By the
first year of university, I had largely succeeded in turning
myself into a human simulation of a computer. I do not fully
understand the motivations for this 'project'. I had a very
strong believe in the value of logic, and used logic as my
main tool in attempting to solve everything from electronic
design, where logic was appropriate, to personal
relationships, where it was decidedly counter-productive. As
part of the process, I taught myself to remove myself from
physical pain, and by extension to separate myself from my
body. In a profound and personal way I had constructed a
'virtual reality' for myself, in which my rational mind was
free from the complications of the biological and emotional.
I felt that ambiguity and contradiction were my gravest
enemies, to be resolved or destroyed at all
costs.
One of my other pet projects
in my teens was a complete rationalization of the English
language so that it made complete sense grammatically and
phonetically. The idea that there were exceptions in
language struck me as wrong, and I delighted in the notion
of bringing order to the chaos.
By the end of my first year
of university I realized that I could probably rationally
convince myself of just about anything. I had completely
separated my thinking process from the context of physical
reality. Logical thinking for its own sake seemed suddenly
to be a self-indulgent game of no consequence. I decided to
make a shift and look for ways of grounding my intellect in
experience, leaving university and entering art college.
At art school I had the
great fortune of encountering some very challenging
teachers. One day, one of my professors told the class that
we would be looking out a window for the whole three-hour
class. I was incensed. I stood at my assigned window and
glared out through the pane. I saw cars, two buildings, a
person on the street. Another person, another car, the sky,
a cloud. For fifteen minutes I fumed, and muttered to
myself. Suddenly I started to notice things. The flow of
traffic down the street was like a river, each car seemingly
drawn along by the next, connected. The blinds in each of
the windows of the facing building were each a slightly
different colour. The shadow of a maple tree in the wind
shifted shape like some giant amoeba. For the remaining
hours of the class I was electrified by the scene outside.
After fifteen minutes, the "names" had started separating
from the objects.
Reflecting on this
afterwards, it seemed to me that for the first 15 minute
period, I had stopped seeing things as soon as I had
positively identified them. At that point of identification,
the word took the place of the sensed object in my
consciousness and I no longer "saw" it. After fifteen
minutes some part of me got very bored and shut down, some
part of me let go, and the raw sense and perception data
started flooding in again.
In his diaries, Austrian
writer Peter Handke at one points talks about "formulation"
as the beginning of forgetting. This aligned very nicely
with my experience of the tradeoffs that occur when language
is applied to phenomena. What is gained is the ability to
externalize the experience as a token that can be stored
(writing), manipulated (reasoning) and shared
(communication). "Coining" a term is an act of power. Adam
in the bible is "the giver of names", charged with the
responsibility to bring nature under his dominion through
the act of naming. But at the same time, something precious
and harder to define is lost. What started as a live,
multi-dimensional, organic, and complex interrelation is
crystallized into a symbol disjunct from context and
experience. It loses its conceptual suppleness. It becomes a
'stereotype' of the thing that it is intended to represent.
But language remains a
powerful tool for communication, and it often seems to
attain levels of richness that seem to belie the
above-mentioned dangers. But the trick is that language has
a layered expressive power only in the context of its
synergistic relationship with the human brain. The human
brain is a very fluid and subjective language decoder.
Reception of a human language term by the brain involves
activating a complex set of relations. The language tokens
are generally interpreted back into a living dialog of
disparate and often contradictory associations derived from
personal experience. The crystallized concept dissolves back
into what I might call a 'wet concept'.
The pre-socratic greeks
recognized no clear distinction between thinking and seeing,
nor between language and reality. There was no sense of an
intervening self in the process of perceiving and describing
the world... it was imagined as a purely reflexive, and
truthful process. According to this belief, it should
therefore be impossible to speak of that which did not
exist. The fact that one could speak of that which did not
exist was the source of one of the first great paradoxes
that troubled the philosophers of the time. The resolution
of the paradox required the invention of the subjective,
imaginative and devious self, the germ of consciousness.
This intervening self
created a new problem for greek philosophy. If the self
could distort the translation of reality into language (and
vice versa), then this self is capable of deceiving through
language. In such a case, how could one discuss and pursue
the truth through language? (Remember that philosophical
dialogue was the method for seeking truth in this culture)
In order to get around this problem, a restricted, purified
subset of language was developed. This subset provided the
foundations of formal language and logic. It provided the
conditions necessary for truth and verification. The
development and refinement of logic finds a materialized and
purified form in the computer.
It was at the extreme end of
this particular trajectory that I found myself at 17, trying
to fit crystalline ideas into my not very crystalline brain.
The computer, on the other hand, is very comfortable these
sorts of ideas so I have spent much time wondering: "By what
sort of mechanism does the computer manage to hold and
manipulate terms of pure logic?"
The computer is perhaps best
imagined as a vacuum: a protected space in which all
ambiguity has been removed. The main engineering problem in
the design of a computer is the containment of that vacuum.
