Box081: Have a look around my brain

19.10.2219.10.22

There’s never any time to think. I was listening to Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell’s new podcast and they were discussing why the supposedly smart people in charge made stupid decisions the other week: Young, up-and-coming politicians have plenty of time to think and articulate; to refine and discuss ideas. Once they have responsibility, and the busy business of statehood creeps in, they don’t and they become increasingly reactive.

Since returning to work after The Crash I’ve found myself relentlessly chasing, being chased and reacting. Never thinking and as a result I made a silly decision (nothing on the scale of crashing an economy.) I need to make more time to think somehow. Cycling used to be my thinking time: As I was on the trainer or cruising around hills and valleys I would literally talk to myself to work out ideas or difficult conversations. And as you know, I think everyone talks to themselves, it’s just taboo to admit it. In Graeber and Wengrow’s book they talk about this self-reflection – to be able to have a conversation with yourself and imagine contrary or agreeing ideas and positions as the root of politics.

Excuse me, is this a piece of your brain?

This week’ PhD to-do list. 50% ain’t bad.

Reading is very much two-steps forward, one step back. For everything I read (and I’m still mostly cracking two or three articles or papers a day) I find two more things I want to read. For instance, I might come across this and realise that almost everything being referenced I want to read too and bam I’ve just added six or seven more things to the pile.

The other problem with reading thing is there are so many things I read that I just cannot understand. This is a particular problem with ‘canonical’ philosophical work that comes up and over and over again in other writing. (Eg. Simondon, some Jameson, Foucault). I pour over these insufferable and terribly written and/or translated tracts just trying to grab something to hold on to to make it make sense. Then maybe I get something, or read an article/wikipedia entry about the chapter/paper/article and get it but it just won’t stick in the brain! I’ve read, have saved and annotated two different translations of On The Mode of Existence of Technical Objects maybe five or six times over and still couldn’t tell you what it’s about or what the fuck ‘concretisation‘ means.

On the other hand, there is a lot of very, very, very good writing from social sciences which makes up for how bad philosophy is. (Don’t even get me started on Stiegler who can frankly, do one.) It just makes me angry that people lock what are apparently great ideas away behind language. I’m a dumb-dumb designer not an English literature scholar.

I finally wrote the abstract this week. This is, of course, by no means final and it is surrounded in an aura of insecurity. I imagine it will be iterated out of recognition over the next two years but I’ve eschewed putting it down thus far for fear of the commitment or the potential that it’s wildly stupid or grandiose or whatever.

This thesis in set in the context of the way images of AI futures are constructed and disseminated and how they return to shape or reinforce AI imaginaries in the present. Through critical practice, the thesis explores and critiques the construction of myths in AI and their alternative imaginaries; how stories, spectacle and metaphors are used to project power and meaning onto AI; and how visual and design language can be used to both foreclose and challenge the immaterial and as-yet contested futures of AI.
The contested space of AI’s imaginaries and futures raises critical questions for design’s role in reinforcing or challenging these dominant imaginaries. Where scholars and practitioners have engaged with the designerly dimensions of human-imperceptible technologies like radio waves, few have meaningfully engaged with the inscrutable dimensions of AI; in particular its construction as both a technological artefact and a social phenomena.
In particular, this thesis focuses on the visual and designerly qualities of AI futures and how certain imaginaries are made manifest in powerful visual metaphors, demonstrations, spectacles, performances or stories which are used to foreclose alternatives and prescribe particular futures or imaginaries. Often, these manifestations, stories and spectacles rely on advances in computer graphics in combination with designerly techniques and tools to generate synthetic future images of AI at the same time as AI itself is increasingly used to generate these very same synthetic images of the future.
The result is a recurring loop of imagination and perceived or reported technical advance and hype that forecloses possible alternative futures for AI outside of dominant narratives emerging from spaces such as Hollywood and Silicon Valley. This thesis explore the opportunity for alternative imaginaries emerging from art and design and explores aesthetics for critiquing these future images.

