inhalation, exhalation

I've been thinking a lot, this morning, about this quote from Harvard rare books librarian Matthew Battles: "The people who shelve the books in Widener [Harvard's library] talk about the library's breathing—at the start of the term, the stacks exhale books in great swirling clouds; at the end of the term, the library inhales, and the books fly back."

I've been thinking about this model—inhalation and exhalation as metaphor—and it occurred to me that this model also describes the way I think of the brain. Given that the brain is an information-processing organ, one can think of it as breathing in information. Given that the brain is also the seat of human creativity one can think of it as breathing information back out as well.

I take in a lot of information as part of my daily experience. Like most humans, I crave novelty, and I make good uses of the tools and resources that allow me to maximize the amount of novelty that I come across. I follow a couple of hundred people, organizations, and things on Twitter. I follow a couple of hundred blogs using Google Reader. I have my Pinboard network set up to dump directly into Evernote. As of this weekend I'm now also using a Chrome extension that allows me to shoot longform Web articles directly to my (new!) Kindle.

I say this partially to brag about being how fast and dense I am, but there are times when the whole process is disquieting. I worry, a little bit, about "data hoarding." (It is, after all, not healthy to inhale too deeply and too often.) I like to think that I'm not just mindlessly consuming stuff to add it to the pile of mindlessly consumed stuff. I tend to work processes on the stuff that I take in: I tag it, I index it, I aggregate it, I curate it, I rank it into lists. I hope that some of these activities begin to count as a type of exhaling. Not hoarding but sharing. (This gets complicated when we begin to think of what it means to "share" something in the digital realm—sharing a link is importantly not the same as sharing something finite, like, say, food—but that's maybe a topic for another time.)

Or maybe not hoarding but investing. A lot of the creative work I do involves writing—it's my major form of imaginative exhalation, to go back to the metaphor that I'm straining here. I like to think that all this data that rushes into me feeds the work that I do, provides the "Silent Partner" with important nourishment, turns it into something that someone may consider valuable. I hope it helps, rather than hinders. (If you want to see what a book looks like when the author is drenched in Too Much Data, you might enjoy this.)

This is also a piece about having (mostly) stopped blogging. If nothing else, this blog used to serve as a good place for synthesis and reflection, a place to pause and make sense of the information I'd taken in, to try to figure out where it was all pointing. I wish I were doing more writing here; I kinda miss it.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Keep going.

Labels: information, me, meta

Monday, August 06, 2012
11:51 AM
0 comments

what news looks like

Flickr user blprnt_van has been using Processing and the New York Times Article Search API to track the occurence of "organizations and personalities" over the course of the year. "Connections between these people & organizations are [then visualized as] lines," and the mind-blowing results are below:

Click on the image for a giant-sized, legible version.

Information visualization edges ever closer to graphically representing something that matches my most deeply-held conception of what God looks like.

Found via the Daily Clique, and indirectly through BLDGBLOG's delicious links.

Labels: design, information, information_visualization, spirituality

Tuesday, February 24, 2009
11:38 AM
1 comments

film club: the maltese falcon

Note: the following post contains some discussion of the resolution and closing scenes of the film.

So last week, when Film Club looked at It Happened One Night, I presented a pair of screenshots and did a quick little analysis of the power dynamic reflected between the man and the woman depicted therein. This week, we watched The Maltese Falcon (1941), and if you wanted to play the same game, you could... try doing a read on this image:

It doesn't take a degree in semiotics to figure out which one appears to be in charge here. And yet the gender politics of Falcon are more complicated than this image might initially suggest.

The woman who Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) is haranguing here is Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), and she's a prime example of that quintessential noir figure, the femme fatale. The question of whether the noir fatales are progressive is a thorny one, but one thing that can be said in the affirmative is that O'Shaughnessy certainly possesses a certain autonomy, with goals that are, for lack of a better word, self-directed. (Specifically, she's one of a number of people in search of a priceless figurine, the falcon of the title.)

