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March 7th, 2010
The scientists keep asking: “is evolution over?” Such a stupid question.
If our society has stopped evolving toward perfecting our survival, instead it selects toward an aesthetic ideal. Material wealth is the measuring stick, and success in this realm is mostly governed by privilege, personality, looks and, occasionally, fashionable skills. It is survival of the prettiest, the boldest and the most charming.
The only problem with these ideals is that they are artificial, they are only relevant within a human perspective of the world, a perspective somewhat warped by our vastly overdeveloped brains. These measures mean nothing to our environment and the elements that shape it.
Deciding if evolution is over is akin to fearing the “end of the world”. The end of the world is not the issue, only the end of human life upon it. We needn’t question if evolution has finished, only if it has finished with us. Our only fear should be that, as a species, we may already be beautiful and dead.
Posted in bad science, evolution, philosophy |
December 14th, 2009
Atoms work together to make cells. Cells work together to form organisms. Organisms work together to form societies, and societies work together to make cultures.
Getting cultures to work together seems to be the tricky one.
Posted in bullets, evolution, philosophy, society |
November 15th, 2008
If you don’t read my work blog (and if you aren’t of the geek persuasion there’s no reason why you should – it would doubtless bore you senseless) you won’t know about my stupidly over-ambitious Open Source Generative Art project that is nibbling away at my precious free time. I have set myself the task of producing 100 generative artworks, to be published one a week for as long as I can keep it up, mainly to see if I can do it, but also to see where it takes me. You are very welcome to drop in and sneer at my awkward efforts, or subscribe and get a new one every Friday.
When putting the site together I felt it needed the obligatory “What Is Generative Art?” FAQ page, to make it more accessible to the bewildered surfer, and so whipped up a bit of copy that I felt did the job. But, obviously unsatisfied with what I wrote, my brain has been bugging me on this question ever since. I’m not sure I can satisfy it.
I don’t require an answer to “What Is Art?“, it’s been a while since I’ve been that drunk, I just want to narrow down what we can call “Generative Art“, and attempt a concise, pithy description. But this is not as simple as it might first appear.
My boy, as with all three year olds, is learning to express himself in a number of ways, including artistically, with varying degrees of success. Naturally, as parents we take stupid amounts of pride in every random daub or scribble he manages to get on a piece of paper, especially if he comes up with something vaguely recognisable. But, my evil brain is wondering, when I compare his works to the algorithmically generated abstracts on abandonedart.org, might my son’s formless doodles also come under the heading ‘generative art’?
The generative element here is a biological process rather than a mechanical one, and the four years taken to complete the algorithm (from conception to splats of paint on paper) is much longer than the process you can observe with each of the abandonedart works. But isn’t the principle essentially the same? Does the “artist” claiming credit for the work (me) have any greater claim on the output of an algorithm he has fashioned than the artistic expressions of a child he has sired?
This is a cruel example obviously, because if anyone can claim to be the artist in this example, it is my son. To attempt to steal the credit for his achievements is an extreme abstraction of influence over individualism, it is only computations we can treat so inhumanely (this century anyway).
It might also be stepping dangerously close to what the crazies call “Intelligent Design“, the idea that a creator might take credit for an evolutionary process if they are the one who defined the initial conditions and started the ball rolling. I’m sure this isn’t the only instance where the concepts of “Artist” and “God” might be so easily interchangeable.
Thirdly, I should also be slapped for once again evoking the spectre of Universal Automatism, seeing the whole universe as one big algorithm; which is what I am doing in proposing a causal chain from a certain ‘creative act’ in the bedroom to an abstract piece bought home from nursery four years later. UA, where every deterministic action or inaction is just part of the great computation, absolves us from responsibility for just about anything we do, our artworks included.
But still I’m no nearer to answering my question. Lets shortcut the discussion with a few bullet points on what I am settling toward, and I challenge you to dispute any of these. For an artwork to be “generative” …
- there has to be some kind of autonomous system involved
- there has to be a degree of unpredictability, and
- the results have to hover somewhere in the sweet spot between chaos and order for it to be appealing.
Beyond these imperfect axioms I can’t come up with anything more definitive.
There is a page on generative.net which collects definitions. Philip Galanter’s is the most often cited,
“Any art practice where the artist creates a process, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other mechanism, which is then set to motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a complete work of art.”
Unfortunately, it’s one of those sentences that leaves your brain looking around the room for someone else to talk to, and it doesn’t even hint at what makes generative art so interesting (bullets 2 and 3 above). I much prefer this glorious nugget, which was teased out of a recent debate on the eu-gene mailing list:
“generative” is where you lose control of a machine which does exactly what you tell it.
