THE HERO’S JOURNEY by telepresence
March 8, 2007
Iceland, Photograph by soffia Gisladottir at Flickr.
So half my life is exploring, and the other half is building tools to do it better the next time.” Dr. Robert Ballard
What a difference a few decades can make. Finding the money to explore the Black Sea in the summer of 2003 and to return to the site of the Titanic this year wasn’t much easier than arranging the Galapagos expedition – ocean exploration remains woefully underfunded. (The British Empire is said to have had more dedicated exploration ships in the late 18th century than the entire world has today.) But advanced technologies made it far less important to select the perfect mix of scientists. On both of the recent missions, we piped live hi-def video over satellite systems and used multiband VoIP to communicate with scientists all over the world – not to mention graduate and grade-school students. A virtual, multidisciplinary array of researchers joined us over the Internet2 network, weighed in on data, and helped with identifications as the expedition progressed. By taking entire scientific communities to previously unseen territories, we changed the scope, reach, and inclusiveness of our deep-ocean journey. Wired expeditions can save millions of dollars while increasing the pace of discovery.
Current deep-submergence technologies will surely seem quaint in a decade. In even less time, today’s communications and Internet systems will be as outmoded as transistor radios. All of this is great for the future of deep-ocean exploration. But I do have one major worry: Where will the explorers come from? Today’s children aren’t ready, especially in the US – where science and math education remains woefully inadequate. Will we help them get what’s needed in mathematics, history, and geology? Will they have the skills necessary to become the next deep-ocean scientists, engineers, oceanographers, or deep-sea archaeologists? Will our children and grandchildren be curious and imaginative enough to continue searching out the deepest, darkest, most mysterious corners of our world? Will we fill in the blanks on the map in my office? If we can’t train the explorers of tomorrow, the best technology in the world isn’t going to make much difference.
Dr. Robert Ballard. Wired Magazine. December 2004
Joseph Campbell, who devoted his life to studying how myths connected up across cultures and throughout time, died not long after recording a series of conversations with Bill Moyers at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch studio. The series, The Power of Myth, was shown a year after his death and was an instant, enormous hit. It captured the public imagination. Campbell’s opinion was that mythology was changing, becoming more fluid. He’d compared myths that could still be tied to one place: the new inflections of timeless myths were going to acknowledge the ability of telepresence tools to take us everywhere without leaving home, and the internet’s ability to create communities that were everywhere but technically nowhere. Sense of place had become an attitude as much as a geographical reference.
The new vessels for myths might not be a poem, as T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland had been when Campbell was a student in the 1920’s. (The Wasteland is a condition of the soul not a place, people living inauthentic lives, deadened to mythology.) Or a radical story structure, like James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, had been. Or even a new storytelling format: film, for instance, which George Lucas had used to essay Campbell’s ideas within the Star Wars series. Google maps is probably the single most powerful mythological device in our society, linking fluid ideas and myths and social and spiritual rituals (as well as advertising, climate change reports and other practical information) to many places. Google maps can allow us to be everywhere at once, and to connect more deeply to where we are. Outside.in, the placeblogging site built upon Google maps, is the new campfire the people of the town gather around to tell stories.
Campbell believed that mythology was changed by the photograph taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts that showed the earth, viewed from the moon’s orbit, as one undivided territory. We now had a way of looking outside ourselves, seeing a bigger picture. Any new mythology would have to reflect that point of view. We became reliant on technology in the 2oth century to alter our lives: the electric light expunged darkness, airconditioning changed our climate, internally. We could work closely with dangerous substances and processes from a distance (the radioactive products that created the atom bomb). We could communicate with, and see, people everywhere. We could travel anywhere incredibly fast. We could work with ideas in an abstract way on the computer. Machines could do work for us at any scale: the molecular or the universal. We could alter our own biology and that of animals and plants. But Campbell felt, the ultimate message of this machine age, the one addressed in Star Wars, was that we had to turn off the machine and return to being human, return to relying again on being human. Anakin Skywalker goes to the dark side and as Darth Vader is mostly a machine. In his battle with his father Luke Skywalker turns off the machine and responds to what is left of the human being his father had submerged. We are at that point. We’re being forced to turn off the machines because we can’t sustain the power or resources to keep them turned on, mostly, but as the internet is preparing to enter its third phase, one based around meaning, some of our turning away from technology is more ethical and spiritual, people deliberately turning off machines or using them sparingly in order to connect more richly with near and far communities.
The ’semantic web’ has two different strands, the one talking about meaning as a more complex way to target marketing information more succinctly, the other is using the tools to connect to place, either as a state of mind or a community reference tool that puts the machine in the background. This report thinks out loud about social networking and is based around the way in which Dr. Robert Ballard has used the tools of telepresence to redefine Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey — a life lived in self-discovery and Ken Goldberg’s use of telepresence projects to simultaneously explore and critique these tools as they’re being developed, “disarming people’s preconceptions using humour and play” and “facilitating the resumption of disbelief”.
