Singularity Postscript: An Artist's Statement

Tom Friedman, Untitled, (1998)


My thanks to Ken MacLeod for giving the go ahead for this series of posts. I am equally indebted to Ray Kurzweil and Tom Friedman. I've linked to Kurzweil's book pretty heavily. And while Friedman is an art star, well known within the artworld, he is almost totally google proof (damn you The World is Flat) here is the full uninterrupted text by Friedman that inspired the last nine posts:

1. Faster computers memory storage, retrieval, and processing more efficient.

2. World-wide web increases in volume and complexity. Search and navigation through web improves. With faster computers able to store, retrieve, and manipulate larger amounts of information: navigation through the web becomes more immediate.

3. Faster computers enable more immediate and complex 3-D image construction and manipulation. Standard commercial computer has processing power to construct, manipulate, and navigate through fairly detailed VR (virtual reality) spaces. Sites on the web begin to incorporate VR formats. Vicinity becomes term for VR site City standard web vicinity format.

4. Developments in image recognition leads to 3-D scanner technology. 3-D scanners look like hand held video cameras. 3-D motion scanner.

5. Basic manipulation of objects in VR spaces. Technologies directed toward programing and hardware for object manipulation.

6. Stereoscopic monitors developed to solve problems of spacial reference in VR space.

7. Standard commercial computer has processing power to construct, manipulate, and navigate through highly detailed VR spaces. Stereoscopic eye ware replaces monitors for internet navigation.

8. Technology directed towards constructing virtual presence in VR space. Programs developed that allow customizing of VR bodies. Sensory body suits developed to more accurately manipulate VR bodies. An elaborate array of armatures offer resistance to simulate real space movement and sustain muscle strength.

9. Sensory implants become available; unpopular due to body violation, mostly used by internet cults.

10. Technology directed towards extending time spent in VR space.

11. Science of neuromapping leads to neuroreconstruction and neurocosmetics. Artificial enlightenment (enlightenment achieved through neurocosmetics) becomes fad.

12. Sensory explants developed. This technology evolved from discovery and research into m-wave or mental wave emissions. Struggle between technologies of neural violating (brain washing) devices and neural security systems.

13. VR space achieves seemlessness with reality. First VR amusement park. Slowly people migrate to a VR space existence.

14. Division, and tension between VR space people and R space people.

15. Assimilation programs develop which translate information or new functions to individual mind base. Physiological assimilation programs available. Library of experiences opens. Public access to files of recorded experiences.

16. Neural devices being used over the years have stimulated m-wave emissions in people perimeter of individual m-wave emission increases to extend outside body shell. Telepathy becomes a standard sense.

17. Technology directed towards m-wave stimulation devices.

18. Slow linking of people in M (mental) space. M space perimeter increases as more individuals assimilate into M space. Within M space individuals retain m (personal) space. Objects in M space are constructed by assimilees. As more individuals assimilate into M space, they contribute to the concretization of object thought form. Distance in M space is measured by the time required to construct the particular relocating thought. First level M space is communal, containing the union and intersections of m spaces. Sublevel M spaces are constructed for various reasons. Each sublevel removed from the first level requires a larger and larger amount of focal energy to sustain. M space existees fluctuate back and forth from M space to R (real) space. Places exist in R space for M space existee's bodies while in M space. Slowly M space existees separate from their material body. The shedding of physiological constructions to pure mind increases dramatically the fluidity and velocity of thought.

19. First contact with another life form (in M-space). Shown new worlds in M space by new life form. Shown the link between M space and R space.

20. Humans evolve to MR (mind real) space. Individuals can fluctuate back and forth between M and R space and the rules for both spaces are interchangeable.

21. Q (quantum) space pockets appear in M space. Q-space is the consciousness of patterns. It is a non reflexive space; a space of being; as opposed to M space which is total reflexivity. If a Q space point intersects with the center of an individual m-wave construction, the individual is assimilated into Q space. In R space, death is assimilation into Q space. M-wave construction designates vicinity within Q-space patterns. If individual m-wave construction is turbulent then it attaches to turbulent Q space vicinity. Very turbulent Q space vicinity can dissolve individual m-wave construction (loss of soul). If an m-wave construction is a single point then that m-wave, when assimilated into Q space, attaches to nothing, is drawn to the center of Q space and is assimilated into A (absolute) space.

Tom Friedman: Artist's Text, 2000

Singularity: A Conclusion

It's funny, as I prepared to 'publish' this series a part of me was a little afraid to call Gates and Ray Kurzweil Slope-Shouldered Code-Geek Capitalist Gods. I suppose my subconscious wants to hedge - just in case the singularity does actually happen - it is better not to offend the most likely Early-Adopter-Deities. But for the parts of my mind that I am fully aware of, it is the hubris of imagining ourselves as a future Godhead that I find most worrying. 

