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Thursday, September 14. 2017
Note: we used references to China Mieville in past works (for example Heterochrony) to depict dual realities in some of our architectural devices. Yet in our case with a twist regarding the notion of narrative as it is described by Geoff Manaugh, even so the article mainly discuss the use of architecture and cities especially in a narrative (by Ch. Miéville), so as the relations between architecture and text here.
In the context of architecture and our personal work, I would rather tend to consider that an environment (built or natural) provides some kind of (open framing) for various narratives (in the same sense that a forest, for example, can host many narratives --from frightening to "feng shui"--, especially with changing conditions, yet by not being a specific narrative in itself, or maybe a very fuzzy narrative). It is not the purpose of a space to tell a story or even many stories therefore, but to be the host for stories, variable, multiple yet partly "framed" or contextualized.
I would rather consider that a space willing to tell a story is too "enclosed" and "enclosing" (a church for example). I prefer variations, some level of interactions en feedbacks and the capacity for the inhabitants of that space to take the environment (built or natural) as a base to create their own "stories", that will change and evolve over time.
Via BLDGBLOG
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By Geoff Manaugh (in 2011)
In his 2000 novel Perdido Street Station, for instance, an old industrial scrapyard on the underside of the city, full of discarded machine parts and used electronic equipment, suddenly bootstraps itself into artificial intelligence, self-rearranging into a tentacular and sentient system. In The Scar, a floating city travels the oceans, lashed together from the hulls of captured ships:
They were built up, topped with structure, styles and materials shoved together from a hundred histories and aesthetics into a compound architecture. Centuries-old pagodas tottered on the decks of ancient oarships, and cement monoliths rose like extra smokestacks on paddlers stolen from southern seas. The streets between the buildings were tight. They passed over the converted vessels on bridges, between mazes and plazas, and what might have been mansions. Parklands crawled across clippers, above armories in deeply hidden decks. Decktop houses were cracked and strained from the boats’ constant motion.
In his story “The Rope of the World,” originally published in Icon, a failed space elevator becomes the next Tintern Abbey, an awe-inspiring Romantic ruin in the sky. In “Reports Of Certain Events In London,” from the collection Looking for Jake, Miéville describes how constellations of temporary roads flash in and out through nighttime London, a shifting vascular geography of trap streets, only cataloged by the most fantastical maps.
And in his 2004 novel Iron Council, Miéville imagines something called “slow sculpture,” a geologically sublime new artform by which huge blocks of sandstone are “carefully prepared: shafts drilled precisely, caustic agents dripped in, for a slight and so-slow dissolution of rock in exact planes, so that over years of weathering, slabs would fall in layers, coming off with the rain, and at very last disclosing their long-planned shapes. Slow-sculptors never disclosed what they had prepared, and their art revealed itself only long after their deaths.”
BLDGBLOG has always been interested in learning how novelists see the city—how spatial descriptions of things like architecture and landscape can have compelling effects, augmenting both plot and emotion in ways that other devices, such as characterization, sometimes cannot. In earlier interviews with such writers as Patrick McGrath, Kim Stanley Robinson, Zachary Mason, Jeff VanderMeer, Tom McCarthy, and Mike Mignola, we have looked at everything from the literary appeal and narrative usefulness of specific buildings and building types to the descriptive influence of classical landscape painting, and we have entertained the idea that the demands of telling a good story often give novelists a more subtle and urgent sense of space even than architects and urban planners.
Over the course of the following long interview, China Miéville discusses the conceptual origins of the divided city featured in his recent, award-winning novel The City and The City; he points out the interpretive limitations of allegory, in a craft better served by metaphor; we take a look at the “squid cults” of Kraken (which arrives in paperback later this month) and maritime science fiction, more broadly; the seductive yet politically misleading appeal of psychogeography; J.G. Ballard and the clichés of suburban perversity; the invigorating necessities of urban travel; and much more.
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BLDGBLOG: I’d like to start with The City and The City. What was your initial attraction to the idea of a divided city, and how did you devise the specific way in which the city would be split?
China Miéville: I first thought of the divided city as a development from an earlier idea I had for a fantasy story. That idea was more to do with different groups of people who live side-by-side but, because they are different species, relate to the physical environment very, very differently, having different kinds of homes and so on. It was essentially an exaggeration of the way humans and rats live in London, or something similar. But, quite quickly, that shifted, and I began to think about making it simply human.
For a long time, I couldn’t get the narrative. I had the setting reasonably clear in my head and, then, once I got that, a lot of things followed. For example, I knew that I didn’t want to make it narrowly, allegorically reductive, in any kind of lumpen way. I didn’t want to make one city heavy-handedly Eastern and one Western, or one capitalist and one communist, or any kind of nonsense like that. I wanted to make them both feel combined and uneven and real and full-blooded. I spent a long time working on the cities and trying to make them feel plausible and half-remembered, as if they were uneasily not quite familiar rather than radically strange.
I auditioned various narrative shapes for the book and, eventually, after a few months, partly as a present to my Mum, who was a big crime reader, and partly because I was reading a lot of crime at the time and thinking about crime, I started realizing what was very obvious and should have been clear to me much earlier. That’s the way that noir and hard-boiled and crime procedurals, in general, are a kind of mythic urbanology, in a way; they relate very directly to cities.
Once I’d thought of that, exaggerating the trope of the trans-jurisdictional police problem—the cops who end up having to be on each other’s beats—the rest of the novel just followed immediately. In fact, it was difficult to imagine that I hadn’t been able to work it out earlier. That was really the genesis.
I should say, also, that with the whole idea of a divided city there are analogies in the real world, as well as precursors within fantastic fiction. C. J. Cherryh wrote a book that had a divided city like that, in some ways, as did Jack Vance. Now I didn’t know this at the time, but I’m also not getting my knickers in a twist about it. If you think what you’re trying to do is come up with a really original idea—one that absolutely no one has ever had before—you’re just kidding yourself.
You’re inevitably going to tread the ground that the greats have trodden before, and that’s fine. It simply depends on what you’re able to do with it.
BLDGBLOG: Something that struck me very strongly about the book was that you manage to achieve the feel of a fantasy or science fiction story simply through the description of a very convoluted political scenario. The book doesn’t rely on monsters, non-humans, magical technologies, and so on; it’s basically a work of political science fiction.
Miéville: This is impossible to talk about without getting into spoiler territory—which is fine, I don’t mind that—but we should flag that right now for anyone who hasn’t read it and does want to read it.
But, yes, the overtly fantastical element just ebbed and ebbed, becoming more suggestive and uncertain. Although it’s written in such a way that there is still ambiguity—and some readers are very insistent on focusing on that ambiguity and insisting on it—at the same time, I think it’s a book, like all of my books, for which, on the question of the fantastic, you might want to take a kind of Occam’s razor approach. It’s a book that has an almost contrary relation to the fantastic, in a certain sense.
[Image: The marbled intra-national sovereignties of Baarle-Hertog].
