BOX099.1: 15 Years of Blogging

11.10.23

DS085: Once again, I have failed to get Eevee to do what I want and have turned to Cycles. I spent some time reinstalling Botanic and Extreme PBR; two great tools that speed up work flow by automating some degree of foliage and material creation respectively. This was an attempt to just test them out a little. As opposed to what I write about blogging, the role for these sketches in my practice and research is a little opaque to me, other than enjoying the small window of creativity.

Telling you it’s been too long is obvious and I apologise for too often beginning these missives with an apology. My last post was 12th July and the work time in between has been difficult, sometimes unpleasant, rarely joyful but definitely purposeful. I have had BOX099 in draft since July but it contains nothing of interest and is outdated so this is a version 0.1 of it. This month – coincidentally – marks the 15th year of me blogging.

Here was my very first post; a video about relativity I found. At the time I was towards the end of undergraduate studies. My first two years of undergraduate were spent exactly the right way; barely attending university, being in and around music, staying out all night, imbibing and partaking of everything London had to offer. I was also (I believe) a different person; convinced I was ineffable and invincible and that, as a result, nothing I did could have any consequence on myself or others. The result of this orgy or egotism and self-indulgence (which I deeply enjoyed, btw) was a violent, immature and childish breakup, one of those shattering ones that suddenly cashes all the emotional cheques you’d been frittering away and forces you to examine who the hell you are. And, at the point, that was an ugly introspection that I Did Not Like and certainly did not want to take all in one go, right when education was also turning up the seriousness dial.

So, I developed the lifelong habit that I still turn to in periods of stress or difficulty (a shattered femur for example); I buried myself in work, spending 12 hours a day in the studio just reading the Internet, sketching and doodling. In 2008, there wasn’t much in the way of Notions or Pinterests or Arenas so if you wanted to keep hold of something, you blogged it. We had had a visit from some interactive typographer (I can’t remember who) who showed the class some entries from his blog and I thought; ‘that seems like a thing that makes it look like you’ve been doing work’ and I desperately needed to look like I had been doing work.

We had a brief about ‘time’ and I always had an interest in popular physics so I just started saving things that I thought might be useful to the blog in the hope that some divine spark would appear. And you know what? That thing that looks like work actually started to be work. Not in the sense of an ‘extra thing you now have to do’ but actually developing the way I think and certainly the way I research.

You see, as you know, I talk to myself a lot. I’m convinced everyone does but they are too embarrassed to admit it. There’s probably some study somewhere about it but I simply find it impossible to work through ideas, scenarios, presentations or conversations without having an externalised internal dialogue and I find it unbelievable that others don’t need this too. Well it turns out that blogging is just a textual extension of that. It doesn’t have the rigour or public-facing-ness of academic writing or things I’ve done for magazines but it’s a bit more considered than pacing around the kitchen table chatting to myself because it requires editing and phrasing and consideration of you and how you read it, even if it’s just you and no one else.

Does it lead to a divine spark? No, because that’s not how creativity works at all. But it lays down pathways that become like desire lines or mud tracks; vague notions and connections and thoughts and tendencies that start to concretise over time as you pour more and more into a particular track, furrow or idea. I imagine it a little like building a campsite: At first you don’t know where anything is, there’s loads of things in the way, but gradually behaviours form, paths are worn, things like tools and utensils find their home in the place best suited for them and develop wear in the right places, tacit agreements are made between campers. And the camp can keep being extended once that base is settled in and new paths are worn and trod in.

It’s different to Pinterest or something in that they demand a rigid, inflexible categorisation (at least to some degree); things are in places. When I think about my blog and how it’s informed the structure of my thinking, it’s more like the cosmic microwave background map. Nothing is in a particular place but there are patterns built up over time; it has a gestalt property that only works because I keep building it.

So, 15 years in. Little has really changed. I still monologue into this interface and expect no particular outcome. I resisted the transition to the newsletter trend (though it’s an option for those that prefer that format) because although I sometimes do put in self-promotion or news I don’t want to overburden the world with more reckons or opinions. I also feel like newsletters make a demand of your space and time – erupting into your inbox without warning, adding the work guilt of feeling like you have to keep up to date – while a blog is here if you want it, but really (and sorry) I do this for me, not you.

