The Splendid Vagabond

Three ways of looking at the Broken Leg TD from Madden

2011-08-09T10:40:00.000-07:00

This video gained over five million views on Youtube. The player in question, Greg Jennings, happens to be a clutch receiver in real life and went on to catch two touchdowns in Superbowl XLV. But he's probably best known for (sort of) appearing in this video.

(Audio probably NSFW, depending on your W)

How shall we think about this video?

1. It's an example of emergent narrative, whereby the complexity of the game yields unscripted moments of drama and wonder worth sharing. A similar example would be after-action reports, or the tale of the Elven king of dwarves found in one particularly odd game of Dwarf Fortress.

2. It's the video game equivalent of Double Rainbow, where we are as much drawn to the commentator's religious intensity as we are to the subject matter itself. Except in the case of Greg Jennings, it's frightfully postmodern, because it's not the majesty of nature the commentator is holy-ghosting about, it's the determination and will of a figure in a simulation.

3. It's an example of convergence culture: The video game spawns a video, which was referenced by teammates and opponents in the real game. Now we've just learned that "Put Da Team on My Back" is going to be an achievement in Madden '12. Everything flows into everything else.

In Memoriam: George Mahlberg

2011-04-08T09:52:00.001-07:00

Earth shudders; she has lost George Mahlberg.

George was sui generis, a true aristocrat of the spirit who made the lives of everyone around him richer. He bent the arc of my and countless other DJs' intellectual and creative development towards far more improbable and fascinating realms, and I shall think of him any time I see a comet,eclipse, or Aurora Borealis, for that must surely be where he resides.

Pledge drive showdown w Dr Cosmo, Fall 2007 by adamflynn

A Young Man's Game

2011-03-18T14:40:00.000-07:00

"The oldest among us are not yet thirty years old: we have therefore at least ten years to accomplish our task. When we are forty let younger and stronger men than we throw us in the waste paper basket like useless manuscripts! They will come against us from afar, leaping on the light cadence of their first poems, clutching the air with their predatory fingers and sniffing at the gates of the academies the good scent of our decaying spirits, already promised to the catacombs of the libraries.

But we shall not be there. They will find us at last one winter's night in the depths of the country in a sad hangar echoing with the notes of the monotonous rain, crouched near our trembling aeroplanes, warming our hands at the wretched fire which our books of today will make when they flame gaily beneath the glittering flight of their pictures.

They will crowd around us, panting with anguish and disappointment, and exasperated by our proud indefatigable courage, will hurl themselves forward to kill us, with all the more hatred as their hearts will be drunk with love and admiration for us. And strong healthy Injustice will shine radiantly from their eyes. For art can only be violence, cruelty, injustice.

The oldest among us are not yet thirty, and yet we have already wasted treasures, treasures of strength, love, courage and keen will, hastily, deliriously, without thinking, with all our might, till we are out of breath."

How can you be in two places at once...

2011-03-10T09:25:00.000-08:00

I may droop off some for this month of march, but it only seems that way. I'm collaborating with John Raimo on a two-person Book club sort of thing, Tandem Reading. The book we're discussing is the classic 60s paperback of high modern social inquiry, The Lonely Crowd.

Furthermore, if you're interested in a more whimsical and business-oriented flow of thought, I also have a Posterous. So check it out.

@Mayor Emanuel, Emperor Norton, and Twitter as a literary form

2011-02-28T13:02:00.000-08:00

On the Atlantic Tech blog, Alexis Madrigal serves up a timely and fascinating look at the creation and development of the finest Twitter feed of the last six months, @MayorEmanuel. I like how Madrigal connects it to the picaresque novel and the long tradition of carnival figures who expose the masquerade of everyday life. He makes a good observation that the form has a chronological and ongoing aspect that differentiates it, as well as the ability to talk back (which brings to mind the episode in Don Quixote when the characters read Part 1 of Don Quixote.) In that sense, there's a similarity to be drawn out to the satirical periodicals and pamphlets of the 1700s (I'm thinking Jonathan Swift and Ben Franklin here).

Image: When it's Dark Enough You Can See the Stars

the official art for Norton, c/o Ryan Bubnis

I'm paying keen attention to this, as I am just about to launch my own experiment in Twitter storytelling as part of Reorb.it. Taking our inspiration from @SamuelPepys, @FeministHulk, and many other experiments in the genre, Reorbit is is a cutting-edge project that merges historical figures and modern technology to create a new set of online plays. For my part, I'm taking the role of Emperor Norton, the first and greatest of San Francisco eccentrics who in 1859 declared himself Emperor of These United States and Protector of Mexico.

One of the most interesting things about Norton was that he was basically used as a @MayorEmanuel type figure by newspapers, who would issue their own proclamations in his name to comment and mock the events of the day. This gave them a rhetorical position more like the shakespearean fool than stately organ of the news, but when reality is suitably absurd and circulation in need of a kick, journalists are left with no choice (cf. Hunter Thompson).

It should be exciting.

Third Eyes

2011-01-25T14:00:00.000-08:00

Apologies for the thin-ish layer of dust. In December I had to manage an artificial ice rink at a christmas village during the holiday season, an activity that demanded all my Christmas cheer (and gave me a greater appreciation for the Santaland Diaries, incidentally). Since the new year I've started up with a bit of researchy work for Duncan/Channon, an awesome advertising agency based out of the Bay Area.

One of their clients is Blurb, which helps people design and print their own books. Given that we're in a major period of transition for media, we're all doing a fair bit of reading and thinking about futures for the book. One thing I've run across lately is the results and findings from Portigal Consulting's Reading Ahead project, which really sets the mind abuzz. As part of that project, they did a One-Hour Design challenge with Core77, which had all kinds of cool results. I particularly liked the Booklight from Kicker Studios, which projects ebook text into a (real) blank book of your choosing:

That's pretty cool, and feeds into the greater trend looking toward ubiquitous projectors as a means of overlaying data onto the real world, of which MIT's Sixth Sense is my current favorite. But that system also involves cameras, which is where we get to the other possibility this picture raised in my head: What if you could put a small camera/projector on a print book you already owned? With the right software, you'd get some of the the added functionality of an ebook (sharing, tagging, copy/paste, analytics and so forth), though obviously none of the portability that comes from e-readers.

If you took it a step further, what if it compared the text it was looking at with a database (like CDDB or Musicbrainz) to identify what you were reading? You could easily comment on it socially, sync it with your other devices, and effect all manner of extensions to your reading life, with all the wonderful and regrettable things that means.

There could also be issues if this doodad had the capability (either built in or suitably-hacked) to rip books and spare consumers from the vinyl-to-cd-like pain of paying again for something you already own. All in all though, I like the idea. One thing that shouldn't be forgotten in our rush to adopt new forms of text is that the ol' print codex has a pretty long shelf-life, particularly when printed on acid-free paper. There's an opportunity to be had in unlocking extra functions out of the stuff people already have.

Cambodian Students Review Hollywood, part I

2011-01-13T19:00:00.000-08:00

Most home-grown Cambodian
films involve scary ghosts.

Last year when I was teaching in Cambodia, I decided to start a weekly lending library of sorts for DVDs, since they were cheap (to me) and would provide an additional flow of English to students, not to mention entertainment. Unlike EFL students in more developed countries like Indonesia, students had seen relatively few western films, and were generally unaware of who big movie stars were. (This made the lesson on "Little-known facts of the Stars" a total pain to teach.)

Once a month, I would have them write reviews. I have a good number of these, so it's likely to be an ongoing series. Here goes...

Cambodian Movie Reviews

Fly of the Concord: Germain and Bret are close friends. They are the main characters in the movie. They are kind of funny characters. Every episode they have one or two songs that describe their lives and feeling. In an episode the two friends get hurt because they faile in their love. At first I thought only Bret that have a broken heart, but later in the episode Saly also broked Germain's heart.

-----------------

Sherlock Holmes is a movie that show about analyzing based on critical way and ability, of a guy named Holmes, who can imagine to see short future. This movie showed about the challenge between Holmes with his partner and Blackwood, who was a guy wanted to dominate all people.

Blackwood tried to show that he had magic to change the world, and he couldn't died. First he was sentenced by hanging his neck because of his killing woman on purpose by using his lying magic. After, he was sentenced, everyone believed he died. Eventually, a few day later, Blackwood survived. Then many people believed he might has magic to change the world, so they should follow him.

Without hopeless, Holmes and his partner tried to figure out that it was all lying. Both of them acrossed many risk until successful. The end of the movie, Sherlock Holmes analyzed that it was a plan of Blackwood. In fact, Blackwood had no magic. He used chemical substance to hide his deaths, and he also used a very good design machine to react with the cloud and caused the sky black. Everythings were revealed by Holmes and his partner, and Blackwood died was pity.

----------
I watched a movie called "The Little Manmade." It was the interesting cartoon. It has a lot of beautiful song, and beautiful views under the ocean. It is a lovely movie that full of lovely creatures.

However, next time I would like the fighting movie.

Mark Twain sounds off

2010-12-05T18:02:00.000-08:00

I'm currently writing up my talk from September at Paraflows, and digging into Mark Twain's observations on the technology of his day. He's probably the first author to be published on the absurdity of one-sided conversations. Alexis Madrigal, the Atlantic's tech editor, notes how Twain picked up on the oddity of "speech detached from its surroundings and social environment, existing fully only on the electrified line connecting two people."