BLDGBLOG: In some ways, it’s as if The City and The City simply describes an exaggerated real-life border condition, similar to how people live in Jerusalem or the West Bank, Cold War Berlin or contemporary Belfast—or even in a small town split by the U.S./Canada border, like Stanstead-Derby Line. In a sense, these settlements consist of next-door neighbors who otherwise have very complicated spatial and political relationships to one another. For instance, I think I sent you an email about a year ago about a town located both on and between the Dutch-Belgian border, called Baarle-Hertog.
Miéville: You did!
BLDGBLOG: I’m curious to what extent you were hoping to base your work on these sorts of real-life border conditions.
Miéville: The most extreme example of this was something I saw in an article in the Christian Science Monitor, where a couple of poli-sci guys from the State Department or something similar were proposing a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. In the case of Jerusalem, they were proposing basically exactly this kind of system, from The City and The City, in that you would have a single urban space in which different citizens are covered by completely different juridical relations and social relations, and in which you would have two overlapping authorities.
I was amazed when I saw this. I think, in a real world sense, it’s completely demented. I don’t think it would work at all, and I don’t think Israel has the slightest intention of trying it.
My intent with The City and The City was, as you say, to derive something hyperbolic and fictional through an exaggeration of the logic of borders, rather than to invent my own magical logic of how borders could be. It was an extrapolation of really quite everyday, quite quotidian, juridical and social aspects of nation-state borders: I combined that with a politicized social filtering, and extrapolated out and exaggerated further on a sociologically plausible basis, eventually taking it to a ridiculous extreme.
But I’m always slightly nervous when people make analogies to things like Palestine because I think there can be a danger of a kind of sympathetic magic: you see two things that are about divided cities and so you think that they must therefore be similar in some way. Whereas, in fact, in a lot of these situations, it seems to me that—and certainly in the question of Palestine—the problem is not one population being unseen, it’s one population being very, very aggressively seen by the armed wing of another population.
In fact, I put those words into Borlu’s mouth in the book, where he says, “This is nothing like Berlin, this is nothing like Jerusalem.” That’s partly just to disavow—because you don’t want to make the book too easy—but it’s also to make a serious point, which is that, obviously, the analogies will occur but sometimes they will obscure as much as they illuminate.
[Image: The international border between the U.S. and Canada passes through the center of a library; photo courtesy of the Center for Land Use Interpretation. “Technically, any time anyone crosses the international line, they are subject to having to report, in person, to a port of entry inspection station for the country they are entering,” CLUI explains. “Visiting someone on the other side of the line, even if the building is next door, means walking around to the inspection station first, or risk being an outlaw. Playing catch on Maple Street/Rue Ball would be an international event, and would break no laws presumably, so long as each time the ball was caught, the recipient marched over to customs to declare the ball.”].
BLDGBLOG: Your books often lend themselves to political readings, on the other hand. Do you write with specific social or political allegories in mind, and, further, how do your settings—as in The City and The City—come to reflect political intentions, spatially?
Miéville: My short answer is that I dislike thinking in terms of allegory—quite a lot. I’ve disagreed with Tolkien about many things over the years, but one of the things I agree with him about is this lovely quote where he talks about having a cordial dislike for allegory.
The reason for that is partly something that Frederic Jameson has written about, which is the notion of having a master code that you can apply to a text and which, in some way, solves that text. At least in my mind, allegory implies a specifically correct reading—a kind of one-to-one reduction of the text.
It amazes me the extent to which this is still a model by which these things are talked about, particularly when it comes to poetry. This is not an original formulation, I know, but one still hears people talking about “what does the text mean?”—and I don’t think text means like that. Texts do things.
I’m always much happier talking in terms of metaphor, because it seems that metaphor is intrinsically more unstable. A metaphor fractures and kicks off more metaphors, which kick off more metaphors, and so on. In any fiction or art at all, but particularly in fantastic or imaginative work, there will inevitably be ramifications, amplifications, resonances, ideas, and riffs that throw out these other ideas. These may well be deliberate; you may well be deliberately trying to think about issues of crime and punishment, for example, or borders, or memory, or whatever it might be. Sometimes they won’t be deliberate.
But the point is, those riffs don’t reduce. There can be perfectly legitimate political readings and perfectly legitimate metaphoric resonances, but that doesn’t end the thing. That doesn’t foreclose it. The text is not in control. Certainly the writer is not in control of what the text can do—but neither, really, is the text itself.
So I’m very unhappy about the idea of allegoric reading, on the whole. Certainly I never intend my own stuff to be allegorical. Allegories, to me, are interesting more to the extent that they fail—to the extent that they spill out of their own bounds. Reading someone like George MacDonald—his books are extraordinary—or Charles Williams. But they’re extraordinary to the extent that they fail or exceed their own intended bounds as Christian allegory.
When Iron Council came out, people would say to me: “Is this book about the Gulf War? Is this book about the Iraq War? You’re making a point about the Iraq War, aren’t you?” And I was always very surprised. I was like, listen: if I want to make a point about the Iraq War, I’ll just say what I think about the Iraq War. I know this because I’ve done it. I write political articles. I’ve written a political book. But insisting on that does not mean for a second that I’m saying—in some kind of unconvincing, “cor-blimey, I’m just a story-teller, guvnor,” type-thing—that these books don’t riff off reality and don’t have things to say about it.
There’s this very strange notion that a writer needs to smuggle these other ideas into the text, but I simply don’t understand why anyone would think that that’s what fiction is for.
BLDGBLOG: There are also very basic historical and referential limits to how someone might interpret a text allegorically. If Iron Council had been written twenty years from now, for instance, during some future war between Taiwan and China, many readers would think it was a fictional exploration of that, and they’d forget about the Iraq War entirely.
Miéville: Sure. And you don’t want to disavow these readings. You may think, at this point in this particular book, I actually do want to make a genuine policy prescription. With my hand on my heart, I don’t think I have ever done that, but, especially if you write with a political texture, you certainly have to take readings like this on the chin.
So, when people say: are you really talking about this? My answer is generally not no—it’s generally yes, but… Or yes, and… Or yes… but not in the way that you mean.
[Image: “The way a cop inhabits the city is doubtless a fascinating thing…” Photo courtesy of the NYPD].
BLDGBLOG: Let’s go back to the idea of the police procedural. It’s intriguing to compare how a police officer and a novelist might look at the city—the sorts of details they both might notice or the narratives they both might pick up on. Broadly speaking, each engages in detection—a kind of hermeneutics of urban space. How did this idea of urban investigation—the “mythic urbanology” you mentioned earlier—shape your writing of The City and The City?
Miéville: On the question of the police procedural and detection, for me, the big touchstones here were detective fiction, not real police. Obviously they are related, but they’re related in a very convoluted, mediated way.