Dr. Robert Ballard: I think of myself as an explorer. I think throughout man’s history, there have been explorers. A lot of people think there is no longer a place for them, but there is, particularly in the ocean. So that’s what I am. [As a kid I liked to read] adventure books. Generally a mix between fiction and non-fiction. I loved The Travels of Marco Polo. It amazed me that he could walk maybe 30 miles a day and he would go from one world to another world. One world he could go to was like Eden, an incredibly wonderful place, and down the road was Hell. There was such diversity on our planet. Now you find McDonald’s everywhere. But there was a diversity of the human species that mimicked other life. The true beauty of this planet is its diversity, not its sameness. Marco Polo opened up my eyes to the diversity of the human experience. I loved Captain Nemo in Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.. Here was a person who built his own submarine, using nuclear energy before anyone even knew that it existed. He was a technologist, but he was an adventurer. He explored beneath the sea. He saw the sea through a giant window, and that’s exactly what I’m doing. I always had this dream of being inside his ship, the Nautilus. I even went to Disneyland and rode it. I lived near Disneyland, and that had a lot of impact on me, I’m sure. [Growing up I wanted to be] what I am. A high-tech, modern-day Captain Nemo. Absolutely no doubt about it. I always wanted to do what I’m doing, as long as I can remember. All kids dream a marvelous images of what they want to do. But then society tells them they can’t do it. I didn’t listen. I wanted to live my dream. So I broke it up into little bite-sized pieces.
Interview with Dr. Robert Ballard.
There’s a scholarly clarity about all that Dr. Robert Ballard does. He footnotes his thoughts and observations, provides bibliographies, his stories remain consistent: interviews with him are never revelatory, they have the burnished quality of favourite tales that grow more interesting in the re-telling, that are comforting and even exciting because they confirm what we already know (the trajectory from a childhood dream to be Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo, through scientific explorations with the navy, to the discovery of the wreck of the Titanic, a triumph for the remotely-operated robots he was developing with the mythic aspect of a quest.)
Tethers, however, remain a problem. They snap, they tangle, they restrict. Sometimes they even get robots into trouble. In the early days, deep-ocean explorers could hardly wait to get rid of the bathysphere’s tether. Piccard’s new bathyscape achieved that feat. It could take a researcher all the way to the bottom with enough freedom of motion to do some exploring. Small submersibles vastly expanded that freedom. Now we can cut the ultimate tether — the one that binds our questioning intellect to vulnerable human flesh. Through telepresence, a mind detaches itself from the body’s restrictions and enters the abyss with ease, and with lightning-quick fiber optic nerves. As Jacques Cousteau used to say, the ideal means of deep-sea transport would allow us to move “like an angel.” Our minds can now go it alone, leaving the body behind. What could be more angelic than that?
The Eternal Darkness: A Personal History of Deep Sea Exploration.
Dr. Robert Ballard. Princeton University Press. 2000
He never expected to be so powerfully affected by the human dimension of the tragedy of the sinking of the Titanic, and the solemnity and melancholy beauty of the wreck as a tomb. He became infamous as the discoverer of the Titantic’s wreck, but the glare of his fame and accomplishments cast a dark shadow over his eldest son, who struggled to define himself, and died in a car crash at the age of 19. He turned, for consolation, to Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth, which he had written had consoled him before, on a “lonely navy research cruise” in 1989.
But then the consequences of living your dream is that there’s a lot of consequences. One of them is you have to prepare yourself. That’s what school’s all about– getting ready to go on your epic journey. But then you assemble your team, your Argonauts. It’s not a solo trip. This is not a solo thing, this is a team sport. And you go out with your team and you are challenged. You’re challenged in two ways, you are challenged mentally: did you prepare yourself? Are educated enough for this challenge? And that you can pretty well predict and pass. The hardest one is the test of your heart. Because you’re going to be challenged and you’re going to face failure. You have to overcome failure to reach success. Most people are in failure avoidance, and if they’re in failure avoidance, they are in success avoidance. Failure and success are the yin and yang.
But then you overcome your tests and Neptune shows you the truth, gives you the Golden Fleece. And then the journey’s never over until you return to society and share what you have learned. And that’s what an expedition is all about. You go out with a mission, you assemble your team, you’re tested, you overcome the test, you attain the truth, and you return to society and share it. We’re all on these epic journeys. Everyone’s on an epic journey, ours is just very obvious. So going to sea reinforces the journey we’re all on, which Joseph Campbell so beautifully said, “Life is the act of becoming, one never arrives.” That’s what expeditions should be; you go on an expedition, only to go to the next one and the next one. You get to go on some of them physically but hopefully mostly through telepresence. So I can also go home at night and be with my children and wife.
Dr. Robert Ballard. Ocean Explorer site.
Hero’s aren’t celebrities but those living their lives in eternal self-discovery, being willing to go into new territory, and travel the dark roads of unexplored experience.
They’ve moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you’ve got to work out your life for yourself. Either you can take it or you can’t. You don’t have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience — that is the hero’s deed.
…That’s the basic motif of the universal hero’s journey — leaving one condition and finding the source of life to bring you forth into a richer or more mature condition.
The Power of Myth. Joseph Campbell.
The hero’s journey can also be mapped through the symbolic references in Nick Cave’s songs. The hero is frequently someone who has had something taken from him, Campbell observed. For Dr. Robert Ballard it was his 19 year old son, in a car crash. For 19 year old Nick Cave it was his father who died in a car crash, and as Nick became an extraordinarily fine writer and performer, he grappled with overtaking ambitions that his father never realised for himself. Putting Dr. Robert Ballard’s writings alongside Nick Cave’s songs makes them into a kind of dialogue with one another where it’s apparent that the ultimate purpose of the hero’s journey isn’t something iconic (the wreck of a famous ship) or something intellectual, understanding grief, but Campbell’s definition of the purpose of mythology, that it enhances the experience of life. Grappling with sadness is where happiness is ultimately to be found: In both Dr. Robert Ballard and Nick Cave’s writing there’s an almost unbearably touching sweetly regretful tone: for the joys not shared, the pride in achievements not noted, apologies never made, not being able to say thank you.
