Daniela Plewe’s discussion brings me back to some thoughts and notes I made about Marcel Duchamp’s Coefficient d’Art. Duchamp described it as:
“An arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.”
It is intended to describe the difference between what artists intend and what the spectator perceives. For Duchamp, this difference is in the act of communication or transaction, where certain differences and attributions of value are made out of the interaction among individuals. It this coefficient that structures the viewers engagement with artifacts and allows them opportunities to appropriate objects to their own needs and ends.
For Duchamp, the coefficient of art could be good (+), bad (-) or indifferent (=), but the sign of the coefficient had no bearing on the effectiveness of the work itself–only the difference between the agency of the artists to produce a desired effect in the minds of the spectators. The effect itself is up for further negotiation between them.
Mutual information is a similar concept to the coefficient of art, but it comes from information theory and describes the amount of information one thing tells about another thing. In other words, it is the reduction in uncertainty of one thing due to knowledge of another. If we ask how information (and consequently, meaning) is shared between different sources of uncertainty (like an object and a spectator or an object and its artist), we may be able to get a sense of how they are connected and how they might respond to each other.
Mutual information is helpful as a concept because we want to understand how interactions vary with one another–i.e. how interaction values may/may not change as a result of signals, actions, and assumptions.
A component of mutual information is information entropy. Entropy is a measure of uncertainty associated with a variable and quantifies the information contained in a message. It is similar to the coefficient of art; it may describe the uncertainty associated with an artwork as judged by the spectator. Conversely, it could describe the absence of meaning when one does not know the value of the work. Likewise the spectator may themselves exhibit high entropy (high uncertainty) relative to the artist if the artist knows little about the spectator and how they will perceive the artwork….at least that’s how I think it would go.
The coefficient of art is a compelling concept. It suggests that that art has an effect, and if an effect–value in context. Describing that value is very close to the describing what difference the work of art makes, either to the spectator or some chain extending through them.
Borrowing from evolutionary and network theory, one could pull in a set of relationships between interacting agents that describe how networks evolve and persist. Relationships endure over time from the benefits of interaction. In network reciprocity, entities pay a cost, c, while their number of neighbors, k, receive a benefit, b. If b/c > k, where the ratio of benefits to costs is greater than the sum of neighbors, the network persists because its members are gaining as a result of their interactions.
Duchamp’s coefficient of art (hereafter described using the greek letter psi, ϕ; see also: epistasis), approximates the number of neighbors, but as indicated by it separation from the actual effect of the work itself, says nothing about costs and benefits. ϕ approximates k, or rather the reciprocal of k, because as the number of neighbors (or spectators of the work) increases, the likely ability of the artwork to communicate intent, decreases. This is because of variation among the spectators who may either not be well-understood by the artist or who are perceiving differently or because the artist. Interestingly, ϕ always assumes artistic intent. If ϕ is low, it may be the ‘fault’ of the spectator, the inability of the artist to realize that intent, or of some other intervening factor.
But what about art that is created beyond intent such as generative, algorithmic, or emergent artworks?
ϕ may also be a bound on the ability of artifacts to bridge social groups, as in the case of boundary objects that have multiple uses. The intent of the maker of that object is only partially achieved, but may clearly be appropriated to serve other purposes. Here we might similarly invoke a coefficient of use–or a measure of intent in use that transforms the intent of the artist.
Far from achieving certainty, at least the idea of ϕ, of a coefficient of art, starts to unlock more questions about translation and meaning between objects and people–and of the directionality of interactions between people.
The CEMA homepage is showing an image of scanner that has opportunistically been colonized by ants (anyone know which species?). I was present at the offending attack, and I have this to say. I didn’t see it so much as an attack as it was (more perversely) an underanticipated observation that ants had quietly moved into an (apparently) unused and undisturbed piece of late 20th century technology- that of the document scanner.
While this may have been felt by some as an attack on our morals of human-hood and right-living (ants and scanners shouldn’t mix, right…er…right?), to me this was much more the most delicate and profound expression not of nature but of the social world in which we live. The most amazing thing to me is that a colony of ants could have arrived and decided that a scanner would make a good home. Perhaps there were some legacy muffins adding allure to the crystal glass and step-motor, but maybe the ants were looking for something held up in the ambient waves of electrical heat left over from un-nourished scans of students’ faces, buttocks, book chapters, and collages.
