This is a pretty cool demo, and the robots are neat-looking but the part of this that’s the most interesting is the problem this is solving. Listen to how often they talk about “low self-weight” and “yielding to human operators”. The top feature of these things is that they can operate in the same area as human workers without tearing their arms off.

In other words, the top-selling feature is that they figured out how to make gentle robots.

Emma,

As I write these words I am sitting in the living room. Technically, it’s a porch but the easy chair, glass of afternoon beer, and somewhat stable net signal make it feel like more of a living room than the actual living room which consists of a TV too old for words and the folded mattress where I’ve been sleeping.

Technically, the porch is outside and the living room is inside, but these kinds of distinctions become academic in a situation where all doors and windows are kept as far open as they can possibly be in the hopes of promoting a cross breeze all day and all night. The porch/living room, kitchen, and living room/bedroom may as well all be pavilions in a gazebo. Only my hosts’ bedrooms are ever really sealed and only when they’ve got overnight guests. (Not that it matters, the walls are old and thin.)

photo credit: Idiolector

Some kind of mysterious transaction just went down in the back alley. I’m not supposed to have noticed it, says Aton. Best not to notice anything around here. But it was broad daylight and how could I not hear the low growl of the engine? It sounded like a gas engine, a real guzzler. Could have been a roadtone, I know, but it sounded genuine to me. I think I even saw smoke.

Last night, we went down by the canal and lit a bonfire. It was pretty nice, though I found it hard to get into at first – too nervous about cops showing up. Samantha laughed at me, said that there was nothing to worry about. Showed me how you can rewire a temp-permit and fix the dates with the right kind of data-paste. She says people leave expired permits all over. I didn’t ask where she got the paste.

In the end it didn’t matter. No one showed up aside from more friends and friends of friends. Late into the night a group split off to go to a place called something like WARHOGS or whatever, Samantha left but I decided to stay behind. Lay in the grass with a few of the quieter folk, trying to spy stars through the clouds. Had a long inchoate debate about whether the clouds or stars were moving and if it was the stars, were they really satellites or one of the stations? I tried holding my finger still as a reference but by that point everything was too wobbly to really achieve much in the way of scientific accuracy.

I wandered home in a pleasant haze.

Did I tell you? They’ve got real records here. Like antique ones, not the cheap retro ones that you can get in any old onDemand outlet. Aton says that the old ones sounds better, even though they can’t hold as many songs. They’ve got more character, he says. They last longer. I asked about their carcindex, but he just laughed. There’s a lot of really great stuff here. Bands I’d never heard of. I’ve taken some pictures and I’ll try to assemble a collection for you sometime this week.

This morning, Sam took me up on the roof to see the stills. It’s an astounding network of tubes and tubs. I tried to follow the line from rain collectors, through to the casks on the other end. I kept getting lost in the tangle. Sam says that if I stick around long enough, she’ll show me the ropes (pipes).

Pretty much everything involved comes from the rain (don’t worry, Sam made to point out their quadruple filtration and reverse osmosis system) or the freedom garden which is run by a New Organist collective just up the street. They supply the supplies and Sam supplies the resulting booze.

They’re completely illegal of course and the patchwork of tarps and scrap material can’t possibly be hiding them from Constellation. Sam says that out here we’re barely worth bothering about so they just don’t. Aton muttered something about a million eyed-god being blind.

photo credit: Dom Dada

We talked a little about tactics last night. Aton says that the privacy war is over and that the people lost. He says that our only real remaining resort is to inefficiency. It’s like when those guys flew those planes into America. Apparently, the echelons of power already knew it was coming but they knew so much other stuff as well that the information just got drowned out on the way to a decision getting made.

Aton says that when you get pick-pocketed, they get away with it because they put pressure somewhere else on your body at the same time, so you are too busy feeling the one thing to notice the other. He says the only path to freedom is to put so much pressure on the system all over the place, that it can’t notice anything at all.

Apparently there was an old philosopher who hated the government too, who used to say “starve the beast” but Aton says that’s all passed now. You could cut half the surveillance feeds at the swipe of a pen (as if!) and we’d still have more than enough information being fed into the echelon – it wouldn’t impact things at all. So he and Sam are taking the opposite approach.

