Word count

Writing in a supine position is a new experience for me. Usually I sit on the couch, with the laptop on, well,  my laptop. The rhythm of the keys moving at a frenetic pace, full of fits and starts. Deep thuds combined with the high clicking sound of the keyboard as my fingers find their way to the keys. In these private moments, traces of thoughts are formed in bursts of fits, starts, reconsideration and editorial randomness. Language as jazz-improvised in a concert of introspection. Judging by the number of readers most of the time, I'm the only one in attendance. At least I have a good seat.

I wish I understood my drive to write. Maybe it's because actual conversation is so difficult for me. Taking words by the throat and throwing them to the wind. Caution and hesitation are my stock in trade in social circles. One can not edit and undo that which has been uttered into the ether. Or as my friend Howard says "you can't un-ring a bell."

No, what I overhear in most circles is random words. Social conventions of useless words tossed around with little regard to the permanence of the moment. Chatter for the sake of being heard. I find it exhausting and not worth the effort. Words for me are the sacred link to the heart of a person. If a conversation is merely for social convention, then what's the point?

In my life, I have a very small circle of friends that I could sit with and spin tangles of words over countless hours. I could count all of those folks on two hands and one foot. It's not because of the words spoken between us, but because of the love I feel when effortless words emanate, intertwine and float into the late hours. Sometimes wine is involved. Throwing caution to the wind, a perilous journey of interconnected thoughts that meander a drunken path is tread. No road, no plan, no point other than sharing in the revelry of the moment. Chords of laughter fill the air making the music of life that matters. 

There are often periods in each of our lives where we are stranded in the desert. It's the hope of cool water in arid stretches of nothingness that pushes us forward. Pressing against the heat of the sun, we walk great distances hoping that something will soothe the parched places that the heat has withered.  

I miss the sound of the voices that I hold dear. Email, text and IM'ing can never replace a warm smile and a hearty laugh. When I get a message from a friend, I have so much to say, that I put off answering until I have the time to give a sincere answer. Days pass, then weeks, and before you know it, the opportunity has passed. Months go by, then the embarrassment of having not answered takes over. 

So what does one do? Wait for the perfect moment for the perfect gathering? Or, do you wade into shallow end of the conversational pool with a few short, but not as heart felt, words? Is it the thought that counts or the count of the words? I am coming to the conclusion that a few here and there is better than few and far between. 

I guess it all goes back to the old saw of "How do you spell love? T-I-M-E." So a little time, a little love and a few heartfelt words are better than none at all. I think maybe the better way to frame an approach can be modeled on the words of Mother Teresa. "Not all of us can do great things. But all of us can do small things with great love." Well chosen words to live by. If she had felt they had neither the gravitas, nor the word count, we would have been none the wiser, and that would have been the greater shame. 

A question of existence within the realm of the circuit

Since 1989, as an artist, I have worked in the medium of film, video and digital animation. Like most, I started with a Super 8mm camera, and whatever other video acquisition format I could gain access to. In my professional life, I went on to produce television commercials, ads, and work in a host of other media. At the end of all of the projects, there was the detritus of creation that could be held in evidence of the creation process: film masters, rough cuts on tape, edit notes, etc. 

In my personal work, and as a father of 4, I could never really justify the cost of purchasing equipment to shoot with. Around 2002, I found myself without a camera to acquire footage, but the need to create was present. That's when I discovered the Prelinger Collection at archive.org. 

If you've never been to the site, it's a vast collection of ephemeral films that have entered into the public domain. For me, it was a resource to draw on to create my personal pieces. After several years, at a showing of one of my pieces in a museum, someone asked "how would an artist would go about selling a video piece?" I had an epiphany: the work I had created with these digital video files, didn't really exist in the true sense. There was nothing tangible that I could lay my hands on to prove their existence - they only existed as streams of data. There was a DVD, but that wasn't the piece. There were the edit and render files, on a hard drive, but again, they were digital files. No film. No slugs of celluloid. Just winding bits of data that were interpreted by devices that flickered images on a screen at 29.97 frames per second. 

With traditional art, you hand the buyer a canvas or a hunk of sculpted rock - something that physically occupied space. Each piece is a unique object that "exists." With digital video, I could duplicate my work as long as the mechanical means existed for me to do so. Each exactly like the original. With the exception of creation date and time, original and duplicate were indistinguishable. The sum of their parts, etherial and intangible.  

To that point, the frailty of my work's existence was further compounded that year when I had a hard drive crash. Several years of work ceased to exist in an instant when a bad data block rendered the drive useless and my work forever destroyed. It was a surreal moment. Most of my work was gone. Outside of a few duplicated video tapes and some film festival programs, I could never prove that the body of work had ever existed. 

The question of existence is one thing to consider, but the truth of existence crosses from the realm of tangibility and into the realm of logic's lesser known cousin: ethics. That may seem like a broad jump - going from video art to the question of truth in existence, but bear with me.

Recently the Web Ecology Project invited 3 teams of programmers to create a social bot that could infiltrate a social network. By the end of the experiment, one bot, JamesMTitus had infiltrated a group of cat lovers, and in the end had gained 109 followers. It did so, not by creating conversations, but by emulating human conversational patterns. It created the illusion of a persona by observation, emulation and persistence of postings.