*I like the idea of synthetic images as like wholly-speculative images both technically and conceptually but am not sure yet how the loose definition in my head is say different from speculative images. Especially as, in the context of AI/ML synthetic has a very particular and useful meaning

*What’s the difference and relationship between an imaginary and a future? I think a future is a type of imaginary. AI imaginaries also extend into the present (innovation, funding, potential, culture etc.) and just a component of them is the future bit. That’s my theory but.

There. I did it. The other big thing this week was making big giant maps as a result of trying to write that abstract. See, in my head I had the words; AI, imagination, futures, images, but no idea how they fit together. To tackle this I decided to map them out for their overlaps and relationships as ‘ideas’ and then also plot where in that map were the bits I want to investigate or talk about.

A Venn Diagram of the subject of the PhD. Green bits are ideas or notions, red bits are actual practices or technologies. The grey bits are important but I don’t want to talk about them in the work and the dotted lines are what binds it all up. I’ve then tried to identify where either existing writing or practice fits and where I’d like to spend some time digging for intellectual tin. (I don’t expect I’ll produce gold but tin was a good reliable metal export for the English for most of the Roman period)

Of course this then led to a bigger question. Last time I wrote I mentioned how I’d gone through my whole library to meaningfully tag everything for better understanding of what I have and don’t. How does the library map onto this? Where have I got lots of great literature and practice and where have I got none? Does it change the focus of what I think my PhD is?

The significantly larger and more complex ‘literature review’ map. Yellow things are articles and papers, blue are practices or projects, purple are real-life examples. It’s all structured around ‘big ideas’ eg. ‘Construciton and Foreclosure of Futures’; ‘How is Knowledge Constructed In/Through AI?’; ‘Hype and Expectation’ Orange ones are then sub-ideas, often these connect between two or three big ideas. For instance ‘Video Games’ is both connected to ‘Pop Culture’ and ‘Worldbuilding’. Then there’s clustering around geographic features like ‘Fuckup County’ (all the stories of AI failure and flaws) or ‘Groundhog Bay’ (where the future is endlessly recycled). Finally are bigger notions like Future and Computational Imaginaries and the ‘What it is vs what we say/think it is’ which indicates as to how we move from technical ‘reality’ to imaginaries.

Well this is the reason I’m a week late writing to you: What I thought would be a fun, Sunday afternoon activity took a few hours every day up to last weekend. I started just putting down articles, practices, ideas and connections from the library. I’ve explained the ‘logic’ of it above. I know connectivism is whatever but it works for me. As well as being quite a pleasing exercise it was useful in a couple of ways:

I need a literature review. This is the second daunting task and this map is a literature review. I just need to figure out how to get the multi-dimensionality of it and my thinking into the linear structure of writing. This is worth coming back to as a problem in a later post. All of this work is really about loops – how image create and are created by futures and futures create and are created by technology etc. etc. There’s no linear route.
I can see where there are gaps. There’s much more in the writing and thinking about AI and images than there is in the futures area. So that’s a good place to spend some time in the future. For now I can use the stuff I have to work on my indicative chapters.
I managed to trim some stuff; to identify what’s just interesting or fun from what’s actually going to contribute to my thinking.

You can probably guess that I did this all in Miro which is perfectly fine no matter what Dr. David Benque thinks. And one of the great things about that is I can open it up for you to have a look around. Hell, why not? I’d like to invite you to add comments because I think that would be super helpful but I’m not getting the paid-for Miro so for now, please have a look and an explore and if anything jumps out at you and you can be bothered, send me a note.

This week I’m going to be going back to point two; refactoring my current stuff I’m happy with from round 2 writing into round 3. I’ve already started doing this for the methodology. I think it’ll be useful in reflection of the maps above to see if they fit together.

Recents

I visited the lovely folk of the From Later broadcast again yesterday where we talked about voice synthesis, video game dance moves and my own, very solid notion of #breezepunk. It’ll be out soon. Also the trailer for Abundance – the film the Arup Foresight team have been busily working on over the summer is up and out there. If you’re interested in screening the whole thing or running an event, then get in touch!

