Excursus on Expressionism and Realism

Specification of instrumental language is all that is needed to construct a machine and by oppostion to define the human. “ If what exactly stated can be done by a machine, the residue of the uniquely human becomes coextensive with the linguistic qualities that interfere with precise specification –ambiguity, metaphoric play, multiple encoding and allusive exchanges between one symbol system and another. The uniqueness of human behavior thus becomes assimilated to the ineffability of language” (Hayles 67). In principle, any machine can be built as long as you can specify what you want the machine to do. This means that as long as you are able to trace the set of steps needed for a certain apparatus to do an action, any robot can be built. The alternate wing of this robot/human ensemble is that anything that cannot be specified in terms of instrumental language, i.e. metaphor; poetry, sensations, feelings, sentiments, intuition, etc, belongs to the human realm. Here is the conundrum of trying to quantify language in order to make it applicable to industrial and commercial purposes such as advertising: only instrumental, unambiguous language can be quantified. I’m afraid that in the present technological and scientific stage, to quantify double meaning, irony, code switching, body language and gesture, tone of voice and eyesight expression is impractical and unviable.

Another questions open up when we take the opposites human/machine in linguistic terms to the field of art. If to be human is to be semantically unmeasurable, then art is that kind of expression that no machine, no matter how much sophisticated and advanced is, cannot do. Art is, in these terms, what only the fathomless of the human soul can express.

The default question, regarding art history and art theory is concerned with the validity of “expressionism” as a current, contemporary artistic trend. Expressionism in art today would connote the viewpoint of the struggle of the human oppressed by the machine. That was a fitting metaphor and reality of the Industrial Revolution; but it remain to be seen if the metaphor of the subjugating machine still holds and if the reality still exist in the present. Another thing is to find out what the routes of escape that would be expressionist artists today would seek. Since the routes of escape for late 19^th and 20^th Century artists were the primitive, the savage, the child and the madman; and these routes are either exhausted or they don’t represent anymore the promise of redemption they used to; wouldn’t be more appropriate to consider or explore new routes of escape such as virtual worlds, second-lives, social media, internet sex and others? I leave that question open. We need to take into account  that the human and the machine have a major, unbridgeable difference: the body and its capacity for sexual reproduction and sexual pleasure; as well as other sorts of bodily pleasures. If you escape, don’t forget to return to the human.

Here is the paradox of trying to escape post-industrial society through technology: perhaps you are not reaching the human but getting away from her/him. But this is something that remains to be seen, and the answer may lie in Gregory Bateson's question: is the cane part of the blind man? " 'We are our epistemology' is Gregory's formulation"  (Hayles 78). Expressionism in art could only make sense in terms of a dichotomy of man/machine, but not in a conception of machine as an extension of man. Choose sides and you would see if you can legitimately do expressionism or not. By choosing sides you would also fall in ether the forces of conservatism or of change, and these boundaries are not so clear-cut in today’s environment. 

Would a robot ever be able to experience the sublime? Would an artificial Intelligence or AI ever be capable of aesthetic contemplation? If the answer is no then you have to give to expressionism the merit of trying to rescue the human from the claws of modernity. The same holds true, although to a lesser degree, for Romanticism and for all those artistic manifestations that try to capture the sublime.

Realism is like the alternate wing of a modern art that was never able to make the bird fly. Realism in painting is a mock feather; one that it has been made in the name of authenticity but is composed of the same elements of a scarecrow. I’m talking about the type of photorealism and hyperrealism of late 20^th and early 21^st Centuries; not about the kind of social program realism of a Courbet or a Corot.

In his seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Walter Benjamin enumerates the elements that add to a work of art’s “aura”: originality, history and tradition, authenticity and uniqueness, and the authority that comes from these features. Benjamin extols the virtues of reproducibility and the impact that technical reproduction and above all photography and film have on society. With the advent of photography,  as Benjamin says, for the first time in history the work of art is taken out of its conventional context, i.e. museum, private collection or gallery, and is made available for consumption by the broad masses. Cinema is experienced as photography in motion with the impact of a “physical shock effect” (Benjamin 525).

“It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function. In other words, the unique value of the authentic work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty” (Benjamin 522).   

