Today we celebrate the fern. I have two ferns which I'm with right now. I will pass on your best wishes on this auspicious day. I don't have any notes lined up today. I've been pouring writing time into the thesis and into a chapter I'm writing with Kristina Andersen. We're writing about machines and imaginations and all the dimensions of that using a very absurd categorisation system. It's due in May 1st (like a lot of things, there must be some statistical analysis about how most 'arbitrary' deadlines are all the same) so we're in the home stretch. It's good, I'm really happy with it.
Apart from that I'm on the thesis. I'm not where I want to be with it really. I got the methodology done which Wes gave very positive feedback on. I'm currently writing up Augury. I want to use some projects I've done and will do as lynch pins of certain sets of ideas. Augury is a lot about the metaphorical languages around inscrutable technologies like machine learning so I'm using it as a kind of vortex for that. The text in that 'chapter' is currently at about 9000 words and I want to bring it down to about 4000 but there's still so much to say. When do you stop? I try and read one thing everyday, a chapter, an essay a paper and that just adds to all the things I want to say.
Anyway, working on that will be the weekend having finished off the chapter with Kristina on Friday.
I've been cycling loads more, taking the opportunity of good weather and quiet roads to get my muscle memory back. Waking up at about six, doing some calisthenics and then going out for about two hours.
Thing on the Internet
Matt Webb has been really active on Interconnected again. That blog is evergreen good with his musings and interesting stuff. It's been going FOREVER, I've read it since I was a student. He gave it a go at a redesign - always a tricky proposition. There's a sign-up version too.
Twitter still, regrettably, exists in a child-like state and is full of opinions in both pithy and threaded form.
Everyone's doing loads of things now (like livestreams, festivals, initiatives and events) and I was reflecting on this this morning next to the problem of taking our entire university online over the last three weeks. That kind of freneticism is exhausting, we'll run out of generosity and then things will get ugly. I'm writing from a position of enormous privilege but is the drive to ramp up activity with this crisis the same logic as that of capitalist exploitation? I don't know. I just worry that yeah, we burn out on generosity and then things get really ugly. I'm going to revisit the salvage stuff more, it makes more sense to me as a crisis response.
Channel Recommendation
Oh I have loads lined up. YouTube is a goldmine right now. I'm going to re-recommend Numberphile again. Which is just a great maths channel. I now know why adding up all the possible whole numbers gives you -1/12
8.1.20
Marbre, Nivôse, 228: How do you know if you produced knowledge?
Sometimes it’s hard to think big when your weekly ambition is just to read all your emails. I tweaked the design of this thing again. Blogger's current favourite thing is not saving HTML changes so I have to edit offline then 'restore' the HTML. It’s been a few weeks since the last post and now we’re in a glorious new Gregorian decade so this is a long one, sorry.
There’s still a lot of these 'decade/year in review' things going out on the social networks where folks list what they consider to be achievements over the period. I won't be doing one, I feel pretty divided about them. It feels vainglorious, boastful and my internal logic suggests that getting things done is in and of itself the validation rather than having other people acknowledge that you did it. On the other hand, it’s been really nice reading all the incredible things that people have been up to in the face of what to many has been years of adversity and struggle. I don’t know. If you know me well you know that I feel ‘sticky’ about talking about my own work. I don’t like it because a) if it was any good it would speak for itself b) if it’s not good then it’s not worth talking about and I’m just taking up airspace from people doing good work which is why (barring one attempt) I never do these year/decade in review things. Anyway, moving on from thoughts that will inevitably land me in trouble on twitter dot com forward slash replies…
Upcoming: Reciprocal Studio - What if Our World is Their Heaven?
Today Natalie and I are starting teaching one of the Reciprocal Studios for MA Graphic Media Design at LCC as Haunted Machines. These are small, short and directed specialist briefs run by creative practitioners that the students can sign up to. We’ve decided to run it about automated image production and the imagination, inspired heavily by the work of Joel McKim but using Carl Di Salvo’s strategies for designerly responses. We’ll do our best to document outcomes and process as we go on the Irish microblog and Instagram (there’s no Haunted Machines Instagram, you just have to follow us as individuals).
How do you know if you produced knowledge?
I’m putting together the ‘methodology’ bit of my PhD. 'Methodology' is such a vague word but I’m summoning the courage to look at the work I’ve been doing the last three years and ask why I did it that way. At some point I decided that speculative and critical design wasn’t doing what I wanted intellectually as far as furthering discourse goes. But I’m forced to consider why I chose to switch into a more artistic approach as in Augury, Finite State Fantasia and Charismatic Megapigment. I’m pretty comfortable describing and arguing about how it’s still ‘designerly;’ I’m always considering legibility of communication, the audience’s needs and experiences and using technical strategies to steer thoughts and behaviours. And in terms of 'research for design' I subscribe to the idea that we learn from doing and I can talk more authoritatively about, for example, machine learning, by actually making something that plays around with machine learning than speculating on it at some intellectual and technical distance.