Short Stuff

Antikythera
The Inflation Reduction Act may, in fact, encourage more climate and green investment than even predicted.
Dan Hon on maybe the metaverse is a verb not a noun.

I’m sorry that’s all I have. I have something else but I need to save it for a podcast. Love you.

Box079: The long road

30.09.22

This one’s been in drafts for a long time and I didn’t want to wait til next Wednesday so here it is.

ICYMI, I got in a pretty bad accident in Richmond Park on 19th August while doing some laps. In the space of two seconds a dog ran into the road, turned around, hesitated and hovered and forced me to slam on the brakes, sending me and the bike flying and shattering my femur into eight pieces. This caused a lot of internal bleeding and I was rushed to Kingston, then St. George’s hospital for surgery. Then I had ten days in hospital with three blood transfusions to get me walking again and now four weeks at home on crutches.

X-Ray of my right femur post-surgery, now replete with titanium rods and pins and stainless steel zip ties holding it all together.

Recovery is going really well generally and I’m hoping to be off crutches next week and possibly even back on a bike, even if indoor training by the end of the year. I’m easing back into work gradually and the pain is totally bearable and lessening every day but the frustration is just how difficult and exhausting everything is. I’ve gone from having super-active, long days of lots of work, exercise and activity to basically needing to take a break every 20 minutes. The fatigue is real and I hope it passes, especially as I get back to exercising and get some more endorphins kicking around.

Then, last week, when I was going to send you this I got knocked out with flu from nowhere (well, not nowhere, the nine-month old girl that lives with us is most likely the culprit) and spent two and a half days with fever in bed which I guess is the side-effect of a generally weakened state.

Where’s the render?

Big format changes over here at the Bounding Box Inc. While in convalescence and tallying up the value of my time I realised that something has to give. Between a full-time job that often bleeds over, my own practice, raising the infant, hopefully returning to bikes and the nascent PhD, there’s just too much. It’s not an unusual or in any way an heroic story but I was just doing too much and frankly, not doing the PhD because it was the hardest thing. Doing the render each week is anything between half a day and a day’s work and that’s valuable time where I really need to break the back of the PhD work. I’m six years into it and not even half way and if I want to combat the anxiety that haunts me every night in bed then I need to make meaningful sacrifices to it.

It’s somewhat ironic because the PhD is very much about computer generated imagery, even though that conversation is accelerating massively all the time now with the AI renderers clogging up LinkedIn, we probably are only six months away from the first short film made in Midjourney or whatever.

So they may come back. It’s still a part of my practice, and it is a practice-based bit of research but I need to attack some theory and thinking for a bit before I can run more experiments for you.

This has also meant doing some recoding on the site because it was all set up around that header video and now it’s all kerfuffled.

While I’m on that.

My interest in these things (both boutique CGI and the AI stuff) is how they loop in with imagination. This interview with David Holz (formerly of Leap Motion now of Midjourney) is really fascinating for a bunch of reasons. Not least because social media is so lousy and loud with the opinions of futurists screaming about how exciting it is to just ask for images and get them without pesky designers or artists challenging their assumptions and provoking their imagination and so it’s unusual to hear from someone actually designing these systems.

We started off testing the raw technology in September last year, and we were immediately finding really different things. We found very quickly that most people don’t know what they want. “Here’s a machine you can imagine anything with it — what do you want?” And they go: “dog.” And you go “really?” and they go “pink dog.” So you give them a picture of a dog, and they go “okay” and then go do something else.
David Holz

Holz is keen to frame Midjourney as an ‘engine’ for imagination: It doesn’t actually replace imagination or make up for a lack of creativity but it can augment it. So if you’re lacking in vision in the first place it’s actually kinda useless. It’s worth reading. I don’t agree with it all: For instance, it bears the usual hallmark of a techno-centric worldview that the social problem of not enough participation in future-making is solveable by a technology as opposed to better education or public policy.

