Rhizome | Blog Posts tagged "transhumanism"

Goodiepal’s Plot To Educate AI

Nat Roe | Wed Nov 16th, 2011 2:01 p.m.

If you find Goodiepal’s artwork to be inexplicable, it may be because you’re not a robot or a blade of grass.

Goodiepal (alternately spelled Gaeoudjiparl or Gaodjiperl) has in fact directed his unique and absurd concerts/lectures/performance art/stand up comedy/show-and-tell toward AI. As he waxes in his Mort Aux Vaches lecture, “We need to start to talk to the machines as human beings, bringing and expecting machines to understand what we are saying....in a Utopian future, [my] work is not only made to be appreciated by human minds. No, it’s also meant to be worshiped by all kinds of alternative intelligence.”

A Goodiepal performance might begin with a solemn whistled rendition of a patriotic ode. Often he will place an array of strange handmade objects on a table and begin to move them around methodically on a chess board, occasionally uttering a guttural croak. He might begin to lecture about his nonlinear conception of time, indicating that small bundles of twine on the table symbolize points of time. He might impersonate rock bands and do karaoke. Goodiepal’s lectures would be a complete upheaval of everything you believed if there weren’t wry Dadaist halo around it all.

Goodiepal’s London studio, The Blue House, designed by FAT

Primarily using voice in recent musical performances is an odd step for Goodiepal, since he was introduced to most fans as a synth musician and builder. One of Goodiepal’s more infamous synths is an motorized brass bird that has several levers to control a synthesized birdsong. This synth is just one charismatically packaged part of a massive portfolio of built-from-scratch and modified electronics. Goodiepal in fact makes much of his income by repairing and modifying synthesizers and various electronics at his studio in London ...

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Beijing Post-Human New Media Art Show “Translife.”

Joanne McNeil | Mon Aug 15th, 2011 10:55 a.m.

From the New York Times, a look at “Translife,” "a cutting-edge International Triennial of New Media Art that purports to ring the death knell for 'representational' art, questions the very notion of life as we know it, and posits our collective entry into a 'post-human era.'” (More images and a write up by An Xiao on Hyperallergic.)

From the NYT review:

The diverse works on display are connected by their use of digital technology, boundary-crossing nature, collective creation process and the implicit assumption that our world has fundamentally transformed — in ways we are barely beginning to grasp.

“The time-space relationship is changed, or our perception of it,” Mr. Zhang said. “When we talk about time, it is multiple times now. Distance has disappeared because of the network.”

This point is made at the outset by the “Weather Tunnel” installation that stands in the museum’s courtyard. Designed by the architect Ma Yansong, the shimmering white tunnel contains weather-themed works by young artists from universities in China, the United States, Europe and Australia that draw on the same, real-time climatic data from around the globe. (Data is transmitted by custom-made sensors based on those created by Joe Saavedra, an adjunct professor at Parsons, for a project called Citizen Sensor.)

Inside the tunnel, which was uncomfortably hot in Beijing’s blistering summer, a visitor can look through a “Solar Wind Periscope” (Jonas Hansen and Lasse Scherffig) at a visualization of extraterrestrial weather conditions based on information conveyed by radio signals; press a button on the “Weather Inflections” suitcase (Joel Louie, Jan L. Andruszkiewicz, Bryan J. Mather, Kevin Raxworthy, Julian Stadon and Paul Thomas) to hear a sensory-crossing sonification of weather conditions in various global cities; and even listen to an “Electromechanical Solenoid Orchestra & Weather Ensemble” (Benjamin Bacon and Joe Saavedra) that plays ...

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Dan O'Hara on Skeuomorphs, JG Ballard, Transhumanism, and the "eradication of individual identity" Through Technology

Joanne McNeil | Tue Jul 5th, 2011 5:57 p.m.

A skeumorph is "a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original." Dan O'Hara, lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Cologne, and editor of the forthcoming book Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J. G. Ballard, 1967–2008, (co-edited with Simon Sellars, London: Fourth Estate, 2012), studies skeumorphism. Transcript from a Knowledge Centre livechat conversation with Dr. O'Hara:

How does skeumorphism relate to the ideas of post- and trans-humanism? Do you think our bodies will once become skeumorphs?

Certainly Stelarc does! And Orlan, the French performance artist who has plastic surgery under local anaesthetic, suggests that we're already skeuomorphic.

Is the human appendix a skeuomorph?

Already so many parts of our bodies aren't biologically necessary. Yes. Though the appendix isn't ornamental... But hair, nails, pierced nipples, all get used to express a style. In the same way as, in evolution, we have exaption: the repurposing of an obsolete function.

Dan, would you mind telling us how your work with JG Ballard intersects with that of skeuomorphs?

Sure. I see Ballard as the key author, philosopher even, of the age of technology. He's always managed to live five minutes into everyone else's futures, and has focused on the way our natural world has increasingly become a technologized domain we don't fully understand. So skeuomorphs, as a kind of 'memory' capacity of artefacts, can show us the processes that guide the evolution of the forms of technology. And I feel that Ballard affirms the moral necessity of this kind of understanding.

Does that suggest to you that we are already skeuomorphs? All, mind and body?

No, we're not. There are many linguistic skeuomorphs: take for example on line 'newspapers'. Which is more ...

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