Technology as a means of extending nature

(In response to “BIOTOPES”)

I think by the time we attempt to create artificial life, we have become a part of the ecology of that life, we have become part of the swarm. By creating artificial life, we are collaborating with the world we create. The AL has agency as we do. We are no gods to the life we create. We co-exist and continue to grow together.

This applies to art making of any kind to me. We gather materials, build an idea around them, collaborate with them throughout the whole process, and create a new meaning into the piece and let it out into the wild to take on its new life. We are no creators, we are collaborators.

I think as humans we tend to think that we are the center of everything, but we are just a part of our ecology. Of course, as humans, we have made a lot of footprints around the earth. Some might be more damaging to the other beings around us, and it’s important to be aware of these things. We’re not above any other beings around us, no other beings are worth suffering because of our footprints.

This human-centric beliefs tend to deter us from exploring new lives around us. Whether it’s artificial life, artificial intelligence, or intraterrestrial and extraterrestrial lives. Maybe the reason why we haven’t gotten in contact with the aliens that we dream of in science fiction is because we are so focused on finding a human-like life around us.

Maybe if we let go of our human ego for one second, we’d start seeing lives all around us.

Western Classification Between Fine Art And Design (Or Applied Art)

I was reading a material for one of my class, “Art, Authenticity, and the Baggage of Cultural Encounter” by Ruth B. Phillips and Christopher B. Steiner about the western view of non-western art. The paper points out a lot of reasons why I think the western separation between what fine art and applied art is dangerous.

I’ve always thought that the way western society define and separate fine art and design is weird and problematic in many ways. The western idea of “art for the art’s sake” being seen as the highest form of art while utilitarian art is deemed the lowest is elitist. So many artists who create utilitarian art (as westerners love to call as “craft” or “kitsch”) are not considered to be “artist” by art critics and theorists. This deconstruction devalues people’s art, especially of those who came from minority groups. For example, in the paper I mentioned before focuses on, the indigenous community.

I will draw my favorite example from an art piece created by my colleague, Emary Parisi, who wrote a piece about the interactions that happened during a previous art piece of hers, “Reclaim Your Time (With My Time)”.

(Screenshot from “(this is) A Theoretical Analysis / section to I am all I have” By Emary Parisi, 2018)

I chose this piece as an example because it is something that I, as an artist, have witnessed first hand where an art critic directly questioned the authenticity of an artist by asking her why she was in an art school rather than being in other field such as journalism or anthropology.

What is art and who gets to decide who is to be called an “artist”? If there is anything that I learned from my undergraduate art school is that no one really gets to define what art is. This is very fundamental to me, as I think, it should to everyone else.

“Although the objects under discussion originated in such diverse times and places as mandarin China circa 1850, the American Plains circa 1880, and Kenya circa 1994, they are all equally difficult to contain within the binary schema of art and artifact. In some instances, where the fact of commoditization could be hidden, the objects have been accorded a place in one of the other category. In others, where their commoditized nature has been all too evident, they have most often fallen into the ontological abyss of the inauthentic, the fake, or the crassly commercial. A particularly dense aura of inauthenticity surrounds objects produced for the souvenir and tourist trades because they are most obviously located at the intersection of the discourses of art, artifact, and commodity.”

What exactly separates art, artifact, and commodity? What makes these objects an intersection of all those things? To understand this reading better I searched for the pieces that are discussed in the book along with Oxford Dictionary definition for “art”, “artifact”, and “commodity”.

art¹

/ärt/

noun

noun: art; plural noun: arts; plural noun: the arts

1. 1.

   the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.

   “the art of the Renaissance”

   Similar:

   fine art, artwork

   creative activity

   • works produced by human creative skill and imagination.

     “his collection of modern art”

     Similar:

     fine art, artwork, creative activity
   • creative activity resulting in the production of paintings, drawings, or sculpture.

     “she’s good at art”
2. 2.

   the various branches of creative activity, such as painting, music, literature, and dance.

   “the visual arts”
3. 3.

   subjects of study primarily concerned with the processes and products of human creativity and social life, such as languages, literature, and history (as contrasted with scientific or technical subjects).

