In Anthropology, the concepts of the sacred and profane are used to show how cultures would take specific aspects of life which they deemed more meaningful and separate them from the mundane tasks of everyday life. Sacred rituals and artifacts were ascribed a symbolic level not attributable to profane tasks and artifacts. In the physical world, museums have functioned as a sacred space for culture, presenting a curated set of artifacts which constitute a version of cultural memory, apart from the outside. The Google Cultural Institute is a new meta-interface providing a digital version of the sacred space for culture, delineated from Google’s profane web search.  

When we talk about “Nighthawks” by Edward Hopper, what are we actually referring to? On the most basic level, it refers to the original, physical painting itself. Moving up a level, it can also refer to the original painting and all the physical copies, or replications, made of the original. Moving up yet another level, it can refer to photographic representations of the painting–since the painting is so distinct, and we can, upon seeing it, recognize it as “Nighthawks.” Moving up even further, photographic representations of the painting (or, most likely, of copies of the painting) uploaded into the digital space constitute yet another interface for the original painting. When you search for “Nighthawks” on Google Images, you get thousands of results, including a wide selection of photographic representations of the painting, as well as iterations that range from re-interpretation to parody.

The former has similar “likeness” to the original and can be immediately recognized as “Nighthawks.” We tend to think of this as merely being the thing that it is representing–if you come across it on Google Images, you will probably refer to it merely as “Nighthawks” (not “a digital representation of a photograph of a copy of…” etc). The latter, on the other hand, may have some similar elements to the original painting, but also alters other elements. Even though it is not an exact replica or representation of the original painting, we still understand it as related, in some way, to “Nighthawks.” This is because it belongs to the cultural category of “Nighthawks,” in that it references and assumes an understanding of the artifact in question. The artistic, recognizable attributes are the same as the original Hopper painting (and its many representations), even though other key elements are changed. These similar attributes are what allow us to understand it as being an iteration belonging to this particular cultural category.

The order in which we look at these representations is important as well in determining their meaning. In this way, how paintings are organized on a wall in a museum becomes another process of recursive modification. As you your eyes pan from one painting to the next, the meanings of each painting changes by each preceding image. This same process is observable in Google’s search interface, when you search for a painting you get all the images that have resulted to similar searches through Google’s PageRank. When you search for “Nighthawks” you get a replica of Edward Hopper’s painting, but you also get parodies of it. These parodies change the meaning of the painting because they denote “Nighthawks”’ cultural significance, without context as to what made it significant, nor where it stands in the artist’s canon. Other Edward Hopper works exist in the same cultural category as paintings related to “Nighthawks”, but they change the meaning of “Nighthawks” by expanding on the themes that the artist was exploring, rather than marking “Nighthawks” as important in and of itself.

Parodies of Nighthawks:

Themes of Nighthawks:

Think of the different ways in which you would conceptualize “Nighthawks” after viewing each block of images. The meta-interface in which you view them will be the same, Google’s search engine, but the meanings elicited by each viewing will be very different. Seeing both give a more elaborate view of artistic output, and the many realms it can penetrate in our cultural consciousness. Google Cultural Institute cannot replace Museums as a way to experience art, but it can offer a substantially different context for looking at art. One that fulfills the more research oriented aspects of what the computer system can do, from it’s early conception as the “Difference Engine” to Vannevar Bush and Alan Kay’s work to where we are now in the mediated present.  

References:

Durkheim, Emile. 1915. “Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.”

Irvine, Martin. 2016. “From Samuel Morse to the Google Art Project: Metamedia, and Art Interfaces.”

Irvine, Martin. 2016. “André Malraux, La Musée Imaginaire (The Museum Idea) and Interfaces to Art.”

Irvine, Martin. 2016. “The Museum and Artworks as Interfaces: Metamedia Interfaces from Velázquez to the Google Art Project“

National Gallery of Art, Background on Samuel Morse’s painting, The Gallery of the Louvre.

Proctor, Nancy. 2011. “The Google Art Project.” Curator: The Museum Journal, March 2.

