From Billions to Trillions

Here's a short clip explaining how we are moving from a world with a few billion of computers to one that contains trillions of computers, up to a point where they are so ubiquitous that they get embedded in the smallest of things. I believe that in the end, we will not be able to distinguish the 'real', unmediated world from digital worlds such as videogames anymore, and moreover, that this blend of the digital and the physical gives rise to a wholly new form of embodiment; one in which we can change physical things, including our own bodies, as easily as virtual things.

I AM

The animation 'I am' by Tronic Studio is some excellent eye-candy, with a message. This spot was created to give animals a voice and put them into our consciousness and conscience. They are depicted as temporary assembled from scrap materials, because that is more or less how we treat them in our urbanized landscapes. We still easily get seduced by technology's newness and in that we tend to 'progressively' forget what we call nature. Nature has become more and more useless in our everyday interactions, so it only remains on the background of awareness in providing a platform for organic life. Thus we are trading an embodied existence for one that is abstracted away from physicality but constituted by symbolic constructions, such as social relationships, the mediasphere, and the self-concept. We connect to static constructions we can give a name to, and give a place in our conscious web of mental associations so they can become social assets, but in that we are alienated from the ongoing and ever-flowing process that that construction is in. We seem to be too much conditioned by structuralism and the linguistic turn in philosophy. In general, people seem stunned by the complexity of the world this view gives us, and have forgotten simple wisdoms such as that everything is in flux and that all boundaries are created by the mind.

But back to the animation. To me, it is particularly well-chosen to depict the animals as temporary constructions without faces, so the focus is not on the character, but on the process of death and rebirth. It makes it clear that any identity is transient and that we all consist of the same things. We are all ghosts, and what defines us is not the form we are in but the potentialities of our embodiment and the stance that we adopt in the process of physical and psycho-spiritual evolution.

Thanks to the excellent blog Spatial Robots for this link.

turquoise; the color of 2010

So Pantone has selected turquoise out of all colors to be the color of 2010. It reminds us of an escape from the everyday world, its green being psychologically soothing but not in a way that signifies nature as we know it. Also it is not an alien color, but somehow we can relate to it. To me turquoise is a very pure color that signifies a clear state of mind. I would immediately relate it to the aquarian age that is starting in 2012, in which we are said to massively awake to our cosmic purpose and develop a new kind of consciousness, a more integral one where we transcend the perspective of the self. Now are all the aesthetic signs that seem to subtly signify this age pure coincidence or is there a red thread to be discovered?

Eunsuk Hur's lasercut fabric structures

I am promoting the work of Eunsuk Hur, who creates incredibly intricate fabric structures that truly speak for themselves and exude an aesthetic sensitivity that we should all look for in our process of creation. Imagine the beauty that can result when this gets combined with less crude materials and manufacturing processes. She also seems to adhere to the vision that morphing textile structures can support ever more nomadic lives in which people become more embodied with and less dependent on technological environments. This is definitely a designer to keep an eye on if you ask me.

Link: Eunsuk Hur's website

breaktime: an organic fountain symphony

Time for some lunchtime aesthetics. This is the tallest fountain of the world, able to shoot water jets up to 500 feet high. More than that and almost incredibly so, the jets can be individually controlled in terms of direction and power, which together with colored light and music allows the creation of stunning visual patterns.

And this is only traditional aesthetics, where the human is the observer and the artwork the observed. Imagine what effect this can have if the fountain is meaningfully coupled to real time data. Think about weather forecasting data, a representation of people's brainwave activity in the city, cellphone use, voting poll statistics, or maybe each jet of the fountain could be directly coupled to a bystanders' bodily movements, inviting a mass interaction to arise. The possibilities are endless, the technological platform is here, so now the people need to start generating ideas and make it useful beyond just preprogrammed patterns, because no matter how seductive it might be to sit back and passively enjoy the ride, it does not render us any step beyond sophisticated couch potatoes. Gently taking what capitalism produces into our own hands is the way to go, if you ask me.

the technium and Kevin Kelly

Here's an interesting little interview with technology-guru Kevin Kelly, who is currently finishing the first draft of his upcoming book "What Technology Wants". The simple but catchy animation is done by the Dutch agency FreedomLab.

Basically, he discusses technology's cosmic driving force that propels us further in our evolution. He also thinks this process is deterministic, i.e. that it evolves towards an end state, as if it had a single intention.

What i would add to his vision comes from a more psycho-spiritual point of view. I would refine technological determinism by stating that there is no end-state technology wants to evolve us towards, it only seems to be so. Not only that, adopting the stance that there seems to be a technological destiny for us can make us happier, because it gives us a sense of purpose. The thing is, I think that this end state can never be known, that we can only flow along with technology, see what it is in technology that truly makes us see and experience happiness, and find it in moments of interaction with technology. Technology progresses with us towards happiness, and this is not happiness as in a desired object outside of us, given to us by technology, but happiness that is always already here in the moment, which technology can reveal to us. Ultimate happiness lies in perfecting skill wherein you are liberated from yourself and are fully absorbed by the environment, so in the end you become one and do not need conscious thoughts anymore. I think that the purpose of anything is to become obsolete, and that we are supremely happy when everything is obsolete. Thoughts, intentions, reactive emotions, words, expressions, objects, concepts, etcetera. Then we come to be pure nothingness and just flow along with whatever happens, and so to say become manifestations of a cosmic force that transcends our thinking, desiring, feeling, experiencing self. That to me is what both humanity and what technology wants.

