Box 010: Being Nice to The Reader

09.09.20

DS005: A heavy one this, done as a side-project of a side-project of a side-project and consequently taking too many hours. I used Botaniq Lite for generated tree and shrub assets (I’m lazy, Matthew Plummer-Fernández has been making his own.) The rocks, grass, ferns and floating leaves are particle systems with some silly physics chucked on. In Eevee you get quicker rendering at the cost of global illumination (the way light bounces into shaded areas) making everything too dark. If only someone could figure out how to make screen-space global illumination oh wait.

The weather’s moody and unpredictable, which makes it difficult to talk about. Like a troubled relative that you brush off when asked about in polite company. You don’t want to privately acknowledge that what you’re witnessing is a very terminal collapse and so you mark it down as eccentricity and hope that it’ll just go away.

Years ago I did a project (naively and clumsily in retrospect) mapping the flow of power through a very Eurocentric view on history. I still hover around the thesis that the power remains the same but the institutions mutate and I’ve been listening to and reading a lot of stuff about ‘deep state’ conspiracies recently, particularly the aesthetics.

Anyway I thought it might be fun to mess with it in the context of this ‘deep-deep state’ conspiracy I sort of speculated on. Let’s get the hashtag #DeepHapsburg going and maybe write a Twitter bot that just replaces all the Q nonsense with things from the Austro-Hungarian empire. What do you think? Good idea? Pointless distraction? ‘Schleswig-Holstein; Tell The Truth #ReleaseTheProclomations’ #WherePalmerstonGoesWeGoOne‘

Practical Thinking

At the moment, the planet might seem poised more for a series of unprecedented catastrophes than for the kind of broad moral and political transformation that would open the way to such a world. But if we are going to have any chance of heading off those catastrophes, we’re going to have to change our accustomed ways of thinking. And as the events of 2011 reveal, the age of revolutions is by no means over. The human imagination stubbornly refuses to die.
David Graeber – A Practical Utopian’s Guide to The Coming Collapse

I’m sure you’re aware David Graeber died last week. I didn’t know him at all but he was a significant influence on my political thinking through my student years and beyond. I came across Debt while working in a bookshop, read that, then went back and read everything else. I remain pleasantly surprised, word-eatingly so, that the post-apocalyptic wasteland ‘marketplace of ideas’ Twitter dot come hasn’t torn his legacy apart yet. Instead, the expressions of loss and meaning in his work appear genuine. His words, activism and general optimism seem to be universally admired and acknowledged.

Thinking about it, there are two things about Graeber’s writing that makes him stand out and may account for this wild exception of why the piranhas of the Irish microblog haven’t turned on him yet.

Firstly, he never seems to trash anything. Nothing was unsalvageable; everything could be a tool put to other uses, subverted and improved. Similar to the way Pratchett never had true villains, just individuals with different, maybe misguided motivations, Graeber’s optimism is rooted in a real belief in change and an optimism for the world to come. This appeals very much to (and possibly formed) my designerly strategy mindset. In writing about Occupy, he describes the strategy as about being cleverer and understanding ‘the system’ better than the the system itself; from occupation to taxation laws. Institutions, systems, organisations and machines are all assemblages that are exploited in a particular way by those who hold the levers of power. Instead of resorting to fire and brimstone, identify those levers, figure out where they’re weakest and exploit them yourself.

The thesis of Debt is a demonstrable argument of this kind: Graeber suggests that ‘Abolish capitalism’ is unfeasible, unimaginable and even undesirable to most and may be snarled up in left activism forever. However, ‘Abolish debt’ hits a chord with a wider audience, drawing on the near-universal experience of debt while identifying it as the actual technical thing that underpins the inequities of capitalism.

This ties into the second point; knowing how to communicate difficult, complex ideas to a wider audience. After all, it was Graeber who (reluctantly) took credit for the ‘We are the 99%’ slogan.