“Wherever two or more are gathered together, I am in your midst,” Jesus said. Just as we are divine creations, so must we in turn create. Divinity must be given its freedom to flow, through us, through language, through communication, through imagination. I believe this is our spiritual duty made clear to us through the example of Christ. Through us God finds His voice, for ust as we need God, He in turn needs us. God found his life through my father as he raved and flailed about in his study reciting his favourite literature, but died in the desk drawer that contained those pages, the first painful contractions of his stillborn dreams. My father asked me what I had done to assist humanity and at twelve years old I could not answer. I now know. Like Christ, I too come in the name of my father, to keep God alive.
The Flesh Made Word. Nick Cave (For BBC Radio 3. July 1996)
What Nick Cave brought back into the light was an examination of the nature of light itself. He rejected the notion of the light of God as an otherworldly spotlight shone from above by a puppet-master directing humanity and found divine light to be something that shone within, as described by Jesus in The Gospel of Thomas: “There is light within a man of light, and he who does not shine is darkness.” Light is something created internally but so is darkness: the evil of dark thoughts. Chris Carter, the creator of the X Files, considered that Nick Cave’s song Red Right Hand, mapped the moral universe of the X-Files, the mental struggle between the world being driven by mystical forces against a rational, scientific explanation for everything.
Stories and storytelling are essential to life. As Nietzsche and Ibsen knew, life requires life-supporting myths and metaphors. Or even illusions. Freud said myths are public dreams and dreams private myths, both essential to the psyche. Or the soul. Science demystifies the world. It’s meant to reassure us, as Georges Braque set forth, whereas the purpose of art is to disturb. The relationship between the two is also essential and should be fostered and celebrated rather than rooted out. Or, as I told the CSIOP folks, science tells you your brain might give you a brain tumor, whereas art allows how it might be how your long dead Uncle Harry reaches you from the Great Beyond.
Chris Carter, creator of the X Files in an introduction to the 1999 book, The Real Science Behind the X-Files by Anne Simon.
Ultimately everyone has to decide for themselves. In both Nick Cave and Dr. Robert Ballard’s writing wonder and realism co-exist and they imply that people have to take control of their own destinies. Red Right Hand was used on the soundtrack for the X Files, and another of Nick Cave’s songs, Time Jesum Transeuntem (Latin for “Dread the passage of Jesus for he does not return”) was a ’secret’ track, numbered zero on an X Files song compilation. It refers to the refusal to be called to the journey, those who will not heed the call. “The myths and folk tales of the whole world make clear that the refusal is essentially a refusal to give up what one takes to be one’s own interest” wrote Joseph Campbell.
There has always been a numinous quality to telepresence. One of its earliest uses was during the American Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb, the scientists were able to work directly with, at some distance from, the dangerous radioactive materials. After the first successful test the project leader, Robert Oppenheimer quoted from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita.
The test, code-named “Trinity,” took place on July 16. It exploded with a force equivalent of 18,000 tons of TNT. Recalling the scene, Oppenheimer said: “A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. There floated through my mind a line from the “Bhagavad-Gita” in which Krishna is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty: “I am become death: the destroyer of worlds.”
PBS. People and Events.
We find the Bhagavad Gita that there is going to be a great battle for the rule of a Kingdom; and how can we doubt that this is the Kingdom of Heaven, the kingdom of the soul? Are we going to allow the forces of light in us or the forces of darkness to win? And yet, how easy not to fight, and to find reasons to withdraw from the battle! In the Bhagavad Gita Arjuna becomes the soul of man and Krishna the charioteer of the soul….
The true progress of man on earth is the progress of an inner vision. We have a progress in science, but is it in harmony with a spiritual progress? We want a scientific progress, but do we want a moral progress? It is not enough to have more, or even to know more, but to live more and if we want to live more we must love more. Love is ‘the treasure hid in a field’, and this field according to the Gita is our own soul. Here the treasure is found for which the wise merchant ‘went and sold all he had’. And contrary to the law of matter where to give more means to have less, in the law of love the more one gives the more one has.
Juan Mascaro from the introduction to his translation of the Bhagavad Gita.
Dr. Robert Ballard has made his tools of telepresence available to schoolchildren, encouraging them to be sharply observant and clear about the science underpinning their projects, while also encouraging their spirits to soar. Ken Goldberg, a Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at the University of California at Berkeley is also critiquing the tools as they’re being developed, through deeply beautiful and amusingly profound art projects. He’s credited with the first telerobotic art project on the Internet. In 1994 People logged in to manouevre a small blowing device to remove sand from objects quoted from Jules Verne’s novel Journey to the Centre of the Earth. In 1995 he created the Telegarden, where people, over the internet, could control a robot arm to plant seeds, water, and weed plants in a garden plot. It created a community garden with all of the joys and disagreements that these projects are blessed with in the material world.
While most everyone in the emerging field of telepresence — the ability to experience things from a remote location — was concentrating on applying video and sound to the Internet, Goldberg was thinking about the next step. What if, instead of simply watching a faraway scenario, you could actually participate? “I could see that once you had that ability to trigger a camera remotely it wasn’t too hard to move something, to actually change the remote environment instead of just observe it,” he says.
Remote-controlled devices were nothing new, of course. But Goldberg was the first to realize that a robot could be connected to a Web interface as easily as a camera could. This idea was somewhat radical — robots were generally expensive, sophisticated machines, and the only people allowed to access them tended to be professionals. Putting a robot online would cede control to anyone with a modem and a mouse. As a proof of concept, Goldberg and his students began working in 1994 on what they called the Mercury Project, the world’s first “telerobot.” While that may sound imposing, the project was actually pretty adorable. People could log on to a live video feed of a sandbox filled with buried artifacts, all related to a certain mysterious book. Using a mouse, they could manipulate the camera and blow sand aside with a robotic device that released puffs of compressed air. After excavating tiny hidden lanterns and magnifying glasses, these cybersleuths were asked to guess which book the props referred to.
