“Ours is a world in vertigo. It is a world that swarms with technological mediation, interlacing our daily lives with abstraction, virtuality, and complexity.

In this video we take a look at why Cosmic Horror (or Lovecraftian Horror) is so hard to adapt onto the screen because of its visual complexity and abstraction.

Video essay made by Moises & Sergio Velasquez https://www.patreon.com/screened

------------- Editor's Note:

• It's not mental patients but someone insane made the drawings.

------------- Follow us on:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/screenedclip/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/MoiVel

------------- Music:

The Old Ones by Scott Buckley – www.scottbuckley.com.au

------------- Movie Clips From:

2001: A Space Odyssey (Debatebly has Lovecraftian elements) Alien Annihilation Bird Box Cloverfield Paradox In the Mouth of Madness The Endless The Mist The Thing The Unnamable The Void

Cosmichorror #Movies #Lovecraft

We have learned how to manipulate the code of life. Why this hasn’t received more attention is beyond me. Synthetic Biology is a multidisciplinary field that often defies definition. Yet despite its complexity, it is a remarkably easy field to apply once you’ve learned the science behind it.

Authors: R. Guevara Erra, D. M. Mateos, R. Wennberg, J.L. Perez Velazquez Abstract: It has been said that complexity lies between order and disorder. In the case of brain activity, and physiology in general, complexity issues are being considered with increased emphasis.

This course examines the history, theory, and practice of making art on the web. Beginning with early examples of systems theory, we will trace the utopian ideals of the web’s origin to the commercial and social complexity of the net today.

This was the paper I delivered at The Theorizing the Web Conference, New York, 18th April 2015. This video of the paper begins part way in, and misses out some important stuff. I urge you to watch the other, superb, papers on my panel by Natalie Kane, Solon Barocas, and Nick Seaver. A better video is forthcoming. I posted this up partly in response to this post at Wired about the UK election, Facebook’s echo-chamber effect, and other implications well worth reading into.

Data churning algorithms are integral to our social and economic networks. Rather than replace humans these programs are built to work with us, allowing the distinct strengths of human and computational intelligences to coalesce. As we are submerged into the era of ‘big data’, these systems have become more and more common, concentrating every terrabyte of raw data into meaningful arrangements more easily digestible by high-level human reasoning. A company calling themselves ‘Narrative Science’, based in Chicago, have established a profitable business model based on this relationship. Their slogan, ‘Tell the Stories Hidden in Your Data’, [1] is aimed at companies drowning in spreadsheets of cold information: a promise that Narrative Science can ‘humanise’ their databases with very little human input. Kristian Hammond, Chief Technology Officer of the company, claims that within 15 years over 90% of all news stories will also be written by algorithms. [2] But rather than replacing the jobs that human journalists now undertake, Hammond claims the vast majority of their ‘robonews’ output will report on data currently not covered by traditional news outlets. One family-friendly example of this is the coverage of little-league baseball games. Very few news organisations have the resources, or desire, to hire a swathe of human journalists to write-up every little-league game. Instead, Narrative Science offer leagues, parents and their children a miniature summary of each game gleaned from match statistics uploaded by diligent little league attendees, and then written up by Narrative Science in a variety of journalistic styles. In their book ‘Big Data’ from 2013, Oxford University Professor of internet governance Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, and  ‘data editor’ of The Economist, Kenneth Cukier, tell us excitedly about another data aggregation company, Prismatic, who: …rank content from the web on the basis of text analysis, user preferences, social network-popularity, and big-data analysis. [3] According to Mayer- Schönberger and Cukier this makes Prismatic able ‘to tell the world what it ought to pay attention to better than the editors of the New York Times’. [4] A situation, Steven Poole reminds us, we can little argue with so long as we agree that popularity underlies everything that is culturally valuable. Data is now the lifeblood of technocapitalism. A vast endless influx of information flowing in from the growing universe of networked and internet connected devices. As many of the papers at Theorizing the Web attest, our environment is more and more founded by systems whose job it is to mediate our relationship with this data. Technocapitalism still appears to respond to Jean Francois Lyotard’s formulation of Postmodernity: that whether something is true has less relevance, than whether it is useful. In 1973 Jean Francois Lyotard described the Postmodern Condition as a change in “the status of knowledge” brought about by new forms of techno-scienctific and techno-economic organisation. If a student could be taught effectively by a machine, rather than by another human, then the most important thing we could give the next generation was what he called, “elementary training in informatics and telematics.” In other words, as long as our students are computer literate “pedagogy would not necessarily suffer”. [5] The next passage – where Lyotard marks the Postmodern turn from the true to the useful – became one of the book’s most widely quoted, and it is worth repeating here at some length:

It is only in the context of the grand narratives of legitimation – the life of the spirit and/or the emancipation of humanity – that the partial replacement of teachers by machines may seem inadequate or even intolerable. But it is probable that these narratives are already no longer the principal driving force behind interest in acquiring knowledge. [6] Here, I want to pause to set in play at least three elements from Lyotard’s text that colour this paper. Firstly, the historical confluence between technocapitalism and the era now considered ‘postmodern’. Secondly, the association of ‘the grand-narrative’ with modern, and pre-modern conditions of knowledge. And thirdly, the idea that the relationship between the human and the machine – or computer, or software – is generally one-sided: i.e. we may shy away from the idea of leaving the responsibility of our children’s education to a machine, but Lyotard’s position presumes that since the machine was created and programmed by humans, it will therefore necessarily be understandable and thus controllable, by humans. Today, Lyotard’s vision of an informatically literate populous has more or less come true. Of course we do not completely understand the intimate workings of all our devices or the software that runs them, but the majority of the world population has some form of regular relationship with systems simulated on silicon. And as Lyotard himself made clear, the uptake of technocapitalism, and therefore the devices and systems it propagates, is piece-meal and difficult to predict or trace. At the same time Google’s fleet of self-driving motor vehicles are let-loose on Californian state highways, in parts of sub-Saharan Africa models of mobile-phones designed 10 or more years ago are allowing farming communities to aggregate their produce into quantities with greater potential to make profit on a world market. As Brian Massumi remarks, network technology allows us the possibility of “bringing to full expression a prehistory of the human”, a “worlding of the human” that marks the “becoming-planetary” of the body itself. [7] This “worlding of the human” represents what Edmund Berger argues is the death of the Postmodern condition itself: [T]he largest bankruptcy of Postmodernism is that the grand narrative of human mastery over the cosmos was never unmoored and knocked from its pulpit. Instead of making the locus of this mastery large aggregates of individuals and institutions – class formations, the state, religion, etc. – it simply has shifted the discourse towards the individual his or herself, promising them a modular dreamworld for their participation… [8] Algorithmic narratives appear to continue this trend. They are piece-meal, tending to feedback user’s dreams, wants and desires, through carefully aggregated, designed, packaged Narratives for individual ‘use’. A world not of increasing connectivity and understanding between entities, but a network worlded to each individual’s data-shadow. This situation is reminiscent of the problem pointed out by Eli Pariser of the ‘filter bubble’, or the ‘you loop’, a prevalent outcome of social media platforms tweaked and personalised by algorithms to echo at the user exactly the kind of thing they want to hear. As algorithms develop in complexity the stories they tell us about the vast sea of data will tend to become more and more enamoring, more and more palatable. Like some vast synthetic evolutionary experiment, those algorithms that devise narratives users dislike, will tend to be killed off in the feedback loop, in favour of other algorithms whose turn of phrase, or ability to stoke our egos, is more pronounced. For instance, Narrative Science’s early algorithms for creating little league narratives tended to focus on the victors of each game. What Narrative Science found is that parents were more interested in hearing about their own children, the tiny ups and downs that made the game significant to them. So the algorithms were tweaked in response. Again, to quote chief scientist Kris Hammond from Narrative Science: These are narratives generated by systems that understand data, that give us information to support the decisions we need to make about tomorrow. [9] Whilst we can program software to translate the informational nuances of a baseball game, or internet social trends, into human palatable narratives, larger social, economic and environmental events also tend to get pushed through an algorithmic meatgrinder to make them more palatable. The ‘tomorrow’ that Hammond claims his company can help us prepare for is one that, presumably, companies like Narrative Science and Prismatic will play an ever larger part in realising. In her recently published essay on Crisis and the Temporality of Networks, Wendy Chun reminds us of the difference between the user and the agent in the machinic assemblage: Celebrations of an all powerful user/agent – ‘you’ as the network, ‘you’ as the producer- counteract concerns over code as law as police by positing ‘you’ as the sovereign subject, ‘you’ as the decider. An agent however, is one who does the  actual labor, hence agent is one who acts on behalf of another. On networks, the agent would seem to be technology, rather than the users or programmers who authorize actions through their commands and clicks. [10] In order to unpack Wendy Chun’s proposition here we need only look at two of the most powerful, and impactful algorithms from the last ten years of the web. Firstly, Amazon’s recommendation system, which I assume you have all interacted with at some point. And secondly, Facebook’s news feed algorithm, that ranks and sorts posts on your personalised stream. Both these algorithms rely on a community of user interactions to establish a hierarchy of products, or posts, based on popularity. Both these algorithms also function in response to user’s past activity, and both, of course, have been tweaked and altered over time by the design and programming teams of the respective companies. As we are all no doubt aware, one of the most significant driving principles behind these extraordinarily successful pieces of code is capitalism itself. The drive for profit, and the relationship that has on distinguishing between a successful or failing company, service or product. Wendy Chun’s reminder that those that carry out an action, that program and click, are not the agents here should give use solace. We are positioned as sovereign subjects over our data, because that idea is beneficial to the propagation of the ‘product’. Whether we are told how well our child has done at baseball, or what particular kinds of news stories we might like, personally, to read right now, it is to the benefit of technocapitalism that those narratives are positive, palatable and uncompromising. However the aggregation and dissemination of big data effects our lives over the coming years, the likelihood is that at the surface – on our screens, and ubiquitous handheld devices – everything will seem rosey, comfortable, and suited to the ‘needs’ and ‘use’ of each sovereign subject.