Beautiful representations are most what you see in galleries today thanks to a cult of beauty grounded on commercial needs. Aesthetic contemplation is the kookiest form of consumption of late capitalism, together with all that it brings to a consumer in terms of social status and such. Benjamin saw in photography and film a redemption of the negative connotations of the original work of art. What Benjamin didn’t take into account is that the photographic product, once had reached the printing galleys and gets distributed by mass media or shown in the gallery system, acquires all the connotations that Benjamin was criticizing in the authority of the original work of art. Once is consumed by the laymen in the newspaper, or by the expert in the museum, the photographic image has acquired the use value of a totem in the ritual dimension of the art world or the mass media.

Benjamin compares the consumption of cinema to that of architecture and in opposition to painting, “ A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters this work of art the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. This is most obvious with regard to buildings. Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction” (Ibid 525).  This may hold true for public architecture, which is consumed through the several ways in which we enjoy ourselves while outing. But in the case of private architecture or the places we rent or purchase and live in, the most fitting explanation of how architecture is consumed may be found in Heidegger’s concept of architecture as dwelling.

For Heidegger, architecture is an existential condition that is located in the fourfold of the earth, sky, the divinity and the body. “But ‘on the earth’ already means ‘under the sky’. Both of these also means ‘remaining before the divinities’ and includes ‘a belonging to men’s being with one another’. By a primal oneness the four –earth and sky, divinities and mortals, being together in one” (Heidegger 327). While for Benjamin architecture is consumed by habit since “buildings has been man’s companion since primeval times (…) Buildings are appropriated by a two-fold manner: by use and by perception --or rather by touch and by sight(…) For the tasks which faces the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are gradually mastered by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation” (Benjamin 526).

Habit is the devil’s way of building non-individuals since cinema’s consumption is the way of shaping perception and public opinion. By the same token, public architecture is also a tool of propaganda as much as cinema is. “ The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of the visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert” (Italics are mine). And also “ Thus, for contemporary man, the representation of reality by the film is incomparable more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanic equipment, an aspect of realty which is free of all equipment.” (Benjamin 523). (The hell what did he smoked?)

I’m more inclined to side with Theodore Adorno when he, talking about what he saw at Neuebabelsber, says that “ rather, reality is everywhere constructed with an infantile mimetism and then ‘photographed“ (Adorno 529). Everything that filmmakers today do is to give representation to their inner fantasies. Perhaps the high popularity of Internet home made video is due to that they are more close to reality than professional filmmaking.

Going back to the monkey artists, those who are experts at mimetic painting, they come in several kinds or groups. First, the ones who make their paintings themselves and struggle to surpass photography in depiction of detail. This is a tendency that started since the advent of photography in the 19^th Century when academic painters were at pains competing with photography in the representation of reality. Of course photography won the race fast and furiously but the tendency persisted throughout the century reaching its climax during the 1970’s hyperrealist trend. These painters have the highest place and esteem among the monkey painters.

Behind them comes those who can achieve the same effects than the original hyperrealists but by hiring a crew of assistants to do their work for them. Most of the time the assistant or assistants who do the actual work are more respected and appreciated by their peers and connoisseurs than the public figure and name under which their work is cloaked. Such is the case as when a famous artist with a hefty bank account has a show a venerated public institution and shows a work of art that all the art world insiders know it was not painted by him but by one of his assistants, who is appreciated and admired but to whom credit is not given.

In the third group of the monkey painters come the lowest of the rank. If the ones in the first group could be compared to silver back gorillas, and the ones in the second group to funky chimpanzees, those in the third group are more like macaques.  They strive to paint like they are in the 18^th Century. They lower window shades, shut down electric lights and light up candle bars in their studios. They crave for regressing back to the times of monarchy and the comfort of copying silky plaids, hairy furs, shiny jewelry and humongous hats. Their creations are made of dead, yellow, varnished flesh –longing to achieve the effects of time. Their paintings populated by cadavers craving to come back to life by eating the effects of photography. Projections and grids are the primary tools of the trade and compositions are only reproductions of theatrically assembled arrangements. They all try to achieve all the connotations of the original work of art and its aura by devouring the fleas out of photography and pooping on the achievements of modern art. All in the name of money-making and public reception.