Now, to be sure, there's a certain degree of self-directedness in last week's female lead, Ellie Andrews—the plot of It Happened One Night is set into motion by her active resistance of her father's wishes for her—but a lot of the "comedy" of that film actually involves the breaking-down of her will in a variety of humiliating and debasing ways. The Maltese Falcon also ultimately punishes O'Shaughnessy—she's shipped off to prison for her role in one of the film's murders—but it's hard to know, exactly, how to read that fact. If I were to read the film from a feminist perspective, I would argue that the film is built around the notion of masculine authority, and the presence of a sufficiently headstrong woman unsettles that authority—it is only once that "uncontrollable feminine" is safely contained that the film's equilibrium is restored, and the narrative can draw to a close.

It's a tempting read, and yet there's a way in which the film's ending seems more bittersweet, or even downright bleak, rather than triumphant. Part of this is complicated by the (improbable) romance that erupts between Spade and O'Shaughnessy:

...and part of it is complicated by the fact that the film and Spade both always seem to maintain a respect for this headstrong woman, even when she's at her most manipulative and dishonest. In fact, you could make the argument that the film respects her because she's manipulative and dishonest. (On more than one occasion, Spade catches her in some sort of lie, and he replies (ungrudgingly) "You're good.")

In order to really buy this as a read, however, one has to understand that, in the moral universe of The Maltese Falcon, the people with the greatest claim to authority are the people who are the most proficient in their ability to control and manipulate the truth. O'Shaughnessy lies, hedges, and omits key information throughout the entire film, but Spade himself does the same, and at least as frequently. Viewed through this lens, the film's narrative can be understood as being "about" various characters attempting to establish their version of the film's narrative as dominant. Half the fun as an audience member is attempting to keep on top of the ever-shifting narrative, which means managing an incessant flow of reversals, revisions, and reveals.

Spade and O'Shaughnessy, of course, are both experts here, as is Spade's "girl Friday," Effie Perine (Lee Patrick), another tough-headed female character held in high regard by the film. The process of watching them managing and responding to this flow of information is a delight—and we're listening as well as watching, given that so much of the information is deployed verbally, through dense, nearly impenetrably rapid patter. (This is a continuation, most likely, of the sound-enabled motion picture industry of this era being "drunk on speech"—and yet these characters also feel utterly contemporary in their way: they are, essentially, prototypes for the knowledge-workers and data-managers of our own current 21st century.)

Returning to the gender issue, however, it does have to be said that in the end Spade emerges as the one highest in this hierarchy—both Effie and Bridget, ultimately, are subordinated to his mastery (Effie is in Spade's employ, and Bridget's eventually loses control of the narrative and goes down in flames). Part of the reason that Spade maintains his enduring appeal as a character, of course, is because of his ability to think so effectively on his feet: to fast-talk his way through even the most dire circumstances until he works his way back into control. (Full disclosure: as a male viewer, it's hard for me not to want to be Spade, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only man who has had this experience.)

And yet our director, John Huston, makes this process of identification a little more complicated than it might be in the hands of a less-ambitious director. Specifically, the film is full of little hints that Spade is kind of a creepy guy. At one point he grabs Effie's wrist and squeezes it, unconsciously, until she has to protest "Sam—you're hurting me."

And the film's closing moments don't exactly show Sam as the most noble fellow, either. This is compounded by the fact that he delivers much of his final monologue with a glassy, faraway look in his eye that makes him look sinister, almost sociopathic:

In a way, what Huston is doing in this film is sort of the reverse of what Hitchcock does in Psycho (Film Club XXXIX). In Psycho, we're introduced to a person who is obviously creepy and later forced into unsettling identification with him; here in The Maltese Falcon we're introduced to a character who's easy to identify with and only as the film proceeds are we made to question just exactly what we've gotten ourselves into by doing so. Genius stuff.

For next week, we'll stick with Bogart, noir, and unstable narratives: we'll be looking at 1946's The Big Sleep, directed by Howard Hawks from a William Faulkner screenplay.