Computers are made of humble, earthly materials like
silicon, with complicated non-linear analog behaviours that
are quite alien to the logical precision desired. The basic
component of the computer, the transistor, is still a fluid
analog device. To attain digital precision, these
transistors are pushed, through the massive amplification of
positive feedback to their absolute limits. (A peculiar form
of extremely violent self-referentiality!). Through this
process, all but the extremes, the 0's and 1's that form the
terms of the restricted language of the digital, are
effaced. This violence has serious repercussions: the rapid
switching from one state to the other produces enormous
amounts of extraneous noise. This required a second
innovation: the 'clock', which carefully times the
procession of digital decision-making to occur at the first
possible movement after each chaotic transition has settled.
So the computer is the
result of a multi-millenial project to create a vacuum of
ambiguity and subjectivity: the conditions necessary for
unambiguous truth and verification.
It is ironic that the
computer, born out of this pursuit of objective truth,
should be so skilled at simulation. (Remember that the word
"simulation" directly implies deception) But perhaps I
should not be surprised, having realized (as related above)
that I could, by being sufficiently divorced from grounded
reality, logically convince myself of anything.
Where the human mind and
human language seem to, for the most part, manage a useful
balance between 'reality' and its encoded shadow, the
computer and computer language seem to lean out toward the
same one extreme. There is no compensatory balance between
the encoder/decoder and the code. The computer plays into
the human fantasy of a perfect language, and perfect
communication, but it does so through the device of
arbitrary and complete isolation and self-reference. It
seals itself in with the device of its own logic.
This is not without cultural
ramifications. The material world cannot enter into this
digital nirvana except through that particular "eye of the
needle" called quantification, that most literal and
unforgiving form of encoding. That which cannot be measured
cannot enter into the kingdom of the digital. The fact that
words can be stored and manipulated by a computer does not
mean that the referenced concepts or material reality are
held in the computer. We reinvigorate a computer's textual
output with our mind's wet and messy renderers. The computer
is just holding on to given patterns, sets of unambiguous
measurements of key-strokes, mouse-clicks, modem songs,
sensor reading...
We regularly engage in
feedback relationships with these systems. In feedback, the
flow of information and influence is recursive. The effect
of filters and processors in the path are multiplied by this
recursion. It has been determined that consciousness tends
to operate at a delay of about 1/10 of a second. Computers
tend to respond in much less than 1/30th of a second. As a
result, the feedback between human and machine can creep
under the level of consciousness, create a tight loop that
invisibly reinforces and attenuates various aspects of the
complex stream flowing through the loop. Such feedback
systems have their own synergetic characteristics. And
because the fastest responding element of the system is
usually the computer, what is most reinforced through the
loop is often defined more by the computer than the human.
I find that this even
manifests itself in familiar systems like e-mail. The
potential speed at which email dialogs can progress tends to
reinforce issues that can be instantly resolved with
straightforward answers. Meanwhile, at least in my
experience, my in-box accumulates a huge pile of unanswered
but more interesting e-mails that can't properly be
addressed in the rapid cycle that e-mail encourages.
The computer, gifted at
sharp distinctions and quick and exact calculations based on
quantifiable parameters, is a most fundamentalist of
technologies. And like all forms of fundamentalism,
subscription to the system gains one an immediate and
tangible power and an attendant reduction of confusion. The
power, however, comes at a cost, and the greatest costs in
this case tend to be unquantifiable, which means that they
conveniently fall out of the equation if encodability is
allowed to rule as a measure of significance or truth.
The computer has come into
accendancy in the same century as quantum mechanics. Logic
itself is a mental instrument for measuring 'reality' and
that the system of logic taints its own discoveries with its
internal biases, finding, for the most part, only the kind
of thing it is looking for. Its internal consistency (as
artificial perhaps as the computer's carefully constructed
and violently reinforced logical workings) is no guarantee
of truth except within its own frame and on its own terms.
It is most important to
prevent the inherent characteristics and extraordinary
powers of the computer from effectively setting the agenda,
for defining the terms by which validity, and merit are
measured.
Much of my artwork since the
beginning of the 90's has been an inquiry into these sorts
of issues. In particular, the "Giver of Names" and
"n-cha(n)t" are explorations of limits and possibilities of
computers in relation to complex concepts and human
language. In the above paragraphs I have outlined some of
the biases of information technology. My project, in the
context of which I effectively dress myself in the drag of
an artificial intelligence worker, is to attempt to
transcend the problems and limitations that I have
enumerated. Success or failure in this endeavour is not the
key issue. I want to ground the issues I have outlined in
practice, exploring in a tangible way what computers do well
and what they are bad at. (Or more properly, what we are
able to program them to do well, and what kinds of
activities are extremely hard to represent in their terms
and context.)
The question of programming
actually brings to the fore another notion of encoding, as
programming is the act of encoding function or process. As
with the encoding of information, in the encoding of process
(aka simulation), we are constrained by the inherent limits
of the encoding process and encoding language.
