Box080: What it is

05.10.22

This week is almost entirely about my PhD but not the argument of it so much as a state of play and plan. I write for you of course, but as you know I start each post and keep it open each week as I go through it because this is just as much about me journaling as anything else (which is what blogs are for, I think.) So, it’s quite a practical autobiopsy of where I’m at which may be of interest if you are struggling with a similar project as well or considering starting one of these wretched things or if you just enjoy other people’s suffering.

So if that doesn’t interest you (and why would it?) you can just close this window and do literally anything else. But if you’ve got this far so you’re in for the haul. What follows isn’t particularly organised, I’m just running through my thoughts as I run trough documents in Scrivener but I would actually love any feedback or thoughts because I’m also quite alone in this which has maybe been part of the problem.

On the state of play.

So I have three PhDs. Like, in drafts. The first one, which isn’t worth going into too much is basically ‘Here’s Everything I Think I Know and Think is Cool.’ (Revell, 2017) and runs at over 100,000 words. It’s the product of six months of splurging out everything to try and find a spine to all the things I was doing. My logic being that I must be doing something with all the things I do so, what is it? Not particularly rigorous; not making any particular argument; just lots and lots of stuff.

Round two ‘Starts To Get at Something’ (Revell, 2019). I did a proper methodology having actually done some proper thinking about how I make stuff and how I think about what I’m thinking about when I do it (see On Theory and Practice further down.) It has a theoretical underpinning (social constructivism), connects that with design and gives the impression that I had an idea of what I was doing (what is AI, why do we imagine it that way, what things make us imagine it that way?) Much smaller, much tighter much more targeted, with a loose sense of how the pieces fit together and a more tightly-focussed AOE. Felt good, then Covid.

Then we have round three which is ‘A Bunch of Great References’ (Revell, 2022) because I spent two and a half years reading lots of things based on round two which were very relevant, making renders and talking a lot. But not writing so this is like 75 words. But this. This is the one we’re going to write, my friend.

On bad habits and feeling old.

You can probably guess from the above that progress is very stop-start. This is because I am Very Fucking Busy™️. I don’t like saying that because everyone is busy and I consider business and overwork to be toxic when I’d rather see a world without work and be a gentlemen of leisure. However, despite being very well organised and good at multitasking and deadlines with no-one holding a sword to my neck on this, it’s been the one that’s slipped. So getting through it is going to require a degree of self-flagellation and rigid discipline with hard targets.

Ok, the other thing is that, whatever it’s about, this PhD is about computer graphics and AI in some way. And, you may not believe it, but there’s been a lot of significant advances since 2016. And it is still changing and all this stop-start means that we can’t cover everything so we’re not going to and we need to be clear about that because every time I read another piece about Midjourney I get a pang of guilt and I can’t live like that.

On reading, writing and thinking.

An easy and impenetrable example of why reading is so easy to hate.

You know this: I don’t enjoy reading. If I want to learn something I watch a YouTube video or Ctrl+F my way through a wiki. To my fickle, gamified millennial brain, reading is just inefficient and boring. A lot of all this work is spending an hour reading an excruciatingly boring or pretentious paper for a snippet of an idea that maybe makes me go ‘hm’ and then forget it. Most academics can’t write, they can just sort of transcribe thesauruses in a random order; it’s dull, tedious and uninspiring and rarely takes into account the reader at all let alone the idea that you might want to thrill, excite or humour them.

I also don’t enjoy writing. I like talking. I like talking through an idea and adjusting, reassessing and rearticulating as the conversation goes on. I also like public speaking, where I can sort of walk through an idea and literally see if it works or makes sense. And again (millennial, patience-starved brain) writing is a deeply inefficient way of communicating. Caveat: I appreciate the irony of writing a blog almost every week for 10 years but I try to make this as ‘me’ as possible; certainly not academic writing in order to make the ‘eat your greens first’ logic of why I do it at least stomach-able.

There are a handful of people I know who really like research and writing (you know who you are, reader) and PhD-like things but to me, it is an lifeless, boring, arduous, archaic and thankless chore the aim of which is to make all the interesting things you like talking and thinking about conform to the formalities of institutional legitimacy.

That’s not an excuse for not doing it. I’m perfectly content to do tedious things that need to be done and understand that they need doing, but I get no thrill or excitement out of this project 95% of the time and people who do baffle me. It is very much type two fun.

On theory and practice.

Design academics love to back-and-forth on theory and practice. For not bad reasons. Design (whatever you think of it) is fundamentally about making stuff, and as you’re making stuff you’re thinking about what you’re making and so the theory/practice debate is well, how do you capture that and show it’s impact? In short. But then stretch that out for multi-year conferences.