Labels: feminism, film club, information, media commentary, narrative

Saturday, November 29, 2008
9:46 PM
0 comments

information-rich environments

Via russell davies

Labels: city, information, videos

Wednesday, October 15, 2008
7:05 PM
1 comments

I brought Rudy Rucker's Seek!: Selected Nonfiction with me on my Milwaukee trip and, as I said over there in the sidebar, I found it a pretty good "geek vacation book": heady enough to be interesting, breezy enough to be fun.

At times, though, Rucker seems to fail to fully think through his arguments before setting them down on the page. This is most notable in the book's final section, "Art," where he makes a few attempts to talk about literature by viewing it through the lens of information theory or chaos theory. This might be a promising approach, if handled with intellectual rigor, and so it's especially disappointing to find the arguments here particularly flimsy.

For example:

"In [both paintings and novels], the information has a kind of fractal structure. I would define a fractal as something that has this property: when you look twice as hard at a fractal, you see three times as much. Language is fractal with words suggesting words suggesting words, while paintings are fractal with their details within details within details. A basic problem is that in either case only a limited amount of information is really being given. Fractal nature has an essentially infinite precision, but a novel or a painting is radically finite. ... The seeming reality of a novel or a painting is an artful construct that only pops into focus at a certain distance. It is only the cosmic fractal of real life that allows for endless zooming."

I think that the point that Rucker's making here is that the "reality" in a novel isn't truly fractal, that you can't immerse yourself in deeper and deeper layers of that world. You can't "endlessly zoom in" on it. Fair enough—but initially, when he's describing why he thinks of language as fractal in the first place, he says that the key piece are those "words suggesting words suggesting words." By this I take him to mean the chains of association and allusion that language triggers in the head of the reader: if this is in fact what he means then a novel is, essentially, infinite, by the way that it engages symbiotically with (fractal) human consciousness. The depth of the novel's world is almost irrelevant, what matters is the resonance and complexity of the triggered associations. One could argue that Finnegans Wake is the perfect example of a fractal novel and simultaneously argue that the book makes little or no effort to establish the "artful construct" of "seeming reality."

Then there's his re-working of information theory into an aesthetic philosophy:

"What is information? [Claude] Shannon measured information in 'bits.' If someone answers a single yes-or-no question, they are giving you one bit of information. Two yes/no questions are two bits. ... He estimated written English as carrying about seven bits per word, meaning that if a random word is excised from a text, you can usually guess it by asking seven yes-or-no questions. ... In a crap genre books, generated by a low-complexity intelligence with a very short runtime, the information per word is going to be low, maybe as low as three or four bits. In a high-complexity work the information per word will be higher...

"The point of all this is that a pattern's information level is a quantity that is absolute and not relative. The pattern can be a book, a record album, or a person's conversation. If I say something is boring, it's not just my cruelty speaking. It's objective fact. It may be that the book really is stupid and boring, as can be witnessed by the fact that the book has a very low information-theoretic complexity."

Tempting, but I don't agree that boring/interesting is really a question of mathematics (much less stupid/intelligent). Again the piece that seems to be missing is the element of human consciousness and the way that art interfaces with it.

"Boredom + attention = becoming interested" —John Cage

"[W]hat some see as a single moment repeating, others see as a nonrepeating series of similar moments." —Matthew Goulish

"We step and do not step into the same rivers, we are and are not." —Heraclitus

When we hear, say, a piece of music with a repeating motif, the second time we hear it is not the same as the first time we hear it. When dealing with an extremely repetitive form of music, such as a hypnotic drumbeat, a drone, or a raga, you can potentially say that the hundredth time you hear the motif is not the same as the first, or the ninety-ninth. The neat logic of information theory makes no allowance for the shifting perceptions of the receiver, and, by extension, neither does Rucker: this is an error. An information theorist might say that Cage's widely misunderstood "silent piano" piece 4'33 contains no information at all, but actually listening to 4'33 (which you can do right now, sitting right where you are) indicates that the piece is in fact teeming endlessly with information.