In 1906 the New York Times recorded the old salt's reaction when shown the teleharmonium, my personal favorite when it comes to electromechanical musical instruments weighing 200 tons or more. Twain remarked that

"The trouble with these beautiful, novel things is that they interfere so with one's arrangements. Every time I see or hear a new wonder like this I have to postpone my death right off. I couldn't possibly leave the world until I have heard this again and again."

That's a pretty great summation of how exciting modern invention can be. Check out the rest of the account for some of his experiences cussing over the phone. (if you can access it, Times archive here)

Games and Learning, part 2

2010-11-10T15:41:00.000-08:00

Greetings, fellow vagabonds. I hope you'll excuse the absence, as I was off canvassing in Bucks County, PA, trying to salvage a few candidates for the Dems. So it goes.

Anyway, as we were discussing last time, games can best educate when they put you in someone's shoes, and give you a better sense of the decisions they had to make, moreover of what their decision space was. You need to have the freedom to see all of the options available, and to take those paths as best you can. Historical simulation games are, almost by definition, also contrafactual alternate-history generating games. If you want to see figure out what was in Napoleon's head at Waterloo, then set up the table with a couple of friends (Or, the computer alone) and play it out.

The logo of the
most famous war game
fail of all time.

But there are a few wrinkles involved. Particularly when it comes to wargames. Despite their attempt to include Clausewitzian concepts like "fog of war," a lot of wargames basically presume perfect command, control, communications, and intelligence. (This was part of the problem with Millenium Challenge 02, from what I gather.) When we play on computer, every epoch of war is translated into our modern information-centric model, where the commander has perfect knowledge of what's going on and perfect confidence that his troops will do what he says. This is because it's built into the interface to be responsive and transparent.

But any student of military history, (or indeed any warrior today) could tell you that reality is not necessarily so. You may issue orders that may or may not be interpreted correctly (rivers of ink have been spilled over whether Richard Ewell misinterpreted Robert E. Lee's command to "take the hill, if practicable.") I may be uninformed, but I haven't seen any really good way in games to model unreliable communications and signals intelligence, despite the fact that entire campaigns have turned on such things. And with a few exceptions, there seems to be little emphasis placed on lines of supply and communication, cutting of which is one of the main points of modern war.

Interestingly enough, Guy Debord, after retiring from the Situationists, went on to develop a game based on Clausewitz that placed major emphasis on lines of communication. I haven't played his "Game of War," but I certainly intend to.

All I know, is that I don't know
if he's going to zerg rush.

Perhaps it's a problem of signalling--oftentimes you don't know when your information is bad. So it might just seem like the dang system isn't working right. If it gives you straight-up question marks, then you actually know that you don't know, which means you do know something.

In some ways, Starcraft is a better simulation of the cognitive experience of leading an army than Civilization or Axis & Allies. There's resource depletion--if you run out of vespene gas, you're kind of screwed. There's fog of war, of course, but there's a real use for reconnaissance, because you as a player have to deal with the uncertainty of "What's he building in there?" Because once intelligence fails, psychological speculation fills in the gaps.

When approaching an opportunity that might be a trap, you must ask, is my opponent the kind of man to trick me, or is he simply foolish? That personal side of generalship, sizing up the opposing commander, his forces, and his intentions, starts with Sun Tzu and continues unabated to the present day. Gladwell devotes a good part of the chapter on Millenium Challenge 02 in Blink to discussing Paul Van Riper's appreciation for how and why Joe Hooker balked at Chancellorsville. There's constant epistemic doubt about what you think you know, and Lee was a master of inducing doubt, so much so that McClellan was convinced that he was facing armies three times their actual size.

So, getting back to games and learning, games definitely do have an opportunity to give us "Extra Lives," to give us mental experiences without the attendant consequences. Thus the entire 'simulator' industry, which kind of doesn't want to admit that they're basically games. A friend of mine in medical school tells me that they're doing lots of simulator work, not only for operations, but also in RPG-style dialogs with patients. That makes a lot of sense to me. On another front, one possible reason for the current profusion of true-freshman quarterbacks in college football might be that they played a lot of Madden.

This is why I'm looking with interest at the Game Show NYC, coming as it does with hopes of linking art, education, and games, and doing so under the theoretical aegis of Dewey's "Art and Experience." I may just submit an application, if I can get the right people together. I'm no Terrorbull Games, but I'm kicking around a couple of ideas.

Of dialog wheels and player-characterization

2010-10-12T15:33:00.000-07:00

As part of the run-up and subsequent write-up of my talk on Mass Effect, I've been doing a lot of thinking on the relationship between gaming, narrative, and the status of the "player character." I just read a great post by Greg Rucka on Mass Effect 2, and it hits on so much of what I've been mulling over, and what's currently keeping the Mass Effect series from jumping the barrier between an excellent game and a great work.

First, consider the dialog-wheel. The dialog system is not just a handy way to handle choice structures on an xbox controller, it also expands your storytelling capacity. By selecting only the general gist of your response, and letting your fully voiced Shepard speak for him/herself, you get much more immersive conversations. Longer speeches and exchanges can be made, Shepard can reveal details about the world or his/her background that the player wasn't party to, or shoot an uncooperative criminal in the face. (It makes it a lot easier to be a jerk, as well.) You cede some of your direct control over the character in order to create a more interesting experience. So, while you can decide some of the parameters of Shepard's backstory and psych profile, and you can make the decisions that Shepard takes, there's a slight remove between you and "your" Shepard.

But, and this is what Rucka's analysis really brings out, once you cede any amount of control to the designer/storyteller "the onus is on the storyteller and not the player to fulfill the demands of the character’s journey." And I wish they did more towards that end. Shepard is, perhaps necessarily, the least-defined member of the Normandy's crew. Lots of people will have lots of impressions of what their Shepard will say and do. What the voice actors do is already amazing if you think about all the different variables they're juggling. So I can understand the lack of customized dialog for and reacting to the different choices and personalities you make. But that's not an excuse.

Mass Effect drives me up the theoretical wall because there are so many things it does so well, it makes us wish it could do the rest, and finally give us something that we could put up on the mantelpiece and point to when asked about why we game. It raises so much potential, so many possibilities, sets our minds racing about the possible ethical quandaries we could be faced with until we realize sadly that, no, the game doesn't actually figure that in. A lot of issues that initially seemed very important were basically hand-waved once you're given a ship and bad guys to point it at. You get precious few chances to express what's really going on with your character.

From Rucka's post:

[after being raised from the dead by a shadowy pro-human conspiracy] nowhere do you have the chance to say anything other than thank you. No opportunity to feel anything about what’s been done to you. And no one, not one person, asks you the obvious question. “What was it like being dead?"

You can play all of ME2 and none of this matters, certainly none of it effects the possible outcomes. But consider: your mission in the game is described, from the very start, as a “suicide mission.” You’re living your second life. Imagine what would’ve happened if you could’ve gone into that mission with a commitment to live, grappling with the fear of dying a second time; imagine what would’ve happened if you went into the mission believing that you were dead already, looking at it as an opportunity to correct Cerberus’ mistake.

Those are the sorts of dramatic choices that really get me going. Of course, since it's a game, you would need to make sure it was balanced in terms of fair-but-challenging gameplay. I can imagine that the suicide mission portion of Mass Effect 2 went through a lot of iterations before they hit on what they thought was a good balance of danger and fairness, and I think the "loyalty missions" represented a pretty good attempt at linking character investment to survivability, while not acting as a guarantee (I think a lot of players lost squad members based on the non-obvious choice of who they picked to lead fire teams.) At bottom, though, I think Mass Effect doesn't force you to make enough hard decisions, and when you do it hasn't yet held you to the consequences of your actions. Although, since you can import your save, time may yet tell...

Now, when I say "cede control of the character," I'm obviously not asking Bioware to fill in the character and leave nothing up to the players (though they've apparently used that cession as the fig leaf for why they decided Shepard's sexual orientation for us.) I just want meaningful choices to define my character in a way that's been theoretically possible for a long time. It was the driving force of Planescape: Torment, and I hope it'll give an emotional core to Mass Effect 3.

¡Bonus link!: Potential new directions for dialog from an MIT prof: "Taking an axe to dialog trees"

Academic Flashback: Lovecraftian Media Theory

2010-10-08T15:18:00.000-07:00

I didn't read a lot of "respectable" literature when I was younger, but I read a ton of mindbending science-fiction. The short stories of Philip K. Dick were a favorite in high school, and I started reading H.P. Lovecraft in eighth grade. I feel that labeling something with a genre is a lazy way to ignore a work's literary merits; I maintain that Kurt Vonnegut, William S. Burroughs, and certain works of Thomas Pynchon belong on Sci-Fi bookshelves. Looking back, I may try a little too hard to bring respectability to the things I loved, but who doesn't?

This essay was published in the most recent Monochrom anthology, and was the first thing I sent them after meeting them in 2007, a slightly modified version of a final paper for a media theory class with Thomas Y. Levin. Unfortunately, it's formatted in the book as a sort of fake-handwriting on crumpled paper, making it nigh-unreadable. A couple of people had asked me to put this up after hearing I had written about media in Lovecraft's stories, so I figured I'd put it up here. It's a bit long for blog-reading, but if you're willing to wade through the academese, there's a couple of decent insights here and there...