Singularity (Part 9 of 9): Slope-Shouldered Code-Geek Capitalist Gods

21. Q (quantum) space pockets appear in M space. Q-space is the consciousness of patterns. It is a non reflexive space; a space of being; as opposed to M space which is total reflexivity. If a Q space point intersects with the center of an individual m-wave construction, the individual is assimilated into Q space. In R space, death is assimilation into Q space. M-wave construction designates vicinity within Q-space patterns. If individual m-wave construction is turbulent then it attaches to turbulent Q space vicinity. Very turbulent Q space vicinity can dissolve individual m-wave construction (loss of soul). If an m-wave construction is a single point then that m-wave, when assimilated into Q space, attaches to nothing, is drawn to the center of Q space and is assimilated into A (absolute) space. ⁴⁶

Tom Friedman: Artist's Statement, 2000

46. “The ancient Egyptians postulated 7 souls… the first three souls are eternal. They go back to Heaven for another vessel. The 4 remaining souls must take their chances with the subject in the Land of the Dead… Can any soul survive the searing fireball of an atomic blast? If human and animal souls are seen as electromagnetic force fields, such fields could be totally disrupted by a nuclear explosion. The mummy's nightmare: disintegration of souls, and this is precisely the ultrasecret and supersensitive function of the atom bomb: a Soul Killer, to alleviate an escalating soul glut.” William S Burroughs, Seven Souls.

Singularity (Part 8 of 9): Life Without Objects

20. Humans evolve to MR (mind real) space. Individuals can fluctuate back and forth between M and R space and the rules for both spaces are interchangeable.⁴³

Tom Friedman: Artist's Statement, 2000

43. “If telekinesis and telepathy don’t yet exist, they surely will, as technology enables us to get more of what we want, more quickly and with less expenditure of our precious attention or effort. (Isn’t that what technology is for?) Our great-grandchildren will send messages by think- ing them. What’s to stop them? They will cause objects to move and the environment to change around them by the efficient means of wanting it to happen.” David Brin, Seeing A New Fulcrum, Skeptic Magazine.

Singularity (Part 7 of 9): Nobody Believes In Aliens Any More

19. First contact with another life form (in M-space).³⁹ Shown new worlds in M space by new life form.⁴⁰ Shown the link between M space and R space.

Tom Friedman: Artist's Statement, 2000

39. “ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.” Arthur C Clarke, 2010: The Year We Make Contact.

Singularity (Part 6 0f 9): Domesticated Bodies

17. Technology directed towards m-wave stimulation devices.

18. Slow linking of people in M (mental) space. M space perimeter increases as more individuals assimilate into M space. Within M space individuals retain m (personal) space. Objects in M space are constructed by assimilees. As more individuals assimilate into M space, they contribute to the concretization of object thought form. Distance in M space is measured by the time required to construct the particular relocating thought. First level M space is communal, containing the union and intersections of m spaces. Sublevel M spaces are constructed for various reasons. Each sublevel removed from the first level requires a larger and larger amount of focal energy to sustain. M space existees fluctuate back and forth from M space to R (real) space. Places exist in R space for M space existee's bodies while in M space. Slowly M space existees separate from their material body. The shedding of physiological constructions to pure mind increases dramatically the fluidity and velocity of thought.³⁶

Tom Friedman: Artist's Statement, 2000

36. “According to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, amputation of the hand results in distorted visuospatial perception of… the space within reach of our hands -- where actions such as grasping and touching occur -- is known as the "action space." Research has shown that visual information in this area is organized in hand-centered coordinates -- in other words, the representation of objects in the human brain depends on their spatial position with respect to the hand… The findings suggest that losing a hand may shrink the action space on the amputated side, leading to permanent distortions in spatial perception.” Eurekalert! [via io9]

The Oppression of the Sith

When Bill Kristal explained on Special Report last year, “So Thursday we will have Obama versus Cheney, which is going to be fun, don't you think? Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, you know. And I want to say that I was always on Darth Vader's side, even when I saw the movie. And I'm sticking with him.” I think he intuitively got his and the other NeoCon’s place within the Star Wars Universe almost exactly right.

