abstractmachine

• Reading : Le mythe de la mite: vers une mite-ology de l’informatique
• Text + voice : Douglas Edric Stanley
• Series : Mythologies 2008; Ma foi ! Croyances, religions, identités
• Producer : Marc Voiry
• Station : Radio grenouille, 88.8, Marseille
• Date : 9h30, 7 avril 2008
• Download : mp3-mythologie-stanley-bug

I’ve been doing a lot of writing, interviews, conferences, etc. that I haven’t been able to comment on from this blog because much of it has yet to be published. But today I just got word that one of these theoretical texts has finally been published, and ran on Radio Grenouille monday morning. It is a text I wrote for Marc Voiry on the subject of the “Myth of the moth: towards a mothology of computer science” (sorry, this just doesn’t translate). Marc wanted to reactualize Roland Barthes’ famous texts of the 1950’s — published in 1957 under the name Mythologies — and invited various thinkers to ponder the mythologies of today, and in some cases return to the mythologies of Barthes some 50 years later to see what had changed. It promises to be a great series considering those he’s invited, and should be a fun listen.

For my ten minute slot, I wrote/spoke about the mythology of the computer bug, and the relationship between one mythical moth and one mythical machine, and how their meeting constructed a mythology that informs us still today. It is an attempt to construct a “miteology” that allows for an epistemological reading of computer science, i.e. how its mythologies can inform us about its internal (logical, conceptual, political) contradictions. It’s about machines, compilers, interfaces, circuits, algorithms and how they relate to one poor moth still (to this day) mumified under a piece of transparent tape while exposed for all eyes to see at the Smithsonian.

Unfortunately, I’m a horrible reader, and pretty much incapable of reading my own damn text without stumbling all over the place. It is strange the degree to which writing and speaking French are two totally different activities for me. I learned the language so late, and yet have depended on it so intimately for practically all of my theoretical activity, and somewhere in that tangle of neurons I have two totally different understandings of the French language that are simply not compatible. I am just not comfortable reading out loud in French. Whereas the text itself was written quite joyously, with a certain sense of freedom; a feeling that I often feel when teaching, for example. But writing a text in French, and then reading it out-loud, just doesn’t seem to work. Pity. I quite enjoyed it.

So for those (like me) that can’t labour through my cracking voice that sounds as if its owner was just introduced to puberty, here is the original text :

• Le mythe de la mite : vers une mite-ology de l’informatique

Pourquoi devons-nous soigner autant toutes ces petites machines qui nous entourent ? Pourquoi faut-il dompter en permanence ces appareils qui n’arrêtent pas de pousser dans nos bureaux, dans nos maisons, qui rentrent jusque dans nos lits ? Pourquoi doit-on les rassurer pour qu’elles ronronnent sans piquer des crises et perdre tous nos précieuses données; les caresser dans le bon sens du poil pour qu’elles nous offrent leurs services tant convoitées ? Pourquoi la tâche d’opérer d’une machine informatique contemporaine ressemble autant aux labeurs du jardinier, qui doit désherber de manière cyclique son jardin pour qu’il pousse convenablement ? Et puis, la véritable question devant tout ceux qui n’arrivent pas à installer la dernier version de Word : est-ce qu’il sera toujours aussi difficile d’actuer ces machines ? Est-ce qu’elles ont toujours été si difficiles, si fragiles, toujours aussi enrageantes ?

Le terme de « bug », c’est-à-dire la « petite bestiole » qui encrasse la machine et l’empêche de fonctionner normalement, ne naît pas avec l’informatique, mais on peut affirmer à l’inverse que cette dernière est née incontestablement — dans une scène historique très précise — avec lui. Si le mot « bug » est entrée dans le vocabulaire populaire, c’est justement parce que l’informatique s’est popularisée — le « personal computer », qui arrive autant infesté de bestioles que toutes les machines qui l’ont précédé.

La première à mythologiser le rapport entre l’informatique et ses défaillances, c’est Grace Murray Hopper, programmeuse du premier ordinateur digne de ce nom — le Mark I, qui voit le jour vers la fin de la guerre en 1944 à l’Université de Harvard. C’est un détail inconnu pour beaucoup de français, mais parmi les premières algoristes historiques, trouvent deux femmes — Grace Murray Hopper et Augusta Ada Byron, comtesse de Lovelace, fille du célèbre poète, qui travaillait quelques cent ans avant Hopper sur la « Machine analytique » en assistant Charles Babbage sur la traduction de thèses mathématiques et sur la correction d’algorithmes pour sa machine qui restera pendant 150 ans inachevée. Pour sa part, Grace Murray Hopper travaillera sur la création de « compilateurs », c’est-à-dire les mécanismes de traduction des instructions lisibles par les êtres humains et qui doivent être traduites ensuite en un langage plus étrange — compréhensible presque exclusivement par la machine. Car écrire directement en langage machine — en 0 et en 1 –, est une exercice rarement supportable pour le commun des mortels, et même fatiguant pour les quelques exceptions comme Hopper qui maîtrisaient l’architecture de la machine avec sa logique particulière. Faciliter l’écriture des programmes permettraient à un plus grand nombre d’accéder aux capacités de l’ordinateur, et aiderait à écrire des programmes capables d’effectuer des actions de plus en plus complexes.