In 1,200 pages of guesses, only one visitor got it right: Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, a story chosen for its classic sci-fi-ness. But the volume of traffic attained was remarkable — Web surfing was still a new habit, after all; Netscape and Yahoo had just launched, and most people’s connection speeds were agonizingly slow. Goldberg next launched the Telegarden, a Webcam trained on a soil-filled planter ten feet in diameter. Rising from its center, like a specter from the grave, was a delicate white robot arm. This time users wouldn’t simply blow dirt around: They would use the arm to plant a seed, water it, and, over the course of many months, watch it grow. Goldberg and his students conceived the Telegarden as a sly critique of how the Internet was spawning a convenience now attitude. “It was about slowing down and being a bit contemplative — you can’t accelerate nature,” he recalls. “We had fast computers and networks and everything was going at top speed. We wanted to hold up nature and say, ‘This hasn’t changed in millions of years.’”
Together, the two projects were something of a revelation to others working in telepresence. Eric Paulos, who was studying robotics at UC Berkeley and would later become one of Goldberg’s collaborators, recalled their novelty at a time when other Web projects were focused on transferring things like sound files or pictures. “The idea that you could sit at your desktop and click on things and that suddenly it’s not just a hard disk at the other end, but that you’re literally moving earth — that was an interesting notion,” Paulos says.
Kara Platoni. East Bay Express. 2005
Ken Goldberg’s projects have a powerful conceptual clarity and philosophically connect with artworks across cultures and through time. As the internet was becoming colonised, the Telegarden considered what happened when the online world moved from a hunter and gatherer society to a cultivated, settled environment, forging connections and seeding communities.
The second phase of his art projects concerned what he’s termed ‘telepistemology’: how do we know what we know, at a distance? Jester was a collaborative filtering project that attempted to “learn” what people found funny. Amazon.com uses collaborative filtering when it asks you to rate the suggestions it gives you for new products to purchase. Although Jester predated the commercial use of this kind of software it predicted its limitations and embodied what’s lacking in Amazon’s system. Humour is both cultural and temporal: something that’s funny within the context of a Marx brothers movie in the 1930’s seems alarmingly racist today. And time isn’t established just by listing the major events and mood of a period, the tone and perspective of the artist needs to be taken into account. The literal and obvious quality of Amazon.com’s collaborative filtering system reminds me the missteps of a 1990’s film adaptation of Kay Thompson’s book Eloise, reviewed by Alessandra Stanley:
What this Sunday’s ”Wonderful World of Disney” has drained from the story is Kay Thompson, or at least her sly wit and melancholy undertone. And that is perhaps not so surprising given the Disney track record of bowdlerizing classics like ”Pinocchio,” ”Mary Poppins” and ”Peter Pan.” But the best Disney movies added something fresh — animation, music and color — to compensate for the excisions of sophisticated humor and pathos. ”Eloise at the Plaza” fills the missing spaces with drearily predictable plot twists and mawkish sentiment — all the very things Thompson fought so fiercely to avert….
Overall, however, the film captures the fashion and glamour of the times quite well. What it loses is the book’s perversity, its impudent mockery of conventional pieties. In 1955, the year ”Eloise” came out, Lee Ann Meriwether was crowned Miss America, and the top-rated television show was ”The $64,000 Question” on CBS. Eisenhower was president, Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy was tarnished but still in office. That year, the Brooklyn Dodgers finally beat the New York Yankees in the World Series, the Soviet Union coaxed seven East European nations into the Warsaw Pact and Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of a Montgomery, Ala., bus. ”Eloise” was part of a different 1955. Hers was the year that Nabokov published ”Lolita,” that ”Marty” [about alcoholism] won the Oscar for Best Picture and Cole Porter’s musical ”Silk Stockings” opened at the Imperial Theater in New York. Thompson’s book was on best-seller lists along with Graham Greene’s ”Quiet American” but its irreverence and frivolity echoed the songs of Tom Lehrer, whose first album came out in 1953; the funny-macabre illustrations of Edward Gorey; and even the cruel wit of Kingsley Amis’s ”Lucky Jim.”
That Girl is Loose at the Plaza Again. Alessandra Stanley. The New York Times. April 25, 2003
What Jester, and Ouija 2000, and most profoundly, flw, questioned was the blind trust we’ve tended to place in information we uncover on the internet. When we read novels and watch movies we suspend disbelief and enter unquestioningly into the world of the artwork, with the Internet Ken Goldberg suggests that we need a resumption of disbelief, to rediscover the ability to be skeptical.
silicon. dimensions: 60 x 80 x 10 micrometers.
A 1/1 millionth scale model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, fabricated from silicon using ultra high precision lithography.
courtesy catharine clark gallery, san francisco, ca.
“Although the senses occasionally mislead us respecting minute objects, such as are so far removed from us as to be beyond the reach of close observation, there are yet many other of their informations, the truth of which it is manifestly impossible to doubt; as for example, that I am in this place, seated by the fire, clothed in a winter dressing gown, and that I hold in my hands this piece of paper….” Descartes, Meditations.
Why Fallingwater?
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater (1936)
Wright employed the cantilever: a horizontal structure for distributing force, “the true earth-line of human life”(Wright). Minature cantilevers are used to measure forces in devices etched from silicon. Examples of current research can be found at many labs including UC Berkeley, Cornell and UCLA.
From the flw website.
