Art Then Technology (Part 7): Companionate Authority

Fat Bastard: end of fifth day of installation (2010).

(Return to Part 6)

I began thinking of Art as authority sometime after I moved to New York, and only began thinking of authority as a technology since reading Kevin Kelly's New book What Technology Wants. Kelly's conception of technology is far broader than most. In addition to our gadgets and industries he includes the entire universe of man-made things; everything from literature and art to abstractions like the rule of law and the scientific method. Kelly makes the case for technological (in its broad sense) Progress (with a capital "P") as inevitable. He largely avoids the cliches of his Modernist predecessors ("Better living through chemistry," "One word: Plastics," etc.), but he does unpack and and dust off the old narrative of "Every man is a King." Kelly tells how he and his daughter counted all the objects in their home (10,000 objects) and compares that with the average number of objects in homes in the developing world (127 objects), contrasting those numbers with King Henry the VIII (18,000 objects), colonial Americans and other historically representative common folk (40-75 objects). Kelly champions technological Progress in terms of Freedom, that innovation brings an increase in the number of choices we have available to us.

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.

The Kitchen of the Future: Fire (Part 1 of 3, Grandma’s Hands)

I love this photo. I am kneeling beside my grandmother. I love it because it was our last visit together, I love it because we are standing together in front of my sculpture Terminal, and although I had been making art for years, this was the first time my grandmother understood what I was doing and enjoyed it without reservation. But there is a covert reason I love this photo that might horrify my family: Terminal is my Death Star, and my grandmother was totally Yoda. That is the smile on my face, that’s what I was thinking about in that moment. (But that is not why I am going to hell.)

Please don’t judge me, I understand that this is a blasphemous connection to make to one's grandmother, but for better or worse I have the brain I have and she was tiny, ancient, had super thick Greek accent and was called yaYa.

She was born in 1908, in Tripoli in Greece. Her father was a lawyer, her mother taught her to speak and read French, but they lived in a small city that, at the time, was on the crumbling edge of the modern world. She met my grandfather in 1936. It was an arranged marriage. She had all of 21 days to decide to marry him and move to Chicago, or stay with her family and likely remain an unmarried spinster in her father's household.

I asked her once if she love my grandfather (he died before I was born, but by all accounts he was a really good guy), she told me, “He was very handsome.” That was all. It was a very sly and funny moment. My grandmother was a very smart woman; if she had had her druthers she would have been a lawyer like her father (and later her brother). She didn’t want to leave Greece with my grandfather, but her choices we’re slim. This was the old world, she wasn't going to become a lawyer, and she had had no dowry.

To me, growing up in a Modernist townhouse surrounded with Bauhaus design, she was truly otherworldly. As a boy I was very aware that, like me, my parents made perfect sense within the material world I knew of Danish flatware and modular furniture. But there was nothing that explained my grandmother. She was a singular artifact of the old world in our very modernist household (mom was so stylish).

Every once in a very great while my yaYa (that is how it is pronounced) would allude to that old world; telling the story of her father being paid in yogurt that had been carried into town in cloth sacks on the backs of their donkeys, and how that the trip would force out the water, making the yogurt thick and tasty, almost like cheese. Or she laugh at the memory about a goat-herder who visited for dinner when she was a girl, and how he was so nervous to be in polite company the he made a fool of himself eating soup. (80 years later we were still laughing at his expense.)

Growing up in Chicago during the 1970s, the only place I had ever seen a goat or a donkey was the zoo. ( I still have not seen a goatherd or a peasant as far as I know.) Every thing I touched as a boy was plastic, nickel-plated or lacquered white. My friends thought eating homemade yogurt on EVERYTHING was weird – assholes still do. (Plain yogurt on rice was a part of almost family meal when I was a kid.)

But my grandmother was not a backward woman, she was a modern. She just happen to have been born in the old world. She was E B White’s third urbanite. She was not born to the city; she didn’t take it for granted. She was not a commuter; she didn't descend on the city like a locust to dip into its wallet looking for coins. She made the city her life. She heard its breath, she had the courageous of a true flaneur.

(For those interested in my Grandmother's recipes, a cookbook she wrote for me when I moved out on my own is posted here. For those of you expecting more about the future, please stay tuned - fire is the future, I promise.)

End of Part I, to be continued..

Yesterday’s, Kitchen of Tomorrow: The Bauhaus

MoMA’s Bauhaus survey Workshop for Modernity closed this week. All things modern seem to eventually lead to the Bauhaus (if only for a stop over), the kitchen of the future is no exception.

Early this month, when a friend organized a get-together to discuss the exhibit, I went back to take another look and ended up spending my whole visit watching a nine minute long loop of film called:

Wie wohnen wir gesund und wirtschaftlich. IV. Teil: Neues Wohnen. Haus Professor Gropius, Dessau (How we live in a healthy and economic way. Part IV: New Living. The House of Professor Gropius, Dessau) - I tried to find the film online, but all I could find was this smarmy fragment.

The film is of the Walter Gropius' home, and features a series of innovations designed by Bauhausers (Bauhausen? I remember seeing the real term in the exhibition, it was odd-ball, but can’t recall what it was), from dressing rooms with electric lights that automatically turn on and off when you open and shut the doors to chrome tea infusers. What was amazing to me is how much Gropius’ home of the future was spot on, and how odd the wrong bits were.

"When I was young I never expected to be so poor that I couldn't afford a servant, or so rich that I could afford a motor car."Agatha Christie

Gropius had designed a rationalized kitchen with work surfaces closer together to facilitate efficiency of movement; created specialized work stations, like a space for washing with racks for drying dishes: and special built in double sided cabinets to easily move dishes to and from the dining room.

Although watching the film I got the feeling that Gropius himself had never spent an evening washing dishes in his life; everything the young maid did looked a bit awkward. These are the sorts of ergonomic concerns have been carefully worked out and turned into formulas by engineers in the years since - Gropius and other early moderns made those first mistakes that others refine.

But all of Gropius' mistakes/innovations were made with a young maid in mind. Unlike Agatha Christie, Gropius did imagine a world of material plenty, but exactly like Christie he had not imagined that the maid would benefit so much that she would no longer want to work for him. I am sure he understood that the luxuries of his time (electric tea pots) would become common place, but that the common place (maids and even housewives) would become the extraordinary seems to have been harder to predict.

Gropius not only failed to understand that the decedents of his maid would not be working for his decedents, he failed to see that instead of a tiny kitchen hidden from polite company (like a bathroom) her decedents would want big open kitchens; that the kitchen would become the hub of social life – and that the entire family would share in the work, instead of being the soul responsibility of a maid or house wife.

I find myself thinking back to my grandmother’s kitchen; which was a chunk smaller then her bathroom. I remember her discomfort when I would insist on washing dishes after dinner ; it was very much her domain, but it was also her private space. (Although looking back it probably had as much to do with the fact that a 17 year old boy is not going to be as thorough cleaning pots as an 80 year old woman.)

Had the Bauhausites projected the gender equality they aspired towards into the future (evidently they didn't even act on it in the moment, female students were siphoned off to wall paper and textile design) they still could not could have guessed that it would lead to a future of open plan kitchens much less why.