We have to give to them that not all is their fault,  because the ground seed of the good public reception of photorealism and hyperrealism is to be found in the excesses that made expressionism the new academicism of the 20^th Century.

What we have in the first decade of the 21^st Century is a situation in which photography and even film, through mass media consumption and expert digestion has acquired all the negative connotations that the original work of art had in Benjamin’s eyes. On the other hand, painting fools itself by using photography while sequestering it from its promiscuous nature. Benjamin’s hope for the revolutionary capabilities of photography and the printed image are shattered by this use of photography as a fish hook for the bourgeoisie. Photography, and film, has lost its revolutionary quality by kneeling to the altar of political ritual, its use value being politics. Photography based painting doesn’t even get close to being political but only serves as an idol in the religion of beauty. While painting in general is caught in the politics of the machine and the human and that is something of which I only can hint to as what evolution has in storage for us.

Works Cited:

Adorno, Theodor. Letter to Benjamin. Harrison, Charles & Wood, Paul. Art in Theory. 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Malden, MA. Blackwell Publishing, 2006.

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Harrison, Charles & Wood, Paul. Art in Theory. 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Malden, MA. Blackwell Publishing, 2006.

Hayles, Katherine N. How We Became Posthuman. The U. of Chicago P. 1999

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Heidegger, Martin. Building and Dwelling.

  

Macy Conference (Work in Progress)

Cybernetics sees behavior at the cellular level as systems of input/output, feedback and homeostasis in a process of reaching equilibrium as the ultimate goal.

In her book “How we Became Post-Humans”, N. Katherine Hayles outlines the arguments deployed in the Macy conferences on Cybernetics “ Broadly speaking, the arguments were deployed along three fronts. The first was concerned with the construction of information as a theoretical entity, the second, with the construction of (human) neural structures so that they were seen as flows of information, the third, with the construction of artifacts that translated information flows into observable operations, thereby making the flows “real” (Hayles 50).

“… at the first major Macy conference John Van Neumann and Norbert Wiener led the way by making clear that the important entity in the man-machine equation was information, not energy (…) Wiener, emphasizing the movement from energy to information, made the point explicitly: ‘The fundamental idea is the message… and the fundamental element of the message is the decision’. Decisions are important not because they produce material goods but because they produce information. Control information, and power follows (…) Wiener thought of information as representing a choice. More specifically, it represents a choice of one message from among a range of possible messages “ (Hayles 52).

Hayles continues “ We are now in a position to understand the deeper implications of information as it was theorized by Wiener and Shannon. Note that the theory is formulated entirely without reference to what information means. Only the probabilities of message elements enter into the equations. Why divorce information from meaning? Shannon and Wiener wanted information to have a stable value as it moved from one context to another. If it was tied to meaning, it would potentially have to change values every time it was embedded in a new context, because context affects meaning” (Hayles 53). Human psychology, including qualities such as consciousness and volition, could be interpreted in terms of information processes. Shannon and Wiener didn’t take into account connotative systems of language but stayed at the denotative level for practical reasons. Their self-imposed limitations were soon challenged by Alex Bavelas first and then by Donald MacKay.

"Donald MacKay, a British researcher, was trying to formulate in information theory that would take meaning into account” (Hayles 54). Mackay distinguished between “selective” information and “structural” information. “Structural information indicates how selective information is to be understood; it is a message about how to interpret a message – that is, meta-communication” (Ibid 55). In order words, MacKay raised the need of differentiating among symbols and signs, and the complexities of subjective, human communication, which includes “code switching” and cultural codes and conventions.

“MacKay theory had as its generative distinction the difference in the state of the receiver’s mind before and after the message arrived. In his model, information was not opposed to change, it was change” (Hayles 63).

MacKay has switched the emphasis from what information is to what information  do; thus opening the door to reflexivity, a word that does not name anything in particular but an interpretative approach to subjective processes. If homeostasis based cybernetics reduce information to quantifiable data and binary codes, reflexivity based cybernetics opens up the filed to psychology. A tension arose between “reified models and embodied subjectivity” (Hayles 57), between the application of logical form and structure, abstract modeling and representation of information processes and embodied information or a model of information that includes that richness of the human sensorium, perception, representation, memory, trauma, obsession, biases and other elements of particular, individual subjectivity. In the words of Hans-Lukas Teuber, “Only the psychologist can give the neurophysiologist information on what ‘ the most relevant aspects of the incipient structures [in sensory functions] may be” (Hayles 59).