But then why is this artistic, installation-style approach of Augury, Charismatic Megapigment and Finite State Fantasia effective at engaging audiences. Some of the speculative design work I’ve done is quite measurable – it went into policy papers, was presented at the Hour of Commons etc. So why does weird-tech-art feel better. I put it out on Irish microblog Twitter dot com and got some nice responses when I asked if anyone knew of ways of measuring the impact of critical practice. A couple of folks got back in touch saying that it’s about how things influence the zeitgeist, enter the canon or start to steer conversation. I think this is perhaps the right lead so Ill head down that rabbit hole for a while. I got some good links to things as well which I’ve listed here:
I also figure I should chuck in Matt Malpass' Critical Design in Context and Carl Di Salvo's Design and the Construction of Publics as brilliant sources. Steph suggested that impact/change assumes a testable hypothesis which I can see a problem with when it comes to critical creative practice, but these projects are in some way hypothesised. For instance, to take Augury, a hypothesis might be; 'Can we have a different type of conversation about machine learning if we talk about it as a semi-occult thing in the context of thousands of years of occult practice?' How then, can I test that hypothesis; of course standing in the gallery led to conversations, and it got a little traction in articles and blogs, but does that change the cultural assimilation of machine learning?
It's much easier to blog about this stuff than write it up academically, that's for sure.
Voyager
I made some slow progress on Voyager over the break. Now that the Arduino knows where Voyager is relative to its position on Earth, the next stage is getting the Arduino to know where north is so it can make sure it’s pointing the right way. To do this I’m going to attach a BNO055 to the arm of the sign so that it will know what way it’s facing and at what angle it is. This is most important for when it first turns on and perhaps running occasional checks for drift.
Of course there’s always a little problem. In the image you can see the BNO055 using pins A4 and A5 for I2C communication with the Arduino Uno. I’d assumed that it would be the same pins on the Rev 2 (which I thought was just an Uno with a WiFi chip) but no, it actually has two special pins near the top of the digital pins for I2C stuff. So that was a few wasted hours trying to figure that out. The second problem is calibration. This takes a long time and requires moving the board around every time it turns on. Luckily Bohle Bots is a library that actually stores the calibration to the Arduino’s memory once done. Now that's all done I need to actually start making the thing so I can figure out where all the components will go and begin working on the motors. That's probably a little way off though, there's a lot of other things to do first.
Things I learned this week:
I’m at the bit of the philosophy podcast about Jewish Andalusian ethics which is really good. I just heard all about Bahya Ibn Paquda (1050-112) who wrote the ‘Duties of The Heart’ which was a curiously accessible book on Aristotelean ethics in the context of the revealed Jewish texts.
My commuter bike has a Sturmey-Archer coaster brake hub on it which hasn’t been shifting properly for the last few months. I finally decided to give it a look over and discovered that the cable just wasn’t moving in the housing. Easy enough to replace but along the way I learned that brake and gear cables are teflon-coated. So that was new. Not important, but new.
I went out for the first ride of the year at the weekend, intending to do the 80 mile loop from my place to Box Hill and back. What i learned was it was very cold. Which was fine once I got going. However, for some reason, the bolts holding the cleats on my right shoe protrude a little too far into the shoe and were literally conducting cold into my toes so they were numb for 41.9 miles. Again, not super interesting but true. I need to put some spacers on that little guy.
Channel Game Recommendation
Amazingly, I haven't been on the YouTubes much over Christmas so don't have a new channel recommendation. I finished up playing This War of Mine and I don’t think I’ll go back for a second game. The game focuses on a group of survivors in a war-torn city and involves a mix of scavenging, crafting and occasionally fighting. It was really good at the beginning but a bit like with other resource management games, the middle-end is pretty repetitive. Once you’ve got your shelter set up and have all your crafting gear it’s mostly just a rinse and repeat job to manufacture and trade stuff. Also, the game is quite long for that amount of repetitiveness. So, on the recommendation of the Internet and Wes I went in to buy Disco Elysium for my Christmas game and HOLY SHIT what. a. game.
I genuinely struggle to think of an indie story-driven RPG I’ve been so engaged with. It’s a small but super-rich world, everything appears to have meaning and connection, the writing is wonderful, the gameplay is tense and the world is weird af. You play an alcoholic, amnesiac detective in a surreal China Mieville-esque fictional city where you’re trying to figure out who killed a man who’s been hanged behind your hotel and also who the hell you are any why you tried to drink yourself to death. The character development works on different parts of your ‘self.’ Things like logic, rhetoric, drama, composure, electro-chemistry, empathy, reaction speed etc. What’s more, these different parts are also characters in the story, intervening in conversations to talk with you or bicker with each other, meaning that you most often fail to trust your self in the way that you make decisions. It’s a bleak, funny, horrifying, surreal and wonderful game which I can’t recommend enough. It's probably about 30 hours all in to get the full experience, so if you've got a couple of evenings, get on it. Amazing.