Mais avant de parler de la complexité, racontons l’anecdote que Grace Hopper aimait tant raconter, c’est-à-dire le jour du premier « bug » informatique. Les premières machines informatiques étaient de véritables monstres qui pouvaient occuper plusieurs salles entières. Elles étaient aussi grandes à cause des différents actionneurs mécaniques qui contrôlaient et executaient les instructions. Ces actionneurs occupaient non seulement de la place mais produisait énormément de chaleur et de bruit. Le 9 septembre 1947 — notre journée mythique – un véritable insecte, une petite mite, s’est glissée dans la salle du Mark I et croyant apercevoir le chemin menant à la lumière du soleil s’est incrustée dans les contactes de l’appareil, provoquant une panne général accompagné de la mort de l’insecte. Au départ, les ingénieurs pensaient qu’il s’agissaient d’une simple erreur humaine, c’est-à-dire d’un phénomène déjà décrit par Ada Lovelace quelques 100 ans auparavant où une erreur d’ordre ou de logique placée au début du programme empêcheraient la partie suivante de fonctionner. Mais après relecture des instructions on ne trouvait nulle erreur, ce qui les amenait à la deuxième phase d’investigation, la vérification de chacun des relais qui très souvent tombaient en panne à cause de l’effort physique de la machine. On l’oublie souvent, mais une machine informatique — bien qu’elle s’opère par grandes abstractions logiques dans son organisation diagrammatique — est toujours actionnée par un jeux de verrins physiques quelconques et en 1947 les défaillances étaient la plupart du temps dû au mauvais fonctionnements physiques des composants. C’est alors pendant la vérification un par un des relais de la machine, que l’équipe de Hopper découvre la mite coincée entre deux contacts en cuivre. Dans un geste dont le résultat est encore exposé aujourd’hui dans la partie du musée national américain dédié aux sciences — le Smithsonian — ces ingénieurs ont extrait la bestiole et l’ont scotché dans leur journal de bord accompagné par la légende, “1545 : Relais #70 Panel F (mite) dans le relais. Premier cas de découverte d’une véritable bogue.”

Nous ne pouvons pas insister assez sur la force mythique de cette anecdote. Même la langue française porte les traces de cette histoire : alors que le terme anglais « bug » est un héritage du français « parasite » — encore employé aujourd’hui en décrivant, par exemple, le bruit qui parasite un signal électrique –, ce terme a été réimporté en français sous la forme « bogue » pour décrire cette défaillance spécifique de la panne de fonctionnement /algorithmique/ de la machine informatique. Il ne s’agit pas d’un simple gêne, ou perte relative du signal; il s’agit d’une /panne/ de la machine dans tout son fonctionnement, ou dans le fonctionnement d’un aspect de la machine comme dans un logiciel qui « plante ». On est proche de l’idée d’un « arrêt » du mouvement de la machine, d’une dislocation ou de son déraillement, plutôt qu’un simple ralentissement ou affectation qualitative. Le scotch employé ce jour de septembre 1947 semble avoir scellé à jamais l’idée qu’une panne algorithmique est liée non pas à la faute de raisonnement dans l’écriture d’un programme — la véritable raison de la plupart de nos pannes –, mais plutôt à une violence introduite dans l’appareil depuis sa strate physique.

La force de tout mythe est de condenser un certain nombre de contradictions internes d’un phénomène quelconque à travers une figure qui raconte de façon synthétique l’histoire de sa conception. Le mythe est une histoire de naissance. Dans mon vocabulaire à moi, j’appelle ce moment « le talon d’Achille », faisant référence au mythe-matrice du trempage d’Achille dans la rivière Styx et de la trace des doigts de sa mère lorsqu’elle enrobait son fils par son nouveau pouvoir technologique. Le talon d’Achille associe à jamais la force constructive d’une technologie à sa déconstruction; autrement dit, le mode d’emploi qui explique comment monter la machine décrit également dans le même mouvement comment la démanteler.

J’y vois dans ce mythe de la mite, deux contradictions propres à l’informatique qui sont toutes les deux liées à la même racine ontologique, et que je définirai comme le problème d’attitude de la machine face à sa physicalité.