What I wanted to do was write something that had a great deal of fidelity—hopefully not camp fidelity, but absolute rigorous fidelity—to certain generic protocols of policing and criminology. That was the drive, much more than trying to find out how police really do their investigations. The way a cop inhabits the city is doubtless a fascinating thing, but what was much more important to me for this book was the way that the genre of crime, as an aesthetic field, relates to the city.
The whole notion of decoding the city—the notion that, in a crime drama, the city is a text of clues, in a kind of constant, quantum oscillation between possibilities, with the moment of the solution really being a collapse and, in a sense, a kind of tragedy—was really important to me.
Of course, I’m not one of those writers who says I don’t read reviews. I do read reviews. I know that some readers were very dissatisfied with the strict crime drama aspect of it. I can only hold up my hands. It was extremely strict. I don’t mean to do that kind of waffley, unconvincing, writerly, carte blanche, get-out-clause of “that was the whole point.” Because you can have something very particular in mind and still fuck it up.
But, for me, given the nature of the setting, it was very important to play it absolutely straight, so that, having conceived of this interweaving of the cities, the actual narrative itself would remain interesting, and page-turning, and so on and so forth. I wanted it to be a genuine who-dunnit. I wanted it to be a book that a crime reader could read and not have a sense that I had cheated.
By the way, I love that formulation of crime-readers: the idea that a book can cheat is just extraordinary.
BLDGBLOG: Can you explain what you mean, in this context, by being rigorous? You were rigorous specifically to what?
Miéville: The book walks through three different kinds of crime drama. In section one and section two, it goes from the world-weary boss with a young, chippy sidekick to the mismatched partners who end up with grudging respect for each other. Then, in part three, it’s a political conspiracy thriller. I quite consciously tried to inhabit these different iterations of crime writing, as a way to explore the city.
But this has all just been a long-winded way of saying that I would not pretend or presume any kind of real policing knowledge of the way cities work. I suspect, probably, like most things, actual genuine policing is considerably less interesting than it is in its fictionalized version—but I honestly don’t know.
[Images: New York City crime scene photographs].
BLDGBLOG: There’s a book that came out a few years ago called The Meadowlands, by Robert Sullivan. At one point, Sullivan tags along with a retired detective in New Jersey who reveals that, now that he’s retired, he no longer really knows what to do with all the information he’s accumulated about the city over the years. Being retired means he basically knows thousands of things about the region that no longer have any real use for him. He thus comes across as a very melancholy figure, almost as if all of it was supposed to lead up to some sort of narrative epiphany—where he would finally and absolutely understand the city—but then retirement came along and everything went back to being slightly pointless. It was an interpretive comedown, you might say.
Miéville: That kind of specialized knowledge, in any field, can be intoxicating. If you experience a space—say, a museum—with a plumber, you may well come out with a different sense of the strengths and weaknesses of that museum—considering the pipework, as well, of course, as the exhibits—than otherwise. This is one reason I love browsing specialist magazines in fields about which I know nothing.
Obviously, then, with something that is explicitly concerned with uncovering and solving, it makes perfect sense that seeing the city through the eyes of a police detective would give you a very self-conscious view of what’s happening out there.
In terms of fiction, though, I think, if anything, the drive is probably the opposite. Novelists have an endless drive to aestheticize and to complicate. I know there’s a very strong tradition—a tradition in which I write, myself—about the decoding of the city. Thomas de Quincey, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Iain Sinclair—that type-thing. The idea that, if you draw the right lines across the city, you’ll find its Kabbalistic heart and so on.
The thing about that is that it’s intoxicating—but it’s also bullshit. It’s bullshit and it’s paranoia—and it’s paranoia in a kind of literal sense, in that it’s a totalizing project. As long as you’re constantly aware of that, at an aesthetic level, then it’s not necessarily a problem; you’re part of a process of urban mythologization, just like James Joyce was, I suppose. But the sense that this notion of uncovering—of taking a scalpel to the city and uncovering the dark truth—is actually real, or that it actually solves anything, and is anything other than an aesthetic sleight of hand, can be quite misleading, and possibly even worse than that. To the extent that those texts do solve anything, they only solve mysteries that they created in the first place, which they scrawled over the map of a mucky contingent mess of history called the city. They scrawled a big question mark over it and then they solved it.
Arthur Machen does this as well. All the great weird fiction city writers do it. Machen explicitly talks about the strength of London, as opposed to Paris, in that London is more chaotic. Although he doesn’t put it in these words, I think what partly draws him to London is this notion that, in the absence of a kind of unifying vision, like Haussmann’s Boulevards, and in a city that’s become much more syncretic and messy over time, you have more room to insert your own aestheticizing vision.
As I say, it’s not in and of itself a sin, but to think of this as a real thing—that it’s a lived political reality or a new historical understanding of the city—is, I think, a misprision.
BLDGBLOG: You can see this, as well, in the rise of psychogeography—or, at least, some popular version of it—as a tool of urban analysis in architecture today. This popularity often fails to recognize that, no matter how fun or poetic an experience it genuinely might be, randomly wandering around Boston with an iPhone, for instance, is not guaranteed to produce useful urban insights.
Miéville: Some really interesting stuff has been done with psychogeography—I’m not going to say it’s without uses other than for making pretty maps. I mean, re-experiencing lived urban reality in ways other than how one is more conventionally supposed to do so can shine a new light on things—but that’s an act of political assertion and will. If you like, it’s a kind of deliberate—and, in certain contexts, radical—misunderstanding. Great, you know—good on you! You’ve productively misunderstood the city. But I think that the bombast of these particular—what are we in now? fourth or fifth generation?—psychogeographers is problematic.
Presumably at some point we’re going to get to a stage, probably reasonably soon, in which someone—maybe even one of the earlier generation of big psychogeographers—will write the great book against psychogeography. Not even that it’s been co-opted—it’s just wheel-spinning.
BLDGBLOG: In an interview with Ballardian, Iain Sinclair once joked that psychogeography, as a term, has effectively lost all meaning. Now, literally any act of walking through the city—walking to work in the morning, walking around your neighborhood, walking out to get a bagel—is referred to as “psychogeography.” It’s as if the experience of being a pedestrian in the city has become so unfamiliar to so many people, that they now think the very act of walking around makes them a kind of psychogeographic avant-garde.
Miéville: It’s no coincidence, presumably, that Sinclair started wandering out of the city and off into fields.
[Image: Art by Vincent Chong for the Subterranean Press edition of Kraken].
BLDGBLOG: This brings us to something I want to talk about from Kraken, which comes out in paperback here in the States next week. In that book, you describe a group of people called the Londonmancers. They’re basically psychogeographers with a very particular, almost parodically mystical understanding of the city. How does Kraken utilize this idea of an occult geography of greater London?
Miéville: Yes, this relates directly to what we were just saying. For various reasons, some cities refract, through aesthetics and through art, with a particular kind of flamboyancy. For whatever reason, London is one of them. I don’t mean to detract from all the other cities in the world that have their own sort of Gnosticism, but it is definitely the case that London has worked particularly well for this. There are a couple of moments in the book of great sentimentality, as well, written, I think, when I was feeling very, very well disposed toward London.