James Cameron's Avatar and our transcendent technological future

We all know James Cameron as the director of Epic movies like Terminator, Aliens, and Titanic. After 1997, he devoted himself to one project and waited for the necessary technology to create a 3D production of mind-bending visual quality. The trailer and high-res images look very promising, and it seems like this is a must-see for anyone interested in transhumanism.

The core of the movie definitely seems to be to address the human desire to transcend itself and transform the own body and world into something that seems paradise-like. The narrative is that humans come into conflict with the Na'vi civilization of the exquisitely beautiful planet Pandora. The Na'vi look exceptionally human, although they seem to be an image of perfection as their skin is serenely blue, they are slim and tall and move with an elegantly intelligent panther-like motion. Their faces look in between human and feline, and they even have a tail for optimal balance in striding the fluorescent forests of their planet.

Humans, still masculine-biased as we have always been, use not embodied skill but mostly brute primitive technological force to combat the Na'vi. But weak as our bodies are, we do not develop them but transplant our consciousness into genetically engineered bodies that mix human DNA with that of the Na'vi. This allows disabled people such as the movie's marine protagonist to still fight.

This movie could definitely be the highlight of the year, as James Cameron combines stunning computer graphics with a nice narrative, contemporary themes of science and technology, and the new medium of 3D cinema that at least adds to the experience of immersion. The whole feel of the movie strongly reminds me of a possibly nearby transcendence of human consciousness which is often called the 'Aquarian age'. From a technological point of view, I always envisioned this to coincide with the intimate connection of electronics into the human body and their enabling of the development of high physical skill towards an embodied oneness of mind, body and environment. The Na'vi seem like a projection of this vision, as they live like tribal people but are highly intelligent and wise, both mentally and physically.

I am still critical of the technological component of projecting our consciousness into another body and controlling that with thought/imagination, as also seen in the movie 'Surrogates' earlier this year. I do not think that it will be possible to control another body as well as your own body, or even come close to that amount of control, because there is a gap in embodiment. I will elaborate a little bit on this critical view.

Embodied skill is developed through progressive interaction with objects that our consciousness gets directed at. As we learn, more and more of what we do is embedded into our memory. This memory is both present in the brain as well as in the cells of our dynamical muscle-joint system. Muscles optimize themselves so as to facilitate similar movements in the future with as least possible conscious control from the brain. And conversely, the brain optimizes itself to give minimal commands that produce maximal effects. In the end, the body as a whole needs less and less resources, and is highly coupled to the neocortical brain. If the environment of the embodied being is limited in generating value for that being, the actions will be minimized such as just walking, eating and sleeping. Through endless repetition of the same movements then, the body becomes highly intertwined as a functional whole, and in the end only a minimal brain command is needed to set off a series of movements in the body. Which is probably why a chicken can run for a while even after his head is cut off.

But this means that if we want to control a remote organic humanoid body with our brain, this body needs to either be highly coupled to the human controller's brain, or have developed sophisticated motor skills to repeated interactions in an environment. Executing the first option would be highly complex, as an incredible amount of very specific neurons or at least sets of neurons have will have to be coupled to the nerve system or brain of the avatar. Reading a human brain that specifically from the outside will require a device that is as or more complex as the human brain itself. Another way would be to also genetically alter human neurons and connect a wireless transmitting element to the axon, so it can be received by another brain directly. It seems that in principle this could be done, although there would still be an enormous amount of neurons that cannot communicate to the other body, because each brain physically optimizes itself to fit one body. Thus, the human brain would have to alter itself when connected to the other body so that to the brain it becomes part of its own body. Switching connection from body to body would require an enormous amount of neuroplasticity, and I doubt whether the human brain can handle that in its current form. Maybe we will have to engineer our own brains first before that can happen.

The other option is equally challenging, even more so on an ethical level. It implies namely, that if we want a remote organic body to react skillfully to brain commands, this body will have to have developed motor skills through experience. In other words, the body has to have had a life. Moreover, I believe that things like emotions and personalities develop as early ways to increase the derivation of value out of perception-action loops, and that these are intrinsically connected to the process of perceptual-motor skill learning. The concept of flow is an obvious bridge between the two; if you move in a flow with your environment, you often couple this to positive emotions. At the same time, you are developing and refining perceptual-motor skills. When you have difficulty handling something this often is perceived as frustrating, and the body is not yet in the flow, but struggling to grow to find ways to get into a fluent interaction with body and mind. Holistically said, I think that in order for a body to have optimal perceptual motor skills, it has to have a happy life. We probably do not want to create beings that develop a life of their own, to at some point be overtaken by a human being's brain and sent out to fight wars. Also we probably don't want to grow these beings in a lab environment and keep them in a dumb, almost dormant state, to only have them acquire physical skills. This will only create a new master-slave dualism in our society, an increasing cultural deification of the human paired with a reification of the nonhuman.

So what we could do is develop tool-bodies that lie somewhere in between the two extremes of depersonalized but unsophisticated engineered body coupled with high technological human augmentation, or a sophisticated slave body. We could develop bodies that have what you could call an insect-consciousness: basic motor skills but no emotional or reflective capacity. Organic warfare machines that need only a few commands, and that on the fly can develop intelligent motor skills by generating basic action-perception loops such as jumping and running on various terrains. But then, do we just exterminate these bodies when we unplug from them, or can we in some way coexist with them?

I think it would be better to not fight any remote civilizations in the first place, but to first find a way to live with ourselves on this planet, be happy with the body and planet we have, not need any avatars at all, and realize that this is paradise already. So I would encourage movie-goers to see this movie from the perspective that this could happen and what you would do, instead of being only emotionally massaged and imbued with new dreams and desires.