If anyone can come up with anything sweeter than that, I’d like to hear it.
Posted in art, culture, evolution, fatherhood, generative art, open source, philosophy, tech, universal automatism, web |
April 18th, 2008
One of the memories I have from my school days is the visit of the “careers advisor”, a strange diplomat from the adult world come to impart her wisdom upon the young. I don’t know whether it still works this way, but in my day careers advice was not a regular part of the curriculum, just an irregular visit by some outside agency. Which is fortunate perhaps because the advice they gave was usually, at best, entirely useless. At worst, dispiriting and psychologically damaging.
“Our records show you’re good at maths. How about working in a bank?”
“Good at art eh? Ever thought about becoming an art teacher?”
Perhaps it wasn’t really her fault that every job I have done in my professional life didn’t actually exist when I was at school. In fact many of the technologies I’m working in at the moment didn’t even exist this time last year, this is how fast things are moving in my field. My career would have been extremely hard to predict, because there was a Black Swan involved – the Internet.
“Black Swan” is a term I probably need to explain before I proceed. There used to be a saying in Medieval England that something was about as likely as “finding a Black Swan”, meaning it was highly unlikely, akin to “when pigs fly”. According to historical record, this term was in widespread use until the 17th Century and the discovery of Australia, which bought with it the first sighting of a Black Swan in 1697. In scientific terms this is known as a paradigm shift, it was a discovery that couldn’t be incorporated into the current understanding, it had to redefine it. And clearly, the metaphor could no longer be used.
Nassib Taleb, in his book of the same name, defines the Black Swan as an event which is 1) hard to predict, 2) highly consequential, and 3) wrongly retro-predicted. The history of human culture is a progression of these Black Swans: the internet, the home computer, the motor car, wikipedia, Harry Potter, Princess Diana, facebook, the Renaissance. World War I was a Black Swan, it may look predictable in hindsight, but prior to it actually happening it was near unimaginable.
Cultural Myopia
If the careers advisor had any imagination about her, she might have talked to me about the job of the Futurist, which is perhaps my dream vocation. It’s basically like being a science fiction author, except better paid and doesn’t require an understanding of character and narrative etc. You basically just dream up big ideas, which is what I spend most nights doing anyway, but instead of losing sleep over them, a futurist sells their ideas to capitalist interests for them to worry about instead. There aren’t many people in this field – Raymond Kurzweil maybe, Bruce Sterling possibly – but if Black Swans are as frequent as Taleb makes out, the very concept of futurology becomes ridiculous. The progression of human culture is about as predictable as the stock market, the weather or any other chaotic system.
Figure and Ground
In trying to predict a chaotic system, a system where there are enough elements for it to be incalculable, we may not be able to accurately predict an outcome, but this doesn’t mean that we can’t still discern patterns. For example, we cannot predict the weather any further than two or three days in advance, but we can still say with confidence that it will be warmer in the summer than it will in the winter. It is by looking at the patterns of the past that we can make predictions for the future.
It is an oft observed phenomenon that every technological leap we make seems to be propelled by either porn or communication, two of the basest human functions, two things it is safe to predict there will always be a demand for.
While the Internet may have been a Black Swan, I’d like to think that a lot of its applications could have been foreseen (which is easy to say with hindsight). The aforementioned wikipedia and facebook for example are the newest of the new (although facebook, a year old now, is already starting to seem like yesterdays news), and weren’t actually possible before the WWW, but the principles behind them – sharing knowledge, keeping in touch with friends – are as old as civilisation.
Marshall McLuhan, sixties cultural theorist, of “the medium is the message” fame, in his later career came up with another epithet which I think is much more useful – “Ignore the figure and watch the ground”. What he’s saying is, when looking at culture and/or technology, don’t be distracted by the phenomenon itself, instead look at what’s going on around it, the effects it is having on the world. This is where the real story is.
While the technological changes themselves might not be easy to predict, the ripples that surround them will likely be quite familiar. Which means we probably can get an idea of where we’ll be in twenty years time, all we need do is look at the past, and squint a bit.
Posted in computers ate my brain, evolution, philosophy, society, tech, web |
January 13th, 2008
 Have you ever questioned why we have such large brains?
The modern human brain is approx 1500 cubic centimeters, three/four times the current size of our closest ape ancestors. Two million years ago, our brains were roughly ape size, around 400cc, but in our transition from Australopithecus to Homo Sapien some evolutionary factor drove the expansion of this one organ to extreme proportions.