TtW15 #A7 @npseaver @nd_kane @s010n @smwat pic.twitter.com/BjJndzaLz1

— Daniel Rourke (@therourke) April 17, 2015

So to finish I just want to gesture towards a much much bigger debate that I think we need to have about big data, technocapitalism and its algorithmic agents. To do this I just want to read a short paragraph which, as far as I know, was not written by an algorithm: Surface temperature is projected to rise over the 21st century under all assessed emission scenarios. It is very likely that heat waves will occur more often and last longer, and that extreme precipitation events will become more intense and frequent in many regions. The ocean will continue to warm and acidify, and global mean sea level to rise. [11] This is from a document entitled ‘Synthesis Report for Policy Makers’ drafted by The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – another organisation who rely on a transnational network of computers, sensors, and programs capable of modeling atmospheric, chemical and wider environmental processes to collate data on human environmental impact. Ironically then, perhaps the most significant tool we have to understand the world, at present, is big data. Never before has humankind had so much information to help us make decisions, and help us enact changes on our world, our society, and our selves. But the problem is that some of the stories big data has to tell us are too big to be narrated, they are just too big to be palatable. To quote Edmund Berger again: For these reasons we can say that the proper end of postmodernism comes in the gradual realization of the Anthropocene: it promises the death of the narrative of human mastery, while erecting an even grander narrative. If modernism was about victory of human history, and postmodernism was the end of history, the Anthropocene means that we are no longer in a “historical age but also a geological one. Or better: we are no longer to think history as exclusively human…” [12] I would argue that the ‘grand narratives of legitimation’ Lyotard claimed we left behind in the move to Postmodernity will need to return in some way if we are to manage big data in a meaningful way. Crises such as catastrophic climate change will never be made palatable in the feedback between users, programmers and  technocapitalism. Instead, we need to revisit Lyotard’s distinction between the true and the useful. Rather than ask how we can make big data useful for us, we need to ask what grand story we want that data to tell us.   References [1] Source: www.narrativescience.com, accessed 15/10/14 [2] Steven Levy, “Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?,” WIRED, April 24, 2012, http://www.wired.com/2012/04/can-an-algorithm-write-a-better-news-story-than-a-human-reporter/. [3] “Steven Poole – On Algorithms,” Aeon Magazine, accessed May 8, 2015, http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/steven-poole-can-algorithms-ever-take-over-from-humans/. [4] Ibid. [5] Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Repr, Theory and History of Literature 10 (Manchester: Univ. Pr, 1992), 50. [6] Ibid., 51. [7] Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Duke University Press, 2002), 128. [8] Edmund Berger, “The Anthropocene and the End of Postmodernism,” Synthetic Zero, n.d., http://syntheticzero.net/2015/04/01/the-anthropocene-and-the-end-of-postmodernism/. [9] Source: www.narrativescience.com, accessed 15/10/14 [10] Wendy Chun, “Crisis and the Temporality of Networks,” in The Nonhuman Turn, ed. Richard Grusin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 154. [11] Rajendra K. Pachauri et al., “Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” 2014, http://epic.awi.de/37530/. [12] Berger, “The Anthropocene and the End of Postmodernism.”

Artist Daniel Temkin has been creating and discussing glitch art for over seven years. In that time, he's exhibited in solo and group shows, and had his work featured in Rhizome and Fast Company, amongst other publications. For Temkin, glitch art is about the disruption of algorithms, though algorithmic art is a bit of a misnomer. He prefers "algo-glitch demented" in describing the methods, aesthetics, and philosophy of glitch.

In January, Temkin published a fascinating glitch art essay on NOOART titled "Glitch && Human/Computer Interaction." There he laid down the philosophy and "mythology" of glitch, which had really started in a series of email conversations with Hugh Manon. Though there is no shortage of writings on glitch art, many aspects of the these texts didn't address what Temkin loved most about how it is created.

"The glitch aesthetic may be rooted in the look of malfunction, but when it comes to actual practice, there’s often not much glitch in glitch art," wrote Temkin in the essay. "Yes, some glitch artists are actually exploiting bugs to get their results — but for most it would be more accurate to describe these methods as introducing noisy data to functional algorithms or applying these algorithms in unconventional ways." This, he said, doesn't make it traditional algorithmic art (algorithm-designed artworks), but a more demented form of it—algo-glitch demented.

Over a series of email conversations, Temkin elaborated on some of his conclusions in "Glitch && Human/Computer Interaction." Aside from highlighting some of the best algo-glitch demented art, Temkin also talked about bad data, image hacking, and why computers are no less "image makers" than humans even though they aren't sentient (yet).

MOTHERBOARD: Aside from being an artist working in glitch, would you say that you've also sort of become a philosopher of glitch or algorithmic art, if there is such a thing?

Temkin: There's tons of writing on glitch, much of it very good (Lab404.com, for instance), but some aspects of glitch theory didn't jibe with what really interested me about the style. Originally, Hugh Manon and I started a long email conversation about glitch, which evolved into our 2011 paper. It ranged across glitch aesthetics, methodology, and issues around authorship, while delving into glitch's ambivalence about error—the way the glitch is possible because of software's ability to "fail to fully fail" when coming across unexpected data.

We questioned why computer error is so emphasized in this form when nothing is really at stake in a digital file (a deleted but endlessly reproducible JPEG has none of the aura of an Erased DeKooning), and what it means to purposely simulate an error, something that ordinarily has power because it is unexpected and outside of our control.

Ted Davis, FFD8 project

These issues stuck with me, until I considered Clement Valla's familiar quote about his Postcards From Google Earth project: that "these images are not glitches... they are the absolute logical result of the system." It was a familiar quote, but in this instance got me thinking about how most glitchwork can be described the same way—as products of perfectly functional systems.

I wrote my recent piece for NOOART, arguing that glitch's preoccupation with error doesn't always serve it well, that it limits the scope of what's produced and how we talk about it. Bypassing computer error opened new avenues of investigation about our relationship both with technology and with logic systems more generally, and got at what interested me more about the style we call glitch.

In the NOOART essay, you write: "Some glitch artists are actually exploiting bugs to get their results — but for most it would be more accurate to describe these methods as introducing noisy data to functional algorithms or applying these algorithms in unconventional ways." Can you elaborate on that point?

In the paper, I discuss JPEG corruption, one of the fundamental glitch techniques. Introduce bad data to a JPEG file, and you'll see broken-looking images emerge. I use this example because it's so familiar to glitch practice. JPEG is not just a file format but an algorithm that compresses/decompresses image data.

When we "corrupt" a JPEG, we're altering compressed data so that it (successfully) renders to an image that no longer appears photographic, taking on a chunky, pixelated, more abstract character we associate with broken software. To the machine, it is not an error—if the image were structurally damaged, we would not be able to open it. This underscores the machine as an apparatus indifferent to what makes visual sense to us, at a place where our expectations clash with algorithmic logic.

Daniel Temkin, Dither Studies #2, 2011

The excitement of altering JPEG data directly is the sense of image hacking—making changes at the digital level without being able to predict the outcome. This becomes more apparent in other glitch techniques, such as sonification, which add layers of complexity to the process. Giving up control to a system or process has a long history in art.

Gerhard Richter describes committing to a systematic approach, veiling the work from conscious decisions that may ruin or limit it. As he puts it, "if the execution works, this is only because I partly destroy it, or because it works in spite of everything—by not detracting and by not looking the way I planned" [p179, Gerhard Richter, Panorama]. In digital art, we often function in an all-too-WYSIWYG environment. Glitch frees us from this, bringing us to unexpected places.

Can you draw a distinction between generative art (which can feature algorithms) and your concept of algo-glitch demented?

I call it algo-glitch demented, as opposed to algorithmic art (which I understand meaning generative art that uses algorithms). I'll have to paraphrase Philip Galanter and say that generative art is any practice where the artist sets a system "in motion with some degree of autonomy," resulting in a work.

"Glitch is a cyborg art, building on human/computer interaction. The patterns created by these unknown processes is what I call the wilderness within the machine." What makes algo-glitch demented is how we misuse existing algorithms, running them in contexts that had never been intended by their designers. Furthermore, there are moments of autonomy in algo-glitch, but this autonomy is not what defines it as algo-glitch; what's more important is the control we give up to the process.

You call glitch art a collaboration with the machine. That's an interesting point because the human is conscious of this, while the machine is not. Or, do you have another way of looking at that collaboration?

Machines are not sentient, but they are image-makers. Trevor Paglen, in a recent Frieze Magazine piece, says we are now or very soon to be at the point "where the majority of the world’s images are made by-machines-for-machines," and "seeing with the meat-eyes of our human bodies is increasingly the exception," refering to facial-recognition systems, qr code readers, and a host of other automation.

One of the most compelling ideas to come from James Bridle's New Aesthetic is how we can treat the machine as having a vision—even as we know it's not sentient—and just how strange this vision is, that does not hold human beings as its audience.