This all nicely overlaps/intersects with this great piece from Erik Savaggio – Radicalized by the Game Genie – which does a great job of re-contextualising AI image generators as games that have their own mechanics and interactions and, importantly (and in full agreement with my general scepticism) as processes of play, not in ends of themselves – don’t get dazzled by the spectacle.

What if DALLE2 is not strictly an art-making tool like Photoshop, but an art-making Sim, a game engine for art making? DALLE2 encourages creative expression within the rules and structures of its mechanics. This is how game narratives are co-created: imagination enters into a mutually created space, and players interact with that world which the code renders to reach some game-stated goal. In the art game, the goal is the creation of a suitable image, rather than slaying a dragon or building the city of our dreams.
Erik Savaggio

Reading

I cracked through Image of the Future by Frederik Polak a week or two ago. This was on reading some of Johannes‘ reflections on it as part of his thesis work. I have to be honest; did not enjoy. It’s supposed to be a cornerstone of futures thinking and I’m sure when it was published in the 70s it was, but it’s very hard to read past the western, Christian supremacy in it. Polak relentlessly laments the ‘decline’ of society as ‘evidenced’ by how previous (European) societies have related to images of the future. It’s not a particularly wild thesis: When there are optimistic images of the future, society thrives, when there isn’t or their dystopian, society dies. ‘Thriving’ in these terms is eg. the Industrial Revolution and Age of Enlightenment where everything was great and everybody was happy and healthy and things were perfect everyone agrees.

There’s a little more to it and part one is maybe a useful list of the history of utopias or future visions since pre-Christianity but honestly, I wouldn’t bother.

I also read Smoke and Mirrors from Gemma Milne. I saw her present at a panel discussion around hype and AI a few years ago and bought her book right away hoping to delve a little deeper since it’s such an important part of my research stuff but the subtitle (How Hype Obscures the Future and How to See Past It) is a little misleading: It’s not really about hype per se, but about nine hyped-up technologies and tries to peel back the curtain a little bit to show you the current state and discourses of eg. urban farming, AI, quantum computing etc. etc. If you’re emerged in the tech/futures space there’s nothing super new here but it’s a useful primer. I did really like her notion that AI isn’t a novel form of black boxing, but that all our social bureaucracy is a black box and we’re just automating it. I might use that.

The Black Box problem is not unique to the current ‘age of AI’, it’ part of our society. AI is not this separate thing we don’t control and which independently came into being – it’s and accentuation of humans and the society in which we live, which we build and affect and can change if we desire.
Gemma Milne, Smoke and Mirrors, p.240.

Other than that I cracked a seam of stuff on AI and expectation that I’ve been delving deep on. Prediction without Futures, from Sun-Ha Hong looks at bits of computational reductionism as well as how prediction and the perception of the power to predict gives permission to entities to make social decisions. Enchanted Determinism, Alexander Campolo and Kate Crawford picks up a similar thread about how the construction of myth around AI (which is very much back in vogue, circa Haunted Machines 2014) helps to enchant the seemingly accurate predictive results; that it builds a cultural spectacle around the machines that make them more powerful due to their inscrutability.

I’m sort of on the fence about whether AI is inscrutable really or if we just all agree to say that. But that’s another trail of thought

Short Stuff

Bleep bloop. More to it than this but here’s what I had in drafts.

The tap of ‘AI is magic’ is now stuck in the ‘on’ position for futurity. In 2014, I thought, ‘huh, that’s a weird and interesting blip‘ and now here we are.
Using DALL-E 2 to redesign streets. This is a use-case I can really get behind. It’s less about vainglorious futurists defining future aesthetics than everyday folks having the opportunity to imagine the World Without Cars. That’s a good and wholesome application of ‘AI.’ Especially because it’s not trying to be photoreal.
Speaking of, another good application, this time of Stable Diffusion, in reverse-engineering prompts to reveal the biases in the data used to train it.
Andrew Dana Hudson coining the idea of ‘Omelianism’ in which we might spot false utopias.