Biologically, our brains are hugely over-sized for our bodies. They are swollen organs, much larger and more sophisticated than we have ever required to satisfy purely biological needs. In Darwinian terms, our over-sized brains are actually a selective disadvantage, not just because of the mess of stimuli they create to distract us, but also because they require so much energy to support, energy that would be better devoted to, say, running away from predators. They are also dangerous to develop; just ask anyone who has ever given birth which part of the infant was the hard bit to squeeze out.
To quote Stephen Pinker, “Why would evolution ever have selected for sheer bigness of brain, that bulbous, metabolically greedy organ? … Any selection on brain size itself would surely have favoured the pinhead.”
But we seem to have done alright with them. We have adapted to our excess of cognition, and invented things like computer games, art galleries and shopping channels to keep them busy. We can’t simply switch these brains off, so we have developed our tendency to over-think everything into a series of complicated games to make our basic anthropological processes of eating, fucking and breathing stupidly challenging, just to make the most of our fine cognitive skills.
Clearly this hyper-demanding swollen mass we balance atop our slender necks is not acting in the interests of furthering the species. No other species have found the need to invent a Michelin Restaurant Rating System in order to eat, nor to develop hideously complicated systems of money, status, fame and haircuts in order to determine which members of the opposite sex are attractive to them. No other species thinks about their lives so deeply that some members of it decide upon suicide, not bothering to wait for predators or harsh natural conditions to determine their survival, but to do the job themselves. This is how “smart” we are. The survival of our species has not been because of our big brains, but despite it.
All the indications seem to point to the fact that, despite how pleased we are with ourselves at our ability to build bridges, fly aeroplanes, play football, invent religions and then fight wars over them, in the grand sweep of geological history, we are very likely going to be one of the flash-in-the-pan species. The “civilisation” our big brains have built around us has protected us from nature, but has weakened us physically. Over time we have lost the ability to survive in the natural world. In England, it only takes a few inches of snow to grind us to a standstill and make us unable to leave our homes. So it’s not going to take much of a natural disaster to finish us off.
And if we were to be wiped out tomorrow, it is probably unlikely we would even appear in the fossil record, simply because we’ve only been around 30,000 years or so, which is nothing. The entire history of homo-sapien is the final millimeter in the million mile marathon of life on earth. There’s a very good chance we would be gone and, after our bridges and aeroplanes have crumbled back to dust, leave no trace of our ever having been here.
But don’t lose heart, it may not be that bad. We aren’t the first freaky creatures to have survived long enough to leave a mark.
The Irish Elk, or Megaloceros Giganteus, was neither Irish, nor an Elk. It lived on our planet during the Late Pleistocene era. It sported the most ridiculous headgear ever seen in the history of the planet.
The antlers of the Irish Elk were around 12 feet wide, the size of a small car, a spread larger even than the body that supported them. They were hugely inappropriate appendages – large, heavy and awkward. They severely limited the areas the animal could move in. They were unable to seek food in forests, wetland, or heavy bush. They could only live on ground hard enough to support their weight in an environment open enough to permit them to move. To predators the antlers were a gift; too unwieldy for fighting or self-defence, too heavy to allow the animal to move with any speed, and so prominent that hiding or camouflage were impossible. The antlers were so big that just staying upright was the animal’s most immediate challenge. The “Irish” of the name comes from the peat bogs of Ireland where the majority of their fossilised remains were found. It is thought that the weight of the antlers caused the animals to sink into the bog to their deaths, which explains why so many of their remains have been discovered.
Yet still, despite this ridiculous handicap, the Irish Elk were awarded around 400,000 years on this planet. Nature demonstrated remarkable tolerance to the Irish Elk’s monstrous mutation. Who knows, perhaps she might be accommodating to Homo-Sapien’s monstrous mutation too.
Interesting though, it is now thought that the eventual demise of the Irish Elk was probably down to being hunted to extinction by the rise of Man. The beast had successfully survived half a million years of predators, climate change and natural disasters. But then no saber-toothed tiger ever needed a hat-rack, whereas mankind now has a pressing need to keep his swollen brain warm.
Large comedy antlers are probably not half as dangerous a mutation as an organ that can encourage the animal to engage in extreme sports, or build nuclear weapons though. While I’d like to believe we are no more freaky than the Irish Elk, we’d probably have been able to survive a pair of big antlers for a few hundred thousand years without too great an issue. But the big brain is likely to be a much shorter lived biological mistake.
Posted in evolution, philosophy, zen |
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