that are supposed no more remarkable in 2050 than an iPad is today. Jacobson has won awards for her poetry, but the verse novel is apparently a new form for her. She read well, and the half hour she had went all too quickly.
Nobody at the conference represented the cultural studies/critical theory side of things, which is understandable considering some of the hostile attitudes towards science that have come from that camp, and the only person who mentioned critical theory was Natasha Vita-More. She discussed briefly a 2011 book Transhumanism and Its Critics, edited by Gregory Hansell and William Grassie, which contains contributions from both sides.
For me the weekend was a very interesting glimpse into the transhumanist world, which I was previously only vaguely aware of. And if Aubrey de Grey's work "only" leads to an effective therapy for macular degeneration, more power to his elbow!
In my previous post I discussed some presentations at the Humanity+ conference that were closely related to current science. This time I will discuss some presentations related to art.
Firstly, Stelarc's presentation, entitled "Meat, Metal and Code". For those who don't know of him, Stelarc (http://stelarc.org) is an Australian artist who has really pushed the boundaries of the body in art. He is also a very engaging presenter, with an extraordinary laugh. He took us through some of his works, from his third hand (an artificial hand he controlled with electrodes attached to his stomach muscles) and the stomach sculpture (which he swallowed: it then unfolded and transmitted video of the interior of his stomach) to more recent work, including work with exoskeletons, and the work Ping, where his body was controlled via the Internet by people clicking on an interface which resulted in Stelarc's muscles being made to move by electric shocks. Stelarc was wearing VR goggles that let him see (via webcam) the face of the person who was controlling him.
Stelarc also talked about, and showed us, his extra ear. The extra ear was originally intended to be on the side of his head, but he ended up growing a small-scale ear-shaped piece of flesh on the inside of one arm, on an implanted scaffolding of artificial cartilage. He also had a microphone and Bluetooth transmitter implanted into the "ear", but he developed a serious infection and the microphone and transmitter had to be removed. He plans to try again with them, and also to implant a small speaker in a gap in his teeth, thus completing a sort of human telephone circuit. There are also plans to inject some of his stem cells to create an earlobe, which is missing at present.
Stelarc also ran the Prosthetic Head for us, an avatar of Stelarc which one converses with, Eliza-fashion, by typing statements or questions. The Head is on a screen. It is based on a scan of Stelarc's head, has changing facial expressions, and talks via speech synthesis. An extension of this work is the Articulated Head, which he only mentioned briefly. This is mounted on a robot arm and has an "attention facility": it is capable of getting bored and turning away from someone interacting with it.
Recently Stelarc reprised his early suspension works, where he had large hooks pushed through his skin and was suspended by steel cables. He did one this March, after a break of more than 20 years, suspended over a four-metre-long statue of his arm with the extra ear. He did say that doing a suspension again wasn't one of his best ideas!
Stelarc had a disconcerting habit during the presentation of referring to himself as "the body" or "this body" or "the artist", though he did say "I" some of the time. In response to a question he said: "There is not an 'I' that owns this body. This body exists and interacts."
Natasha Vita-More (which I think is an adopted name; http://www.natasha.cc) describes herself as a designer, though she has evidently had a very varied career; at one point she did pre-astronaut training. She described her "Primo Posthuman" design for a re-engineered body, with choice of gender, improved skin with adjustable colour, and so on. She made this design in collaboration with various professionals, but as far as I can tell it is essentially a piece of conceptual art, without technical detail of the sort I described in my previous post. She also showed us other works, based in part on things like scans of the bone density of her body; to some extent they are meditations on the frailty of the human body—hers. She said she isn't interested in radical body modification for herself (as things are now), though she has had cosmetic surgery.
Her main work seems to be tireless promotion of ideas around trans-humanism, a movement to improve the human condition by scientific means, leading ultimately to humans being able to take charge of their own evolution.
A surprise was the talk by Stuart Candy (http://futuryst.com/). Candy is a professional futurist: his day job is as a member of the "Foresight" team of the big engineering and construction firm Arup. He also has an adjunct position at the California College of the Arts.
Stuart explained what he does as a futurist. He doesn't try to "predict the future": that is futile. He does develop a range of possible future scenarios; the challenge then is to try to move towards the scenarios that we prefer and away from the ones we don't want. He also considered that the scenarios are best presented as stories or experiences, rather than through tables and charts.
