A summary of:
Zaleski, J. (1997). The Soul of Cyberspace: How New Technology Is Changing Our Spiritual Lives. HarperEdge: New York.
Reflections part 2 – Interviews with Jaron Lanier

I’ll begin this post where I left off at the last one, i.e. with the idea that computers are what we make them. Lanier puts this in no uncertain terms: “Computers don’t exist, to put it bluntly. Computers are just a bundle of matter, and they act as computers by virtue of cultural ability to recognize them acting as computers. So we can make of them what we will…. We have a choice here” (139).

While we have a choice, Lanier explains that it is very easy to get stuck in familiar ways of thinking, particularly the more and more we engage with technology. He uses two helpful analogies. The first is that of a trolley system: “I think there are three different things that can happen. One is that you can be just wandering around on a place, another is that you can have a map. The third, and it’s what happens with computers, is that you install a trolley system and you can go only where the trolley is going. That’s much more analogous to what happens when you create culture using programs. / As soon as a computer program becomes your tool for creation, you can create only what was conceived of in the ideas embedded in the program. That’s the nature of programs. Programs are not the same thing as nature” (185).

Lanier uses another, more colorful analogy to explain that it is very difficult to be creative (thinking outside of the box) when you are confined to the ‘box’ of the rules of computer programs: “When you try to do creative work by playing with computer programs that embed your own ideas or someone else’s ideas, it’s a little bit like hooking up a tube between your anus and your mouth to get nutrition. What you’re doing is, you’re recycling ideas instead of contacting nature and exploring it. That’s the difference between playing with musical instruments and using computers” (147).

What is this “contacting nature” business all about? Here it is again: “Essentially, if you try to do science without going back to nature, all you’re doing is reexploring human ideas that have been set down in a computer, and amplified by the simulation. So what you’re really doing is, you’re self-glorifying your own ideas that have been set down. It’s a little bit like taking a little poem that you wrote and then putting it up in a huge marquee in lights and saying, ‘Oh, wow, that’s really wise.’ It might be, or it might not be, but the point is that you’re blinding yourself. Essentially, a simulation takes a starting human idea that somebody had and amplifies it, and it looks more impressive” (148).

And again: “The way you get off the trolley system is by directly contacting the mysteries of nature. There’s nothing wrong with the trolley system as long as you get off. The problem, the nerd way of using the trolley system, to carry this metaphor on, is to stay on it all the time” (186).

Is this a useful way of defining spirituality? – making contact with (the mysteries of) nature? I suppose part of what Lanier is getting at is the sort of intangibility of reality – that we live in a constantly unfolding reality, of which we are co-creators but can never fully grasp because of its awesome complexity. This gets back to exactly what Lanier was saying about computers being a construct of our imaginations, a subjective thing. As he says, “If you think of the computer as only a conduit between people, you don’t run into this problem at all, because then you’re dealing with it as a conduit between minds. As soon as you treat the computer as an objective thing – as a real instrument, like a real person, as something that stands by itself – you run into this problem, you connect the tube to the wrong hole” (147). This almost energetic transference would be one of those mysteries of nature, and we ought to tap into that energy if we wish to do anything truly worthwhile – in a spiritual way, perhaps – with our technology.

Lanier is the Big Daddy of virtual reality, so of course he has opinions about how this relates to VR. “One way to think about a computer,” he says, “is that it’s a conduit between people. It’s a communication technology in which people can create miniature worlds that are models of things inside themselves in order to have a new form of communication in which they make up a shared objective reality in simulation instead of passing symbols between each other exclusively” (139). I really like this notion of trying to represent something “inside” yourself, because for the most part, I think that where VR and social networking and the like has failed thus far is that it only caters to representation of surface or external qualities of ourselves, e.g. Avatars that look like us, or Profiles where we fill in biographical information. But the other key aspect of this quote is that Lanier is challenging us to do great things with technology, rather than simply simulate our world. This, in fact, is the difference between someone who can draw what they see (someone who in Ellul’s terms would have mastered la technique) and a true artist, who can capture the ineffable. The latter would be spiritual, and Lanier argues that it should be the goal of technological development: “The potential does not lie, ever, in simulating something in the physical world. Because it will always either be done poorly, or if it seems it’s not being done poorly, it means you’re fooling yourself, as in the case of the music example, or this evolution-simulation example. If it seems like the (148) computer is simulating the real world, well, it just means that you’ve lost touch. / The right way to use computers is to use them to simulate alternate worlds, together with other people, as a form of communication” (149).

