Emergent Properties

A few days ago, I had a post called Not Entirely Matter,  the title for which was taken from one sentence within it, “After all, we are not entirely matter, nor are we entirely idea.”

What did I mean by “not entirely matter”? Spirituality? The soul? Voodoo? Raw sensations? No. The non-matter that matters is the emergent properties that result from that matter.

Systems. Networks. Relationships. Meaning.

Pretend for a minute, that there is an fMRI machine that is transportable. We have a photographer wearing or attached to this portable fMRI machine and he is, at this instant, taking a picture. We have the light, the scene, the camera, the photographer and his brain activity, all there. What’s not there? A picture. Meaning. Coherence. The picture emerges from the system – of light > camera > photographer > brain.

Imagine another case. You have taken a “straight” photograph of a scene. It’s a “pure” photograph; no manipulation allowed. You put it in a drawer, and a year later, you take it out and look at it. You exclaim, “That’s not how I remember it!” But now, what you remember is mostly the picture with only remnants of your non-picture memory. Another year goes by and you take the picture out of the drawer and look at it again. As before, you exclaim, “That’s not how I remember it!”. Your memory of both the non-picture and last-year’s picture are not the same as the picture itself. Now, your memory is updated with two different viewings of the photo (processed to memory differently) and one original non-picture memory that is fading fast.

If you do this, year after year, each viewing of the photo will be different because you are different. Each viewing will “paint over” the previous viewings. The surface that is in the photo will gradually replace the full 3D memory of the real scene until you have sort of a false front architecture, with what was not visible to the camera fading to vapor. You are left with sort of a scab of repeated excrescence; a hard crust floating on a vacuum.

So much for “real” photographs.

The retention of perception by memory is anything but linear. All perception, be it directly of ones experience, or of photographs of ones experience, is processed  into memory.

“Perception is mostly a filtering and defragmenting process. Our interests and needs affect perception, but most of what is available to us as potential sense data will never be processed. And most of what is processed will be forgotten.

“How accurate and reliable is memory? Studies on memory have shown that we often construct our memories after the fact, that we are susceptible to suggestions from others that help us fill in the gaps in our memories. That is why, for example, a police officer investigating a crime should not show a picture of a single individual to a victim and ask if the victim recognizes the assailant. If the victim is then presented with a line-up and picks out the individual whose picture the victim had been shown, there is no way of knowing whether the victim is remembering the assailant or the picture.

“Another interesting fact about memory is that studies have shown that there is no significant correlation between the subjective feeling of certainty  a person has about a memory and the memory being accurate.”

– from Memory  (from The Skeptics Dictionary) by Robert Todd Carroll

Further on episodic memory:

“Some researchers believe that episodic memories are converted from episodic into semantic memories over time. In this process, most of the episodic information about a particular event is generalized and the context of the specific events is lost. One modification of this view is that episodic memories which are recalled often are remembered as a kind of monologue. If you tell and re-tell a story repeatedly, you may feel that you no longer remember the event,  but that what you’re recalling is a kind of pre-written story.

“Others believe that you always remember episodic memories as episodic memories. Of course, episodic memories do inform semantic knowledge and episodic memories are reliant upon semantic knowledge. The point is that some people do not believe that all episodic memories will inevitably distill away into semantic memory.”

– from Wikipedia

What reason is there to insist that any attempt by a photographer, post-event, to move  his pictures from raw episodic memory toward semantic knowledge, is degenerative? Especially since episodic memory is always peculiar to each individual.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

Déjà Vu All Over Again

Does the following description of the roots of modernist art from the nineteenth century remind you of the more recent path taken in art photography — from Adams/Weston to the present?

“In the nineteenth century, an unexampled prosperity began to lift the world out of its Malthusian doldrums. The new affluence threatened art by creating a surplus of artists. Competition grew more intense, and it became ever more difficult for an artist to stand out in the crowd. Some artists—now mostly forgotten—earned their bread by pandering to middle-class tastes. The shrewder ones perceived that as soon as art ceases to be the exclusive province of an elect few, it loses the mysterious qualities that distinguish it from mere technical craftsmanship.

“For centuries, artists, conscious of their elect status, shunned the herd. “I hate the vulgar rabble,” Horace sang. The difficulty, for the modern artist, was that the canons of formal beauty with which Horace and Virgil kept the mob at bay were fast becoming commonplace in the literate nineteenth century. The artist, cherishing his esoteric secrets, sacrificing to the Muses to please a select clientele, was understandably distressed to discover that every shopgirl whom he met could burn with the hard, gemlike flame quite as well as he. The vulgar now aspired to culture: think of Leonard Bast in Howard’s End, reverently studying The Stones of Venice.  A monopoly was broken; daylight was shed on magic.