The question that arises for me is this: were the conversations that JamesMTitus a part of any less real because it was participated in by a social bot? Was it any more real because a human participated? To the human participant(s) in the conversational stream, they were no more or less real than the other snippets of conversation in the Twitter stream. To those who elected to follow JamesMTitus, the conversations were perceived as being very real. The fact that the bot's posts consisted of phrases like "Right on bro", and "Oh so true" is disappointing. Not that the bots failed to be less than eloquent, but that humans were so accepting of less than eloquent utterances that sprang from an algorithm derived from our own less than eloquent utterances in the digital void in the first place.

Artificial Intelligence futurist, Ray Kerzweil, points to a future point in the evolution of biology and technology where there will be a convergence of technology and humanity in a junction Kerzweil refers to as the Transcendent Singularity. He predicts that by 2045, computers will be able to fool humans into thinking they are humans as set forth in the terms of the Turing Test . In a greater future, he sees the melding of the organic with the mechanical into a new life form. 

While the thought of mechanically regenerative organic structures such as cells is enticing, and the thought of an eternal existence in turbocharged bodies that make us more human than human, can seem promising, the simple fact is that any complex system devised by humanity, including computers is subject to failure. In the event of a loss of power, will our super human minds dream of electric sheep? Or, will we move into a world of pre-programmed dreams that allow us to receive continual stimulation and data input as our bodies recharge - if they will indeed need recharging? What will happen if there is a true catastrophic system failure? Will our very existence be erased like my video art projects over a decade ago?

Ultimately, the  question of the melding of organic and artificial intelligence is: at what point is our perception of reality considered as the truth of existence?  Will it be a well fabricated illusion that we accept as simply as  cat lovers on Twitter were hoodwinked with simple phrases like "Right on bro", and "Oh so true?" Will that become the new standard of the truth of existence that will serve as the benchmark of reality? Will an algorithm of our behavioral patterns fool us into accepting an illusion as the truth? Much like watching a movie in 3D and losing our grasp for a moment and falling into the illusion that has been created? Reaching that point will be a matter of our willing participation and complicity with the illusion presented as the truth of existence. The scary part is will we know the difference?

@JamesMTitus: Oh so true.

The shattering of the inner myth

It's interesting writing this blog. What you don't hear is the voice in my head that speaks the words in a deep rich tone. I lob strange, oddly shaped words at it. And, despite my best efforts to make it trip and fall over those long, tangled polysyllabic strings, it does a victory dance in my head and says "is that all you've got?" I write the words for that rich voice-the voice I will never have.

I laugh when I hear my own voice on video or in audio recordings. It's this slightly slow, slightly effeminate voice. It sounds as if someone reduced the playback speed but raised the pitch about 3/4 of an octave. Don't get me wrong, it has taken me years to grow to accept my voice in all its shrill, slow paced glory-but it doesn't mean I like it. It's just reality. Whether I like it or not.

Truth is, we are all constantly at odds with the image we carry of ourselves. The ideal that we create in regard to the person we want to be verses the reality of who we are. The person we want to project rather than facing the disappointing reality of who we are, or what we have become.

A friend of mine recently shared an insight that I found interesting. He said "when we look in the mirror, the things we find unsettling are the things we see that are in conflict with the mental image of ourselves that we are comparing ourselves against." Reality comes into conflict with the myth we have created, and we fight with our psyches to keep the reality of the truth of who we really are at bay.

It's that inward driven fear of facing the truth of the reality of who we truly are that propels us forward to face the day. The clothes we wear. The things we buy. The inward struggle of the things we want instead of what we actually need. In truth, we need very little. A larger part of the world survives on significantly less than we do. In fact almost half the global population lives on less than $2.50 US per day. 80% of the world's people live on less than $10.00 US per day. Those are astounding numbers.

When I look at what I have, what I want and compare those things to what I really need it is staggering. Looking at the disparity that exists between those diametrically opposed motives is disappointing. It's at this point I must face the ugly truth of who I actually am. It's easy to wave facts and figures and say "look at how bad everyone else is", but that deep, rich voice in my head refuses to say the words that my ego is flinging its way. The deeper truth of the reality is that when I look at the hard truth of data, I'm just as guilty and self absorbed as everyone else. Looking into the high powered mirror of perception that I aim elsewhere now falls squarely and disappointingly on me.

You know, when I sit down to write these entries, I don't know where these words will lead me. The voice I write for takes me down these meandering paths, lacing the way in circuitous streams of words that lead to ribbons of letters that flicker across the screen in the dark of night. Sometimes that stream of words will take me close to the edge of my own inner darkness that comes in conflict with the carefully crafted illusion I have painted for myself. I guess when we skim closely to the true inner voice, we run the risk of finding the boogie man that is really the truth of who we are.