   “the belief that the arts and sciences were incompatible”
4. 4.

   a skill at doing a specified thing, typically one acquired through practice.

   “the art of conversation”

com·mod·i·ty

/kəˈmädədē/

noun

noun: commodity; plural noun: commodities

1. a raw material or primary agricultural product that can be bought and sold, such as copper or coffee.

   “commodities such as copper and coffee”

   Similar:

   item, material

   type of produce:

   product, article, object, thing, artifact, piece of merchandise, import, export

   • a useful or valuable thing, such as water or time.

     “water is a precious commodity”

ar·ti·fact

/ˈärdəfakt/

noun

noun: artefact; plural noun: artefacts; noun: artifact; plural noun: artifacts

1. 1.

   an object made by a human being, typically an item of cultural or historical interest.

   “gold and silver artifacts”
2. 2.

   something observed in a scientific investigation or experiment that is not naturally present but occurs as a result of the preparative or investigative procedure.

   “widespread tissue infection may be a technical artifact”

“We aim, in particular, to add to the dichotomy of art and artifact a third, pivotal category, the commodity, and, further, to discuss how some aspects of the discourses surrounding all three were complementary and mutually reinforcing while others were intersecting, contingent, and contradictory.”

Another reason why I think this is a good book (that I might actually buy because apparently our school doesn’t have full access to this on Jstor) is this point. By the western definition themselves, art and artifact seem to overlap each other. And the belief that commodity cannot be considered as art is, I think, ignorant, as art takes many forms in our daily life. Igor Kopytoff wrote in “Cultural Biology of Things” that, “A commodity is a thing that has use value and that can be exchanged in a discrete transaction for a counterpart, the very fact of exchange indicating that the counterpart has, in the immediate context, an equivalent value.” In the modern day, what to be considered to be a “high art fine art” is also commonly commoditized as an exchanged value between art collectors and institutions.

Banksy’s attempt to destroy the painting after it was bought at an auction rendered futile as it was kept being commoditized at even a higher value than it was before the painting got shredded.

“To be represented as “art,” in other words, the aesthetic objects of non-Western people had to be transposed into the Western system of classification of the fine and applied art. Feminist and Marxist art historians have revealed how this system reinforces hierarchies of gender and class. Its hegemonic implication for race have, however, been less clearly set out, in large part because the highly selective promotion of non-Western art by modernist artists has constructed the illusion that a universalist inclusiveness has been achieved.”

I’m a firm believer of the notion that nothing in this world is universal, and that everything was created and defined within context of one another (Deleuze and Guattari’s Rhizome). Dissecting the work of indigenous culture through the western lens based on the classification of fine art and applied art, cherry-picking on what fits into the Oxford definition of fine art (“in a visual form such as painting or sculpture”) to represent to the rest of the world of what counts as indigenous art, ignores the indigenous systems of value and meaning that are attached to the objects, is a flawed and ignorant practice.

“The nineteenth-century critical historians of art also grounded their work in a Hegelian notion of progress in which the increased freedom of the artist and the greater incidence of fine art become signs of advanced civilization.”

With that, if you connect the dots, believing in the classifications of what fine art and applied art mean could simply mean believing that western civilization is more advanced in comparison to indigenous civilization. And that is why I think the dichotomy between fine art and design (applied art) is a dangerous belief.

But still, I am guilty of this practice too, by constantly calling myself an “artist and designer” I am actively submitting to the belief. Why have I not changed my title to just “an artist”? As a creator, I have the autonomy to decide what my creations mean to my community, but I think I should still be aware of setting a context for myself and other people. This is both a question and a call out for myself.

Ordinary Computation

Today we learned more about P5.js in class. It was a lot of information in one session and I couldn’t grasp all of the materials because I was trying to understand the parts that was explained at the beginning. I personally think Nick was going too fast, though I understand why he needed to. We’ve only got 2 years in grad school!

I’ve had this conversation with a friend, Allan Doyle, before, but I just remembered again that learning coding is just like learning a language. And we’re trying to understand it over such short amount of time. But I think the upper-hand of being in a learning space is that we can consistently dedicate a huge chunk of our time to learn it.