We’re going out tonight, with bags and bags of sensors and cameras that we’re going to set up and donate to the public feeds. Some of these devices are faulty in all sorts of really interesting ways. We’re going to put them up all over the place, in the least interesting places possible. We’re going to do this for weeks and weeks, just adding more and more mud to the stream.

I also heard Sam say something to Aton about the Russians renting some time on one of their botnets. I think the plan is to put those spam engines to emancipatory use, replacing sex ads with Home Sec keywords. I heard a rumour that their analysis engines are already months behind in processing. They’ll stay that way so long as we can keep the heat on to deny them future budget expansions (all the more reason to ask our brothers and sisters in the capital to redouble their lobbying efforts).

I don’t know if it’ll amount to much in the end, but it seems like the only path we’ve got left.

“Drown the beast.”

Ada

photo credit: urban_data

Back in January, Alexis Madrigal wrote a post called What History Can Bring to (Green) Technology.

It’s a broad thoughtful discussion of the philosophy of history disguised as worries about his upcoming book. I like the way it articulates the importance of sifting through the graveyard of evidence. All the lessons to be gained from the failed attempts.

photo credit: Corey Templeton

Atemporality

On the same day that I read the post, I watched Bruce Sterling’s keynote on atemporality. Have you seen it?

He stands in front of a slideshow of the Looking Into the Past Flickr set and explains that if after seeing those images you don’t get atemporality, then you won’t get it.

He talks about his usual theme: gothic high tech, favela chic, decay, and lifeboat economics. He discusses atemporality as a serene skepticism about the historical narrative. He throws out dozens of promising avenues of artistic and humanities research, it’s really quite inspiring.

And somewhere in there, he throws away a term that stuck with me about contemporary digital culture. A lot of it, he said, is “rag picking”. It’s loops and samples and quotation and so on. He talks approvingly about steampunk, atompunk, and all the other fiction around directions things could have gone, with a slight change a missing or an added event that makes one thing work out after all.

I feel like rag-picking is a lot of my project and a lot of the projects of the best people who I’m interested in these days. Plumbing the discarded depths of the past, present, and future for clues and evidence. We learn a lot about the past by looking at their garbage. Shouldn’t we be learning about the present and future that way too?

So when I read Madrigal talking about needing to examine the detours and off ramps of history I think, “Yes! Exactly!” and then Sterling talks rag picking and it resonates.

The Fragile Timeline

Have you ever wondered how fragile history is? How contingent? Is what happened perpetually on the knife edge of one accident or another, or is it all very robust, would it have all happened anyway, give or take some statistical noise in minor events?

On the fragile hand we have all the narrowly missed assassination attempts and Back to the Future. For the case of robustness, we have the many stories of close-call duplicate patentings and parallel scientific discoveries. But hold on! Who is to say that the death of Hitler would have halted the Third Reich? And what makes us so sure that the world born of Bell’s telephone company would be in any way similar to one born of Gray’s?

This is an important question because it has a natural corollary about the fragility of the future.

Steampunk and Atompunk and all the cacophonous children of cyberpunk seem to come down squarely on the side of contingency. If only Babbage’s work had been fully funded, say the Steampunks, the information age might have been ushered in a century earlier. They see in the proto-cybernetic governors and pneumatic tubes the seeds of a future that could have germinated earlier.

But before we get too excited, consider this subtle little dig from the Steampunk entry on Wikipedia: “these frequently are presented in an idealized light, or with a presumption of functionality.”

I was reading this interview with Dr. Story Musgrave on space flight. In it, he drops an amazing statistic. For the cost of the International Space Station, he says, we could have had 300 Voyager missions. 300!

photo credit: Paloetic

Let’s allow some ideological slop for inflation, increasingly complex machines, and perhaps a secret agenda. How far off do you think the estimate is? 2x? 3x? Even at 100 missions, we’re considering two orders of magnitude more trips than the ISS gives us. Listen, I love the International Space Station. It’s right there on the same blurry boundary between architects and cyborgs that the space program was at 50 years ago. No one enjoyed Bruce Sterling’s Dwell interview about ISS living conditions more than me.

But 300! That’s multiple missions to every planet, moon and pseudo planet (we love you, Pluto!) in the solar system. I don’t buy the argument that human spaceflight is more inspiring than robot space flight. Let’s be honest with one another, which was more exciting? The now routine ISS docking and re-crewing procedures, the corporate drenched SpaceShipOne pseudo-flight, or the life and death struggle of Spirit to stay operational on Mars? Let me give you a hint. Two of those missions do not have a fan fiction LiveJournal, nor did they star in an episode of XKCD.