They are Sith all right; but they are not Sith Masters, just latter-day lackeys and leeches. The NeoCon response to the September 11^th attacks has been a consistent campaign of fear mongering. They have made every effort to prolong the corrosive paranoia of Containment, Americas's post war response to the Soviet Union. And their policy responses have had no relationship to the reality of the threat (My father says the halmark of a bully is poor threat assessment). In his book The First Total War David A Bell writes that:

"Since September 2001, the United States has been involved in a War on Terror that has, to date, cost the same number of American civilian lives that are lost every two and a half weeks in road accidents on American highways. It is the same number of lives that the soviet Union lost every six hours, for four agonizing years, during World War II. Our opponents in this new conflict, for all their stated desire to acquire weapons of mass destruction, have so far demonstrated no ability to wield anything more powerful than knives, guns, and conventional explosives. A war it may be, but does it really deserve comparison to World War II and its 50 million dead? Not every adversary is an apocalyptic threat. Yet the languages in which we speak are used to discussing war and peace make it difficult for this point to emerge."

A lot has been made of the fascist imagery in Star Wars, from the uniforms of the Imperial forces to the unfortunate resemblance between the Award Ceremony at the end and Leny Riefenstahl's nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. But the 1930s imagery in Star Wars was not limited to Fascist allusion.

In The Disappointment Artist Jonathan Lethem, admitted to seeing Star Wars twenty one times the summer of 1977 and to having found C-3PO sexy: "Its as if a strand of DNA from Fritz Lang’s fetishized girl robot in Metropolis has carried forward to the bland world of Star Wars.” And he is exactly right. C-3PO's appearance was based on Maria's. Additionally Luke's Land Speeder was a fragment of the very same deco future past that produced his golden robotic companion. It looks like it was produced by the same assembly lines that produced the massive airships in the 1933 film Things to Come. Those ships were as crisp and new as ebonite of course, and the Land speeder was love worn, but both were unmistakably stamped with the look of 1930s design.

Toward the end of Gates of Eden, Morris Dickstein’s account of the 1960s, he wrote “It didn't take long for us to become nostalgic for the thirties, when we hadn't even been born.” Gates of Eden was published in 1977, in the immediate wake of the period he was celebrating, and the same year Star Wars premiered. He and his friends, he tells us, “looked back wistfully at the excited ideological climate of the thirties, about which we knew next to nothing.” I think Lucas and his young crew were very similar to Dickstein and his young friends.

But waking up today and hearing on the radio that it is the 160 anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, made me want to unpack the “War,” in Star Wars. To those of you who think Star Wars is about the Allies struggle against capital “F” Fascism in WWII, or "an allegory for the Cold War and America's struggle against another Evil Empire" - please reconsider. The struggle the film re-imagines, is the Cold War, but it was the struggle against the lowercase “f” fascist pigs in the US government. The Rebellion was a resistance modeled on the North Vietnamese communists.

Here is what Lucas said at the time:


"I started to work on Star Wars rather than continue on Apocalypse Now. I had worked on Apocalypse Now for about four years and I had very strong feelings about it. I wanted to do it, but could not get it off the ground... A lot of my interest in Apocalypse Now was carried over into Star Wars. I figured I couldn't make that film because it was about the Vietnam War, so I would essentially deal with some of the same interesting concepts that I was going to use and convert them into space fantasy, so you'd have essentially a large technological empire going after a small group of freedom fighters or human beings... a small independent country like North Vietnam threatened by a neighbor or provincial rebellion, instigated by gangsters aided by empire... The empire is like America ten years from now, after Nixonian gangsters assassinated the Emperor and were elevated to power in a rigged election; created civil disorder by instigating race riots aiding rebel groups and allowing the crime rate to rise to the point where a 'total control' police state was welcomed by the people. Then the people were exploited with high taxes, utility and transport costs" The Making of Star Wars: 7-8,17.



According to the French philosopher Michel Foucault, fascism is an all-but meaningless term, or what he called “a floating signifier whose function, is essentially that of denunciation.” I believe the real ghost that haunts Star Wars is not the WWII struggle against fascism or even the Cold War Struggle against the Soviet Union. The destruction of the Deathstar was a denunciation of the American Cold War tactics used in the struggle against domestic dissent.

To be clear: this conclusion is my own. I’ve have never heard Lucas or anyone else say this in anything I have read about Star Wars, but Lucas does say the Imperials are Nixonian gangsters. And more recently explained on his audio commentary for the Revenge of the Sith DVD that:

“When I first started making the film [the first Star Wars], it was during the Vietnam War, and it was during a period when Nixon was going for a third term - or trying to get the Constitution changed to could go for a third term - and it got me to thinking about how democracies turn into dictatorships. Not how they’re taken over where there’s a coup or anything like that, but how the democracy turns itself over to a tyrant."

