The dynamo and the Spime, part two
When Francis Bacon said that science is "the development or economy of forces," machines were just beginning to economize and amplify force. Perspective as a graphic tool was still a relatively new way to realize space, and crafty building techniques like the cupola were the height of techne.
Cupola at St.Peter's Basilica, Rome
The "occult mechanism" was concomitant with popular modes of representation. Adams' statement that no machine could've generated the force that built the cathedral at Amiens bluntly makes my point for me: even up to and including Adams' lifetime, modes of discovering the unknown were mediated by analogy. Religious iconography and art were the primary modes, but science as a distinct discipline and system was also being leveraged to explore the occult. (What's now called the Romantic movement is popularly synonymous with "anti-science": a literary attempt to keep the mechanism occult. In retrospect it's interesting to see how deeply into the occult some preeminent scientists of the time were. Newton lived about twenty years after Bacon; he spent the latter part of his life in esoteric bible studies. Also: there's a blog that treats the subject of communication between science and literature.)
The Last Supper, Leonardo Da Vinci, 1498
The dynamo is from the era when the machine was the best representation of Bacon's statement. The Spime (see "When Blobjects Rule the Earth," bookmarked in the sidebar) is from a future era when the "development or economy of forces" is the responsibility of anyone who interacts with objects. It's an interesting way of thinking about the evolution of science. And of omniscience.
The Spime doesn't yet exist--Bruce Sterling (who came up with the idea) calls it a "historical thesis." I'm treating it as a literary device--a plot mechanism--but because of the medium (genre?) we're communicating through, even a literary device can be applied beyond text. For one thing, it can augment repututation. It can help out in first-person narrations. (This lets me do some "wrangling" for Sterling, about which I'm a little ambivalent as I only know Sterling the narrator. That he does some wrangling for me by commenting here, well, doesn't make me glib.)
Spimes are objects that narrate themselves. They exist in space and time, accumulating a past that determines their future. A Spime would likely not want you to attribute its workings to an "occult mechanism." If you do, it hasn't done what it's designed to do: to negate all that time (and mystery) between its existence as potential--some designer's idea--and its realization as your object, by telling you everything about itself. Ostensibly, a Spime can give you all the information the Spime's creator has, thereby making itself transparent. With transparency, you get omniscience: information about where the object came from, how it works, and where it needs to go when you're done with it is part of the object from the beginning. The process becomes the product...but all of this is in Sterling's speech.
Sterling talks about the Spime to an audience of SIGGRAPHers: a cohort of animators, computer game designers, motion picture makers...people who design virtual worlds. They work in two dimensions to simulate three; they've got algorithms to apply principles of perspective Da Vinci would've had to spend many, many hours on his back fast with a church ceiling to realize. Sterling suggests that these designers, or their future counterparts, will be creating not only useable objects via computer simulations (which they're already doing), but also a process by which we can find out nearly everything about our objects. They're embedding the process by which the object was created in the object, so it can communicate its history to its user. Representation no longer decorates the occult but the process by which the occult reveals itself. We participate in this process by using the object.
This process is one that is akin to what Adams experienced when he tried to understand, via analogy, how the dynamo could so affect his imagination. It's also akin to the process that makes pet rocks pets. In fact, the process is one that's so familiar and obvious, it doesn't even need an analogy. Or: the analogy is designed into the process so as to be transparent. It has been wholly digitized. And it ostensibly obviates the analogy the Romantics tried to write between human and machine. As a literary device, the Spime lets us think about what first-person omniscient narration might be like.
Next: Part three, if there is one, will address whatever remains to be said about this topic.
Cupola at St.Peter's Basilica, Rome
The "occult mechanism" was concomitant with popular modes of representation. Adams' statement that no machine could've generated the force that built the cathedral at Amiens bluntly makes my point for me: even up to and including Adams' lifetime, modes of discovering the unknown were mediated by analogy. Religious iconography and art were the primary modes, but science as a distinct discipline and system was also being leveraged to explore the occult. (What's now called the Romantic movement is popularly synonymous with "anti-science": a literary attempt to keep the mechanism occult. In retrospect it's interesting to see how deeply into the occult some preeminent scientists of the time were. Newton lived about twenty years after Bacon; he spent the latter part of his life in esoteric bible studies. Also: there's a blog that treats the subject of communication between science and literature.)
The Last Supper, Leonardo Da Vinci, 1498
The dynamo is from the era when the machine was the best representation of Bacon's statement. The Spime (see "When Blobjects Rule the Earth," bookmarked in the sidebar) is from a future era when the "development or economy of forces" is the responsibility of anyone who interacts with objects. It's an interesting way of thinking about the evolution of science. And of omniscience.
The Spime doesn't yet exist--Bruce Sterling (who came up with the idea) calls it a "historical thesis." I'm treating it as a literary device--a plot mechanism--but because of the medium (genre?) we're communicating through, even a literary device can be applied beyond text. For one thing, it can augment repututation. It can help out in first-person narrations. (This lets me do some "wrangling" for Sterling, about which I'm a little ambivalent as I only know Sterling the narrator. That he does some wrangling for me by commenting here, well, doesn't make me glib.)
Spimes are objects that narrate themselves. They exist in space and time, accumulating a past that determines their future. A Spime would likely not want you to attribute its workings to an "occult mechanism." If you do, it hasn't done what it's designed to do: to negate all that time (and mystery) between its existence as potential--some designer's idea--and its realization as your object, by telling you everything about itself. Ostensibly, a Spime can give you all the information the Spime's creator has, thereby making itself transparent. With transparency, you get omniscience: information about where the object came from, how it works, and where it needs to go when you're done with it is part of the object from the beginning. The process becomes the product...but all of this is in Sterling's speech.
Sterling talks about the Spime to an audience of SIGGRAPHers: a cohort of animators, computer game designers, motion picture makers...people who design virtual worlds. They work in two dimensions to simulate three; they've got algorithms to apply principles of perspective Da Vinci would've had to spend many, many hours on his back fast with a church ceiling to realize. Sterling suggests that these designers, or their future counterparts, will be creating not only useable objects via computer simulations (which they're already doing), but also a process by which we can find out nearly everything about our objects. They're embedding the process by which the object was created in the object, so it can communicate its history to its user. Representation no longer decorates the occult but the process by which the occult reveals itself. We participate in this process by using the object.
This process is one that is akin to what Adams experienced when he tried to understand, via analogy, how the dynamo could so affect his imagination. It's also akin to the process that makes pet rocks pets. In fact, the process is one that's so familiar and obvious, it doesn't even need an analogy. Or: the analogy is designed into the process so as to be transparent. It has been wholly digitized. And it ostensibly obviates the analogy the Romantics tried to write between human and machine. As a literary device, the Spime lets us think about what first-person omniscient narration might be like.
posted by evelyn at 11:26 AM
1 Comments:
"Flow calcifies into artifacts. Able to play with the experience as you have it. You can start off the system in total play mode with multiple people, and as that progresses things like tools will fall out of the experience. People in technology are addicted to that moment of play, interacting socially around not-yet-defined experiences.
flickr is an example of a service that grew out of building a game."
[etech06] playsh - the playful shell
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