What this means for his writing is that it’s actually readable. I half-joke a lot that I hate reading but that’s because it’s half true. Reading is hard and very often incredibly boring. It is a physical effort involving squinting and an intellectual effort involving memory and thought. Just like a designer, you, as a writer, have a job to make that effort as easy as possible for your reader so they can get to the actual substance of what you’re describing.

I’m hardly unique in suggesting that the intellectual class reward obfuscation and dodging and glamourise it as ‘nuance.’ Fuck nuance. You don’t nuance a toaster or a fridge, which is why everyone knows how to make a cheese toastie. Graeber’s writing was popular because he made difficult ideas easy to understand through applied examples that drew on most folks’ experience and in doing so progressed not only society but his field of thought. Maybe it’s because I’m an educator but I don’t believe you can move ideas forward if you’re not willing to be generous about inviting other people along with you. So much bad intellectuality is about protecting, hoarding and demarcating those ‘in the know’ against everyone else. More crucially, and particularly for left, liberal stuff, writing and theory is riddled with an unspoken notion that if you, the reader, don’t understand the ideas, then it’s your fault for not being educated, aware or revolutionary enough. Reading Graeber felt like being warmly and generously introduced to the interesting kids at school you thought were way out of your league.

A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse explains his whole philosophy in one title – pragmatic, optimistic, straight-forward but grounded in serious cynicism and fashioned through humour. I hope there are more Graebers in the years to come or we’re going to have big problems.

Short Stuff

There’s a lot of short stuff this week. So much that I’m saving some for next week which is a Content Strategy.

I have a growing theory that Death in Paradise and Lost belong to the same universe. Ask me about it some other time.
The Navier-Stokes equation and the unresolved problem at the core of it is one of my favourite mysteries of maths. You may have heard me bang on about it to you some time: The equation is very good at predicting how fluids move at any scale up to the galactic except that as you get closer and closer to an infinitely small scale they approach infinite speed, which is impossible. I watched this terrible film recently in which the problem was given much less than a starring role next to Chris Evans’ fatherly redemption story, despite being mentioned all the time. Don’t watch that terrible film. Watch this Numberphile about it instead.
Speaking of protocols and file formats last week. Check out this amazing event from the New School next Monday.
I linked it up the top there but, a very exciting thing to happen for Blender Eevee is someone has made an add-on that simulates the effect of global illumination. Eevee is Blender‘s newish real-time rendering engine made to compete with Unreal. The cost of real-time rendering is you’re never going to get the top of the reward curve of “realism” that comes with really superheating your graphics card for hours like used to happen with Cycles – the other Blender rendering engine which uses the much slower but more accurate ray-tracing lighting method. Real-time (or rasterised) rendering always looks like a video game – harsh lighting, high contrast – unless you engage in loads of trickery. Physical reality is generally softly lit and coloured from all directions – called global illumination. This hysterical gentleman does a good job of explaining it, but I’ll be messing around with that this week, for sure.
How does Matt Webb do this every. damn. day?
Your favourite solarpunk and mine Jay Springett has a new channel – ‘Come Internet With Me‘ which sort of explains itself.

That’s it. I love you as always. Sorry for getting frustrated at academic and intellectual culture. I know Certain People will lambast me later and tell me how I’m wrong but I don’t think they’ll ever change my mind: There’s a reason that good ideas keep losing out to conservatism and wilful ignorance and it’s partly our fault for making them hard to get at.

Box 009: Slanted Surfaces

02.09.2002.09.20

DS004: Some displacement textures mapped and animated across a subdivided sphere. The mapping is done by making them follow an invisible empty that is rotating around the whole scene making it look like the sphere is spinning.

Back to the routine today. I’m hoping that some of the better habits I’ve clung to over the last few weeks don’t get washed away in the churn; ‘like water’s wet and sky is up.’

