Bad Things that could happen

Bad Things That Could Happen from This Is It on Vimeo.

From This is It, a collective of illustrators, animators, artists and designers based in London. Thanks Erika.

CogSci in Pop Culture

In my Body and Cognition class in 2009, I asked students to send in links to things they found on the web that they felt were relevant to cognitive science. Here's what they came up with:

Cartoons

Pinky and the brain
Song in which Pinky and the brain describe the parts of the brain.

Visualizations

How the Body Works: The Regions of the Brain
Narrated animation: "The brain has three functional and anatomical parts…"

Neurotransmitter Synapse 3D animation

3D computer graphics animation of an action potential traveling down an axon

Hybrid Medical Animation
Simple 3D computer animation of a DNA molecule

Action potential animation
3D animation of cells and action potential

School Projects

Brain Tumors
A school student creates a narrated video with cartoon figures, describing medical facts around brain tumors.

Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development
A school student creates a talking-head account of Piaget's stages of Cognitive Development.

The Right Brain vs. Left Brain
An optical illusion that tells you which side of the brain you use more.

Metaphorical / Art

Sensory Neurons
A metaphorical animation that uses stop-motion to illustrate the moment between touch and feel.

Sounds of Complexity
Audiovisual performance where crude sounds of the brain are monitored then transformed into frequencies.

Sounds of Complexity 2009
Continuation of above. Material is processed digitally in real-time, frequencies are transformed into Cartesian space to form visual trajectories on screens that react dynamically.

Health Education

What causes Epilepsy? (Epilepsy #5)
A health education video on the causes and effects of epilepsy.

Promotion/Advertising

Honda Develops Brain Machine Interface
Promo piece by Honda: Using the brain to remote-control things by thought alone. Technology showcase of current state of the art.

Sex, drugs and Rock'n'Roll center in the brain
Promo piece by Philips about how rock and roll music stimulates the reward center of the brain - the same way that sex and drugs do.

The Many Faces of Toni Collette in “Tara”
An Associated Press introduction to "United States of Tara", Showtime series from Steven Spielberg and Diablo Codya, featuring an interview with the show's star, Toni Collette.

Popular Science

Human Body: Pushing The Limits
Discovery: Too often we take our bodys for granted, but under presser our bodies can show how extraordinary they are". Uses 3D to illustrate full of hyperbole "our brain can slow down time and unleash immense power."

Super Brain Yoga
Channel 2 news feature about a form of exercise that is claimed to "pump up" neural activity in the brain and turn people into Grade A students.

Your Brains on Sex
When we have an orgasm, the limbic system releases the highest legal of dopamine in the brain - the same chemical released by Heroin.

Brain Controls Pain
Short video about how doctors are teaching patients how to manage pain through brain control.

Making Brain Cells
Science feature by ScienCentral on genetically modified mice, and the similarities between skin and brain stem cells. Claims that that the brain stem cells and hair follicle stem cells can both form into neurons. Could have long-term medical implications.

Crush the myth about Hypnosis, find out the truth today
A Mythbusters test about whether pypnosis helps three subjects remember details of a staged scene. Conclusion: they do have enhanced recall.

Remember Name hypnotically with Wendi
Self-help video in which Wendi tries to use hypnosis techniques to help people remember. Claims "things are stored in specific places in the brain."

Optical Illusions Show How we See
A TED presentation by Beau Lotto where he shows several optical illusions to illustrate that we don't see "reality" but a filtered version of it.

Feature Films

Ghost in the Shell (philosophical scenes)
Three philosophical scenes from the feature animation "Ghost in the Shell". The main character's memories are shown to be faked - raises questions of identity and subjectivity.

Waking Life Clip: Ants
A segment of the film waking life. "I don't want to be an ant" - female character asks male character for a more human connection.

The Cruise
A clip from the film The Cruise. Timothy Levitch a NY bus tour guide singing. "This is the first real day of their lives" - Timothy talks about cruising manifestations and connecting with tourists.

Mindgame Clip: God
A clip from the film Mindgame, in which the main character dies and meets God.