Part of this is about legitimisation: Design is relatively new to academicisation and there’s no real mechanism established to evaluate the weight, rigour or appropriateness of a ‘thing’ when they can take so many forms. I’m very familiar with this because I spent so long in the old job trying to hammer design into academic frameworks. But the baby Jesus gave us conference papers and PhDs and so designers make their things, then write about it in papers and PhDs and academics then know whether it was good or not.

So in 2016-2019 I was very busy making things and most of those things (Augury, Finite State Fantasia, Charismatic Megapigment etc.) are things I made to think about the subject of the PhD but I still haven’t really figured out how they fit in and how to relate them. Also, as noted above (On Bad Habits and Feeling Old) the technology has shifted to become almost unrecognisable in the last few years and a lot of those projects look very dated which gives me 0.3106 anxiety about the validity of the practice to the subject of the study. Which is annoying because I was sort of banking on having done most of the practice and most of the rest of this thing about being tying everything together.

I mentioned earlier the methodology is pretty strong. It uses Frayling (no surprises) to say that making things is a way of producing knowledge backed up with Borgdorff (which is great and who has a similar framework) to sort of say that this is done serendipitously; that as we make stuff we come across new things and then have to think about those new things. It’s basically a good chunk of ‘here’s what I mean by design research’ and is pretty solid tbf but could maybe use a diagram.

What’s the plan?

Zotero has been an unstructured dumping ground for things for years and I need to fix it so I can build some structure. (🧨 = really good)

First: I have everything of relevance I’ve read since 2016 in Zotero and I’ll be honest, I can’t remember a lot of it. So the weekend and mornings this week were spent crawling through it all, reviewing the highlights and trying to tag and classify with a view of getting to a literature review or map of the field that I’m looking at and importantly, an acknowledgement of what I’m not looking at. This is important because it’s easy to drift off into data ethics, or governance or whatever and so being clear to myself what’s directly relevant and what’s tangential is important.

Second: Continue cracking through reading two or three articles a day. The rate of stuff published is just insane and I need to keep staying on top of it as I’m writing not doing one of the other.

Three: Start refactoring round two into the new version. This won’t need significant change but just a careful picking through of the bits that are ok (like the methodology) and starting to piece together things like a literature review as well as iterating over the chapter I had made a good crack at before Covid. I also want to change the tone of it. I have tried to write academically you know and I don’t like it. I’m going to write like me.

Four: Abstract. I need to pin this down. I know last week I promised you that but I need the clear brief for myself what am I doing, how, why. I find this incredibly easy when teaching and helping others to pin down their thesis or even now in work pinning down project briefs but this is so close *hand in front of nose gesture* that it’s really hard to see and I need to get on it.

So those are the four targets this week. Not too tricky I don’t think.

No Short Stuff this week because well I was doing other things. Like the above. Speak next week, love you, thanks for your help.

Box075: Planetary strike out

27.07.22

DS075-e059: It could be described as rain if you thought about the water cycle. Everything started as sand and returned to it. The sand they were walking on was just temporarily formed into concrete. In a few thousand years it might be sand again, then a thousand years after back to concrete as a new path or corridor or structure is formed. The sand is the only constant.

London was, as I’m sure everyone knows, seized by heatwaves Monday and Tuesday. I was lucky enough to be working in an air conditioned office, leaving to collect a bubble tea felt like being in Singapore or similar; that wall of heat that suddenly hits you. But unlike a country built around that temperature, London can’t cope; the shops were closed, people on the street were tired, frustrated, angry and aggressive. It’s hard to feel hopeful: ESG’s are a mess where Tesla (whatever you think of them) are kicked off but Exxon Mobil, Phillips 66 and other fossil fuel companies profit from it. Joe Manchin singlehandedly set back progress on climate policy for decades. The EU has decided natural gas is ‘green.‘ Oil and gas companies earn $2.3 billion a day with which they can ‘…buy every politician, every system with all this money…’ and government funding priorities are clearly 98.8% elsewhere while celebrities take 17 minute flights that dump 1 ton of carbon into the atmosphere. As Umair Haque has written ‘We’re not going to make it to 2050:’

Take a hard look at right now. Do you really think our civilization’s going to survive another three decades of this? Skyrocketing inflation, growing shortages, runaway temperatures, killing heat, failing harvests, shattered systems, continents on fire, masses turning to lunacy and theocracy and fascism as a result?