I submitted 7000 words to the Yale architecture journal last week just in time for this in-depth analysis of the whole Revit fun factory controversy to appear. Thanks Alan Warburton for sending it my way. The short version of this whole debacle is that Revit – Autodesk’s flagship Building Information Management (BIM) software – dominates the software market for architecture firms and the world’s leading architects think it’s crap basically. It’s over-priced and lacks basic features and so a bunch of superstar architecture firms wrote an open letter threatening to pull out of the subscription model they’ve now been trapped in and demanding change. However, because it is the standard, it dominates the market and the article does a really good job of anecdata-ly explaining the monopoly Autodesk have built:

Earlier this year [2020! – me], Autodesk released an update that allowed designers to create walls that weren’t vertical. Previously, architects could either draw slanted walls using cumbersome workarounds or avoid designing them all together. Such is Autodesk’s power: It can dictate not only the effort required to design a slanted wall but perhaps whether a designer will create one at all.

This is such a wonderfully innocuous anecdote that perfectly surmises the article I wrote and a big piece of my own thinking. The politics and economics of software development’s role in future and near-future aesthetics. Now, in the article I wrote I’m keen to stress that software constraints also constrain imaginable possibilities, not just practice. In this case, it’s not like architect’s hadn’t designed, built and imagined slanted walls before, it’s just that (by their account) they are particularly put out in doing so in Revit. It’s also slanted walls, so who cares? But if it’s a pain in the neck for the world’s leading architecture firms to slightly slope a wall, what are the unimaginable facilities of the software they don’t even know to complain about?

Further down the article is an even more telling quote about how the standardisation of Revit has crept into the finances of business working with each other. As an aside, I remember reading Alexander Galloway’s Protocol for the first time and truly grasping the extent of the role of standardisation and formatting in technology and the consequent socio-political landscape that standardisation creates through the power it choses to secure. (Actually, I probably should have dug it out for this article, oh well, nvm.) So, in the article, out of frustration, an unnamed but apparently significant technologist at an unnamed but apparently significant architecture firm tried to move the company out or Revit, citing the amount of money they would save but:

…when their firm started getting serious about the deal, the tech leader began reading through past contracts with clients and realized that many required projects either to use Revit or to deliver data using Autodesk’s proprietary .rvt file format. Their firm couldn’t afford to lose this work so they stayed with Revit—and with Autodesk.

File formats are counter-revolutionary folks. The article ends with the bleak prophecy that Autodesk probably don’t have to do anything. They’ve so monopolised the market that architecture firms can moan all they want, and they can still crank out under-performing, over-priced software. Anyway, the world is currently busy dealing with a much bigger technology market monopolisation controversy and whether you like it or not, you bougie intellectual you, the video games studios have significantly more cultural and financial heft than ZHA and the architectural elite.

What else?

AWE was released last week, the latest DLC addition to Control – definitely the best non-Indie game I’ve played over the last year or so (have you played Disco Elysium? Well, what are you doing?) I’ve only spent a few hours in the dark technocratic Narnia that is The Oldest House over the last week but I’m once again entranced by the incredible concrete artistry of the place. I never played Alan Wake – the game that this new expansion ties into – so some of the references are a bit lost on me, still I hope they make another expansion. I hope they never stop giving me more space and time to explore the world of Control, to be honest. For now I’m inching my way through The Oldest House again, making sure to make the most of every moment.

I popped over to Game Art Engines on Saturday afternoon after my friend Sarah Brin reminded me that I am really into art, games and software. Sarah hosted a session with Joseph DeLappe and they discussed a load of stuff including DeLappe’s project using the game Grand Theft Auto V (which we have talked about before) to visualise gun deaths in the US – Elegy. It was also nice to hear more about Luke Caspar Pearson and Sandra Youkhana’s work with Videogame Urbanism which I’ve been following for a little bit. There were some interesting ideas and practices in the presentations but there are still problems with the format of these online things. The event got a bit… janky due to connection issues and trying to operate in a virtual space that only a few folks controlled. Limiting control over the virtual space was a way to stop trolling but it made some of the presentations unintelligible because of the format of being a stream-in-a-stream and some very dense, dry, text-based academic presentations. Look, it’s still a great event with some great folks. This Saturday is the next one, you can find more info through the link at the top there.