Learn it like a language. Learn it as if it’s ordinary. I read the intro part of Ordinary Affect by Kathleen Stewart today. What is Ordinary Affect? I tried to break it down by word definition as I usually do to understand a word or a phrase:

or·di·nar·y

/ˈôrdnˌerē/

Learn to pronounce

adjective

adjective: ordinary

1. 1.

   with no special or distinctive features; normal.

   “he sets out to depict ordinary people”

   synonyms:

   usual, normal, standard, typical, stock, common, customary, habitual, accustomed,
   expected, wonted, everyday, regular, routine, day-to-day, daily, established, settled, set, fixed, traditional, quotidian, prevailing

   “the ordinary course of events”

   antonyms:

   abnormal

   • uninteresting; commonplace.

     “ordinary items of everyday wear”

     synonyms:

      average, normal, run-of-the-mill, standard, typical, middle-of-the-road, common, conventional, mainstream, unremarkable, unexceptional,
     unpretentious, modest, plain, simple, homely, homespun, workaday,
     undistinguished, nondescript, characterless, colorless, commonplace,
     humdrum, mundane, unmemorable, pedestrian, prosaic, quotidian,
     uninteresting, uneventful, dull, boring, uninspiring, bland, suburban,
     hackneyed, stale, mediocre, middling, indifferent; More

     antonyms:

     unusual, extraordinary, unique, exceptional
2. 2.

   (especially of a judge or bishop) exercising authority by virtue of office and not by delegation.

noun

noun: the ordinary; noun: ordinary; plural noun: ordinaries; noun: Ordinary; plural noun: Ordinaries

1. 1.

   what is commonplace or standard.

   “their clichés were vested with enough emotion to elevate them above the ordinary”
2. 2.

   BRITISH•LAW

   a person, especially a judge, exercising authority by virtue of office and not by delegation.

   • US

     (in some US states) a judge of probate.
3. 3.

   those parts of a Roman Catholic service, especially the Mass, which do not vary from day to day.

   • a rule or book giving the order for saying the Mass.
4. 4.

   HERALDRY

   any of the simplest principal charges used in coats of arms (especially chief, pale, bend, fess, bar, chevron, and saltire).
5. 5.

   ARCHAIC

   a meal provided at a fixed time and price at an inn.

   • an inn providing a meal at a fixed time and price.
6. 6.

   HISTORICAL•NORTH AMERICAN

   another term for penny-farthing.

and interestingly, the word Affect had 3 different meanings in 3 different context,

af·fect¹

/əˈfekt/

verb

verb: affect; 3rd person present: affects; past tense: affected; past participle: affected; gerund or present participle: affecting

1. have an effect on; make a difference to.

   “the dampness began to affect my health”

   synonyms:

    influence, exert influence on, have an effect on, act on, work on, condition, touch, have an impact on, impact on, take hold of, attack, infect, strike, strike at, hit; More

   antonyms:
   be unaffected

   • touch the feelings of (someone); move emotionally.

     “the atrocities he witnessed have affected him most deeply”

     synonyms:

     upset, trouble, hit hard, overwhelm, devastate, damage, hurt, pain, grieve, sadden,
     distress, disturb, perturb, agitate, shake, shake up, stir; More

     antonyms:

      be unaffected, be indifferent to, unaffecting, unmoving

af·fect²

/əˈfekt/

verb

verb: affect; 3rd person present: affects; past tense: affected; past participle: affected; gerund or present participle: affecting

1. pretend to have or feel (something).

   “as usual I affected a supreme unconcern”

   synonyms:

   pretend, feign, fake, counterfeit, sham, simulate, fabricate, give the appearance of, make a show of, make a pretense of, play at, go through the motions of; More

   • use, wear, or assume (something) pretentiously or so as to make an impression on others.

     “an American who had affected a British accent”

     synonyms:

     assume, put on, take on, adopt, like, have a liking for, embrace, espouse

     “he deliberately affected a republican stance”

af·fect³

/ˈafekt,əˈfekt/

noun

PSYCHOLOGY

noun: affect

1. emotion or desire, especially as influencing behavior or action.