Nixon was a cold Warrior. He was an active and aggressive anti-communist crusader. If the battle fought in Star Wars was Vietnam – a war that did not mark America’s defeat, but did mark the collapse of the by then septic policies (both domestic and abroad) of the Cold Warriors. When Obi Wan mentions the Clone War to young Luke Skywalker in Star Wars the struggle it evokes is the Black Lists of the 1940s and 50s and the rolling terror of the House Committee On Un-American Activities.

In no way do the Storm Troopers uniforms evoke Nazis, but they do seem like a natural progression from the robots in Lucas’ first film THX 1138. The robots in that film wore white riot helmets exactly like the ones worn by the American police who stood against and often beat protesters around the country as the Vietnam War withered and Cold Warriors became frantic to control the American public’s morale. It is as if in Star Wars the helmet grew to completely encapsulate the Clones.

Additionally those chrome faced robots repeatedly asked “Are you now or have you ever?” The robotic cops were a conflation of two of the ugliest chapters of American Cold War politics: the Post-War anti-communist witch-hunt of the 40s and 50s (a time when careers were destroyed by the question: “Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the communist party?”) with the police riots of the 60s and 70s.

In Star Wars Lucas served us “a floating signifier” of such fantastic scale it is difficult to recognize the thing it is. The Deathstar can be imagined as many things, but at its core is an angry young fist raised up and flipping the bird back at the Cold Warriors. This one is for you Dick Chenney.

Happy Anniversery all you pinko Jedi.

Singularity (Part 5 of 9): Post-Homo Ludens

15. Assimilation programs develop which translate information or new functions to individual mind base. Physiological assimilation programs available. Library of experiences opens. Public access to files of recorded experiences.³⁰

16. Neural devices being used over the years have stimulated m-wave emissions in people perimeter of individual m-wave emission increases to extend outside body shell. Telepathy becomes a standard sense.

Tom Friedman: Artist's Statement, 2000

30. “The world has arrived at a period which renders it the part of Wisdom to pay homage to the perspective precedents of the Future in preference to those of the past. The Past is dead, and has no resurrection; but the Future is endowed with such life, that it lives to us even in anticipation. The Past is, in many things, the foe of mankind; the Future is, in all things, our friend. In the Past is no hope; the Future is both hope and fruition. The Past is the text-book of tyrants; the Future the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot’s wife, crystallized in the act of looking backwards, and forever incapable of looking before.” Herman Melville, White-Jacket; 144.

Singularity (Part 4 of 9): Obligatorily Gregarious Apes vs Too-Smart-Weapons

13. VR space achieves seamlessness with reality. First VR amusement park.²⁴ Slowly people migrate to a VR space existence.²⁵

14. Division, and tension between VR space people and R space people.²⁶

Tom Friedman: Artist's Statement, 2000

24. "The masses have solved the problem of Pleasure, they present the elite elsewhere on the island with the problem of the masses. Between the comparatively salubrious islands of Steeplechase and Luna Park is an ever deteriorating community. 'There is scarcely any variety of human flotsam an jetsam that is not represented in this permanent population... Every defaulting cashier, every eloping couple, every man or woman harboring suicidal intent... comes flocking to it from every part of the island' to be exposed to 'a concentrated sublimation of all the mean petty, degrading swindles which depraved ingenuity has ever devised to prey upon humanity...'" Koolhaas, Delirious New York: 62.



Singularity (Part 3 of 9): Machine Self-Consciousness

12. Sensory explants developed.¹⁸ This technology evolved from discovery and research into m-wave or mental wave emissions. Struggle between technologies of neural violating (brain washing) devices and neural security systems.¹⁹

Tom Friedman: Artist's Statement, 2000

18. "Such was the CNN Effect of the Gulf War for me: repelled by the politics, I was riveted the images of, by a psych-techno-thrill that locked me in, as smart bomb and spectator are locked in as one. A thrill of techno-mastery (my mere human perception became a super machine vision, able to see what it destroys and to destroy what it sees), but also a thrill in an imaginary dispersal of my own body, of my own subjecthood.” Hal Foster, Return of the Real; 222.

Singularity (Part 2 of 9): Artificial Enlightenment

5. Basic manipulation of objects in VR spaces. Technologies directed toward programming and hardware for object manipulation.

6. Stereoscopic monitors developed to solve problems of special reference in VR space.

7. Standard commercial computer has processing power to construct, manipulate, and navigate through highly detailed VR spaces. Stereoscopic eye ware replaces monitors for internet navigation.

8. Technology directed towards constructing virtual presence in VR space. Programs developed that allow customizing of VR bodies. Sensory body suits developed to more accurately manipulate VR bodies. An elaborate array of armatures offer resistance to simulate real space movement and sustain muscle strength.