La première contradiction d’une machine algorithmique concerne la tension entre la couche matérielle ou /concrète/ de l’informatique, et sa couche /abstraite/ ou algorithmique. Quand nous décrivons un programme à une machine, nous décrivons un certain « comportement », c’est-à-dire nous lui donnons son « orientation ». Nous ne nous soucions pas forcément de tous les détails de son fonctionnement, et c’est Grace Murray Hopper qui a eu en premier assez de lucidité pour voir la force que l’abstraction pouvait apporter dans le maniement de l’appareil : à travers ses activités de recherche et de développement (menant à terme au langage COBOL), elle a montré que pour programmer une machine il faudrait mieux s’abstraire de son opération purement mécanique — la machine vu à partir de ses circuits –, et à la place lui communiquer plutôt par des grandes lignes. Malheureusement, c’est précisément dans cette abstraction des couches matérielles que les erreurs algorithmiques peuvent s’introduire, notamment dans l’approximation qu’elles font de la manière dont la machine exécutera ses tâches. Parfois les erreurs du programme peuvent venir d’un mauvais ordonnancement purement logique, par exemple le cas déjà décrit par Ada Lovelace en 1842 où le résultat d’un calcul serait demandé par un programme avant même que ce calcul soit lancé. Mais il existe un autre problème de conception des programmes et qui concerne le problème de la traduction de ces instructions algorithmiques (autrement dit le programme comme « Idée ») vers les rouages mécaniques qui doivent physiquement les actionner. Souvent la logique de ses deux couches sont très différentes, et demandent au programmeur (ou programmeuse) une grande gymnastique de la pensée pour maîtriser. On ne maîtrise jamais totalement la bête, d’où divers accidents historiques, comme celui du porte-avion USS Yorktown qui a resté en panne pendant trois heures à cause d’un zéro que Windows NT 4.0 n’a pas su calculer. D’autres erreurs algorithmico-matérielle sont souvent provoquées par la manière dont une valeur est stocké dans la machine : le calcul ne sera pas le même si on utilise deux octets, quatre pour stocker matériellement la valeur de PI dans un registre de la mémoire. Dans ces deux cas, les valeurs après la virgule, ne seront pas les mêmes. Le souci du programmeur est précisément cet endroit où la logique intellectuelle du programme rencontre l’interrupteur machinique qui doit l’actualiser — ce que le mythe de la mite représente sous la forme d’une rencontre de deux mondes ontologiquement incompatibles mais qui cherchent néanmoins à se communiquer. Car il est impossible, voire fatal, de parler avec la machine dans son langage pur.

Ce qui nous amène à la deuxième contradiction constitutive de l’informatique : celle de notre accès à la machine, autrement dit l’interfaçage. Quelque part nous pouvons qualifier l’erreur de la mite d’avoir voulu interagir /directement/ avec la machine. Ce que ce mythe nous apprend, c’est qu’avoir voulu interagir avec la machine sans interface était à la fois fatale pour la machine et pour la mite. Ce conflit nous ramène bel et bien à la contradiction précédente, c’est-à-dire à cet étrange négociation permanente qui doit exister entre la matière et l’abstraction pour que l’informatique puisse fonctionner.

Informé par ces observations, je propose à une humanité de plus en plus imbriquée par contagion à l’informatique, un nouveau champ d’étude — celui de sa mite-ology, qui étudierait la mite informatique dans ce qu’elle aurait de constitutive pour le nouveau monde qui arrive. Au lieu de fuir le plantage ou le bogue, cette mite-ology la prendrait comme la limite constitutive, comme son ouverture. La mite-ology partirait du mythe de la mite comme l’annonce d’une nouvelle physicalité qui en permanence doit accompagner toute agorithmisation de notre polis — autrement nommé sa virtualisation. Pas de nouvelles abstractions, pas de monde soi-distant « virtuel », sans que parallèlement soit engendré des retour de bâton du monde physique qui doit accueillir et rendre compatible (ou incompatible) cette virtualisation. Pas d’algorithmisation du monde sans de nouvelles rencontres avec la mite : cette bestiole qui par curiosité et besoin cherche à créer de nouveaux circuits d’interaction avec le monde.

Several people asked me to post a copy of my talk from the Art-Oriented Programming conference (cf. Art-Oriented Programming++). As I mentioned at the opening of my talk, the conference itself was organized on such short notice that I had to write everything in English. I had originally planned to show a French translation on-screen (hence all all the flying letters) but just ran out of time as I was still writing the talk itself on the train. So this is a very hastily-written document.

I should also mention that during the talk I realized that many of my most important concepts were a little washed-out in the rush. A lot of the vocabulary I used in the talk should have been qualified. I’m thinking specificially about the uses of terms such as “abstraction”, “recursion”, and especially “simulation” which is proposed as an alternative to “representation” (cf. plotseme). This imprecision makes some of the arguments a little difficult to follow, or a little more banal than intended.

Algorithmic Writing Systems (pdf)

I’ve been experimenting with the idea of complexity recently, and over the past few hours with Gestalt-esque tensions between form recognition and visual overload. This is related to a series of questions I’ve been asking myself about the relationship between perspective and recursivity in algorithmic machines. I’m interested in the nature of all those lovely spindly lines we see populating so many Processing sketches, and how they relate with code stuctures. Complex forms come cheap in code; all you need is an iterator: it costs almost nothing — from the programmer’s perspective — to draw 1 line and n lines, especially when you take performance out of the equation. But beyond the economy of drawing hundreds of thousands of millions of bajillions of lines, what about the perceptive field that emerges from this code? If there is a machinic relationship between the visual forms and the code forms (one our basic tenets), what do these code structures generate in terms of perceptive structures? And does computer code — if treated as a series of recursive abstractions (at least in practice) — form new perception-fields at each stratum of abstraction, synchronized to the code abstraction layers?