Documentaries

Music and the Brain
A clip from a lecture at the library of congress by Daniel Levitin. He presents an argument that music came before language.

Science Bulletins: Language and the Brain
An American Museum of Natural History mini documentary on speech and language in the brain.

Cognitive Psychology: The Brain
A ten minute clip from a longer KPBS documentary on learning and brain plasticity. "The brain is capable of rapidly revising..."

Dissociative Identity Disorder
A day-in-the-life style documentary about a man with dissociative identity order.

Kim Peek – The Real Rain Man
A documentary about Kim Peek, the savant who inspired the Rain Man. "He's become a living Google." Talks about his emotional life, his relationship with his father, and his cognitive abilities.

Savant Drawings
Documentary about Stephen Wiltshire, a savant who has perfect visual recall. He creates a near-perfect drawing of Rome after only seeing it from a Helicopter.

How to Improve Your Memory -2
Part of a British documentary about change blindness, memory and attentiveness.

US Language Attitudes
A documentary by Dennis Preston's on what people believe are "correct" and "bad" accents in American English.

East of Krakatoa - John Kang
Clip from the documentary Ring of Fire: East of Krakatoa. Appears to show John Chang, a meditation expert, creating fire only with his hand.

Design as intervention

I recently attended a series of presentations by designers who were invited to create "interventions" in public space.

I've been thinking about this since then, and especially about the concept of design as intervention. Is "intervention" a valid or appropriate strategy for design?

Interventionism is where one group disregards another group's right to self-determination in order to forward the first group's moral agenda and sovereignty. There are clear cases where interventionism is accepted, e.g. to prevent genocide. However, in the case of a designer intervening in a space or situation through a designed artifact in order to forward that designer's moral (or technical) agenda, we have to be more careful. "Intervention" has an activist ring to it, but when employed by those equipped with the tools of mass production, it quickly becomes hegamonic.

In particular, I wonder what criteria is used for evaluating a given intervention? Designers talk of objective functions for measuring the consequences of an object in line with their agenda. For example, if a designer were to publish a series of leaflets on waste disposal they might adopt an objective function that measures the resulting increase in the use of recycling bins. Although these types of objective measurements are appealing, they are often misleading. I'm reminded of Thomas Midgley's invention of Tetraethly Lead (TEL), a gasoline additive that had important benefits measured in the metrics of the day (it reduced engine "knocking"). It was only years later that we discovered the disastrous secondary and tertiary consequences of this change. Another example is plastic bags, which in the objective measurement function of their day were cheap, lightweight, and strong. Today we have a new artificial island in the Pacific that is made up from this cheap, lightweight and strong.

Interventionism applies a cause-effect analysis that fits well with the service-based ethos of design: Have a problem? Identify a solution, create an intervention, measure the improvements, iterate. How does this address a complex ecosphere? It is unclear, since the designer in this scenario is placed on the outside, as a lone agent with little real accountability for the secondary and tertiary effects of their work.

I realize I am being rather cynical. Certainly I often enjoy encounters with social interventions. I especially relish the bizarre, strange and unexpected. But the strategy of interventionism seems stuck in a colonial imaginary, one that relies on a construction of self and other. What other strategies are possible? What about design for the subaltern, for example?

Thinking about this (and this is very unformed), Daniel Eatock represents one place to start. Eatock is an independent artist with a design practice (or is it the other way around?) He offers a materials-based conceptual take on design. His manifesto on his website is:

Begin with ideas
Embrace chance
Celebrate coincidence
Ad-lib and make things up
Eliminate superfluous elements
Subvert expectation
Make something difficult look easy
Be first or last
Believe complex ideas can produce simple things
Trust the process
Allow concepts to determine form
Reduce material and production to their essence
Sustain the integrity of an idea
Propose honesty as a solution

His approach is deceptively simple. His model is collaborative and at the same time he asserts his independence. He does have large clients (e.g. Channel 4), but he is selective in his choice of clients, and insists that they work within his creative model, rather that designing to a brief. "there is no brief, no description, no guidelines.... If criteria were written down, they would be restrictive." Eatock's approach downscales design and takes it out of a solution-oriented framework. He doesn't make any claims about interventions or about measuring results.