Given that Rucker is a mathematician, it makes sense that he would attempt to make this argument, but given that Rucker is also something of a mystic, who argues eloquently elsewhere in Seek! that the universe is suffused with consciousness and intelligence, it's disappointing to see him take an aesthetic stance that is so arid and lifeless. (It's worth noting that in a postscript he gives up on discussing a text's "algorithmic complexity" and instead moves to discussing the fuzzily-presented concept of its "logical depth," but, again, leaves consciousness filtered out of the equation.)

Labels: art, information, language

Monday, July 12, 2004
4:26 PM
0 comments

cosmopolis

Cosmopolis, the new Don DeLillo book, is something of a disappointment. The book's primary set-pieces—an anti-globalism protest, a hip-hop performer's funeral, a rave, and a Spencer Tunick-esque mass gathering of nudes—all feel slightly stale: there is nothing here as inventive as White Noise's Airborne Toxic Event or Most Photographed Barn In America; nothing here as accomplished as Underworld's "super-omniscient" Giants-Dodgers game.

That said, there are some interesting thematic threads woven throughout the book. Like DeLillo's last novel, The Body Artist, Cosmopolis permits the appearance of elements which are overtly fantastic. In this novel, the super-natural is embodied by two pieces of image-capturing technology (a surveillance system and a camera-watch), which are so sophisticated that they begin to display events that have not yet occurred.

These devices are the most dramatic symbol of one of the book's central thematic concerns: the predictive capabilities of technology. The protagonist, Eric Packer, is an asset manager who has made millions by accurately predicting the inherently unpredictable fluctuations of currencies, with the assistance of sophisticated information-gathering technologies. The book seems to suggest that as these technologies improve, they grow ever-closer to penetrating the veil of the future.

Thinking about this reminded me of something that ex-hacker Steve Steinberg mentioned over in the Boing Boing sideblog, which warrants quoting at length here:

"[T]o be a hacker in the late 1980s was to know something profound about the nature and degree of connectedness before everyone else ... today, an equally singular and premonitory view is coming into focus at a few of the edgier hedge funds on wall street.

[...] we have all heard that companies from Wal-Mart to Cheescake Factory rely on sophisticated data mining to run their business. Every customer is analyzed 43 different ways until They know what you will buy before even you do. Even ignoring the enormous gap between rhetoric and reality, these algorithms are at best myopic. Like the idealized model used in undergraduate physics -- no gravity, no friction -- these companies imagine their business in isolation.

But money flows through a network with thousands of significant nodes-- to partners, from customers, away from competitors. The airline industry has come the closest to this kind of holistic analysis, thanks to their penchant for collusion.

But right now the only people who really want to see how all the pieces fit together -- to datamine entire industries, economies -- are on wall street. Coincidently, the web has already made many businesses so transparent that an outsider can know almost as much as management.

Surely, with enough determination.. a lot of bandwidth, some fast computers... somebody will build the first detailed map.. a topography of money flows.. to see what's next."

Labels: book_commentary, capitalism, information, technology

Tuesday, September 09, 2003
12:09 PM
0 comments

"[Electronic data processing meant] that the collective knowledge bank would no longer be fed through routinized 'office' channels, but through entirely random and unregulated ones. This produced an n-fold multiplication of circulating data and a diminishment of the prestige of the quality of sources. The end result is a newly tolerated indeterminacy with regard to the quality of knowledge[.]"
—Sanford Kwinter & Daniela Fabricus, in Mutations

Elsewhere in Mutations, Kwinter and Fabricus refer to the concept of a "Truth-function," which they define as "the minimal assembly criteria necessary for an artifact to be held as a 'fact'".

Still elsewhere, they reference Herbert Simon, an Carnegie Mellon researcher in the fields of artificial intelligence, industrial management, cognitive psychology, and complex systems. Simon's work replaces the concept of "facts" with the concept of "acceptable functional propositions."

I'm also currently reading Peter Knight's analysis on the rhetoric of conspiracy, Conspiracy Culture, which spends some time exploring the way every "fact" pertaining to the Kennedy assassination has a haze of interpretive possibilities swirling around it.

