Archive for March 2009
The Articulation:
“Excuse me,” Lisa Durnau said. “Can I say something here? I think you’re wrong.” Then she told them about the idea that made life, mind, and intelligence emerge from the underlying properties of the universe as mechanically as physical forces and matter. That CyberEarth was a model of another universe that could exist in the polyverse, a universe where mind was not an emergent phenomenon but a fundamental like the Fine Structure constant, like Omega, like dimensionality. A universe that thought. Like God, she said and as she said those words she saw the gaps and the flaws and the bits she hadn’t thought through and she knew that every face around the table saw them too. She could hear her own voice, hectoring, so so certain, so sure she had all the answers at twenty-four. She tailed off into an apologetic mumble. (p.108-109, River of the Gods, Ian McDonald)
And it’s been there, encoded in ink formed as symbols, themselves representing sounds, mirrored in soundless electric thought in minds. Been there printed on a page, folded into a book, sitting on a shelf since 2004, before that cast into the light of a screen, tapped out through the buttons at the end of the author’s fingertips, resolved out of the thought-realm of the author’s mind space. From fog to fog, via light and ink, and back again round round round.
“Come on, man.” The Bengali might as well have said Jesus or James Bond of Lal Darfan. Chakraborty turns to Vishram.
“What is it about my answer that you do no believe?”
“Generation Three aeis, that’s science fiction.”
“I assure you my employer is quite actual. Odeco is indeed a venture capital holding company, it just happens that the venture capitalist is an artificial intelligence.”
“The Hamilton Acts, the Krishna Cops…”
“There are spaces where an aeai may live. Especially in something like the international financial markets which demand loose regulation to exploit their so-called market freedoms. These aeais are not like our kind of intelligence at all; they are distributed, in many places at once.”
“You’re telling me that this … Brahma … is the stock market, come to life?”
“The international financial markets have used low-level aeais to buy and sell since the last century. As the complexity of the financial transactions spiraled, so did that of the aeais.”
“But who would design something like that?”
“Brahma is not designed, no more than you, Mr. Ray. It evolved”.
[…]
“Brahma?” he says weakly.
“A name. A title. It means nothing. Identity is a much larger and looser construct in CyberEarth. Brahma is a geographically dispersed entity across many nodes and many subcomponents, lower-level aeais, that may not realize they are part of a larger sentience.”
“And this … Generation Three … is more than happy to give me one hundred million US dollars.”
“Or more. You must understand, Mr. Ray, to an entity such as Brahma, making money is the easiest thing there is. It is no harder than breathing is for you.”
-Ian McDonald River of the Gods p.385. (Set in 2047).
A third idea: An infinite range of behavior can be generated by finite combinatorial programs in the mind. […] The clearest example is the Chomskyan revolution in language. (15) Language is the epitome of creative and variable behavior. Most utterances are brand-new combinations of words, never before uttered in the history of humankind. We are nothing like Tickle Me Elmo dolls who have a fixed list of verbal responses hard-wired in. But, Chomsky pointed out, for all its openendedness language is not a free-for-all; it obeys rules and patterns. An English speaker can utter unprecedented strings of words such as Every day new universes come into existence, or He likes his toast with cream cheese and ketchup, or My car has been eaten by wolverines. But no one would say Car my been eaten has wolverines by or most of the other possible orderings of English words. Something in the head must be capable of generating not just any combination of words but highly systematic ones.
That something is a kind of software, a generative grammar that can crank out new arrangements of words. A battery of rules such as “An English sentence contains a subject and a predicate,” “A predicate contains a verb, an object, and complement,” and “The subject of eat is the eater,” can explain the boundless creativity of a human talker. With a few thousand nouns that can fill the subjective slot and a few thousand verbs that can fill the predicate slot, one already has several million ways to open a sentence. The possible combinations quickly multiply out to unimaginable large numbers. Indeed, the repertoire of sentences is theoretically infinite, because the rules of language use a trick called recursion. A recursive rule allows a phrase to contain an example of itself, as in She thinks that he think that they thinki that he knows and so on, ad infinitum. And if the number of sentences is infinite, the number of possible thoughts and intentions is infinite too, because virtually every sentence expresses a different thought or intention. The combinatorial grammar for language meshes with other combinatorial programs in the head for thoughts and intentions. A fixed collection of machinery in the mind can generate an infinite range of behavior by the muscles.
-Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate pages 36-37
JIM RILEY: COMMUTE
January 10 – February 15, 2009
Reception and artist talk: Sunday, January 11, 2009 2 p.m.
Burlington Arts Centre
In our age, the idea of commuting raises certain societal issues. How a person commutes to work is now being questioned more and more for a variety of environmental, psychological and economical reasons.
This installation consists of a looping video projection and four video paintings examining the daily routine life of the commuter. Jim Riley documented the view seen through the train window by a commuter travelling between Burlington and Union Station, Toronto over a three year time period. He used these images to illustrate the commuter’s dilemma. Riley’s aesthetic investigation examines the connection between time and perceptual memory. With this installation, he continues his exploration of the relationship between painting and video. Riley uses both media as perceptual, philosophical instruments for questioning reality and the way we relate with the world.
“The effect of Riley’s stated emotive rather than linear narrative is that at some point the trans-like monotonous routine of the commuter overtakes the viewer. In the vicious loop of getting to the train and getting off the train, going to work and home again, on again, off again, home again, day after day, season after season, we have removed the final particle of mystery. In compensation for the perpetual neurosis of post-industrial commodification, we sympathize with the anonymous and generic commuter who is both a victim and a perpetrator of the surburban distopia.” — Ingrid Mayrhofer-exhibition publication essay
Jim Riley is a video artist and curator based in Burlington, ON. He has exhibited in Canada and the United States. The artist wishes to acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council and Paul Rak & Rhona Tai of Veriform Inc., Cambridge.
Contact: George Wale, Director of Programs at 905-632-7796 or info@jimriley.ca
Burlington Arts Centre, 1333 Lakeshore Rd (at Brock Rd.) Burlington, ON, L7S 1A9
Hours: Monday – Thursday 9:00am – 10:00pm, Friday – Saturday 9:00am- 5:00pm, Sunday 12noon – 5:00pm
from Akimbo exhibitions feed by
akimbo@akimbo.biz
Loop Gallery presents:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Linda Heffernan
Ordinary People
January 10 – February 1, 2009
Reception: Saturday, January 10th, 2009, 2 – 5 pm
Loop Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition by Loop Gallery member Linda Heffernan entitled Ordinary People.
Linda Heffernan’s current body of work is a tongue in cheek response to politics, the media and ordinary people. It speaks to the manner in which corporate America, government officials and ordinary people interact with the media during coverage of both global and local events in a constant play of bait and banter.
Painted photos of ordinary people combine with titles inspired by a Toronto Star meme of the week, or a quote from Saturday Night Live or Canada A.M., to demonstrate the disconnect between the politically astute and those who simply want off the current economic roller coaster to put their head between their knees and take a deep breath.
The semi abstract backgrounds stand in for the snow and ice of backyard rinks, melting glaciers and the extended political snow day invoked by our prorogued parliament. The surreal nature of these paintings is both a comment on the current state of Canadian political affairs and a portal for momentary escape.
Linda Heffernan is a Whitby-based artist exploring themes of consumer capitalism and bureaucracy in an ever more interconnected global economy. She recently obtained her BFA from Ontario College of Art and Design where she was named to the Dean’s Honour List in the Faculty of Art. She has exhibited her work in a number of galleries in Toronto’s Queen West district as well as Whitby’s Station Gallery.
Please join the artist in celebrating the opening on Saturday, January 10th from 2-5 pm.