I think, in those terms, that I would locate myself completely in the tradition of London phantasmagoria. I see myself as very much doing that kind of thing. But, at the same time, as the previous answer showed, I’m also rather ambivalent to it and sort of impatient with it—probably with the self-hating zeal of someone who recognizes their own predilections!
Kraken, for me, in a relatively light-hearted and comedic form, is my attempt to have it both ways: to both be very much in that tradition and also to take the piss out of it. Reputedly, throughout Kraken, the very act of psychogeographic enunciation and urban uncovering is both potentially an important plot point and something that does uncover a genuine mystery; but it is also something that is ridiculous and silly, an act of misunderstanding. It’s all to do with what Thomas Pynchon, in Gravity’s Rainbow, called kute korrespondences: “hoping to zero in on the tremendous and secret Function whose name, like the permuted names of God, cannot be spoken.”
The London within Kraken feels, to me, much more dreamlike than the London of something like King Rat. That’s obviously a much earlier book, and I now write very differently; but King Rat, for all its flaws, is a book very much to do with its time. It’s not just to do with London; it’s to do with London in the mid-nineties. It’s a real, particular London, phantasmagorized.
But Kraken is also set in London—and I wanted to indulge all my usual Londonisms and take them to an absurd extreme. The idea, for example, as you say, of this cadre of mages called the Londonmancers: that’s both in homage to parts of that tradition, and also, hopefully, an extension of it to a kind of absurdity—the ne plus ultra, you know?
BLDGBLOG: Kraken also makes some very explicit maritime gestures—the squid, of course, which is very redolent of H.P. Lovecraft, but also details such as the pirate-like duo of Goss and Subby. This maritime thread pops up, as well, in The Scar, with its floating city of linked ships. My question is: how do your interests in urban arcana and myth continue into the sphere of the maritime, and what narrative or symbolic possibilities do maritime themes offer your work?
Miéville: Actually, I think I was very restrained about Lovecraft. I think the book mentions Cthulhu twice—which, for a 140,000 or 150,000-word novel about giant squid cults, is pretty restrained! That’s partly because, as you say, if you write a book about a tentacular monster with a strange cult associated with it, anyone who knows the field is going to be thinking immediately in terms of Lovecraft. And I’m very, very impressed by Lovecraft—he’s a big presence for me—but, partly for that very reason, I think Kraken is one of the least Lovecrafty things I’ve done.
As to the question of maritimism, like a lot of my interests, it’s more to do with how it has been filtered through fiction, rather than how it is in reality. In reality, I have no interest in sailing. I’ve done it, I think, once.
But maritime fiction, from Gulliver’s Travels onward, I absolutely love. I love that it has its own set of traditions; in some ways, it’s a kind of mini-canon. It has its own riffs. There are some lovely teasings of maritime fiction within Gulliver’s Travels where he gets into the pornography of maritime terminology: mainstays and capstans and mizzens and so on, which, again, feature quite prominently in The Scar.
[Image: “An Imaginary View of the Arsenale” by J.M.W. Turner, courtesy of the Tate].
BLDGBLOG: In the context of the maritime, I was speaking to Reza Negarestani recently and he mentioned a Russian novella from the 1970s called “The Crew Of The Mekong,” suggesting that I ask you about your interest in it. Reza, of course, wrote Cyclonopedia, which falls somewhere between, say, H.P. Lovecraft and ExxonMobil, and for which you supplied an enthusiastic endorsement.
Miéville: Yes, I was blown away by Reza’s book—partly just because of the excitement of something that seems genuinely unclassifiable. It really is pretty much impossible to say whether you’re reading a work of genre fiction or a philosophical textbook or both of the above. There’s also the slightly crazed pseudo-rigor of it, and the sense that this is philosophy as inspired by schlocky horror movies as much as by Alain Badiou.
There’s a phrase that Kim Newman uses: post-genre horror. It’s a really nice phrase for something which is clearly inflected in a horror way, and clearly emerges out of the generic tradition of horror, but is no longer reducible to it. I think that Reza’s work is a very, very good example of that. As such, Cyclonopedia is one of my favorite books of the last few years.
BLDGBLOG: So Reza pointed me to “The Crew of the Mekong,” a work of Russian maritime scifi. The authors describe it, somewhat baroquely, as “an account of the latest fantastic discoveries, happenings of the eighteenth century, mysteries of matter, and adventures on land and at sea.” What drew you to it?
Miéville: I can’t remember exactly what brought me to it, to be perfectly honest: it was in a secondhand bookshop and I bought it because it looked like an oddity.
It’s very odd in terms of the shape of its narrative; it sort of lurches, with a story within a story, including a long, extended flashback within the larger framing narrative, and it’s all wrapped up in this pulp shell. In terms of the story itself, if I recall, it was actually me who suggested it to Reza because it has loads of stuff in it about oil, plastic resins, and pipelines, and one of the characters works for an institute called the Institute of Surfaces, which deals with the weird physics and uncanny properties of surfaces and topology.
Some of the flashback scenes and some of the background I’ve seen described as proto-steampunk, which I think is highly anachronistic: it’s more of an elective affinity, that, if you like retro-futurity, you might also like this. At a bare minimum, it’s a book worth reading simply because it’s very odd; at a maximum, some of the things going on it are philosophically interesting, although in a bizarre way.
But foreign pulp always has that peculiar kind of feeling to it, because you have a distinct cultural remove. At its worst, that can lead to an awful kind of orientalism, but it’s undeniably fascinating as a reader.
BLDGBLOG: It’s interesting that depictions of maritime journeys can maintain such strong mythic and imaginative resonance, even across wildly different cultures, eras, genres, and artforms—whether it’s “The Crew of the Mekong” or The Scar, Valhalla Rising or Moby Dick.
Miéville: The maritime world in general is an over-determined symbol of pretty much anything you want it to be—just fill in the blank: yearning, manifest destiny, whatever. It’s a very fecund field. My own interest in it comes pretty much through fiction and, to a certain extent, art. I wish I had a bit more money, in fact, because I would buy a lot of those fairly cheap, timeless, uncredited, late 19th-century, early 20th-century seascapes that you see on sale in a lot of thrift shops.
You also mentioned Goss and Subby. Goss and Subby themselves I never thought of as pirates, in fact. They were my go at iterating the much-masticated trope of the freakishly monstrous duo, figures who are, in some way that I suspect is politically meaningful, and that one day I’ll try to parse, generally even worse than their boss. They often speak in a somewhat odd, stilted fashion, like Hazel and Cha-Cha, or Croup and Vandemar, or various others. The magisterial TV Tropes has a whole entry on such duos called “Those Two Bad Guys.” The tweak that I tried to add with Goss and Subby was to integrate an idea from a Serbian fairy-tale called—spoiler!—“BasCelik.” For anyone who knows that story, this is a big give-away.