“Thus was born a new aesthetic, one that enabled the artist to revive the mysteriousness of art and shut out the prosaic masses. The Greeks taught that art springs from two sources. The artist has an Apollonian vocation: he is a maker of order. But he acknowledges, too, the claims of Dionysus, for without an insight into the secret depths of life he is powerless to create. For centuries artists tried, with varying degrees of success, to please both masters. But when the philistine classes began to “come and go, talking of Michelangelo,” the modernist rebelled. He heretically deposed Apollo and replaced his harmonies with a mysticism of disorder, an aesthetic of Dionysian misrule sure to baffle the wood-hewing peasants who were just then learning to fondle pretty things. Leonard Bast might get on with Ruskin; he’d have a harder time with Finnegan’s Wake.”

– from an article (fall 2007) in the City Journal, Appetite for Destruction  by Michael Knox Beran

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

Probablies

The 2005 question posed by The Edge was “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?” Below are some of the responses that I found entertaining:

Robert Sapolsky, Neuroscientist, Stanford University answered by saying that he does not believe in god, but cannot prove that god does not exist (just as those who do believe cannot prove that). He says, “A religious friend of mine once said to me that the concept of god is very useful, so that you can berate god during the bad times. But it is clear to me that I don’t need to believe that there is a god in order to berate him.”

For his response, Leonard Susskind, Physicist, Stanford University gives a fictional conversation with one of his students:

Student:  Aw come on Prof. Tell me something I can trust. You keep telling me what probably  means by giving me more probablies. Tell me what probability means without using the word probably.

Professor:  Hmmm. Well how about this: It means I would be surprised if the answer were outside the margin of error.

Student:  My god! You mean all that stuff you taught us about statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics and mathematical probability: all it means is that you’d personally be surprised if it didn’t work?

Professor:  Well, uh…
If I were to flip a coin a million times I’d be damn sure I wasn’t going to get all heads. I’m not a betting man but I’d be so sure that I’d bet my life or my soul. I’d even go the whole way and bet a year’s salary. I’m absolutely certain the laws of large numbers—probability theory—will work and protect me. All of science is based on it. But, I can’t prove it and I don’t really know why it works. That may be the reason why Einstein said, “God doesn’t play dice.” It probably is.

I don’t think that the response of Piet Hut, Astrophysicist, Institute of Advanced Study was meant to be humorous, but the part that follows where he says , “Note…” made me laugh out loud:

“Science, like most human activities, is based on a belief, namely the assumption that nature is understandable.

“If we are faced with a puzzling experimental result, we first try harder to understand it with currently available theory, using more clever ways to apply that theory. If that really doesn’t work, we try to improve or perhaps even replace the theory. We never conclude that a not-yet understood result is in principle un-understandable.

“While some philosophers might draw a different conclusion—see the contribution by Nicholas Humphrey—as a scientist I strongly believe that Nature is understandable. And such a belief can neither be proved nor disproved.

“Note: undoubtedly, the notion of what counts as “understandable” will continue to change. What physicists consider to be understandable now is very different from what had been regarded as such one hundred years ago. For example, quantum mechanics tells us that repeating the same experiment will give different results. The discovery of quantum mechanics led us to relax the rigid requirement of a deterministic objective reality to a statistical agreement with a not fully determinable reality. Although at first sight such a restriction might seem to limit our understanding, we in fact have gained a far deeper understanding of matter through the use of quantum mechanics than we could possibly have obtained using only classical mechanics.”

If it’s not understandable now, it will be soon. I’m sure of it … Well, yeah. Duh! They told us that from the day we were born!

[Also good, though not quoted, is the response from Keith Devlin. ]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

The Politics of Vision

[The below, taken out of context, could be a demonstration (or work of performance art) about the purist, straight photographers' frantic effort to preserve the "hallowed image". ]

“… Anthony McCall’s filmic installation, Line describing a Cone (1973), offers perhaps the most successful progression, using a smoky room for the projection of an arc that, over 30 minutes, gradually increases its circumference from a single point to a full circle. Not only is the work viewed backwards as a shaft of light as much as a frontal projection on to a screen, but viewers immersed within its growing luminous boundary must negotiate with each other to avoid obscuring the hallowed image. The work not only accentuates the politics of vision, but transports us back in time to pre-Victorian works of equal economy and clarity, recalling the naïve verve of Camille Flammarion’s dreams of travelling along light beams and the ongoing artistic project of wreaking magic from technology. “

- from Eyes, Lies & Illusions

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

The Philistine

“… A philistine is someone who has no sense for aesthetic criteria in art and therefore goes by pure content or big names. Someone who thinks an art work can only be important if it addresses meaningful subjects. Someone who knows which names wield symbolic capital without knowing why exactly. And of course the philistine knows what he likes. He is fond of the figurative and he sees himself, because he despises anything difficult as elitist, as a defender of common sense.”

