This week I’ve been reabsorbing myself into the stack. I came back from holiday and just went full tilt at my old work habits and found myself completely disorientated by the end of the week. Severe mental whiplash jumping from lie-ins back to early mornings; from peace to the constant bing and boop of notifications, from talking to 4 people to talking to 40. I’m almost back to my sleep schedule now but just sort of basking in the work headspace rather than trying to do too much. I’m older and less agile. I overdid it on my leg a few weeks back from which I still haven’t recovered. The physio seems to think it’s nothing more serious than strain so I’m spending as much time as possible off my feet which means only going out to take the kid to nursery and standing to cook.
PhD
Last week was the special one, you can look back there for some misty remembrances of blogs past and the hundredth post on this blog (which BOX099.1 technically was). I also mentioned last week that I’d passed my upgrade for the PhD and that I’d give you more information. The upgrade (this is Goldsmith’s term, other places call it a ‘transfer’ or other things) is in short, the little-bit-past-halfway point on the PhD. It’s a light-touch viva in which you need to prove to the examiners that the research is original and novel, that it’s based on solid foundations, that you know what you’re talking about and that you have a good and pragmatic plan to complete.
I think in all those criteria it was a good pass which meant that we didn’t have to spend much time debating the ins and outs and could spend the time focussing on the bits that could be improved. Mostly this was on how the practice is positioned. There’s oodles and oodles of stuff out there on practice-based work and all of it is a little bit nebulous because a) it’s a tricky thing to pin down – exactly how does making things generate knowledge? And b) why would you want to? You would then constrain the opportunity to do new and exciting things if you put it in a straitjacket.
The contradiction the examiners identified (and that I agree with fully but had never had articulated) is that I talk about practice as driving research through discovery but then write about it textually, like I’m reading someone else’s work. In other words; I claim that I read about an idea and think about it, then try it out in practice either by implementing it or thinking about its opposite or challenging it. But then in the thesis I write about my practice as if it’s anyone else’s work and give it a critical reading. Let’s take an example:
There’s a bit where I talk about how people interface with AI; that a lot of that is inherited from sci-fi; either in the form of humanoid robots, data rich interfaces, talking gizmos etc. etc. And in that interface is a metaphor of control and power which reinforces how we should relate to this nebulous idea of AI. So far so good, lots of evidence and examples and good theory.
Then I talk about Augury and how it exposes this bodily and physical relationship by having the audience lie on the floor and supplicate themselves in a sort of grotesque satire of the ideas of magic and power that is in the narrative of AI. And then I compare that to Sougwen Chung’s work where she is on the floor at the same level of the machines which is more representative of a collaboration. The problem the examiners basically asked is ‘well what happened in what order?’ All of these things; the theory and real-world examples, my practice and the practice of others are all presented simultaneously and read intertextually (which is great) but they didn’t all happen in that order, there’s a distinct chain of events that led to decision-making.
This is actually quite a simple but fundamental change: What specifically drove decisions in the practice? And then what specifically did the practice reveal about the real-world examples? How was it inspired by the work of others I saw that I thought was either lacking, or doing something interesting?
This led to a brief debate over whether the fundamental structure is right for showing a ‘design-led/driven’ bit of research but I’m reluctant to completely reassess something I’m relatively happy with and I have a plan to tie it all together. Another question was; how did I decide on the chapters? I sort of blustered here because it was basically intuition based on reading a bunch. Which is fine. Saying ‘these ideas were really weighty in the literature’ is ok. But we can cross-reference this with our other problem of positioning the practice and rationalising the structure.
What I want to do is map each practice project to each of the chapters and make super clear (and it’s not yet in this image) what each project drives or addresses in the theme of that chapter. I rushed this out so it’s scrappy but the idea is to give a really clear logic and narrative to the way it’s done. I think there’ll be more layering. I don’t want to simply write about each project in order in the context of the chapter but find some cross-cutting drivers (like I have now) that work across all projects in a chapter. But this approach should make those relationships much clearer in my head and consequently, clearer in the mind of the reader.
Recents
I wrote a short piece for the Crafts Council magazine about AI. They were interested in how AI might affect crafts (which I really know very little about) but I wrote a bit about how OIO and Sougwen are using machines in their practice to augment or extend their creativity and have a more honest conversation with the audience about what machines are. It’s out now here.
Short Stuff
- Matt Webb on fractional AI becoming too cheap to meter.
- Oh my god The Bear season 2 was so good.
- Gen Z are apparently really into video essays. The Gen-Z link is a bit spurious. I really like video essays as well and have shared many 2 hour+ ones here. I think it’s more that you get a huge amount of information on a niche subject. I mean, we had Adam Curtis before. I’m sure the bad ones are just as bad but the good ones are amazing.
- ChatGPT is exposing flaws in the grant-writing process. I like that a side-effect of GPT-creep is that it exposes bullshit processes that are used for gate-keeping or filtering (like grant writing). The sort of tacit social contracts around it are laid bare when you realise that really asking people to write hundreds of pages of application is a test of will, not of expertise or rigour. The question is what the alternative is? As we know from other systems, it could result in a deluge of poor-quality work and scams if there isn’t some check and balance around research funding.
- Marc Andreesen’s Techno-Optimists Manifesto is everything you expect and less; really a techno-populist screed. I suppose the format of a manifesto gives him the opportunity to shout about all the things he’s made money off without actually providing any evidence that they have been socially useful. As a luxury believer, remoaner and part of the anti-growth coalition I’ve also been enjoying the inventive sobriquet’s populists have been producing. I now count ‘enemy of the future’ amongst them. Gary Marcus reviewed it well:
I admire his unbridled optimism, his yearning for markets to be free, his longing for technologies that could be without restraint, his ability to unabashedly cite 56 of his allies and nobody who disagrees, and, Nixon-like, to confidently declare anyone who disagrees with him to be both immoral and an Enemy, and above all else his absolute certainty in his own ideas.
- Some good news though. Carbon emissions from power production may have peaked.
- Matt’s been doing more stuff with breezepunk thinking. Which he really took and ran away with. Breezepunk originated in a podcast when talking about some research using small turbines ot generate small amounts of power. The idea in my mind was that thousands of these super cheap, DIY, palm-sized generators might start proliferating in the environment. I mean, if overnight London became chock-full of e-scooters and app bikes then why not tiny wind generators with little batteries?
- The Whole Earth Index. An online repository of all the Whole Earth stuff in one place.
Alright that’s it for now. I love you. I have a bunch of writing to do that I’d kicked into the long grass earlier in the year and now the grass has grown and people are emailing to ask kindly how it’s going and when I think I’ll have done this or that for them.