Jeff Donaldson, panasonic wj-mx12 video feedback, 2012

Glitch artists have been doing this for a long time, treating it as an equal collaborator and seeing where it leads us as we cede control to broken processes and zombie algorithms. Curt Cloninger describes it as "painting with a very blunt brush that has a mind of its own;" in this way, glitch is a cyborg art, building on human/computer interaction. The patterns created by these unknown processes is what I call the wilderness within the machine.

Can you talk about glitch as mythology? I've never heard it described as such.

I'm probably being a bit obnoxious there, using mythology to describe the gap between how we talk about glitch and what we're actually doing. There are several strains of work within glitch or that overlap with glitch. There is Dirty New Media, which is related to noise-based work; materialist explorations; the algo-glitch I've emphasized in the JPEG example; and what we might call "minimal slippage glitch" (a term that arose in a Facebook discussion between me and Rosa Menkman).

Minimal Slippage fits a familiar contemporary art scenario of the single gesture that puts things in motion and reveals something new. It's great when things actually work this way, but when this language is used to describe work made by manipulating data repeatedly, there's a problem.

I also take issue with the term glitch art. I don't propose we replace it, only to be more conscious of its influence. If we produce work with other visual styles using glitch processes, why limit ourselves to work that has an error-strewn appearance? This connection begins to seems artificial. I kept this in mind with my Glitchometry series. I use the sonification technique to process simple geometric shapes (b&w squares and triangles, etc.) into works that range from somewhat glitchy to abstractions that fall very far from a glitch aesthetic. They emphasize process, the back-and-forth with the machine, and an anxiety about giving up that control.

Clement Valla, from “Iconoclashes” 2013

With Glitchometry Stripes (an extension of the Glitchometry work), the results are even less glitchy in appearance; this time using only sound effects that cleanly transform the lines, ending up with Op Art-inspired, crisply graphic works that create optical buzzing when scrolled across the screen.

You mention Ted Davis's FFD8 project in your essay. What is it about the work that you like?

FFD8 is JPEG image hacking, with protection against messing up the header (which would make the image undisplayable). It's a gentle introduction to glitching, but it illustrates how it works, which encourages one to go deeper. I'm suspicious of glitch software that does all the work for you, essentially turning glitch styling into the equivalent of a Photoshop filter. With FFD8, enough of the process is exposed that folks starting out in the style might decide to take the next step and mess with raw files directly, or build their own software, or discover some new avenue to create work.

What's your opinion on something like the iPhone's panorama function, which, if you move the camera fast or in unexpected directions, creates glitches? It's movement-based as opposed to other types of glitch.

I think someone will come along with a brilliant idea of how to use it to do something fresh and interesting. One interesting work that uses photo-stitching (although not on the iPhone) is Clement Valla's Iconoclasts series. He loads images of gods from the Met's collection and lets Photoshop decide how to combine them, creating improbable composites, many physically impossible. It works because of how carefully the objects were photographed. Each is lit the same way with the same background. Many of these religious relics come from cultures where it was believed that such objects were not created by human hands. Now an algorithm, also not human, decides how to combine them to construct new artifacts.

Daniel Temkin, Glitchometry Circles #6, 2013

Where do you feel you've been most successful in your own projects?

I never trust artists to tell me which of their works are more successful. [laughs] I'll tell you the theme I'm most interested in. Much of my work revolves around this clash between human thinking and computer logic, and the compulsiveness that comes from trying to think in a logical way. My own experience with this comes from programming, which is my background from before art. Glitch gives me a way to create chaotic works as a release from the overly structured thinking programming requires.

As a few examples of work that deals with this, my Dither Studies expose the seemingly irrational patterns that come from the very simple rules of dithering patterns. They began as a collaboration with Photoshop, where I asked it to dither a solid color with two incompatible colors. From there, I constructed a web tool that walks through progressions of dithers.

In Drunk Eliza, I re-coded the classic chat bot using my language Entropy, where all data is unstable. Since the original Eliza has such a small databank of phrases, yet so clearly has a personality, I wanted to know how she would seem with her mind slowly disintegrating, HAL-style. Drunk Eliza was the result. The drunken responses she gets online have been a great source of amusement for me.

Daniel Rourke: Your ongoing project, Dark Matter, was something of a revelation for me: a collection of objects forbidden or “unwelcome” in Iran, brought together through digital modelling, meshing, and 3D printing. The results are playful and surrealistic, with the same capacity to waken the subconscious as any Dali Lobster-Telephone or Hair-Lamp. For me Dark Matter resonates as subversive not just because the dog-dildo is an affront to conservative sexual values, or because the Barbie-VHS blurs cultural boundaries (a feature of a lot of your work). Rather I was taken by how the objects spoke to the here and now; that perhaps there is something about the collapse of all commodities, forms, and ideas into the digital that promotes blurred perspectives and subversive practices. I wondered whether you saw your work as particular to the digital tools and materials you choose, or are you “just” making use of things that happen to be available to you? Morehshin Allahyari: I was particularly interested in choosing the most relevant tools and materials for creating a new body of work about forbidden/unwelcome objects. I found the idea of “3D printing/re-creating the forbidden” a very compelling prospect, which raised paradoxical issues of limitations and boundaries—social, cultural, and political. I was also very interested in the technology of 3D printing as this “poetic technology” for resistance, for reclaiming all the things that were taken from me during my life in Iran or are currently being taken away from my sister, and mother, and my friends. There is something very special about things that you can’t have access to when they are forced by law out of your life. When there are many of those objects/things, and they are the most ordinary things (dog, sex toys, neck-tie, Barbie, satellite-dish, Bart Simpson, ham/pig, alcohol, etc.), then there is something meaningful and symbolic about using a technology like 3D printing to re-create them. The combination of the objects, I think, adds a sense of humor to the work that is very similar to the ridiculousness of having these objects banned when you look at the whole picture.

While developing the project, I really fell in love with thinking about 3D printing as a “documentation tool”… you know, like when you go to historical museums, and they have this whole collection of objects or things that used to be this and that, or had whatever functionality 500 years ago. I thought, what if this could be the archive, the documentation of the life after the 1979 revolution in Iran, the life I lived, and how will it feel to look back at this collection in 20 or 30 years? Also, through combining and re-creating these objects and putting them inside a virtual word, I can re-contextualize and invite the audience to enter the historical dimension of the work… So yeah… I am directly addressing the medium of 3D printing here. Plus, there is a broad conversation of censorship built into the technology of 3D printing as a whole, which actually expands the project to other countries including the United States (I am thinking about the 3D printed, potentially functional gun as one of the first examples).

Morehshin Allahyari, virtual landscape for #dog #dildo #satellite-dish from the series “Dark Matter.” Work in progress. DR: You have just collaborated on a text that shifts between registers, performing the splits, breaks and tears it indicates in the life and work of “self-exiled” people. I was struck by an image you use of “Time, memory, space, and bodies collapsing, losing composition.” [1] These ideas feature heavily in your work, where one’s heritage or identity can coalesce and mutate as readily as a 3D print. MA: I am struck by the idea of representation in digital art. I think about the reconstruction of memory in virtual worlds, the rebuilding of non-existent objects from the virtual world into real life… how we understand our world through representation, the dystopian, the utopian, and everything in-between. Since I have moved to the U.S. (2007), I have become more and more fascinated by the in-depth thoughts on exile and diaspora within Edward Said’s text “Reflections on Exile,” Mahmoud Darwish’s poems, and Lorna Dee Cervantes’ Palastine poem, among others. But in my own work, I wanted to simultaneously be aware of the dangers of the romanticization of exile and self-exile – as well as the whole nostalgic remembrance of the “homeland” that is inaccessible; I wanted to look for different ways that I can use digital technology to talk about my own understanding of self-exile. So I worked on a 3D animation video, a plexiglas installation, a 16mm film, a series of Facebook post-cards installation, and a creative research/writing project in the course of one year. It’s interesting to step-back and think about each of these works now (after two years); to think about geographical determinism and the collective history of the young self-exiled Iranians; but also to realize that, through time, my relationship has changed with “home” and that it will continue to change. Doing this interview and thinking about my body of work “The Romantic Self-Exiles”, I remembered that I haven’t thought about my house in Tehran, Yousefabad and Valiasr streets, and other common places that I used to go, for a very long time. I used to do this thing almost every night, that I would close my eyes and try to imagine and remember every details of my room in Tehran… or the exact directions/streets that I would have to take to get to whatever place. I couldn’t help but think that’s the only way to survive the diasporic life… could this be one dimension of the mutation of identity? Is this where I forever will feel distanced, unrelated, and disconnected from home? Or have I just entered a new stage of life in diaspora? Gray areas might be the only places worth existing…delving into identity as a transparent rather than defined; homeland as belonging to nowhere and everywhere; virtual space as both real and imagined; aesthetics as perfection vs imperfection.

