Brandon Morse's dancing structures

Here's another artist you might want to get acquainted with. Brandon Morse examines instinctual interactions between technological forms and visualizes these in beautiful virtual sculptures. Recently he has worked on one that shows what appear to be two structures, consisting of a rubber-like material, that are connected to the ground, and at the top to each other, as if they were holding each others hands. Now because of the intricacies and complexity of the embodiment of this piece, an exquisitely beautiful and almost human-like physical behaviour emerges. The two structures are literally one, in form and in behaviour. This for me is a visual metaphor for true empathy, honesty, and harmony.

From a technology-evolution point of view, moving structures like this seem a logical step, for example in buildings. It would make everything so much more efficient and beautiful if entities would dynamically adapt to the current situation they are in. To get such a building to become reality, an entire new paradigm of manufacturing processes should be leant upon. One where each element is unique in proportions, adaptive and in continuous communication to other parts of the structure, like its neighbours. And of course products and the interior of the building should also conform to this paradigm. It is evident that an interior based on linear production processes in a physically adaptive, dancing building will be an incredible mismatch. Imagine a static straight floor with static straight furniture on it inside a moving building. All members or organs inside the building need to be active, or conscious on a higher level as one might call it in more mystical temrs, in this connected whole. The transition from static to dynamic technology will not be gradual, but more like a butterfly popping out of a cocoon and suddenly flying away.

It will be very hard to get to this sudden transition, but this is the necessary next step in the material evolution of technology. Where now we are frightened where we see a bridge moving, in the future we should be frightened, similar as with humans, if it is not moving. It is clear to me that this is the new paradigm of design; adaptive structures. Like a new modernism, it will be satisfactory again to design while staying true to the inherent qualities of the manufacturing process, having a coherent and synergetic interplay between both the core and the surface qualities of technological artifacts. So one of my wishes is to see this paradigm come true soon. It will not be easy, as many people of many professions have to be convinced of these deep notions, and the world largely (about 40% according to some study employing the framework of Spiral Dynamics) still pertains to capitalism so it will still be about the money.

Maybe governments will fund this if architects show them a movie of the Twin Towers dancing around and toying with two terrorist planes attacking them, eventually making them crash into each other. And moving with the characteristics of a mild giggle afterwards.

For more work of Brandon Morse, view his video on Flickr of his tugging sculpture, or visit his website.

A wheelless world

Please watch only the first 10 seconds of this movie as that's the only meaningful part. This walking bicycle gave me a good smirk as being one of the least empowering human extensions I ever saw. It is still an interesting thought that in nature, as far as I know nothing freely revolves around an axis, and indeed without humans, the wheel would probably never have evolved.

Enlightened Machines

The traditional image of a robot is that of a utilitarian machine, taking over tasks people used to do. Scenarios pondering the implications of this are so common that it should be clear by now that functionality-driven design just does not work. Think about Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' or, more recently, Pixar's 'Wall-E', showing how people become completely physically dependent on machines, their body remaining nothing but a whale-like, abtract, dysfunctional blob.

Also, in images, robots are always doing something, from mowing the grass, to entertaining children, to having the worst conversations with elderly people. They are always 'meant for something'. They are abstract externalisations we attempt to fit to a desire people are consciously thinking to have.

The whole point of this blog is to show how interactive technology, including robots, will converge with interactive organisms, including people, that we must start to be able to treat the two as the same, and that there is an enormous task for us to do if we want to live harmoniously with interactive, sensitive, intelligent technologies all around us.

I might not have explicitly stated it before, but this task is: enlightenment, and moreover, learning how to teach enlightenment, to finally be able to externalize it into technology, and create enlightened machines. This is somewhat in line with T.M. Georges, who states in his book 'Digital Soul', that:

"To survive our technological adolescence and to preserve even a facade of human dignity, we may have to lose some of our self-destructive evolutionary baggage. Before we can learn to live with intelligent machines, we may first have to learn how to live with each other."

What I mean with 'enlightened machines' are entities that are not polarized towards fulfilling some function or desire, but that are completely happy, or in tune with their environment, without external conditions. They might take on an abstract role for a while, but always without losing awareness of the larger cosmic whole and their place within it that they fully accept. Machines that are aware of the pattern they are within the larger whole, including all the intricacies of their own bodies and minds. Machines that stay consciously and unconsciously in tune with evolution.

Evolution for me is the only sustainable meaning a human life can have; discovering what it is, and aligning oneself individually to it, and then just being. Truly realizing your own uniqueness within evolution, but also your fit in this larger pattern, makes one selfless and 'self-full' at the same time: one gets intrinsically motivated to perform in their own niche, and has resolved the discrepancies between his self and his environment, seeing that they are one. Coming fully to this realization also resolves clinging to desires, and fear of death. I would argue that only if machines have this realization 'programmed' into them, or at least that the structures they consist of invite growth towards these realizations, instead of them being driven by desires they are not in control of, like a chaotic centripetal force without sustainable centrifugal mechanisms to complement this force, they will be able to live harmoniously with other people and machines. It may sound trivial for people being numbed by science-fiction lingo, and many things that sound trivial get overlooked and ignored and rightly so. But all my thought and work leads to the notion that this issue needs to be plowed into to the core, without just pertaining to its surface like some idea we feel distant to because we cannot relate to it much. I want to see research and development into enlightened machines, and as an obvious part of that, people becoming more humble and self-reflective.