4.12.19
Cédre, Frimaire, 228; Project PROBE, Knowledge Capture in Design Part 3
If I put the titles to what these posts are about, they might be easier to find, though I do tag liberally to help.
Project PROBE
Last week I wrote that I’d started a new little vanity project. I find myself very happy learning new technical stuff and this project gives me the chance to combine some of the things I learnt about servos from Charismatic Megapigment with some of the other projects that have used geolocation maths like Augury. I'm not going to give much away on what it's about, just show process as I go.
I’m trying to get all the inputs to talk to each other this week. Without giving away spoilers; it needs to know exactly where it is in relationship to where something else is. So I need a WiFi module and IMU (inertia measurement unit), ideally with a magnetometer so it can figure out where north is. This way it can use WiFi beacons and the magnetometer to figure it's exact position on the Earth and it's orientation to the poles. Rather than plugging in a bunch of different components, the Rev2 pictured has a WiFi module and IMU built in so that’ll save on space and complexity (although I'm not sure the IMU has a magnetometer built-in.) However, the first challenge was getting it to talk. It wouldn’t talk to any Macs but when I hook it in to a Window’s PC; no problem.
The solution was a creeping reinstall (there's probably a technical name): I had to do a complete manual reinstall of Arduino IDE and all the drivers, starting with oldest to newest until I got one that worked. This meant going through the preferences menu to find Arduino’s cache and wiping it. This is risky if you’re dependent on Arduino projects but I don’t use it everyday so I think I’ll survive.
The second issue was getting it to connect to a WiFi network. Luckily there is a secret one at work that has only WPA encryption (no username, just a password) so I managed to sneak it on. Currently the standard Arduino wifi library – WiFiNINA – has no support for WPA Enterprise without a lot of jiggery-pokery.
The next step is finding a way to get its location in longitude and latitude. Google now charges for its geolocation API which is a pain on a vanity project and not something I wanted to go through the hassle of setting up. Unwired Labs LocationAPI which I found through this helpful tutorial allows you to track up to five devices free for 100 calls every twenty-four hours. I only need to track one device and since it should only need to call the API when it's first turned on this would easily suit my purposes.
The idea here is to ask the Arduino to compile a list of nearby WiFi routers and their signal strength, send them to Unwired Labs and then receive a longitude and latitude, same as the Google Geolocation API. The code in the tutorial is pretty useful but there’s always a bunch of problems to be un-kinked when building a system from different components. The version of the Arduino WiFi scanner library being used in the tutorial had a handy ‘BSSIDstr’ function that converts the byte arrays of BSSID (the mac addresses of nearby routers) to strings so you can feed them into a JSON string. Essentially, the format that the mac addresses are scraped in are in the wrong format to send to the API and you get mangled gobbledy gook if you try. However, BSSIDstr no longer exists so I had to mangle in a ‘sprintf’ bit to do that for me. Sprintf is one of those things I've never properly understood so it was useful to learn how it and byte arrays work. FYI, just for fun, the order of the bytes is backwards so you need to lace the string backwards to get the BSSID in the right order. Then there just some tweaking around with the URL for the API request since it’s all changed since and it was good to go. Et Voila, my Arduino knows exactly where it is on the surface of the world as pictured to a remarkable degree of accuracy.
I already have a magnetometer working from an earlier test so I'm not hugely bothered by the amount of work there so once that's integrated the Arduino will be able to know it's position and orientation when it turns on easily. Most of the stuff that seems to happen in the early stages of these projects is versioning; tutorials use out of date firmware, terms have changed or been removed etc. etc. So most of what you end up doing is chasing around dates and versions to get everything to talk to each other.
If I get any more time I will be looking in to what turns out to be some exceptionally complicated geometry problems which I hitherto had considered child's play. Who knew there are different versions of time?
Knowledge in design part 3; cognitive dissonance and sympathy,
This is more of a short addendum than an entire new line of thinking. A lot of activities last week kept me from reading as much as I’d like but I met up with Yosuke Ushigome of Takram fame on Monday night and we discussed some of this stuff since he at least apparently reads this. We were reflecting briefly on the history and state of speculative and/or critical design with regard to our peers from MA Design Interactions: Why did the canon there struggle to respond to issues that were beyond a limited temporal window and individual scale?