Morehshin Allahyari. Excerpt from The Romantic Self-Exiles I (2012). DR: The mutations you speak of also come through in the way you approached the writing of that text, stretching the critical territory you cover by fusing the essay with a voice more readily associated with fiction. I also note elements of fabulation in your gallery and video works. Both The Romantic Self-Exiles-I and Over There Is Over Here toy with reality and imagination in a broken essayistic language. Do you understand your practice as writerly? MA: My discovery of the art world has been through creative writing (since the age of 12 when I started to take part in a private creative writing class in Iran that would meet weekly, which continued until I was 18)… so writing is very dear to my heart and it’s a very important part of my work. I’m interested in bridging digital technology, writing, and visual arts in an essayistic and poetic language. I think about Milan Kundera and Chris Marker as the best examples of this style of writing. As I have worked more and more with a software like Maya, I have learned that there is something very beautiful about building and creating landscapes and environments. Especially in the Romantic Self Exiles animation, it felt like creating an imagined home… a space and environment where I could perhaps belong… but another aspect of it was talking about this experience and process of modeling, animating, texturing, etc through a self-reflexive narration. In Over There Is Over Here, there is also a landscape, but the narration is more complex with ambiguity… going back and forth between a third-person narrator and myself as the narrator and an outsider… In both of these works, though, my writing process was connected to the process of designing these virtual landscapes. DR: In another text produced with collaborator Jennifer Way you discuss the representation of female identity in Iran. Could you tell us some more about how this relates to art and romanticization in particular? MA: I was really interested in doing research on women, technology, and art in Iran, because there is almost no academic research and discourse about this topic (although the art and technology scene is growing very rapidly in Iran). So I have kept an eye on the art and technology festivals, exhibitions, workshops, and lectures that have been happening in Iran in the last 4-5 years and been amazed by the lack of women and the dominance of the hyper-masculine culture. In collaboration with Jennifer Way, we interviewed Iranian artists (mostly women) who in one way or another are and have been involved in the new media art scene in Iran and asked for their comments, observations, and concerns regarding new media art or art and technology considering the recent rise of such art practices in Iran. This is especially and personally very important to me because Iranian women have been the dominant university demographic in Iran for the last decade or so. On the other hand, in my own work, I have constantly thought about and re-defined both my Middle-Eastern female identity, as well as my identity as a woman in the field of art and technology. On the one hand, I have gradually become aware of and resisted the female identity defined by—for instance—the work of artists like Shirin Neshat. This is something that comes up in my daily discussions with other female colleagues from the Middle-East: how we feel distanced from the presentation and re-presentation of women in the work of older generation artists (in this case from Iran)… That in fact, we are eager to re-define these clichés and—in most cases—one-dimensional interpretations and exoticized or stereotypical images of women of the Middle-East; thinking about ourselves more as “Glocal.”

Morehshin Allahyari,#barbie #vhs from the series “Dark Matter.” Work in progress. The other side of this is my relationship with technology and the fact that I am interested in a poetic and feminine voice in technological aesthetics and in ways to challenge and push whatever medium that I’m using. In the last couple of years, I have been inspired by the works of other female artists and activists such as Claudia Hart, Brenna Murphy, Jenny Vogel, Tania Bruguera, and Guerrilla Girls. I feel like I have the amazing opportunity of combining and experimenting with all these ideas… to bring together new media, politics, art, social science, and creative writing… and examine a multi-layered understanding of female identity while dealing with the complexity of being in between. DR: To bring it back to my first question then, do you think that there is something specific in the ways and means of digital technology that enables the representation of interstitial spaces, politics and identities? MA: In both the writing/narrative and the aesthetics of my work, I am interested in the idea of imperfection and the allowance of error… which makes me think about the fact that bleeding/leading edge technology has built-in flaws and imperfections in them… which also works perfectly with the broader discourse of corruption of politics, collapse of identities, the loss of space through time, etc. In the case of 3D printing technology, I like to think there is something very special about it that doesn’t exist in other software/tools/material. Maybe this is a very “Eastern/Dervish” kind of way of thinking about digital technology: to think about means and ways and reasons and effects as points of departure and entrance. You know, like trying to stay away from the fetishism and consumerism that falls into the use of digital technology… so, yes! DR: Finally, what are you working on at the moment? MA: Well, as of right now, I am creating a series of virtual spaces for my 3D printed objects, and also combining more unwelcome/forbidden objects to print in the next coming months. After this, I want to broaden the conversation to other countries in an upcoming project, creating a 3D forbidden orgy (lol) installation, looking for new ways to blur these cultural boundaries and relationships. In general, in these new series of work I am taking a break from heavy, serious work which is mostly what I’ve been working on and creating for the last 6 years. I feel like I am exhausted from that, and I want to actually take a step back and be able to make fun of all these very serious topics. If you think about Dark Matter and these forbidden objects that we grew up with in Iran, they are actually simultaneously fucked up and ridiculous. I think as I’m growing as an artist, I am getting more and more interested about exploring humor in serious circumstances. I don’t want to feel bad for myself and the life I lived in Iran. I don’t want other people’s sympathy. That’s why I want to be able to sometimes make fun of it more than anything else. Age: 28 Location: Dallas, TX. How/when did you begin working creatively with technology? Since the very first months that I moved from Iran to Denver to study for my MA in Digital Media Studies. I remember I only knew a little bit of photoshop, and one of the first classes that I had to take was coding and CSS. It was a big jump. But after two years, I started to work constantly with different software and digital tools… At the same time, my partner (andrew blanton) has played an important role in my approach to technology, both conceptually and how I can teach myself new software and skill-sets as an artist. Where did you go to school? What did you study? During my undergrad I was in Iran and I studied Social Science and Media Studies at Tehran University. I studied Digital Media Studies for my MA at the University of Denver, where I was invited by Lynn Schofield Clark to do research with her at the Estlow Center on projects that concerned art, culture, and media (this was my initial reason to move from Iran to the United States). Then I was invited by David Stout of Noisefold to go to University of North Texas and work with him in Developing the Initiative for Advanced Research in Technology and the Arts (iARTA) research cluster while studying in New Media Art for my M.F.A. What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously? Currently I am a visiting assistant professor at University of Texas in Dallas at the Art and Technology department. Before this I worked mostly doing adjunct positions. I lived in Chicago before Texas, and Denver before moving from Iran in 2007. When I lived in Tehran, I taught English and freelanced for different art and culture magazines and newspapers. What does your desktop or workspace look like? I don’t have a studio space outside of our house right now. But I do have a room as my studio to work at, which I kind of like better than studios that I’ve had in the last 4 years. I mostly work on my Hackintosh for my animation projects. I make a lot of notes, both in Farsi and English depending on my headspace when I’m writing and thinking… I’m obsessed with lighting of the space that I work at. Some days both my workspace and desktop look more organized than the others, which might be a good measurement of how productive I’m being. : )

  References [1] Allahyari, Morehshin, and Jennifer Way. “Romantic Self-Exiles.” Anglistica no. Issue 17 1 (2013). https://www.anglistica.unior.it/content/romantic-self-exiles.

The latest in a series of interviews with artists who have developed a significant body of work engaged (in its process, or in the issues it raises) with technology. See the full list of Artist Profiles here.

Morehshin Allahyari, #dog #dildo #satellite-dish from the series "Dark Matter." Work in progress. Daniel Rourke: Your ongoing project, Dark Matter, was something of a revelation for me: a collection of objects forbidden or "unwelcome" in Iran, brought together through digital modelling, meshing, and 3D printing. The results are playful and surrealistic, with the same capacity to waken the subconscious as any Dali Lobster-Telephone or Hair-Lamp. For me Dark Matter resonates as subversive not just because the dog-dildo is an affront to conservative sexual values, or because the Barbie-VHS blurs cultural boundaries (a feature of a lot of your work). Rather I was taken by how the objects spoke to the here and now; that perhaps there is something about the collapse of all commodities, forms, and ideas into the digital that promotes blurred perspectives and subversive practices. I wondered whether you saw your work as particular to the digital tools and materials you choose, or are you "just" making use of things that happen to be available to you? Morehshin Allahyari: I was particularly interested in choosing the most relevant tools and materials for creating a new body of work about forbidden/unwelcome objects. I found the idea of "3D printing/re-creating the forbidden" a very compelling prospect, which raised paradoxical issues of limitations and boundaries—social, cultural, and political. I was also very interested in the technology of 3D printing as this "poetic technology" for resistance, for reclaiming all the things that were taken from me during my life in Iran or are currently being taken away from my sister, and mother, and my friends. There is something very special about things that you can't have access to when they are forced by law out of your life. When there are many of those objects/things, and they are the most ordinary things (dog, sex toys, neck-tie, Barbie, satellite-dish, Bart Simpson, ham/pig, alcohol, etc.), then there is something meaningful and symbolic about using a technology like 3D printing to re-create them. The combination of the objects, I think, adds a sense of humor to the work that is very similar to the ridiculousness of having these objects banned when you look at the whole picture. While developing the project, I really fell in love with thinking about 3D printing as a "documentation tool"... you know, like when you go to historical museums, and they have this whole collection of objects or things that used to be this and that, or had whatever functionality 500 years ago. I thought, what if this could be the archive, the documentation of the life after the 1979 revolution in Iran, the life I lived, and how will it feel to look back at this collection in 20 or 30 years? Also, through combining and re-creating these objects and putting them inside a virtual word, I can re-contextualize and invite the audience to enter the historical dimension of the work... So yeah... I am directly addressing the medium of 3D printing here. Plus, there is a broad conversation of censorship built into the technology of 3D printing as a whole, which actually expands the project to other countries including the United States (I am thinking about the 3D printed, potentially functional gun as one of the first examples).