Again, though, I think you have to ration your own predilections. I have always been very faithful to my own loves: I look at my notebooks or bits of paper from when I was four and, basically, my interests haven’t changed. Left to my own devices, I would probably write about octopuses, monsters, occasionally Tarzan, and that’s really it. From a fairly young age, the maritime yarn was one of those.
But you can’t just give into your own drives, or you simply end up writing the same book again and again.
[Image: Mapping old London].
BLDGBLOG: Along those lines, are there any settings or environments—or even particular cities—that would be a real challenge for you to work with? Put another way, can you imagine giving yourself a deliberate challenge to write a novel set out in the English suburbs, or even in a place like Los Angeles? How might that sort of unfamiliar, seemingly very un-Miéville-like landscape affect your plots and characters?
Miéville: That’s a very interesting question. I really like that approach, in terms of setting yourself challenges that don’t come naturally. It’s almost a kind of Oulipo approach. It’s tricky, though, because you have to find something that doesn’t come naturally, but, obviously, you don’t want to write about something that doesn’t interest you. It has to be something that interests you contradictorally, or contrarily.
To be honest, the suburbs don’t attract me, for a bunch of reasons. I think it’s been done to death. I think anyone who tried to do that after J. G. Ballard would be setting themselves up for failure. As I tried to say when I did my review of the Ballard collection for The Nation, one of the problems is that, with an awful lot of suburban art today, it is pitched as this tremendously outré and radical claim to say that the suburbs are actually hotbeds of perversity—whereas, in fact, that is completely the cliché now. If you wanted to do something interesting, you would have to write about terribly boring suburbs, which would loop all the way back round again, out of interesting, through meta-interesting, and back down again to boring. So I doubt I would do something set in the suburbs.
I am quite interested in wilderness. Iron Council has quite a bit of wilderness, and that was something that I really liked writing and that I’d like to try again.
But, to be honest, it’s different kinds of urban space that appeal to me. If you’re someone who can’t drive, like I can’t, you find a lot of American cities are not just difficult, but really quite strange. I spend a lot of time in Providence, Rhode Island, and it’s a nice town, but it just doesn’t operate like a British town. A lot of American towns don’t. The number of American cities where downtown is essentially dead after seven o’clock, or in which you have these strange little downtowns, and then these quite extensive, sprawling but not quite suburban surroundings that all call themselves separate cities, that segue into each other and often have their own laws—that sort of thing is a very, very strange urban political aesthetic to me.
I’ve been thinking about trying to write a story not just set, for example, in Providence, but in which Providence, or another city that operates in a very non-English—or non-my-English—fashion, is very much part of the structuring power of the story. I’d be interested in trying something like that.
But countries all around the world have their own specificities about the way their urban environments work. I was in India recently, for example. It was a very brief trip, and I’m sure some of this was just wish fulfillment or aesthetic speculation, but I became really obsessed with the way, the moment you touched down at a different airport, you got out and you breathed the air, Mumbai felt different to Delhi, felt different to Kolkata, felt different to Chennai.
Rather than syncretizing a lot of those elements, I’d like to try to be really, really faithful to one or another city, which is not my city, in the hopes that, being an outsider, I might notice certain aspects that otherwise one would not. There’s a certain type of ingenuous everyday inhabiting of a city, which is very pre-theoretical for something like psychogeography, but it brings its own insights, particularly when it doesn’t come naturally or when it goes wrong.
There’s a lovely phrase that I think Algernon Blackwood used to describe someone’s bewilderment: he describes him as being bewildered in the way a man is when he’s looking for a post box in a foreign city. It’s a completely everyday, quotidian thing, and he might walk past it ten times, but he doesn’t—he can’t—recognize it.
That kind of very, very low-level alienation—the uncertainty about how do you hail a taxi, how do you buy food in this place, if somebody yells something from their top window, why does everyone move away from this part of the street and not that part? It’s that kind of very low-level stuff, as opposed to the kind of more obvious, dramatic differences, and I think there might be a way of tapping into that knowledge, knowledge that the locals don’t even think to tell you, that might be an interesting way in.
To that extent, it would be cities that I like but in which I’m very much an outsider that I’d like to try to tap.
• • •
Thanks to China Miéville for finding time to have this conversation, including scheduling a phone call at midnight in order to wrap up the final questions. Thanks, as well, to Nicola Twilley, who transcribed 95% of this interview and offered editorial feedback while it was in process, and to Tim Maly who first told me about the towns of Derby Line–Stanstead.
Miéville’s newest book, Embassytown, comes out in the U.S. in May; show your support for speculative fiction and pre-order a copy soon. If you are new to Miéville’s work, meanwhile, I might suggest starting with The City and The City.
Friday, January 15. 2016
Note: it is not too late to wish everybody a happy '16, so, here I do! ... even so the year started in such a sad way with the disappearance of this shiny artist called David Bowie.
Maybe is it then already the right time to bring back our good old '16 resolutions, so to conjure these bad vibes? For my part, some of them were about reading... like always (or adding books on my already too big pile I can guess) and while I was wandering here and there on the Net late last December, I stumble upon this interesting initiative of curated lists of books related to design and art. Curators of books include readers such as Peter Eisenman, Tonny Dunne, Sou Fujimoto, Massimo Vignelli, John Maeda and many others (177 designers to date, 34 commentators, 73 guests, etc.).
Well... interesting line up I must say! Have a good '16 reading ...
Via Designers & Books
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" Designers & Books is an advocate for books as an important source of inspiration for creativity, innovation, and invention. The main way we do this is by publishing lists of books that esteemed members of the international design community identify as important, meaningful, and formative—books that have shaped their values, their worldview, and their ideas about design. This provides the direction for our focus on books about architecture, fashion, graphic design, interactive design, interior design, landscape architecture, product and industrial design, and urban design. "
Tuesday, September 04. 2012
Via MIT Technology Review
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Researchers at Harvard encode information in DNA at a density on par with any other experimental storage method.
DNA can be used to store information at a density about a million times greater than your hard drive, report researchers in Science today. George Church of Harvard Medical School and colleagues report that they have written an entire book in DNA, a feat that highlights the recent advances in DNA synthesis and sequencing.
The team encoded a draft HTML version of a book co-written by Church called Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. In addition to the text, the biological bits included the information for modern formatting, images and Javascript, to show that “DNA (like other digital media) can encode executable directives for digital machines,” they write.
To do this, the authors converted the computational language of 0's and 1's into the language of DNA--the nucleotides typically represented by A's, T's G's and C's; the A’s and C’s took the place of 0's and T’s and G’s of 1's. They then used off-the-shelf DNA synthesizers to make 54,898 pieces of DNA, each 159 nucleotides long, to encode the book, which could then be decoded with DNA sequencing.
This is not the first time non-biological information has been stored in DNA, but Church's demonstration goes far beyond the amount of information stored in previous efforts. For example, in 2009, researchers encoded 1688 bits of text, music and imagery in DNA and in 2010, Craig Venter and colleagues encoded a watermarked, synthetic genome worth 7920 bits.