I struggle to think of examples where we have realized this potential on the Internet. But I can think of many where we are doing poor simulations. Facebook, for example, fosters simulated friendships which, I think we would all agree, pale in comparison to the real. We should not be content to think that this is all we can achieve with our technology, though! While it’s a far more difficult challenge – and one that may take a flash of artistic brilliance, an epiphany – we ought to be striving to create entirely new opportunities for us to think, see, communicate; and we’ll know it when we see it, just as we feel when a truly great painting moves us. This is the spiritual.

The challenge now is that computers exist within a framework that reinforces thinking about them as objective ‘things’, as the evolution of rational Western thought which is increasingly materialistic, pushing the soul and the spirit out of the picture. This makes it difficult to understand our current creations in new spiritual ways, because they were not created from a worldview that allows for this type of thinking. As Lanier himself says, “I think of virtual reality as a Western (142) idea, I make sense of it within the Western framework…. I think that the quest for the universal cultural framework that can contain everything is futile. So I don’t feel a need to try to explain prana in virtual reality. I use a different set of categories to explain virtual reality that don’t include prana. In my life, I certainly think in the larger framework that does include it” (143). To me, this means that we cannot succeed in making ‘slightly more spiritual technology’ if the underlying structure is not radically altered. We have to make “spiritual technology”, not “more spiritual technology”.

The key might lie in uncoupling technology from information. In our minds, they are the same. And immediately, information creates the alienation that would be the distancing of ourselves from (the mysteries of ) nature. Lanier explains, “…information is alienated experience. So, nothing ever goes over the wires whatsoever. But it can be whatever we wish it to be…. These are things we make up, like language” (157). His mission, therefore, is this: “What I’m trying to do is to save Western culture from being destroyed by information” (180).

In conclusion, all of Lanier’s discussions on what technology should be exposes his own spirituality which fits precisely with what Heelas et al described as the ‘subjective turn.’ In other words, Lanier is calling for a turn toward the subjective in our thinking about technology, which will thus lead to more glorious developments which nourish us in ways that technologies produced within an objective paradigm do not. This is perhaps best exemplified by Lanier’s “syncretic creation myth”. In this myth, as technology gets developed further and further along the lines it’s being created now, ‘experience’ gets squeezed out, until finally people can stand it no longer. “So they convened an emergency meeting about their lack of experience…. And as they knew there would be, there was only one solution: They got all of their machines and they put them in a great bonfire and destroyed them” (196). Call it ‘experience’, ‘subjectivity’, or ‘spirituality’, the lesson is that we need to pay attention to these needs, or else one day we will wake up to find that we are living in a prison of our own technological creations.

A summary of:
Zaleski, J. (1997). The Soul of Cyberspace: How New Technology Is Changing Our Spiritual Lives. HarperEdge: New York.
Reflections part 1 – Prana

Zaleski makes this interesting, highly questionably claim:

“Prana is a Sanskrit word sometimes translated as ‘life force,’ sometimes as ‘breath.’ It is equivalent to the Chinese concept of chi, and somewhat to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic concept of spirit. In all the major religious traditions, this force is seen as manifesting through the physical body of the human being. This view has profound implications for spiritual work in cyberspace, where the body is absent” (34).

What’s bizarre about this is that Zaleski seems to think that physicality is a necessity of spirituality… whereas most would probably say that the spiritual is fundamentally non-physical. (While I think this is a crude reductionism, take this opinion, for example: “[John Perry Barlow] But I also think that anytime you’ve got a large number of people going somewhere they can’t take their bodies, you are engaged in spiritual activity. It’s that simple” (51).) And for Zaleski, this physicality poses a particular problem to technology if we are hoping to have some kind of spiritual experience. He uses the example of an early Skype-like technology: “It seems like it’s leading toward the point where it won’t be much different than me sitting in front of you an talking like this, except for the lack of prana” (43).