No..I think this is exactly where we want to be…where mixes and happenstances converge out of nothing more than the desire to find place, continence in the “other”, and the cheap thrill of being where you aren’t supposed to.
On checking up on their status, they are gone from the scanner…pupae and all. I’m not sure if they left on their own accord or if they were kicked out. Where did they go? The water cooler perhaps? As for next time, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that discovery doesn’t correlate with disentanglement. I’d like to keep my scanner ants…who knows…they may have figured out something that we haven’t.
Ok, the pic isn’t great but you get the idea. This is “The Cube” at the MIT Media Lab. I visited the Lifelong Kindergarten group there and saw how their close proximity to tools, shared workspaces, and each other facilitated their work in progress. I really liked how the space was large with high ceilings, that it was a mess of projects, and that there was a table where lab members would work individually with a tacit sociality.
Most of what I liked about the GROCS lab at the University of Michigan Media Union was how the activities of various groups, classes and projects were in an open, shared space. Mix that with some movable furniture and a close proximity to other resources in the Media Union and it made for a good space to come up with ideas, share them and work them out with each other.
I was up this morning thinking about the kinds of spaces, communities and interactions I would like to see. Somewhere between physical computing, synthetic biology, evolutionary ecology, and design is a space where species can speak and be recognized by each other, where urban infrastructure becomes adaptive in the space of days and not decades, where the threshold of difference is lowered to such a degree that new networks between otherwise unrelated groups and individuals can find common ground.
Perhaps for the first time, I am beginning to see how things can be connected for the purpose of builing empathy. Whereas previously, I think the difficult work of etting to know a species was largely out of many peoples’ desires and time banks, perhaps there are now ways of making the opportunities both immediate and resource-efficient.
Rather than always seeking to decouple tightly-linked host-parasite relationships, can we find ways to make new ones…perhaps ones that can grow into mutualisms and symbioses? Is hardwiring a step in the process? What are the costs, benefits, sources and sinks? Can we create or link networks of co-dependence? What models of covariation should we adopt: linear, dominance, epistatic, topological?
This semester I have the pleasure of being able to lead and help two teams of students create engaging, socially-embedded, interactive design projects. The experience was a success both for me and the students. I learned a lot about my students and what they needed to do excellent work. I think we also found some new ways of working here at Srishti that may prove valuable in the long-term.
The teams also took part in a competition in which the winning team is invited to present their work at the Microsoft Research Design Expo, part of the Faculty Summit held in Redmond, WA in late July. We’re all looking forward to attending because we are very proud of the students’ accomplishments.
The ‘Moon Vehicle’ project consisted of a system to create interactive storytelling experiences around themes of the moon, space exploration and colonization, and India’s forthcoming launch of the Chandrayaan-I moon satellite.
Screen captures from the \'Moon Vehicle\' project design.
The Moon Vehicle team’s design developed in part from the Bangalore Space and Culture Initiative, an interdisciplinary endeavor of artists, scientists, designers, and technologists that began in late September, 2007 and coordinated by Srishti, NIAS, and ISRO.
The Play Revolution project changed many times, but it was always focused on the idea of building a socio-econo-technical system for improving the knowledge-networking opportunities of children living in slums in and around Bangalore.
The lab itself and the social interactions were influenced in part by the GROCS lab at the University of Michigan. Thanks go to Linda Kendall-Knox for her willingness to share aspects of their process.
The course started as a relatively straightforward user interface design series of topics, but this plan was quickly abandoned for a more socially-embedded model that would adapt to the different concerns and questions we were going to encounter. The primary article guiding this process was entitled “Products and Practices: Selected Concepts from Science and Technology Studies and from Social Theories of Consumption and Practice” (Ingram et al. 2007). The article stressed six stages of technological adoption: acquisition, scripting, appropriation, assembly, normalization, and practice.
We used these stages to guide our design process.