DNA synthesis and sequencing is still too slow and costly to be practical for most data storage, but the authors suggest DNA’s long-lived nature could make it a suitable medium for archival storage.
Erik Winfree, who studies DNA-based computation at Caltech and was a 1999 TR35 winner, hopes the study will stimulate a serious discussion about what roles DNA can play in information science and technology.
“The most remarkable thing about DNA is its information density, which is roughly one bit per cubic nanometer,” he writes in an email.
“Technology changes things, and many old ideas for DNA information storage and information processing deserve to be revisited now -- especially since DNA synthesis and sequencing technology will continue their remarkable advance.”
Personal comment:
Where the living binds to the machine / to computation and where information seems to be the key ingredient. Somehow what Wiener and Shannon told us half a century ago.
Wednesday, November 02. 2011
The Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University and the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry have co-published "New Art/Science Affinities," a 190-page book on contemporary artists that was written and designed in one week by four authors (Andrea Grover, Régine Debatty, Claire Evans and Pablo Garcia) and two designers (Luke Bulman and Jessica Young of Thumb).
"New Art/Science Affinities," which focuses on artists working at the intersection of art, science and technology, was produced by a collaborative authoring process known as a "book sprint." Derived from "code sprinting," a method in which software developers gather in a single room to work intensely on an open source project for a certain period of time, the term book sprint describes the quick, collective writing of a topical book.
The book includes meditations, interviews, diagrams, letters and manifestos on maker culture, hacking, artist research, distributed creativity, and technological and speculative design. Chapters include Program Art or Be Programmed, Subvert! Citizen Science, Artists in White Coats and Latex Gloves, The Maker Moment and The Overview Effect.
Sixty international artists and art collaboratives are featured, including Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Atelier Van Lieshout, Brandon Ballengée, Free Art and Technology (F.A.T.), Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, The Institute for Figuring, Aaron Koblin, Machine Project, Openframeworks, C.E.B. Reas, Philip Ross, Tomás Saraceno, SymbioticA, Jer Thorp, and Marius Watz.
The authors collectively wrote and designed the book during seven, 10-14 hour-days in February 2011 at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry. During their sessions they held conversations with CMU faculty, staff and students from the STUDIO, Miller Gallery, College of Fine Arts, Robotics Institute, Machine Learning Department and BXA Intercollege Degree Program.
"The book sprint method was adopted in order to understand this very moment in art, science and technology hybrid practices, and to mirror the ways Internet culture and networked communication have accelerated creative collaborations, expanded methodologies, and given artists greater agency to work fluidly across disciplines," says lead author Andrea Grover....
Personal comment:
Note: there is a pdf downloadable version of the book on Nasabook website (follow the link above).
PS. Thanks also Sinan for the info.
Friday, June 04. 2010
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Software offers a running commentary to ease video searching and analysis.
By Tom Simonite
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Picture this: The objects in a surveillance footage scene (top) are annotated by computer vision software (below).
Credit: Song-Chun Zhu/UCLA |
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Multimedia
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A prototype computer vision system can generate a live text description of what's happening in a feed from a surveillance camera. Although not yet ready for commercial use, the system demonstrates how software could make it easier to skim or search through video or image collections. It was developed by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, in collaboration with ObjectVideo of Reston, VA.
"You can see from the existence of YouTube and all the other growing sources of video around us that being able to search video is a major problem," says Song-Chun Zhu, lead researcher and professor of statistics and computer science at UCLA.
"Almost all search for images or video is still done using the surrounding text," he says. Zhu and UCLA colleagues Benjamin Yao and Haifeng Gong developed a new system, called I2T (Image to Text), which is intended to change that.
It puts a series of computer vision algorithms into a system that takes images or video frames as input, and spits out summaries of what they depict. "That can be searched using simple text search, so it's very human-friendly," says Zhu.
The team applied the software to surveillance footage in collaboration with Mun Wai Lee of ObjectVideo to demonstrate the strength of I2T. Systems like it might help address the fact that there are more and more surveillance cameras--on the streets and in military equipment, for instance--while the number of people working with them remains about the same, says Zhu.
The first part of I2T is an image parser that decomposes an image--meaning it removes the background, and objects like vehicles, trees, and people. Some objects can be broken down further; for example, the limbs of a person or wheels of a car can be separated from the object they belong to.
Next, the meaning of that collection of shapes is determined. "This knowledge representation step is the most important part of the system," says Zhu, explaining that this knowledge comes from human smarts. In 2005, Zhu established the nonprofit Lotus Hill Institute in Ezhou, China, and, with some support from the Chinese government, recruited about 20 graduates of local art colleges to work full-time to annotate a library of images to aid computer vision systems. The result is a database of more than two million images containing objects that have been identified and classified into more than 500 categories.
To ensure that workers annotate images in a standard way, software guides them as they work. It uses versions of the algorithms that will eventually benefit from the final data to pick out the key objects for a person to classify, and it suggests how they might be classified based on previous data. The objects inside images are classified into a hierarchy of categories based on Princeton's WordNet database, which organizes English words into groups according to their meanings. "Once you have the image parsed using that system that also includes the meaning, transcription into the natural language is not too hard," says Zhu, who makes some of the data available for free to other researchers. "It is high-quality data and we hope that more people are going to use this," he says.
The video-processing system also uses algorithms that can describe the movement of objects in successive frames. It generates sentences like "boat1 follows boat2 between 35:56 and 37:23" or "boat3 approaches maritime marker at 40:01." "Sometimes it can do a match on an object that has left and reentered a scene," says Zhu, "and say, for example, this is probably a certain car again." It is also possible to define virtual "trip wires" to help it describe certain events, like a car running a stop sign (see video).
Although the system demonstrates a step toward what Zhu calls a "grand vision in computer science," I2T is not yet ready for commercialization. Processing surveillance footage is relatively easy for the software because the camera--and hence the background in a scene--is static; I2T is far from capable of recognizing the variety of objects or situations a human could. If set loose on random images or videos found online, for example, I2T would struggle to perform so well.
Improving the system's knowledge of how to identify objects and scenes by adding to the number of images in the Lotus Hill Institute training set should help, says Zhu.
The I2T system underlying the surveillance prototype is powerful, says Zu Kim, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who researches the use of computer vision to aid traffic surveillance and vehicle tracking. "It's a really nice piece of work," he says, even if it can't come close to matching human performance.
Kim explains that better image parsing is relevant to artificial intelligence work of all kinds. "There are very many possibilities for a good image parser--for example, allowing a blind person to understand an image on the Web."
Kim can see other uses for generating text from video, pointing out that it could be fed into a speech synthesizer. "It could be helpful if someone was driving and needed to know what a surveillance camera was seeing." But humans are visual creatures, he adds, and in many situations could be expected to prefer to decide what's happening in an image or a video for themselves.