I think Zaleski’s sticking point with this is that he doesn’t think it is possible for ritual sacraments, like Holy Communion, to be performed online. In response to Zaleski’s questions on the matter, John Perry Barlow responds, “If you don’t have the grounding in the wine, the physical manifestation, I can see where they would think that there’s no potential for that holy voltage between the physical symbol and the spiritual reality” (35). But we have to ask ourselves what exactly he thinks is missing (he does not clarify that well). If it is the possibility for transformation, this is clearly not true. Buddhist interviewee John Daido Loori responds, “‘That being the case, …we’d have to say there’s no chi, which is what we’d [Buddhists] call it – breath, life – there’s no chi in a work of art. And I don’t buy that for a second. I feel that art can be transformative, has been transformative’” (166).

It also seems that sometimes what Zaleski thinks is missing is the full-body engagement, the kind that would be associated with “flow” (233). In that case, we might do well to ask whether we really see any kind of spiritual difference between a computer game and a wii game, if the latter involves our whole body. I would say not.

Zaleski also defines the missing element this way: “The break with the body in cyberspace is most apparent when meeting other people through live, text-mediated chat, as in IRC or the chat rooms of AOL. The prana, the subtle energies, are lost. The incarnate being, the human being, behind the words can only be imagined, just as the reader of these words can only imagine the writer. What fills the space left by the absent prana is self-projection” (233). This, too, seems bizarre, and I guess it really depends on what you mean by ‘subtle energies’, or ‘self-projection’. As one interviewee was quoted saying, “‘I totally disagree that there’s no prana in cyberspace. That’s like saying you have to lose your humanity because you’re using a different form of communication” (253).

Zaleski softens his argument only slightly with this admission: “I believe that [prana] does break in cyberspace, limiting the medium’s potential for spiritual work in communities as well as on the individual level. But limit does not mean negate, and spiritual work, which calls upon us to accept others, to love them as ourselves, does take place in virtual communities” (254). If this is the case, then the goal is to strengthen the connections between individuals, within communities, to enhance the prana. The problem (as I will go into more depth about in further posts on Zaleski) is that cyberspace produces broad experiences, but not deep ones; so the design challenge would be to focus on creating deeper bonds between people (another way to say this is increasing strong ties, rather than weak ones).

This discussion of prana raises other interesting questions. What do we think is exchanged in a spiritual experience, for example? One interviewee, Sheikh Hisham Muhammad Kabbani, responded: “Because you know that always spirituality is high-tech. Spirituality is a kind of energy transmission from human beings to each other, if we are able to receive it, because human beings are receivers and transmitters at the same time” (61). This is fascinating, mostly because it clearly only makes sense in our modern scientific paradigm. You wouldn’t hear someone describe it like this 200 years ago, would you?

Another question this has made me consider is what I think is happening in a spiritual process. John Perry Barlow said, “So much of what the spiritual process is about is sliding up and down between those two poles of the physical and the immaterial” (35). Where does practice come into this? Some see practice as essential to spiritual growth (perhaps this is a separate question in itself?).

And this has also been helpful for helping me think about what kind of spiritual change I would like to realize in technology. Two separate ideas were raised by this book. The first is inspired by this quote from Loori: “So, how do you use them in a way that nourishes? Cyberspace is here to stay. How can we use it to nourish” (167)? That is a fabulous description of the kind of spirituality I’m aiming at. It should nourish us, nourish our souls, be, as I said, ‘soul-satisfying’.

The other idea is very different, in that it aims at the foundations of the construction. Loori said this: “Sacredness is something that’s earned through time. Kyoto is sacred. Jerusalem is sacred. Rome is sacred. Stonehenge is sacred. These are sacred places because of what has been put into them” (173). Given this, how can we design sacredness into cyberspace? Is it possible to design it in such a way as to make people treat is as sacred? Pesce, for example, tried something like this:“[Pesce] The idea was [in blessing the Internet], inasmuch as possible, to sanctify cyberspace. If we don’t bless our creations, they dehumanize us” (262). There is a big difference, however, in blessing something that is not inherently sacred, and designing something to be sacred.