The students were given a design brief that consisted of two challenges: one consisting of Srishti’s existing commitments to cultural, educational, artistic,and design-based engagements with society, and another consisting of a more general challenge to design a user interface and/or interactive experience around the theme of learning and education. They were asked to develop a project that synthesized these challenges into one unique approach that incorporated the concerns, commitments, and constraints that were implicitly and explicitly embedded in the issues raised.
The theme of this year’s competition was “Learning and Education”, and students were challenged to design a user interface and/or interactive experience around the theme of learning and education that improves the daily life of a wide variety of users through learning and education, promotes creativity and curiosity in new topics, demonstrates novel ways of providing instruction, and rethinks education systems and tools.
I’m reading a book entitled, When Species Meet, by Donna Haraway. She’s one of my favorite authors, not only because of her subject matter, the relationships between ourselves and other organisms, science, and the stories we use to create meaning for how we act in the world, but because her literary style mixes the meanings of words and maintains her constantly questioning presence in the text.
Potamopyrgus antipodarum under the dissecting scope
In the third chapter of the book, she handles suffering, particularly of organisms in highly-constructed laboratory settings, with great care. By pointing out that we are always linked to killing in one form or another, the questions she raises is not if we do it at all, but rather how we approach, encounter, and leave those organisms that we are inextricably bound to.
My favorite passage from that third chapter is the one in which she asks some of her colleagues in the biological sciences how they demonstrate concern for the organisms in the lab as part of their practice. This is a question very close to home for me because it describes so much about my own motivations for doing science in the lab, how ‘reliable’ data are produced, and what kinds of practices can result.
I’m reminded of that famous quote from Barbara McClintock, also the title of Evelyn Fox Keller’s book, that emphasizes how “Getting a Feeling for the Organism” inserts itself so profoundly into daily scientific practice. This is empathy, yes, but the question Haraway asks is how we learn to recognize and therefore intervene in existing situations to show concern and enact strategies for care.
I think back to my own experiences in the lab, or rather, a temperature-controlled cool room. Others had brought snails back from a mountainous lake region in the southern hemisphere, and I was responsible for their care. These snails happened to be an invasive species in the U.S., requiring an extra level of containment to keep them, their offspring, and the parasites out of the regional ecosystem. My relationship with them meant creating the best possible environment for their growth and reproduction. They were, in effect, prisoners (although escape did have a potentially huge payoff). My role in their care meant feeding, finding and installing balanced spectrum lighting to mimic the ambient wavelengths, bringing in local plants to help filter the water in a huge freshwater ecosystem, making sure the water kept moving, installing irrigation systems to distribute a constant flow across many individual containers, adding sterilized rocks to the containers to allow for micronutrients, bacteria and other microorganisms, and even keeping fish and crayfish in the main tank to help condition and scavenge the water. For me, all of these technologies were about care. For one thing we couldn’t maintain the relationship these snails had with their parasites in the lab because we thought they just weren’t being taken care of well enough. There was this very important relationship, then, between how we cared for these snails and how and what kind of data we could collect about their own tight relationship with the parasites they came with.
For design, I’m thinking of how we script care. How can it be made obligatory as part of the function of a service, object, or process? How is it that we find connections and feel compelled to spend our time and energies attempting to make an environment or artifact more comfortable for another? How are we able to recognize what matters in this equation, especially when there are so many possibilities to misinterpret or just plain get it wrong. I suppose we look for signs of health, reproduction, and activity as indicators that we are on the right track. In doing so we create synergies between ourselves and others. By designing for their comfort, we link our vigor and theirs.
Not the first movies depicting plant sex, but perhaps the first dedicated theater. What I’m wondering is why it would necessarily be visual at all. My question is how other species (in this case plants) would sense and respond to suggestions of sexual display. For plants, it’s often interspecies mediated. Does a non-pollinating insect then provide stimulation if not fertilization?
WORLD’S FIRST PORN THEATER FOR HOUSE PLANTS OPENS IN CALIFORNIA Chico Gallery Hosts Revolution in Film for Non-Humans Beginning September 10th
August 24, 2007 – In a bid to increase movie audiences exponentially, and to dominate the motion picture industry, conceptual artist Jonathon Keats has announced plans to produce film and video for other species — from rose bushes to almond trees — using specialized new techniques. “Humans have more entertainment than they can endure,” explains Mr. Keats. “Yet organisms with populations far greater than ours are routinely ignored by MGM and Disney.”