Copyright Technology Review 2010.
Personal comment:
That's nothing new that surveillance camera are being driven by softwares that analyses the content of the image. The "interesting" point here is that the software creates a text based commentary (a sort of text based substitution of the image and its software analysis) upon which text based search algorythms can be applied to find specific content in a video.
Applied to surveillance camera, this could trigger powerfull surveillance. Applied to other projects, this could be interesting to get text based descriptiond of real time actions in public or private space. Of course, with all the questions about the nature of space that come along with this type of project...
Monday, December 07. 2009
November 4, 2009
Jenny Holzer is considered as one of the most popular contemporary artists. Holzer is known for her use of words and ideas in public space. In 1982 she publicised her statements and aphorisms (”truisms”) on one of Times Square’s gigantic LED billboards, in 2008 she created a site-specific light projection for the newly renovated facade of the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum in New York.
Fondation Beyeler in Riehen near Basel, Switzerland, is now presenting Jenny Holzer’s first large sale exhibition in a Swiss museum. The focus is on recent works, some of which have never before been shown in Europe. On display are Jenny Holzer’s famous LED installations, combining poetic, socio-critical, and political texts and visual effects, as welll as paintings and sculptures. The exhibition is supplemented by a selection of works the artist has chosen from the Beyeler Collection (Giacometti, Picasso, Malevich, Bacon).
The presentation of Jenny Holzer’s work is not confined to the museum space. The show extends outdoors to the public space. Jenny Holzer conceived light projections on key buildings and sites in Basel and Zürich. These will only be on view on special nights.
The exhibition has been conceived in close cooperation with the artist and the MCA, Chicago, and curated by Elizabeth A. T. Smith and Philippe Büttner. The exhibition at Fondation Beyeler runs until January 24, 2010.
Jenny Holzer at Fondation Beyeler in Riehen / Switzerland. Opening reception, October 31, 2009.
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Vis Vernissage TV
Personal comment:
Avancer dans la vidéo et quelques installations intéressantes, réalisées avec des textes led en défilement (bandeaux lumineux). Pas mal de maîtrise dans la mise en espace pour un résultat peut-être un peu "joli".
Thursday, October 22. 2009
By Geeta Dayal on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 1:00 pm.
 Image: Cover of Brian Eno's 1974 album "Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)"
Cybernetics is one of the most widely misunderstood concepts. The word itself seems sinister and futuristic, but the term has ancient roots – the Greek word kybernetes, meaning steersman. Cybernetics was famously defined in more recent times by Norbert Wiener in 1948, as the science of “control and communication, in the animal and the machine.” Words like "control” may seem to have creepy overtones, but at its heart, cybernetics is simply the study of systems. "Cybernetics is the discipline of whole systems thinking...a whole system is a living system is a learning system," as Stewart Brand put it in 1980. Cybernetic systems have been used to model all kinds of phenomena, with varying degrees of success – factories, societies, machines, ecosystems, brains -- and many noted artists and musicians derived inspiration from this powerful conceptual toolkit. Cybernetics may be one of the most interdisciplinary frameworks ever devised; its theories link engineering, math, physics, biology, psychology, and an array of other fields, and ideas from cybernetics inevitably infiltrated the arts. The musician and producer Brian Eno, for example, was a big fan of connecting ideas from cybernetics to the studio environment, and to music composition, in his work in the 1970s.
Eno was first exposed to concepts in cybernetics as a teenager in the mid-1960s, during his days as a student at Ipswich Art College. Several art schools in the UK in the '60s were incorporating ideas from cybernetics into their pedagogical approaches, mainly via Roy Ascott's infamous “Groundcourse” curriculum. Ipswich Art College, where Eno studied in the mid-'60s, was run by Ascott, an imposing presence who incorporated cutting-edge cybernetics principles into his offbeat teaching style. Before Ipswich, Ascott had been head tutor at Ealing, a nearby art school where a young Pete Townshend was studying. "The first term at Ipswich was devoted entirely to getting rid of those silly ideas about the nobility of the artist by a process of complete and relentless disorientation," Eno recalled some ten years later, in a guest lecture he gave at Trent Polytechnic. Ascott's teaching philosophy involved countless mandatory group collaboration exercises -- an echo of cybernetics' emphasis on “systems learning” -- and mental games. Very little of the teaching at Ipswich had anything to do with what the teenage Eno had ostensibly set out to do -- study the fine arts. Instead of daubing canvases with oil paints, Eno and his fellow students were instructed to create "mindmaps'' of each other.
Eno became very interested in cybernetics, and possible ways to apply those ideas to music. As an art school student, he had gotten into observing life on a “meta” level, and looked at his own creative process with a bird's eye view. Cybernetics concepts challenged Eno to think in different ways about the process of making music, and these ideas infiltrated Eno's thinking on many of his 1970s albums in key ways. Groups of musicians working in the studio could be conceptualized, in some general sense, as cybernetic systems. A piece of music composed using feedback, or tape loops, could be construed using cybernetics principles, too. One of Eno's favorite quotes, from the managerial-cybernetics theorist Stafford Beer, would become a fundamental guiding principle for his work: ''Instead of trying to specify it in full detail," Beer wrote in his book The Brain of the Firm, "you specify it only somewhat. You then ride on the dynamics of the system in the direction you want to go." Eno also derived inspiration from Stafford Beer's related definition of a “heuristic.” “To use Beer's example: If you wish to tell someone how to reach the top of a mountain that is shrouded in mist, the heuristic ‘keep going up’ will get him there,” Eno wrote. Eno connected Beer's concept of a “heuristic” to music.
 Image: Back cover of Brian Eno's 1975 album "Discreet Music"
The work of Eno's late friend, the British artist Peter Schmidt, who died in 1980, goes strangely underrecognized in the story of cybernetics and the arts. Schmidt, who died in 1980, had a major impact on legions of artists, perhaps most famously on Eno. Schmidt contributed artwork to several of Eno's key albums in the 1970s. His lithographs adorn the cover of 1974's Taking Tiger Mountain [by Strategy]; he also created the striking abstract painting that formed the cover of Robert Fripp and Brian Eno's 1975 collaboration Evening Star, and a series of prints that were included as collectible inserts in the 1977 album Before and After Science. Schmidt and Eno also released the renowned Oblique Strategies cards – “one hundred worthwhile dilemmas” designed to coax artists out of creative ruts – together in 1975. Schmidt is mostly known as a painter, but he was also an electronic composer in his own right; in 1967, he merged his two interests together, performing a show at London's ICA called “A Painter's Use of Sound.”