In the 'Giver of Names', I
set about creating a system that can look at objects
presented to it, make some sort of perceptual
interpretation, and generate a complex internal state
through a broad and fluid process of association based on a
large highly cross-referenced knowledge-base. Stimulation
from each perceived attribute of the seen objects spreads in
decreasing intensity from the initial stimulus through all
the associative links related to the initially stimulated
node and then from those related nodes in the knowledge base
through all their links, etc., until the stimulus is
exhausted. The resulting complex internal state is the basis
for a process of articulation, through which the system
constructs sentences in proper english grammar and speaks
them aloud using voice synthesis. The computer, in a manner
of speaking, attempts to express its internal 'state of
mind'. This is not a recognition system... the results of
the perceptive and associative processes are not a single
identifying term. The system's 'ideas' about what it sees
are held in the complex topology of the internal state, and
the sentences it speaks are reflections of this topology,
forced into the constraints of english language.
The process of creating this
software has been and continues to be an exciting and
frustrating struggle with the constraints of the computer
and the limits of our understanding of ourselves as humans.
First off, it has been an extraordinary encounter with
language. The attempt to encode human-like language facility
echoes, in retrospect, my adolescent dream of bringing order
to the english language. But even the most so-called
'proper' english is maddeningly (or delightfully)
unsystematic. Through this lens, language appears as the
most perverse and original of human creations. It seems to
me that language is, at base, a collection of exceptions. In
the early evolution of language, as long as the number of
language expressions remained small, each term could afford
to be singular and unique without requiring any underlying
system. The rules of language became a necessity only as the
number of language terms increased, reaching the limits of
the human capacity to hold unrelated exceptions in memory.
But this pool of exceptions lives on in contemporary
language, and the greatest concentration of exceptions is
found in the words used most often (i.e. the verb 'to be'),
and in the colloquial terms that are invented to cover new
ideas and paradigms in popular culture.
My personal experience that
the task of simulating vision and speech can reveal hidden
things about human function inspired the notion that the
computer can function as a sort of philosophical prosthesis.
We are not very good at perceiving ourselves, being so
deeply invested. And our imagination invisibly fills in
conceptual gaps and flaws much as our vision system papers
over gaps in our visual field. Rigorously externalizing our
models of ourselves can dramatically clarify the limits of
our self-understanding and open those hidden conceptual gaps
to inspection.
This is particularly
interesting as many of these sorts of blind spots are
created by our increased reliance on a logical and
scientific understanding of ourselves which the computer
often encourages and validates. Some of our most remarkable
human capabilities are so familiar that we all too easily
lose sight of their remarkability. But as we engage more and
more in a computer mediated life, we need to work harder and
harder at supporting those aspects of ourselves which are
least logical and least understood.
'n-cha(n)t' extends the
exploration initiated with the 'Giver of Names' to include
the social dimension of communication. Seven computers
running a derivative of the software developed for the
'Giver of Names' are interconnected into a network. Each
computer follows its own stream of associations, producing
an endless string of utterances (words, phrases and
sentences) as its follows this stream. Each machine also
communicates the current focus of its stream to the rest of
the machines via the network. Each machine responds to these
incoming messages by stimulating itself through an
associative process similar to that in operation in the
'Giver of Names'. This mutual reinforcement draws the
complex states of all seven computers toward a state of
consensus. When complete consensus is achieved, the machines
reach the point where they are chanting identical or very
similar utterances in approximate synchronization. This is a
dynamic and emergent chant. Each machine is also listening
to its immediate environment through a microphone set to
ignore the sounds of the other computers, but responding to
any sounds made by a person in its immediate vicinity. This
overheard voice is run through a voice recognition system,
and the result of the recognition stimulate that machine's
knowledge base. This knocks that machine out of the state of
consensus, it falls away from the chant. Meanwhile, it
starts selectively broadcasting this information through the
network, causing a spreading disarray that usual eventually
dissolves the chant into a chaos of voices. In the absence
of further external intervention, the system finds its way
back to equilibrium, and returns to chanting.
The presence of the computer
in our culture represents a fairly radical shift in balance.
Having an external device capable of logical processing and
precise memory poses interesting challenges and
opportunities. For the most part we have failed to take
useful advantage of the potentials of these devices, and
have allowed the ease with which they do certain kinds of
things to effectively determine the agenda of 'progress'. We
need to make new kinds of demands on them. They need to be
critically examined from a very human perspective, not in a
knee-jerk Luddite manner, but as a way of understanding
ourselves and the peculiarly human desires that caused us to
invent such a machine. The computer is a kind of wishful
self-portrait... a compendium of abilities we have as humans
aspired to but are not very gifted at. We need a much
clearer understanding of this complex relationship. Without
this understanding we will be unable to find an appropriate
partnership with our creations.
From my own experience, one
such fruitful partnership results when the computer is used
as a device for exploring the limits of logic and its
applicability, a new weapon in the philosopher's
arsenal.
dichtung-digital