DS043: I was given the prompt ‘Insects’ by Marianna Maruyama the other week which was a great opportunity to play with boid particles as gone through in the infamous ‘moths‘ lazy tutorial. Setting them up was easy but I rendered this out like four times. The first time the light seemed to be baked from some reason. Then the particles didn’t appear. Then I made a mistake and overwrote some files. So anyway. Done now. This wasn’t helped at all by being in Cycles because Eevee can’t deal with changing lighting conditions very easily.
I feel like a dopey fly today. Bouncing around between tabs looking for nothing. This bit of the year where things are winding down but there’s still a lot of the weight of things to do around.
It’s rare that I’m happy with a bit of writing. I really don’t enjoy writing, not in the same way as rendering or making things. Often I’m asked to write about things that I’ve written or spoken about elsewhere and though there’s a real value in doing that, it lacks the novelty of coming up with something new. I know that as a good academic I’m supposed to dig deep, reiterate, bulwark my ideas but I’m restless and short-tempered and once something’s done I’d really rather move on. Anyway, Telling of Things was both something new that we came up with together and a joyful collaboration so it was a real pleasure to write and fun to read back.
Upcoming
This also gives me the chance to let you know what’s coming up. I’ve written a short piece for Dirty Furniture again about the early researchers of the telephone, charlatanism, necromancy and their interest in spirituality. I revisited and wrote up a talk I gave years ago for a new publication called Phantoms of Design. The chapter works thorough some of the ideas around magic, myth etc. but with a specific focus on opacity. I think those are both coming out this year.
I’m going to release those lectures I recorded for our students next week as well. I’ll hopefully get to do some new ones for the coming year.
Short Stuff
Probably most probable. An analysis of what chances in percentage people think sentiments of probability are. Super interesting visualisation. Reminds me of something I saw years ago where someone walked around London asking people where they thought they were and drew a similar plot using a similar method. I’ll never find it, so don’t even ask.
DS042: I think my computer is getting old. Really struggled to do this liquid sim and I’m not really happy with it. It’s a bit all over the place and the collisions are really inaccurate but you only get one go since it takes half a day to bake. In Eevee you can’t target particles by ID so that’s why the texture is all jittery. Again, you only really get one go and if it comes out bad you have to eat the burnt turkey.
I turned again to doing liquid simulations this week. I’m convinced there must be a way to do it which isn’t stupidly, achingly slow and heavy and I was wrong. I asked on Instagram for some inspiration for future renders and got some really good ideas to help me so that gives me a week or two of directions to go but I’m going to stay away from heavy physics sims for a little while because they just take up so much time and space.
One of the best things I’ve read about AI is Is chess the drosophila of artificial intelligence? A social history of an algorithm by Nathan Ensmerger. The paper traces the love affair of AI researchers and chess and unpacks and questions the nature of this relationship; how it exposes biases about what computer scientists and mathematicians think intelligence, how it creates publicity and hype for the public and funders and how it provides some form of flawed benchmarking. It draws the comparison with genetic science and drosophila – fruit flies – and how their proclivity for morphogenesis, quick breeding and relatively long lifespans make them useful to the biological and genetic sciences. However, it disassembles this simile with the brilliant quote from John McCarthy”
Computer chess has developed much as genetics might have if the geneticists had concentrated their efforts starting in 1910 on breeding racing Drosophila. We would have some science, but mainly we would have very fast fruit flies.
John McCarthy, AI as Sport, 1997
In other words, the focus on chess as a benchmark of computation and intelligence has limited the possibility of AI to do anything else except conform to a certain competitive and elite understanding of what intelligence is or could be. So I really like this playful call from Sally Davies for Dungeons & Dragons to replace chess as a benchmark test for AI. She describes how the aim of D&D isn’t to ‘win’ in the highly constrained and logical ways of Chess and Go but to make creative stories, D&D players enjoy defeat as much as victory as long as it is supported by a great story. Then there’s the complex social entanglements of it; players know each other and are pretending to be others, imagining the actions of imaginative characters and intentionally trying to make it as enjoyable as possible for the group. It’s a good assumption that an AI that could be a good D&D player would be a lot better than one that can solve the mathematics of Chess or Go.
It also strikes me that it so easily could have gone the other way. In Utopia of Rules, Graeber writes that a very good explanation for the prevalence of magic and occult language in computation (setup wizards, mailer daemons etc. etc.) is because people working in computation were all playing D&D in their spare time. A computer is a mathematical system with a thin veneer of lore, after all.