Peirce’s triadic model enables a better understanding of communication as more than just sender and receiver. There are endless signs that can be used to communicate meaning, and when we fix them to an artifact we extend cognition. When we started to use digital mediums as the space to express ourselves we treated them as we had other spaces, and Otto’s notebook (from Clark’s example) became Otto’s computer system. However, a notebook would never refresh to show new information, or link the information you want to other information you might be interested in. With Otto’s computer system, it’s all about association, building webs of interest, from one idea. Otto might search for directions to the MOMA, then save those directions, then his computer prompts him to look at other museums, he saves those directions too. If Otto remembers that his goal is to get to the MOMA he’ll be fine, but if he builds his associative trail too far, he might forget where he was going.

This endless search for new signs, creates information overload, and it’s a real problem right now. There’s a palpable, sometimes dark energy out there, that I think a lot of people are feeling. It’s at its most powerful on the internet, where the sheer volume of information out there to be consumed is swallowing discourse. Not too long ago we had a fixed set of information, you’d get your daily paper and you’d be limited to the facts on it. Now, we still represent this information in the same way, but it’s no longer fixed. Wegner differs from Turing/Von Neumann in his assertion that there is greater richness to computation, as evidenced that machines can’t handle the passage of time during the act of computation. We have this same problem where as we are trying to digest new information, and we can’t account for what’s developing.

Possibly one of the issues in bridging legacy media like the newspaper to a digital medium is that we’re trying to pour old wine into new bottles. There’s a space that needs to be allocated to communicate news, science, and culture, but maybe that space needs to be represented differently. These sites as they are designed now do not reflect the way they are being consumed, which is minute to minute, second by second. Murray makes the point that there is a better option, for instance GUI helped to design a better desktop, and not by creating a layout that looks like a physical desk. We might need to change the mediums on which we receive information, otherwise we may be bogged looking at one story and seeing it propped on the back of another, on the back of another, on the back of another, and we’ll be searching without understanding. Only it won’t be turtles all the way down, it will be turtles made of bits.

A particularly interesting quote from these readings is found in Bolter and Grusin’s piece on remediation: “In addressing our culture’s contradictory imperatives for immediacy and hypermediacy, this film demonstrates what we call a double logic of remediation. Our culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation: ideally, it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying them” (Bolter and Grusin).

This is a fascinating concept, and even more relevant today as we accelerate towards a world that is, in a sense, at the same time both media-ful and media-less. Not only are different mediums combined (and “remediated”) in novel ways—text, video, audio, imagery, etc, and the new forms that emerge from their combinations—but they are also becoming even more a part of our reality. They are no longer seen as mediating forces for and to the world, but exist as forces for and to the world. They are both everywhere and nowhere. They are not merely tools we use to express, capture, or understand something else, they are also the something else. They are ubiquitous yet invisible. This is the double logic of remediation: we want to access the “unmediated” meaning being represented “behind” the medium (the “object,” in Peircean terms), without the “mediation” in between us and the object. What this means is we get an explosion of media, while at the same time try to limit any evidence that media exists.

Alan Kay discussed the new power that the DynaBook (and computers in general) could have on our education. His view on technology as a commodity was that the DynaBook could be given away for free, and only it’s content would be sold. Today we see the exact opposite, as our systems come with a hefty price, but are pre-loaded with free software. It’s the software that enables remediation: we can represent endlessly, convert one message into another, and represent that conversion as a unique message. However, what we can not do is properly denote the link in this trail of representation. For instance, to make a GIF is to take a sequence from a recording out of context, and loop it, thus repurposing the old sequence with a new meaning. If you do not recognize the context of the GIF, you cannot comprehend the full message. A small tweak in a GIF could enable a user to click on it bringing them back to the full sequence or source material. We have the capabilities to do this in research where we mark our cognitive associations with citations, so anyone reading our work can access the papers which influenced us. This type of linkage would be more difficult as it relates to music sampling, you can’t click on a soundwave, and digital streaming services do not show producer credits. Ultimately, it will be interesting to see if new media built for short viewing, will be able to credit sources, as original content becomes increasingly repurposed and devalued.

Alan Kay, A Personal Computer for Children of all Ages. Palo Alto: Xerox PARC, 1972.

Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media.

Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000.

Vannevar Bush, As We May Think. Atlantic, July, 1945.

It would be very easy to say that there is a lot to unpack from these readings. So many ideas espoused in these papers exist today in modern computing, and while things did not progress exactly like these papers predicted (our computer systems are much more compact than a memex), they are still pretty incredible to read. For me it was Bush’s concept of “associated indexing”  that the memex would allow that provided the “wow” moment.