And while the environmental left has been adopting a strategy of small, incremental change, convcined that system change was impossible or would automatically shut out the right, the right went ahead and did it anyway as George Monbiot writes:

Some of us know what we want: private sufficiency, public luxury, doughnut economics, participatory democracy and an ecological civilisation. None of these are bigger asks than those the billionaire press has made and largely achieved: the neoliberal revolution that has swept away effective governance, effective taxation of the rich, effective restraints on the power of business and oligarchs and, increasingly, effective democracy.

So yeah it does feel very much like the end. The last week or two has been a litany of human intransigence, failure and incompetence in the face of planetary change.

So what does this information do? To be honest, I don’t think most people are willing or able to entertain the idea that this may be the end of life as we know it. That it is the end of life as we know it. I sort of stomached it a few years ago but being honest, in a kind of nihilistic way. People will literally look away from you when you suggest that a very high and increasingly likely outcome is civilisational collapse within out lifetimes and that’s worth bearing in mind.

It’s a ‘selling tickets to the Titanic’ problem (as I once heard put on a podcast) – you can’t convince people to buy into a terrible time. But do the positive visions have the same visceral impact? I’m working on once right now, trying to tease out the nuance of it, but it feels so much like a dream in comparison to the reality laid out every day.

I have often said ‘you can only do what’s reasonably possible’ – you can’t expect the impossible of yourself or others or for them to do things that unreasonably painful or destructive to themselves or others. But, again ‘reasonably possible’ may not be enough.

Reading

I read some good fiction recently. The Employees from Olga Ravn and Making of Incarnation from Tom McCarthy. The former is a series of short interviews from a space ship going through some calamity. It centres on what being human is as various different types of being struggle to define themselves but it’s all wrapped in the poetry of bureaucracy, workplace hearings, meetings and agenda items. The sentence ‘I would like some materials on which thoughts require forgiveness’ is now stuck in my head forever and there’s a lot of other great poetic turns in there.

Incarnation is also made in it’s own way. Justin recommended it a while ago. It’s a sort of conspiracy thriller set at the intersection of time and motion studies, motion capture, aerodynamics, kinematics and Hollywood cinema. It’s mostly deep long technical paragraphs melding computer graphics and simulation with character enlightenment which I found absolutely wonderful but I’m not sure is everyone’s bag. Characters working through forward kinematic simulations as they come to realise that all movement in the universe is connected I found thrilling is all.

I’m currently reading The Image of the Future from Polak after Johannes has written about it for a bit and it’s making my PhD fingers tingle.

Upcoming and Recents

John Wilshire very kindly invited me to drop in on his Innovation and Futures Thinking course at IED Barcelona last week. I talked about some Arup work and some of our methods and tools. I feel more confident in these things than I would have done even a few weeks ago.

Next week I’m in the Lake District at a getaway with a bunch of clever design folks in a country house. Yes I’m taking the bike obviously.

DS075

The procedural texture for the wall of sand.

This week was once again playing around with procedural textures. I’m convinced that it must be possible to generate almost anything but it does get slow. For the wall of sand I put a wave texture moving up with a gradient texture to stretch it out, then mapped it onto some noise and musgrave to make it more uneven. Finally, the ‘pipes’ are a dynamic paint texture that’s then put on top. So where it’s white, there’s sand, where it’s black, transparent. Not bad. A long way to go though. Also I’ve found that they start to get slow really quickly as Blender struggles to compile all the nodes.

Short Stuff

I’ve done a lot of gardening on my Are.na. The way I use it is I just seem to chuck stuff in, sometimes throwing up new boards then look back and go ‘well there’s something here I’m saving a lot’ or ‘one block! delete’ and do a tidy up.

Minecraft’s developers Mojang have rejected the idea of having NFTs on its platform. The creep of the bad vibes into PR offices is a good signal of the crypto winter to come. Sony have also announced ‘Stars’ which is, according to a Sony spokesperson: ‘…definitely not NFTs. Definitely not. You can’t trade them or sell them. It is not leveraging any blockchain technologies and definitely not NFTs.’
Matt Jones has written up his slides from CIID – Keeping up with the Kardashevians. The story of his journey so far.
An Archaeology of the Future in Space. A conversation with Fabien Girardin, Simone Rebaudengo and Fred Scharmen. Some great, really meaty design process discussion which I really like from designers. ‘How did we come up with this thing?’
Jarrett has been putting up some old episodes of Scratching the Surface that he has found powerful, including this one with Cameron Tonkinwise. I might think poorly of the way he treats people on Twitter and the almost acrimonious way that he writes but it’s an incredibly good interview, he makes a powerful case for design, a discipline that he clearly loves and wants to elevate and give power to as a route to the environmental politics he comes from. Well worth a listen. Also put a bunch of Gregory Ulmer on my reading list.
Benjamin Bratton and Blaise Agüeras Y Arcas have a piece in Noema – The Model is the Message – about the limitations of language in describing what AI is and does and the risk of jumping to ‘premature ontologicization.’ They call for us to be more open to bend our definitions to the interactions that emerge between AI, humans and other sentiences rather than try and classify things on existing definitions. There’s also a nice summary with potential and emerging problems in AI.