This is where the surprise came in, as these stories or experiences are essentially imaginative artworks. Candy studied at the University of Hawaii under the noted futurist Jim Dator. While Candy was there, the State Government of Hawaii launched a project to discuss Hawaii in 2050 and asked the University to assist. The result was four experiential scenarios. In one, which was more or less "business as usual", the audience attended an election debate between the candidates for the Governorship of Hawaii in 2050; the candidates were corporations, as legal personhood was assumed to have advanced to the point where corporations could run for office. In another scenario the audience was herded into a room by gun-carrying soldiers for an indoctrination lecture. It was supposed that a global economic collapse had essentially separated Hawaii from the rest of the world; parts of the U.S. Army based in Hawaii had taken over, cloaking their authoritarian rule with respectability by restoring the Hawaiian monarchy, which was overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup in 1893. In all there were four such future scenarios.
At the California College of the Arts, Candy has encouraged students to come up with projects like the "Genetic Census of 2020", where the students got people to spit into a test-tube, supposedly to ascertain their genetic profiles. Candy's point was that these experiential scenarios present ideas about the future far more engagingly than any number of graphs, charts and technical reports. He showed us some pages from a "Summary for Policymakers" produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It was full of dry graphs and charts, whose implications are in fact frightening, but which would have had far more impact on the policy makers if they had been supplemented with the sort of experiential scenarios Candy was showing us.
A change of pace was provided by a reading by Lisa Jacobson (http://lisajacobson.org/) of extracts from her verse novel The Sunlit Zone, which is being published this month. The novel is set partly in the year 2050, and the extracts we heard blended the everyday with occasional startling elements that are supposed no more remarkable in 2050 than an iPad is today. Jacobson has won awards for her poetry, but the verse novel is apparently a new form for her. She read well, and the half hour she had went all too quickly.
Nobody at the conference represented the cultural studies/critical theory side of things, which is understandable considering some of the hostile attitudes towards science that have come from that camp, and the only person who mentioned critical theory was Natasha Vita-More. She discussed briefly a 2011 book Transhumanism and Its Critics, edited by Gregory Hansell and William Grassie, which contains contributions from both sides.
For me the weekend was a very interesting glimpse into the transhumanist world, which I was previously only vaguely aware of. And if Aubrey de Grey's work "only" leads to an effective therapy for macular degeneration, more power to his elbow!
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Human, Transhuman, Posthuman (Part 1)
Last weekend I attended the "Humanity+" conference in Melbourne
(http://hplusconf.com.au), held at RMIT. It consisted of an
eclectic mix of presentations by invited speakers, without
contributed papers or a published proceedings, though videos of the
talks will become available. The conference was under the
auspices of the Humanity+ organisation (http://humanityplus.org),
whose aim is to promote thinking about the "next steps" of
humanity. The main areas of focus appear to be biomedical and
bioengineering developments for longer and healthier life, leading
on to enhancements of the body, and artificial intelligence and
enhancements of the mind. The chair of Humanity+, Natasha
Vita-More, was one of the presenters. I went because I thought
the gerontologist Aubrey de Grey would be worth hearing, and because
the artist Stelarc was giving a presentation.
This conference was more optimistic than pessimistic. Climate change and population pressures were there in the background, and sustainability was a theme, but on the whole the intent was to look beyond these problems to longer-term possible futures for humanity. The organiser was Adam Ford, who has just become a board member of Humanity+, and who has had a considerable involvement in this general area.
Maybe 80 people attended, predominantly but by no means exclusively male, and a mixture of young and old, with relatively few people in the middle age range. I got the impression that almost everyone there had a background in science, engineering or computing.
Aubrey de Grey was well worth hearing. His view on ageing is that normal metabolic processes produce "damage" of various kinds, such as junk inside cells that the body cannot dissolve. We can tolerate a certain amount of such damage, but eventually it starts to harm us. De Grey listed all the classes of damage that are known (and indicated that no fundamentally new classes of damage had come to light in the last 30 years), and indicated plausible approaches to dealing with all of them. He mentioned two specific projects at his laboratory dealing with junk inside the cell, targeted at macular degeneration, which is a leading cause of blindness, and at atherosclerosis, which is inflammation of the walls of the arteries, heading to heart disease and strokes.
