James T. Kirk: You know, coming back in time, changing history... that's cheating.
Spock Prime: A trick I learned from an old friend.

Star Treck (2009)

There are many reasons to love science fiction, but sometimes, in some rare circumstances, a sci-fi work carries a gedanken experiment of the highest import, such is the case with Star Treck, Kobayashi Maru.

For the benefit of those not familiar with the concept, a short recap:

“The Kobayashi Maru is a test in the fictional Star Trek universe. It is a Starfleet training exercise designed to test the character of cadets in the command track at Starfleet Academy. The Kobayashi Maru test was first depicted in the opening scene of the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and also appears in the 2009 film Star Trek. In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Dr. McCoy referenced the test euphemistically to indicate the no-win scenario that he and Captain Kirk were facing.[1] The test's name is occasionally used among Star Trek fans or those familiar with the series to describe a no-win scenario, or a solution that involves redefining the problem.” For more – Wiki



The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

David Hockney


The Kobayashi Maru test is an interesting state of affairs that was designed by Spock to be in principle unwinnable, Spock wanted to test what he called the ‘integrity ‘ of the space cadet in front of certain defeat, in the process judging the character of the cadet, in this case Kirk’s.
Kirk however cheated the system by rewiring the parameters of the simulation in a fashion that will permit a winning scenario to be a viable option.
Kirk cheated the simulation, an act normally considered to be of low moral basis and character, if moral at all, and yet we cannot but admire Kirk’s initiative.

Captain James T Kirk cheated and we perceive him as a hero!

Why?

There are many answers to this question but to my mind the foremost explanation is quite simple, we admire the capacity of the human mind to prevail in front of impossible circumstances, and if it involves cheating, so be it.
That is not say that there is no place for morality or ethics, or personal integrity, the point however should always be what is the meaning of cheating the system and under what conditions, is cheating a legitimate course of action? If indeed cheating it is.

Cheating then:

My readers would know that I hold a worldview that is fundamentally open and flexible, always a work in progress and deeply malleable. As a Polytopian, a futurist and writer, I never take anything for granted especially when the issue at play is the future of humanity, the future of personhood and more precisely perhaps the future of our mutual engagements as hyperconnected beings. As evolutionary agents involved with all life, humans are to the best of our knowledge the top dogs on this planet at this time as concerns tool using and manipulation. Nowhere more so, than in the realm of ideas and concepts, for these are the ultimate tools we have at our disposal.
Nevertheless it appears that somehow we have become the slaves of our own making. Of course we can trace back the history of ideas and try to disentangle the idea itself from the mesh of nonsense it has accumulated across time and culture and yet at this point we may be better off, trying not so much to find a solution as trying to understand the current state of affairs of our ideas.

There are two main ways by which ideas operate both of which are open to what can be called cheating.
The first is convergence the second is divergence.

Convergence

In convergence we may assume that a set of circumstances revolves around the finding of a particular solution to a particular problem, in the case of convergence it is assumed that only a very specific answer is a viable option and thus a black and white state of affairs is presumed. Therefore under convergence having the ‘right’ answer is the only way out of the situation. In the case of the Kobayashi-Maru the correct answer presupposed by the designer of the simulation (Spock) was to lose.
There are three main issues at play here; the first is the total acceptance that the designer of the simulation is the ultimate authority as to the state of affairs of the circumstances. In our case here Kirk disregarded this tenet, since by changing the parameters of the simulation he took the authority into his own hands.

The second is the acceptance that the question (or problem or event, take your pick) has one single answer (defeat), again Capt. Kirk denied this fundamental assertion, a fact which led him to think of the problem as a divergence situation implying many possible answers, one of which obviously was to win the scenario.

The third and most important to my eyes concerns the aim of the exercise, Starfleet Academy designed the test under the aegis of Spock to test the behavior of captains under assured defeat, in other words, under a no-win state of affairs. However the mindset of Kirk did not contain such an aim, for him the point of winning was stronger, in fact changing the aim of the simulation from one of an integrity test to one of an ingenuity test (self imposed).


*Let it be said presently that it is not my wish here to try and define the reasons or motivations behind Kirk’s decision to choose an alternative path, for though it might be as some have suggested that Kirk was motivated by personal arrogance, hubris and the like and thus took an unethical path, the question remains the same was he cheating?

Divergence

In divergence we may assume that a set of circumstances is fundamentally complex and open-ended, therefore implying that for every set there are a number of questions and problems asked and presented simultaneously to which a broad set of answers are available. It is my assumption that in the case of the Kobayashi-Maru Kirk did a fascinating trick in his mind (much before the actual tempering with the computer), he redefined the state of affairs of the scenario from one of convergence to one of divergence, in the process applying the three aspects I have described above.

Transmuting a problem from one of convergence (where there exists only one answer) to one of divergence (where a broad array of answers are possible) is the first principle applicable when confronting an impossible situation.