I’ll leave you with some on-bike footage from this year’s men’s Tour, which finished on Sunday and was actually really good and competitive unlike last year and featured one of the most beautiful moments in sport. The love and respect rivals show each other is one of the many reasons I love to watch the sport and, as I said to a colleague recently; we don’t have cycling hooligans. Anyway, depending on who you are this on-bike footage is either incredibly exciting or anxiety inducing but should strike some awe.

Ok, I love you, I’m sorry it’s been so long.

BOX048: It’s Impossible

01.09.21

DS048: Second part of a project where I was asked to think about how we work now. I really want to focus on the material qualities and get a good, reliable workflow for ‘realistic’ looking stuff. The noise filter in cycles is a bit unpredictable at these high levels of realism which is why the animation is so noisy but I’m not unhappy overall.

I went out to try and get some photo scans the other day using a variety of apps and found all the results a bit poor and glitchy. The new iPhone 12 has LIDAR on it which a lot of the good results I’m seeing online seem to be relying on. AR Kit is ok for macro scale stuff but for capturing scenery, it’s just bumpy and ineffective.

Reading

There has to be a word for that feeling of seeing the work you’re really into done better than you ever could. It’s a sort of deflation met with excitement. I’m about halfway through Image Objects by Jacob Gaboury and very much in that head space. Gaboury tells us a sweeping history of computer graphics based around the work done at the university of Utah that drove the field forward. In doing so he untangles the particularly logic of computer graphics as computational objects first and images second and the paradoxes of visual representation. The first chapter for instance goes through the work done on the Hidden Surface Problem. To a computer:

…graphical objects exist in their totality – as a collection of coordinates, points, image files and object databases – prior to their manifestation as a visible image. Graphical objects are in this sense non-phenomenological, known in their entirety prior to out perception of them.
Page 32

The Hidden Surface Problem lies in programming a computer to hide things which would not normally be perceptible to a human because they are behind other things. You have to programme perspective and perception into a machine that was never designed to be visual. Gaboury then examines perspective – not as a linear path through art history but something that has emerged in different contexts at different times.

So far he seems to be heading in the same direction as, for instance Deborah Levitt, that computer graphics are distinct from photography and cinema rather than a technological continuation of them. That the underlying logics and experience of working with computer graphics are more akin to painting or sculpture and the potential of them lies in moving beyond logics of cinema and into new aesthetic sensibilities. (I’m paraphrasing Levitt’s words, don’t @ me).

Anyway, it’s a remarkable book and I’m bummed and excited by it. Gaboury is doing a much more rigorous and rich job of what I attempted with Computers Making Pictures (he actually even uses a similar phrase). This is probably be cause he’s been working on it for a decade with a a bunch of different research projects while I scribbled some notes for a week and a half. That’s a useful delineation of my work ethic against that of actual scholars.

Doing

Natalie and I are heading all the way over to Peckham Digital Festival on the 12th September to roll out our AI schitck. This looks like a really fun and interesting event for folks from the local area to get into and share work in creative technology. I’m sure we’ll see lots of people we know. It’ll also be my first in-person event for two years. It’s free so you should go.

Short Stuff

A sort of cheery story from the intersection of automation, open source and ‘democratisation’ in design: The Rise of Semi-automated Illustration. Several interviewees make a point about the homogenisation effect of automation but stress that the memetic nature of visual culture is hardly new, it just happens faster.
Why is it So Hard to Be Rational? via Shannon. Mattern. A sort of review of rationalism including the ‘rationalism community’ and all the pitfalls, including the need for meta-cognition. I like that things Spock deemed ‘logically impossible’ happened 80% of the time, largely because he assumed everyone else was as logical as him.
Deb Chachra on Care at Scale. Brilliantly demonstrating the political and infrastructural imbalance (‘Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is allowed to go everywhere. People are not.’) and calling for an ultrastructure. I also never saw such a comprehendible version of Rawl’s Veil of Ignorance – I finally get it.

Ok, super brief I know, I’m about to head off for a few days. Love you.