Non-Aggressive Critique
I finally read this great interview with Clara Balaguer here with Rhys Atkinson, who used to be on MA Graphic Media Design where she talks about trolling design with ‘bad’ software and the fashion for exhausting words before they’re done but I really, really, really gelled with this sentiment;
Humour and self-deprecation is a non-aggressive approach to criticality… I don’t always use this tactic, but I can draw from it. And I do not see it as submission. It’s exerting negative power. By ceding with gentleness rather than occupying with aggression—with a joke or an apology or a compliment—one can command a space.
Which, you know is a big part of the Revell™️ brand. I’ve always been uncomfortable around aggressive critique, either people bullying others in crits or on Twitter dot com or this notion that critique is competitive and you are ‘more right’ by having read more and using the right words in the right order. I find satire and self-satire much more useful because it’s not simply about intimidating people. I was talking to someone the other day who said (paraphrasing) ‘When you go to the doctor’s you don’t expect them to reel off a load of medical research citations in order for you to trust their diagnosis.’
Recents
Well, hopefully you saw but I had a great chat with Jarrett Fuller on Scratching the Surface a few weeks back and that’s now been released. It’s here on Soundcloud but is available on all good podcasting platforms. We talk about university, design, administration, speculation and everything in between.
I need to do some site updates this week. There’s a list of recent talks, events, publications etc. that need to go up but I just need to do that yearly tidy and get them up there.
Oh, we’re looking for a new course leader of BA User Experience Design. It’s been weirdly difficult to find someone for this role but if you think it might be you or someone you know, let me know. You just need to know about UX, teaching and a little about managing.
Short Stuff
Interesting piece on ‘Academia’s Stockholm Syndrome‘ and how we can’t manage to see past rankings. The author suggests that a) rankings are only respected and thus of commercial value to the ranker if they conform to what people already think which means the metrics used are chosen to do so eg: ‘Oxford and Harvard must be the best → by what metric are they the best? → Let’s use that to rank all universities.’ But b) that we can’t seem to see a world without rankings, griping and grumbling about the way they’e done as opposed to just rejecting them.
Bruce Sterling has a new ‘art’ blog; Artmaker. Lots of stuff on NFTs. There’s not an easy way to subscribe or get those things in your inbox which is fine because I have 80 odd unread newsletters anyway.
Firsting in Research from Max Liboirin about the problem of the reverence with which being ‘first’ to do/discover/see something is held in research.
Ok, that’s it back to work. I managed to read some stuff there but it’s late in the day now. I don’t call you enough. You know almost everyday I think ‘oh I gotta catch up with so and so and see how they’re doing’ and it’s very often you but events overtake me all the time. Love is a two-sided coin like that. Ok, until next time.
DS040: Trying to get interesting transparency in Eevee. Again, I’m not happy with it. Transparency is really hard to do in Eevee, so I just kept adding more crystals until it looked ok but that slowed it right down to where I may as well have used Cycles anyway. Then I couldn’t preview the animation because it ran too slow and when the final render came out I really hated the jaggedness and inorganic movement of the crystals growing and shrinking. Maybe I’ll have another crack at the same scene later on.
I haven’t had coffee since Saturday so everything just feels a bit dazed and uncertain.
Well no-one got back to me to say that this website looks broken so it is you, Natalie. I did have some time to sit down and do some actual reading this week. I’ve cracked the spine on the Indigenous epistemologies of AI work from Suzanna Kite et al, particularly the Making Kin With Machines piece. There’s not a lot more to say about it other than what’s on the tin really. It’s a rich reflection of non-singularitarian, non-western perspectives on the position of AI in the world, or worlds. There’s also a performance work by Kite; Everything I say Is True, Poetic Bibliography which is a beautiful interpretation of some of these ideas. I’m sorry there’s not more, still many tabs open, many things to do but at least the rhythm is returning.
Susan Cox-Smith shared this as the ‘most Dutch thing ever’ – an easily hacked vaccine passport system in Holland. It’s the story of a hack, some systemic incompetence and then people find their own workarounds by sharing QR codes to basically go out clubbing despite not having negative results. I’ve been struck recently when doing home testing by how much faith is put in the social contract in order for the whole thing to work. You have to self-report the result of the test which means there’s nothing to stop you lying if you were that kind of person or, as we now know, million of tests that presumably show negative that aren’t reported because the interface is clunky and relies on you hand-typing a tiny sixteen digit string of letters and numbers and people – quite reasonably – can’t be bothered even though that data is just as useful and important.