The cantilever is a device that allows us to go out on a limb while remaining supported: it’s used in bridges, architecture, the wings of planes. In the digital realm it’s allowed us to go further mentally, to expand our knowledge. flw is built from silicon atoms, the substance that computer chips have mostly been made from. There are many reasons to admire Ken Goldberg’s telerobotic art projects: for their poetic and visual beauty, their philosophical clarity, the precision and reliability of the scientific mechanisms and algorithms that underpin their workings, but mostly it’s their prescience that’s astonishing. By considering these technological mechanisms and software from cultural, social, and mythological perspectives as well as scientific and practical viewpoints, his projects often arrive at an analaysis of the benefits and shortcomings of various technologies before those who are working by trial and error and are driven by the marketplace.
His projects have always emphasised the human dimension. As a scientist he’s making tools, as an artist he’s reflecting upon the (sometimes wondrous) products we are able to fashion with these tools, but his reverence is for humanity. He doesn’t make a God of the tools. Before the current concerns about the use of computers and webcameras for surveillance Ken Goldberg began experimenting with computers controlling human actions, with The Teleactor project, which began in 2000.
Collective Telepresence:
We are studying network-based systems that allow groups of users to “explore” live remote environments such as a rainforest, biotechnology lab, political rally, or rock concert. The “Tele-Actor” is a skilled human with cameras and microphones connected to a wireless digital network. Live video and audio are broadcast to participants via the Internet or interactive television. Participants not only view, but interact with each other and with the Tele-Actor by voting on what to do next. Our “Spatial Dynamic Voting” (SDV) interface incorporates group dynamics into a variety of online experiences.
The more recent Baldessari’s Bubbles referenced conceptual artist John Baldessari’s photographs of people taken in public places, with red and green dots placed over their faces to protect their identities. Ken Goldberg applied the same principle to surveillance cameras, controlled over the internet, and trained on a public space on the Berkeley campus that is associated with gatherings during the civil rights era. In his scientific research he’s working with collaboratively controlled web-cameras set in nature, to observe animals in remote areas.
Intrigued by the problem, Goldberg and colleague Dezhen Song, an assistant professor of computer science at Texas A&M University, designed a special system to aid in the search. Known as the Automated Collaborative Observatory for Natural Environments (ACONE), the two-camera system scans a patch of sky (measuring roughly 300 feet by 900 feet) above the Cache River refuge. Goldberg says it’s an ideal location because it’s a high-traffic area for birds and clear of treetops, so the cameras get a relatively unobstructed view. The cameras are mounted on a power-line pole, along with a computer, in the middle of a bayou.
As the cameras scan the sky, each one captures images at 11 frames per second. Those frames are temporarily stored in a buffer. Software on the computer analyzes each frame immediately, looking for things that roughly match the speed and size of an ivory-billed woodpecker. When a bird is detected, Goldberg explains, the system permanently records and stores the previous seven frames and the next seven frames of video on the hard drive…..
Ultimately, Goldberg says, the researchers would like the software to automatically identify each species. For now, human eyes still have to review the selected footage to determine whether the bird is, indeed, an ivory-billed woodpecker. “It’s not capturing as many pictures as we hoped it would capture,” says Luneau. “But it holds a lot of promise.” Goldberg says the team plans on studying the rate of false negatives in March, by comparing the number of birds recorded by the robo watcher to the number of birds spotted by a field biologist.
If you read anything about computers and technology you’re stuck in an eternally accelerating future present tense without thinking about the consequences of William Gibson’s observation about how quickly the “sexiness of newness” wears off. Trend forecasting is leaning into an age that’s being termed ‘Web 3.0′ when the Internet will assume semantic qualities. If we accept this terminology we’re currently in the ‘Web 2.0′ phase, where online collaboration is possible because so many people are connected to the Internet and so many services are networked. This has allowed businesses to come online and reliably use the Internet. The paradox is that although the Internet becomes a more valuable resource the more people and services that are connected to it, the more unweildy and unworkable it becomes: weeks worth of songs on your i-Pod, millions of answers to a simple search on Google (in which the commercial listings and editorial content are hopelessly intertwined and entangled), thousands and thousands of listings for a photograph of polar bears on Flickr.
To see how these ideas may evolve, and what may emerge after Web 2.0, one need only look to groups such as MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the World Wide Web Consortium, Amazon.com, and Google. All of these organizations are working for a smarter Web, and some of their prototype implementations are available on the Web for anyone to try. Many of these projects emphasize leveraging the human intelligence already embedded in the Web in the form of data, metadata, and links between data nodes. Others aim to recruit live humans and apply their intelligence to tasks computers can’t handle. But none are ready for prime time.
The first category of projects is related to the Semantic Web, a vision for a smarter Web laid out in the late 1990s by World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee. The vision calls for enriching every piece of data on the Web with metadata conveying its meaning. In theory, this added context would help Web-based software applications use the data more appropriately….
A second category of post-Web 2.0 projects focuses not on helping machines understand the meaning and the uses of existing Web content, but on recruiting real people to add their intelligence to information before it’s used. The best known example is Amazon Mechanical Turk, a kind of high-tech temp agency introduced by the online retailer in 2005. The service allows people with tasks and questions that computers can’t handle–for example, spotting inappropriate images in a collection of photos–to hire other Web users to help.
The employment is extremely temporary–less than an hour per task, in most cases–and the pay is ridiculously low: solutions typically earn the worker only a few cents. But the point isn’t to provide Internet addicts with a second income: it’s to harness users’ brainpower for a few spare moments to carry out simple tasks that remain far beyond the capabilities of artificial-intelligence software. (In fact, Amazon calls its project a form of “artificial artificial intelligence.”)