Discussing Eatock in class last year, one student proposed taking the idea of an independent designer further: What about a designer who creates designs for just one other individual? Or a designer who creates artifacts for one very small community or village? Returning to these highly embedded and communal models is a counterstrike against design for the masses.

Finally there is APG. Claire Bishop wrote about the Artist Placement Group in this months ArtForum (link). The APG was a group in the 1960's which placed artists (or "Incidental Persons") within organizations. The motivations of APG's founders, John Latham and Barbara Stevani, were intentionally precarious. Rather than aiming for a specific identifiable outcome, the Incidental Person was viewed as a figure who "takes the stand of a third ideological position which is off the plane of their obvious collision areas." In other words, rather than occupying known positions, it was an attempt to intentionally create unknowable positions.

The APG makes a mockery of activism since, although their aim was to achieve change, they were unconcerned with the ideological direction of that change. Instead they measured the change produced by their placements in terms of what they called the "delta unit", which had factors like the number of people affected by a change, or the length the change lasted. At first this seems absurd - how can you be for any change whatsoever? But what the delta unit does is force us to take a much longer view on assessing change. It prevents us from pre-determining an objective function based on naive causality.

The APG is a call for experimentation that is intentionally unplanned, where evaluations are performed a long time after the fact. If I were an interventionist, this is the kind of agenda I would want to impose on design.

PhD induction week

Last week I started my MPHIL/PhD in Art Practice at Goldsmiths College, University of London. I had my first meeting with my supervisor at Goldsmiths, professor Suhail Malik. I also recently met with Joseph Tanke, a philosophy professor at CCA who is co-advising me in San Francisco.

The working title of my thesis is "The fate of the hand." This is a section heading of the book Gesture and Speech by paleontologist André Leroi-Gourhan. In the book, Leroi-Gourhan argues that in the future the hand may regress to simply an index finger to push buttons. Machines will take care of the rest. Against this prediction, in my thesis I plan to examine many possible scenarios for the future hand.

So what am I reading? In art theory, I'm starting with Heidegger, and the 2002 book Tool-Being by Graham Harman, who aims to rethink Heidegger's analysis of the tool. Harman is one of a group of philosophers arguing for "speculative realism" - the first time since Kant that there has been a concerted push to advance a realist position, rather than the myriad relational positions found in philosophy from Kant to Deleuze.

I've also begun reading neuroscience papers. Cognitive scientists, like speculative realist philosophers, have shown a renewed interest in the relationship between mind and reality, and there are now entire conferences dedicated to "embodied cognition," which aims to study thought without isolating it from body states. It can be no accident that these two groups, with very different historical trajectories, have both zeroed in on the mind-body problem. The connection, I am certain, will be found in Flying Spagetti Monsterism.

Things I learnt last night

Yesterday, my friend Scott pointed out two factoids during a party to celebrate 10/10/10:

1. 101010 = 42. Which of course is a very important number.

2. The volume of a pizza whose radius is z and whose thickness is a = pizza. Which is perhaps only important when you are hungry.

Back in San Francisco

Photo by Bob Lake

I have arrived back in San Francisco. I decided to kick off my year here by going on a Motorcycle course (above). It was outrageously fun. I plan to purchase a motorbike to get around the city. I'm still waiting for all the paperwork to come in so it will probably be another month before I have a bike. Can't wait.

Body and Cognition

This semester I am teaching a class at CCA called "Body and Cognition" - the syllabus is below. I have also enrolled as a distance scholar in the MPHIL ART program at Goldsmiths - I will be dividing my time between the two.

Body and Cognition

“Body and Cognition is a tour of topics in cognitive science - from vision and language to memory, learning and consciousness. The course has a special focus on the relationship between mind and body. Students will learn some of the core underlying concepts of cognitive science, and also practice data collection and analysis.”

Week 1 (9 September) Introduction. Decartes and the Mind/Body problem. Dualism, materialism. Doubt as a methodology.

Week 2 (16 September) Language 1: Phonology and Morphology. The Devanagari writing system.Low level language processing.