Loop Members
Mark Adair . Elizabeth Babyn . Yael Brotman . Kelly Cade . Laura Ciruls (1959-2008) . Gary Clement . Tanya Cunnington . Catherine Daigle (1953 – 2006) . Elizabeth D’Agostino . Chris Dow . Martha Eleen . Adrian Fish . Maria Gabankova . Candida Girling . Charles Hackbarth . Libby Hague . Linda Heffernan . Isabelle Hemard . David Holt . Sung Ja Kim . JJ Lee . Richard Mongiat . Mary Catherine Newcomb . Liz Parkinson . Maureen Paxton . Barbara Rehus . Thelma Rosner . Rochelle Rubinstein. Lanny Shereck . Yvonne Singer . Adrienne Trent
Loop Gallery
1174 Queen Street West, Toronto, Ontario, M6J 1J5 (one block east of Gladstone).
Gallery Hours: Wed – Sat 1 to 5 pm, and Sun 1 to 4pm. Artist is in attendance on Sundays.
For more information please contact Ester Pugliese, gallery director, at (416) 516-2581 or loopgallery@primus.ca.
www.loopgallery.ca
Hans Gindlesberger and Nicholas Knight January 9 – February 14 @ Gallery 44, Toronto
Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography
401 Richmond St West, Suite 120
Toronto, Ontario
Right Frame, Wrong Film
Hans Gindlesberger and Nicholas Knight
January 9 – February 14, 2009
Opening: Friday January 9, 6-9pm
Artist talk: Friday January 9, 6-7pm
Gallery 44’s first exhibition of 2009, Right Frame, Wrong Film, challenges the viewer’s expectations about photography and seeing. Premiering in Canada, Hans Gindlesberger’s I’m in the Wrong Film explores the story of a character lost in suburbia, through cinematic photographs. Nicholas Knight, a New York based photographer, has created site-specific trompe-l’oeil installations that question the ways that photography frames its subjects. James D. Campbell, the exhibition brochure writer, states: “Gindlesberger and Knight are seasoned archaeologists of the seeing and the seen. Knight excavates the conventions of photographic practice in pursuit of a fully decoded aesthetic; Gindlesberger unearths potent psychological artifacts and tropes that imply much about place, non-place, belonging and alienation.” The full text is available on our website and exhibition brochure.
Exhibition programming
Artist talk: Friday January 9, 6-7pm
Join the artists for a walk-through of the exhibition and a discussion of the artist’s practices. A reception will follow.
Biographies
Hans Gindlesberger, originally from Toledo, Ohio, is interested in exploring issues of locality and displacement in theatre, silent film, and photography. His work has been exhibited and published in North America and abroad. He is currently based in Buffalo, New York, and Huntington, West Virginia, where he is Visiting Assistant Professor of Photography at Marshall University.
Nicholas Knight lives and works in New York City. He attended Indiana University, where he studied painting and the history and philosophy of science. He has exhibited his work throughout North America, including solo exhibitions in Chicago, San Francisco, and Marfa, Texas. He was artist-in-residence in 2007 at the Domaine de Kerguéhennec in Bignan, France.
Image Credit: Hans Gindlesberger, Untitled, from the series I’m in the Wrong Film, archival inkjet print, 55.88 x 101.60 cm, 2006
Media contact:
Melissa Bennett, Exhibition Coordinator
Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography
melissa@gallery44.org
(416) 979-3941
Gallery 44 is open Tuesday to Saturday 11am to 5pm
Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 120
Toronto, Ontario M5V 3A8
www.gallery44.org
From: Saturday, December 13th, 2008
…Google’s Chrome browser being available for the Mac. (~January 2009) [sometime by June I understand]
…seeing Obama’s inauguration and hearing his speech (Jan 20 2009)
…seeing the last episodes of Battlestar Galactica. (Jan-March 2009)
…seeing the new Star Trekmovie (May 2009)
…getting an iPhone (Jan-Jun 2009)
…seeing the Caprica series (Jan 2010) [DVD of pilot to be released on April 21st]
(From HBO’s Rome)
Related:
http://timothycomeau.com/blog/348/
http://timothycomeau.com/blog/420/
http://timothycomeau.com/blog/677/
(source)