I got out of hospital after just over 48 hours which was way better than I could have hoped. And I was back at my desk on Jan 3rd. If you think that last time I was mostly in bed and struggling to sit up straight for three weeks it’s pretty remarkable. But the long tail of this recovery is going to be, well, longer. I can’t put weight on my leg except in the most ginger of circumstances, am basically confined to my flat and am being carefully monitored by the NHS to make sure my bones stick together. So I don’t have much more to write about other than PhD stuff this week.
PhD
This week has been about cracking on with one of the substantial chapters. Meanwhile I also try and stay on top of the reading by reading one more paper or article than I add to the Zotero library. I’m not sure if keeping a note of them here would be interesting and useful for you or not really. I’ve developed a pretty good feel for crunching through academic papers now.
I’ve spent the last week diving into one of the main chapters of the PhD to try and get it ready for upgrade but I’m really struggling to structure the sub-sections. I’m working on the chapter about Spectacles, Performances and Demonstrations. Seems straightforward enough; promotional videos, sci-fi, advertising, marketing, public demos etc.; all the ways AI is represented. But each of those is massive! I could write a whole PhD about the advertising language of AI. Ok, so focus on the overarching question; how does the design shape imaginaries of AI and thus foreclose futures? But then it’s just describing and critiquing the design of some adverts, the design of some promotional films and doesn’t really hit at any insights. So, what about instead of looking at forms, platforms or media we look at forms of representation or narratives. For instance, the idea of AI development as a David and Goliath story, or how they are shown as more than or less than human; either superhuman or human servants. Or how massive corporations are repackaged as plucky little upstarts through AI? I look back at the paragraph describing the chapter in the introduction:
Spectacles, Performances and Demonstrations addresses the long history of AI as a spectacle since its earliest inception. Highly public performance through games such as chess, go, the game show Jeopardy and so on, as well as sensational stories about exaggerated postive test results in highly contained settings serve to inflate expectations about AI and buoy public and financial interest. Design is heavily implicated in the orchestration and production of these showcases but also has a role in exposing the fallacy of positive performances through strategies of satire and reverse-engineering to show how the trick is done.
And it makes total sense but actually getting into structuring it is tough. I started trying to use Miro again to structure connections but again, I could see the remit of the chapter quickly exploding and spiralling. Perhaps I just need to go for it and then scale back. Problem is, that’s where I started 3 or 4 months ago.
In my head it’s like trying to lace all these ways that I’ve cut, sliced and layered the ideas, thing I’ve read and concepts together into a cohesive and original argument. Here; I tried to draw where my head is at:
So I spent most of the week’s work trying to crack away at this problem and have managed to get to some subdomains and some structure: On the right is an example sub-section as it is now. The content is a collage of sentences, paragraphs and notions from the previous draft and pertinent quotes I’ve dropped in where I’ve remembered or bothered. At the top is the what, why and how of this section. It’s so hard not to let it spiral and end up writing about everything. The challenge is keeping it tight, each sub-sections could conceivably be a whole PhD!
Orange bits are milestones I guess; where does the last section lead in to this, what’s the lead out; narrative markers. Green bits are things I need to dig around for more on. Yellow bits are key ideas or arguments. Blue bits are examples of practice to talk about. And that’s the system; I just went over and over and over and over it again to work down to sub-sections of the chapter and I still hate it. Like I said, each one could be it’s own PhD and I don’t see yet how they actually do more than just describe things. I guess that’s because they’re mostly made of other people’s quotations so far.
One of the things that is helping is I’m keeping three other PhDs/Theses (I’ll never tell who’s) that I really like open nearby me all the time and every time I get stuck about how to go about what I’m doing I just open a random page and read a bit of one of them to try and get a feel again of how to do this damn thing.
So this is a pretty intense spurt of work, post-recovery getting back into the swing of my mornings hasn’t been hard and the work/work/work/life balance is ok (though fuck me I miss bikes so much). I’m feeling good about getting this chapter in for at least end of January in some form or another and (as per lot’s of people’s advice on Instagram) I can’t be precious about it. Do it, get it out, get feedback and this one is important because this is the bulk of the project; not the intro, not the context; the thing in itself.
Short Stuff
- Worshipping at the Altar of Artificial Intelligence, Jessica DeFino. Interesting to read about the impacts of recent advances on beauty and aesthetics; slightly outside my wheelhouse.
- Why ‘eat the rich’ will be the dominant creative narrative of 2023. I’ve been wondering recently whether the surge in aspirational imagery (young men in particular in sports cars and big beach houses, usually attached to a trading scheme) is a normal vision for most people. I guess not.
I feel like I work harder than ever at the moment. Reading and writing all morning, nine hours of work and intellectual labour in the middle, couple of articles or a book in the evening and yet I feel stupider than ever; the cascade of information and stuff just gets bigger the closer you get to it.
A final tip (which may or may not be useful) as I sit here trying to pull this chapter together: Don’t look up. If I start by thinking about the enormity of the overall project I get paralysed and prevaricate: Have super simple, short and easily achievable steps.
Ok, I love you, obviously.