Lots of governmental rhetoric has leant on ideas like faith, trust, patience, responsibility and so on which actually makes total sense to me. I’ve had a number of conversations over the last two years of the form ‘I know we’re allowed to do it, but does that mean it’s the right thing to do?’ And it’s been pleasing to see a world where most folks are reckoning with the responsibility for others directly instead of just going by the letter of the law and smashing around into the crash barriers of legislation: Just because you can travel at 30 miles per hour down a residential street with people everywhere, doesn’t mean you should.
There are exceptions of course. For example, when ‘local exercise’ was permitted in January there was outrage as Boris was spotted cycling in Victoria Park – not deemed to be in the ‘local area.’ ‘What is a local area!?’ people demanded. ‘Demarcate for me in miles what my local area is!’ Incidentally, British Cycling’s guidance was simply that local area would be considered a comfortable area where you would normally cycle, so if that’s a circle around 80km from your door (as it is in my case) that’s ‘local.’ The point was not to exceed normal behaviour and put others at risk, not to do anything that would stretch the net.
Policy makers I think had assumed two things; one cynically and one somewhat faithfully. Firstly that you don’t want to write anything or say anything that you might later be called up on. Practically, the local area for me in central London is smaller than say for my parents in a town in the north of England. It’s further for them to go for anything and everything’s spaced further apart. Giving metrics here would just create further questions. So instead, you lean on part two; that after months of taking the gravity of the situation seriously, people generally have a dialled-in moral compass to what is reasonable social behaviour in the time of a pandemic and can make responsible decisions on that basis.
But to bring it round to Dutch night clubbers, maybe that will never happen. We’re so deprogrammed from thinking about ourselves as s community or network that we make of ourselves exceptions convinced of gambler’s fallacy: ‘It won’t happen to me, I’m different. Those rules are for other people, I have a special case.’ So an exciting future of digital services that lean as much on trust for faithful participation as gates, checks, balances and verification is basically implausible. I don’t know if that’s what they were attempting to try with self-reporting testing, but it’s basically what they proved.
Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying ‘End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH’, the paint wouldn’t even have time to dry.
Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time.
Recents
Two books coming out in the coming weeks bear my name, one I co-authored and the other I contributed a chapter to: Design and Digital Interfaceswhich I coauthored with John Fass, Ben Stopher and Eva Verhoeven is the first one. We wrote this back pre-pandemic so it’s going to be interesting to revisit it. It’s a sort of discursive guide aimed at designers working with digital media and platforms taking in the different dimension and properties of working digitally with some interesting examples throughout.
The second books, Designing Smart Objects in Everyday Life is one I co-authored a chapter for with Kristina Andersen. I’m really excited by this one. Despite the gravity of the book’s title we wrote a tongue-in-cheeck chapter attempting to classify types of machines according to a taxonomy developed by Jorge Luis Borges. The result is a somewhat frivolous but serious critique of smart objects. Anyway, those are all going out there soon and will be out and about. I’ll try and remember to report more once I have some feedback.
Here’s a short talk on the Haunted Machines stuff and AI I did for ‘My Home is My Burg’ – it was super fun. I always like it when it’s really conversational and I still miss meeting new people so there’s an opportunity to do that.
Short Stuff
I’m still crunking through the many tabs of things. I don’t think crunking is a verb.
Matt Webb pointed out the other day that it’s been six years since we all put pictures of puppy slugs in our slide decks and talked about how weird it was that Google was building a computer that could dream. Now it all seems rather prosaic. If I see one more painter making a ‘deep dream’ of Disney films to try and turn a buck on an NFT I’ll grumble very quietly to myself. Nonetheless, here’s the original article again.
Google is using AI to design chips to run AI on. The person who posted it said something like ‘this is the most amazing advance ever, truly groundbreaking’ and I think that’s a bit much. It’s not people making computer in Minecraft. But you know, it’s interesting.
Ok, ok, ok, ok. I can feel the body coming to life actually. Let’s hope the spirit is as willing this week. I love you, I love you, I love you. Speak to you next week.