 

Being in a class called “Affect And Emotions In Practice” I went into the reading with presumption that within the context of the class the affect mentioned in “Ordinary Affect” primarily mean the 3rd description of the word. But I would miss the entire point of this reading if I take that as the only meaning of the word here.

Order, rules, fixed, not special, habitual, common and normal. It is what it is supposed to be and just is, ordinary. Nothing is out of place, it’s just there where it is supposed to be. What is it? Affect. But what is affect? “to make difference to”, “to move someone emotionally”, “pretend to feel”, “pretentiously”, or “desire or emotion”? perhaps it is all of them. They might seem to mean differently, but they make sense together in “Ordinary Affect”. as Steward wrote:

“Ordinary Affects is an experiment, not a judgement. Committed not to the demystification and uncovered truths that support a well-known picture of the world, but rather to speculation, curiosity, and the concrete, it tries to provoke attention to the forces that come into view as habit or shock, resonance or impact. Something throws itself together in a moment as an event and a sensation: a something both animated and inhabitable.”

But of what something? gestures, was it, that we talked about in class? Maybe it’s the poetry of everyday movements, the way someone touch their hair, when your parents lick their thumb to flick the page of newspaper, the way trees  grow in directions that are recorded in their grain pattern, the tic toc of a clock? characteristics of the universe that are always affected and affecting to one and another, going on continuous motion keeping the world rotating and revolving.

I don’t know. I would love to hear what other people have to say in class on Monday. I’m very excited for the discussions in this class. But ordinary, ordinary…. I also want to make coding something that is ordinary to me.

So I did a little more practice this afternoon, and probably gonna watch videos and do more tonight. (you know I prefer a night out dancing at some old men bar with friends but I haven’t made many friends just yet and this is okay too).

I tried to create a prototype of our group project that reacts to microphone input, but somehow it’s not working on mobile as we intended to for the context of the piece.

https://editor.p5js.org/nilampwns/sketches/UGF7GFVCM

I tried to find solution to it but google wasn’t much of a help this time around.

But I also want to show this other thing I worked on for fun,

https://editor.p5js.org/nilampwns/sketches/mvB3bq2BG

Which is also in my sketches that make sketches series. The dot goes up and down based on microphone input and the horizontal movement are moving steadily. It’s almost as if it’s making graph for voice input. It was very fun to make!

P.s. we learned how to use webcam on our p5 sketches as well. And we captured this in class.

took us 4 collaborators to make this pic happen. Thanks Liam, Jessie, and Lilian.

Postscript on The Societies of Control; The Nature and Art of Workmanship; ‘What is Cybernetics?’ from The Human Use of Humans: reading response

I’m going to breakdown my reading responses into individual response to each reading materials, make correlations of all of the texts at the end, and as usual, share my direct notes that I wrote while reading these materials.

First, Deleuze’s Postcript on The Societies of Control:

Societies of Control is a faux freedom by giving the societies an illusion of choice to do anything, however, the number of choices are limited and cannot break a certain boundary that was already set in the beginning. While disciplinary’s societies does seem more controlling if not traumatizing, societies of control is not that close to human freedom either.

Foucault’s disciplinary societies and Deleuze’s Societies of Control were metaphorized as molds of distinct castings and modulation respectively. I think this metaphor helped me understanding how limited and deceiving societies of control actually is. Given no room for options but to obey is objectively terrible. Nobody likes being told what to do and watched over, living in a determined mold and cast. But if one were to live in this kind of society, it is pretty easy for one to realize that the rights of freedom was taken away from them. They would have an urge to break out of the mold. But in societies of control where one could modulate their options, it might not seem like a bad idea at first. But there would be less awareness on how restricted one really is. If you see my scribbles and notes on the file attached (more pages on pdf file), you can see an example of how having the opportunity to build your life out of pre-existing modular pieces is more tricky way of control to break out of. while one does have multiple options, they cannot break out of those options that were given. These options give an illusion of freedom to manipulate the societies and make them feel more content than being casted in a small mold, but it is harder to realize that they are, in fact, being controlled.

another example was to use password instead of watchwords. using a password is active, and regulated by watchwords is passive. People are more driven to gain something, to gain more access by being active on getting passwords give the society more will to do things told by the system. Societies of control operate with computers that runs under codes that is starting to evolve machines to appear to have conscious mind of its own. For machines to function like human, is that the mutation of capitalism?

