Just another liquid man

A little drawing I made while waiting for my machine to finish a 3D picture. Mostly we're one, but sometimes he needs time of his own and then we follow parallel creative tracks.

It was just an image in my head, that if man externalizes his reflective capabilities to the extent that he gets immediate control over his own body, he can transform it to live in any environment. In my view it is the next step of evolution of man and technology that the two converge and each conscious individual can find its ecological/functional/whatever-you-want-to-call-it niche, like a newly formed fully technologized and networked animal. Where in pre-medieval times man was in the process of conquering the liveable world, we will be able to greatly expand the notion of what liveable is, and enter a new, similar process, where we will roam new environments to occupy new niches, like the bottom of the ocean, the moon, or inside volcanoes.

The problem here though is the clash between our hardwired reptilian brain and our reflective neocortex, and I predict that this stage will take hundreds of years and in that I think I am less provoking and less technologically biased than Ray Kurzweil, who predicts full oneness of man and technology by the end of this century. I think that there is something fundamental which we need to overcome first as a species: the understanding, control and incorporation of our instincts with the thoughts and technologies we construct.

The universe within us

Start the movie at 7:05 for the most mind-blowing animation I have ever seen.

It shows what goes on in one cell of a human body, and the scale of things is just incredible and seen from this perspective, a universe of its own.

I feel that our information-saturated world has so much deprived us from a feeling for the evolutionary process of which we are still part that we have become greatly abstract beings, clueless about how to create meaning in life, and instead reverting to chunks of information we somehow get implanted into us and which we consciously employ, through mainly left-brain thinking, to try to assimilate something meaningful out of.

I deem this hopeless unless we inspire ourselves with more parallel, subliminal information, and learn to see the value of this. This animation by David Bolinsky helps to implant us with a sensitivity to natural evolution, in which everything is part of something and devoted to something larger than itself. This, in my opinion, is the goal of life and the human brain; try to create a functional niche in which it can selflessly express itself through holistic interaction with its environment.

As Bolinsky also mentions, the things inside our cells we can perceive as individual entities are also part of a larger whole, a higher evolutionary pattern, of which they are not conscious. We must learn that we too are part of something larger than us, and on a level of higher complexity than our experiential lives patterns can be perceived that are similar to that of a living organism.

Now, watch the animation again.

Flesh controls

A screenshot from the third movie of Matthew Barney's magnum opus The Cremaster Cycle, where a main character, the apprentice, has landed on the surgery table, and doctors reveal what seems to be a turning knob from under some kind of horizontal labia. As the movie is from 2002 it is not very recent, but still very relevant and worth bringing under the attention.

The thought of having mechanical parts substitute for the body parts I have now somehow creates an enormous feeling of aversion. Unless grown from within, in continuous interaction with the rest of the body, it will always be a misfit, resulting in many unforeseen problems for the whole body.

Anyway, where Barney set the stage by provoking questions about such issues by means of metaphorical imagery, it is now time that we lose symbolic thinking, get real, and seriously plow through these issues for ourselves. We really want to gain some wisdom and sensitivity about our bodies and their interaction with their world, before we start to use our entire body as an open platform for modification the way we do with tattoos and piercings now. From consciously designing an identity that actually represents only a part of us, we need to learn how to revert to  our core selves and attune to our unconscious processes.

Virtual sanddunes

Definitely a nice project is 'Reizend Zand', Dutch for 'travelling sand', an animation of sanddunes located in front of the railway station in the Dutch city Apeldoorn. Artist Giny Vos worked for four years on this project, in collaboration with the city of Apeldoorn, Rena electronics and a 3D animator, to finally deliver this 480.000 Euro display that contains 1.3 million LEDs.

Though perhaps not very interesting technology- or interaction-wise, this project in a way shows excellently what the aesthetics of future technology as I envision it look like. Organic, and ever adapting. Although it is a pity that it is still a direct translation of nature as we know it, and that it is not interactive. I hope there will be continuations of this project, and the display becomes a platform for interactive experimentation. This landscape could for example react on human passers-by and reflect their behaviour or their emotional states, hence becoming an intuitive tool for collective self-reflection and identity and self-concept building.

And the less serious science-fiction buff in me would propose an Easter egg for this system based on the classic 1984 David Lynch movie Dune based on Frank Herbert's novel: there could be a giant worm underneath the sand which rises up when the pedestrians or cyclists move in a certain way, or in certain configurations, of course accompanied by music including the lyrics "walk without rhythm, and you won't attract the worm."





But seriously, despite my usual critical stance I do find this stunning. Calm technology like this is definitely what we information-addicts need to feel more in tune.

Neurons stuck to a robot

A recent article on New Scientist, 'Rise of the rat-brained robots', describes how professor Kevin Warwick and his team have succeeded to incorporate a living culture of neurons into the simple behaviour of a wheeled robot. These neurons are kept disembodied from it, in an oven, and communicate wirelessly. The goal is to create a model of the brain that might be useful in the treatment of diseases like Alzheimers.

It is interesting how behaviours emerge like neurons firing when they are not stimulated to a certain extent. I am not a neuroscientist, but such findings might be the key to understanding things like human creativity on a neuronal basis; it might be just neurons firing randomly out of 'boredom'. It also provokes many questions, such as how it will feel if you would connect some of your neurons to a body somewhere else in the world. You could literally become a spread out being, as if you transformed from a solid to a gaseous state of being.

I personally can't wait for more of these findings, but at the same time am concerned, since any study does not just generate neutral knowledge; it also invites certain developments more than others. And, as with any research, I would like to see not just stating the obvious goals of such research, but also the wider implications and possible future scenarios. I would certainly like to invite discussions on this, so feel free to comment through this blog.

Regressive self-transformations

A movie you might find eerie at first, it shows a boy who wants to transform into a mouse because this would save him money on renting a living space. But seen the developments in genetic engineering, something like this may well be possible one day. But the question that radically challenges self-concepts then is; is this new form then still the same 'person' it used to be? According to me, a self-concept, probably including a name, is just a social construct. When it is not useful anymore, we might as well treat a new embodiment as a new person. Did the old person die, then? Yes, if people's concepts about that person are not relevant and useful anymore at all you could say he died.

In my opinion,  people inherently live by concepts and nothing but concepts, which are illusions. We have no truth; truth is constituted by the illusions that are most useful. This is a pragmatist stance, but in a world so complex as it will be, this is the most useful stance according to me; it makes you flow along with these developments instead having to go through clash after clash with internal beliefs you try to maintain.

Now we have rather static implicit conventions on this, but these sort of developments will make the world so complex that we need to explicitly start discussing these now perhaps seemingly absurd topics. We need to develop an intelligence based not on old, rational, science, but on practical embodiment theory. We need to learn and get a feeling for the relationship between bodies and their environments, and how the two can be attuned to each other to result in the most meaning, or happiness for the individual. Then, we will be able to think more creatively and analytically about how our bodies should be constituted so we feel at home with them, rather than regressing to static images already present in the mind, like that of a mouse in the case of the Halifax commercial.

Me's to We

Great movie showing how individuals evolve and learn how to form a whole with others, so individual ego's learn to occupy an own niche in the larger whole of the 'we'. Whereas now we live in a time where everybody can develop his own identity and truth, in the future this will evolve into a new paradigm where individuals act from an internal drive that is complemented by a feeling for a whole and its needs.

via nextnature.net