Morehshin Allahyari, virtual landscape for #dog #dildo #satellite-dish from the series "Dark Matter." Work in progress. DR: You have just collaborated on a text that shifts between registers, performing the splits, breaks and tears it indicates in the life and work of "self-exiled" people. I was struck by an image you use of "Time, memory, space, and bodies collapsing, losing composition." [1] These ideas feature heavily in your work, where one's heritage or identity can coalesce and mutate as readily as a 3D print. MA: I am struck by the idea of representation in digital art. I think about the reconstruction of memory in virtual worlds, the rebuilding of non-existent objects from the virtual world into real life… how we understand our world through representation, the dystopian, the utopian, and everything in-between. Since I have moved to the U.S. (2007), I have become more and more fascinated by the in-depth thoughts on exile and diaspora within Edward Said's text "Reflections on Exile," Mahmoud Darwish's poems, and Lorna Dee Cervantes' Palastine poem, among others. But in my own work, I wanted to simultaneously be aware of the dangers of the romanticization of exile and self-exile - as well as the whole nostalgic remembrance of the "homeland" that is inaccessible; I wanted to look for different ways that I can use digital technology to talk about my own understanding of self-exile. So I worked on a 3D animation video, a plexiglas installation, a 16mm film, a series of Facebook post-cards installation, and a creative research/writing project in the course of one year. It's interesting to step-back and think about each of these works now (after two years); to think about geographical determinism and the collective history of the young self-exiled Iranians; but also to realize that, through time, my relationship has changed with "home" and that it will continue to change. Doing this interview and thinking about my body of work "The Romantic Self-Exiles", I remembered that I haven't thought about my house in Tehran, Yousefabad and Valiasr streets, and other common places that I used to go, for a very long time. I used to do this thing almost every night, that I would close my eyes and try to imagine and remember every details of my room in Tehran… or the exact directions/streets that I would have to take to get to whatever place. I couldn't help but think that's the only way to survive the diasporic life… could this be one dimension of the mutation of identity? Is this where I forever will feel distanced, unrelated, and disconnected from home? Or have I just entered a new stage of life in diaspora? Gray areas might be the only places worth existing...delving into identity as a transparent rather than defined; homeland as belonging to nowhere and everywhere; virtual space as both real and imagined; aesthetics as perfection vs imperfection.

Morehshin Allahyari. Excerpt from The Romantic Self-Exiles I (2012). DR: The mutations you speak of also come through in the way you approached the writing of that text, stretching the critical territory you cover by fusing the essay with a voice more readily associated with fiction. I also note elements of fabulation in your gallery and video works. Both The Romantic Self-Exiles-I and Over There Is Over Here toy with reality and imagination in a broken essayistic language. Do you understand your practice as writerly? MA: My discovery of the art world has been through creative writing (since the age of 12 when I started to take part in a private creative writing class in Iran that would meet weekly, which continued until I was 18)... so writing is very dear to my heart and it's a very important part of my work. I'm interested in bridging digital technology, writing, and visual arts in an essayistic and poetic language. I think about Milan Kundera and Chris Marker as the best examples of this style of writing. As I have worked more and more with a software like Maya, I have learned that there is something very beautiful about building and creating landscapes and environments. Especially in the Romantic Self Exiles animation, it felt like creating an imagined home… a space and environment where I could perhaps belong… but another aspect of it was talking about this experience and process of modeling, animating, texturing, etc through a self-reflexive narration. In Over There Is Over Here, there is also a landscape, but the narration is more complex with ambiguity… going back and forth between a third-person narrator and myself as the narrator and an outsider… In both of these works, though, my writing process was connected to the process of designing these virtual landscapes. DR: In another text produced with collaborator Jennifer Way you discuss the representation of female identity in Iran. Could you tell us some more about how this relates to art and romanticization in particular? MA: I was really interested in doing research on women, technology, and art in Iran, because there is almost no academic research and discourse about this topic (although the art and technology scene is growing very rapidly in Iran). So I have kept an eye on the art and technology festivals, exhibitions, workshops, and lectures that have been happening in Iran in the last 4-5 years and been amazed by the lack of women and the dominance of the hyper-masculine culture. In collaboration with Jennifer Way, we interviewed Iranian artists (mostly women) who in one way or another are and have been involved in the new media art scene in Iran and asked for their comments, observations, and concerns regarding new media art or art and technology considering the recent rise of such art practices in Iran. This is especially and personally very important to me because Iranian women have been the dominant university demographic in Iran for the last decade or so. On the other hand, in my own work, I have constantly thought about and re-defined both my Middle-Eastern female identity, as well as my identity as a woman in the field of art and technology. On the one hand, I have gradually become aware of and resisted the female identity defined by—for instance—the work of artists like Shirin Neshat. This is something that comes up in my daily discussions with other female colleagues from the Middle-East: how we feel distanced from the presentation and re-presentation of women in the work of older generation artists (in this case from Iran)... That in fact, we are eager to re-define these clichés and—in most cases—one-dimensional interpretations and exoticized or stereotypical images of women of the Middle-East; thinking about ourselves more as "Glocal."

Morehshin Allahyari,#barbie #vhs from the series "Dark Matter." Work in progress. The other side of this is my relationship with technology and the fact that I am interested in a poetic and feminine voice in technological aesthetics and in ways to challenge and push whatever medium that I'm using. In the last couple of years, I have been inspired by the works of other female artists and activists such as Claudia Hart, Brenna Murphy, Jenny Vogel, Tania Bruguera, and Guerrilla Girls. I feel like I have the amazing opportunity of combining and experimenting with all these ideas… to bring together new media, politics, art, social science, and creative writing… and examine a multi-layered understanding of female identity while dealing with the complexity of being in between. DR: To bring it back to my first question then, do you think that there is something specific in the ways and means of digital technology that enables the representation of interstitial spaces, politics and identities? MA: In both the writing/narrative and the aesthetics of my work, I am interested in the idea of imperfection and the allowance of error… which makes me think about the fact that bleeding/leading edge technology has built-in flaws and imperfections in them… which also works perfectly with the broader discourse of corruption of politics, collapse of identities, the loss of space through time, etc. In the case of 3D printing technology, I like to think there is something very special about it that doesn't exist in other software/tools/material. Maybe this is a very "Eastern/Dervish" kind of way of thinking about digital technology: to think about means and ways and reasons and effects as points of departure and entrance. You know, like trying to stay away from the fetishism and consumerism that falls into the use of digital technology… so, yes! DR: Finally, what are you working on at the moment? MA: Well, as of right now, I am creating a series of virtual spaces for my 3D printed objects, and also combining more unwelcome/forbidden objects to print in the next coming months. After this, I want to broaden the conversation to other countries in an upcoming project, creating a 3D forbidden orgy (lol) installation, looking for new ways to blur these cultural boundaries and relationships. In general, in these new series of work I am taking a break from heavy, serious work which is mostly what I've been working on and creating for the last 6 years. I feel like I am exhausted from that, and I want to actually take a step back and be able to make fun of all these very serious topics. If you think about Dark Matter and these forbidden objects that we grew up with in Iran, they are actually simultaneously fucked up and ridiculous. I think as I'm growing as an artist, I am getting more and more interested about exploring humor in serious circumstances. I don't want to feel bad for myself and the life I lived in Iran. I don't want other people's sympathy. That's why I want to be able to sometimes make fun of it more than anything else. Age: 28 Location: Dallas, TX. How/when did you begin working creatively with technology? Since the very first months that I moved from Iran to Denver to study for my MA in Digital Media Studies. I remember I only knew a little bit of photoshop, and one of the first classes that I had to take was coding and CSS. It was a big jump. But after two years, I started to work constantly with different software and digital tools… At the same time, my partner (andrew blanton) has played an important role in my approach to technology, both conceptually and how I can teach myself new software and skill-sets as an artist. Where did you go to school? What did you study? During my undergrad I was in Iran and I studied Social Science and Media Studies at Tehran University. I studied Digital Media Studies for my MA at the University of Denver, where I was invited by Lynn Schofield Clark to do research with her at the Estlow Center on projects that concerned art, culture, and media (this was my initial reason to move from Iran to the United States). Then I was invited by David Stout of Noisefold to go to University of North Texas and work with him in Developing the Initiative for Advanced Research in Technology and the Arts (iARTA) research cluster while studying in New Media Art for my M.F.A. What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously? Currently I am a visiting assistant professor at University of Texas in Dallas at the Art and Technology department. Before this I worked mostly doing adjunct positions. I lived in Chicago before Texas, and Denver before moving from Iran in 2007. When I lived in Tehran, I taught English and freelanced for different art and culture magazines and newspapers. What does your desktop or workspace look like? I don't have a studio space outside of our house right now. But I do have a room as my studio to work at, which I kind of like better than studios that I've had in the last 4 years. I mostly work on my Hackintosh for my animation projects. I make a lot of notes, both in Farsi and English depending on my headspace when I'm writing and thinking… I'm obsessed with lighting of the space that I work at. Some days both my workspace and desktop look more organized than the others, which might be a good measurement of how productive I'm being. : )

  References [1] Allahyari, Morehshin, and Jennifer Way. "Romantic Self-Exiles." Anglistica no. Issue 17 1 (2013). http://www.anglistica.unior.it/content/romantic-self-exiles.

Metaphor wants to be…

‘[...] metaphors work to change people’s minds. Orators have known this since Demosthenes. [...] But there’s precious little evidence that they tell you what people think. [...] And in any case, words aren’t meanings. As any really good spy knows, a word is a code that stands for something else. If you take the code at face value then you’ve fallen for the trick.’ (Daniel Soar, “The Bourne Analogy”).