Week 3 (23 September) Language 2. Higher level language processing. Grammars. Mental lexicons. Syntax and semantics. Mentalese.

Week 4 (30 September) Psychology 1: Experiment design. Between-subject versus within-subject. Central tendency. Spread. Collecting data.

Week 5 (7 October) Psychology 2: P-scores and the null hypothesis. Central limit theorem. Analyzing results.

Week 6 (14 October) Machines 1. Software. Algorithms. Incompleteness, uncertainty and the Enlightenment. The Turing Machine. The halting problem. Sort and search algorithms.

Week 7 (21 October) Machines 2. AI: The Turing Test. Machine Intelligence. Eliza. Searle’s Chinese Room. Logic and knowledge representation.

Week 8 (28 October) The Brain. Neurons, ganglions, axons, brain structure. Connectionism.

Week 9 (4 November) Vision 1. The eye and the visual cortex. Illusions. Marr’s Three Levels.

Week 10 (11 November) Vision 2. Face recognition. Change blindness. Visual memory. Vision and art. Non-photorealistic rendering and HDR.

Week 11 (18 November) Information and Memory. What is information? Information theory. Redundancy. Memory. The hippocampus. Long and short term memory.

Week 12 (25 November) Thanksgiving break.

Week 13 (2 December) Emotions. Feelings. Affect. Emotional models. The limbic system and the Amygdala.

Week 14 (9 December) Consciousness. Philosophical approaches to consciousness. Bandwidth. Attention.

Week 15 (16 December) Final class: Special topic (tbd).

Research in an art school

Rachel Schreiber kindly invited me to be on a panel talking about research for the Humanities & Sciences divisional faculty meeting at the start of term at Califorinia College of the arts. A copy of my statement is below.

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Thank you Rachel for inviting me to speak. Its a pleasure to be back in San Francisco after a summer break. I spent much my summer in England, while there I had the opportunity to watch my niece learn to use the slide for the first time. It was pretty cool...

Rachel asked me to respond to four questions: (1) what methods of research are used within fine arts? (2) What is the current state of the discussion around studio practice as research? (3) What would you like CCA students to learn about conducting research that will help them become better artists? and (4) Can you articulate connections between research in fine arts and research for science.

Pondering these questions, I quickly hit a stumbling block. It is this: 

I don't believe in "research". Or rather, for me the concept of "research" is a myth: specifically it is the myth that rational processes and rational methodologies will lead to positive outcomes. It is a positivistic vision, and, as James Elkins has pointed out in his books, it is invading the shores of creative practice. When Goldsmiths College, a well respected art school, renames their woodshed the "woodwork research laboratory", we know what's in store. Art is in the process of being territorialized by research. The panel we are having today is evidence of this, as is the fact that I was able to enroll in a PhD program in research based art practice - something that didn't exist ten years ago. The myth of research is spreading.

What do I mean when I say research is a myth? My friend Andre Fenton, a neuroscientist at NYU, recently related to me how, when he is teaching science to his students, he has them read two papers from the 70s. One paper follows stringent methodologies. It is well articulated and clearly presented. It provides extremely accurate data. It is beautiful research. Meanwhile, the second paper, by some competing scientists on the same topic, is scrappier, it has some holes, patchy methodology, weaker writing.

It just happens that the conclusions of the first paper are wrong - or not wrong, but the authors were so focused on the details that they missed the big picture. Meanwhile, this second paper, which was initially dismissed as bad research, had some ideas in it that changed how people conceived the problem. It led to breakthroughs. The second paper is now a seminal landmark in the field. The learning lesson for Andre's students is that there is no a-priori criteria for evaluating good or bad research. Without criteria, the entire category of research is unstable. Most of what we can say about research is rhetoric.

And yet countless books continue to written on the subject and the story these books tell is almost inevitably the story of the first paper, because this is the story we know how to tell, and this is the myth of research: follow the process, get your results, communicate well, and you produce value.  We know how to discuss this. We know how to discuss "how do we follow a process?" We know how to discuss "how do we communicate results?" How do we… how do we? Any amount of elaboration of the "how do we" line of thinking can only get us to that first paper.