When Bush discusses the “associated trail” I automatically thought of Zotero and RefWorks, where we can save our sources as we conduct research. He foresees that lawyers, doctors, attorneys, will all have their own trail, correlated to their specific expertise. Could he have imagined that all of their information would exist communally on the internet? That Douglas Englebart’s patent is not only known to patent attorneys, but to anyone who searches for it on Google.

The constraints of other media are limited to our ability to search with them, a physical book we have to flip through the pages we want, a painting requires a trip to a museum. With a tablet or computer system our only limits are what we can cognize and how much electricity we have. I type in any book section I want and it comes up, ditto any painting, and they aren’t saved on microfilm, but exist digitally. These are cognitive artifacts that exist within a cognitive artifact. Artifacts which we can blend together.  This was one of my takeaways from Conery piece, even if he did not intend it this way: that we need to think of computing as more than code, more than programming, but as thinking. As researchers, using the right databases to extract the exact information we need, is actually a form of computing. We create an associative trail as we think, and with every new bit we save, we extend our memory.

One small thing that I keep thinking about as it applies to design thinking,  is what if Xerox PARC hadn’t shared it’s work with aspiring entrepreneurs. We know that Apple basically took Englebart’s GUI system and ran with it straight to the bank, and they did so with a closed system. Englebart’s GUI and mouse made computers accessible, but they could have helped popularized an open system. If Apple hadn’t been the first to reach a critical mass, maybe we would all be hobbyists and adept with the more technical aspects of our computers. Englebart, Bush, and Licklider, predicted (and worked on) some of the most amazing developments of the 20th/21st century, but could they have seen the Cubs winning the World Series? I’m not so sure.

Bush, Vannevar. 1945. “As We May Think.” The Atlantic.

Conery, John. 2010.  “Computation Is Symbol Manipulation.” The Computer Journal, 55, no. 7

This is my third attempt to get myself to learn a programming language. The first time I tried it was through Harvard’s edX Computer Science Course, but as I was already enrolled in 5 other classes I couldn’t really get into it. The next time was an Introductory Programming course taught by the head of Geneseo’s Computing and Information technology department, but I had senior-itis and the course was geared towards Physics majors, so again it didn’t take. I hope the third time’s the charm, I really like Code Academy and it’s helpful that I can structure the lessons myself. While I worked my way through the lessons I really kept thinking about one feature of linguistics and how it relates to coding: recursion.

The term has popped up before as the key feature of language that enables the production of a discrete infinity of sentence possibilities.  We cycle through our lexicon and combine words and syntax structure we know, but the recombinations are always unique. In programming it allows us to call back functions we’ve already used and apply them to new concepts. On the micro-level this allows us to create things like the ‘pyg latin generator’ in Code Academy’s python tutorial. We create the function that can translate a word into pig latin and then we can call it back to put any word we want in it. I can’t really comprehend the type of code big data companies must be writing, but I can imagine how instrumental recursion must be to them. Possible (and simplistic) example: every time you publish a Yelp review of a cafe, their code takes all of the other reviews given to that cafe and adds yours to the average, and the same type of process would happen for every review you post at any other cafe making it easy for them to assign aggregate scores to businesses. Ultimately, if we did not have recursion we would not be able to automate code, or at least our pattern matching would be far less efficient. However, despite all the praise I’ve heaped on recursion, I do have an issue with the term itself. We don’t  only use it to bring back old code, we always add something new to it. Otherwise, there would be no reason to go back in the first place.

Unrelated points:

• Model Checking: Wing’s explanation of model checking as a system we can use across disciplines and professions was very interesting. When she explained it with the ATM metaphor I felt like I really understood it. Machines have two inputs, one being the hardware finite state (the physical ATM) and the software or temporal logic property (being able to get my money). Bugs in the system itself (money doesn’t come out) are the counter examples. However, I feel like her use of the ‘counter example’ doesn’t cover a wide enough range of  externalities related to the system. Model checking, in my understanding of it, wouldn’t account for how the ATM has affected the way we carry (less) paper money or a robber stealing your money at an ATM. They aren’t flaws in the model, but they wouldn’t exist without it.
• This is more of a public statement: I f anyone has made it to the end of this post, I’m going to try and code for an hour every other day so I can finally learn a programming language. If you see me around ask me if I’ve been keeping up with Python and if I haven’t feel free to hit me.