Recents

Ok, quick life/work updates.

Recovery was going really well and I was even back to commuting by bike in August. Honestly, a very Good Thing in an otherwise frustrating period of time this summer. But then I did some travelling for work, overdid it and set myself back. I’m back on painkillers and using the stick and have had to go back to the physio. Probably pulled my quads up pretty bad. Very disheartening.
I was on holiday trying to recover but didn’t really manage to. I used to think ‘time to reflect’ was just something people said rather than something you could actually do but I did grab 20 minutes here and there when not in pain or trying to chase down an infant or entertain an 11 year old to have the internal ‘what am I doing and why’ conversation (not out loud because these moments often occurred while trying to get a baby to sleep.)
I was in Amsterdam in late September giving a presentation about a really great project we’re working on in Foresight. The project itself is really exciting and interesting but getting it lifted has been very difficult and frustrating. I think the presentation and the project will be public at some point, I’ll share it with you then.
I had my PhD upgrade this week. This is a big milestone at sort of kind of the ‘halfway point’ (but not really cos it’s more like the three-quarters point). You should be about 60-75% done and need to make the case that what you’re doing is a) good b) original c) achievable. It went well (I passed) and the examiners were very complimentary of it generally but there’s a lot of work to do on thinking about the practice and how it sits with the writing. I’ll talk about this later with you but that is something I get to build that’s mine and that feels nice.
I joined Lex on the new Comuzi podcast, #NextBillionUsers where we did a terrible job of not talking about design and futures and focussing on AI’s implication for design. They made it a video too.

Short Stuff

Utrecht University rejected being included in the Times Higher Education rankings. This is a thing that we often toyed with at UAL; that and the QS rankings. There’s a great paper here about how rankings are even more than just the obvious ouroboros of self-flagellation but create the conditions for universities’ own low scores and increasingly implausible future visions.
Keir Starmer audio deepfake was released on the first day of the Labour party conference. It purports to record him abusing party members.
Good lord the collaborators on this new Paramore album. Are Paramore one of the most evergreen bands?
Ramon opened a research lab called -1. Looks very sick.

This was a long one to write but it’s been a while so I felt you deserved it, or that I’d impose myself on you more to make up for my recent lack. I love you. Speak next week.

Box088: Cracking the Back

11.01.23

I got out of hospital after just over 48 hours which was way better than I could have hoped. And I was back at my desk on Jan 3rd. If you think that last time I was mostly in bed and struggling to sit up straight for three weeks it’s pretty remarkable. But the long tail of this recovery is going to be, well, longer. I can’t put weight on my leg except in the most ginger of circumstances, am basically confined to my flat and am being carefully monitored by the NHS to make sure my bones stick together. So I don’t have much more to write about other than PhD stuff this week.

PhD

This week has been about cracking on with one of the substantial chapters. Meanwhile I also try and stay on top of the reading by reading one more paper or article than I add to the Zotero library. I’m not sure if keeping a note of them here would be interesting and useful for you or not really. I’ve developed a pretty good feel for crunching through academic papers now.

Trying to hold it all in my head and avoid the thesis or anything else drifting. Words to live by.

I’ve spent the last week diving into one of the main chapters of the PhD to try and get it ready for upgrade but I’m really struggling to structure the sub-sections. I’m working on the chapter about Spectacles, Performances and Demonstrations. Seems straightforward enough; promotional videos, sci-fi, advertising, marketing, public demos etc.; all the ways AI is represented. But each of those is massive! I could write a whole PhD about the advertising language of AI. Ok, so focus on the overarching question; how does the design shape imaginaries of AI and thus foreclose futures? But then it’s just describing and critiquing the design of some adverts, the design of some promotional films and doesn’t really hit at any insights. So, what about instead of looking at forms, platforms or media we look at forms of representation or narratives. For instance, the idea of AI development as a David and Goliath story, or how they are shown as more than or less than human; either superhuman or human servants. Or how massive corporations are repackaged as plucky little upstarts through AI? I look back at the paragraph describing the chapter in the introduction:

Spectacles, Performances and Demonstrations addresses the long history of AI as a spectacle since its earliest inception. Highly public performance through games such as chess, go, the game show Jeopardy and so on, as well as sensational stories about exaggerated postive test results in highly contained settings serve to inflate expectations about AI and buoy public and financial interest. Design is heavily implicated in the orchestration and production of these showcases but also has a role in exposing the fallacy of positive performances through strategies of satire and reverse-engineering to show how the trick is done.