The truth is that cyberspace represents tremendous opportunity, precisely because it is unbounded and emerging. It is not anything, beyond what we say it is. For example: “‘Cyberspace is a field that has been created where there is an absence of obstructions,’ explained Thomas E. Miller to me…. Miller is a Namgyal Monastery official and the man who conceived of the blessing [different from above]. ‘That’s the way cyberspace was designed. Which creates the potential for something to arise. And the nature of what will arise there is dependent upon the motivations of the people that use it’” (280). In that case, why would we ever say that we could not create an internet that allows for prana?

Reflections on article at: http://www.distancelab.org/projects/mutsugoto/

What a sweet idea! -  “Instead of exchanging e-mail or SMS messages using generic interfaces in business-like venues, Mutsugoto allows distant partners to communicate through the language of touch as expressed on the canvas of the human body. A custom computer vision and projection system allows users to draw on each other’s bodies while lying in bed. Drawings are transmitted ‘live’ between the two beds, enabling a different kind of synchronous communication that leverages the emotional quality of physical gesture.”

This is an interesting example to discuss in regards to my personal definition of spiritual technology (admittedly still taking shape). At first this seems to be an attempt to design for human values, namely intimacy. As the article says, “Human intimacy is a significant but often neglected part of modern life. More people now than ever carry on long distance relationships with romantic partners, sometimes for extended periods of time. However today’s communication systems are impersonal and generic. E-mail, for example, is often read and written on the same computer and at the same desk that one uses for any other kind of communication. Phone calls and SMS messages are sent and received between partners on the same devices used for work and business.” But where this goes wrong, I suppose, is that takes this characteristic of modern society as given, unquestionable, or at least unchangeable… and in fact, if it took off, would reinforce the structures that make this lack of intimacy possible. To say this more clearly, it is like applying a tourniquet to hemorrhaging society (Senge et al., 2004, would call this “shifting the burden” (204)), in short, propping up the structures that in turn enable decreased intimacy by preventing us from reaching what I would call a Turning Point, or Breaking Point. If we were, instead, to reach a point where we could finally say, “I hate this lifestyle that means I can’t be with the people I love!” we might actually change as a society. But if we create technologies that make these “realities” of modern life palatable, we calcify them in practice and in our mindsets.

I sometimes think we’re asking the wrong questions.  The question perhaps should not be, “How do we create technology that offsets the side-effects of a technologized society?” (think of taking pills to counteract negative side-effects of other pills, and on and on).  Should we not be asking, “Where did we go wrong?”  I think this is why it’s important to me to approach technological innovation from a spiritual perspective, i.e., to not avoid the deeper questions.

I was pointed to this article on the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11793847

The idea is that rather than have lots and lots of weak ties (read: friends in name only), the site helps you foster stronger friendship ties. These ties are designed into the system by limiting the number of friends you can have. I think it’s similar to going back in time to film cameras, before digital: You really had to pick your moments, not waste the film. When digital came along, you could snap as many crap pictures as you liked, because they didn’t cost anything to throw away. But is this a good model for friendships? Is this a fair comparison to Facebook?

There is some evidence – cited by the article – that humans can only manage 50 friends, so the notion that Facebook promotes, that we can have 1,000 if we wanted, cheapens the very word “friend”.

I think if we value true “friendship”, we ought to be thinking of ways to make that word meaningful again in the era of Facebook. People ask me all the time what I mean by “spiritual technology”, and follow up with, “Can you give me an example of one?” I now have an example. This is getting closer to what I’m talking about: Asserting human values over and above technological capabilities.

Kees Dorst | Interpreting Design Thinking – Long version from Business 21C on Vimeo.

A summary of:
Senge, P., Scharmer, C.O., Jaworski, J. & Flowers, B.S. (2004). Presence: Exploring Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society. Nicholas Brealey Publishing: London.
Part 2 – Into the Silence:
Chapter 6 – An Emerging Understanding: The U Theory
& Chapter 7 – The Eye of the Needle: Letting Go and Letting Come

In this section we are introduced to a concept the authors call U Theory – a framework for a new process of thinking. They have drawn a diagram, in the shape of a U, representing the path that the great thinkers take:
1) (At the top, left) “Sensing”: “‘observe, observe, observe’ – become one with the world”;
2) (Down to the bottom of the U) “Presencing”: “‘retreat, and reflect” – allow inner knowing to emerge”;
3) (Up again, top right) “Realizing”: “‘act swiftly, with a natural flow’” (88).