Imperfect Vessels: The Treatment of Media in H.P. Lovecraft’s Cosmic Horror

“Kittler's book[Gramophone, Film, Typewriter] is great. I consider it a branch of occult media studies, or at least weird media studies, in the sense that I feel like if H.P. Lovecraft were writing media theory, he'd come up with something like this…”
--found among the Microsound mailing list archives, Feb 6th, 2003

It is perhaps one of the great surprises of literary history that the work of Howard Philips Lovecraft (1890-1937), pulp writer of “weird tales” replete with fungi-creatures from Pluto, monstrous gods trapped beneath the seas, and cults of “degenerate Esquimeaux,” has become widely read, studied, and translated into all manner of languages. Lovecraft has been criticized for his prose, but never for his imagination. His creation of an entirely new kind of horror writing, based on the dread unleashed by a thoroughgoing examination of the implications of a materialistic universe bereft of a benevolent god, has influenced a diverse assortment of writers, from Stephen King to Joyce Carol Oates. Yet, in the small cottage industry of Lovecraft scholarship, few if any have touched on the role of media qua media[1] in his work. Lovecraft’s treatment of written, oral, gramophonic, and photographic media, (as particularly evidenced in his story, “The Whisperer in Darkness”[2]) is notable for its use of ‘signal loss’ as literary device, its role in evoking the uncanny, and its more general relation to the episteme in which he lived.

1 .Why Lovecraft?

Determinedly old-fashioned in taste, Lovecraft was unwillingly the arch-priest of the modern, post-enlightenment world. Paul Buhle, who skillfully juxtaposes quotes from Dialectics of Enlightenment and The Call of Cthulhu at the beginning of his essay “Dystopia as Utopia: Howard Philips Lovecraft and the Unknown Content of Horror Literature,” points out the trenchant assault on the established (rationalist, progressive, Western, Enlightenment) order that horror presents. And indeed, it is the stark rediscovery of ‘nature’ and the artificial, temporary nature of the civilizing system placed upon it that presents the greatest source of terror to Lovecraft’s narrators (nearly always educated, cultivated men of some kind). In his pulp horror, one can see the clash of rising and falling paradigms at work: the main character of his “Dreams in the Witch-House,” for instance, is a student of mathematics who finds hidden correspondences between non-Euclidian geometry, quantum physics and the lore of seventeenth-century witchcraft. The bedeviling, unearthly architecture of sunken R’yleh, where “the geometry is all wrong” is compared to futurist and cubist art. Lovecraft found the modernists generally repellent (Eliot a dead-end and Freud “puerile symbolism,” though he had some kinder words for the Surrealists) and yet within his tales he seems convinced that decadence and doom are all the future offers, and that they have been heralded by the developments in art, science, and politics since 1900. Lovecraft’s terror is in part informed by the fear that the world he knew (one firmly rooted in the 18th and 19th centuries) had ceased to be, and that a strange new one was being birthed during his life.

The Lovecraft mythos, in a nutshell, is this: The real truths of the universe, already revealed by Einstein to be less than self-evident (If the laws of physics need not be constant in all areas of the universe, the possibility of the utterly unknowable arises), are sufficient when discovered to drive humans to despair and insanity. Humans are but ants in the larger scheme of things, owing their rise and inevitable fall to mere accident. Their place in the universe is insignificant, and the limits of human comprehension end at little more than the realization of that insignificance. The climax of the typical Lovecraft story is rarely an unequivocally real encounter with an actual creature or dark god—rather, the climax is often marked by the addition of the final, incontrovertible piece of evidence that makes possible the dreadful confirmation of suspicions long held[3]. This evocation of the uncanny through indirect means makes it more likely for the reader to be equally perturbed. The entire plot of “The Call of Cthulhu,” for instance, is driven by the piecing together of several media objects. The joint force and full effect of a Lovecraft story is a piece that might border on mundane in its constituents (Many are the Lovecraft groaners in which the payoff is utterly incommensurate to the build-up) but profoundly nihilistic in generality. His creations are an evil for an age ‘beyond good and evil.’

Unheimlich Maneuvers (a brief note)

The uncanny, first considered by Jentsch and Freud, has been done half to death (ha!) over the past century, but I will describe [my] working conception of it briefly. The uncanny is a difficult-to-describe sensation of dread that belongs to “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (Freud) . In Jentsch’s original essay, the unheimlich is strongly associated with intellectual uncertainty about the human-ness of an object of perception. It may be living or dead, human or inhuman. The doppelganger recurs. Freud notes Schelling’s characterization of it as “everything…that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.” Lovecraft’s use of uncertainty in his stories (especially uncertainty regarding objects and events of strange provenance) is important for maintaining dramatic tension. The notion of the uncanny seems to undergird the supernatural horror of Lovecraft and is helpful for thinking about the dread of the unknown expressed in his stories.

2. MEDIA IN A HOSTILE WORLD, Or: why perfect communication is not a good thing.

Given that a perfect communication of meaning from his world would have to invoke insanity in order to be realistic, Lovecraft turns the traditional drawbacks of a given medium into saving graces. In print media for instance, the enveloping of a tale within letters and memoirs makes for an ingenious solution to the simple theoretical problem that persons who encounter entities of the otherworldly power and inhuman malevolence Lovecraft ascribes to the Great Old Ones are (as a rule) not long for the world. Therefore, the fact that text “stored writing—no more and no less” (Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, pg 7) is an incredibly merciful thing in Lovecraft’s fictional world, and a device to aid the suspension of disbelief in the reading world. Just as the bible could store nothing but “mere words” in its description of Moses and God on Mount Sinai [Kittler, ibid], it is bluntly said of Cthulhu that “The Thing cannot be described--there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of matter, force, and cosmic order.” (of course, he tries.) The subjects of his stories are too horrid for depiction to do them justice—their trace is only conveyed through the impossibility of a trace.
Further, individuals who hold cosmic secrets are most likely dead or insane, or very rarely both, with homicidal mania to boot. “The Call of Cthulhu,” for instance observes an excellent unity when it comes to textual sources: the narrator, known via the story’s subtitle to be dead, finds the notes of his dead great-uncle on the Cthulhu cult, and tracks down the manuscript of the only man to survive an encounter with Cthulhu, also dead. Therefore through writing one might engage in a conversation from safe distance, so to speak.
Plato’s objection in the Phaedrus that the author of a text is not there to clarify himself and take questions is perhaps less pressing, then, when the author was a ‘mad Arab’ renowned for his blasphemous iniquity and said to have been devoured by invisible beasts in broad daylight on the streets of Damascus, as is the case with the author of one of Lovecraft’s most popular fictional tomes, the Necronomicon.

It is an old saw among horror writers that over-description is dangerous; it is usually better to let the reader fill in ambiguities with entities far more fearful than anything the author could do with his poor power to add or detract from a dramatic situation. While his successors often ignored this rule, constructing tidy pantheons of Outer and Elder gods, Lovecraft intentionally remained vague on the definite natures of any of his fictional creations, as it should be with any ‘knowledge’ meant not to be known. Even when the narrator’s ignorance is dispelled (as in “The Whisperer in Darkness”) and “the foulest nightmares of secret myth” are “cleared up in concrete terms whose stark, morbid hatefulness exceeded the boldest hints of ancient and medieval mystics” the particulars are unrevealed.

The vagaries of oral transmission and misunderstanding mean that even the cultists devoted to the worship of these creatures have little understanding of their true nature. Half-remembered truths become softened through oral culture into myths and legends palatable to general mankind. It should be remembered that Albert Wilmarth and Henry Akeley, the main human characters of “The Whisperer in Darkness,” are themselves folklorists with experience in the transcription of folk tales; the transmission of oral culture into the written. In part, the horror Lovecraft seeks to impart can only be taken in by contemplative reading of texts.

In fact, the process of the story “The Whisperer in Darkness” can be seen as almost entirely based on successive media. The beginnings of the plot are found in the exchanges of letters in the pages of Vermont newspapers regarding the reports of strange bodies seen floating downstream during the great floods of November 1927, setting a somewhat Fortean tone for the tale that predates Ufology by a generation. Albert Wilmarth, a professor at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Mass, becomes well-known in Vermont without ever having stepped foot in the state for his debunking of the incidents. He receives a letter from and soon engages in correspondence with one Henry Akeley, a semi-recluse and folklorist who seems far more credible than the average crank, and who follows up his first letter with photographic prints.

The photos are seen as far more convincing evidence than the letters alone, possessing “a damnably suggestive power which was intensified by the fact of their being genuine photographs—actual optical links with what they portrayed, and the product of an impersonal transmitting process without prejudice, fallibility, or mendacity.” This credulity as to the absolute faithfulness of the photographic medium is balanced by a savvy about the means of photographic fakery: a photo of a creature claw-print is affirmed as “no cheaply counterfeited thing, I could see at a glance; for the sharply defined pebbles and grass-blades in the field of vision gave a clear index of scale and left no possibility of a tricky double exposure.” The narrator, while aware of methods of photographic forgery, possesses a faith in photography now rendered impossible by photoshop. It is important to note, however, that there is never any direct photographic evidence of the creatures harassing Henry Akeley. In one of his letters he claims to have seen a corpse of one killed by his dog, but standard photographic film could not capture its image, which ‘evaporated’ within a few hours of his encountering it. Wilmarth is incredulous at this, believing Akeley’s failure came through “some excited slip of his own.” The fraudulent letter (the only one that was typewritten) sent to Wilmarth (by the aliens or their human agents) claims that the aliens are composed of matter foreign to this part of the universe, right down to the “vibration of the electrons,” but that special emulsion could be prepared by any reasonably skilled chemist which would capture their image. Whether this is true or not is uncertain, but it follows the general idea of there being different laws of physics in different parts of the universe.