There are several ways to explore these questions. As a quick experiment, I built this somewhat simplistic diagram in a few minutes to describe one of these perceptive fields (source code). Often 3D shapes make no sense in a 2D plane unless there is movement; even when you add shadows, shaders, and camera effects, etc., there is often that problem of render mode ambiguity. This diagram plays with this ambiguity, making the code form more visible with movement. Otherwise it tends to resemble a formless 2D field. Here, the addition of an extra plane (i.e. movement) renders a form visible, just as Google Earth renders visible historically ambiguous relationships between the U.S. military and Nazism or reveals Roman ruins by looking at unnaturally shaped mounds from space. By the addition of one simple « dimension », a form emerges. What is interesting here is how the extra dimension can be mapped to a specific line of code: rotate().

Actually, there is an additiontal relationship in this diagram between the 3D functions « translate » and « rotate » : the translation movements of each mini-cube makes the meta-cube more visible (by revealing more of its contours), but only when viewed in conjunction with a rotation movement.

It is important to keep in mind that this is a simple example intended to illustrate the principle, and not its effect in the real-world. For that, we would have to look elsewhere; to give just a few examples I’ve been working with recently, I could cite Masaki Fujihata’s Field-Works or, from a more media analysis perspective, Ben Fry’s Mario Soup, Dismap or Martin Wattenberg’s Shape of Song.

This might be totally left field, but now that I think of it, there’s a great passage in Italo Calivino’s Leibniz inspired « reading a wave » from Mr. Palomar:

« Mr Palomar sees a wave rise in the distance, grow, approach, change form and color, fold over itself, break, vanish, and flow again. At this point he could convince himself that he has concluded the operation he had set out to achieve, and he could go away. But it is very difficult to isolate one wave, separating it from the wave immediately following it, which seems to push it and at times overtakes it and sweeps it away; just as it is difficult to separate that one wave from the wave that precedes it and seems to drag it towards the shore, unless it turns against its follower as if to arrest it. Then if you consider the breath of the wave, parallel to the shore, it is hard to decide where the advancing front extends regularly and where it is separated and segmented into independent waves, distinguished by their speed, shape, force, direction. In other words, you cannot observe a wave without bearing in mind the complex features that concur in shaping it and the other equally complex ones that the wave itself originates. These aspects vary constantly, so each wave is different from another wave, even if not immediately adjacent to successive; in other words there are some forms and sequences that are repeated, though irregularly distributed in space and time. » (p.3-4)

For ultimately, all of these questions of abstraction and gestalt are in fact questions about our relationship to complexity and the role algorithmic machines (will inevitably) play in negotating our increasing complexity malaise :

« [A]t each moment he thinks he has managed to see everything to be seen from his observation-point, […] something always crops up that he had not borne in mind. If it were not for his impatience to reach a complete, definitive conclusion of his visual operation, looking at waves would be a very restful exercise for him and could save him from neurasthenia, heart attack, and gastric ulcer. And it could perhaps be the key to mastering the world’s complexity by reducing it to the simplest mechanism. […] Only if he manages to bear all the aspects in mind at once can he begin the second phase of the operation: extending this knowledge to the enitre universe. It would suffice not to lose patience, as he soon does. Mr Palomar goes off along the beach, tense and nervous as when he came, and even more unsure about everything. » (p.5-7)

 Gestalt (example no°1): Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (458)

Via Slashdot who got it from tshb, here’s a fascinating paper by Daniel E. Holcomb, Wayne P. Burleson, and Kevin Fu (University of Massachusetts) on accessing the physical properties of digital circuits for both the generation of random numbers and the fingerprinting of individual circuits . The paper is entitled Initial SRAM State as a Fingerprint and Source of True Random Numbers for RFID Tags (link).

I always wonder why people are so obsessed with this idea of « true » random numbers. It’s as if computer science, in its vain lust for purity — i.e. to rid the circuitry of « noise » through the abstraction of physical substrates —, had somehow actually succeeded in achieving a purely unphysical world in which circuitry could conduct itself outside of the constraints of base material imperfection.

Ironically, the dream of true imperfection seems troubled by the same science fiction, only on the other side of the dialectic. For example, in John Maeda’s Design by Numbers, we find a similar disdain for the artificial nature of random numbers, and a gentle prod to new coders to avoid its siren song as much as possible :

The amateur may be tempted by the cheap thrills of randomness. Random numbers, noise, stochastics, or whatever you want to call the complete lack of control that serves as the roots of techno-styled graphics, is a form of profanity that you should generally avoid. But in many ways, resistance may prove futile because complete control of a complex computational process is still something of a faraway goal and the allure of randomness can be overpowering. My personal philosophy has been that if you are going to use randomness, you should at least know where it comes from. Design by Numbers, p.247

I love Maeda’s pragmatism : hey Kid, before you play with that dirty code, you should at least know where it’s been sleeping around!

