Tag: “As We May Think”

Final Hyperessay: Be cautious of technological change – aaajiao

April 26, 2018 / / 0 Comments

‘aaajiao’ is the virtual persona of Chinese new media artist Xu Wenkai(徐文恺). His art is marked by a strong dystopian awareness, literati spirits and sophistication. In my view, aaajiao is a special artist who comes from the background of Computer Science. Compare with common engineers,  he doesn’t care about the machine performance and employ the ability to create the technological products to solve problems. By contrast, he is not optimistic about the power of technology and focuses on discovering the dark side of it, he employs his technical skills to create implied artworks to engage audiences to consider the value of technology from his perspective.

Personally speaking, from his artworks, I realize the thinking of “ Be cautious of technological change“.  And in the following essay,  I will explian how aaajiao communicate this idea to audiences through his artworks.

Typeface

‘Typeface’ https://github.com/aaajiao/typeface

‘Typeface’ is aaajiao’s artwork that aims to explore the value of Chinese characters which are recreated by the digital mean. In this project, aaajiao codes algorithm to teach the machine to learn how to write 9 Chinese characters. During the process of machine training, through mutilating a large number of characters into the pixel level, the neural network finally learns the writing skill in its own way. However, aaajiao claims that the machine’s study of creating words leads to the loss of the meaning of characters, and he states his purpose is not to teach the computer to write characters but to create a sense of ‘meaningless’.

In my view, in order to understand this ‘meaningless’, audiences should have the context of the historical knowledge about the birth of Chinese characters. It is generally believed that Chinese characters are one of the oldest words over the world in term of history, it has been thousands of years since the development of Oracle bone script to today’s Chinese characters. Basically, most of Chines characters could be seen as a long-time evolution from the abstract graphics drawings.

evolution of Chinese character(fish) in different dynasties

Some people hold overly romantic attitude toward the out of computers, they start to believe that computers are creating a wisdom. As a sensible artist and engineer who creates this piece, aaajiao reminds people of that the recreated words are only an image or a digital image processing from computers perspective. There are thousands of humanistic history of creating Chinese characters while the computer only takes several seconds to recreate it, as a human, we cannot treat these characters without our previous experience, and the history, is the essential soul of words, and without history, words are losing their meaning.

The artwork of ‘Typeface’ reminders me of Google’s artificial intelligence(AI) of AlphaGo who beats the best human Go player and ranks the first in the world. The rapid development of AI provides endless possibilities for human, and we start to imagine what value that AI can bring to us. Different from most people, aaajiao doesn’t hold an absolutely optimistic attitude toward it, as a sensitive artist,  he cares about the humanistic value of the technological products and critically thinks about the result caused by the technological revolution. And ‘Typeface’ was his typical artwork reflecting the negative value brought by AI.

Moreover, I would like to link the piece of  ‘Typeface’ to Mark Amerika’s work, GRAMMATRON. From my understanding, GRAMMATRON was an artwork that employs the subject of ‘texts’ and the new type of technology at that time(Internet or Hypermedia). Instead of book production, it provides a public domain networked-narrative environment where the stories are narrated. Through experiments the technique of hypertexts, GRAMMATRON was questioning how a narrative would be composed, published and distributed in the age of digital dissemination and predicting the coming change that internet will bring to our life. Compare with GRAMMATRON, ‘Typeface’ is doing something similar that experiment the current advanced technology(AI) as well as create a new way of handwriting, the difference is that ‘Typeface’ does not aim to challenge the traditional handwriting but to attempt to emphasize the humanistic importance of traditional handwriting.

Blog weighting(2013) & A Dead Innovative Company(2016)

Blog Weighting http://eventstructure.com/blogArchaeological-0

“Blog weighting” is aaajiao’s artwork that implies the underrated power of data in the digital era. aaajiao found a writer who has been writing his blog for ten years. He collected all of the blog’s data and saved it onto an SD card.  And then he put the SD card on the scale and jewelry on another scale to compare their value by traditional measuring standard.

A Dead Innovative Company, http://eventstructure.com/A-Dead-Innovative-Company

The piece of “A Dead Innovative Company” emphasizes that data is the core fortune of an innovative company in this current digital era. In this piece, audiences could insert a flash disk into the USB port, and get two files which means they can easily destroy an innovative company by stealing the soul(data) from it.

From my perspective, “Blog weighting” and “A Dead Innovative Company” are also interesting and thoughtful works.  The comparison between the SD card(data) and the jewelry is really humorous and ironical, without doubt, the result is obvious that the card is much lighter than the jewelry, but does it mean data is less value than jewelry? I think the answer is no.

aaajiao describes that the purpose for him to create these two artworks is to engage audiences to reconsider the value of data in this digital era.  Data’s spreading has become fast and easy, I tend to say that we are living in a society which has become fed on the open data spaces arising from the proliferation of the internet. And the subject of data in these two works reminders me of Bush’s “As We May Think”:

“Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals; it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual.