9. Sensory implants become available; unpopular due to body violation, mostly used by internet cults.

10. Technology directed towards extending time spent in VR space.

11. Science of neuromapping leads to neuroreconstruction and neurocosmetics. Artificial enlightenment (enlightenment achieved through neurocosmetics) becomes fad."^*

Tom Friedman: Artist's Statement, 2000

* "The Unabomber's manifesto was greeted in 1995 by many thoughtful people as a work of genius, or at least profundity, and as quite sane. In The New York Times the environmental write Kirkpatrick Sale wrote that the Unabomber 'is a rational man and his principal beliefs are, if hardly mainstream, entirely reasonable.' In The Nation Sale declared that the manifesto's first sentence 'is absolutely crucial for the American public to understand and ought to be on the forefront of the nations' political agenda.' The science writer Robert Wright observed in Time magazine, 'There's a little bit of the Unabomber in most of us.' And essay in The New Yorker by Cynthia Ozick described the Unabomber as America's 'own Raskolnikov--the appealing, appalling and disturbingly visionary murderer of `Crime and Punishment,' Dostoyevsky's masterwork of 1866.' Ozick called the Unabomber a 'philosophical criminal of exceptional intelligence and humanitarian purpose, who is driven to commit murder out of an uncompromising idealism.'" Alston Chase, Harvard and The Making of The Unabomber, The Atlantic Monthly, June 2000

Singularity (Part 1 of 9): Hard Rapture*

1. Faster computers memory storage, retrieval, and processing more efficient.

2. World-wide web increases in volume and complexity. Search and navigation through web improves. With faster computers able to store, retrieve, and manipulate larger amounts of information: navigation through the web becomes more immediate.

3. Faster computers enable more immediate and complex 3-D image construction and manipulation. Standard commercial computer has processing power to construct, manipulate, and navigate through fairly detailed VR (virtual reality) spaces. Sites on the web begin to incorporate VR formats. Vicinity becomes term for VR site City standard web vicinity format.

4. Developments in image recognition leads to 3-D scanner technology. 3-D scanners look like hand held video cameras. 3-D motion scanner.

Tom Friedman: Artist's Statement, 2000

* "The future ain't what it used to be." Yogi Berra

"The exponential trend that has gained the greatest public recognition has become known as Moore's law. In the mid-1970's Gordon Moore, a leading inventor of integrated circuits and later chairman of Intel, observed that we could squeeze twice as many transistors onto and integrated circuit every twenty-four months...² There is a gentle but unmistakable exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth... it took three years to double the price performance of computing at the beginning of the twentieth century and two years in the middle, and it takes about one year currently... ³ For These reasons, it is reasonable to expect human brain capacity, at least in terms of hardware computational capacity, for one thousand dollars by 2020... By 2050, one thousand dollars of computing power will exceed the processing power of all human brains on earth."⁴

Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near; 56,68,126-7

2. “It can’t continue forever. The nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens... We have another 10 to 20 years before we reach a fundamental limit.” Gordon Moore, April 2005, Techworld

3. "But now, with the prospect of human-level computing power in about 30 years, a new idea suggests itself: that I may be working to create tools which will enable the construction of the technology that may replace our species. How do I feel about this? Very uncomfortable. Having struggled my entire career to build reliable software systems, it seems to me more than likely that this future will not work out as well as some people may imagine. My personal experience suggests we tend to overestimate our design abilities." Bill Joy, Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us, Wired Magazine

3. "Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells." Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto.

"Carlyle couldn't help guffawing. 'They torched off their own Hard Rapture!'⁵ "...Once you reach singularity, there are further singularities within it, faster and faster, and in very short order the intelligences involved have fucked off out of our universe, or lost interest in it - we don't know. What's left is incomprehensible artifacts."⁶

Ken MacLeod, Newton's Wake; 26-7.

5. "Rapturist theology, which was popularized in the U.S. in the 19th century by a renegade Irish Anglican preacher named John Nelson Darby. A proponent of a prophetic branch of theology known as premillennial dispensationalism, Darby asserted that a series of signs—including wars, immorality, and the return of the Jews to Israel—signal the End of Days. Once the end is nigh, all true believers will be raptured to meet Christ. After that, Darby taught, the world will enter a horrifying seven-year period of Tribulation, during which a charismatic Antichrist will seize power. But in the end, he prophesied, the Antichrist will be vanquished by Christ at Armageddon, and Christ’s 1,000-year reign of peace and justice will begin. This, in brief, is the theology taught by evangelists such as Jerry Falwell, John Hagee, and many others—including Tim LaHaye." Craig Unger, American Rapture Vanity Fair Magazine.