Warren McCulloch tried to arrive at a compromise of both the formal-abstract and the embodied-concrete tendencies. “The model constructing the human in this terms was the McCulloch-Pitts neuron” (Hayles 57); which sought to describe binary-codes processing at the neural level. The input-output, goal-seeking behavior gets complicated a step further when McCulloch introduced the concepts of excitatory and inhibitory stimulus. “In his view, when a neuron receives an input related to a sensory stimulus, it firing is a direct consequence of something that happened in the external world” (Hayles 59). Needles to say, we are already aware of the push for simplification in the McCulloch-Pitts neuron model since is not taking into account internal phenomena such as the one described above and which are an internal part of the human psyche. External phenomena and stimuli is always received in a spectrum of meanings by different subjects. This model doesn’t take into account the un-common, the un-conventional and the strange. But McCulloch keeps drawing his model back to the external world by tying internal phenomena to neural loops or the reverberation of past events into memory. McCulloch called “signals” to the firings caused by external events, while “signs” were caused by history or memory reverberations. Human psyche is just an accumulation of past sensory experiences that can influence perception; the immediate conceptual outcome is that quantifying needs not go away. McCulloch is riding a tightrope between logical propositions or the abstract, theoretical construction of the human, a smack on the blueprint of the Platonic backhand; and the embodied actuality or the complexities, ineffability and unlimited wealth of the human being.

McCulloch compare pattern-recognition circuits at the neural level and at the machine-robot level to prove that they are the same. “These circuits are diagrams that have been abstracted from two different kinds of embodiments, neural tissues for the human and vacuum tubes or silicon chips for the robot” (Hayles 61).

If we compare Shannon’s from MacKay’s model in terms of political philosophy we would see that homeostasis construct of Shannon’s imply a sort of conservatism made apparent by the rearrangement of the system to a previous equilibrium position, in other words, any change deviation from the norm should be corrected (Ibid 63).

For MacKay information is change in itself since it implies a former state being altered or changed by the arrived message.

Regarding goal-seeking behavior, for Shannon’s “the goal was a pre-existing state toward which the mechanism would move by making a series of distinctions between correct and incorrect choices. The goal was stable and the mechanism would achieve stability when it reached the goal (Ibid 63-64). Information is thus constructed in terms of signal/noise. Anything that is an obstacle to achieving the goal is noise; any message helping to achieve it is a signal. For McKay “the goal was not a fixed point but was a changing series of values that varied with context” (Ibid 64). Looking at these models you could trace parallelisms between forms of governments, political philosophies and ideologies.

Another sets of implications show up when we apply Shannon’s signal/noise opposites to psychology. Since the goal of the individual is to function, be productive and happy in society, any noise affecting these goals can be interpreted in terms of neurotic symptoms or McCulloch’s neural reverberations, as represented by Shannon’s rat caught in a reflexive loop. Reflexivity or unlimited neural reverberations, and its paralyzing effects, is neurosis.

 

John Stroud’s “analysis of an operator sandwiched between a radar-tracking device on one side and an anti-aircraft gun on the other (is used) to construct the human as an input/output device” (Hayles 68). This is the image of the “man-in-the-middle”. A most fitting image for an utilitarian concept of the individual and its role in the collective. Not that the man-in-the-middle is in itself a negative rendition of humanity caught in the social fabric but it could be if it doesn’t take into account the individual’s will and disposition. Without this individual will and disposition unhappiness and slavery and all sort of human rights violations is brought into play. This is the case when someone is sacrificed against his/her will to serve the interest of the majority.

Polemics aroused between Stroud and Freemon-Smith about the exclusion of the observer in the man-in-the-middle equation. Frank Freemon-Smith objected, “You cannot possibly. Dr. Stroud, eliminate the human being” (Ibid 68). For Stroud, the man-in the middle is converted, “from and open-ended system into a portable instrument set” (Hayles 68). Now, if you look into Stanley Milgram’s “Obedience to Authority” experiment; and if you look into Zimbardo’s “Stanford Prison” experiment, you would see that individuals may consciously and willingly withdraw moral and affective barriers in order to become what Stroud call an “input/output device”. The man-in-the-middle is a two faced Janus individual that exists between his/her en-codification and his/her own subjectivity. In order to function effectively his/her subjectivity needs to be suppressed and there are means to achieve so by using appeals to authority, personal gain or simply unbounded realization and pleasure.