When I read that passage from Maeda’s 1999 masterpiece (yeah, that’s a big word, but come on, we’re talking about the origins of Processing here), I burst out laughing. Until then, I had avoided random numbers for pretty much the same reasons: they somehow represented sloppy, or lazy coding practices to me. But hearing someone else say it out loud immediately cured me of this folly and I immediately began throwing random numbers into pretty much anything that moved, calculated, reacted, beeped, blurped or just sat there waiting for someone to click on it. Upon learning that random numbers were the equivalent of an easy date, a vaccuous pop song, or perhaps the fatty delight of cheap fast food that you eat precisely because it is bad for you, somehow those random numbers felt all the more fun, all the more rebellious: kind of like dressing up like a punk rocker at 16 in the protected confines of your suburb (I know something about this): it’s not like you’re going to do any real damage to anything so you might as well just run with it.

But something funny happened after using these skanky random numbers for several years of guilty pleasure. Little by little I realized that I started to inuitively recognize these numbers and could even feel when my programs had shifted from one random thread to the next. I could even feel when my random numbers had moved from one dimension to two or three dimensions of calculation. Since most of the random numbers I used were of the really cheap kind (i.e. nothing like the relatively effective sort, such as the Mersenne Twister), ultimately I was coming to know (fairly well) the feel of the random number, even if its seed always departed from a new (and therefore different) point. It’s somewhat silly, I know, but in one project in particular — my Concrescence algorithmic cinema platform —, I actually stuck with cheap random numbers precisely because after so many years of milking those numbers I ended up finding what I considered their sweet spot of expression.

What I’m talking about, ultimately, is form; and it is this aspect which brings me back to the aforementioned paper. While the specifics may change, the forms they reveal are anything but immaterial. And just as in any process bound by what I like to call the process of algorithmic « physicalization », the effect is reversible. When I said that I felt my random numbers, I meant it quite literally as I was generating images and sounds based on user touch, and that material behavior became easy to recognize over time. You can understand a lot about the underlying physical apparatus that runs the software simply through the observation of its output. But the reverse is also true : by fiddling with the physical aspect of the cell you can impregnate digital circuits with interrestic behaviors.

I love the diagram on page 5 that follows this amazing quote: « By descending below the logical level of abstraction, and considering RAM to be a physical fingerprint, a wealth of information is found. » The diagram shows the precise point at which the SRAM cell generates both its fingerprint and « true » random numbers :

CmdrTaco expressed « surprise » at this double quality of {identification} and {randomness}. But when you get down to it, both states are by-products of the same nature of circuit being a physical device. To simplify our terminology, the circuit brings with it what so many today are calling « analog » world, although I find this term unfortunate because it merely exists as the rediscovered sibling of « digital ». I far prefer the idea of a process of physicalisation that poses the analog world as neither a given nor a goal, but instead an internal quality of hybrid processes.

The hybrid nature of repurposing digitally the physical circuit already sitting in the computer you’re using to read this post, is an exciting prospect, and if pushed to its extreme could even re-write the mythe du mite (the myth of the moth in the machine). When Grace Murray Hopper pulled that famous moth out of the machine and taped it into her notebook, the joke was of course that the idea of a « bug » in the machine had suddenly found a very litteral instance. But my reading of this myth went more into nature of interfaces, and the fact that the moth had actually crashed the machines precisely because it had interacted with the computer not via its terminal (or punch-card, or whatever), but instead directly via it’s modular circuitry. But in fact, technology such as random number generators that use the physicality of the circuit to determine a digital transduction, operate precisely at this level of « direct » interaction, and do so perfectly fine without crashing anything. And of course most transducers do the same day-in, day-out without causing any serious harm, and ultimately, as the referenced paper show, can be folded back into the digital nature of the circuit without much worry.

I was working on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the « egg » this afternoon when I stumbled upon this cachet of notes I had apparently stored at the back of my copy of the 1981 edition of « Logique De La Sensation ». They revealed a series of conceptual diagrams I had made of each chapter of this amazing book.

I had totally forgotten these notes as they were part of a project I had to abandon for legal reasons. Basically what happened was the copyright holders at Bacon’s estate turned out to be just too darn stuffy to work with. At the same time the French publisher was being equally difficult. Deleuze was too sick at the time to be troubled with getting his editor to open up his book (he was coming out of yet another failed lung surgery), so I had a doubly impossible situation. If I remember correctly, Deleuze threw himself out of a window to end his physical suffering just about the time I was trying to get this project off the ground, which pretty much hammered the last nail into the coffin of this project (yes, that’s an intentional bad joke, but one should always show irreverence for one’s heros ;-). So I moved on to other things and eventually forgot all about the 12 months I had put into this project. Until I found these little notes.

There should be some digital documents and software lying around, as I just recently re-arranged a whole library of CD-Roms of the dozens and dozens of failed projects I’ve explored over the years.