Tao Lin’s recent novel Taipei (2013) is a fictional document of life in our current digital culture. The protagonist, Paul — who is loosely based on the author — is numb from his always turned on digitally mediated life, and throughout the novel increases his recreational drug taking as a kind of compensation: the chemical highs and trips are the experiential counterpoint to the mundanity of what once seemed otherworldly — his online encounters. In the novel online interactions are not distinguished from real life ones, they are all real, and so Paul’s digital malaise is also his embodied depressive mindset. The apotheosis of both these highs and lows is experienced by Paul, and his then girlfriend Erin, on a trip to visit Paul’s parents in Taipei. There the hyper-digital displays of the city — ‘lighted signs [...] animated and repeating like GIF files, attached to every building’ (166) — launch some of the more explicit mediations on digital culture in the novel: Paul asked [Erin] if she could think of a newer word for “computer” than “computer,” which seemed outdated and, in still being used, suspicious in some way, like maybe the word itself was intelligent and had manipulated culture in its favor, perpetuating its usage (167). Here Paul intimates a sense that language is elusive, that it is sentient, and that, in the words of Daniel Soar quoted above as an epitaph, it tricks us. It seems to matter that in this extract from Taipei the word ‘computer’ is conflated with a sense of the object ‘computer’. The word, in being ‘intelligent’, has somehow taken on the quality of the thing it denotes — a potentially malevolent agency. The history of computing is one of people and things: computers were first the women who calculated ballistics trajectories during the Second World War, whose actions became the template for modern automated programming. The computer, as an object, is also-always a metaphor of a human-machine relation. The name for the machine asserts a likeness between the automated mechanisms of computing and the physical and mental labour of the first human ‘computers’. Thinking of computing as a substantiated metaphor for a human-machine interaction pervades the way we talk about digital culture. Most particularly in the way we think of computers as sentient — however casually. We often speak of computers as acting independently from our commands, and frequently we think of them ‘wanting’ things, ‘manipulating’ culture, or ourselves.

Pre-Electronic Binary Code Pre-electronic binary code: the history of computing offers us metaphors for human-machine interaction which pervade the way we talk about digital culture today [Image by Erik Wilde under a CC BY-SA license]

Julie E. Cohen, in her 2012 book Configuring the Networked Self, describes the way the misplaced metaphor of human-computer and machine-computer has permeated utopian views of digitally mediated life: Advocates of information-as-freedom initially envisioned the Internet as a seamless and fundamentally democratic web of information [...]. That vision is encapsulated in Stewart Brand’s memorable aphorism “Information wants to be free.” [...] Information “wants” to be free in the same sense that objects with mass present in the earth’s gravitational field “want” to fall to the ground. (8) Cohen’s sharp undercutting of Brand’s aphorism points us toward the way the metaphor of computing is also an anthropomorphisation. The metaphor implicates a human desire in machine action. This linguistic slipperiness filters through discussion of computing at all levels. In particular the field of software studies — concerned with theorising code and programming as praxis and thing — contains at its core a debate on the complexity of considering code in a language which will always metaphorise, or allegorise. Responding to an article of Alexander R. Galloway’s titled “Language Wants to Be Overlooked: On Software and Ideology”, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that Galloway’s stance against a kind of ‘anthropomorphization’ of code studies (his assertion that as an executable language code is ‘against interpretation’) is impossible within a discourse of critical theory. Chun argues, ‘to what extent, however, can source code be understood outside of anthropomorphization? [...] (The inevitability of this anthropomorphization is arguably evident in the title of Galloway’s article: “Language Wants to Be Overlooked” [emphasis added].)’ (Chun 305). In her critique of Galloway’s approach Wendy Chun asserts that it is not possible to extract the metaphor from the material, that they are importantly and intrinsically linked.[1] For Julie E. Cohen the relationship between metaphor and digital culture-as-it-is-lived is a problematic tie that potentially damages legal and constitutional understanding of user rights. Cohen convincingly argues that a term such as ‘cyberspace’, which remains inextricable from its fictional and virtual connotations, does not transition into legal language successfully; in part because the word itself is a metaphor, premised on an imagined reality rather than ‘the situated, embodied beings who inhabit it’ (Cohen 3). And yet Cohen’s writing itself demonstrates the tenacious substance of metaphoric language, using extended exposition of metaphors as a means to think more materially about the effects of legal and digital protocol and action. In the following extract from Configuring the Networked Self, Cohen is winding down a discussion of the difficulty of forming actual policy out of freedom versus control debates surrounding digital culture. Throughout the discussion Cohen has emphasised the way that both sides of the debate are unable to substantiate their rhetoric with embodied user practice; instead Cohen identifies a language that defers specific policy aims.[2] Cohen’s own use of metaphor in this section — ‘objections to control fuel calls [...]’, ‘darknets’ (the latter in inverted commas) — is made to mean something grounded, through a kind of allegorical framework. I am not suggesting that allegory materialises metaphor — allegory functioning in part as itself an extended metaphor — but it does contextualise metaphor.

Circuit Board 2 How tenacious is metaphoric language? The persistence of computational metaphors in understanding digital culture could harm legal and constitutional understandings of user rights [Image by Christian under a CC BY-NC-ND license]

This is exemplified in Cohen’s description of the ways US policy discussions regarding code, rights and privacy of the subject are bound to a kind of imaginary, and demonstrate great difficulty in becoming concrete: Policy debates have a circular, self-referential quality. Allegations of lawlessness bolster the perceived need for control, and objections to control fuel calls for increased openness. That is no accident; rigidity and license historically have maintained a curious symbiosis. In the 1920s, Prohibition fueled the rise of Al Capone; today, privately deputized copyright cops and draconian technical protection systems spur the emergence of uncontrolled “darknets.” In science fiction, technocratic, rule-bound civilizations spawn “edge cities” marked by their comparative heterogeneity and near imperviousness to externally imposed authority. These cities are patterned on the favelas and shantytowns that both sap and sustain the world’s emerging megacities. The pattern suggests an implicit acknowledgment that each half of the freedom/control binary contains and requires the other (9-10). I quote this passage at length in order to get at the way in which the ‘self-referential nature’ of policy discussion is here explained through a conceptual, and specifically literary, framing. Technology is always both imagined and built: this seems obvious, but it justifies reiteration because the material operations of technology are always metaphorically considered just as they are concretely manifest. The perilous circumstance this creates is played on in Cohen’s writing as she critiques constitutional policy that repeatedly cannot get at the embodied subject that uses digital technology; thwarted by the writing and rewriting of debate. In Cohen’s words this real situation is like the science fiction that is always-already seemingly like the real technology. Whether William Gibson’s ‘cyberspace’, a programmer’s speculative coding, or a lawyer’s articulation of copyright, there is no easy way to break apart the relationship between the imaginary and the actual of technoculture. Perhaps then what is called for is an explosion of the metaphors that pervade contemporary digital culture. To, so to speak, push metaphors until they give way; to generate critical discourse that tests the limits of metaphors, in an effort to see what pretext they may yield for our daily digital interactions. The articles in this issue all engage with exactly this kind of discourse. In Sophie Jones’ “The Electronic Heart”, the history of computing as one of women’s labour is used to reconfigure the metaphor of a computer as an ‘electronic brain’; instead asking whether cultural anxieties about computer-simulated emotion are linked to the naturalization of women’s affective labour. In “An Ontology of Everything on the Face of the Earth”, Daniel Rourke also considers computers as a sentient metaphor: uncovering an uncanny symbiosis between what a computer wants and what a human can effect with computing, through a critical dissection of the biocybernetic leeching of John Carpenter’s 1982 film The Thing. Finally, in “The Metaphorics of Virtual Depth”, Rob Gallagher uses Marcel Proust’s treatment of novelistic spacetime to generate a critical discourse on spatial and perspectival metaphor in virtual game environments. All these articles put into play an academic approach to metaphors of computing that dig up and pull out the stuff in between language and machine. In his introduction to Understanding Digital Humanities David M. Berry has argued for such an approach: [what is needed is a] ‘critical understanding of the literature of the digital, and through that [to] develop a shared culture through a form of Bildung’ (8).

Elysium A wheel in the sky: Neil Blomkamp's futuristic L.A. plays on the territorial paranoia of the U.S. over alien invasion and dystopian metaphors of digitally-mediated environments [Image used under fair dealings provisions]

I am writing this article a day after seeing Neill Blomkamp’s film Elysium (2013). Reading Cohen’s assertion regarding the cyclical nature of US digital rights policy debates on control and freedom, her allegory with science fiction seems entirely pertinent. Elysium is set in 2154; the earth is overpopulated, under-resourced, and a global elite have escaped to a man-made (and machine-made) world on a spaceship, ‘Elysium’. Manufacturing for Elysium continues on earth where the population, ravaged by illness, dreams of escaping to Elysium to be cured in “Med-Pods”. The movie focuses on the slums of near future L.A. and — perhaps unsurprisingly given Blomkamp’s last film District 9 (2009) — plays on the real territorial paranoia of the U.S. over alien invasion: that the favelas of Central and South America, and the political structures they embody, are always threatening ascension. In Elysium the “edge city” is the whole world, and the technocratic power base is a spaceship garden, circling the earth’s orbit. ‘Elysium’ is a green and white paradise; a techno-civic environment in which humans and nature are equally managed, and manicured. ‘Elysium’, visually, looks a lot like Disney’s Epcot theme park — which brings me back to where I started. In Tao Lin’s Taipei Paul’s disillusionment with technology is in part with its failure to be as he imagined, and his imagination was informed by the Disney-fied future of Epcot. In Taipei: Paul stared at the lighted signs, some of which were animated and repeated like GIF files, attached to almost every building to face oncoming traffic [...] and sleepily thought how technology was no longer the source of wonderment and possibility it had been when, for example, he learned as a child at Epcot Center [...] that families of three, with one or two robot dogs and one maid, would live in self-sustaining, underwater, glass spheres by something like 2004 or 2008 (166). Thinking through the metaphor of Elysium has me thinking toward the fiction of Epcot (via Tao Lin’s book). The metaphor-come-allegories at work here are at remove from my digitally mediated, embodied reality, but they seep through nonetheless. Rather than only look for the concrete reality that drives the metaphor, why not also engage with the messiness of the metaphor; its potential disjunction with technology as it is lived, and its persistent presence regardless.