Symbiosis in the realm of the circuit

In my delving into the deeper world of technology, artificial intelligence (AI) and the world of human interaction, I am coming to some conclusions. First, humans are inherently flawed in their thinking process. Emotions, love, dreams-all of these things make us hopelessly and beautifully flawed. Second, computers and technology are endlessly evolving in a flawed linear path that makes their inability to think outside an algorithm beautifully flawed as well.

A year ago, 03, 2010, Wired Magazine published a short piece by Clive Thompson, "Clive Thomson on the Cyborg Advantage" in which he puts forth that the concept of cyborgs already exist. But first we need to start with what exactly is a cyborg. According to the dictionary on my mac it is:

cyborg |ˈsīˌbôrg|

noun

a fictional or hypothetical person whose physical abilities are extended beyond normal human limitations by mechanical elements built into the body.

ORIGIN 1960s: blend of cyber- and organism .

To go further, the origin of cyber comes from cybernetics:

cybernetics |ˌsībərˈnetiks|

plural noun [treated as sing. ]

the science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things.

So a cybernetic organism (cyborg) is any system-whether organic, or mechanical, or both-that uses the science of communication. As Mr. Thompson asserted, we are already exhibiting cyborg traits in our use of technology to further advance our tasks to completion. Proof in point, as I was writing this post, I went to Google to search for my terms, validate my references and pull together the pieces I needed. I integrated my actions with my computer's to yield a better end result. What is missing from most assertions in the area of artificial intelligence is that we, humans are necessary to set this process in motion. I initiated this piece, not my computer. I knew what I needed to search for in order to assemble the necessary pieces to support my original idea. Had I not acted on the process, the computer would have sat idle.

The beauty of the flawed human thought process is in its ability to "create" that which rests outside of an algorithm. Look at the Netflix Prize winner . While Netflix offered a prize of $1M US, to any one who could who could create a predictive algorithm that would improve automated, movie recommendations accuracy by >10%, it took more than 7,000 teams and individuals over 3 years to create an algorithm using a database of over 1,000,000 movies to show an improvement in predictive modeling that yielded results based on a specified subset of data by a grand total of 10.06%. As a contrast, using Google, IMDB and an understanding of a person, we can get closer to >50% accuracy of predicting a movie a person will like over their having taken a blind guess. We could also flip a coin, but that's not the point. ( I should note here, I do not know the accuracy of correct prediction of the Netfilx algorithm either before or after the 10.06% improvement. Nor, do I have statistical data supporting general accuracy, so work with me here.)

The point is, until a computer recognizes a problem that needs solving, as well as having an understanding of abstract concepts like frustration or irony, it is outside the ability of technology to create the parameters that establish a framework to create the problem to which a dataset can be applied to reach a conclusion that resolves the original issue. Recognizing a problem through observation, creating the framework of the problem and then solving that same problem. That's true intelligence-artificial or organic.

While we look to such milestones as the day a machine passes the vaunted "Turin Test" , and takes home the $100K US Loebner Prize , that will only be the beginning. By the way, the current money is riding on 2029 as being the pivotal year for meeting the Turin Test milestone.

No, what will be the true turning point isn't the ability to fool a judge in to believing a computer is giving human answers, but for intelligent rationalization and observation to arrive at a conclusion. For instance, being able to observe and understand that someone you know well is having a good or a bad day. Sympathy, empathy and understanding. The ability to "read between the lines". For now, the best we can hope for in the foreseeable future is a blended alliance or process that combines the best of human instinct combined with computational analytics. As Garry Kasparov put it, "a weak human with a machine can be better than a strong human with a machine if the weak human has a better process."

A few words about Steve Wilson.

Sometime the measure of a presence is realized in absence. Take a footprint left in the sand. The weight, mass and trajectory of a person can be measured by observing the details left in the wake of their having walked, ran or danced there. Evidence can found not in what is no longer there, but by the traces that remain.

Monday afternoon, I received word that my friend and colleague, Steve Wilson had been admitted to the ICU that preceding weekend. That same Monday evening, he passed away. Steve was never one to belabor the point in social situations. He was short on fanfare, but long on concern and caring. I don't think I had ever really registered this until now.

Years ago, while attending college, Steve came to Myrtle Beach, SC. He took a summer job as a waiter, and never left. And while he never finished that college degree, he always amazed me with his depth of knowledge about art, advertising, typography and design. His work was meticulous, deliberate and precise. So was Steve.

He thought long and hard before he spoke. His conversation was deliberate and focused. He was always serious. Until you made him laugh. In those great moments he let his guard down and laughed, it always reminded me of the truly sincere and thoughtful man that he was.

I've struggled to pay tribute to Steve. Not because there aren't sincere feelings for him, but because Steve never liked a fuss being made about him. He was always quietly working. Be it a on a design, or, for one of the many charitable causes he was so deeply involved in, he worked in the background-not for the reward of praise, but from the reward that came from doing his best. Doing that which is right.

Judging from the sense of loss that has radiated from the coast of South Carolina, to North Carolina, Virginia, California and all the way to Upstate New York, the measure of Steve's life has been measured in the absence he has left on the world. For all of us who knew him, we take comfort in residing in the traces of that life that still remains within our hearts. Thanks Steve for spending time with us.