MIT Technology Review. December 1, 2006
Ken Goldberg’s academic career began in the study of artificial intelligence, and his A.I. projects, like his robotics projects expansively push the science forward without getting bogged down in sentimentality: He’s not trying to teach software nuances of emotional thinking or becoming sentimental about or anthropomorphising robots. What his projects suggest is that Web 3.0 is a change in human perspective, looking away from the computer and back towards human communities. The consequences of the computer age are just beginning to dawn on us: how much power computers use, how toxic their components are and how poorly they break down for recycling. Just as Ken put sophisticated robotic devices into the hands of untrained users with his earliest telerobotic projects, now ‘hyperlocal’ sites and community newspapers are using Google maps and satellite images and finely articulated data tags. One of the most sophisticated sites on the Internet is Outside.in, which uses tagging, mapping devices and feed aggregators to collect neighbourhood information across America (and eventually globally). The genius behind Outside.in is how simple it is: the rich levels and layers of meaning are supplied by the users, they don’t need to be built into the system itself. All you need to know is who you are and where you are to make effective use of the site.
…but for now the most important thing to understand are the basic new categories we’ve added that now form the underlying architecture of the site: Neighbors, Places, Stories, and Comments. We’ve only scratched the surface of what we can do with these different variables, but we think you’ll see why they’re going to be a lot of fun to explore.
Neighbors are registered users of outside.in. Each neighbor has a profile page that shows a bio, photo, neighborhood, website, plus all the stories, comments, and places they’ve contributed to outside.in. (Right now it’s a little tricky to find a specific neighbor, much less communicate with them — but we’re working on it!)
Stories and Comments are the content you add to outside.in about your area. When you add them to the site, they appear on the home page of the area you specified for everyone to see, as well as on your neighbor pages.
Stories are content that comes from other sites, like blogs or newspaper websites, that you submit to the site via the submit a story link in the right column of the page. Add stories to outside.in that relate to your neighborhood and that you find interesting and want to share with your neighbors.
Comments are content that you write yourself, directly to the outside.in website. You add comments to Places, which are any location or venue in your area. Add a comment to any Place you want, either to point out something you like, or just to talk about something interesting in your neighborhood.
Places can be everything from restaurants to playgrounds to schools — or even more subjective categories (most dangerous intersection, best spot for winter sledding.) Any story or comment can be attached to a Place. The cool thing about these Place pages is that the become an archive of everything that’s been said online about a given place — comments from outside.in Neighbors, blog posts, newspaper reviews, discussion threads.
Outside.in Information page by Steven Johnson.
Some of Ken Goldberg’s new telerobotic art projects will be tied to the films made by his wife, Tiffany Shlain. They collaborated on a short film called The Tribe.
What can the most successful doll on the planet show us about being Jewish today? Narrated by Peter Coyote, the film mixes old school narration with a new school visual style. The Tribe weaves together archival footage, graphics, animation, Barbie dioramas, and slam poetry to take audiences on an electric ride through the complex history of both the Barbie doll and the Jewish people- from Biblical times to present day. By tracing Barbie’s history, the film sheds light on what it means to be an American Jew in the 21st Century.
And a new film, Tangle: The Declaration of Interdependence, is in production. “By tracing the absurd and profound connections among seemingly disparate social, cultural and political issues, this film reveals a network of cause and effect that alters our global condition.” They’ve started a production company and Think Tank called, The Moxie Institute, which “focuses on the power of film and the web to make social change. It creates, develops and distributes films and discussion programs using new approaches and emerging technologies.” Tiffany Shlain has referred to the short films as “the appetiser” and the discussions that they provoke as “the main course.” Her films don’t have plots, they have perspectives, and they seem as if they’re chains of associations of thoughts and images taken outside the brain, for viewing.
Mysterious film fragments that are deeply symbolic are the basis for a part of the story-line of William Gibson’s novel, Pattern Recognition:
Q: The nature of the footage is ambiguous and enigmatic, with very few clues as to what is actually happening, or to a particular place or time. It’s something that people are able to project a lot of meaning onto, yet it affects them strongly. Do you think this is an increasingly common feature of cultural products of all kinds?
William Gibson: I think I was trying to explore how new media may differ from old media. Old media (broadcast television, say) was hierarchical, top-down, and randomness of content was minimized.Q: Cayce refers often to the “mirror world” – the parallel realities that seem to exist in other countries and other cultures, which are both like and unlike our own. To what extent is globalization reducing the differences between these “mirror worlds”? What kinds of differences are likely to remain?
William Gibson: I don’t know, but I know how much difference I’ve seen vanish in the past thirty years. Which equates, perhaps, to a loss of “pyschogeographical” space. A lot of the writing that I’ve found most interesting, over the past decade or so, has dealt in some way with the idea of spirit of place, and I’m uncomfortable with the notion of losing that.
Pattern Recognition Q&A segment from William Gibson’s website.
At the end of 1999 I attended a reading of All Tomorrow’s Parties that William Gibson gave at a small independent bookstore in my neighbourhood in Los Angeles. Someone asked him about the connection between the novel and the Velvet Underground song of the same name. He’d just always wanted to use that title he said. The way that the people behave in William Gibson’s books, how technology doesn’t, ultimately, make them more powerful, or richer, or happier, but just throws them back upon each other, links their fates to those of the people around them, made me think of something Lou Reed said in an introduction to a volume of his lyrics about ten years ago. People never realise how compassionate these songs are, he said. The same thing can be said of William Gibson’s novels.