Let’s discuss the moonwalk. For the overwhelming majority of humans it was a media event, just as remote as the guided missile strikes in Iraq. The dream that one day you too could walk on the Moon? Maybe. Maybe that flew in 1969. It’s 2010 now and most of us are not homeric astronaut demigods. We’re dudes and ladies with robot phones and Wii controllers.

Geoffrey Miller is worried that our increasingly compelling virtual content will drive us down a dead end. Better entertainment systems will keep us trapped on the planet as we get more and more into World of Warcraft or whatever. I have a different theory. What if this stuff is all training?

Generations of gamers are getting used to telepresence. We spend all kinds of time projecting ourselves into imagined distant worlds. Why not into real distant worlds? The US military is miles ahead of the rest of us here. Kids in Vegas patrol the roads of Afghanistan. They change shifts, while the robot remains in the air. It’s far more efficient and the vehicles are much, much cheaper.

The dreamed approach of putting humans back on the Moon and then on Mars. This is a high expense, high stakes, high risk proposition and we have only the dimmest idea of what’s there. I like Brooks and Flynn’s idea. Send the robots first.

Send thousands of robots. Little robots – cheap ones that are disposable. More robots than NASA can manage. Fast, cheap, and out of control.

Want to inspire the kids of tomorrow? Forget the heroic myths. That kind of inspiration is over. “Anyone can be the President.” No they can’t. We all know it.

Instead of some guy or another walking on Mars, how about this: “Hey kids of Middlevale Elementary, our class has booked off Mars Swarm Unit 213.3 for the rest of May. We’ll be directing the explorations of an actual robot on Mars.”

“You mean we get to drive an actual Mars robot?!”

Look, the only reason we know a lot of what we do about the water cycle on Mars is because a robot’s wheel got stuck. There’s so much that we don’t know about the planet that we’re just tripping over discoveries. We can’t help but find out new things. We don’t even know if Mars is the most interesting place to go.

By all means, let’s keep experimenting with the social, architectural, and cultural needs of a human space exploration program. But while we work out how to get a small group of people to live in a tiny enclosed space for months on end without killing each other, let’s spend a bunch more time figuring out where we should send them. Send humans to explore, but send robots first.

Colosseo: Reimagining the Roman Coliseum with type (Canon 7D) from Cameron Moll on Vimeo.

Cameron Moll has created a poster that depicts the Coliseum using type. The Colosseo is a gloriously hybrid entity, digitally produced but mechanically reproduced. The prints are these beautiful objects, but the Colosseo is also data. You can buy parts of the data as vector art glyphs, while a low-resolution digital copy flies around the Internet.

The artwork is great but I’m sharing this for the video, which first lovingly depicts and then explicitly discusses the fetishistic craftsmanship of printing the posters. In fact, the video devotes far more time to the process of reproducing the work than to the time spent creating it, which was done on a computer and much more time-consuming. (Moll has released other videos focussing the act of digital creation.)

Here’s why this fascinates me:

An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead us to an all-important insight: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed.

Walter Benjamin The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

And yet, here are Cameron Moll and Bryce Knudson managing to impart all kinds of aura and ritual to the reproduction. The reproductions are weirdly more authentic than the original which is just a file with dubious forward-compatibility.

I enjoy this alchemy, made possible by the presence of easier reproduction techniques. It transmutes the time needed to make a letterpress work into painstaking labour when, at the moment of invention, it was labour-saving. Imagine the salespeople and inventors of these machines learning that their long term legacy would be assured by how difficult they are to use, compared to their displacing successors (yes, yes, I know there are special features of the resulting print that are unique to the process but the video is all about the process itself).

What I’m deeply curious about is what comes next. At what point will the techniques have morphed and changed to that point that lovingly submitting PDFs to be printed “by hand” on colour printer feels more authentic than whatever’s replaced it? I suppose we’re about due for dot-matrix nostalgia.

I think we’re already seeing some glimpses of that sentiment in essays like this one:

I want to make things, not just glue things together.

Mike Taylor Whatever happened to programming?