The easiest answer to me is in design’s aesthetic history of tackling human problems on Maslow’s hierarchy; where to live, how to eat and sleep, how to communicate and share information etc. All of these things can be interfaced or encountered within the human sensorium and consequently design’s aesthetic sensibility is drawn from the human body and it’s scale. It’s only in recent years that design has attempted to address ‘systems’ and even these are human-oriented with solutions and products largely being aimed at the interface of the human and the system; different information flows and architectures, levels of access or responsiveness. This is as opposed to the approach of an activist or artist who might address the system in total as an artefact rather than as an inevitability.
Take for example, Suzanne Triester’s work; Hexen 2.0 (left) which examines the history of computation through a quasi-occult, quasi-conspiratorial lens. The goal here is not to improve the system or design it in a different way but to give us a pan-historical reading of it that challenges our comprehensive model and presents alternate narratives.
This is opposed to any number of brilliant design projects on computation that address the way we interface with the very notion of computation through the interface. For example, the amazing work of IF and their catalogue of data patterns almost all of which feature a hand, a phone, a laptop. They address the system at the point of interface where design is most appropriate and comfortable. This is how cognitive understanding is built between the audience of the design and the idea of the design. We all have hands, phones and laptops, we can project ourselves into the alternatives that IF propose for data patterns. To a degree, Triester exploits the same sympathies by drawing on an aesthetic sensibility of diagrams and visualisations with which we might be familiar and so are equipped to interpret the work and put it in a certain frame of reference.
If I was to think about Auguryas a project about computation then I’d say it is further abstract than Triester’s work. It draws on some familiar aesthetics; the audience having to look up indicates it’s about something above us, there are flight numbers and names of airline companies to conclude it has something to do with planes. Though it draws on a popular ancient practice of divination, this was less familiar to the audience which was perhaps a failing. Connecting this ancient divination technique with a contemporary technological equivalent – planes’ instead of birds’ flight patterns used to predict the future – was a knowing cognitive leap rather than one meant to create cognitive sympathy. The project exploited the idea that the audience might question why these things are together as way of teasing them towards the absurdity of computational prediction without having to reduce it to human terms (phones, laptops hands) that would make it more comfortable. From the perspective of my practice I find the only way to deal with things maybe beyond the human scale is to exploit cognitive dissonance as it's impossible to make these things sympathetic to human understanding in their entirety.
While a design project might draw on a more familiar aesthetic sensibility to provoke the idea of the absurdity of computational prediction by exploring alternative device interfaces or human interactions, in Augury Wes and I were keen to highlight the supra-human qualities of computation by placing it in the world of the supernatural. It’s hard to then draw on design aesthetics and logics for this kind of framing, there aren’t really (arguably) tenants, principles or methodologies for designing the supernatural. There are certainly designed aesthetics; colours, shapes, styles but not many functional models.
Let’s put this back into the question; ‘Why did Formafantasma design a chair about e-waste?’ which seems to have become the locus for this thinking. Ore Streams draws entirely on a comfortable and sympathetic design aesthetic – the chair – to engage with a bigger-than-human (I’ve been trying out various words here, you may have noticed) idea/issue. But, they draw on elements of sympathy and dissonance; it’s a chair with which we can all connect experientially but it is also provoking a discussion about e-waste with a particular audience. Consequently the audience might ask ‘why is the chair made that way?’ I am going to stop banging on Formafantasma now, I really do love their work and I’m sorry they’ve become a lynch pin that seems to be unduly criticised here. I do think Ore Streams is great, I’m just using it as an exemplar project for design projects that don’t give me a good sense of why did they do it that way? The follow on from which is what is the best way of doing this? Which is basically a PhD right.
Restoring some regular features - things I learned this week.
A while back I said I liked reflecting on what I've learnt. Obviously it's a bit of a cheat this week because:
I learnt a lot more Arduino stuff, particularly what is and how exactly 'sprintf' works and loads of other stuff about using Arduino with online stuff.
I've been listening intently to my Arabic philosophy podcast and have learnt a lot about Al-Razi who spent a lot of time refuting Galen and was mostly known as a heretic so most of his writings are only known by how they're refuted by later Islamic scholars. He dared to suggest that four things preceded God - soul, matter, the universe and time.
The folks at Wikimedia are super cool and have a lot of really interesting stuff going on. (Bit of a cop-out this one, I'll own it.)
And – Channel recommendation
I've loved Girlfriend Reviews since they first started. Witty and irreverent reviews of games which are becoming increasingly more critically engaged in discussion of the industry. The latest one on the new Star Wars game which received lavish praise is brilliant as a piece of media criticism on how games reuse and reconstruct tropes but also now hilarious for my new catch phrase; 'Have y'all lost your minds cos I'll help ya find 'em!'
I've already started notes for next week's blog and it's currently Tuesday so I guess it's going well. I hope you enjoy something and it's not too tiresome.