The most interesting object Wilmarth receives in “The Whisperer in Darkness” is the gramophone recording of ritualistic speeches between a human and the aliens. Akeley, a folklorist, makes a clandestine ‘field recording’ of an exchange that supposedly took place on the early morning of May 1st, 1915(‘May-eve’), at a cave entrance noted for its weird voices. The remarks Akeley sends surrounding the recording clearly note its materiality and imperfection:

The recording phonograph and Dictaphone had not worked uniformly well, and had of course been at a great disadvantage because of the remote and muffled nature of the overheard ritual, so that the actual speech secured was very fragmentary. Akeley had given me a transcript of what he believed the spoken words to be, and I glanced through this again as I prepared the machine for action. The text was darkly mysterious rather than openly horrible, though a knowledge of its origin and manner of gathering gave it all the associative horror which any words could well possess. I will present it here in full as I remember it—and I am fairly confident that I know it correctly by heart not only from reading the transcript, but from playing the record itself over and over again. It is not a thing which one might readily forget!

The transcript contains numerous caesuras, and the final speech is cut off by the end of the record. Once again, the limitations of the media (the record, the memory-transcript, and the description of the record) give Lovecraft an excuse to attest to a greater horror than he is able to create on his own. Again he strains at the limits of language to describe the buzzing voice of the aliens: “I have not even yet been able to analyse it well enough for a graphic description…there were singularities in timbre, range, and overtones which placed this phenomenon wholly outside the sphere of humanity and earth-life.” He describes his repeated audition and study of the record, listening to it over and over as one might do with a piece of complex music, attempting to transcribe the spoken ritual as a jazz student might transcribe an improvised solo. The recording of the buzzing voices is considered the most valuable of the human-made media objects by Akeley and Wilmarth because of the difficulty of its reproduction (compared to photography and even letters, which are hand-copied by the correspondents to replace letters intercepted by the human agents of the Mi-Go.) and its ability to produce actual speech without the according danger. This gives some degree of power to the listener, whose listening experience is far less stressful than what it would be were he actually within earshot of such danger.

The objects of the aliens are more philosophically interesting, because here Lovecraft is not (theoretically) limited by the technology of his time, only by the imagination (of his time). The effect of the aliens that creates the greatest uncanny feeling is the Akeley-disguise; in the big shocker of the story, Wilmarth discovers the prosthetic hands and head designed by cunning alien science to look like his correspondent Akeley, leading him to realize that the unnerving person whom he has been speaking with had actually been one of the fungi from Yuggoth. The entire conversation was in essence theater for one. There is an open question as to whether the disguise is formed from Akeley’s very body (thus making it at least its own index, after a fashion) or created from scratch.

Perhaps the most philosophically interesting objects in the story are the metal cylinders in which are kept live brains. Humans, like many other species encountered by the Mi-Go, cannot withstand the rigors of interstellar travel for obvious reasons. So their brains are taken out of their bodies and put into “ether-tight” metal cylinders. Three ports connect the brain via electrodes to machines which act as surrogates for the faculties of sight, speech, and hearing. They are, for want of a better term, plug-and-play; the ports are common to all the worlds inhabited by the Mi-Go, “so that after a little fitting these traveling intelligences could be given a full sensory and articulate life—albeit a bodiless and mechanical one—at each stage of their journeying through and beyond the space-time continuum. It was as simple as carrying a phonograph record and playing it wherever a phonograph of corresponding make exists.” Different machines exist for the various and sundry beings from across the universe with different means of sensation and communication. When the electrodes are detached, the brain supposedly falls into a state of “vivid and fantastic dreams;” Speak no evil, hear no evil, see no evil. Their contraptions for the faculties seem today laughably primitive—vacuum tubes seem to mark the height of their electronic circuitry, and the voice synthesizer is flat, metallic, uniform among brains and without intonation. And yet the idea that a brain’s transmissions can be reduced to electric signals, that one can plug their brain into a machine for sensory input, is remarkably current, perhaps more so today than it was in Lovecraft’s time. It privileges a mechanistic interpretation of human consciousness, one newly possible in Lovecraft’s day, and further privileges the faculties of sight, hearing, and sound, though this is likely a comment on the imperfection of such a device.

Possibly intentionally, these brain-boxes can be thought of as an excellent analogue to a phonograph record. Like the capture of a musical event by the phonograph (especially as analyzed by Adorno) many of the special qualities of that musical event are destroyed by the process of encoding in that medium. While they can now be transmitted far beyond their original context, the source materials (in this case, Humans) are rendered uniform by the process, the individuality of their voice eliminated by the lo-fidelity transmission of the voice synthesizer. They are imperfect vessels for human consciousness, just as radio and phonograph are imperfect vessels for musical performance.

Media form an important part of Lovecraft’s narrative toolkit, allowing him to filter ‘imperfectly’ the terrors beyond man’s ken into something consumable by the average reader of pulp literature. His conceptions of media, especially as a metaphor for cognition, place him as a man of his time even as he attempted to write stories that transcended it.

End Notes:

1. Burleson provides a deconstructionist analysis of a number of Lovecraft’s stories that recognizes the sophisticated use of framed narrative in “Call of Cthulhu,” and Houellebecq has ruminated on the importance of architecture in Lovecraft’s oeuvre generally, but I have yet to see a media-theoretical analysis.

2.1931 story, narrated by Albert Wilmarth, “instructor of literature at Miskatonic University,” about the strange goings on in the Vermont Hills he has learned about from correspondence with one Henry Akeley, a retiree and semi-recluse who believes the ancient legends about creatures from another world (called either Mi-Go or the fungi from Yuggoth) have some grounding in fact. Their exchanges reveal the presence of organized opposition that disrupts their mail and exchanges gunfire with an increasingly agitated Akeley, who seems to become less and less confident and sane as time goes on. This abruptly ceases when Wilmarth receives a typewritten letter, apparently from Akeley, asserting that he has made his peace with the aliens and learned much secret knowledge from them. The letter invites Wilmarth to come to Vermont with all the correspondence, photographs, and the phonograph record, so that they might compare notes. He obliges, and falls victim to the alien subterfuge, which includes disguising a Mi-Go as Akeley using very good prosthetics, and showing off their ability to keep human brains alive in metal cylinders for space travel, a process which Akeley has fallen victim to. Wilmarth, though he never sees one of the fungi ‘in person,’ hears a mysterious conversation that night, and bolts the house after discovering the Akeley-puppet. The police sent to the house the next day find nothing out of the ordinary, besides a number of bullet holes from the earlier gunfire. It is a testament to Lovecraft’s skill as a writer that the story is not actually as goofy as this description implies.

3. See Fritz Lieber, Jr’s essay “A Literary Copernicus” for more information. This seminal essay can be found in H.P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism ed. S.T. Joshi. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1980.

For more information, check out Kittler's Gramophone, Film, Typewriter.

Games and Learning, part 1

2010-10-07T20:04:00.000-07:00

The late 1980s computer game Hidden Agenda at first glance, doesn't seem very interesting. The graphics are archaic by modern standards, the interface often confusing. The game always ends after a set amount of time.Yet within all those constraints lies a fascinating, endlessly replayable game. The basics of the story is thus: You are the president of a post-revolutionary Latin American country, that had just overthrown an unpopular dictator through a broad-front effort. Now, the task is to create a new order that balances the economic and political demands of the many domestic and foreign powers you are beholden to, without letting the country fall into civil war or worse, losing power. As you make difficult decisions, you often find your actions misrepresented by foreign press and your enemies bankrolled by one or the other Cold War powers. You often find your ambitious farming co-ops ravaged by your own army. You will likely face at least one coup attempt during your term. Being re-elected is an ambiguous victory, since it often requires rigging the democracy you're trying to establish.

Hidden Agenda is a great game because it teaches players about the (regrettably limited) decision-space of Latin American leaders during the Cold War, not by lecturing them about their Anglo pretensions, but by letting them take on the role themselves. In fact, Foreign Service Officers from the US were sometimes asked to play the game before rotating to Latin America, to better understand the people they were working with. I don't think enough ostensibly "educational" games make use of this approach.

"I maintain, quite forcefully, that you can learn more about the Roman military, its changes over the course of the Late Republic and the Empire, and the nature of internal conflict in the Empire, by studying Nofi’s game [Imperium Romanum II] than from any six books on the subject. In some cases, games are better than narrative, because they allow you to explore a system, to experiment with alternatives, while linear narrative must stick to the literal events and not the possibilities." --Greg Costikyan

You'd think that the best exemplar for simulation games that educate would be miltary war-games, right? Fight as Napoleon did, et cetera. Well, next week I'm going to explain why war games teach you very little about actual generalship, with a guest appearance by Guy Debord (yes, the situationist Guy Debord)

I'm Commander Shepard, and this is my favorite blog on the Citadel.