It is quite obvious that in the regular course of affairs of our lives some issues appear to be of the convergence kind whilst other appear as belonging to the divergence kind, however, there is a fundamental difference between these two perspectives. The difference I believe lies with the term ‘agreement as to nature’. There must be an agreement of communication between minds as to the nature of circumstances; the two basic forms of agreement come in the form of the descriptive and the prescriptive, in which the descriptive form can be said to be a suggestion and the prescriptive form can be said to be an order.
Put differently a descriptive form of agreement refers to the state of affairs as it actually is and the prescriptive form of agreement refers to the state of affairs, as it should be.
In the issue I am trying to portray here clearly the design of Spock is of a prescriptive nature whilst the perception of Kirk of the same state of affairs (the simulation of KM) is clearly of a descriptive nature.
Therefore it will be easy to see that there exists a strong correlation between Convergence and Prescriptive just as there is such strong correlation between Divergence and Descriptive.
It is my view that just as Kirk played a mind trick transmuting the problem from a convergent one to a divergent one, he also performed a different trick, transforming a prescriptive state into a descriptive one.

Transmuting a problem from one of prescriptive (where the rules are set) to one of descriptive (where the state of affairs is factual and not normative) is the second principle applicable when confronting an impossible situation.

The question is again with us, was it legitimate for Kirk to, as it were, play this trick and transform a prescriptive state into a descriptive state? And was it cheating?

A short analysis

It should be clear by now that I do not believe Kirk cheated. On the contrary, it is my view that Kirk not only performed admirably, he might be the only cadet in Starfleet Academy ever (since he is purported to be the only one to ever pass the KM test) to show with utmost clarity that he carries the features and characteristics of a great leader, a great captain and possibly a unique perspective.

To my thinking Kirk demonstrated a number of extraordinary features of the human mind, most important of which is his demonstrably capacity for critical thought. However before indulging in the explanation of Kirk’s critical reasoning we need take heed that this critical reasoning would not have been possible had not Kirk first have an axiomatic stance.
The axiomatic stance, which is also the argument of rebuttal Kirk gave to Spock, was simple: “ I do not accept a no-win scenario” !
The question concerning the legitimacy of such a stance is irrelevant since a stance in such a case as we have here is nothing less than a fundamental statement of belief about the state of affairs of the universe.
By stating such a statement and taking such a stance Kirk declares his faith and not an objective reality, such a stance is in fact the hallmark of greatness defining a supreme form of realization that the state of affairs of the world is fundamentally open-ended and released to the potential interpretation and interference by the intelligence of the mind in question.
The stance of non acceptance or non belief as presented in the statement of Kirk:” I do not believe in a no-win scenario” is the motivational support and ethical background upon which his critical reasoning came to dismantle the Convergent and Prescriptive and rebuild the situation into one of Divergent and Descriptive.

The critical reasoning procedure was then an easy walk, first he questioned the basic premise of the scenario, namely: the scenario is a no-win scenario. Then he questioned the ultimate authority of the designer (Spock) and the implicit prescriptive rules and intended consequences (learn to cope with assured defeat) of the simulation. But his critical thinking did not stop there, applying the skill commonly called Fluid Intelligence Kirk tackled the situation in a fashion that disregarded all previous and past failures and set himself to the task of proving his stance (by rewiring the simulation computer) that no such animal exists as a no-win scenario.

A philosophical challenge

There is a Greek sense, a certain myth in the making in the act of Kirk, a certain playing of the game (‘gaming’ the game in modern parlance) in hubris like fashion. Kirk to my mind demonstrates exuberance and delight in triumph not only in defeating the defeat but also in taking a deep pleasure in the act, almost self-indulgent if not outright hedonistic.
In a very real sense I think of Kirk’s response to the Kobayashi Maru as an aesthetic act of insurgence, not unlike Nietzsche’s rebellion.

A stance of divergence and description is an act of freedom of self-narration against the cold front of convergence and prescription.

Guest Post By Xaos



‘Matter’ becomes soft. It is the softening of matter, of ourselves, of our genes, of our beliefs, the softening of our mindset and base-images, which is distributed all over as the voice and signal of the 21st century. It is the softening of ‘matter’, of the concreteness of our precincts and restrictions that allows us to choose our identity, to shape it as malleable substance. Fundamentalism, the historical mindset of fundamentalism is becoming obsolete. (From notes in black and white)


Migration into the Soft

When we speak of the “middle” in a hard medium, what we see is the center in a structure, an a-priori privileged location, a unique point of view, like the control tower in a panopticon, or like reason in rationality, like good in morality or the truth in validation. It is the center from which to behold the symmetry of architectural virtuosity.

When matter becomes soft, ‘middle’ loses its structural image while sustaining the potency of relation. Where is the ‘middle’ of flowing minds? The ‘middle’ of imagination? Where is the middle of an evolving phenomenon? Even the middle of a living town… and we are in the middle of each one of them. A shift in meaning, the middle in a soft medium depicts a state; it is a within, a between, an un-pictured touch-like equidistance from everything reaching from the inside out.