6. "As an alternative to the excessive and often sterile spaces of rationalist planning, Aldo van Eyck proposed that architects plan buildings and cities of 'labrinthine clarity,' substituting a strict hierarchy of spaces with more multifarious order." Simon Sadler, The Situationist City; 30.

Singularity: An Introduction

My original proposal for Surface Magazine. 

Five years ago I was approached by a design magazine, and asked to "curate a spread." I didn't know what that meant, but I really liked the idea, so I laid out the a mashup of quotes and images as a four or five page spread and presented it at a meeting. The subject of my mashup was the Singularity, a concept that is more widely talked about now. Unfortunately it turned out that the editors of the design magazine didn't know what they had meant by "curate a spread" either. My proposal drew some seriously blank stares when I explained it at the time. I think I scared the magazine people a little, but to their credit they didn't run away, and ended up publishing a very nice piece about my sculpture. Hopefully this post won't scare anyone else away, but an explanation of what I am up too might might help. Even for those familiar with the singularity, what follows is an unconventional essay; one in wich I have written nothing myself, only quoted others. It is more of a mash-up than an essay.

I have broken that that original "spread" I curated into a series of 9 posts:

• Part 1: Hard Rapture
• Part 2: Artificial Enlightenment
• Part 3: Machine Self-Consciousness
• Part 4: Obligatorily Gregarious Apes vs Too-Smart-Weapons
• Part 5: Post-Homo Ludens
• Part 6: Domesticated Bodies
• Part 7: Nobody Believes In Aliens Any More
• Part 8: Slope-Shouldered Code-Geek Capitalist Gods
• Part 9: Conclusion

Ugly Jedi; Tom Friedman

Each post contains three block quotes, and is footnoted with even more quotes. Each post is accompanied by images from architecture, film, comic books and in one case a painting by Maria Park that was showing at Margaret Thatcher Gallery at the time. 


The first block quote in each post is taken from the artist Tom Friedman's artist statement that he provided for his show at Feature gallery in 2000. I generally hate artist statements (but feel compelled to read them), and try to avoid writing them for my own shows. At best the ones I come across are usually a few paragraphs of boilerplate art-speak (and that is pretty awful). As you will see Friedman's had nothing to do with the artwork in his show, or even art generally. Instead it was a bullet point list that outlined a history of the future. My step-mother once told me: "I've liked Mohammed Ali ever since he said he was like a butterfly." I've loved Tom Friedman ever since I picked up that artist statement ten years ago.

"Well, if droids could think, there'd be none of us here, would there?"; Ray Kurzweil

The second block of text (and some of the footnotes) comes from Ray Kurzweil's nonfiction book, The Singularity is Near. I remember liking The Age of Spiritual Machines, but was unprepared for his follow up. It blew me away, but my response was very mixed - Kurzweil's book is a full-on futurist manifesto in the best and worst sense - it excited me and scared me in equal measure. What scared me was not that his ideas might come true (that's what scared Bill Joy), but that in a crucial sense it already had.

What Kurzweil's Singularity is Near made clear to me was that the singularity was something that a growing group of really smart (and in some cases wealthy and influential) people truly believed will happen, and that plans were being made based on the premise that we would become like gods. What scares me is the presumption that we will be able to fix all the things we are destroying (like the oceans). I don't believe we will ever recover the things we have lost.

Ken MacLeod; Uncle Owen

The third set of block quotes comes from Ken MacLeod's book Newton's Wake. MacLeod is my first love when it comes to post-singularity Scottish free-market socialist scifi writers. And while Friedman is ironic and Kurzweil's enthusiasm is unshadowed by doubt (kind of like Freeman Dyson's enthusiasm for biotech neo-pastoralism which unambiguously creeps me out), MacLeod's writings seem to reflect my own ambivalence. He cautions that the singularity, or "the Rapture for nerds" will most likely be sparked by the super rich and the super geek - that we should expect "wankers" not gods.

Superstudio, Continuous Monument: New York Extrusion Project (1969)

It was the descriptions of post-singularity artifacts in Newton's Wake that inspired me to curate this spread (still not sure what they meant). MacLeod's frost-like mountains of diamond dendrites are to the singularians (singulariots?), what JG Ballard's descriptions were to the artist Robert Smithson, and the visionary architecture of Superstudio and Archigram.

Full Disclosure: Turns out I unknowingly/unintentionally plagiarized this site's motto from one of Ken's books. For years that sentence - "The natural environment of man has yet to be built." - has kicked around my head, and I over the years I have consistently misattributed it to Trotsky, but could not figure out where I had heard it. Mystery solved: I stole it from Ken. He was very gentle with me, and more then a little generous: "The slogan is a more elegant formulation of something one of my characters in The Star Fraction (Jon Wilde I think) says, based on a quote from Engels."