All of this meditation on what constitutes a "fact" is causing me to reopen my aesthetics of misinformation files...

Labels: information

Tuesday, August 26, 2003
1:07 AM
0 comments

I'm currently reading Mutations, a sprawling, white-hot anthology on the contemporary city.

One of the prominent contributors to this book is Rem Koolhaas (and his students involved in the Harvard Design School's Project on the City) and the book, at least on initial glance, seems to be a towering sheaf of disorganized data, similar to Koolhaas' deliriously unassailable S, M, L, XL. There's definitely something appealing about trying to approach an enormously complex topic (be it the metropolis or the creative work and theoretical contexts of an individual) by essentially collating a vast supply of raw documentary material and allowing the reader to sift and select from it as they wish, in accord with their own purposes. (In some ways we can imagine that this is what a non-electronic hypermedia would look like.)

There is no good reason why this strategy need be the exclusive province of hip architecture / urbanism books. Indeed, I've been thinking a lot about what this strategy might mean for fiction, how it fits in to my ideas about information prose, what effects the use of such a strategy might have on narrative. Lots of notes have ensued.

(Note: close inspection will reveal that Mutations does, indeed, have a structure, albeit one flexible enough to accomodate bewildering variety: ten pages of statistics are followed by roughly two hundred pages of essays, which are followed by a series of photographic dossiers, which are followed by several massive hybrid-form projects from various groups and individuals, which are followed by an index of "urban rumors"...)

Linked before but relevant here: the Praystation Harddrive CD-R.

Labels: book_commentary, information, narrative

Monday, August 25, 2003
4:32 PM
0 comments

Yesterday I went to go see Minority Report, and I enjoyed it, although not without some reservations.

I found just about every escape that Tom Cruise pulls in the movie to be implausible, even by action-movie standards. (If you want details, check out the fake memo drafted by Jane over at Umami Tsunami (thanks, Judith)).

I also found that the film failed to put forth a coherent ideology about the future world it depicted. The film seems to almost function as a critique, but it always then seems to step back. The messages that the film communicates most strongly are "it's good for people to love one another," "it's good to love your children," and "killers are bad," none of which are especially provocative, and all of which are particularly, uh, Spielbergian. My concerns in this regard match up roughly with those put forth by the Chicago Reader's film critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum, in this lengthy, intelligent piece on the film.

Rosenbaum comments about the tendency of this film to cram the visual field with active details—he describes trying to concentrate on all the details as being akin to trying to concentrate on all three rings of a circus. This is something that this film shares in common with Attack of the Clones (which I also saw and enjoyed, although with a separate set of reservations), so I've been thinking a lot about the way that films are starting to do this. As an audience member, I share some of Rosenbaum's irritation—I hated the digital revamp of the initial three Star Wars movies, the way gags or gimmicks (or what Eisenstein would have called "attractions") were stuffed into spaces that formerly served as neutral background. (Rosenbaum traces this aesthetic back to Mad Magazine, which is interesting.)
But I wonder if these attractions are not being designed to appeal to people in the DVD / videotape market. These creators, notoriously forward-thinking, may be beginning to think about film not as something that unfolds in a temporal line but rather as something that can be broken into segments which can be independently accessed, frozen and inspected frame-by-frame if so desired. Think of the jokes in The Simpsons that go by faster than the eye can see. I would not be surprised if these were early peeks at the future of filmmaking.

I have to admit that the interfaces in Minority Report are a delight to look at. Alex Wright calls the film "interface porn" (and he also got his hands on Katherine Jones' original prototype sketches; thanks to BlackBeltJones for the link.)

Labels: information, media commentary, science_fiction

Monday, July 01, 2002
2:14 PM
0 comments

The person or persons behind the strange Process Engine interview Paul Ford, of FTrain.com, on the subject of fictional web narrators.

Related: who is Ana Skyfish?

Labels: information

Wednesday, May 15, 2002
6:25 PM
0 comments

An Umberto Eco article on the role of intellectuals in the information age.