51 years ago four young,intrepid, mop-headed boys went into a recording studio and played “Ticket to Ride.” To be able to perform this track they had to first write it, a process in which they came together and each extended their creative, musical ideas into song form. Each of them had distinct cognitive abilities and talents, which, when brought together in the group, interacted in order to develop the song as we know it. John Lennon’s songbook functions in the same way Otto’s notebook does. He could probably play the song from memory, but having musical notes written out and standardized enabled there to be future reproductions. Anyone with the skills (linguistic competency) to read the notes and play the music could look at the notes and play the song, but no reproduction would ever sound the same. Of course, most people want to hear it from the source, and recording allows the extension of the performance into the future an infinite amount of times. In effect, listening to the recording allows you to time travel to Abbey Road studios and meet The Beatles.

The music itself conforms to the structure we think of in a pop song in terms of duration, instrumentation, key signature, tempo, chord progression, etc. They took the signifiers we know to be pop music from a long history of other intersubjective accessible meanings and generates a new iteration of it. We recognize “Ticket to Ride” as its own distinct, identifiable song, but understand it within the context of pop music forms. This allows their musical ideas, brought together in the form of a song, to be distributed in a cultural language that fans of the form will understand.

Today you would not be able to experience the Beatles music through the original lineup performing it to you. We rely on reproductions, whether that be other musicians re-interpreting it, or recordings on vinyl, cassette, digital, etc. In active externalism your environment drives your cognitive processes. If we wanted to go and purchase a Beatles album, we would go to a record store but we are limited by what they sell. If we go to a digital store, we can buy any Beatles album (assuming they have the rights). The digital musical library offloads these physical recordings into the digital sphere. In other words, a press of a record and an mp3 have the same affordance, they play the same tune, but how we interact with them as external cognitive artifacts are completely different. To play the Beatles on a vinyl record is to be limited to how they sequenced their music, hitting shuffle in a library we can listen to their entire archive instantaneously.

This whole process began with social cognition—one of us hummed “Ticket to Ride,” and, because of our shared repertoire of sign and symbol systems, the other could recognize it, even though it was a recreation of one distinct melody. As far as the lyrics go, we assumed the meaning of the song to be literally about a train ticket, but apparently Lennon and McCartney can’t even agree on the meaning.

I didn’t come up with that title  it’s from an album and it has nothing to do with this post (but it is cool, and random, and I’m writing about entropy).

Entropy may have been Von Neumann’s joking way of connecting concepts in thermodynamics to information, but when extrapolated to semiotics it’s system of informer – informee – informant creates a model that is Peircean in it’s application. If I understand this concept as it relates to information, the more structured your communication there is a small chance of it’s misinterpretation, whereas a much a message with more entropy (randomness) has a larger chance of being misinterpreted. The random information adds noise to our message, and we somehow need to parse out what is accurate.

I want to move on to Inforgs, a Philip K. Dick-esque term for how individuals are becoming interconnected informational organisms. I would argue that we have always been this way, but it wasn’t until discourse moved online that we could comment in real-time and with such rapidity. With our creation of online profiles on major social networking sites we have created the ability to create two separate personas: online and offline. Although code-switching in Hall’s use is usually applied to linguistics (bilingual speakers mixing the high language and low language) it also helps explain online identities.

When we upload new pictures or share content, we deem what information is suitable as an avatar for our natural selves. However, something that is not touched on, is our ability to create a completely fake persona, enter weird twitter, where personas are built from cultural references. Their is also an identity that we do not get to build for ourselves, this is the ITentity. I once studied the use of RFID’s in school ID cards. School’s in large districts stopped tracking in-class attendance and instead relied on the derivative data from the chip to see if the students were really on school grounds. Through our online interactions, we leave a constant trail of metadata and derivative data behind us, I will be interested in studying the models for how this information is used (and it’s limits).

Hall, Stuart. “Encoding, Decoding.” In The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During, 507-17. London; New York: Routledge, 1993.

Martin Irvine, “Introduction to the Technical Theory of Information

Luciano Floridi, Information, Chapters 1-4. PDF of excerpts.

We are still working out whether language is the model or the main modeling system for other forms of meaning making (Irvine). While we attempt to work this out, we can use theories of language and see how they apply in other symbolic genres. While looking at Jackendoff’s model of logical directionality of language perception I wanted to test out how it would work if applied to sight.