All of this comes under the heading of "regenerative medicine", therapies to rejuvenate (that is, to make young again) systems in the body by clearing out damage and taking the bodily systems back some way towards the healthy young adult state. Once such therapies are in place for all the major types of damage (which is quite a few years away), de Grey thinks that we will be able to have another 30 years of healthy middle age. These days 60 is the new 50; with these therapies 80 or 90 would be the new 50. But that is only the start. As techniques improve, clearing out a greater proportion of damage, repeated rejuvenation would allow enormous prolongation of healthy, active life, to ultimately maybe 1,000 years. This doesn't imply a cure for cancer, but it does imply a method of avoiding cancer by manipulating telomeres (the caps at the end of DNA strands).
All of this provoked a lot of discussion, and de Grey devoted his second presentation to discussing objections to his program. The diseases of ageing are not just a first world problem: de Grey said that already two-thirds of the deaths in the world are due to them. Of course if we do have the potential to live to 1,000 years there will have to be massive changes in society, but de Grey pointed out that by the time such long life becomes feasible there will have been massive changes in society anyway.
Incidentally de Grey is not a food faddist or anything of that sort. He was asked about diet, and said that as long as one is reasonably sensible about diet and exercise (and doesn't smoke), things like the "paleo diet" and the like don't achieve much. And he enjoyed a beer at the pub afterwards.
The other presentation that contained a road map for future developments was that of Tim Josling on artificial intelligence. He outlined the so-called hype cycle that tends to apply to new technologies. Once a new technology becomes known, at first there is a great deal of hype, resulting in wildly inflated expectations. When the technology doesn't live up to these, there is a "trough of disillusionment", and then after than attitudes to the technology finally settle to a realistic view of what it can achieve.
Artificial intelligence (AI) went through this cycle: after quite a long initial period of hype the "AI winter" descended in the 1980s, when funding dried up and AI was generally regarded to have failed. In fact it developed quietly in various specialised areas. Josling listed several techniques developed years or decades ago that were impractical at the time but are now coming in to their own as increased computer power has made them feasible. Incidentally Josling is more optimistic about the continuation of Moore's Law (that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years) than Herb Sutter (whom I mentioned in a previous post), but it doesn't matter for Josling's argument whether increased computing power arrives via Moore's Law in one box or via networks, as Sutter expects.
Josling expects that more and more low-level white-collar jobs will be cheaper to do by machines, on a relatively short time frame, and he ended by posing the question: "Leisured aristocracy or unemployed underclass?"
This sort of prophecy was made in my youth, and hasn't really come to pass. However, the "acceptable" minimum rate of unemployment has risen from 2% to 5% in my lifetime, and since the official figures are constructed to be as low as possible, the true unemployment figure is at least 10%. I also think that the availability of cheap Third World workers has delayed the development of automation, but that is beginning to come to an end. Eventually the machines will be cheaper than even a Third World worker.
In the background of Josling's presentation is a concept known as "The Singularity", and there was a panel discussion around this at the conference. The Singularity is when machines become smarter than we are; this may be a long way off, but it is hard to argue convincingly that it can never happen. The Singularity is a sort of "event horizon", as we cannot predict what would happen after that. As far as raw processing power is concerned, by one estimate a current desktop machine with a good graphics card has maybe 1/2000 of the raw power of a human brain. Networks of 2000 such machines already exist. Though one of the panellists, Colin Hales, indicated that recent discoveries have indicated that the brain may have far more power than the above estimate implies.
The work up until now has been in specialised domains, for example making driverless trucks for mining sites. There was mention of a possible approach to general artificial intelligence being pioneered by Marcus Hutter at the Australian National University. Josling indicated that the promising advances in artificial intelligence involve various forms of machine learning (and I got the impression that this applies to Hutter's work); this led into a discussion of risks. If a machine has learnt from experience rather than being explicitly programmed (and this already happens in some areas) then we don't know in detail how it does what it does. If it does something unexpected and kills or injures someone, it is not at all clear who should be held accountable. One of the attendees, who works as a safety engineer (I didn't catch his name) said that once a technology such as that for driverless trucks is mature, it is more reliable than having human drivers; it is the early period of introduction of such technologies that is really dangerous. In this context, the Google Car has driven itself autonomously around Los Angeles. One of the panellists, James Newton-Thomas, who works with autonomous mining equipment, indicated that the current approach is to segregate the equipment behind physical barriers, as well as fitting independent safety systems.
A discussion that was only touched on at the conference was how to make sure that a super-intelligent machine would be friendly towards us, and there was some discussion about the relationship among consciousness, intelligence and morality. There was also some discussion about the uses to which governments and large corporations would put super-intelligent machines. The prospect of large-scale technological unemployment and the thought-police-like powers already available via automated surveillance and data mining are much more immediate concerns.