I admire Eco a great deal, and some of his work has been deeply influential in the way I think about the world. But I found this article to be oddly disappointing, revealing a distinct lack of understanding about the way that information technologies such as the Web function in practice.

"With the Web, everyone is in the situation of having to filter information that is so vast, and so unsustainable, that if it isn't filtered it cannot be absorbed. It is filtered unsystematically, so what is the primary metaphysical risk of this business? That we'll end up with a civilization in which every person has his own system of filters, in other words where every person creates his own encyclopaedia. Now a society with five billion concurrent encyclopaedias is a society in which there is no more communication. ... We could end up with competing encyclopaedias, some of them completely wild."

A few points:

1) Evoking "five hundred billion encyclopedias" strikes me as a reductio ad absurdum argument, but I'll let that slide.

2) I'm not convinced that a world with some "wild" encyclopedias would be all that bad. Are the encyclopedias we have now truly so utterly free of ideological bias that they need no competition to keep them honest? For instance, a positive example of a "competing" text might be Exhibit A.

3) Most importantly, Eco's notion that working on your own particular set of filters precludes communication with others strikes me as ridiculous, and it completely overlooks the collaborative nature of the Web, which is exactly what has kept me working on the Web so consistently for these past four years. Collaboration, context and cross-reference are fundamental to the Web; they are literally built into the Web by virtue of hyperlink technology. Everyone who I've ever known to work on any kind of Web filter does so because they want to find other similar-minded people to communicate with: often these sorts of Web collaborations work spectacularly.

Someone actually uses the Web, and who thus seems closer to "getting" what it's all about is David Weinberger, of JOHO. From this recent entry in the JOHO weblog:

On the Web we join with others who share our passions, but we do so in our own unique voices. Sameness and difference, the ultimate contradiction. If the Web lets us resolve such a basic duality — which means embracing both sides fully and simultaneously — no wonder it matters so damn much.

Now, let me pull back from the dread disease: Ontological Overstatement. It's not as if we've never overcome this contradiction before. In fact, we resolve the duality every time we have a conversation with someone in the real world. The importance of the Web, in this regard, is that as a medium (because of its hyperlinked architecture) it enables the resolution of this duality on a scale we've never seen before.

That seems a lot more true to me than Eco's recationary apocalypticism.

Labels: information, internet

Friday, May 03, 2002
3:39 PM
0 comments

I've been thinking a lot lately about misinformation.

In particular, I've been thinking about misinformation as an aesthetic response to the "information revolution" of the 1990s. Information is now available on nearly any conceivable topic, no matter how obscure, and I don't think that I'm alone in noticing that the end result is a world that feels flattened out somehow.

For a long time now, artists have created new forms of meaning from the raw materials of their culture. I've noticed more and more that contemporary creative types have begun to appropriate the very rhetoric of information as a texture, and are using that texture to create pockets of "non-information," packets of data which make sense by the way that they cancel out useful meaning...

I see something like The Onion as a high-profile example of this trend, although no small percentage of the "meaning" of The Onion derives from its heavy reliance on more-or-less traditional sorts of gags.

Perhaps a better example would be the 100 Lies sequence, currently in progress over at Geegaw.

I have more examples. Stay tuned.

Labels: information

Thursday, April 04, 2002
9:49 PM
0 comments

various small fires

My computer problems seem momentarily solved, so I can return to posting.

Doing some research on photography recently, I was reminded of how much I like the photographic books of Ed Ruscha: books with titles like Thirty-Four Parking Lots or Various Small Fires. The photos in the books depict exactly what is indicated by the titles, in as artless a fashion as possible: raw documentation.

In a 1965 Artforum interview, Ruscha remarks:

"I think photography is dead as a fine art; its only place is in the commercial world, for technical or information purposes. Thus [Various Small Fires] is not a book to house a collection of art photographs—they are technical data like industrial photography."

Arcana Books has descriptions of some of Ruscha's books (as well as photos of some of the covers) on this page.

Labels: art, information, photography

Monday, January 14, 2002
3:15 PM
0 comments

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