Schmidt served as the music adviser to curator Jasia Reichardt for the landmark exhibition "Cybernetic Serendipity" at London's ICA in 1968, and his selection of computer music for the ICA show proved extraordinarily prescient. Schmidt had long been intrigued by electronic music, systems, and their connections to the visual arts. "Cybernetic Serendipity" showcased pathbreaking work by hundreds of artists, including John Cage, Nam June Paik, and Jean Tinguely, and was a huge success for Reichardt and the ICA, drawing somewhere between 45,000 and 60,000 viewers and foreshadowing multiple major trends on the interfaces between art and technology. “Cybernetic Serendipity” also galvanized the interest in systems-based art. "The very notion of having a system in relation to making paintings is often anathema to those who value the mysterious and the intuitive, the free and the expressionistic, in art,” wrote Reichardt in 1968. “Systems, nevertheless, dispense neither with intuition nor mystery. Intuition is instrumental in the design of the system and mystery always remains in the final result."
 Image: "Cybernetic Serendipity" poster 1968 (Source: Media Art Net)
Shortly after "Cybernetic Serendipity," Schmidt held a solo show of his systems-based prints and paintings at London's Lisson Gallery. "The paintings and prints shown here were all done according to pre-conceived formulae," wrote Schmidt in his artist's statement. "In some of them a few decisions were left to be made as the picture progressed, but in most of them all the decisions were made beforehand. But the point of working this way is not at all to achieve a pre-conceived result, it is to allow an unexpected one. The more decisions that I have to make during the course of a painting, the more it becomes that these decisions will be influenced by taste and by the desire for a specific outcome. In these paintings the shape and color structure was often completely predetermined, but the way the paintings looked was a complete surprise.”
 Image: Exhibition invitation from Peter Schmidt's solo show at Lisson Gallery, Nov. 7 - Dec. 24, 1968
(Courtesy of Lisson Gallery)
A year later, in 1969, Schmidt made a series of 64 drawings based on hexagrams from the ancient Chinese divination system, the I Ching. John Cage had famously been using the I Ching to make compositional decisions -- a move that would inspire the Oblique Strategies cards, published by Eno and Schmidt in the mid-1970s.
Eno and Schmidt released the Oblique Strategies cards together in 1975, when they realized that they had both been independently developing sets of ideas to help themselves come up with creative solutions to trying situations. “The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation – particularly in studios -- tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working, and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach,” explained Eno in an interview with Charles Amirkhanian in 1980.
 Image: Oblique Strategies cards
The Oblique Strategies cards, while ostensibly quirky, had a specific, utilitarian purpose. The cards were designed to help artists and musicians get out of creative ruts and loosen up in the studio. Each Oblique Strategy had a different aphorism: "Accept advice," read one. "Imagine the music as a series of disconnected events," read another. “Humanize something free of error." The Strategies were, in their own way, a systems-based approach to creativity.
The work of Eno and Schmidt, and of many other artists who took inspiration from ideas in cybernetics and other ideas from the sciences, was never a literal interpretation of scientific principles. That was part of what made it interesting. "One night at dinner, John Cage handed me a copy of Cybernetics by Norbert Wiener, and said "this is for you"," remembered John Brockman in his book By the Late John Brockman, published in 1969. "Robert Rauschenberg encouraged me to read about physics, recommending The Mysterious Universe by Sir James Jeans, and One, Two, Three, Infinity by George Gamow." Rauschenbergian physics and Cagean cybernetics were not, perhaps, the genuine article. These garbled transmissions from the sciences, mixed in ad-hoc ways into the arts, allowed for strange mutations to take root in culture, taking a life all their own.
Geeta Dayal is the author of Another Green World (Continuum, 2009), a new book on Brian Eno. She has written over 150 articles and reviews for major publications, including Bookforum, The Village Voice, The New York Times, The International Herald-Tribune, Wired, The Wire, Print, I.D., and many more. She has taught several courses as a lecturer in new media and journalism at the University of California - Berkeley, Fordham University, and the State University of New York. She studied cognitive neuroscience and film at M.I.T. and journalism at Columbia. You can find more of her work on her blog, The Original Soundtrack.
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Via Rhizome.org
Monday, September 28. 2009
 The image above is a CAPTCHA — you can read it, but computers have a harder time interpreting the letters. We tried to make it hard for computers to recognize because we wanted to give humans the scoop first, but we're happy to announce to everybody now that Google has acquired reCAPTCHA, a company that provides CAPTCHAs to help protect more than 100,000 websites from spam and fraud.
Since computers have trouble reading squiggly words like these, CAPTCHAs are designed to allow humans in but prevent malicious programs from scalping tickets or obtain millions of email accounts for spamming. But there’s a twist — the words in many of the CAPTCHAs provided by reCAPTCHA come from scanned archival newspapers and old books. Computers find it hard to recognize these words because the ink and paper have degraded over time, but by typing them in as a CAPTCHA, crowds teach computers to read the scanned text.
In this way, reCAPTCHA’s unique technology improves the process that converts scanned images into plain text, known as Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This technology also powers large scale text scanning projects like Google Books and Google News Archive Search. Having the text version of documents is important because plain text can be searched, easily rendered on mobile devices and displayed to visually impaired users. So we'll be applying the technology within Google not only to increase fraud and spam protection for Google products but also to improve our books and newspaper scanning process.
That's why we're excited to welcome the reCAPTCHA team to Google, and we're committed to delivering the same high level of performance that websites using reCAPTCHA have come to expect. Improving the availability and accessibility of all the information on the Internet is really important to us, so we're looking forward to advancing this technology with the reCAPTCHA team.
Posted by Luis von Ahn, co-founder of reCAPTCHA, and Will Cathcart, Google Product Manager
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Via The Official Google Blog
Personal comment:
Après la fonte créée spécifiquement pour pouvoir être lue par les machines (on pense ici bien entendu à l'OCR), le CAPTCHA est apparu bien plus récemment avec l'objectif exactement contraire: ne pas pouvoir être lu par les machines... (pour les raisons que l'on sait d'éviter les logins automatiques et autres spams de listes ou siztes divers).
On avait réalisé un projet en 2004 (Electroscape 004) exploitant du "text to speech" et il y a peut-être un projet inverse à faire avec ça aujourd'hui...?
Monday, July 06. 2009
Ascenders & Descenders is a typographic reinterpretation of Merce Cunningham's dancing hands as recorded by OpenEnded Group for the Loops project.
The piece is a Cunningham dance work reconstructed from textual deconstructions of other Cunningham dance works. Each finger has an associated excerpt from an article, review, or essay on Cunningham from the last 5 decades. These texts become the "ink" with which each finger manifests its movements. Each text is dynamically typeset in 3 dimensional space along the curves traced by his fingertips.
The software keeps track of various movement parameters which it uses to modulate aspects of the visualization such as letter size, camera position, angle, and zoom. Merce not only dances the dance, but becomes typesetter and cinematographer, conducting the audience's view of the dance.
What, from the outside, appear to be subtle manipulations of the hands become a beautiful tangle of diving flocks and waterfalls of letters. Presenting dance in this way, we hope to get closer to the experience of the dance from the inside out.
Watch the video below.
Thnkx John.
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Via Information Aesthetics
Personal comment:
Une approche 3d-générative des "dancing hands" de Merce Cunningham.
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