2010-10-02T02:11:00.000-07:00

Today at around 3pm in San Francisco I'm speaking on the issue of romance in narrative games; specifically, interspecies romance in the Mass Effect series. Yes, it's kind of a weird topic. But if it weren't, it would be out of place at Arse Elektronika, Monochrom's crazy celebration of sex, technology, and all the intersections thereof. This year's topic being "Space Racy," it seemed like the perfect topic. Mass Effect not only takes place out there in space, but games can best be understood critically as reactive spaces for action. There's some really interesting stuff in how Bioware constructs its romances, especially in Mass Effect 2. There's a lot to unpack, but hopefully I can cover it all in 45 minutes.

Anyway, if you're in the area, AE's "conference for brainy pervs" is happening at Parisoma, ostensibly at 3 but possibly later (people tend to run over time.)

Small Change we can believe in

2010-09-30T14:41:00.000-07:00

I'm following the internet kerfuffle about Malcolm Gladwell's recent article in the New Yorker about what he considers the false promise of net-activism. It follows his standard model (one that I really enjoy, btw) of a)introducing an exceptional anecdote, followed by b) presenting a seemingly-plausible theory and then c) taking it apart by using some sort of social or behavioral science. In this case A is played by the civil rights movement, B is the optimistic outlook on social media as sold by Clay Shirky et al, and C is the sociology of movements. Gladwell is perfectly justified in pointing out that twitter does not make a revolution, but he overreaches at times.

I think there are a couple of useful takeaways from the article+discussion, most of which I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that people already knew:

1-Techno-utopianism, like any other utopianism, needs to be taken in very measured doses to be practically useful. Just because there's new potential for change doesn't mean it's guaranteed to turn out that way, especially if people naively assume the latter.
2-'lazy activism,' whether by donations, magazines, or new media, is no substitute for personal investment in a cause and face-to-face direct action, but can be useful when taken on its own terms. I've taken this as a given this ever since reading "Bowling Alone."

These things seem obvious to me, and maybe not enough to hang an article on, but they are valid points.

The main thing I take issue in the article with are the all the binary oppositions in the article (strong/weak ties, networks/hierarchies) that oversimplify a messy system with lots of overlaps. It's rarely all one way or another. Strictly top-down military command structures of WWI, for instance, gave way to more flexible arrangements that allow subordinates to exploit opportunities as they come. (Gladwell himself has covered this change to "in command and out of control"--he wrote about Paul van Riper and Millenium Challenge '02 in "Blink").

Not to mention that centralization of communication is a definite vulnerability: the classic revolutionary move in the 1930s was to seize the telephone exchange and radio station, the top targets in the Gulf War were the enemy's command and communications structures, and the standard counter-revolutionary move today is to shut down cell networks and social media websites. That's the whole reason the internet was built on decentralized protocols: to survive the expected atomic attack on communications centers.

That does raise one problem with facebook/twitter: people are decentralized, but the service is not. Shut it down or compromise the operators, and there's not a lot that users can do. In contrast, the old web services like email, usenet, or IRC are nearly impossible to eliminate, even if very few people actually use them. That's one reason why I'm intrigued by the prospect of Thimbl, an attempt to do twitter-style microblogging with decentralized protocols.

by hand

2010-09-14T05:28:00.000-07:00

If you're surrounded by things you don't understand and can't affect, you're going to feel unhappy, or at least less happy than you would be if otherwise. Most people would agree with this, and yet there's a tremendous amount of disconnection between people and the thousands of objects, systems, and and in/conveniences of everyday life. This isn't a new thing; the 60s counterculture and the subsequent "Back to the Land" movement testify to alienation over the past generation at least. But I think people are beginning to adopt a more pragmatic approach. Rather than chucking all of modern civilization out and starting from scratch, we're trying to make everything around us more transparent and open to modification. This is reflected strongly in how we look at food and cooking, but also in more technical realms.

I visited Vienna's Metalab in July 2007, back when I didn't really know what hackerspaces were, but instantly grasped the idea. In fact, as I learned more I was surprised to find out that it hadn't started sooner. Today, they're all over the world, and you can find your nearest one on hackerspaces.org. They offer workshops and classes on everything from Arduino to welding to bookbinding, as well as a space to congregate and tinker. Some act as areas for freelancers to have a sort of office, and they work without an undue amount of centralized authority.

I also believe, though, that every system of behavior rests on a ground of culture. Seemingly 'free' systems, from classless hunter-gatherer groups to modern anarchistic communes, if they are to work, need to have strong cultural norms to prevent antisocial behavior. I'm curious, then: what is the ideal culture of a hackerspace?

Love on a Wire

2010-09-14T04:43:00.000-07:00

This past Sunday, as part of Vienna's Paraflows Conference this year on digital reconceptions of mind and matter, my girlfriend and I gave a talk on the technology and strategies of long-distance relationships. That we were able to jointly give the talk despite the fact that she was in New York at the time is just one more indicator of the futuristic present in which we live.

I'm not going to reiterate the content of the talk here (that can wait for when we write the paper), but based on the comments we got, it presented a good balance of the technical, media-theoretical, and poetic dimensions, just as talk on Long-Distance Relationships ought to. Johannes Grenzfurthner, one of the organizers of the conference (and partner in a LDR himself) thought it systematized neatly a lot of the observations and stresses he had experienced in his own relationship.

I think it went really well, considering the number of possible technical failures that can happen when you hook up speakers and a projector to carry a skype video call through a netbook. Kudos to the organizers who had apparently upgraded the bandwidth after a failure of that sort of thing last year.

If you're interested in the basic content of the talk, our outline is available at http://www.southwaite.org/love_on_a_wire.html

A post for today

2010-09-11T04:02:00.000-07:00

I'm in Vienna, preparing for a talk on the technology of Long-Distance Relationships at the Paraflows conference (powered by monochrom). It's great brain-candy to go to a bunch of talks where interesting people present interesting things. Day One included talks by Heather Kelley and Kyle Machulis on new directions in game design (for one, using your own vital signs as game inputs--stuff like mindball, or taking your heartbeat as the meter for a rhythm game). It's very cool stuff, all stuff that I'm deeply interested in.

But given today's date and the attendant craziness we've been feeling as a country lately, I feel compelled to step a bit outside the normal run of topics. So, that post I'm cooking about games-that-teach will have to wait. Instead, I'm going to give you words from a man from long ago, words worth remembering.

First, Here's his thoughts about discrimination against immigrants or believers in strange religions:

At one time I promoted five men for gallantry on the field of battle. Afterward in making some inquiries about them I found that two of them were Protestants, two Catholic, and one a Jew. One Protestant came from Germany and one was born in Ireland. I did not promote them because of their religion. It just happened that way. If all five of them had been Jews I would have promoted them, or if all five of them had been Protestants I would have promoted them; or if they had been Catholics. In that regiment I had a man born in Italy who distinguished himself by gallantry; there was another young fellow, a son of Polish parents, and another who came here when he was a child from Bohemia, who likewise distinguished themselves; and friends, I assure you, that I was incapable of considering any question whatever, but the worth of each individual as a fighting man. If he was a good fighting man, then I saw that Uncle Sam got the benefit of it. That is all.

I make the same appeal to our citizenship. I ask in our civic life that we in the same way pay heed only to the man's quality of citizenship, to repudiate as the worst enemy that we can have whoever tries to get us to discriminate for or against any man because of his creed or birthplace. [italics mine]

Now, his thoughts on inflamed rhetoric and the violence it breeds:

Now, I do not know who he was or what he represented. He was a coward. He stood in the darkness in the crowd around the automobile and when they cheered me, and I got up to bow, he stepped forward and shot me in the darkness.
Now, friends, of course, I do not know, as I say, anything about him; but it is a very natural thing that weak and vicious minds should be inflamed to acts of violence by the kind of awful mendacity and abuse that have been heaped upon me for the last three months by the papers in the interest of not only Mr. Debs but of Mr. Wilson and Mr. Taft.
Friends, I will disown and repudiate any man of my party who attacks with such foul slander and abuse any opponent of any other party; and now I wish to say seriously to all the daily newspapers, to the Republicans, the Democrat, and Socialist parties, that they cannot, month in month out and year in and year out, make the kind of untruthful, of bitter assault that they have made and not expect that brutal, violent natures, or brutal and violent characters, especially when the brutality is accompanied by a not very strong mind; they cannot expect that such natures will be unaffected by it.
Now, friends, I am not speaking for myself at all, I give you my word, I do not care a rap about being shot; not a rap.

If you haven't figured it out already, this is from the speech Theodore Roosevelt gave shortly after being shot in the chest. The bullet was slowed enough by his eyeglasses case, the folded papers of his (extremely long) speech, and his impressive chest muscles that it didn't penetrate his lung. Once he realized this (on account of not coughing up any blood), he insisted on giving his speech, albeit in a slightly quieter form. There were several attempts to get him to end his speech and get medical attention, understandable given the bloodstain spreading through his shirt, but he refused them all and spoke for ninety minutes, insisting, "Don't you pity me. I am all right. I am all right and you cannot escape listening to the speech either."

Teddy Roosevelt was one of a kind, a high-powered mutant unsuitable for mass production. This country could use someone with his combination of commitment to social justice and incredibly ballsy craziness.