The key seems to be in the ‘presencing’ step, which they say, “constitutes a third type of seeing, beyond seeing external reality and beyond even seeing from within the living whole” (90). But the authors go even further, clearly seeing this stage as a spiritual state of being: “The bottom of the U is where, in Joseph’s words, you discover ‘who you really are as a servant or steward for what’s needed in the world” (91). In many ways, this is not unlike meditation: “We choose the term ‘presencing’ to describe this state because it is about becoming totally present – to the larger space or field around us, to an expanded sense of self, and, ultimately, to what is emerging through us” (91); “Getting to the ‘different place’ that allows presencing to occur begins as we develop a capacity to let go and surrender our perceived need to control”; and “The seeds for this transformation lie in seeing our reality more clearly, without preconceptions and judgments” (131).
(96).

The authors, indeed, link this practice with Buddhist tradition: “Developing a capacity to let go allows us to be open to what is emerging and to practice what Buddhism and other meditative traditions call ‘nonattachment.’ In Buddhist theory, two Sanskrit terms, (96) vitarka and vicara, are used to describe the subtle attachments of mind. Vitarka characterizes the state of ‘seeking,’ when our attention is attached to what we’re trying to make happen. Vicara characterizes the state of ‘watching,’ when, even though we’re not trying to force something to happen, we’re still attached to an outcome we are waiting for. With either, our mental attachment makes us blind or resistant to other aspects of what is happening right now. Overcoming the traps of vitarka and vicara requires continual letting go” (97).

The point of this U trajectory is not to be spiritual, per se, but to see results. The authors argue that engaging in what amounts to a spiritual process will lead to better outcomes. The difference, if we were to make an analogy to scientists: “‘most scientists take existing frameworks and overlay them onto some situation,’ while ‘first-rate ones sit back and study the situation from many, many angles and then ask, ‘What’s fundamentally going on here?’” (85). And while the latter are not any more intelligent than the former, they are able to make the real breakthroughs. Eleanor Rosch, professor of cognitive psychology at the University of California at Berkeley talks about the need for all science to be done with the “‘mind of wisdom’” (98). And she sees this as an almost artistic outlook: “Great artists naturally operate from this other level and always have.’ This ‘other level’ entails a different sort of knowing, what is called in Tibetan Buddhism ‘wisdom awareness.’” (98). Rosch suggests that the trick is in recognizing that “‘mind and world are not separate’” (98), as Buddhism teaches.

Now, psychologists are not the most receptive audience when it comes to pithy spiritual sayings; so in terms that are more palpable for the academics, Rosch has come up with two categories of knowing: ‘primary knowing’ and ‘analytic knowing.’ The former, “arises by means of ‘interconnected (98) wholes, rather than isolated contingent parts and by means of timeless, direct, presentation’ rather than through stored ‘re-presentation.’ ‘Such knowing is open rather than determinate, and a sense of unconditional value, rather than conditional usefulness, is an inherent part of the act of knowing itself,’ said Rosch. Acting from such awareness is ‘spontaneous, rather than the result of decision making,’ and it is ‘compassionate… since it is based on wholes larger than the self’” (99). And:

…all these attributes – timeless, direct, spontaneous, open, unconditional value, and compassionate – go together as one thing. That one thing is what some in Tibetan Buddhism call ‘the natural state’ and what Taoism calls ‘the Source’ (99).

Primary knowing has also been described as tapping into a field of knowledge. The authors again draw on Buddhist teaching: “Tibetan Buddhism talks about emptiness, luminosity, and the knowing capacity as inseparable. That knowing capacity actually is the field knowing itself, in a sense, or this larger context knowing itself’” (99).