What I find fascinating about this book is the quality of Deleuze’s portrait using the pigments of philosophy. Rather than building a philosophical treatise on the possibility of painting or the ontology of artistic practice (yawn), Deleuze instead focuses his magnifying glass (and scalpel) onto the Bacon-machine itself as his object of study. This makes the entire endeavour more intimate, because it requires moving into the working of the machine itself and seing how it functions. Hence the « logic » of Bacon’s art-production-machine, which is to be understood more as its blueprint, or diagram. Indeed the logic of the « diagram » is essential here not only in his discription of Bacon’s re-invention of perspective, but in terms of Deleuze’s method of analysis itself. (Even a cursory glance at my current theoretical work should show the influence this method has had on me).

Unfortunately, the re-prints of this book make it difficult to follow his analysis of the paintings (which are quite in-depth), as there are no longer the same plates he referenced in the original edition. But it’s still worth it. His chapter on « athletics » and « hysteria » is worth the price of admission alone, with or without the pretty reproductions. And if you’re interested, I stole my concept of « éffort » from those two chapters, although I somewhat re-worked them for the then-popular context of interactivity (re-yawn, snore). Therein the recurring idea I have worked with for years to describe interactivity — that of extracting from production the object produced and seeing what remains —, can be localized in those two chapters of Logique de la sensation, although somewhat more implicitly than explicitly. And I love the way he alludes to Kafka’s famous quote on swimming: « I can swim like everyone else, only I have a better memory than them. I have not forgotten my former inability to swim. But since I have not forgotten it, my ability to swim is of no avail and in the end I cannot swim. » This refusal to master swimming (or productivity in the case of interactivity), to retain a lack of mastery in mastery, is a powerful idea for artistic practice, even if it does risk sounding a little too cliché (I’ll take that risk, thank-you-very-much). Whatever the case, in Bacon’s paintings the idea is perfectly appropriate, because indeed the figures are in a constant state of making figurative that which desires formlessness. And finally, this was one of the ideas that finally cured me of any residue of 80’s postmodernism, and opened up a whole series of artistic methods for me personally.

And while I’m rambling, it just occurred to me that my last admission might explain the distinction between my own position on artistic activity, and those of many of my collegues who emerged from more official channels of art education, steeped as they are in a sort of negative-dialectics of the Kantian sublime. That’s a mouthful (and a pretty nasty accusation now that I think about it), but a pretty accurate mouthful that I am perfectly willing to stand by. I remember quite a few debates with some very heady artists at the time I was working on Logique de la sensation who complained of Deleuze pulling art back down into the morass of sensation and perception, and basically re-pictorializing art, or sending it back the way of impressionism. I actually agree with them, and cringe at a few passages in What is philosophy? wherein D&G limit art to the production of « percepts ». But I still retain that art has throughout its history had an intimate relationship with plasticity, form, figuration, landscape, portrait and what-have-you, even in the midst of the peak of 60’s and 70’s conceptual art. Sure, it’s hard to see much of a political position in Bacon’s refiguring the defigurative — without sinking into some lame ode to the arts as the last form of political resistance —, but who the hell needs an all-incompasing definition of art anyway?

As a philosophical treatise, La logique de la sensation (« The Logic of Sensation ») was not one of Deleuze’s massive cultural bombs such as Difference and Repetition, and his books written with Felix Guattari: Anti-Oedipus, Mille Plateaux (A Thousand Plateaus), and What Is Philosophy?. In those books, seminal concepts such as the rhizome or the corps-sans-organes are introduced. In contrast, The Logic of Sensation is a smaller book, less ambitious than those works. Logique de la sensation would never have the global influence that those books did, nor did its concepts dislodge themselves from the book and travel about in the cultural landscape like so many little memes. This is not to say that Logique de de la sensation does not invent important concepts — to the contrary, the book is an endless stream of inventions. The aforementioned concept of « éffort » would probably be the most important offering from this book, as well as the concept of the chute, which I used at the time of Deleuze’s death to comment its « critical reception ». There’s a beautiful section on animality and the becoming-animal. And finally, there is a significantly different version of his concept of the « diagram » from the version he proposes in Foucault. So there is some important writing here for people working outside of the field of painting, or art for that matter. What I mean to suggest is that this is a minor work that creates it’s own territory that works on you locally, albeit intensely. It requires its own study, and yet reads like an enthralling novel. It’s the difference between Nieztsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra and Zur Genealogie der Moral : the former you read on a road trip, feeling like Jack Kerouac — worldly with your Bildungsroman half-torn and dangling out of your rucksack; while with the latter you actually learn something, and have to sit down in a small well-lit corner and let the thing soak in.

Yes, I’m still writing my thesis, and yes, I was supposed to be finished a few weeks ago, so I don’t really have time to blog right now. Therefore, you’ll have to wait for my take on the Wii, the iPhone, and other digital news. I already have a few comments here or there in the official press channels, so you’ll just have to be content with those when they’re released in the newstands. I.e. this post is really just one-of-those-lame-placeholder-promises for content still-to-come.

Also, it looks as if I’ll be travelling in February, both within France and to the United States, some of it semi-public. So I’ll let you know here when the details are set in stone.