CITATION: Zara Dinnen, "Digital Metaphors: Editor's Introduction," Alluvium, Vol. 2, No. 6 (2013): n. pag. Web. 4 December 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v2.6.04

The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.

Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto (1991) [1]

This is no fantasy... no careless product of wild imagination. No, my good friends.

The opening lines of Richard Donner's Superman (1978) [2] In a 1950 film serial entitled Atom Man vs Superman [3] television executive and evil genius Lex Luthor sends Superman into a ghostly limbo he calls "The Empty Doom." Trapped in this phantom void, Superman's infinite powers are rendered useless, for although he can still see and hear the "real" world his ability to interact with it has all but disappeared. Over the following decades this paraspace [4]—to use Samuel Delany's term for a fictional space, accessed via technology, that is neither within nor entirely separate from the 'real' world—would reappear in the Superman mythos in various forms, beginning in 1961. Eventually dubbed "The Phantom Zone," its back story was reworked substantially, until by the mid 60s it had become a parallel dimension discovered by Superman's father, Jor El. Once used to incarcerate Krypton's most unsavory characters, The Phantom Zone had outlasted its doomed home world and eventually burst at the seams, sending legions of super-evil denizens raining down onto Earth. Beginning its life as an empty doom, The Phantom Zone was soon filled with terrors prolific enough to make even The Man of Steel fear its existence.

Overseen by story editor Mortimer Weisinger, and the unfortunately named artist Wayne Boring, the late 50s and early 60s were a strange time in the Superman universe. The comics suddenly became filled with mutated variants of kryptonite that gave Superman the head of an ant or the ability to read thoughts; with miniature Supermen arriving seconds before their namesake to save the day and steal his thunder; with vast universes of time caught fast in single comic book panels. It was an era of narrative excess wrapped by a tighter, more meticulous and, many would say, repressed aesthetic:

Centuries of epic time could pass in a single caption. Synasties fell between balloons, and the sun could grow old and die on the turn of a page. It was a toy world, too, observed through the wrong end of a telescope. Boring made eternity tiny, capable of being held in two small hands. He reduced the infinite to fit in a cameo... [5]

The Phantom Zone is one of the least bizarre narrative concepts from what is now known as the Silver Age of D.C. Comics (following on from the more widely celebrated Golden Age). It could be readily understood on a narrative level, and it had a metaphorical dimension as well, one that made conceivable the depths contained in Superman's vast, but ultimately manipulable universe. The Phantom Zone was usually portrayed on a television screen kept safe in one of the many rooms of the League of Justice headquarters. It could also be used as a weapon and fired from a portable projection device—the cold, harsh infinity of the Empty Doom blazing into Superman's world long enough to ensnare any character foolish enough to stand in its rays. Whether glimpsed on screen or via projection, then, The Phantom Zone could be interpreted as a metaphor for the moving image. 

In comic books, as in the moving image, the frame is the constituent element of narrative. Each page of a comic book is a frame which itself frames a series of frames, so that by altering each panel's size, bleed or aesthetic variety, time and space can be made elastic. Weisinger and Boring's Phantom Zone took this mechanism further, behaving like a weaponized frame free to roam within the comic book world. Rather than manipulating three-dimensional space or the fourth dimension of time, as the comic book frame does, The Phantom Zone opened out onto the existence of other dimensions. It was a comic book device that bled beyond the edge of the page, out into a world in which comic book narratives were experienced not in isolation, but in parallel with the onscreen narratives of the cinema and the television. As such, the device heralded televisual modes of attention.

For his 1978 big-budget movie version of Superman, [6] director Richard Donner cunningly translated The Phantom Zone into something resembling the cinema screen itself. In the film's opening sequence, a crystal surface swoops down from the immense backdrop of space, rendering the despicable General Zod and his cronies two-dimensional as it imprisons them. In the documentary The Magic Behind the Cape, [7] bundled with the DVD release of Superman in 2001, we are given an insight into the technical prowess behind Donner's The Phantom Zone. The actors are made to simulate existential terror against the black void of the studio, pressed up against translucent, flesh-like membranes and physically rotated out of sync with the gaze of the camera. Rendering the faux two-dimensional surface of Donner's Phantom Zone believable required all manner of human dimensions to be framed out of the final production. The actors react to causes generated beyond the studio space, the director's commands, or the camera's gaze. They twist and recoil from transformations still to occur in post-production. In a sense, the actors behave as bodies that are already images. With its reliance on post-produced visual effects, the Phantom Zone sequence represents an intermediary stage in the gradual removal of sets, locations, and any 'actual' spatial depths from the film production process. Today, actors must address their humanity to green voids post-produced with CGI, and the indexical relationship between the film image and the events unfolding in front of the lens have been almost entirely shattered. In this Phantom cinema produced after the event, ever-deeper layers of special effects seal actors into a cinematic paraspace. Just as The Phantom Zone of the comic book heralded televisual modes of attention, The Phantom Zone of the 1970s marked a perceptual regime in which the cinematic image was increasingly sealed off from reality by synthetic visual effects.

   For Walter Benjamin, writing during cinema's first “Golden Era,", the ability of the cinema screen to frame discontinuous times and spaces represented its most profound "truth." Delivered by cinema, Benjamin argued, mechanically disseminated images were actually fracturing the limits of our perceptions, training "human beings in the apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily." [8]  The cinema screen offered audiences who were confined to finite bodies that had never before experienced such juxtapositions an apparently shared experience of illuminated consciousness. Far from inventing this new mode of perception through the "shock-character" of montage, Benjamin believed that cinema spoke of the 'truths' which awaited us beneath the mirage of proletarian experience. Truths which would guide us—with utopian fervor—towards an awareness, and eventual control, of what Benjamin called the "new nature":

Not just industrial technology, but the entire world of matter (including human beings) as it has been transformed by that technology. [9]

In short, cinema was less a technology than a new and evolving mode of machinic thought, both generated by and generating the post-industrial subject. Observing the relation between representation and visibility, Jens Andermann notes:

Truth, the truth of representation, crucially depends on the clear-cut separation between the visible and the invisible, the non-objectness of the latter. Truth is the effect of what we could call the catachretic nature of visuality, the way in which the world of visual objects can point to the invisible domain of pure being only by obsessively pointing to itself. [10]

As from the Greek root aisthanesthai – "to perceive"—the aesthetic conditions through which The Phantom Zone have been translated frame far more than a supposed fictional void. Called upon to indicate an absolute outside — the unfathomable infinity of another, ghostly, parallel universe — The Phantom Zone instead reiterates the medium of its delivery, whether comic book, television, or cinema, with mirror-like insistency. Such is the power of new technical modes of thought, that very often, they cause us to rethink the outmoded media that we are so used to as to be unaware. The Phantom Zone hides the cinematographic image in plain view. Its reappearance and reimagining over the last 60 odd years, in ever newer forms and aesthetic modes, can be read paradigmatically, that is, as a figure that stands in place of, and points towards, shifts, mutations and absolute overturnings in our perceptual apparatus. Its most recent iteration is in the 2013 Superman reboot, Man of Steel, [11] and in particular in a 'viral' trailer distributed on YouTube a few weeks before the film was released. [12] Coming towards us soars a new mode of machinic thought; a Phantom Zone of unparalleled depth and aesthetic complexity that opens onto a new new - digital - nature.

The General Zod trailer for Man of Steel begins with a static rift that breaks into a visual and audial disarrangement of the phrase, “You are not alone". General Zod's masked face materializes, blended with the digital miasma: a painterly 3D effect that highlights the inherent ‘otherness' of where his message originates. The aesthetic is unsettling in as much as it is recognizable. We have no doubt as viewers of this 'viral' dispatch as to the narrative meaning of what we are witnessing, namely, a datastream compressed and distributed from a paraspace by an entity very much unlike us. The uncanny significance of the trailer stems more from how very normal the digital miasma feels; from how apprehensible this barrage of noise is to us. Indeed, it is ‘other', but its otherness is also somehow routine, foreseeable. The pathogen here is not Zod's message, it is digital technology itself. The glitched aesthetic of the trailer has become so habitual as to herald the passing of digital materiality into the background of awareness. Its mode of dissemination, via the Trojan Horse of YouTube, just as unvisible to us during the regular shifts we make between online/offline modes of communication. The surface of this Phantom Zone very much interfaces with our material world, even if the message it impresses upon us aches to be composed of an alien substance.   Digital video does the work of representation via a series of very clever algorithms called codecs that compress the amount of information needed to produce a moving image. Rather than the individual frames of film, each as visually rich and total as the last, in a codec only the difference between frames need be encoded, making each frame “more like a set of movement instructions than an image." [13] The painterly technique used in the General Zod trailer is normally derived from a collapse between key (image) and reference (difference) frames at the status of encoding. The process is called ‘datamoshing', and has its origins in glitch art, a form of media manipulation predicated on those minute moments when the surface of an image or sound cracks open to reveal some aspect of the process that produced it. By a method of cutting, repeating or glitching of key and reference frames visual representations are made to blend into one another, space becomes difference and time becomes image. The General Zod trailer homages/copies/steals the datamoshing technique, marking digital video's final move from convenient means of dissemination, to palpable aesthetic and cultural influence.  In the actual movie, Man of Steel (2013), Zod's video message is transposed in its entirety to the fictional Planet Earth. The viral component of its movement around the web is entirely absent: its apparent digitality, therefore, remains somewhat intact, but only as a mere surface appearance. This time around the message shattering through The Phantom Zone is completely devoid of affective power: it frames nothing but its existence as a narrative device. The filmmakers rely on a series of “taking over the world" tropes to set the stage for General Zod's Earth-shaking proclamation. TV sets in stereotypical, exotic, locales flicker into life, all broadcasting the same thing. Electronic billboards light up, loudspeakers blare, mobile phones rumble in pockets, indeed, all imaging technologies suddenly take on the role of prostheses for a single, datamoshed, stream. In one—particularly sincere—moment of the montage a faceless character clutches a Nokia brand smartphone in the centre of shot and exclaims, “It's coming through the RSS feeds!" This surface, this Phantom Zone, frames an apparatus far vaster than a datamoshed image codec: an apparatus apparently impossible to represent through the medium of cinema. The surface appearance of the original viral trailer is only a small component of what constitutes the image it conveys, and thus, of the image it frames of our time. Digital materiality shows itself via poorly compressed video clips arriving through streams of overburdened bandwidth. Our understanding of what constitutes a digital image must then, according to Mark Hansen, “be extended to encompass the entire process by which information is made perceivable." [14]