(To continue…)

Dwelling and Property

Dwelling in Heidegger's sense: Is where you pernoctate, live, function, think. Your body is the house of the universe. The only universe you will ever know because you have created it and constructed bit by bit with your life experiences, remembrances, traumatic events, frustrations and limitations. The silver cage of morality. The platinum door of ethics. The leash of desire. The whip of achievement. The mask of success and social status.

Your body is your property; something that you have the natural right to defend, to care for, to nurture and share at will with other bodies. Everything man made that you have gathered, hunt, built or made is an extension of your body: your property. This property you also have the duty and natural inclination to defend, care and share, or ex-change at will. That one who tries to take it from you by force is violating your integrity in all its manifestations, material and spiritual.

The right to hold onto your property: your body and its extensions, is inalienable and sovereign. It is the base of respect for your individuality, your uniqueness in the world. It is also the base of respect among human beings and what they share with other creatures since they also have rights. It is the base of society, harmony, collaboration, coordinated action, collective living and civil evolution.

Attempts to eliminate your rights to the place you dwell destroys humanity and society. It destroys you. That's the reason individual rights are so important.

Frick Out ( At the Frick Collection)

I was first disappointed by the Medieval art salon and the detestable Rococo murals that you see when you enter the galleries; " a miniature Met museum", I thought. But when you get in what seems to be the living hall, and at one side of the fireplace, you encounter -a third kind encounter- hitting upon your face, this magnificent Holbein, a portrait of no other than Thomas More, the author of "Utopia".

A magnificent "St Jerome" by El Greco. A wonderful sea scape by Whistler, greyish, rythmical waves and boats disappearing in the atmosphere; economy of means, scratched surface to produce planes and shapes. taking off rather than adding layers, the way only a Velazquez could do. The "Mortlake Terrace" by Willian Turmer. A wonderful Corot landscape.

The best self-portrait of Rembrandt you will ever see, so many centuries ahead of his time, expressionistic in style, magestically and absolutey constructed and structured by planes of color, rich in visual texture, abyssal depth and those eyes, so acute and piercing your soul, mirror of his intelligent, chrystaline soul, reflection of psi energy or whatever you want to call it. If you ever had doubts that the soul cannot exist after death, just look at those eyes.

J. Craig Venter

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y92cleVXns&feature=feedu

Signs

I took this pics with a Motorola Droidx while jogging in Central Park. Pain in the ligaments that holds the fibula and femur together made me stop. The surrounding light and haziness became a visual expression of my interior state.

Sign is used here in the McCullochian sense. I will extend later in the McCulloch-Pitts neuron but suffice to say that McCulloch call "signals" information bits that come from the outside or external world; while "signs" are caused by "past history" (Hayles 59) or interior events. 

This images fuse the external and the internal, showing the source of information: pain, localized in the context, organism and landscape of the body.  Hopefully the fibula and the femur make love and everything between them goes back to harmony so that they can run in peace again.

                                                         

                                                                        Sign in the technological body

 

Bing Experiences

After receiving visual stimuli through the eye and the retina, the brain makes sense of information by detecting shape, color and motion, producing a visual gestalt. The front and the back parts of the brain, which includes the hypothalamus, pre-frontal cortex and cortex, produces the “bing” experience which is nothing else but consciousness.

However there other experiences of consciousness which does not include the front and back parts of the brain in a complete fashion but only certain, localized parts. This is what happens when, for example, one is looking at pure areas of color. This type of activity affects only certain parts of the brain associated with emotion, affection, and else dopamine driven primitive regions of the brain.

So-called irrational, emotional driven behavior that shapes the personality and character of certain romantic types and individuals is mastered by this local steering centers, opening up an unsuspected set of possibilities for the local, regarding thoughts, actions and behavior of the whole.

A Different Bombing Doctrine.