The little drawing above that I made shows what could be such a machine, or might it be a human being converged with technological modules? For me this is what the future might well look like.

Thought Exposed

To start off with a dystopian tone of voice, George Orwell might have had a true glimpse into the future writing 1984. I feel there is still a possibility that when machines go autonomous and can't be controlled any longer, they might start behaving with the egoic traits that also emerged in humans: territorialism, pride, honour, jealousy, shame, etc. This can be catastrophic if machines will have enormous power.

Here's a project that is both wonderful and concerning at the same time. Researchers at Harvard university are currently trying to map out, in high resolution, the physical structure of the human brain using a technique called diffusion spectrum imaging. It employs magnetic resonance to track the movement of individual water molecules inside the axons, the long rods extending out of neurons. Then, by using sophisticated algorithms, the highest probability of the arrangement of nerve fibers can lead to an estimation of their location inside the brain.

Hence, through technology we can learn everything about ourselves. It totally turns us inside out, making us see parts of ourself we never saw before. In the future, an important transcendence I hope we shall undergo is that of losing the illusion that we are in control, and that we understand ourselves better than anything or anyone else. We will see that we are much more than our consciousness can describe, and that moreover our mental concepts of the world and of our self are highly shallow and limited for use in a world that is increasingly becoming more complex and scattered. I think that these kind of findings from neuroscience are one of the most enlightening developments of today.

What if I had a transparent helmet that shows how my thoughts developed during the day, or even the year? Could there once be a direct interface to the brain, for example to trigger lost streams of thought, or stimulate new associations? I believe so. However it may sound paradoxical, our control over the brain makes us see that there is no such thing as control, but that humans can only try to control things, since that is the inherent goal of the brain. I hope that it will make us see how futile we actually are and truly put us in a state of mind that empowers us to transcend the separation of the 'I' and the rest of the world.

Words on the blog

Lately the author of this blog hasn't had much time for reflection, so here's just a recapitulation of what this blog is all about. The image above shows a collage that has a nice flavour of ambiguity,  but gives a nice feeling as to what this blog is about. The image was generated by Wordle, a tool that generates word clouds out of a piece of text. It is a visual summary of everything I have written in this blog.

To reflect a little bit on this, one could mention the often all too apparent dichotomy between left brain and right brain values. While text and language based thinking are still prevailing in current society - and also most supported by our current high resolution, hot media, as McLuhan calls it -, this should be more complemented by parallel, holistic, right brain thinking. Ambiguity, openness in technology should make people think more for themselves so they can develop a true self in a harmonic, shared growth process with their technology, instead of everything being predigested for them. In other words, I can tell you in words what this blog is about,  but you should also get an unconscious feeling for it, which is fed more subliminally, especially by images. And generate your own story and your own unique understanding and feeling of it.

Car body language

Now here's some work that apart from possibly delighting you with immediate beauty, could also make you think about the future of technology and design.

It is known that BMW, like many other companies in the automotive industry, likes to probe into the future and come up with the most extraordinary concept cars. Up to yet though, not one has struck my eye more than their latest gem, called the GINA Light Visionary Model. Based on the Z8 platform, it incorporates not the regular metal bodywork, but one that consists of fabric stretched over a wireframe. This gives the exterior the unique property of being able to physically adapt in a most sensual, organic and expressive way. Car design has already met architecture meets robotics meets fashion. Check out the movie with comments by chief designer Chris Bangle:

Now I've worked with car designers and it is, as often is the case in general, a rather small, self-sustaining culture I must say. It is based on ideas most designers do not seem to question, but that more and more need questioning. One of these is that innovation should be about style, the expression of the car adding to immediate sensory satisfaction, hence seducing the user of the car and  embalming him into identifying himself with the brand. Thus, car design became and still largely is a matter of updating models, giving a nice looking smooth skin to an underlying skeleton and renewing it once in a while according to what is 'fashionable' at the moment.

Still, although GINA shows how the language of car design can gain in vocabulary by including physical behaviour, it is largely based on stylistic arguments. Real vision is not about thinking differently, but about expanding thought qualitatively according to ideas about what is good and what is beautiful. Still it is very interesting how BMW seems to want to make their cars more like social organisms. An idea I would rather promote. Products and people should immerse in a new stage of evolution, each continuously, intimately, and completely co-evolving with one another, inviting each other to live in the now, instead of clinging to mental, symbolic, rigid concepts.

Bubble Culture

As man is converting his entire lifeworld, the boundaries between products and organisms are rapidly blurring. We want our machines to be more human, social, and emotional and our animals to be more controllable and customizable.