One more response I have on this text is this sentence Deleuze wrote in this text that struck me the most, he said, “Marketing has become the center of the “soul” of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world.” How are so many philosophers have got this theory down to its core, and that so many people are aware of these systems, but nobody has succeeded in dismantling it yet? Would our world fall apart if we were to dismantle such system that only benefits a certain privileged group? Are there any other better system? would it have its flaws again and the world is just a cycle of failing systems that were created and dismantled to create another defective system that was thought to be better? I have a lot of questions.

Second, David Pye’s The Nature and Art of Workmanship:

In the process of making crafts, developments; improvisations; and risk takings happen as it goes. Those process, especially risk taking, are the keys to create something new, something that is not reproduced over and over. This risk could create variations, and even mutations, and I think both could be charming. People tend to not value the workmanship of certainty, a machine work, but I think a work by machine, precision, has its own beauty to it. It is definitely a quality that is different than a workmanship of risk but nonetheless has its potential to be beautiful.

The value of handmade things raises because of the change in technology dropped the supply to a place lower than the demands. And as the supply gets lower, society seems to be more interested in the variety, rarity, and unattainability of crafts, creates higher demand in the industry. This places a higher value on items of workmanship of risk. Not everyone can afford expensive crafts, which then creates a smaller market for it, making it seems exclusive. With this small market, not everyone who makes workmanship of risks can sell their work for a living anymore in this capitalistic world. People prefer to buy a ready mass produced items for their daily needs.

If you think it economically, it’s true that if the number of demand declines, the number of supply will decline as well. But we’re human beings with compassion, love for certain things, and passion to do what we love. This is what makes human different than machines that are made of binary numbers. while our behavior could still be calculated, we are made out of innumerable things. Crafts will not die that easily in the hands of humanity, no matter how terrible humanity is anyway. And instead of dwelling on the idea that some of hand handled traditions are being taken away by machines, why don’t we use this as a way to take a step further to discover more skills that are out there that only humans can do. and let them take over again and let us learn more again. The universe is too big to whine on how all printed letters in books look the same, there are still book artists who make things by hand and younger generation can focus more on the content rather than the production.

There are people who tries to create variety with machines, which I think has been the topic of this class, hasn’t it? But I have my own comment on the subject, while technology is amazing and with algorithm it is possible to make machines create different products within variations I think it is also a problematic way of thinking. And here is why: to have variety as a goal to achieve is not a mindset I want people to have. Variety should be the default, not the goal. By trying to achieve variety as the product goal is exploitative, and to have variety as default is inclusive. If you don’t get what I mean try to apply this statement of exploitation and inclusiveness in social issues. This should apply to almost everything.

Pye stated that workmanship and design is extension of one another. And I personally think that workmanship and design are not just extension of one another, it is a collaboration, a choreographed combination that only work when one respond to the other.

Last, on Wiener’s ‘What is Cybernetics?’, from the Human Use of Humans:

human are good for what humans are good for. But what are the things that only human has? Old machines such as automata has grown into robots that could communicate with the environment surrounding them just like us. But we have compassion and ego. These are the two factors machines do not have that could change the communication– the calculated output from the input given.

From what I read from the material, it seems like we do not sympathize with things that do not communicate with its surroundings. But by the time it starts to communicate with the rest of the world and blend with its surroundings, we begin to express sympathy towards it. With this advanced technology, it’s easy to exploit both the machines and their environment including humans who have begun to show sympathies towards them.

Thoughts on all those readings:

It seems like, Pye’s view of crafts and technology is really restricted within the society of control. He kept mentioning all the possibilities crafts could continue on within capitalistic world (to keep as hobby, to be a part time, to fully dedicate time for craft to be the source of income, to not be influenced by money, to have to make craft from only love) but none of his possibilities are ideal. He is not thinking outside the modular options that has been given to artists and craftsmen in the society of control. In an ideal world, craftsmen can create work without thinking about the money he would make out of it, but just for the love of making it, and still would be able to live off what he does comfortably.