Targeting of civilians used to be the Strategic Doctrine of WWII. Civilians were seen as the backbone of arms and logistic supply, therefore in order to win a war it was logical and necessary to destroy the base of the war efforts. Entire cities and whole populations were annihilated in Eastern and Central Europe by the Germans, the Soviets and the Allied forces; Hiroshima and Nagasaki were erased from the face of earth by the American forces.

Today, support of the civilian population is essential to win a war. Individuals and civil society have achieved powers of communication and coordination of action that were unthinkable 50 years ago. The killing of civilians triggers a chain reaction that covers not only the territorial space of a nation but crosses international borders as well. With the coming of Social Networking, killing, torturing and imprisoning  civilians become an anathema of sound strategic policy.

It is because of this that every effort of rogue and totalitarian regimes to suffocate revolutions, such as the Spring Arab uprisings, by assassination, imprisonment and torture are bound to fail. The more a rogue government kills the faster the social reaction  multiply, triggering the cutting off of economic, logistical and moral support: the same parameters that strategic military policy of WWII sought to destroy. Military regimes such as Syria's and Libya's are stuck in mid 20th Century military strategy and ideology, ignorant of the new conditions of mass communication and group coordination.

The following is an example of sound military policy in war. In it, targeting of specific subjects is controlled and limited in such a way that no house in  the surroundings gets affected. Obviously this is one example and not always things goes as well.  This one stands as a model a contemporary correct military thinking and acting.

A Mind - Body- Machine Odyssey

"2001. A Space Odyssey", by Stanley Kubrick. Scene 1. The Dawn of Man

Scarcity. Fight for natural resources or the lack of. Hominids versus quadrupeds.

A leopard killing a primate. The stronger wins.

They have to be together in groups so that they share sentinel tasks and feel stronger, compensating for their individual weakness.

But in the group, individuals emerge and fight each other.

Different groups or hordes fight among themselves for control of natural resources and territory, in this case for access to water: War

Night time: Fear. Magic. Paranoia.

The stronger element stays separated from the group. Is an antisocial.

At dawn; aesthetic perception of nature and beauty.

Technology allow to kill a stronger animal. Meat consumption provoke biological changes. Brain capacity expands as well as physical strength.

More food means a lower rate of child mortality; thus increase in population.

The one who posses technology wins the war for natural resources

The conquest of inner nature and outer nature leads to the conquest of the universe.


It may be that there is a relation between fear of darkness and intelligence. The stronger the fear of natural forces in the shape of carnivorous beasts, the more intense the quest to use reason to overcome nature and physical weakness.

Paranoia is technically different from reality testing in that the foundation of paranoid fears and suspicions are irrational or fantastic, nevertheless there is a core truth of primal fear and of survival instinct in paranoia, developed by intelligence against an hostile environment.

A hostile environment creates alertness and suspicion. Paranoia feeds intelligence and back. The more intelligence the more paranoia and those who have both are more fit for survival than those who lack it. Take this to the political realm and is no mere coincidence that there are high levels of paranoia in subjects born and raised in totalitarian regimes.

Not only there is a relation between paranoia and intelligence; there is also a relation between paranoia and creativity. Since paranoia is an activity of the imagination is easy for the person who imagine things to endow them with a material body. The one who has the capacity to cook unknown fears also has the capacity to create the characters that populate them, the tools that they use and the objects that they surround themselves with. History is full of creative paranoid and anti-social types that see danger everywhere, who are prone to isolation and alienation.

Reason symbolically appears in the form of a squarish monolith, a tri-dimensional geometrical form, an abstraction that is the product of the mind, non-existent in nature.

Awe and worship appears as a product of reason. God is a rational creation. (Feel free to doubt that statement; I sometimes doubt it too).

Reason gives way to the perception of certain objects as tools. Tools are an extension of the body and compensate for the body's weakness. Technology is power; power over nature as well as destructive power. But technology is not born of the mere use of a stick or a stone as a weapon. Technology is born when man by rational thinking is capable of tying the polished dart to the stick, making an arrow. As I read somewhere, the first real technological genius of civilization was not the one who invented the wheel, but the one that added the other three.