“… Which is why, year after year, the Berlinale consists of a collection of mild, mediocre movies, dominated in aesthetic terms by emaciated wishy-washy realism, sickened by a lack of consideration of the potential or the limits of the moving image, a naive and plodding narrative style, and a prolonged cosiness of image whose TV-compatible idiocy does its utmost to prevent any alternative thoughts from spoiling its naturally-gifted craftmanship. Discoveries are not made like this …”

– Ekkehard Knörer criticising the current crop of movies.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

It’s Always Showtime

OT article that I think is very good — Rank-Breakeres: The Anatomy of an Industry   by Jacob Heilbrunn in World Affairs (magazine). It’s about “the craving for celebrity — and its availability because of radio and television talk shows and the Internet — as a reason for the decline of public intellectuals…”.

“… Several decades ago, Dwight Macdonald unwittingly captured the mixture of grandiosity and frivolity of many public intellectuals when he bridled at a description of himself as a plain journalist, asking, “For what is a journalist? Alas, an ignorant and superficial fellow, a kibitzer (rather than ‘a man determined to a goal of action and truth’).” Since then, the quest for sincere authenticity among America’s feuding intellectuals has become even more authentically insincere. For these proud refugees from their own arguments, the only enduring belief seems to be that it’s always showtime.”

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

Honesty

“… there’s no way to approach honesty except through dishonesty. (By contrast, one doesn’t need to invoke stinginess to write about generosity.) No virtue is more elusive than honesty, even when we have the best of intentions.”

“… One can get around this problem semantically, by just allowing that if people think they’re being honest, then they are. And that’s fair enough. But it doesn’t go far in evaluating people who happily live with intermediate levels of self-knowledge — and that’s most of us. We all know the experience of improving a story as we tell it: all of a sudden bland details become lively; a blank spot of memory gets filled in with vivid description. And on some level we know we’re fudging a bit, but then after several tellings of the story our improvisations cease to be improvised, and the story just assumes a permanent form. Are we liars if we allow that new, better story to have a life in posterity?

“Is there a moral dimension to these minor fudgings, whose main purpose is to make us seem more interesting? What about the small lies that we tell to lubricate conversation? A friend says to us, “I was talking to that barista at Starbucks this morning — you know the one I mean, the one with the nose ring and the streak of purple hair. Anyway, she was telling me about …” And we just nod along, allowing our friend to believe that, yes, we know exactly which barista he is talking about, while all the while the only barista who comes to mind is the stoned kid who looks like Spicoli, the Sean Penn character from Fast Times at Ridgemont High.  This is a form of dishonesty, but how inelegant is the alternative! “Wait, dude, back up a second —I don’t know which barista you’re talking about …” “

The above is the introductory essay in the Spring 2007 (current) issue of In Character  magazine. It’s called “Truthfully…”  and it’s written by Mark Oppenheimer. He goes on:

“… Philosophers since Locke have been very concerned with questions of belief and epistemology — what we tell ourselves is true — but far fewer (Sissela Bok being a notable exception) have touched on the ethics of honesty in everyday life. And that’s surprising, because we lie all the time. We lie to save people’s feelings, to get into the theater with a senior discount, to get people off the phone. I think there are days when I am a paragon of compassion, a model of justice, an exemplar of modesty. But surely there has been no day since I learned to speak when I was wholly honest.”

He’s not saying anything new, but there’s no harm in an occassional reminder – that, like ‘art’ and ‘truth’, we talk around some subjects without ever explicitly defining what they are.  They are the thing that’s in the space we avoided talking about. The missing piece in our jigsaw puzzle. You know what I mean.  :)  [the smiley face emoticon points you to the unspoken blank space]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

 

Not Entirely Matter

“Throughout the history of portraiture, objectivity and documentation see-saw in and out of precedence over subjectivity and symbolism. The finite, singular subject leads to our understanding of universal themes, while our individuating tendencies link generalities back to our own experience. Fischer creates a pictorial environment in which these dualisms dilate and declare their inversely proportional relationship. The tension between formal composition and implied content is wire-tight. He describes this tension as the vital, humanist essence of his portraiture: ‘As I see it, human existence is situated between freedom and determination. By analogy, and as far as the pictorial plane is concerned, I’m also interested in … the similarly dynamic relationships between freedom and form, between freedom and the obligations entailed by our integration within a larger whole. In my view, these relationships aren’t dualistic, they are in dialogue. Consequently, the notion of transparency, the various ways these two principles fit within one another, is very decisive for me. After all, we are not entirely matter, nor are we entirely idea.’ “