Under the society of control, it’s really easy to exploit both craftsmen. There are people who control codes behind machines, too, that are being exploited to create more finished products under short time, like factories. That is all to benefit the people above the creators, as Wiener referred to those who suffer from a power complex, those who benefit from capitalism.

So knowing all these, how do we react as artists who create? Do we give into the system so we could live? Or do we use this knowledge to dodge the mistakes people make and work as a creator that are not being used as worker bees to benefit the upper ups? How do we dismantle something that are as entangled as it is in everyone’s lives today? Am I going too philosophical and deep on these reading materials??? Life is weird and hard. For now I guess I’ll just focus on what I’m gonna do for my project– that being said, I have momentarily given myself to MICA as an institution, I guess.

Attached is the pdf file of the notes and scribbles while I was reading the texts.

The Fold: response

Everything in this world was created by patterns of multiple matters. Just like how we talked about weaving last week, pleats and folds have patterns as well. This reading confused me, so I thought that the easiest way to understand things is to actually do it on my own.

i looked sad in the last picture because i finished an origami and i still didn’t get it.

there was a part in the reading where it says “everything in the body works like a machine” and I had a lecture in my Biology in Pop Culture class, that that mindset is common amongst molecular scientists and they tend to be more religious. a couple paragraph after, it says “And when the hour comes for them to unfold their parts, to attain a degree or organic development proper to man, or to form cerebral folds, at the same time their animal soul becomes reasonable by gaining greater degree of unity (mind) …” it implies that a body is a folded machine that is ready to grow whenever the soul is blown into it and unfold each parts as it grows.

other thoughts I had while reading this material was the implication of different dimensions that was talked about in the beginning of chapter two. how there’s point, line, and plane, and those does not exist from our point of view because we live in a three dimensional world with time.

—> digital form is a fold of information in a form of codes, the binary system is the fold, the pleats, the crease, the minimize the fold.

this video helps me too

I’ll put more thoughts once I hear what other people think of it in class okay.

The Fundamental Constructions: Reading Response

I figured this is a reading to understand the basic three different structures of weaving, so I’m just gonna write the response/note in bullet points:

• Weaving is an interlacing structure of two distinct groups of threads
• Its firmer than other thread interlacing structures. It is more likely to keep its shape than other structures such as knits, braids, lace, etc.– which are more likely to bunched up and can be stretched apart to create elasticity.
• It requires less materials and can be produced faster (simple structured machine)
• There are three basic structures of weave: plain, twill, and satin. Which each has a lot of their own variations.
• A plain weave is the simplest structure of weave, it takes equal part in both sides; front, back, front back. Requires two warps and two wefts. The rhythm should go like 1-2-1-2.
• everyday plain weave sample: canvas, sheets, tarps, etc.
• A twill weave can be balanced or unbalanced, the structure should be a step more complicated than plain weave. Ones with more on the warps are called warp twills, more on the fillings are called filing twills. Requires at least three warps and weft. There can be unlimited combination of twill weave, since it can varies in its pattern and leaves. A balanced twill pattern usually creates a diagonal pattern (half drop) across the structure.
• everyday twill weave sample: denim, cotton, baskets, etc.
• A satin weave is the most complicated weave is never balanced, the opposite of plain weave; satin weave seeks for the furthest point of interlacing threads in the leaves. Requires a combination of at least five warps and wefts.
• everyday satin weave sample: silk, luxurious fabrics, etc.

For a live response/notes/scribbles and how I see and understand the patterning of these three different kinds of weave structures, a pdf of the scanned printed reading material can be viewed here.

The Sympathy of Things: Excerpt 1 Reading Response

Discussions around craft and mass productions had always caught my attention ever since I started to question what my art practice really is. Is it design? Is it Art? is it production? is it craft? So the first part of this reading really got my interest. There are so many experts and philosophers who always argue around this topic with strong opinions from both sides, just like Ruskin and Babbage in this reading. Why do a lot of people feel uncomfortable emotions when they think of machines doing things that human beings are supposed to do when the purpose of machine invention is to achieve time and labor efficiency? Is it really about the missing craft and authenticity of the products created or is it about the process itself?