(To be continued...)
This conference was more optimistic than pessimistic. Climate change and population pressures were there in the background, and sustainability was a theme, but on the whole the intent was to look beyond these problems to longer-term possible futures for humanity. The organiser was Adam Ford, who has just become a board member of Humanity+, and who has had a considerable involvement in this general area.
Maybe 80 people attended, predominantly but by no means exclusively male, and a mixture of young and old, with relatively few people in the middle age range. I got the impression that almost everyone there had a background in science, engineering or computing.
Aubrey de Grey was well worth hearing. His view on ageing is that normal metabolic processes produce "damage" of various kinds, such as junk inside cells that the body cannot dissolve. We can tolerate a certain amount of such damage, but eventually it starts to harm us. De Grey listed all the classes of damage that are known (and indicated that no fundamentally new classes of damage had come to light in the last 30 years), and indicated plausible approaches to dealing with all of them. He mentioned two specific projects at his laboratory dealing with junk inside the cell, targeted at macular degeneration, which is a leading cause of blindness, and at atherosclerosis, which is inflammation of the walls of the arteries, heading to heart disease and strokes.
All of this comes under the heading of "regenerative medicine", therapies to rejuvenate (that is, to make young again) systems in the body by clearing out damage and taking the bodily systems back some way towards the healthy young adult state. Once such therapies are in place for all the major types of damage (which is quite a few years away), de Grey thinks that we will be able to have another 30 years of healthy middle age. These days 60 is the new 50; with these therapies 80 or 90 would be the new 50. But that is only the start. As techniques improve, clearing out a greater proportion of damage, repeated rejuvenation would allow enormous prolongation of healthy, active life, to ultimately maybe 1,000 years. This doesn't imply a cure for cancer, but it does imply a method of avoiding cancer by manipulating telomeres (the caps at the end of DNA strands).
All of this provoked a lot of discussion, and de Grey devoted his second presentation to discussing objections to his program. The diseases of ageing are not just a first world problem: de Grey said that already two-thirds of the deaths in the world are due to them. Of course if we do have the potential to live to 1,000 years there will have to be massive changes in society, but de Grey pointed out that by the time such long life becomes feasible there will have been massive changes in society anyway.
Incidentally de Grey is not a food faddist or anything of that sort. He was asked about diet, and said that as long as one is reasonably sensible about diet and exercise (and doesn't smoke), things like the "paleo diet" and the like don't achieve much. And he enjoyed a beer at the pub afterwards.
The other presentation that contained a road map for future developments was that of Tim Josling on artificial intelligence. He outlined the so-called hype cycle that tends to apply to new technologies. Once a new technology becomes known, at first there is a great deal of hype, resulting in wildly inflated expectations. When the technology doesn't live up to these, there is a "trough of disillusionment", and then after than attitudes to the technology finally settle to a realistic view of what it can achieve.
Artificial intelligence (AI) went through this cycle: after quite a long initial period of hype the "AI winter" descended in the 1980s, when funding dried up and AI was generally regarded to have failed. In fact it developed quietly in various specialised areas. Josling listed several techniques developed years or decades ago that were impractical at the time but are now coming in to their own as increased computer power has made them feasible. Incidentally Josling is more optimistic about the continuation of Moore's Law (that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years) than Herb Sutter (whom I mentioned in a previous post), but it doesn't matter for Josling's argument whether increased computing power arrives via Moore's Law in one box or via networks, as Sutter expects.
Josling expects that more and more low-level white-collar jobs will be cheaper to do by machines, on a relatively short time frame, and he ended by posing the question: "Leisured aristocracy or unemployed underclass?"
This sort of prophecy was made in my youth, and hasn't really come to pass. However, the "acceptable" minimum rate of unemployment has risen from 2% to 5% in my lifetime, and since the official figures are constructed to be as low as possible, the true unemployment figure is at least 10%. I also think that the availability of cheap Third World workers has delayed the development of automation, but that is beginning to come to an end. Eventually the machines will be cheaper than even a Third World worker.
