Towards The Development of a Terminal Site: Artist's Statements

"It's a Trap!"

I spent the morning working on a couple applications. One was for the Guggenheim's YouTube show. I decided to submit the short test I did with the help of my digital animation friend Teddy Gage Spiral Jedi. I misread the instructions on the submission. I thought they wanted a thousand words - turns out they only allowed a thousand characters (spaces included). Rather than throw away 4,447 carefully arranged characters I thought I would use them as a post, but I have a reservation. I am always interested to read artist writing, but I very seldom enjoy reading artist statements. They tend to sound bloated and pretentious - my own included - it's the nature of the beast.

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]

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: 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)