I think we as human feel uncomfortable when we cannot find a way to relate to something we are exposed to. Our brain constantly look for connections and correlations on things that we sense, and when we fail to do so our first defense mechanism is to reject those things in forms of emotions such as anger, sadness, disgust, or disappointment. After we processed our emotions, we look for reasoning behind the emotions. However, this process does not seem obvious for most people because all of it happens under our subconscious thinking and our mind does not naturally take it further to our conscious thoughts, for it takes a conscious effort to do so. Therefore, a lot of people jump into immediate conclusion that it’s the objects that are presented to them that makes them feel a certain way.

For example from the reading, for most of the part of the world, society are still used to the butchers slicing and cutting their meat products. Even if most of us are not butchers, we can relate and imagine ourselves holding butchers knives and do a slicing motion and hold the meat with our other hand. But with machines? It takes a lot of effort and understanding to relate to pieces of metals and electronics. Even if most mechanical movements are inspired by nature and that our body share a lot of same elements as metals that are used in machines, most of us cannot spontaneously relate to something that we are rarely exposed to. This disconnect creates discomfort when one is exposed to a piece of meat that is supposed to go inside their body that was handled by something so alien to them, even if the final products are more likely to be more hygienic, evenly cut, and neatly packed.

(It is also mentioned in the reading that our eyes prefer variation rather than seeing exact molded copies, that is also a fair concept that still confuses me even though I agree with it. Why is variety pleasing to our eyes but to have a couple of odd ones out is seen as an error? Our brains like neither perfect orders nor disorders. We conform, like variations, and we dislike minorities by nature. This might be a little out of topic but with all the recent big issues revolving around discrimination against minorities I can’t help but wonder if human mind was just built to be rejecting and defensive towards differences, and to dismantle that subconscious thinking we really have to take a conscious effort to fight against our nature. I don’t know where I am going with this but it’s kind of saddening to think that there are inevitable going to be people who are not going to take a conscious effort to go there.)

If some people are really scared of the world where craft being replaced by cold repetitive machine, hard labor being replaced by instant products, shouldn’t they also realize that machines are also a craft of another human being? It takes time, effort, and knowledge to create inventions. There is a lot of research, thinking, design, and crafting that goes into making machines. I think our tendency to only take things in front of us only on superficial level makes it hard to not take the work that goes from far behind what is presented in our face for granted. Some of us think of machine made product as cheap products and easy quick work, physically. But what goes into machinery and the programming behind it is complex.

I think it is easy for some people to discredit programming and coding, for they do not have a physical form that is visually easier to understand. After reading and understanding the concept that coding is a language, it opened my mind and see it from a different light. “…, the language we speak every day is descriptive, while programming language is instructive. …“, I have never paid enough attention to realize that coding is a language because it is communicating. And a limited one at that because it is only used to demand something from the receiving end, which in this case are machines. Given this information, you could say that machines do not and will not have will on their own since we can only communicate with them through the language of commands, and execute they do. But with the technology that we have today, programs can learn on their own with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and if they were to be given commands to have will on their own and create varieties like human do, they would, wouldn’t they? I can’t really say that because I don’t have any knowledge in programming but I’d like to think that it is a possibility. And I wonder when we reach that point, will society warm up to the idea of machines working along side human with the same acknowledgement of craft.

Now diving more into the reading topic about coding, patterns, formula, and creation process. responding to the question of ‘what it is made of’ or ‘what is its pattern?’, I think an object cannot be separated from its material and a concept cannot be separated from the mind it was born from. And pattern is the creator, a formula, of all matters, manipulated by time. Last semester I took an Astronomy course taught by Forrest Hall, and I learned a lot about the universe and all the matters inside. “The universe is just one big blanket of patterns of molecules, all holding hands together and dancing“, or so he said. It’s so poetic that I still remember the tone and the smile he had when he said it. If everything in the universe has a similar pattern, then I think its safe to assume that this is also the case for programming.

There were a lot of parts that I picked up from the reading that I have trouble articulating into words for this entry, however, I attached notes that I took and wrote directly onto the reading materials in pdf format. I hope it would somehow makes more sense.

See my ‘The Sympathy of Things: 1st excerpt’ direct notes and scribbles