Stephan Martiniere, Newton's Wake (2004)

The original Engels' quote is from Engels, Dialectics of Nature, Notes and Fragments - and is a total ball buster:

"The normal existence of animals is given by the contemporary conditions in which they live and to which they adapt themselves — those of man, as soon as he differentiates himself from the animal in the narrower sense, have as yet never been present, and are only to be elaborated by the ensuing historical development. Man is the sole animal capable of working his way out of the merely animal state — his normal state is one appropriate to his consciousness, one that has to be created by himself."

I never would have ripped off the original Engels, it was Ken's far more elegant reformulation that stuck in my head:

"Moh Kohn says 'Like Engels said, man's natural environment doesn't exist yet: he has to create it for himself.' And Wilde says, after some chit-chat: 'Man's natural environment is artificial - yeah, I like it.'"

Ken is by far the better writer (if we are ever in a sinking boat I promise to give him the last remaining life jacket) but somewhere in the "half remembered" file of my brain I came up with something that I'm attached to, and am ready to stick with, if not stuck with. My reformulation of his reformulation of Engels is at the core of what is at this point a monsterously large project that this blog is just the tip of. What follows meanwhile is the product of my high regard for these all three of these very different thinkers and the cloud of images and writings I ended up associating them with.

John Powers, Anarcha (2008)

The Kitchen of the Future: Fire (Part III, The Shores of Bohemia)

The modest kitchen featured in Blade Runner or the even more radically modest dispensertopian kitchenette pod in Fifth Element will almost certainly remain out of reach for the 20% of the population who will not live in cities 50 years from now. For billions of people the kitchen of the future will be a fire and very little more.

Still, all futures are now haunted by the possibility of the Singularity and the kitchen of the future is no exception, so this future paucity may not be an entirely bad thing. The best case scenario I can convince myself of for both the future poor and the coming Geek Rapture is something like Bruce Sterling’s short story The Shores of Bohemia. In contrast to the cornucopia machines and smart mater of the rosiest Singularians (you know who I’m talking about Ray). Sterling is far more sanguine. His story imagines a post-singularity world of material scarcity – goose quill pens, straight razors, bedpans and sponge baths. (Sterling sets the scene with great economy; I love his character's aside about the “true allure of money.”)

In his story the singularity has come and gone long ago (a Chinese coin has “the ancient symbol of a television” on it). Near immortal post-humans have their place within a larger, but by then, immaterial and invisible “gerontocracy” called the Convention – “a global data system”, in which the "megatechnic infrastructure has miniaturized, and woven itself into on a cellular level into the ontological information-processing structure of what was once the natural realm."

The embodied “youth” of this world (those under 100), live a lot like my grandmother did in her childhood, and like billions of others do around the world right now. They live materially modest lives and, one imagines, cook, heat, and launder with coal or wood. The middle-aged (100-400?) wander the world as “Wild Men.” Sterling describes them as naked hairy and unwashed. These wild men and women are accompanied by their Domestics; “cybernetic-organic incarnation of the former industrial urban environment.” In the story we meet one Domestic, a bear named Baltimore.

I love that idea that in the future the urban character of whole cities will be distilled down to talking bears, horses, beds of ants, or some other avatar hijack from the natural world protectively shadowing dirty naked people lost in a haze of higher order contemplation.

In Sterling’s story the embodied post-humans are not reciting the names of God, or some other mystical endeavor however. Instead these wild-people have a crucial place in the disembodied consciousness of the Convention; they “Talk about thinking. And think about talking.”

But more crucially Sterling imagines the humans in the story as active players in this super-consciousness; the post-humans personify the Convention. Sterling imagines us as evolutionary partners, like sled-dogs something more akin to a hippocampus. This is so much more rosier picture of post-singularity life then the most obvious best-case-scenario I find myself dwelling on: we’ll make great pets, or fond memories.

Embodiment is one of the stickier issues in my mind as I consider the possible reality of Strong AI – if consciousness is, as Antonio Damasio describes, “the feeling of what happens,” and I believe it is, what, if anything, can the experience of a disembodied consciousness be? My anxiety is strong AI will be unimaginably alien - possibly insane and sociopathic. But I seriously doubt a super intelligent AI would wait around to kill us or enslave us like the AIs in the Terminator and Matrix films - unless we make the hideously stupid mistake of basing our AIs on the sadistic neural framework of cats.