Of course, we do not tend to operate on this plane. And furthermore, our technology is beating the capacity to reach that plane right out of us. As the authors say matter-of-factly, “The problem is that most of us have spent our lives immersed in analytic knowing, with its dualistic separation of subject (‘I’) and object (‘it’). There’s nothing wrong with analytic knowing. It’s useful and appropriate for many activities – for example, for interacting with machines. But if it’s our only way of knowing, we’ll tend to apply it in all situations” (99). To me this signals a potential point of intervention, though I hardly know yet what this means in terms of new design concepts. Can we develop technologies that are not built on – and thereby reinforce – this dualistic thinking? My initial reaction is that blurring the boundary between ‘I’ and ‘it’ seems like the misguided goal of VR technology. But then again, immersion, which I have argued elsewhere is certainly not a spiritual evil, does just that – blurs the distinctions. How could you build a system that allows for the kind of immersive experience that something like meditation does? And if part of analytic knowing is it’s linear nature, is there a way of designing for more nebulous, non-linear interaction with a computer? Do we always, for example, need to be oriented around our selves, our avatars and profiles, when we engage with the Internet? Could we be and experience multiple perspectives simultaneously? Is there a way of attaining what Ohashi calls ‘alien self’?:

Ryosoke Ohashi, a scholar of Japan’s leading twentieth-century Zen philosopher, Kitaro Nishida, used the word ‘alien self’ to describe what arises when the localized sense of self fades: ‘Something which is quite alien to me enables my existence.’ Eastern traditions often label this ‘nothingness’: ‘This nothingness enables my existence and also my relation with all.’ But ‘in traditional Christian terminology, this absolute alienness could be said to be God. God is in me – although Nishida doesn’t directly say ‘God.’ But something that is quite alien to me is in my own self’ (101).

More obviously than immediately suggesting design interventions and concepts, this section very clearly advocates a particular methodology that I should probably try to use in my PhD. My supervisor had been describing a non-linear design process to me, that sounds much like this: about doing the linear bit that’s necessary for the literature review, but simultaneously allowing the intuition, completely uninhibited, to make leaps. The thing that I really like about this section is that I now have a spiritual justification for using this design methodology. This ‘presencing’ in my PhD is, effectively, spiritual practice applied to design thinking.

And lastly, I think one of the points I should argue in my PhD is that this spiritual process – which the design community would to some extent embrace (though perhaps not always in Buddhist terms) – would be tremendously helpful for coming up with radical innovations in computing, which is more biased toward and traditionally linear. Infusing computing thinking with spiritual ‘knowing’, and borrowing methodologically from design, I will argue, might just be the key to really changing the world.

This weekend I will be attending “To Catch a Neutrino” by Dr Marieke Navin on Sunday at the 9th Manchester Girl Geek Tea Party.

‘Neutrinos are the most enigmatic and elusive of particles. They can transmit information from the furthest reaches of space and it is this unlikeliness to interact that makes them so interesting to study. Marieke will give you a whistle stop tour of the world of neutrino astronomy then bring you back to Earth to man-made neutrino beams and why we are firing them through the Earth, across Japan and why the study of neutrinos will help us solve some of the mysteries of the Universe.

Marieke Navin took 3 years out after doing an MPhys in Physics and Astronomy at the University of Sheffield. In this time she travelled, volunteered and worked as a debt collector. Marieke returned to Sheffield and has recently completed a PhD on the neutrino oscillation experiment T2K in Japan. She spent 6 weeks working down a mine in the Japanese Alps refurbishing part of the detector. Marieke was runner up in the 2007 FameLab competition and now works as Science Communication Officer at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester.’

If you are there come say hi!

HighWire update: Last week we took some of the new HighWire cohort to FabLab Manchester to let them play. FabLab is somewhere you’ll be able to find us if we go missing. On this venture we escaped to eat and discoveredMadLab hidden away in the Northern Quarter also. We have also been discussing the idea of ‘impact’ and what this means for HighWire, academia and industry. Lots to come. Watch this space.

MakerBot have announced that their Botcave™ Retail Store in Brooklyn will open on November 26th. This is a physical retail space that will retail MakerBotsand Arduinos as well as kits from Adafruit, Evil Mad Science, Jimmie Rodgers, Sparkfun and Liquidware.

This reflects increasingly obvious emergence of retail and commercially focused models growing around open source, crowd-sourcing, social product design and citizen led approaches. [Perhaps better understood as citizen/retail/production models.] Examples include Ponoko, Shapeways, Nervous Systems and perhaps most obviously DOIY and Quirky.com.