When we hear something we first analyze the sound (phonology), then the words in the sound (lexicon) and the structure of those words (syntax), enabling us to parse what they mean so we can think about them. When we see something, for instance a flag, what is the order in which we uncover it’s meaning? While flags often carry with them ideas of distinct nationality, most are not particularly visually idiosyncratic. Exhibit A, the French Flag:

The first thing we might process would be the flags spatial size. If we did not have this cognitive possess this cognitive ability, we would not be able to distinguish the flag from any of the other images in front of us, and would not make it to the next step of processing. Following Jackendoff’s rules, we simultaneously process the shape and color of the flag. If we could comprehend the French flags color, but not the shapes within it, we might be fooled into thinking we were looking at a Russian flag:

If we could comprehend the French flags shape, but not its proper color we might believe we are looking at the Belgian flag:

Flags exist dialogically like everything else, and the tri-color vertical design could pay homage to the country its second most popular language is derived from. The last step would be to put all of this information together and evaluate it based on context. If an image identical to the French flag was displayed in an art gallery and given the name Composition X it could be seen as a really lazy attempt at De Stijl, rather than a key component of French national identity.

Of course there are other processes that need to be in consideration. A flag can exist physically in ways that words cannot, while they are also unable to convey the depth of meaning that words can. A large French flag made out of cotton may inspire more reverence then a pixelated flag. Why do certain colors convey meaning? A feeling of “red” is a qualisign that means anger, feeling “blue” could indicate sadness. Tying it back to flags rather crudely, do French and Russian exclaim they feel the “red, white, and blue” when they feel patriotic?

References:

Martin Irvine, Selections from: Semiotics, Symbolic Cognition, and Technology: A Reader of Key Texts

Ray Jackendoff, Foundations of Language, selections on the “Parallel Architecture” model of language as a combinatorial system. Chap. 5.5, pp. 123-128; Chap. 7, pp. 196-200.

Semiotic Elements and Classes of Signs (Wikipedia)

Whoa. Siri has its work cut out for it.

If someone asked me what a language is, I would probably start by telling them what language is not, as Pinker does. It is not thought; it is a way of expressing thought. As we learn more about connections between language and other forms of expressing thought (i.e. multimedia, film) this should hold true. When we think about the rules of language, for instance, lexical categories (finite) and their combinatorial nature (infinite), I assume we can apply them for other forms of expression. In music there are only so many notes you can play on any given instrument, but there are endless possibilities with which you can play those notes in a song. I haven’t gone further than basic googling, but it seems that childhood musical development is concurrent (or they at least have some overlap) to language development. I wonder if music is also structure dependent like language.

When Jackendoff writes “the little star besides the big star”, his spatial structure model seems intuitively clear. Although when he draws out the physical structure of a big star and a little star, I wonder if drawing two celebrities of unequal fame would also suffice. There are parts of all of the other structures that make sense, but as a whole the new terminology makes them more difficult. I never really thought before about the way that plural suffixes have three different types of sounds (s,z,uhz), or how syllables have a nuclei which makes up the bulk of the word. I still have a hard time following how he maps the different structures out, but the structure itself provides a useful framework.

I’ve only taken one class on linguistics and it was the last requirement I needed for my Anthropology minor. It focused on social uses of language, although we started off by going over syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. We also discussed things that I assume we won’t be using here like haptics (use of touch in communication) and proxemics (location in communication), although their implementation can alter our perception of meaning. What’s interesting is that although we spent a lot of class time going over the ebonics debate and how descriptivist’s would agree that it is sophisticated, but we never went over Chomsky. His ideas seem to be integral to the idea of linguistic relativity. Jackendoff even mentions his merge rule (although he doesn’t say whether we should give it creedence), where any word or phrase can be combined with any other word or phrase (I suspect this rule governs how startups choose their company names and Dada art). How far did Chomsky take this rule?

Lastly, here’s Rick and Morty’s take on a universe where grammar evolved to have ‘shm’ as the prefix for everything (I wasn’t sure how to weld it to an examplet in the reading, but I know it belongs here):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pAMdn9oSPE

Martin Irvine, Introduction to Linguistics and Symbolic Systems. 2015.

Ray Jackendoff, Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, USA, 2003.

Steven Pinker, Linguistics as a Window to Understanding the Brain. 2012.