“… In Society of the Spectacle (1967), Guy Debord describes the increasing domination of economy over social life, proposing that the feudal system was an era of ‘being’ and the capitalist era one of ‘having’, with the high-capitalism of the twentieth century finally degrading to a culture of ‘appearing’. He suggests that experience is mediated through representation and is no longer directly lived. In a way, Fischer’s work reflects on this theory; the clatter of dematerialisation resounds throughout his work as archetypes are stripped of significance and animal and mineral essence are converted into autonomous pictorial codes. As Fischer says: ‘the only thing that counts is the final image, the outcome of the work. I don’t see it as a question of fiction versus documentation, the authenticity of an artwork has, in my opinion, nothing to do with realism.’ “

- from an (old) article in Contemporary Magazine, Profile: Face Value  by Sally O’Reilly - on Roland Fischer’s portrait photography

I don’t entirely agree with the content of the article from which these quotes are taken, but I think the phrase, “experience is mediated through representation and is no longer directly lived” is worth thinking about for more than a few minutes.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

Somebody Call the Logic Police

The top item in a polyglot posting  on the Online Photographer today reads as follows:

“One of the most discouraging aspects of modern computer photography and its newfangled distribution models, to me, is the extent to which new audiences for photography insist that fakery and visual cant are unavoidable, that “it’s always been done” and therefore it’s not worth bemoaning or even considering. It’s tantamount to insisting that photographs are essentially decorative and trivial and can’t be expected to contain truth, and thus that it isn’t worthwhile to try to decode them.”

Does any part of that statement lead logically to the next part? Is the conclusion in any way supported by the preceding “evidence”?

Yeah, I know, Mike writes this stuff to get hits on his blog, but he ends up looking like he never took Logic 101. Dummy. Add this to your hominum.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

The Giver of Names

“… One day, one of my [art class] 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.”

The above is from The Computer as a Prosthetic Organ of Philosophy   by David Rokeby. Mr. Rokeby is the artist who created the Giver of Names. He goes on, in the same article:

“… 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?”

As a response to these questions, Rokeby made the Giver of Names:

“The Giver of Names is quite simply, a computer system that gives objects names. The installation includes an empty pedestal, a video camera, a computer system and a small video projection. The camera observes the top of the pedestal. The installation space is full of “stuff”… objects of many sorts. The gallery visitor can choose an object or set of objects from those in the space, or anything they might have with them, and place them on the pedestal. When an object is placed on the pedestal, the computer grabs an image. It then performs many levels of image processing (outline analysis, division into separate objects or parts, colour analysis, texture analysis, etc.) These processes are visible on the life-size video projection above the pedestal. In the projection, the objects make the transition from real to imaged to increasingly abstracted as the system tries to make sense of them.

“The results of the analytical processes are then ‘radiated’ through a metaphorically-linked associative database of known objects, ideas, sensations, etc. The words and ideas stimulated by the object(s) appear in the background of the computer screen, showing what could very loosely be described as a ’state of mind’.

“From the words and ideas that resonate most with the perceptions of the object, a phrase or sentence in correct English is constructed and then spoken aloud by the computer.

“The phrase is, of course, not a literal description of the object. At the same, time, it is definitely not a randomly generated phrase. Everything that the computer says in some way reflects its experience of the objects. However its experience is in many ways quite ‘alien’. For example, it has no human real experience of the world. It has not burned its hand, scraped its knee, been hungry, angry, fallen in love, wanted something it couldn’t have. It does the best it can to talk about the objects from its very particular point of view. If you spend some time with the Giver of Names, you tend to find that the peculiarities of its perceptions and its speech begin to coalesce into a tangible and coherent character. Misused or mispronounced words become the character of a dialect.

“My intent as an artist is that sufficient tension exist between the object and the name given to challenge the viewers’ preconceptions of the objects, and draw them into speculative exploration. The names will have something of the quality of titles that artists give artworks: something a little out of left field, representing a re-interpretation, or alternate interpretation of the visual image of the object. One aim is to highlight the tight conspiracy between perception and language, bringing into focus the assumptions that make perception viable, but also biased and fallible, and the way language inhibits (or alternately enhances) our ability to see.”

The above description is by Rokeby.

In an article, The Task of the Digital Translator   by Laura U. Marks, she describes an incident with the Giver of Names:

“… Rokeby notes that The Giver of Names exhibited some interesting emergent characteristics. In an early version, it was programmed to generate new sentences based on the database of texts and grammars fed to it. When a Spanish-language version of The Giver of Names was fed Quixote’s Don Juan and a large associative database, he found that if left alone for a few hours it “began to obsess on its possessions,” beginning every sentence with mis or “my.” Finally it began repeating over and over, with minor variations, such as a sentence that began “mis peccadoes,” or, “my sins.”"

Rokeby made a follow-up to the Giver of Names — called ‘n-cha(n)t’:

“‘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.” (quote taken from the same page as the lead quotes)

I find Rokeby’s work to be  an interesting parallel to the (human) viewer’s interpretation of photographs.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/