Well next week I’ve decided to write to you about what this actual damn PhD is about. Not just random musings but a sort of semi-structured breakdown because I keep mentioning it, keep thinking about it, keep finding more things to read but rarely actually tell you about it.

(Read that back in Mike Duncan closing out an episode voice, queue string music… ‘but rarely, actually, tell you about it.’)

Ok, love you as always, byee.

Box071: Render Fiction

15.06.22

DS072-e130: The halls stood silent, implying by their presence that they were waiting for something. Rows of chairs looked as if they were only recently vacated, as if we were just too late to catch the main event, the flight. The reality of course is no-one had ever been here nor, given the astronomical odds, be here again but the place liked to keep up appearances, liked to play host to calm the mind.

I wish I could just listen to articles. My Audm is always on – usually Vanity Fair pieces about Republicans because I’m just a rubber-necker like you. Sometimes I come across long articles and (following last week’s comment about never having time) and wish I could listen to them instead of have to read them. I’m an excellent and eager multi-tasker, I can do a million other things while listening to articles but reading demands my full concentration and it’s another reason I resent it.

Saying that, I tired of trying to read ‘relevant’ non-fiction and finally opened Tom McCarthy’s Making of Incarnation which Justin recommended to me and it’s brilliant. I forgot that you’re allowed to just read fiction. I used to work in a bookshop, long before I took anything this seriously and just chose to read things I actually wanted to rather than things I felt I should.

It’s a great novel (so far) and Justin was bang on with the recommendation. It’s the only novel I’ve read that features Blender as a McGuffin. About a third in and we’ve already had a IP-minded conspiracy theory build around the back catalogue of Lillian Gilbreth, examined the inner working of a CGI and simulation company and got really into kinematic science. The reviews for it aren’t great but I’m loving the detail and world-building. It reminds me a little of Crying of Lot 49, this idea of a shady, diffident secret society on very specific technical grounds. It’s chock full of CGI terms and technology but turned towards this worldbuilding project. Years ago I wanted to do a project about the computer graphics industry as a political force, like small arms, tobacco or oil. What would they lobby for? How? What would make them so powerful and how would we live with them? Maybe I’ll do it one day still, McCarthy comes close.

I’m involved in writing a script at the moment at work and there’s something not quite right about it. I used to absorb myself in novels and worldbuilding projects when I was doing more speculative design stuff, not just sci-fi but Russian tragicomedy and Argentinian dramas. It’s helping a little to get back there again.

Recently

Week before last I was in Lisbon for Humane conference giving a sweeping overview of trends impacting the future of Higher Education and trying not to re-enter debates about digital learning I was deeply involved in in my previous role. If you’d like some Design Futures / Foresight stuff, get in touch!

Upcoming

I’m up in Manchester 4-8 July for a thing so if you’re around and want to meet up, please let me know!

Short Stuff

Very much enjoyed this excellent call for ‘Imaginology‘ from Stephen Asma. Something I’m super keen on promoting and normalising, the use of ‘icky’ things like intuition and imagination.
Check out this amazing short – ‘Revenge‘ – made by Leo Avero in Blender. There’s a strong Ian Hubert influence in there but it’s interesting because I think that Avero has drawn on limitations of hardware for stylistic decisions. For instance, there’s a slight ‘glitchiness’ to the visuals which I think are probably caused by noise filters that are creating interference every few frames. This would have meant much shorter render times but he’s then clearly embraced the effect for it’s ‘painterly quality.’ The characters look a little clay-like, again reducing rendering time without sub-surface and animation time without needing to get super human-like motion. I can also see other influences in there which I adore, Control for one in the office scenes. Anyway, check it out:

Some useful ideas of what a good Web3 might look like, basically, the opposite of the current Web3. I enjoyed this much more nuanced and detailed exploration of Web3 that delves into some of the contradictions and behind the veneer of scams and heists – Paradise at the Crypto Arcade on Wired.
Perhaps a small step toward a general AI – Gato – which can recognise images, play game, respond to chat and control a robot arm. Simple suff but all in one package.