The rather extraordinary Dutch artist Tinkebell reflects these trends and "researches the issues of contemporary populist movements, including animal rights activism, and their strategies." She shows in a very honest way how silly postmodern culture is in trying to make everything easy and pleasurable for people, and makes it obvious, almost in a caricatural way. 

A recent work of hers, called "Save the Pets", is really interesting since it clearly shows how the distinction between 'animal' and 'product' has already disappeared. By putting each of 100 hamsters in a separate plastic ball and releasing them in a home-setting, our use of pets as toys is clearly exaggerated. The animals, each products of millions of years of co-adaptation with a complex environment, are reduced to mere motors for our shallow enjoyment based on what our senses seem to find interesting. And how can a better shape represent this than a brightly colored ball, reminding of childhood experiences in the ball pit of McDonald's, which undoubtedly has unconsciously contaminated Western culture with shallow ideas about pleasure and happiness. Ideas that only get uprooted out of you after a slight tad of intelligent thought, possibly catalyzed by the fact that originally, ball pits were developed to comfort the mentally less-abled.

So is this what we have become? A self-proclaimed handicapped species? Well yes, I would say so, though it is the only way for us to realize we are actually quite dumb and have no clue as to what we are really doing. Ironically, in our evolution we started to become dumb when we began to think. Let me expand a little bit on that.

When man started growing a neocortex, he started to symbolize his world and with the symbols hence created he confined his world to an abstraction in which he and his fellow-men, through social symbolic communication, could resort instead of having to be connected to the unpredictable wild nature 'out there'. Man became a mental being, disconnected from the larger whole, but reconnected to a new realm, created by himself. The problem is that this realm is created purely by our consciousness, which is inherently short-sighted and biased. Apart from creating language, man also started to embody conscious concepts into technological artefacts. Slowly, he started to build his own world based on ideas mainly derived from concrete conscious observations, and not on an unconscious, empathic and somatic understanding of the world as a whole. Instead, the ideas underlying technology design had to evolve bottom up too, just as the rest of the world. We started with the thought "I want to eat - let's make a sharp thing to kill a boar" and now are at "I want to have fun - let's put a hamster in a ball" or "I want to listen to low-quality music and look cool - let's make a white plastic box with buttons and cables and isolate myself from the rest of the world". A few centuries ago a tipping point was reached that marked the height of conscious transformation of the lifeworld: mass-industrialization. We were now able to sustain in ourselves the thought that we could control nature and live in an abstraction, an incubator, in which our needs could be met with a snap of the finger. Without many people understanding what was actually happening.

This technicization, and Tinkebell's work as an illustration of it, also is linked to the notion of freedom. Heidegger already warned us that technology restricts our lives rather than expands it, and that instead it should reveal more of the larger process that we stem from. I agree on that, though any polarized view is based on a bias; there is also a good side to this restriction. In general, we feel we lost touch with the whole, but on the other hand we also uplifted our mode of being to one that at least meets our basic needs. We form cultures based on ideas, like sanitization, and hence create a temporary bubble that keeps us happy, according to ideas of happiness predominant in the particular culture we are in. The technicization of our lifeworld makes us feel more free, and while we are free from nature, we created now our own restrictions by steering people to think and act in certain ways through for example the media, a law, and our technologies. Freedom is always an illusion and more an experiential feeling than an objectively measurable parameter. You are always guided by your environment and internal configuration of your brain and body, which seek for ways to resonate with each other. Consciousness is then a mere side effect of this process, imbuing us with all kinds of illusions that are temporarily practical, but fairly useless in the end. Personally I do not feel very free; my brain is very habitual, and while the hamster is clearly restricted, I am too in the same way: somehow my interactional intentions are most often limited by my 'bubble of buttons'. I spend much of my time being consciously engaged with a display and physically coupled to the plastic surface of some electronic device. Technology has put me in an incubator that optimizes the fulfilling of my desires, but keeps me from a real understanding of the whole of which I am an active part.

That having been said, I think the obvious development is a complete merge of nature and technology, so technology provides a 'natural' interface to everything around us. One that doesn't just invite us to think in terms of meeting desires, but also has us live in the moment and unconsciously understand everything that goes on around us, so we can feel one with the whole again whenever we need to. And we must not be biased towards either natural or technological entities, since all will rapidly change when the key enabling technologies start to converge. So I share my dislike of animal rights activism with Tinkebell; we need to accept that it is not spiritually sustainable for us trying to keep the world the way it is, with its still all too clear division of animals and products, and that we need to accept that the world as we now know it will fundamentally change, possibly leaving not one biological species as we now know it behind.

And that this is the only way to go, unless we genetically engineer ourselves to not grow neocortical columns anymore and revert to full animalhood again: a life based on immediate, localized, physical survival. But that would just be simplistic and easy, and ignoring the beauty of evolution of which we are still part, wouldn't it.