But a strong disembodied AI may value human life so little that it might have no qualms about use nanotechnology to break the entire solar system into concentric clouds of smart matter forming a massive Matrioshka Brain like the one described in Charles Stoss’s book Accelerando. What’s scariest about disembodied AI is not that it would be malevolent, but that in the absence of a body, it would literally have no moral qualms – because without a body to feel, an AI would no have feelings what so ever – moral or not.

“We are its soul!” is the answer Sterling came up with in 1990 (early for a post-singularian narrative). It is an elegant and comforting scenario. In my imagination Sterling’s wild people occupy an additional role in their world (this is where I bring it back to the kitchen of the future). In Charles Mann’s book 1492 he describes the role of what he calls Indigenous Fire. All that is necessary is to replace the word Indian (his term not mine, he explains the choice in the book, which is totally worth reading):

“Rather than domesticate animals for meat, Indians retooled ecosystems to encourage elk, deer, and bear. Constant burning of undergrowth increased the numbers of herbivores, the predators that fed on them, and the people who ate them both... Sometime in the first millennium A.D. the Indians who had burned undergrowth to facilitate grazing began systematically replanting large belts of woodland, transforming them into orchards for fruit and mast (the general name for hickory nuts, beech nuts, acorns, butternuts, hazelnuts, pecans, walnuts, and chestnuts)... In Colonial times, as many as one out of every four trees in between southeastern Canada and Georgia was a chestnut - partly the result, it would seem, of Indian planting and burning." Charles Mann, 1492; 282-3, 297.

In addition to the North American antropogenic (human-created) forests and prairies, Mann explains that native South Americans used fire just as aggressively, and perhaps even more effectively. Mann describes “terra preta” or anthropogenic soils – pre-columbian Amazonian natives practiced some sort of “slash and char” agriculture creating thick black topsoil rich in charcoal are far superior to the tropical soil of the region – and unlike all other forms of agriculture the Amazonian natives charcoal driven agriculture improved the soil.

In his latest book, Whole Earth Discipline, Stewart Brand writes that prehistoric humans were terraforming the Americas. European diseases put a stop to that activity – according to Mann, as many as a 100 million Native Americans died in immediate aftermath of first contact – and not coincidently, Brand points out the global temperature dropped, sparking a Little Ice Age that lasted into the 19^th century.

Brand argues that humans have been shaping their environments and altering the climate for tens of thousands of years. Pointing out that the cycle of true ice ages seems to hve been interrupted by human activity. This is the secondary role I image humans having in the future:

"Gardens are fashioned for many purposes with many different tools, but all are collaborations with natural forces. Rarely do their makers claim to be restoring or rebuilding anything from the past; and they are never in full control of the results. instead, using the best tools they have and all the knowledge that they can gather, they work to create future environments." Charles C. Mann, 1491: 366.

Picturing my grandmother as an eleven year old girl struggling to get the hang cooking and boiling laundry is heartbreaking for me – according to Burkhard Bilger’s New Yorker article, in villages without liquid fuel or electricity “burns are among the most common injuries and smoke is the sixth leading cause of death.” I have no doubt that there are a millions of 11 year old girls struggling to work with dangerous stoves right now.

In my twenties I lived for six years at the end of a dirt road with no running water. During that time I lived with wood stoves for heat, but this is crucial – I did not depend on those stoves for cooking and laundry, and neither did any of my neighbors. I had found my way from downtown Chicago to a community of log cabins in the back woods of Washington State (hippy its too lame a term for such a beautiful a group of people). The life we led (and they still lead) was physically challenging, but I'm not fooling myself, I was still living in a wealthy country and had access to cars, restaurants and laundromats. But even in the mild climate of the Olympic Peninsula life would have been unbearable if I had to cook and launder with a wood stove. I seriously doubt I would have lasted out the first year.

The future Sterling’s story evokes is one of post-human fire, of self-regulating climate engineering by cooking in a globe spanning garden. The kitchen of the future does not have to be a dispensertopia doled out in plastic wrapped single serving sizes, it could be a healthy reengagement with fire, both intimate and Whole Earth. That the singularity could leave room for intact human appetites as part of intact human bodies (not the emptied out pleasure models Ray Kurzweil imagines) and intact human worlds.

A good kitchen is not just a place to prepare food with nifty things and ingredients, ideally its a pleasant place to sit and talk, or just think. I like to imagine that something like Sterling's Convention could ride herd over billions of small fires. That the singularity won't be an apocalypse, but could instead could be a super-consciousness choreographing an end to the tragedy of the commons and transforming the full spectrum of the human and nonhuman world into a Jovian kitchenette rich with interesting things to talk about and cook.