But from within my stress-induced apathy, I did want to post about this news that just arrived in my inbox. Jean-Baptiste Labrune just sent me word that the first Dorkbot Paris meeting will finally be taking place Wednesday, January 24th at 20h30 at Ars Longa, 67, avenue Parmentier in the 11ème (m° Parmentier / Saint-Ambroise). Jean-Baptiste will be speaking, along with Joëlle Bitton, Emmanuel Ferrand, and David Steinberg. They even have very official sounding « titles » to their talk (hmm, I don’t know how décontracté the whole thing will be, but it’s a move in the right direction).

We’re all in the middle of a million different workshops with various invited guests in Aix-en-Provence right now so I don’t know who among us will have the courage to head up to Paris. Currently in-house : Ben Chang and Robb Drinkwater from Chicago, Tamiko Thiel and Peter Graf from Munich, and in two weeks John Klima will be joining France Cadet for a workshop on gaming. Meanwhile, François Parra and I are sharing duties on a sound + hypermedia hybrid workshop with the 2nd-year students, using Processing on my side and PureData on the other, and seeing how the two logics can join up. So that’s just too many things to allow any of us to be mobile right now.

Marie Lechner also just sent word that she’s put up Etienne Cliquet’s cryptic Tégument X along with an interview. This is required reading/folding for all current students working with me (either on-line, or on-site), so if this is your case, you now know this week’s assignment. Etienne is a brilliant artist, a former member of the now-disbanded Téléférique, and the author of an important text for digital aesthetics, L’esthétique par défaut. Over the holidays I was lucky enough to corner Etienne for some questions on his recent origami work, which I will publish later in the year along with the other interviews I conducted for my research (Toshio Iwai, Casey Reas, Servovalve, were some of the others). If you can read French I suggest you visit his blog, it’s great stuff, and should be further proof to those that aren’t paying attention that the form of the blog is shifting, and becoming many different things for many different people. In Etienne’s case, one could argue that his blog is an intrinsic part of the artwork itself, i.e. yet another fold in his artistic machine.

Quick translation of the diagram key:

• Black lines: Fold toward you
• Red lines: Fold away from you
• Grey lines: Guiding line
• Blue dots: Hyperlink

Lame coder’s joke, okay, but it’s just to give notice that I really am busy right now and won’t be posting much during the holidays. It’s the last rush to finish my thesis which will be added to this space when it’s done. You can also follow progress on individual sections via the various links above.

It’s a little sad: back when I was studying philosophy, literature and all things wordly I used to be quite prolific; I even wrote a novel (egad!). Writing was such a pleasure then and I did it every day, often for long hours at a stretch. But writing this thesis, even if I know everything I want to say, is so… hard. Despite the little wonderful inspired moments, I just have so many distractions these days that it’s hard to find that time for myself to just close shop and get everything done.

For example, if you’re in Aix-en-Provence tomorrow, I’ll be listening to my friend Paul Devautour tomorrow afternoon, followed by a recording for Radio Grenouille where Paul, Jean Cristofol and I will discuss the current state of intellectual property. Our discussion will be broadcast in mid-January. You see? There we go again, more distractions…

Luckily I found an old love in the attic while looking for a book. Ah, at least I now have a soundtrack to keep me going; and thanks to some top-notch customer service from Bose, a new pair of headphones to shut out unwanted noise and bathe in all that soothing distortion (now if they could just do something about email).

P.S. Since I’ll be a little quieter than usual, I just wanted to take a second out and say : (ok, I’m gonna sound hokey here) I really enjoy all the emails people send me and although I reply to everyone, it sometimes takes me a few days weeks. But I love it, know that — and don’t forget to send pictures of your wrapping paper!

*:-)

Apparently, there are still fans of the Lexique de l’interactivité I wrote a little under ten years ago. Yikes! I was at the Arborescence festival when I was introduced to an interresting artist (more on her work later) who could recite my own texts back to me. The emotional effect was at once charming and creepy. It is also funny how each fan seems to attach himself or herself to a very different quote, and how it talks to each of them in very different ways — in fact in ways that have little to do with the way I currently view interactivity. Over the years I have occasionally met fans of this old text, but I had thought them long since gone. Apparently not. I also met some enthusiastic readers back in June after the 8=8 concert, so it looks indeed like my old cat just keeps coming back, no matter what I do to misplace it.

So under request, I’ve reactivated the lexique in all its embarassing glory, up on the main abstractmachine_menubar. Just look for the red cursor up on top of any abstractmachine page. I also updated the diagrams with a more appropriate icon to keep the confusion to a minimum.

I should also point out that all the interactive illustrations run in Shockwave which makes things a little complicated if you’re on a MacIntel like me. There are work-arounds explained on the opening page. The annoying thing is that you have to choose between the newer Processing-based diagrams or these older Director-based ones, requiring a brower restart to switch over from one to the other (I actually just keep two browsers open). Although this is rediculous, I find it almost poetically indicative of the state of Director as a development platform, especially when an open-source equivalent has been available for MacIntels for several months, indeed almost from the moment the machines were available.