The physical union of human and machine, long dreaded and long anticipated, has been an accomplished fact for decades, though we tend not to see it. We tend not to see it because we are it, and because we still employ Newtonian paradigms that tell us that “physical” has only to do with what we can see, or touch. Which of course is not the case. The electrons streaming into a child’s eye from the screen of the wooden television are as physical as anything else. As physical as the neurons subsequently moving along that child’s optic nerves. As physical as the structures and chemicals those neurons will encounter in the human brain. We are implicit, here, all of us, in a vast physical construct of artificially linked nervous systems. Invisible. We cannot touch it. We are it. We are already the Borg, but we seem to need myth to bring us to that knowledge.
William Gibson, blog. January 30, 2003
The most extraordinary sequences in his “Bridge” trilogy — Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow’s Parties — are the existential sociologist Shinya Yamazaki’s curious and lovingly detailed examinations of the spiritual rituals of the societies he visits.
William Gibson has allegorically included rituals and figures from almost every spiritual system in his books, but the spiritual sequence is the most developed, and touching, is his allegorical re-telling of the martyrdom of Jesus Christ through the figure of Shapely, a male prostitute whose strain of AIDS has the capacity to reverse the disease in others when it’s injected into their systems. Shapely is murdered by white supremacists and Shinya Yamazaki observes a parade in honour of Shapely’s birthday, that seems to include elements of the celebrations of the Mexican Day of the Dead and the New Orleans jazz funeral.
Bill Moyers: I came to understand from reading your books — The Masks of God or The Hero With a Thousand Faces, for example — that what human beings have in common is revealed in myths. Myths are stories of our search through the ages for truth, for meaning, for significance. We all need to tell our story and to understand our story. We all need to understand death and cope with death, and we all need help in our passages from birth to life and then to death. We need for life to signify, to touch the eternal, to understand the mysterious, to find out who we are.
Joseph Campbell: People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That’s what it’s all finally about, and that’s what these clues help us to find within ourselves.
Bill Moyers: Myths are clues?
Joseph Campbell: Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.
Bill Moyers: What we’re capable of knowing and experiencing within?
Joseph Campbell: Yes.
Bill Moyers: You changed the definition of a myth from the search for meaning to the experience of meaning.
Joseph Campbell: The experience of life. The mind has to do with meaning. What’s the meaning of a flower? There’s a Zen story about a sermon of the Buddha inwhich he simply lifted a flower. There was only one man who gave him a sign with his eyes that he understood what was said. Now, the Buddha himself is called “the one thus come.” There’s no meaning. What’s the meaning of a flea? It’s just there. That’s it. And your own meaning is that you’re there. We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget taht the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it’s all about.
The Power of Myth. Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers.
After he’d discovered the wreck of the Titanic Dr. Robert Ballard received thousands of letters from schoolchildren asking if they could go on his next exploration with him. He developed the Jason program for schoolchildren, where they’re able, by telepresence, to connect with the scientists on a mission and carry out their own experiments from their classrooms. The tools of telepresence are able to take us where we’re physically unable to go, but, paradoxically the missions and experiments of Dr. Robert Ballard and Ken Goldberg are raising ethical questions about whether there are some places we shouldn’t visit. Travel has been considered to open the mind and broaden one’s experience by coming into contact with unfamiliar people and environments. Travelling, by telepresence, to an iconic site to carry out experiments is a far richer form of learning than reading about an explorer’s mission or watching a video. Unmanned small submersibles create less impact on a site than larger, manned craft. Dr. Robert Ballard returned to the Titanic’s wreck in 2004 and was saddened by the degredation that had been caused by visitors and looting of the site, he noted that thousands of artifacts had been removed from the site since 1987.
NOAA researchers, scientists, and other Titanic visitors have reported that the ship is deteriorating at a shocking rate. Holes have widened in her decks and walls; the bridge railing has disappeared; the entire roof above the Reading and Writing Room has collapsed. A gangway door that Second Officer Charles Herbert Lightoller opened as the ship sank is gone, as is the gymnasium roof. And the crow’s nest from which lookout Frederick Fleet shouted “Iceberg, right ahead!” just seconds before the fatal collision has similarly vanished.
Dr. Ballard is convinced the decay has been caused by people repeatedly visiting the site and its surrounding wreckage; visitors include adventurers, tour companies, filmmakers, and salvors who have removed over 6,000 artifacts. In addition, countless marine organisms feast on the ship’s iron and wood.
Dr. Ballard intends to document the ship’s deterioration during an 11-day expedition. Comparing the photographs from the 1985 and 1986 voyages with those gathered during this latest trip will let scientists assess the rate of decay, while providing new data to help them determine how best to preserve Titanic.
Dr. Ballard envisions turning her into a protected historic site.
“Despite all that has been done to Titanic since her discovery, she is still there,” Dr. Ballard said. “Yes, they have removed many of the jewels from the old lady while she rested in her grave, but she is still there. And if we do the right thing, she and her memory will remain.”
“The deep sea is a museum that contains more history than all of the museums of the world combined,” he said. “Yet there is no law covering the vast majority of shipwrecks, and a great deal is at risk.”
He referred to shipwrecks as “pyramids of the deep.”
Ballard’s previous expeditions to Titanic found and photographed a pair of work boots. Their relative position –about shoulder-length apart, heels in, toes out – suggest they remained on someone’s feet as the body came to rest on the ocean floor. Over the years, flesh and bone dissolved, leaving the microbe-resistant leather intact. A ceramic doll’s head also resisted the ravages of time. Both artifacts call to mind the more than 1,500 deaths.
National Geographic Return to Titanic website.
In his column “Urban Planet” in the New York Times Select, Steven Johnson made reference to a column by the paper’s global affairs correspondent, Thomas Friedman, who’d written about a cab ride he’d made from Charles de Gaulle airport into the city of Paris while the driver chatted on a mobile phone all the way and simultaneously watched a movie on a television set on his dashboard. During the trip Thomas Friedman listened to Stevie Nicks on his i-Pod and tapped away on his laptop. This was evidence, Thomas Friedman thought, of technology acting like inverted telepresence tools, removing us from where we are, physically, and disconnecting from the people around us. Steven Johnson, an author, and one of the creators of Outside.in, thought otherwise.