And it makes total sense but actually getting into structuring it is tough. I started trying to use Miro again to structure connections but again, I could see the remit of the chapter quickly exploding and spiralling. Perhaps I just need to go for it and then scale back. Problem is, that’s where I started 3 or 4 months ago.

In my head it’s like trying to lace all these ways that I’ve cut, sliced and layered the ideas, thing I’ve read and concepts together into a cohesive and original argument. Here; I tried to draw where my head is at:

At the top is all the reading and research; my own practice, other’s, books, papers in the Zotero library. They’re not directly connected to each other because I’ve assembled them but some are very deep and some are very broad.Next is ideas (effectively tags in Zotero); things like ‘obfuscation,’ ‘non-human,’ ‘epistemology,’ etc. They don’t mean anything in themselves but are a vocabulary for the whole PhD. Then it’s concepts which is mostly what’s happening in the Miro Brane; big, broader, *interesting* and *curious* recurring relationships or similarities or groupings of ideas that seem to relate or impact each other. Then it’s theories; essentially the chapter and structuring rubric of the PhD; critical futures, sociology of expectations, critical practice and so on. As well as the chapter titles I suppose. The acting of ideas on the material world and vice versa. And then it’s the trickiest part; the actual writing. The linear, top-left-to-bottom-right, clearly evidenced and logical distillation of all the above layers.

So I spent most of the week’s work trying to crack away at this problem and have managed to get to some subdomains and some structure: On the right is an example sub-section as it is now. The content is a collage of sentences, paragraphs and notions from the previous draft and pertinent quotes I’ve dropped in where I’ve remembered or bothered. At the top is the what, why and how of this section. It’s so hard not to let it spiral and end up writing about everything. The challenge is keeping it tight, each sub-sections could conceivably be a whole PhD!

Orange bits are milestones I guess; where does the last section lead in to this, what’s the lead out; narrative markers. Green bits are things I need to dig around for more on. Yellow bits are key ideas or arguments. Blue bits are examples of practice to talk about. And that’s the system; I just went over and over and over and over it again to work down to sub-sections of the chapter and I still hate it. Like I said, each one could be it’s own PhD and I don’t see yet how they actually do more than just describe things. I guess that’s because they’re mostly made of other people’s quotations so far.

One of the things that is helping is I’m keeping three other PhDs/Theses (I’ll never tell who’s) that I really like open nearby me all the time and every time I get stuck about how to go about what I’m doing I just open a random page and read a bit of one of them to try and get a feel again of how to do this damn thing.

So this is a pretty intense spurt of work, post-recovery getting back into the swing of my mornings hasn’t been hard and the work/work/work/life balance is ok (though fuck me I miss bikes so much). I’m feeling good about getting this chapter in for at least end of January in some form or another and (as per lot’s of people’s advice on Instagram) I can’t be precious about it. Do it, get it out, get feedback and this one is important because this is the bulk of the project; not the intro, not the context; the thing in itself.

Short Stuff

Worshipping at the Altar of Artificial Intelligence, Jessica DeFino. Interesting to read about the impacts of recent advances on beauty and aesthetics; slightly outside my wheelhouse.
Why ‘eat the rich’ will be the dominant creative narrative of 2023. I’ve been wondering recently whether the surge in aspirational imagery (young men in particular in sports cars and big beach houses, usually attached to a trading scheme) is a normal vision for most people. I guess not.

I feel like I work harder than ever at the moment. Reading and writing all morning, nine hours of work and intellectual labour in the middle, couple of articles or a book in the evening and yet I feel stupider than ever; the cascade of information and stuff just gets bigger the closer you get to it.

A final tip (which may or may not be useful) as I sit here trying to pull this chapter together: Don’t look up. If I start by thinking about the enormity of the overall project I get paralysed and prevaricate: Have super simple, short and easily achievable steps.

Ok, I love you, obviously.

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.