Recents

I’m going to be putting my cycling miles to work for British Red Cross this month for Miles for Refugees. I’m going to do at least 555 miles (893 km to normal people) and try and raise lots of money to keep people alive. Yes, I would probably ride 893 km in a month anyway but again, I want to try and stop people dying and if I can use my paltry platform to do that, great. You can donate here. As always I’ll be updating gleeful followers on the Instagram.

Short Stuff:

I shared an article a few weeks back in 002 on the interesting debate going on right now in maths about what the nature of proof is in the context of computation and artificial intelligence. This great little article furthers that with an overview of computation and mathematical reasoning: If something can only be proved by computer because of it’s complexity and the time required, what does that do to human-oriented versions of proof? Complexity and comprehensibility become significant issues in proving pure mathematical truths and it’s causing some super interesting turmoil.
I started taking the time to read Venkatesh Rao’s Ribbonfarm newsletter again. His writing was really influential on me when I was doing my MA and I’ve been a subscriber ever since but have sort of not felt smart enough to engage with it until recently. His writing is as interesting now as ever.
I don’t know much about simulators or the Flight Simulator series but I’m intrigued by the advances in the latest release. Microsoft have managed to wire it into other parts of the ecosystem – streaming in Bing maps and ‘smart’ simulating cars on roads, using live weather data in-game. It’s just interesting watching technologies strive for realism and in doing so having to write their own definition of what realism even is: What are the boundaries of realism within the specific affordances of this world we’re making? O’Reilly’s Everything is a stringent critique of this, of course.

Ok, that’s it. There are 7 billion notifications over there → right now on my screen and I need a bunch more coffee. I love you, never forget. Speak to you next week.

Box 004: Not enough particles.

15.07.20

I missed last week because I don’t have anything clever to say. I have a very low bar and an incredible sense of self-aggrandisement for what I consider to be my own remarkable cleverness so the fact that there’s been nothing for two weeks should tell you something. I’m just going to list some recents and skip to the videos.

Recents

I completed my Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy after a stalled attempt last year. I wrote about digital pedagogy and the emancipatory potential of working with as opposed to parallel with or against the digital ecologies we are already immersed in. A lot of the writing is about leadership philosophy and what you’ve learned. This was a delicate process of unpacking and trying to understand the last few years, acknowledging mistakes and trying to identify some sense in the way I’ve made decisions. I find taking myself seriously and doing that kind of serious introspection to play havoc with my ego; it dispels the sense of whimsy that peppers my self-constructed mythos.

On Tuesday morning I did an Instagram live chat with my friend and professor at Karlsruhe, Füsun Türetken about her project ‘Object For Likes‘ that she’s running out there with a group of students. We chatted about the temperaments and tendencies of working online and the industrial production of images for social networks. I think it’s all still up on their profile.

Short Stuff

Here’s a rendering engine for non-Euclidian geometry. Actually, the title is a little misleading; it’s a Euclidian rendering engine that fakes non-Eculidian geometry. I was a little disappointed once the trick was revealed, I’m hoping there’s a real one out there. It reminded me a bit of this video where someone tries to recreate Portal and exposes the incredible complexities in the process.
Speaking of rendering, Dezeen have drawn attention to some of the stuff we’ve explored in What if Our World is Their Heaven?: The penchant for dreamy rendered landscapes in design. I feel like there’s more unpacking to do here about the preference for these types of images.
Finally, at its current rate of growth, in 8604 years humanity will exhaust all particulate matter in the universe. According to the maths.

Listen, I love you but that’s it for now. I’ve been doing a lot of lecturing recently and I’ve used up all my good ideas on paying audiences. I’ll get back to you in the cheap seats next week.