(The meritocratic racism, not so much...)

dictated but not signed

2010-08-24T19:46:00.000-07:00

I was sitting in a bookstore, blizting through The Best Technology Writing 2010, and came upon Anne Trubeck's piece, "Handwriting is History." It's a searching, historically minded piece in the best way, one that recalls McLuhan's musings on the effects of alphabetical type, and Kittler's notions on the 'discourse network' of 1800 that prized handwriting as the ineffable expression of one's character. It also includes the requisite depiction of traditionalists as stuck in the mud. I'm not going to argue from a traditionalist viewpoint, but more one of neurodiversity.

Trubeck describes the desired goal of writing technologies as "cognitive automaticity," the ability to transmit ideas wholly formed from our brain to the page, so that we don't forget our poems about Kublai Khan's pleasure domes and so forth. But I'm not sure that's always the case.

How often do we have such gold that it /must/ be put onto the page as imagined? Certainly, in the case of dictation and stenography, we have the advantage of operating on the level of spoken rhetoric, with all the directness, engagement, and potential loss of focus that implies-- which makes the dictated nature of works from Paradise Lost to Dialectics of Enlightenment doubly impressive. In fact, I think that students should do more dictating and speechifying. We have the technology for it, and (as in the case of Trubeck's son) it could be helpful for writers with certain mental blocks.

But oftentimes, we need to work over pieces. Slower forms of writing lead to more simultaneous reading. The processing lag of handwriting leads us to analyze and reinterpret our work as we create it, and may take us in unexpected directions. While that might seemingly make our internal editor stronger, hard copy writing is also harder to delete; its physical reslience makes it harder to give into self-doubt and take it all away at the stroke of a key. It's also easier to give up on a digital document and hit print or send. In my first year of university I often forced myself into drafting by writing on notepads before transcribing it onto computer. The act of typing up a paper forced me to re-read the text and re-evaluate it.

I might seem a willing hypocrite, having typed this up on my netbook, but I'm not arguing for slow writing exclusively--there were certainly times in university where I had 6 hours to turn long-stewing thoughts into a paper, and I thanked great Theuth for this invention. What I am arguing for is a greater diversity of writing practice. If you get too stuck into one method, its negative consequences build up like mercury in a fish. So let a thousand prose flowers bloom. It's important to periodically rewire your brain, anyway.

[and no, I haven't yet read all the online responses. Give me a break, I'm catching up as fast as I can.]

History

2010-08-19T12:33:00.000-07:00

It's sometimes hard to describe my interests in a concise way, (though I have tried listing them in the past.) To put it plainly, I'm interested in the many ways that people relate to technology, both as individuals and within social structures, and the ways that they have done so in the past-- then, we might have an insight in to how we might in the future.

It's easy to say that technology drives social change, but it's a much more interrelated, dynamic process. Things start to get really interesting when you're looking at the macro-structures behind inventions and their conditions of possibility, because you start to examine all of the non-material aspects behind technology. Sometimes all the materials are there to make something, but there's no economic means of support for research and development, or it's not conceivable given the mindset of the time. I'm personally fascinated by the mental universes of people in the 1600s who were doing pioneering science, but in crazily magical ways (like Helmont or Newton, who did private alchemy experiments and believed that God that went bowling with comets.) In a more modern vein, Eleanor Saitta has a call for papers up that asks what ideas of the last few decades will be incomprehensible to future generations--an interesting question.

Or, you have situations like a war where both sides have pretty similar tech and forces, but one side completely wipes the floor with the other (my favorite examples are the 1940 Fall of France, or the 1895 Sino-Japanese War). Surprising results like that are really useful, because they show you things you otherwise wouldn't know. In both those cases, the (superior) ideas of the winning side were embodied in effective organizations, and that won wars. (In the science-fictional realm, Arthur C. Clarke's short story "Superiority" is a fantastic example of a materially superior force hamstrung by a dysfunctional organization and priorities.)

I think that it's worth it to examine nearly-forgotten artifacts of past media and technology because they give us a ton more examples and case studies of socio-technological relations and forms of interaction than we'd have if we only paid attention to what exists today. Given the accelerating rate of technological change over the past 100 years, It's a dangerous trap to assume that anything about our era is 'normal' for the range of human existence or to project our own patterns too far into the future. That's where history comes in. By paying attention to weird strange things in our past, we're better protected against weird, catastrophic things in the future.

For more information:
Athanasius Kircher
Edward Tenner
Dead Media Archive

Dispatch from Alsace

2010-07-31T16:07:00.000-07:00

Greetings from Europe. I've been seeing a ton of World War II battlegrounds and fortifications, and reading a lot about the fall of France in 1940. I will be putting up observations, piece by piece, but for now I'll leave you with a quick thought:

If you want to know where Paul Virilio is coming from with all his talk about speed and warfare, read Marc Bloch's Strange Defeat. Bloch was an influential historian, one of the guys who developed the Annales style of long-duration social history. (His most famous work investigated the folk belief that the touch of the French King could cure scrofula--basically the first historical anthropology.) He was also a reservist mobilized into staff work during the second World War. He witnessed firsthand the failure of the French general staff to grasp the increased speed of land warfare, but more importantly the increased tempo of operations that came with radio. Every time they tried to fall back and establish a defensive line, the germans had raced beyond it. They were able to identify opportunities and support breakthroughs far faster than any of the pre-war planning had anticipated. The defeat was strange, surprising, and demoralizing, especially since germany had no real advantage in men or material.

Defeats like those are surprising, and as Claude Shannon would have you know, surprises are always informative.

Strange Defeat was composed after Bloch was demobilized, while he was working with the resistance. Sadly, he didn't live to see its publication--the Nazis shot him a few weeks after D-Day. It's a short, interesting book, and well worth the read.

Seen in Cambodia, part 1

2010-06-28T20:40:00.000-07:00

I'm currently off in seclusion in Kampot, grading papers and wrapping up my affairs in lovely Cambodia, but I thought I'd share this when I had a spare second. I noticed this chair when I went to the tailor for fitting (affordable tailored clothing is but one of the many wonderful things about this country).

Check it out. What do you notice, besides that great dark wood that typifies Khmer furniture?

Yep--instead of the standard wicker or straw, this chair's seating is made out of old tennis racket strings. Totally cool and surprisingly comfortable.

"No Impact Man" as seen from Cambodia

2010-06-17T00:35:00.000-07:00

For the observant, browsing through the bootleg DVD shops here can be quite rewarding. Firstly, the covers were definitely designed by non-native speakers of English, because their hype quotes on the front of the box are sometimes ambivalent or downright negative about the film. My favorite was for "Step Up 2: The Streets," which proudly displayed the faint praise, "It's no Stomp the Yard, but it's alright!"

There are also curiosities of selection. While you're guaranteed to have the current blockbusters and popular tv show box sets, there are always certain unusual offerings, like 8-in-1 selections of Oscar winners from the 20s and 30s or 9/11 conspiracy documentaries. But more to the point, there are a ton of quality documentaries available, I reckon as the joint result of backpacker/NGO-worker demand and ease of supply (I'm guessing the maker of a movie about philosophers talking is maybe not as zealous about copyright infringement as the big studios. After all, for small players in the creative arts, obscurity is a far greater threat than piracy.) As a result of this, I got to watch the wonderfully entertaining documentary, No Impact Man.

I really liked it, and it spurred a couple of thoughts:

First, the inclusion of Bevan's family as a no-impact unit made the project infinitely more compelling. Watching his wife react to and deal with each successive phase of the project not only made for 21st century situation comedy, but also deep reflections on personal development, modern disconnection, and what it means to live according to your ideals while still being part of a group.

Secondly, it made me consider how much less of an ecological footprint I've had over my last two years in Cambodia, far less than I would have created if I had been in the states at the time. I hand-wash about two-thirds of my laundry, I ride my bicycle quite a bit (and when I don't, I take moto-taxis), and I eat mostly food that originated somewhere in Southeast Asia, even the french-style baguettes I favor (Thanks, colonialism.)

Admittedly, Cambodians use a ton of plastic bags, though I'm pretty sure that they don't realize that the bags aren't biodegradable-- it's just the continuation of a culture of littering that was harmless when your 'packaging' consisted of palm leaves. I tried to save shopping bags to use for trashbags, but I now have a huge bag-of-bags under my counter that's inexorably accumulated over the last year. I do have a fridge and an air-conditioner, which means that I still use a lot more electricity than the average Cambodian (who is lucky if he or she is even connected to the power grid). No one here uses toilet paper, instead they opt for the low-tech bidet approach via a sprayer hose like the one you may have on your kitchen sink. It also makes it easy to spot-clean your bathroom floor, which is useful because here the entire bathroom acts as the shower.

I also do a lot of cooking for myself using food I buy at the market, which was something I never did in the states. I don't eat a ton of meat, either, but what I do eat I try to go for Cambodian meat rather than Australian-imported stuff. When I return to the US I hope to keep up as much of these lifestyle as possible, though it will be a bit of a let-down to realize that the local products there will be, I don't know, parsnips and turnips, instead of juicy mangoes and heirloom bananas (My students were shocked to find that there was only one kind of banana in America; the uniform bananas we eat in the states were bred to survive transport from Central America, not for tastiness.) I'll probably also be working a more intensive job, so I won't have as much time to cook as I do now. Still, living in Cambodia has opened my eyes to so many things that I just didn't think about before coming here.