Here innovation is observed in the research, design, supply chain, production and distribution mechanisms employed. Quirky, for example, employs crowd sourced (social) product design, research and development. This is complemented by a pull production system, requiring a predetermined level of sales before products are actually produced. This low risk (agile, pull) approach is an interesting development for production and retail of consumer goods.

My research has been looking at models such as these for some time and in doing so I have found many failures and obviously sub-standard models. While it is early for such models it is obvious that Quirky (for one) is something to watch out for.

For the models that didn’t survive or are destined for the retail administration/bankruptcy graveyard I suggest that their primary failings or short comings are related to the client/citizen side interaction, how the citizen/consumer interacts with the model, the effort required, barriers to participation, incentive to participate and a simple lack of consumer awareness.

My forth-coming paper* with Dr. Leon Cruickshank begins to address the client/citizen side of such models through consideration of the role of design as applied to such models. We suggest that through appropriate service design, design of (citizen) processes, provision of toolkits, design or supply of proto-designs** these citizen/retail/production model will be substantially enhanced. (Throw IoT into this mix and we have a perfect storm.)

Retail kids WAKE UP!

>>More to come<<

*SVID 2010
**Related to the known concepts of unfinished, modular and under-design.

In an emerging tradition HighWire is today welcoming it’s second cohort of students in Brantwood at the home of Ruskin. The new cohort is embarking on the Master of research stage of the course which will of course be an exciting and challenging time.

During this time we warmly welcome the new students to the fold and provide insight as to what they will face throughout this year. This may also be the first opportunity that some of the cohort will encounter the trials and tribulations of post disciplinary research which has been the focus of workshops this morning.

Importantly today also marks the transfer of the first cohort to the PhD stage of HighWire where we are pleased to report that the entire cohort has successfully progressed. A few busy months ahead then.

Novak, M. 1991. Liquid architectures in cyberspace. In Cyberspace: First Steps, M. Benedikt, Ed. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 225-254.

Novak’s chapter is very interesting. It begins with the assertion that, “Our interaction with computers so far has primarily been one of clear, linear thinking. Poetic thinking is of an entirely different order” (225-6). The mission is laid out as such: “The greater task will not be to impose science on poetry, but to restore poetry to science” (226).

Novak indulges in some poetic writing about the experience of cyberspace:
“Every paragraph an idea, every idea an image, every image an index, indices strung together along dimensions of my choosing, and I travel through them, sometimes with them, sometimes across them. I produce new sense, nonsense, and nuisance by combination and variation, and I follow the scent of a quality through sand dunes of information. Hints of an attribute attach themselves to my sensors and guide me past the irrelevant, into the company of the important; or I choose to browse the unfamiliar and tumble through volumes and volumes of knowledge still in the making. Sometimes I linger on a pattern for the sake of its strangeness, and as it becomes familiar, I grow into another self. I wonder how much richer the patterns I can recognize can become, and surprise myself by scanning vaster and vaster regions in times shorter and shorter. Like a bird of prey my acuity allows me to glide high above the planes of information, seeking jewels among the grains, seeking knowledge” (230).

That’s lovely. But it’s probably complete BS. Does anyone experience the Internet like this??? The lesson from Novak’s creative writing exercise is that all sorts of not-so-great things can be justified and sold on the poetry of its description. So poetry can be “restored to science” if we’re going to force it on cyberspace thusly; but perhaps we should stop kidding ourselves, rely less on the eloquence of our optimistic dreaming about cyberspace, and actually make it, itself, inherently poetic. In other words, let’s not just describe it more poetically; let’s build it on a more poetic logic.

Then the chapter turns utopian as Novak hails cyberspace as being this turn to the poetic: “Cyberspace is poetry inhabited, and to navigate through it is to become a leaf on the wind of a dream” (229). He introduces the concept of liquidity by stating that, “Poetry is liquid language” (229) – i.e. embodied fiction, which we can rewrite, changing its meaning according to our whims. Then, he argues further:

“Cyberspace is liquid. Liquid cyberspace, liquid architecture, liquid cities. Liquid architecture is more than kinetic architecture, robotic architecture, an architecture of fixed parts and variable links. Liquid architecture is an architecture whose form is contingent on the interests of the beholder; it is an architecture that opens to welcome me and closes to defend me; it is an architecture without doors and hallways, where the next room is always where I need it to be and what I need it to be. Liquid architecture makes liquid cities, cities that change at the shift of a value, where visitors with different backgrounds see different landmarks, where neighborhoods vary with ideas held in common, and evolve as the ideas mature or dissolve” (251).