So last week I presented my research on “Abstract Machines : Art and the Age of the Algorithm” to the LEI and ARI labs. An interresting debate ensued, with my thesis director Jean-Louis Boissier heading the charge, mostly around what I suspect will be further debate concerning the ontological status of programmed images. While we both apparently still refer to my old mentor Raymond Bellour and his fundamental work on cinema and semiotics, it looks as if we have an emerging debate around the status of the image once it has been seized by the processor. Precisely where we place the “entre” of Bellour’s Entre-Images is probably where we still have some issues to discuss. I propose a strange concept more or less revolving around the idea of a Frankenstein process in which the image re-negotiates with the processor at each iteration in a discrete disembodied process, whereas for Boissier it looks as if the algorithm works at the temporal edge of the image, between images, but acting on the image as a whole. I might be misrepresenting Jean-Louis here, so I’ll quit while I’m behind, but I thought the distinction interesting and look forward to debating this issue in a future session, perhaps during the defense itself.

As for the rest, I began the talk with an easy distinction: separating the algorithmic layer of computers from their computational layer — an idea that many reading this would probably already take for granted. Indeed it is not a new position, however it is one I’ve been working with for quite some time, and it is the object of this thesis. On this subject, Marius Watz over at Generator.x has a recent post subtitled Your new procedural lifestyle where he mentions Michael Mateas’ Procedural Literacy: Educating the New Media Practitioner, which from my quick scan deals precisely with this issue.

However, once we got to the meat of the thesis — and the part I’m having the most fun with — i.e. the theoretical “diagrams” of various artistic and commercial machines, the discussion veered into a strange ideological debate, yet again leading us to the pros and cons of using Processing in artistic practice. Ultimately, I’m building these diagrams with Processing because it represents a common pedagogical and artistic platform and allows me to easily share the code for anyone willing to take the next step. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that it would probably be a good idea to have access to working code from a thesis exploring the relationship between art and code. Processing is far more open for these needs, while still remaining accessible to anyone willing to make the effort.

But Processing is still a tough swallow apparently for many that have an artistic past steeped in other environments. There is also a (somewhat justified) fear of visually (and procedurally) formatting the art to a specific school of thought.

There was also an interresting observation my collegue Jean-Michel Géridan made, i.e. that as curators become more and more interested in code-based works, artworks are increasingly chosen based on preconceptions about the environment and compiler they were programmed with. In this respect, Processing would currently be “in”, whereas other environments like Director would be “out”. So true. The number of times people have sort of sighed when they discovered that my complex fancy interactive generative gizmo was programmed with Director. Ah bon? Director? as if the work suddenly took on a less true or real quality. The red-meat quotient suddenly draining from the work like some flatulent gas. This is of course silly, especially since we actually choose interpreted languages even if we work with more difficult compiled ones. And, for the moment at least, my work with Director is far more interesting artistically than my work with Assembly Language. But there’s still that cool-factor…

I’ll post more about the advancement of the thesis later, for the moment I have an installation to prepare for ZeroOne (more on that later as well). So with those two projects don’t be suprised if I disappear again for a while.

• Seminar: Esthétique des nouveaux médias
• Speaker: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Presentation: Machines abstraites : l’art à l’age de l’algorithme
• Date: 12:00-14:00, April 5, 2006
• Location: ENSAD, École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratives
• Room: 122
• Links: Laboratoire Esthétique de l’Interactivité, Université de Paris 8; Atelier de Recherches Interactives, ENSAD

It’s a private seminar, but I wanted to mention it here because I will be presenting the current status of my research for my doctoral thesis. I still have a lot more work to do — this is why I’ve been so silent recently — and the writing system has been somewhat tricky to finalize as the entire system is relational and recursive. I find it easy to get lost when writing recursive systems. But the foundation is more or less set, at last the overall idea, the rest is at the tweaking stage, and a first list of artists and works has been entered into the relational database which I’ll be working off from here on in. Yes there will be lots of Processing sketches with source code. I love the idea of writing a thesis on algorithms within an algorithm, and most of all that one of the components is a ”linearizer”, allowing me to push a button and print : Presto! Insta-thesis!

Here is the original french announcement:

Douglas Edric Stanley fera l’exposé suivant : « Machines abstraites : l’art à l’age de l’algorithme »

« Mes recherches portent sur l’algorithme dans l’art, et plus précisément sur la façon dont les structures et logiques de la programmation informatique influencent aujourd’hui la création artistique. Il s’agit non seulement de proposer une analyse d’oeuvres qui engagent la question de l’algorithme, mais églament de repérer des figures - appellé ici des “diagrammes” pour accentuer leur aspect fonctionnel - qui animent ces oeuvres depuis l’intérieur. »

After this I’ll be heading to Rennes to stay with my step-daughter and hang out at the Assises nationales des écoles d’art. Then it’s back to Paris on Friday to see Servovalve’s performance at the opening of the Festival Némo. If you’re around…