The lack of natural resources and control over it generates war. There is nothing intrinsically wrong in war since war generates technology and its never ending perfecting it. He who has developed the best technological weapon wins. It is not fortuitous that the link between the military, the academic and the industrial, on what is known as the industrial-military complex or the "iron triangle", has built the greatest military superpower in the world. The military is behind every major technological and scientific breakthrough in the US, from DARPA and the ARPANET giving birth to the Internet, to the ENIAC, Whirlwind and SAGE which were the precursors of the modern personal computer.

" Whirlwind and SAGE where responsible for a vast array of major technological advances. The very long list includes the following inventions:

magnetic core memory

video displays

light guns

the first effective algebraic computer language

graphic display techniques

simulation techniques

synchronous parallel logic (digits transmitted simultaneously rather than serially, through the computer)

analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion techniques

digital transmission over telephone lines

duplexing

multiprocessing

networks (automatic data exchange among different computers)

Readers unfamiliar with computer technology may not appreciate the extreme importance of these developments to the history of computing. Suffice to say that much-evolved versions of all of them remain in use today. Some, such as networking and graphic display. comprise the very backbone of modern computing" (Edwards 99-100).


The right political climate, which is the one that uses freedom as it ideological foundation, propitiate individual creation and entrepreneurship. " The rationalist who desire to submit everything to human reason is thus subjected to a real dilemma. The use of reason aims at control and predictability. But the process of the advance of reason rest in freedom and the unpredictability of human action. Those who extol the powers of human reason usually see only one side of that interaction of human thought and conduct in which reason is at the same time used and shaped. They do not see that, for advance to take place, the social process from which the growth of reason emerges must remain free from its control" (Hayek 38), It is not mere coincidence that winners are symbolic of the type of individual that is valued more in American society, they push forward innovation in the race for conquest.

The lack of peril and and possibility of annihilation results in a freeze of scientific and technological development, with the paradoxical correlation that enemy entities and enemy states are needed for survival and growth. In concrte terms, authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, and the ideological-political enemies of American democracy are needed and bound to remain as long as they represent a real danger. Once the danger they pose to the system ceased to be real, they tend to disappear out of irrelevance. That's how the USRR ceased to exist and the Castro regime will too soon due to lack of credibilty as an real enemy.

Conquest lies at the heart of every major political formation. The Greeks new this better than anyone else. Thucydides wrote about it in his account of The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians. He said that "The Athenians add that they are not the first to yield to the temptation of empire, but that it has always been established for the weaker to be kept down by the stronger, and that no one with a chance to acquire something by force has ever yet been dissuaded by the argument from justice" (Bolotin 13). This line of argument is before social contract theories, is pre-modern but expres the truth of humankind facing natural forces. In this context conquest means survival. Thus there are no moral qualms for the Greeks to accept war and to value the warrior Achilles as the greatest social type.

There is nothing shameful about war. What is shameful is that at this stage in human history people and governments are still waging war among themselves. With the actual development of science and technology food scarcity and necessity should have been a thing of the past. Either a group of people and its culture will prevail among the others and unify the world population in a world government or people will rationally achieve an agreement of social harmony, a sort of global social contract that would lift humankind above the state of nature in which still live. When one of the two solutions happens man will be in condition of allocating every bit of human intelligence and creativity, and the tools of science and technology to the conquer of the cosmos and the universe. Extraterrestrial civilizations will be discovered and new wars would start.

These new wars would propel humankind into a new scientific and technological revolution, one that has already started and that will culminate with the fusion of the human and the machine or with the overcoming of the body by the machine, what Hans Moravec calls the next genetic takeover of the process of evolution that started about 100 million years ago. "Today billions of years later, another change is under way in how information passes from generation to generation. Humans evolved form organisms defined almost totally by their organic genes. We now rely additionally on a vast and rapidly growing corpus of cultural information generated and stored outside our genes -in our nervous system, libraries and most recently computers. Our culture still depends utterly on biological human beings, but which passing years our machines will become knowledgeable enough to handle their own maintenance, reproduction and self-improvement without help. When this happen the new genetic takeover will be complete. Our culture then will be able to evolve independently of human biology and its limitations, passing instead directly from generation to generation of ever more capable intelligent machinery" (Moravec 4).