This is a great example of the libertarian vision of the Internet: liquid equals free! The problem with liquid is that when you try to grasp it, it slips through your fingers. How desirable is liquidity, really? For example, who would choose liquid friendships over solid ones? Could we not, rather, benefit from some concreteness? Further, consider the implications: “It is a symphony in space, but a symphony that never repeats and continues to develop. If architecture is an extension of our bodies, shelter and actor for the fragile self, a liquid architecture is that self in the act of becoming its own changing shelter. Like us, it has an identity; but this identity is only revealed fully during the course of its lifetime” (251). How are we to comprehend a reality that is constantly morphing? – constantly vanishing at the moment we reach out to touch it? Again, is this libertarian vision really desirable?

Novak also makes a sort of aside about the nature of our lived reality: “Cyberspace, as a world of our creation, makes us contemplate the possibility that the reality we exist in is already a sort of ‘cyberspace,’ and the difficulties we would have in understanding what is real if such were the case. Architecture, in its strategies for dealing with a constraining reality suggests ways in which the limitations of a fictional reality may be surmounted” (243). This is something that I will come back to when I write about Ryan’s book Narrative as Virtual Reality.

A more useful invocation of poetry in this cyberspace discourse has to do with the ways in which poetry forces us to stretch our imaginations, thus allowing us to see beyond what we might have before. Novak discusses what this means to architecture:

“Just as poetry differs from prose in its controlled intoxication with meanings to be found beyond the limits of ordinary language, so visionary architecture exceeds ordinary architecture in its search for the conceivable. Visionary architecture, like poetry, seeks an extreme, any extreme: beauty, awe, structure, or the lack of structure, enormous weight, lightness, expense, economy, detail, complexity, universality, uniqueness. In this search for that which is beyond the immediate, it proposes embodiments of ideas that are well beyond what can be built. This is not a weakness: in this precisely is to be found the poignancy of vision” (244).

This has become a recognized design technique: “Piranesi’s series of etchings entitled Carceri, or Prisons, marks the beginning of an architectural discourse of the purposefully unbuildable” (245). How freeing this is! I was thinking that my PhD would require that I design something that could work; but now I’m realizing the contribution that I could make by suggesting alternatives that – at least for now – are purposefully unbuildable. This might then compel people to begin to develop their thinking in a new direction, i.e. towards realizing these ‘unbuildable’ designs. Novak includes this great quote from Gropius (New Ideas on Architecture, 1919): “… build in the imagination, unconcerned about technical difficulties” (247). I shall make this my new motto.

Lastly, I was particularly intrigued by this passage: “Against the increasing constriction of architectural practice, Piranesi drew an imagined world of complex, evocative architecture. His title recalls a phrase by George Bataille: ‘Man will escape his head as a convict escapes his prison’” (245). The reason I like this phrasing is because it harkens back to the Weberian “iron cage” by which we have become imprisoned. Should we ever break out of this cage, we’re going to need to bend our minds a bit. It’s like the moment that the boy explains to Neo in the Matrix that “There is no spoon.” The cage is an illusion; to see this, you have to bend your mind (not the spoon, as it were).

Novak even suggests some good thought experiments for getting us to break out of our caged thinking: “What would it be like to be inside a cubist universe? a hieroglyphic universe? a universe of cave drawings or Magritte paintings? Just as alternative renditions of the same reality by different artists, each with a particular style, can bring to our attention otherwise invisible aspects of that reality, so too can different modes of cyberspace provide new ways of interrogating the world” (244). There are a few artists in particular that I would love to use as inspiration for the building of alternative cyber-worlds: e.g. Matta, Blake, Malevich, and my favorite architect, Zaha Hadid (and I can finally – happily – put that MFA degree to some use!).