In the background of Josling's presentation is a concept known as "The Singularity", and there was a panel discussion around this at the conference. The Singularity is when machines become smarter than we are; this may be a long way off, but it is hard to argue convincingly that it can never happen. The Singularity is a sort of "event horizon", as we cannot predict what would happen after that. As far as raw processing power is concerned, by one estimate a current desktop machine with a good graphics card has maybe 1/2000 of the raw power of a human brain. Networks of 2000 such machines already exist. Though one of the panellists, Colin Hales, indicated that recent discoveries have indicated that the brain may have far more power than the above estimate implies.
The work up until now has been in specialised domains, for example making driverless trucks for mining sites. There was mention of a possible approach to general artificial intelligence being pioneered by Marcus Hutter at the Australian National University. Josling indicated that the promising advances in artificial intelligence involve various forms of machine learning (and I got the impression that this applies to Hutter's work); this led into a discussion of risks. If a machine has learnt from experience rather than being explicitly programmed (and this already happens in some areas) then we don't know in detail how it does what it does. If it does something unexpected and kills or injures someone, it is not at all clear who should be held accountable. One of the attendees, who works as a safety engineer (I didn't catch his name) said that once a technology such as that for driverless trucks is mature, it is more reliable than having human drivers; it is the early period of introduction of such technologies that is really dangerous. In this context, the Google Car has driven itself autonomously around Los Angeles. One of the panellists, James Newton-Thomas, who works with autonomous mining equipment, indicated that the current approach is to segregate the equipment behind physical barriers, as well as fitting independent safety systems.
A discussion that was only touched on at the conference was how to make sure that a super-intelligent machine would be friendly towards us, and there was some discussion about the relationship among consciousness, intelligence and morality. There was also some discussion about the uses to which governments and large corporations would put super-intelligent machines. The prospect of large-scale technological unemployment and the thought-police-like powers already available via automated surveillance and data mining are much more immediate concerns.
(To be continued...)
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Phenomenology Rules
(Long post)
At the beginning of October I went to a three-day conference in Melbourne called "Time, Transcendence, Performance". Not something that I would normally do, but my installation Cloud Drum was in the art show associated with the event. All the works dealt with some mixture of time and performance in some way, and since mine involves two time scales and is interactive it fitted in quite well.
The conference was organised by Stuart Grant, Jodie McNeilly and Caroline Vains, assisted by lots of people; Jeff Stewart looked after the art show, among other things. The conference took place at three locations: Monash University's Caulfield campus, Dancehouse in Carlton, and ACMI at Federation Square. There were also events in Second Life. At times it seemed that threre were three or four separate conferences going on, and I missed out on all the Federation Square events, including Stelarc's opening talk. Also at Caulfield there were multiple parallel sessions, so I only saw a fraction of the conference. It was certainly a large and complex event, with a sizeable international participation. Of the parts I saw, although the tight schedule became a bit frayed at times, as far as I can tell things ran pretty well.
I don't think I have met a card-carrying phenomenologist before, but there were quite a few around the conference. It was pretty clear that "time" in the conference title didn't have a lot to do with physics, but rather with personal experience. Heidegger and especially Husserl came up repeatedly. (I realise that there is an argument that time as conceived by physicists can be derived from phenomenology, but I don't know how it goes.) There is a whole language here that I don't speak - this is not a criticism, just a comment - so quite a few of the presentations went over my head. There was a sub-theme of comments on intense experience, described by one speaker as "moments of stillness".
As well as theory, there was practice. The main performing artform people were concerned with seemed to be dance, and there were performances at Dancehouse, some quite striking, in the evenings. I'll just mention "Zeno's Overcoat", performed by Peter Fraser (dancer) and Dale Gorfinkel (musician). There were also two talks I attended where the speakers described their personal experiences very vividly. One was by Ian Maxwell (Sydney), describing his baptism into the Greek Orthodox Church, which came about because he wished to marry a Greek woman; the other was the last paper of the conference, given by Alphonso Lingis (U.S.A), which consisted of a series of vignettes of various experiences he has had over the years, with appropriate music. Although both of these people were talking about specific experiences, they somehow managed to give them a universal character.
I'm not sure what I've taken away from the conference, though I found it enjoyable, and there were lots of interesting things. There is a whole world of phenomenology, it seems. Indeed, I did have a sense to some extent of two parallel worlds, with phenomenologists occupying one and cognitive scientists (who were not represented here) the other. From what I can work out, the phenomenologists opened up these questions first, but a lot has happened since. This isn't a criticism of Stuart Grant, as the conference already had an impressively wide scope. Also, I understand he has plans for bringing together phenomenologists and cognitive scientists at some time.