" We might conceive of a civilization coming to a stand still not because the possibilities of further growth has been exhausted, but because men has so completely succeeded in subjecting all his actions and his immediate surroundings to his existing state of knowledge that there would be no occasion for
new knowledge to appear" (Hayek 38).

Humans will find extraterrestrial intelligence when they are ready; after they solve their differences and become sufficiently technologically savvy and powerful to survive an encounter of the third kind. And if humans don't solve their religious, economic and political conflicts they will perish when that encounter occurs. A hostile environment found in other galaxies or planets, and everything that comes with it, will be beneficial to a further development of human intelligence, which at that time will be fused with the machine and not dependent on human bodies. Adverse and hostile environments enforce survival skills, increasing alertness and predictability. The need to stay a step ahead of terror mobilize and expands intelligence and creativity.

Machines are not the enemy and they are not going to kill humanity. Machines are an extension of ourselves, they are ourselves at another stage of evolution. Robotic, cyborg and computer development will liberate man from his/her biological limitations.

Paul Krugman: Space Aliens Invasion Will Fix U.S. Economy

Works Cited:

Edward, Paul N. The Closed Worlds: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. The MIT P.

Hayek, Friedrich A. The Constitution of Liberty. The U of Chicago P.

David Bolotin. Thucydides. Strauss, Leo and Cropsey, Joseph. History of Political Philosophy. Third Ed. U of Chicago P.

Moravec, Hans. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. Harvard UP.

Birth of Technology

First Prosthetic Device

From the Conquest of Nature

To the Conquest of the Universe

L.E.S. is the New East Village

Neighborhoods change faces as times goes by. The East Village used to be full of punks and bohemians. Tattoo parlors and punks where all around St Marks, weird hairs and colors were fun to watch, Today the same neighborhood has a different face, the product of international gentrification, and by this I mean international money taking over American money.

If you want to find young white Americans in Manhattan you have to go to the Lower East Side, you can find groups of young Asians there too, but more at the corner of what used to be the kitchen and restaurant equipment supply area. Strolling around the inside areas you would find the hipsters of American descent.

Hispanics in LES has been displaced by the power of mainstream white American money; local gentrification has made people from other parts of the country displace American minorities in the city. In the meantime American majorities has been displaced by money from other parts of the world where is produced in great quantities but that lack the cultural sophistication and spirit of tolerance of a city like NY. So the East Village became China Town and the Lower East Side has become the New East Village; or, sort of.

"Lost Horizons"

"Lost Horizons"

The Time Machine

H.G. Wells. "The Time Machine". The 1960 Metro-Goldwin Meyer production, directed by George Pal, I watched it as a child, producing a strong impression. I have come time and again back to it. Unforgettable Weena and the time traveler, played by Yvette Mimieux and Rod Taylor. I was scared of Morlocks and never imagined that as an adult I was going to witness the first existential manifestations of Eloism, so brilliantly outlined by N. Katherine Hayles "How we Became PostHuman."








The Time Traveler says " What make humans different from animals is the capacity for self-sacrifice". Not According to this:

Or this:

Joao Silva is Walking Again

I've been thinking for a long time to write an apology of some works that I made some time ago criticizing the manipulation of photogenic events such as war, violence, famine and genocide.

The Bang-Bang Club and the figures of Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovich, Ken Oosterbroek and Joao-Silva epitomize the ambivalent relation between authentic photojournalism, media consciousness, awareness of events and consumerist manipulation by the media.

I cannot hide my joy after seeing this video of Joao Silva walking again thanks to technology and science. Joao Silva's strength of character has made me re-evaluate my perception of the Bang-Bang Club. He is casting them in a different light, showing them as authentic personalities, real motherf...ers committed to what the do best and willing to sacrifice everything for what they believe in; life, legs, anything.

As you may know Joao Silva lost both legs in October of 2010 to a land mine detonation while doing photographic coverage in Kandahar, Afghanistan. He was visited by First Lady Michelle Obama on Memorial Day.

God Bless Joao.

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/standing-when-the-first-lady-pays-a-call/?scp=1&sq=joao%20silva%20+michelle%20Obama&st=cse


http://blogs.elpais.com/aguas-internacionales/2011/06/joao-silva-empieza-a-caminar.html

Kevin Carter