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.”

Bush describes that the record of ideas(data) helps knowledge to be inherited and evolved across the entire human race instead of individual, and human was bogged down at that time as specialization extends(or the difficulty of saving and extending knowledge from my understanding). What is ironical, nowadays people are used to be benefited from the internet or the hypermedia which is evolved from Bush’s idea of Memex, however,  the ease of spreading knowledge(data) leads to people’s neglect the value of data. I think that “Blog weighting” is attempting to recall our attention to the value or the power of data.

“The applications of science have built man a well-supplied house, and are teaching him to live healthily therein. They have enabled him to throw masses of people against one another with cruel weapons. They may yet allow him truly to encompass the great record and to grow in the wisdom of race experience. He may perish in conflict before he learns to wield that record for his true good. Yet, in the application of science to the needs and desires of man, it would seem to be a singularly unfortunate stage at which to terminate the process, or to lose hope as to the outcome.”

This is the last paragraph of “As we may think” where predicts the Bush’s concerned about the science application in future. In the piece of “Dead Innovative Company”, the audience’s interaction with the artwork could imply the violent behavior that human use the science application in a wrong way, to be more specific, the interaction of inserting a flash disk(cruel weapon) is trying to kill the company(perish in conflict).  It also warns us that we are living in the age of information, we are benefited from data, but also threatened by data such as the privacy issues.

Conclusion

In conclusion,  aaajiao’s works are throwing the idea of “Be cautious of technological change” to the public. In this hyperessay, I research three of his artworks to communicate his idea. Nowadays most people are holding overly optimistic attitude toward the technology, and or even overly obsessed with the technological explosion. However, like what Walter Benjamin describes the ‘mechanical reproduction era’ and the loss of aura of artworks, copied artworks are losing aura during the process of mechanical reproduction, and the recreated Chinese characters in ‘Typeface’ are also losing its aura and its essential meaning during the computer recreation. In “Blog weighting” and “A Dead Innovative Company”, aaajiao attempts to emphasize the power of data, and to hint that the positive and negative ways for people to employ the technology.  As an observant artist, aaajiao is reminding us to be cautious of technological change not only from the positive perspective but also the cautious one.

 

 

Reference

  • Vannevar Bush, As We May Think, 1945

Bibliography

  • Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, 2001

 

Research Critique: Aspen Movie Map, Michael Naimark, 1979

February 5, 2018 / / 1 Comment

The Aspen Movie Map was Naimark‘s first exploration into what he refers to as “surrogate travel,” in which the viewer is transported virtually to another place. And it is considered as the beginning of Google Map’s street view.

There were several cameras installed on a car to capture front, back, and side views of streets, and the car was making its way through the city. The film was assembled into a collection of discontinuous scenes (one segment per view per city block) and then transferred to laserdisc. A database was made that correlated the layout of the video on the disc with the two-dimensional street plan. Thus linked, the user was able to choose an arbitrary path through the city.

Vannevar Bush

In my view, Aspen Movie Map follows the thinking of microfilm and memex which introduced by  Vannevar Bush in his 1945 “As We May Think”. Bush envisioned the memex as a device in which individuals would compress and store all of their books, records, and communications, “mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.” The memex would provide an “enlarged intimate supplement to one’s memory”.

MEMEX

In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely  ……

…………

There is, of course, provision for consultation of the record by the usual scheme of indexing. If the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing positions.

-Vannevar Bush, As We May Think, 1945

According to this principle of memex that Bush talked in his eassy. I tend to believe that the way to store, display, index and retrieve information of Aspen Interactive Map was inspired by memex.

In addition, In 1972, Alan Kay envisioned to a design idea for a personal dynamic medium the size of a notebook (the Dynabook) which could be owned by everyone and could have the power to handle virtually all of its owner’s information-related needs.

Dynabook

Suppose it had enough power to outrace your senses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for later retrieval thousands of page-equivalents of reference materials, poems, letters, recipes, records, drawings, animations, musical scores, waveforms, dynamic simulations, and anything else you would like to remember and change.

– Personal Dynamic Media, Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, 1977

Meanwhile, what should be mentioned is that Dynabook attempted to improve the way for human to interact with media. The interactions of humans with their media have been primarily non-conversational and passive in the sense that marks on paper, paint on walls, even “motion” pictures and television, do not change in response to the viewer’s wishes. And for the project of Aspen Movie Map, compare with a static map, it allows users to control the media and outrace your senses to follow their wishes, so it is also referred to “surrogate travel”.