The conference also pointed out to me a specific difference between the humanities and the sciences. I saw somewhere (I don't remember where) a comment that in science, successful work becomes anonymous, in that it is absorbed into textbooks and nobody except the odd historian feels the need to go back to the original writings. This certainly fits in with my past experience in science. The conference was on the humanities; there were constant references back to the writings of Heidegger and Husserl, and other originary thinkers. Also, the history of science is a small sub-discipline, whereas it seems that many (most?) humanities scholars are part-time historians of their disciplines. Again, a Mathematics department is full of mathematicians; the parallel would be an English department full of novelists or poets. Not only is the history of science not much practised in science departments, but criticism or analysis as understood in the humanities is not much practised either. This isn't a question of wilful blindess; it must be a consequence of the different ways knowledge or understanding is secured in the different disciplines.
I'm not gong to rush in any further where angels fear to tread.
At the beginning of October I went to a three-day conference in Melbourne called "Time, Transcendence, Performance". Not something that I would normally do, but my installation Cloud Drum was in the art show associated with the event. All the works dealt with some mixture of time and performance in some way, and since mine involves two time scales and is interactive it fitted in quite well.
The conference was organised by Stuart Grant, Jodie McNeilly and Caroline Vains, assisted by lots of people; Jeff Stewart looked after the art show, among other things. The conference took place at three locations: Monash University's Caulfield campus, Dancehouse in Carlton, and ACMI at Federation Square. There were also events in Second Life. At times it seemed that threre were three or four separate conferences going on, and I missed out on all the Federation Square events, including Stelarc's opening talk. Also at Caulfield there were multiple parallel sessions, so I only saw a fraction of the conference. It was certainly a large and complex event, with a sizeable international participation. Of the parts I saw, although the tight schedule became a bit frayed at times, as far as I can tell things ran pretty well.
I don't think I have met a card-carrying phenomenologist before, but there were quite a few around the conference. It was pretty clear that "time" in the conference title didn't have a lot to do with physics, but rather with personal experience. Heidegger and especially Husserl came up repeatedly. (I realise that there is an argument that time as conceived by physicists can be derived from phenomenology, but I don't know how it goes.) There is a whole language here that I don't speak - this is not a criticism, just a comment - so quite a few of the presentations went over my head. There was a sub-theme of comments on intense experience, described by one speaker as "moments of stillness".
As well as theory, there was practice. The main performing artform people were concerned with seemed to be dance, and there were performances at Dancehouse, some quite striking, in the evenings. I'll just mention "Zeno's Overcoat", performed by Peter Fraser (dancer) and Dale Gorfinkel (musician). There were also two talks I attended where the speakers described their personal experiences very vividly. One was by Ian Maxwell (Sydney), describing his baptism into the Greek Orthodox Church, which came about because he wished to marry a Greek woman; the other was the last paper of the conference, given by Alphonso Lingis (U.S.A), which consisted of a series of vignettes of various experiences he has had over the years, with appropriate music. Although both of these people were talking about specific experiences, they somehow managed to give them a universal character.
I'm not sure what I've taken away from the conference, though I found it enjoyable, and there were lots of interesting things. There is a whole world of phenomenology, it seems. Indeed, I did have a sense to some extent of two parallel worlds, with phenomenologists occupying one and cognitive scientists (who were not represented here) the other. From what I can work out, the phenomenologists opened up these questions first, but a lot has happened since. This isn't a criticism of Stuart Grant, as the conference already had an impressively wide scope. Also, I understand he has plans for bringing together phenomenologists and cognitive scientists at some time.
The conference also pointed out to me a specific difference between the humanities and the sciences. I saw somewhere (I don't remember where) a comment that in science, successful work becomes anonymous, in that it is absorbed into textbooks and nobody except the odd historian feels the need to go back to the original writings. This certainly fits in with my past experience in science. The conference was on the humanities; there were constant references back to the writings of Heidegger and Husserl, and other originary thinkers. Also, the history of science is a small sub-discipline, whereas it seems that many (most?) humanities scholars are part-time historians of their disciplines. Again, a Mathematics department is full of mathematicians; the parallel would be an English department full of novelists or poets. Not only is the history of science not much practised in science departments, but criticism or analysis as understood in the humanities is not much practised either. This isn't a question of wilful blindess; it must be a consequence of the different ways knowledge or understanding is secured in the different disciplines.
I'm not gong to rush in any further where angels fear to tread.
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