In its cinematic and comic book guises, The Phantom Zone was depicted as “a kind of membrane dividing yet connecting two worlds that are alien to and also dependent upon each other".[15] The success of the datamoshed trailer comes from the way it broke through that interface, its visual surface bubbling with a new kind of viral, digital, potential that encompasses and exposes the material engaged in its delivery. As cinematographic subjects we have an integral understanding of the materiality of film. Although we know that the frames of cinema are separate we crave the illusion of movement, and the image of time, they create. The ‘viral' datamoshed message corrupts this separation between image and movement, the viewer and the viewed. Not only does General Zod seem to push out, from inside the numerical image, it is as if we, the viewing subject enraptured by the digital event, have been consumed by its flow. The datamoshed Phantom Zone trailer takes the one last, brave, step beyond the apparatus of image production. Not only is the studio, the actor, and even the slick appeal of CGI framed out of its mode of delivery, arriving through a network that holds us complicit, this Phantom Zone frames the 'real' world in its entirety, making even the fictional world it appeals to devoid of affective impact. To take liberty with the words of Jean Baudrillard:

[Jorge Luis] Borges wrote: they are slaves to resemblance and representation; a day will come when they will try to stop resembling. They will go to the other side of the mirror and destroy the empire. But here, you cannot come back from the other side. The empire is on both sides. [16]

Once again, The Phantom Zone highlights the material mode of its delivery with uncanny exactness. We are now surrounded by images that supersede mere visual appearance: they generate and are generated by everything the digital touches, including we, the most important component of General Zod's 'viral' diffusion. The digital Phantom Zone extends to both sides of the flickering screen.   References

[1] Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women : The Reinvention of Nature. (London: Free Association Books Ltd, 1991), 149–181.

[2] Richard Donner, Superman, Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi, 1978.

[3] Spencer Gordon Bennet, Atom Man Vs. Superman, Sci-Fi, 1950.

[4] Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 164.

[5] Grant Morrison, Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero (London: Vintage Books, 2012), 62.

[6] Donner, Superman.

[7] Michael Thau, The Magic Behind the Cape, Documentary, Short, 2001. See : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYXbzVJ6NzA&feature=youtu.be&t=4m12s

[8] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge  Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 26.

[9] Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (MIT Press, 1991), 70.

[10] Jens Andermann, The Optic of the State: Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil (University of Pittsburgh Pre, 2007), 5.

[11] Zack Snyder, Man of Steel, Action, Adventure, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, 2013.

[12] Man of Steel Viral - General Zod's Warning (2013) Superman Movie HD, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QkfmqsDTgY.

[13] BackStarCreativeMedia, “Datamoshing—the Beauty of Glitch," April 9, 2009, http://backstar.com/blog/2009/04/09/datamoshing-the-beauty-of-glitch/.

[14] Mark B. Hansen, “Cinema Beyond Cybernetics, or How to Frame the Digital Image," Configurations 10, no. 1 (2002): 54, doi:10.1353/con.2003.0005.

[15] Mark Poster, The Second Media Age (Wiley, 1995), 20.

[16] Jean Baudrillard, “The Murder of the Sign," in Consumption in an Age of Information, ed. Sande Cohen and R. L. Rutsky (Berg, 2005), 11.  

Good books transcend their times; bad books reflect them. One reads Madame Bovary for its sublime writing and exploration of the human condition in all its tortuous complexity.

It's a testament to Turing's fascination with nearly everything that 76 years since his first major paper, there's still so much to write about his work. Expect this week to offer more events and glimpses into these projects: Neuro-computational studies into the functional basis of cognition. The ever forward march for genuine artificial intelligence. New methods of simulating the complexity of biological forms nearly 60 years after Turing's paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis (indeed this area of complexity theory is now an established area of major research). The slippery mathematical formalist discoveries which define what can or cannot be computed. And not forgetting key historical developments in cryptography, perhaps the field which Turing is most respected for. Moreover, Turing wasn't just one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th Century, but also one of the greatest creative engineers; someone who wasn't afraid of putting his ideas into automation, through the ne

2012 sees the thirtieth anniversary of the untimely death, at the age of 53, of Philip K. Dick – a figure whose cultural impact within and beyond science fiction remains difficult to overestimate. Dick’s academic and popular reputation continues to grow, as a number of recent monographs, several biographies and an unceasing flow of film adaptations testify.

Yet while his status as “The Most Brilliant Sci-Fi Mind on Any Planet” (Paul Williams) is rarely questioned, scholarly criticism of Dick has not kept pace with recent developments in academia – from transnationalism to adaptation studies, from the cultural turn in historiography to the material turn in the humanities. Too often Dick remains shrouded in clichés and myth. Indeed, rarely since the seminal contributions of Fredric Jameson and Darko Suvin have our engagements with Dick proved equal to the complexity of his writing – an oeuvre indebted to the pulps and Goethe, Greek philosophy and the Beats – that calls for renewed attempts at a history of popular culture. The aim of this conference is to contribute to such an undertaking.

This mental approach to causality is often effective, which is why it’s so deeply embedded in the brain. However, those same shortcuts get us into serious trouble in the modern world when we use our perceptual habits to explain events that we can’t perceive or easily understand. Rather than accept the complexity of a situation—say, that snarl of causal interactions in the cholesterol pathway—we persist in pretending that we’re staring at a blue ball and a red ball bouncing off each other. There’s a fundamental mismatch between how the world works and how we think about the world.

Since the 1930s, the theory of computation has profoundly influenced philosophical thinking about topics such as the theory of the mind, the nature of mathematical knowledge and the prospect of machine intelligence. In fact, it’s hard to think of an idea that has had a bigger impact on philosophy. And yet there is an even bigger philosophical revolution waiting in the wings. The theory of computing is a philosophical minnow compared to the potential of another theory that is currently dominating thinking about computation. @ Technology Review

Routledge (1998), Edition: 1, Hardcover, 176 pages

The origin of animals was one of the most astonishing and important transformations in the history of life. From single-celled ancestors, they evolved into a riot of complexity and diversity. An estimated seven million species of animals live on earth today, ranging from tubeworms at the bottom of the ocean to elephants lumbering across the African savanna. Their bodies can total trillions of cells, which can develop into muscles, bones and hundreds of other kinds of tissues and cell types. The dawn of the animal kingdom about 800 million years ago was also an ecological revolution. Animals devoured the microbial mats that had dominated the oceans for more than two billion years and created their own habitats, like coral reefs.

The origin of animals is also one of the more mysterious episodes in the history of life. Changing from a single-celled organism to a trillion-cell collective demands a huge genetic overhaul. 

Because we perceive print and electronic media differently. Because Marshall McLuhan was right about some things.

In case you don't recall one of the more influential thinkers of the late 20th century: McLuhan was an academic media theorist who ended up being called a "high priest of popular culture." He was big enough to be a standing joke on Laugh-In ("Marshall McLuhan, what are you doin'?") to appear in a cameo in Annie Hall, to get interviewed in Playboy. One of the fundamental things McLuhan said was that new media change us and change the world. We see that principle in every kind of technology. When films started to talk, we started to talk in their phrases and cadences. When musical notation was invented, it took music into new dimensions of complexity and length. When computers started to link up on the Internet … You get the idea.

McLuhan declared that the two epochal cultural developments of the last millennium were, first, the invention of movable type in the 15th centur

One of the most beautiful aspects of the genetic code is its simplicity: three letters of DNA combine in 64 different ways, easily spelled out in a handy table, to encode the 20 standard amino acids that combine to form a protein.

But between DNA and proteins comes RNA, and an expanding realm of complexity. RNA is a shape-shifter, sometimes carrying genetic messages and sometimes regulating them, adopting a multitude of structures that can affect its function. In a paper published in this issue (see page 53), a team of researchers led by Benjamin Blencowe and Brendan Frey of the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada, reports the first attempt to define a second genetic code: one that predicts how segments of messenger RNA transcribed from a given gene can be mixed and matched to yield multiple products in different tissues, a process called alternative splicing. This time there is no simple table — in its place are algorithms that combine more than 200 different features of DNA wit