Lindsay Abromaitis-Smith and Matt Lebo

My visual aid today is an image of two artists asking the question: how do we perform puppet dissection? (Lindsay Abromaitis-Smith and Matt Lebo). It strikes me that in this image we have a clue to a response to the "how do we?" problem. Taking a line from Donna Harrayway, when faced with a myth, our best course of action is to create a new myth to replace it. Rather than allowing art to be territorialized by research as is, we must do the opposite, we must articulate a new vision of research, one that overthrows the idea of research as primarily a rational engine of epistemology, and reinserts what art has always laid claim to: processes of ontology - the making of worlds; and phenomenology - the experience of those worlds; the non-rational; the nonsensical; the compelling but utterly useless.

There is something paradoxical to what I am saying. I'm arguing that we must embrace the insertion of research into art, along with research's logic, precision, and intellectual authority, not to make creative practice more rational or more predictable, but precisely the opposite: Research through art, research through creative practice, is, in my opinion, a political project that aims to undermine the authority of research and remind us of those woolly, soft, and very human qualities of expressivity, emotion, affect, hunch, guesswork, intuition, doubt, or blind leaping... ironically, all qualities that have been downsized by academic art in its play for legitimacy in academia. Research based art is a way to return us to unresearch concepts, or 'pata-research. It might mean simply trying something, whether it is puppet research or neurobiology research, or research on using a slide for the first time … to see what happens. Because, as Andre Fenton would agree, this is at the core of good science, at the core of good art. It is probably at the core of everything.

Our challenge as teachers, then, in an art school is to not be overly seduced by terms like "design research," or "design thinking." Yes, teach rigorous research practices. Yes, teach the latest tools and processes, Yes, teach exquisite communication skills. But this is not our quest. Our quest is to  demand, assert, struggle, and cry over something that no amount of rationalism can explain: the awesome reign of the imagination.

The Business of Aura

Some of my recent works will be included in both parts of the group show The Business of Aura, showing at Broadway Gallery and Elga Wimmer Gallery this August in New York. Details below.

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The Business of Aura is a single exhibition hosted in two locations, Elga Wimmer Gallery and Broadway Gallery, curated by Kelsey Harrington. It includes painting, drawing, photography, sculptural prototypes, and installation. The show examines the potential of studio processes to produce aura. In particular it considers sensual, conceptual, and psychological interpretations of aura and highlights the role aura plays in the buying and selling of art.

Elga Wimmer Gallery
526 West 26th St. NYC #310
August 12 - September 18, 2010
Opening reception Thursday August 12 6:00-8:00pm
Summer hours - Tuesday - Friday 12-6pm
Hours after Labor Day Tuesday - Saturday 12-6pm

Artists & architecturally trained designers at Elga Wimmer Gallery include - Helen Brough, Elizabeth Cooper, Cmmnwlth (Zoe Coombes & David Boira)-in collaboration with Timothy Saccenti, Kelsey Harrington, Jon Meyer, Steve Orlando, Devin Powers, Snarkitecture (Daniel Arsham & Alex Mustonen), SOFTlab (Michael Szivos and Jose Luis Conzalez), Studio Mode (Gil Akos & Ronnie Parsons), and yo_cy (Christine Yogiaman & Ken Tracy).

Broadway Gallery
473 Broadway 7th Floor, NYC
August 19 - September 10, 2010
Opening reception August 19 6:00-8:00pm
Hours - Monday - Saturday 10-6pm

Artists at Broadway Gallery include - Jaqueline Cedar, Laura Greengold, Kelsey Harrington, Jeff Hutchison, Jeanne Jo, Amanda Lechner, Lauren Luoff, Jon Meyer, Jan Mollet, Ryan Russo, Matthew Schreiber, Rebecca Sherman, Emet Sosna, and Christopher Ulivo

Press Release (pdf)

MPhil/PhD in Art

I have joined Goldsmith's MPhil/PhD in Art programme as a part-time student. I will be studying towards my MPhil (leading to my PhD) part-time while completing my second year as a visiting artist at CCA in California.