Which brings me to my final point. As we try and plot out snazzy and eco-friendly visions of human organization in the future, one aspect is rarely included: servants. This came up when we were watching Bevan scrub his kitchen counter with some combination of Baking Soda, Borax, and/or White Vinegar. "Why doesn't he just hire someone to clean with that environmental stuff?" My friend, who was watching it at the time, endured six months of domestic agony before giving up and hiring one of the people in her building to come in and clean once a week. The family could use the money, and she doesn't lose her mind every time things get a little bit messy.

The very idea of having a servant offends our [im]pious and sometimes overly self-congratulatory democratic instincts-- the same instincts, of course, that historically led the US government to continually intervene in Latin America for its 'interests,' which seem to exclude the promotion of democracy abroad. We cannot imagine ourselves ordering around a scullery maid, but the plain fact is, the amazing chemicals and "labor-saving devices" of the 20th century enabled people to get rid of their hired help and do it themselves. The labor you saved was the contracted labor of other people, particularly live-in servants. But really, we just moved it elsewhere. Instead of paying a real live person with room, board, and money

I know it might offend your delicate sensibilities to suggest it, Dear Reader, but maybe the world needs fewer appliances and more servants. Last time I checked, people could use the jobs, a lot more than we could use a Roomba or whatever crap is being hawked on infomercials these days. The other problem is that the kind of people for whom domestic service is an attractive opportunity tend to come from the developing world, and then you get into knots of ethnic exploitation. In order to make domestic service feasible for middle class families and tolerable for the workers, the cost of living probably needs to drop steeply, and lord knows what kind of deflationary madness might happen then.

So I don't have the answers, but I think it's a question worth asking: So much of the low-impact environmentalist ethos centers on rejecting modern "conveniences" for the poisonous opiates they are, embracing a more human mode of existence, and taking on the consequent increase in work as a return to traditional patterns. Human labor is, ultimately, a sustainable and renewable resource, (though it raises far more questions of dignity and equality than whiz-bang technology). Does then the prospect of having an "Eco-maid" make better sense in terms of impact than so-called Green Consumerism? Does it make more sense to take a cyclo than drive a hybrid?

Anyway, I'm going to give my copy to some of my students from the Environmental Studies department, and see what they think of it. Maybe I can let you know about their reactions in a future post.

Twitter

2010-06-14T02:31:00.000-07:00

"Nietzsche's style can be taken to represent a brutally frank admission that today hardly anyone can offer more than scattered profound insights or single beautiful sentences--and his writings abound in both."

--Walter Kaufmann, (from chapter 2 of Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist.)

Over the past two years or so I have been an apologist for Twitter, especially since the TwittIran news bath of summer 2009 and resulting backlash among sophisticated intellectual-types.

It is a easy thing to bash Twitter, Google Buzz and all other forms of status updates, probably too easy. I think the main problem is that most of the people who try to explain the usefulness of Twitter tend to focus on the wrong parts. Certainly, the point is to explain what you're doing and how your life is going, but there's an element of curatorial selection, of separating the worthy and interesting from the quotidian. This is the essence of what historians do with primary sources.

A good tweet will certainly give basic details of what's going on in your life, but writing interesting tweets requires finding the sublime within the minute, similar to the best work produced by the Mass Observation movement of the late 1930s. Twitter is also a good place to put together an aphorism, which is a hobby of mine anyway. (Adam Flynn: Part-time Aphorist). This is a form that rewards terse, tight phrasing, which is in short supply these days.

I suspect, however, that it's not necessarily the content that annoys literary savants--people have been keeping diaries for a long time. For example, you can follow @samuelpepys for the adventures of the seventeenth-century English diarist. The entries are pretty entertaining, and have led me to use the word "vex" more often in everyday conversation.

Maybe it's just the medium they decry. It's too short, they say, it's disconnected; the broadcast nature of it promotes lazy and idiotic pseudo-sharing of boring lives by people who ought not to seek fame. Leaving aside the elitism bubbling beneath those sentiments, I can't help but think about how they mirror the myopic comments of "typographic man" as described by Marshall MacLuhan in Understanding Media. They judge every medium based on its ability to hold book-like elements, without considering the effect of the medium on either the message, or on human society and organization, nor the current media ecology of readers and writers. They hold up the mighty canons of old as examples of our fallen nature: Who today could write the multi-volume masterworks we associate with those gods of the codex, men such as Gibbon or Spinoza? Furthermore, who would publish it? Hell, who would read it? No one has time for 5-volume monsterworks, no matter how dazzling their joint force and full effect may be.

This is where Nietzche comes in. He saw himself as the first of the new philosophers, and indeed many of his insights seem more plausible today than they did at the time. The problem, as Nietzsche saw it, was that he lived in an age of decadence, and must adapt to a style of decadence:

"What is the mark of every literary decadence? That life no longer resides in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, and the page comes to life at the expense of the whole--the whole is no longer a whole...every time there is an anarchy of atoms." (from The Case Wagner, quoted in Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher Psychologist, Antichrist, Chapter 2: "Nietzsche's Method")

So, says Kaufmann, if we cannot create with the "sustained grandeur" of those older eras, if today we are lucky to be praised on a few good chapters or insights and not the totality of our work, then the great modern artist is instead "'The greatest miniaturist...who crowds into the smallest space an infinity of meaning.' while apparently lacking the gift to fashion a large fresco." (Kaufmann quotes Nietzche describing Wagner, but characteristically applies it to Nietzsche as well.) Nietzsche wrote his works in a way that accepts this disability, that allows an "anarchy of atoms" while still adding up to a philosophy, albeit not a system.[1]

Nietzsche is famous for his aphorisms, but they can't be read any-which-way like the pensees of Pascal or Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch. To him, the sequence (with occasional back-and-forth cross-checking) was ultimately important, though he admitted that for casual readers the aphorisms could act as fish-hooks. It is just so with Twitter: people follow you for the ongoing progress of your life told with scattered profound insights and lonely beautiful sentences, but one of the best ways to get followers is to have your particularly good entries re-tweeted. It is also a basically honest form of writing, in his estimation, since there is less of the smoothening-over of imperfections that book authors perpetrate on their ideas.

Finally, there's the technological aspect, which should not be forgotten. Kittler beautifully describes Nietzsche's failed love affair with a typewriter. Though the machine proved unreliable and was cast aside after six weeks of experimentation, he is the first philosopher to type instead of composing longhand, and may be the first philosopher to use markup.{An important side thought--many great works, from Paradise Lost to Dialectics of Enlightenment, were dictated. How does that change composition?}The power of "instant" publication and contrast with longhand writing were not lost on him: he made the still-hip observation in a letter that "Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts." Clearly, Nietzsche would have loved Twitter.

So, with Twitter, we have instant publication of sequential aphorisms. That sounds like the perfect ingredients for a style of decadence to me. The key is to work within it as Nietzsche did, rather than struggle vainly towards some fading ideal of novelistic wholeness. So the next time you find yourself before a blinking cursor, ask yourself, What Would Nietzsche Tweet?

[1] Nietzsche grasped the basic gist of Godelian incompleteness years before it was formulated; he realized that any philosophical system must rest on assumptions that it cannot question or prove from inside the system. Accordingly, he remained skeptical of systems as potential prisons, and instead adopted a perspectivism vaguely reminiscent of American pragmatism or that of Robert Anton Wilson. For more info, see Chapter 2 of Kaufmann's book.

Attn.

2010-06-06T19:56:00.000-07:00

WATCH THIS SPACE, DEAR READER

for it will soon be occupied

by NEW and POSSIBLY INSIGHTFUL

CONTENT

courtesy of the SPLENDID VAGABOND.

Of slow motion and modern perception

2009-01-06T20:29:00.000-08:00

This blog is still officially on hiatus (for more current updates continue to check my PIA blog), but I had a thought I wanted to put down here, and damn the torpedoes if I can't write here when I want.

Anyway, to get to the point: I've been seeing commercials for this new show called Time Warp on the Discovery Channel. And basically the conceit is, "Let's film cool stuff happening with high speed cameras and then show it in super slow motion." That's it.

It's a simple, beautiful concept. In essence, it's no different from the animal locomotion studies of Eadweard Muybridge, except jacked up to accommodate modern modes of perception. On their forums for suggesting new projects, people still ask for slow motion shots of racehorses. It's like they were watching mythbusters, and trying to figure out what made it successful (besides the engaging hosts and frequent use of high explosives), and realized the following deep truth about humans:

It is fascinating to observe phenomena that exist beyond normal human vision.

...slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones “which, far from looking like retarded rapid movements, give the effect of singularly gliding, floating, supernatural motions.” Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye – if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man. Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person’s posture during the fractional second of a stride.

--Walter Benjamin

[It should be mentioned that this not only works for slowing things down, but the converse as well. Even though speeding up a process has become commonplace with time-lapse photography, we are still delighted to see the results a man photographing himself daily for six years.]