Mr. Keats came to appreciate the potential impact of arts and entertainment on non-human audiences while choreographing ballet for honeybees at Chico State University last year. “Dance comes naturally to bees,” he says, “less naturally to trees. But all plants can perform photosynthesis. They’re sensitive to the play of light. As an entertainment form, cinema was practically made for them.”
By projecting specially-prepared video directly onto foliage, Mr. Keats found an effective way to share films with bushes and brambles, even entire forests and jungles. Yet he chose to open the first movie theater for the botanical kingdom at 1078 Gallery, an alternative arts space in Chico, California. “Chico has the advantage of being an agricultural town,” he explains. “In a place like this, my venture is likely to be appreciated.”
Still an essential question remained: What genres of film would appeal to flora? “This wasn’t the sort of situation where I could learn the audience’s mindset,” admits Mr. Keats. “The only thing that would be a sure hit, I figured, was sex.” Accordingly, the artist dutifully filmed plants getting pollinated, editing his uncensored footage into a gritty black-and-white porn video.
“I think it must be very titillating, if pollination is your thing,” says 1078 exhibition committee member J. Pouwels. Mr. Keats, who’s already looking into further venues for plant porn, believes that the theater might even be intriguing to people. “Watching movies in a cineplex is partly about absorbing the experience of others in the audience. On the big screen, our point of view is enlarged. I see no reason why shared experiences with other species can’t further expand our perspective.”
A Cinema Botanica trailer can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZqzr5ANi7I * * * Jonathon Keats is a conceptual artist, fabulist, and critic. Recently he exhibited extraterrestrial abstract artwork at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley. He has also attempted to genetically engineer God in a petri dish, in collaboration with scientists at the University of California, and petitioned Berkeley to pass a fundamental law of logic — A=A — a work commissioned by the city’s annual Arts Festival. He has been awarded Yaddo and MacDowell fellowships, and his projects have been documented by KQED-TV and the BBC World Service, as well as periodicals ranging from The San Francisco Chronicle to New Scientist. He is represented by Modernism Gallery in San Francisco. For more information, please contact Mr. Keats at jonathon_keats@yahoo.com, or see http://www.modernisminc.com/artists/Jonathon_KEATS/
My goal is to implement synthesis between the disciplines of art, design, and biology. As a way of reaching this objective, a set of heuristics can be a valuable tool. My attempt is situated within a systems approach to art, which seeks to integrate the development of better decision making and other analytical strategies with creative arts behaviors. I import the heuristic concepts of relational aesthetics, boundary objects, and network entrepreneurship. These ideas of value, form, and behavioral strategy, respectively, can serve as first approximations for how to engage in the ideation and implementation of creative work. These also function as design strategies that take into account differences among disciplines. They may therefore aid in the formation of educational and organizational objectives whose aim is to find positive solutions at the interfaces of art, design, and life science.
1.1.1. Relational Aesthetics One way to resolve the inconsistencies and differences among individuals is to emphasize the relationships among individuals. Relationships effectively emphasize the nature of interactions and are the product of more than one individual. This suggests a relational aesthetic, which takes into account the range and quality of human relationships and their social context (Bourriaud, 2002). Relational aesthetics relies on a definition of aesthetics as “an idea that sets humankind apart from other animal species.” Though human aesthetics are very different from those of other species, it is only the idea that they are different which sets humans apart from others. A definition of relational aesthetics can be expanded to include the range and quality of human and non-human relationships as variables.
Instead of setting humans apart from others we can now take into account the numerous interactions and relationships that occur between and among humans and non-humans.
If we refer back to the benchmarks for interdisciplinary integration, we are reminded to ask, “How do we create common ground and promote just relationships for each of these interactions?”