Thomas Friedman rightly celebrates “having lots of contacts and easy connectivity.” Still, there’s an underlying assumption in his piece – appropriate for someone who writes so powerfully about globalization – that connectivity is largely a matter of bringing disparate parts of the planet into closer contact. Yet that is not the whole story. Connectivity – in most instances the specific form of connectivity offered by the Web – has also greatly enhanced and amplified the kinds of conversations that happen in real-world neighborhoods. “Placebloggers” are writing about the micro-news of shared communities: the new playground that’s just opened up, or the latest the city council election. The discussion forums at Chowhound are dissecting every change of menu in every hot restaurant in most American cities. Real estate blogs dish about last week’s open houses, and trade statistics debating the inevitability of the post-bubble dark ages. (Full disclosure: I have, as James Baker likes to say, a dog in this hunt, in form of a new Web site I helped create called outside.in, which tries to organize all those conversations.)
So the idea that the new technology is pushing us away from the people sharing our local spaces is only half true. To be sure, iPods and mobile phones give us fewer opportunities to start conversations with people of different perspectives. But the Web gives us more of those opportunities, and for the most part, I think it gives us better opportunities. What it doesn’t directly provide is face-to-face connection. So the question becomes: how important is face-to-face? I don’t have a full answer to that – clearly it’s important, and clearly we lose something in the transition to increasingly virtual interactions.
November 28, 2006. Steven Johnson. Urban Planet column. ‘Social Connections’. New York Times.
The stages of life are unchanging: birth, youth, adulthood, death, and the rituals that move us from one stage to another and connect us to our societies are timeless but the rituals and myths must be made relevant for each new generation and the new circumstances, they must be given a new context for their messages to remain relevant.
Bill Moyers: I wonder what happens to children who don’t have those fixed stars, that known horizon — those myths?
Joseph Campbell: Well, as I said, all you have to do is read the newspaper. It’s a mess. On this immediate level of life and structure, myths offer life models. But the models have to be appropriate to the time in which you are living, and our time has changed so fast that what was proper fifty years ago is not proper today. The virtues of the past are the vices of today. And many of what were thought to be the vices of the past are the necessities of today. The moral order has to catch up with the moral necessities of actual life in time, here and now. And that is what we are not doing.
The Power of Myth. Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers.
The section where it’s possible to see how fast and far life has changed is in the regional news sections of the newspapers, and the ‘Vows’ section of the New York Times, which each week features the stories behind several marriages. This is where it’s possible to see people grappling with making rituals meaningful for a new world: bringing different religious traditions together in one ceremony, different cultures, writing their own vows, finding their own sacred places to hold the ceremonies.
And so a globetrotting romance began. A London weekend. Then a safari in Zimbabwe. But there Mr. Foan came down with malaria and dengue fever. Ms. Heuisler treated him with cold compresses and homemade chicken soup.
He was hooked. “You can’t be any more yourself than when you are sick and completely in need of someone,” he said. “Whenever I opened my eyes, she would be there to give me a cup of tea.” In May 2004, Ms. Heuisler moved to Dili, East Timor, to administer grants for local nonprofit groups. In October, Mr. Foan, who was without an assignment, living in Washington and desperate to be reunited, crossed the globe to Dili.
During their courtship they climbed mountains to sip wine at sunset and went scuba diving. He contracted dysentery, she a staph infection. He got the flu, she suffered the stings of swarming bees. One moonlight night in November 2005 in Bali — their getaway from the stress of East Timor — Mr. Foan proposed near a lotus pond.“It sounds like a fairy tale,” Mr. Foan said.
But he insists that their relationship isn’t fueled by romance and danger. Rather, it’s the balance and stability they give each other against a backdrop of illnesses, the hardships of the people they are trying to help and the daily reality of Timorese uprisings. “He is on call for whatever I need,” Ms. Heuisler said, “and I know that is the way he will be for whatever we go through.”
On Sept. 23, they married near her hometown of Baltimore in Baldwin, Md., at the gardens of her godfather, Kurt Bluemel, a botanist and recently retired chairman of the American Horticultural Society. Mr. Bluemel created an arbor mounted with saffron orange and white Balinese prayer flags for the ceremony. At the arbor’s center was an altar of bamboo grass, pink begonias and interlocking stone circles. Ms. Heuisler’s childhood friend and University of Pennsylvania classmate, the Rev. Charles Howard, an Episcopal priest, performed a nondenominational ceremony.
Vows. New York Times. October 8, 2006
The new mythology has to be one that takes in the whole world, Joseph Campbell said. And it’s fluid, people are in motion: travellers, refugees, those sheltering from natural disasters. The rituals and traditions from various parts of the world are carried along, transferred, adapted to new places. Old stories are quoted, misremembered, given a new form: it’s what DJ Spooky says is happening in music:
Memory demands newness. You have to always update your archive. “Act global, think local.” This is what Dj-ing tells us in the era of the sample. The sample is an interrogation of the meaning we see in a song, of its emotional content lifted away like a shroud from a dead corpse, only to be refitted and placed on another body. That’s the deal — you renew the cloth by repurposing the fabric. That’s recycling. The world of sounds is a context buster. Local can just be the thought patterns bouncing around in your head at the moment or the radio that you’re able to get in a certain geographic area. It can also be stuff that you receive from the internet.
Rhythm Science. Paul D Miller. AKA DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid.