...in photography, process reproduction can bring out those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens, which is adjustable and chooses its angle at will. And photographic reproduction, with the aid of certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion, can capture images which escape natural vision.
--Walter Benjamin

Perhaps the high-speed photography we see on Mythbusters or Time Warp is the sensory equivalent of early cinema in its day. The fallibility of human perception has been a common theme at least since the development of crime scene forensics (not to mention the discovery of radioactivity) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and human vision has been in epistemic doubt since the discoveries of Galileo and Leeuwenhoek. Since then, we've been looking to science and technology to help us "see" what cannot be seen and perceive what cannot be percieved. This issue of human perception in modernity, typified first by time lapse photography and slow motion shots of important events, and now by things like machine vision, video analytics, and of course, Bullet Time, seeps through the way we look at things in a way that would baffle humans living only 15 years ago.

[In a related but outlying collorary, the increasing complexity of American football over the past 30-40 years is in no small part the result of video analysis of the opponent's past games to detect tendencies in offensive and defensive schemes. This is translated to the lay watcher as "Instant Replay," which incidentally featured Bullet Time-like effects in Super Bowl XXXV. As a member of a college football team for 4 years (including one spent as a video assistant when I tore up my knee), I can attest to the positional meeting as a far-flung outpost of audio-visual close reading. As a side note, I would urge any budding media theoretician interested in screening or studying VHS in its twilight to call up local high school football coaches and see if they have a VCR and/or "cowboy remote" they're looking to get rid of.
The advent of digital film and databasing will only add to the complexity. I expect at some point-- and this may have already happened in elite programs-- gameplanning will be first and foremost a careful balancing act between preparing your players to exploit the other team's tendencies and making sure you don't cause cognitive overload.]

That's leading me to wonder whether a number of artistic developments of the 20th century (especially in film, the 20th century artform par excellence) aren't related to and influenced by this problem of perception. Right now though, I'm trying to untangle the knot of what's related to perception, what's related to attention, and what's both. I'd appreciate any comments pointing me to theoretical works on this.

So anyway, in the 60s avant-garde there's an oppositional approach towards time-manipulation, evidenced in the creation of 'boring' film that tries to tweak your impatience for action. Warhol's long takes, for example, can be read as a reaction against the economy of attention that requires you to speed things up or slow big action down in order for them to be interesting. No, you don't get to see something fascinating collapsed or expanded into a 90 seccond snippet suitable for youtubing. Instead, you get to see the Empire State building, in real time, for eight hours and five minutes. Happy now?

Also, I'm not familiar enough with Robert Wilson's work to say anything definite, but I'd guess from what I have read and seen to say that the extremely slow, deliberate movement he uses in productions is probably akin to "Time Warp" in how it slows down movement and action to a level people are able to really process, though it has an entirely different economy of interest. which might make people think that it's more like Giant. But if they do that, they're missing the difference between film and theater.

Time moves much slower in his pieces. Everything appears to be moving in slow motion, but really it's just giving you longer to register the theatrical information, so that you can really be inside the theater and experience it. If you don't change time in some way, it's not theater. It's real.

--Tom Waits on Robert Wilson

That's enough for now. There's a lot here that needs a rehashing or two, but I'd appreciate advice and comments. Maybe next time I'll talk about "Destroyed In Seconds" and how it's related to Paul Virilio.

Oddly enough, considering that I am vagabonding...

2008-09-03T00:01:00.000-07:00

I made the decision this summer when I started this blog, that I'd keep it separate from my travel experiences, mostly for the sake of people who wanted to hear about cambodia, and not about media theory or the cultural codes of postwar Men's Adventure magazines. The official princeton-in-asia blog would be for experiences and reflections on my nascent year in Cambodia, and this would be for speculations of a more esoteric sort. Plenty of PiA friends are doing blogs on Blogger, though, so I'm going to be commenting on them with this account. This blog, however, is in semi-hibernation until my return to more regular climes.

Should someone track back here, I'd like to point you, Dear Reader, to my PiA travel blog, which will sate all your desires for anecdotes from the edge, and moreover, will make you a NEW MAN, as indicated in the illustration on the right:

Call for Syncretism at Monochrom

2008-08-01T17:41:00.000-07:00

I contributed to Monochrom's International Year of Polytheism recently with a call for more syncretism. You can read it at here:

As civilizations bumped into one another in antiquity, they tended to discover that they had many different gods. But since most pantheons break down gods into somewhat similar areas of expertise, the greeks just figured that the barbarians had funny names for their gods, and combined the two. This eventually got to the point where you could slam almost any two gods with similar areas of expertise together to get something subtly new. Some of my favorite gods, like Mithras and Hermes Trismegistus, come from the intercultural mashups (Persio-Roman and Greco-Egyptian, respectively) that were going on at this time.

[...]

So I propose that the international year of Polytheism, in the interest of kick-starting the spread of polytheism, hold an open call for syncretism and de-euhemerism. Combine your favorite gods with modern saints or legendary figures of our times. Let a thousand syncretic gods bloom. Say, for instance, one of those sainted old nuns like Mother Teresa or Mother Cabrini...they might make a good match with a hearth goddess like Demeter, or if you want to push a little farther, with Cybele, mother goddess of the wild earth. Or perhaps Saint Stephen (Istvan) of Hungary, the badass magyar warrior king whose severed hand is a national relic, might well be identified with Labraid Lámh Dhearg (Labraid of the Red Hand), the Celtic sun god whose legecy lives on in the red hand of Ulster.

That New Yorker Cover...

2008-07-17T17:09:00.000-07:00

I probably don't need to provide much background on the firestorm of controversy surrounding the July 21 cover of the New Yorker. Plenty of ink and pixels have been spilled on this subject, but I think a couple things beyond the standard arguments in the news ought to be pointed out:

The New Yorker editors argue that their cartoon is just a satirical depiction of right-wing smears in the style of Colbert. If that's so, it's not even good satire. The character of "Colbert" works because of the many logical fallacies and amusing absurdities included in his speech. Good satire does most of its work inside the reader's head, providing them with the evidence to realize the point on their own. There has to be the element of the absurd.

The New Yorker editors argue that the cartoon is so ridiculous, no one could possibly believe it. They don't seem to realize that there are people who actually believe this stuff. Around 12 percent of the country believe that Obama is a practicing Muslim who was sworn into the senate on a Koran. But beyond that, there's a quiet but uncomfortably large minority in this country that sees Obama as un-american. I'm occasionally seeing it in Bucks County. If you don't realize that, then the much-overused term of "elitist" really does apply to you.

If a cartoon covers such an explosive topic, and it's point isn't immediately self-evident, one must ask what the difference is between the image and actual propaganda. A friend brought up the idea that if, say the cartoon were of, say a portrait sitting for the Obama family, with a crazed painter depicting the current cover on an easel, it would provide an amusing perspective on right-wing distortions. As it is, we're grasping for the message. The editors suggest that the title helps shed light, but honestly how many people actually read turn to the inside cover under the table of contents to read it? It's not like it's there with the image, as most political cartoons are. Remnick was a liberal arts major at Princeton, he above anyone should realize that interpretation isn't always in the hands of the author.

In any case, the cover has now spilled into the non-issue of "Can you joke about Obama?" That's it? That's what we're talking about? There's seriously so little going on we're spending network news time on jokes? The United States is considering sending an embassy back to Iran, is that not newsworthy? Meanwhile Thai and Cambodian soldiers, in the latest episode of a long-running grudge, are pointing weapons at each other over a newly-approved UNESCO World Heritage Site. Thank you, the news.

2008-06-26T13:14:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure when I started wanting to become a blogger, wear a cape and ride in a hot-air balloon, presumably careening and caroming across the globe in search of adventure and moderately amusing anecdotes. [note:You are not Cory Doctorow; results may vary.] It was probably some time in high school when I started digging into the strange nooks and crannies of internet weirdness. I was happy to find that wow, there were people out there who spent time finding out about interesting things, and then writing about them. It was something I felt like getting into, but didn't really have time for.
What actually got me started was admission into the fantastic Princeton-in-Asia program, where they had a special optional workshop during orientation on "Blogging," which was partly useful but mostly encouraging. They wanted us to reflect on our rather unusual circumstances, which in my case is teaching English in Cambodia for a year at the Royal University of Phnom Penh.

I came to the conclusion that my PIA blog ought to focus on my experiences of travel, teaching, and cultural ridiculousness, and keep to a minimum speculation on what Theodor Adorno might have thought of Guitar Hero (which is probably going to be one of my first big posts here.) Now, my volume is probably going to be rather low over the next year or so, as I will be travelling to areas with lackluster internet, as a statement of interest and purpose, here are some things that interest me:

Strange and awesome historical oddities
Collections of Curiosities, in both the early modern and postmodern style.
Cold War/High Modern social inquiry (up to and including atomic war planning) and design (gotta love that Bakelite!)
Speculation about coming social trends, as well as antiquated visions of the future and "modern society,"
Media theory (mostly German influenced) and media Archaeology (Dead Media, etc.)

Possibly a confluence of more than one of these interests, I did a lot of research last year on radio and the contemporary academic study thereof, particularly regarding the Orson Welles broadcast. No, it was not a psychological warfare test, though I can blog later about why some people think so.

'Conditions and constraints of content creation,' be it music, history, or science
Anthropological study of magic (though this is an area I'll admit I need to read more in)
Games and Gaming, considered as objects worthy of study (I'm not quite sure if I can use the term "ludologist" entirely seriously yet.)
Grand Strategy and the debate over "4th Generation War"

Now, I'll probably not cover all these various and sundry topics, but this is a good start, and interestingly a good way to look at these varied interests and think about what connects them. Maybe I'll comment to myself.