George Gessert’s work with hybrids of the Iris genus are a good example of relational aesthetics in action. Gessert cultivates iris strains as art. The cultivation and culling of Iris plants strengthens the relationship between Gessert’s own aesthetic preferences and the hybrid phenotypes or outward appearance (Gessert 1993). This is a form of artificial selection that has been used for centuries to domesticate and select organisms for human purposes–in Gessert’s case, the purposes are aesthetic. The thing to remember about Gessert’s relationship with the iris hybrids is that the relationship is, in many ways, the artwork. Rather than promoting an agonistic interaction by simply picking and displaying the flowers, Gessert refers to himself as a “facilitator” which demonstrates that his role is a cooperative one. Raising hybrid Irises is a collaborative artwork involving selective decisions from the artist and developmental decisions the organism. Gessert directly affects floral morphology through cultivation. This raises issues about how human-mediated selection and so-called natural forms of selection might affect plant-pollinator interactions. Correspondingly, other relationships that the plant has (e.g. microbes and fungi in the soil) may implicate other responsive stakeholders.
Examples of human and non-human interactions that promote cooperative relationships are not restricted to the art world. The poultry industry, pressured by the demand for eggs, raises hens in crowded cages to increase industrial efficiency. This crowding increases competitive interactions, mortality, and decreased egg production among the chickens and led to beak trimming as a controversial method of reducing injury. Researchers decided that a better way to decrease mortality and increase egg laying could be accomplished by selecting cages rather than individuals (Muir 1996). In this manner, the relationships among the individuals in the cages were important to the well-being of each individual. Cages with fewer agnostic interactions also demonstrated higher egg-laying productivity. Again, the point of this example is to demonstrate how relationships themselves can be a positive area of interest and lead to a more synergistic response.
Framing the relationship between individuals rather than specific qualities of individuals ensures that individual attributes are maintained in a relationship system, despite whatever value judgments are made. This system might include humans, non-humans, or a mix of both. Mark Thompson creates art installations that allow him to share a space with bees. In Thompson’s words, these serve as “models of interaction” while simultaneously creating pollination opportunities outside of the exhibition space (Gessert 1993).
Another area in which attention to relationships is important is in the practice of good pedagogy in teaching and learning. Attention to the strength of interactions fosters second-order understanding. Second-order understanding is the understanding that results from recognizing another individual’s understanding (Krippendorf 2006).
Strong interactions among individuals often promotes the establishment of empathy, a form of second-order understanding.
This can result in better design for educational objectives and creative research that springs from strong design. Chickering and Gamson outline seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education (1987) that have a relational component. Contact between students and faculty, reciprocity and cooperation among students, and prompt feedback, clearly suggest a relational strategy. Though less explicitly connected, feedback is a very important relational device for communication and for assessing the quality and range of interactions. Feedback reinforces second-order understanding.
My point in outlining these variables is to demonstrate that relationships (intense/relaxed; local/global; friendly/apathetic, for example) can be attended to, and as all relationships need more than one individual, there may be better opportunities to find common ground between differences. Attention to relationships can happen through working arrangements in the classroom, lab, or studio. In this approach, the comparison is about those patterns that connect these different levels of organization–biological or otherwise. This also does not presuppose which relationships are better or have more value than others. In Gessert’s work, an argument can be made that the iris benefits from increased cultivation. Gessert benefits from the pleasure they provide.
My intention is only to reframe the boundary of the system to take more perspectives into account. Those that are less frequently incorporated (e.g. non-humans) may gain an increased stake in discussions under this model. Consequently,decision-making that implements a relational set of values would first ask about the kinds of relationships created and what qualities and/or ranges those relationship exhibit.
Bourriaud, N. Relational Aesthetics. Trans. Pleasance, S. & F. Woods. Les Presses du Reel. 2002.
Chickering, A. W., and Gamson, Z. F. “Seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education” American Association of Higher Education Bulletin. (1987). p.3-7.
Gessert, G. “Notes on Genetic Art,” Leonardo Vol 26, No. 3 (1993).
Krippendorf, K. The Semantic Turn: a new foundation for design. CRC Press. Boca Raton, FL. 2006.
Muir, W. M. Group selection for adaptation to multiple-hen cages: selection program and direct responses. Poultry Science 75: (1996). p.447-458.