Letting oneself into the “middle”, the solid concreteness of restrictions is re-examined anew and projected into possible tensions that generate change. The structural stability of the hard yields to the dynamic potential of the soft, giving play to corridors of yet unexpressed opportunities, momentary shapes, endless reshuffling of landscapes.

In a momentary crossing over from a world of definite restrictions toward the wilderness of dynamic tensions, mind learns to morph singular states in soft matter.

The ‘middle’ is an aesthetic attitude of mind.

We are in migration; we are migrating into the soft; first generations to step into a soft universe, to cross over into softening selves and softening “matter”. And migration, this new form of migration, is reshaping our minds, our perception and intelligence.

Between mathematics to imagination

The works of Diana Al Hadid are to me a window into the Soft, a private window into the indefinite opportunities hidden in the ‘middle’ of ‘Matter’. The works occupy the infinitesimal space between construction and deconstruction, between emergence and entropy and between mathematics and imagination.



Her unique ability to walk these shifting lines, to operate intuitively membranes between construction and deconstruction, is reflected in her inspiring manipulation of shapes. It seems as if matter in her hands is indeed becoming soft, enriched with undomesticated opportunities for re-viewing.

The works are like a descriptive poem of the gradual coming into existence, a poetry of poiesis – the bringing of a ‘form’ into the light, layer by layer, time after time, process after process, a becoming, a long becoming, a very long becoming that resonates with a million years.

Yet there is a discernment between natural evolution and conscious poiesis, there is a difference between nature and culture, and between the processes through which forms are produced. A conscious catalyst that interferes with becoming (of form) becomes in its turn intimate with the process of exceeding itself while in the ‘middle’. Thus opening doors that are disengaged from the natural.

The difference, where manifested, is not a matter of perfection or imperfection as in the world of Plato, rather it is an aesthetic probe, sensing where to make the difference visible, harvesting its power to un-domesticate form. From cracks on the surface of the familiar into the liquid streams of possibilities, emerging as the singular.


At the inexistent heart of soft matter, aesthetics is rumbling, probing new grounds for thought, portraying the “middle”, not as locus nor as subject, but as a new intelligence within the flow of human minding.

Aesthetics, the ‘Middle’ of Minding

“When the lines of distinction between Matter and Mind are fading, that is when an artist begins to work. When matter is soft and mind is clear, when matter and mind become a ‘Brain’ that thinks, then thought begins to move in alternative paths.” (From notes in black and white)

It is this state of affairs that I call the ‘middle’ of minding, and the ground of aesthetic thought. The intense and singular emergence in which mind and matter forge a ‘Brain’ that thinks and exceeds. A virtual ‘brain’ that moves and emotes along the line of tension, stretched between the intimate and the alien.
Like those moments in which a sculptor merges with the substance she is working with, and a painter migrates into color and a photographer blends with light, it is not the union that matters but the kind of ‘brain’ that emerges.

It is with the emergence of these virtual ‘brains’ that we realize; we are not ‘caged in matter’ as much as we are not ‘caged in selves’, rather, we have just begun our journey into flows of concrete potentialities that unfold through and emerge within the amalgam of ‘mind’ and ‘matter’.

‘While going to a condition’

“I want the audience to experience the space” - Hiroaki Umeda

“While going to a condition” was the first work of Hiroaki Umeda, performed in 2002. It is an enlightening work, brilliant in its simplicity and elegant and modest in its use of technology.
It ventures away from the standards of perception into an alternative phase-space, into being intimate with an alien mindset of sight. It is a reminder, so to say, of the endless opportunities that constitute the space between forms and language.



The elements from which the work is composed are brought to a plane of equivalence - body movements, sound, light and technology - so that, the basic unit, the ‘Atom’ from which the performance is made, is an alien composition of multiplicities.

The hard distinction between the elements is replaced by soft distinction. Making clear that softness is not about a collapse into one amorphous substance, but rather it is pointing to endless relational opportunities, existing in the space that enfolds between the elements.

Sound, light and movement are as if physical substances, materials that he strips from melody, text and continuity; so that the relation with them and between them is a flesh of direct contact.
Once the index of patterns is cracked open, and softness fills up the fractures, space is exposed as an eruption of unpredictable spatial opportunities, the ‘middle’ of undefined possibilities becoming tangible.

The volume of possibilities

“It's not easy to see things in the middle, rather than looking down on them from above or up at them from below, or from left to right or right to left: try it, you'll see that everything changes”. — Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Both intelligence and evolution operate upon multiplicity of options; our tendency to anchor an understanding to a single point of view or a specific form is a bias of linear perception. Moving into softness we need a metaphor expanding awareness to unexpressed multiplicity and parallel waves of possibility; together with the accuracy of calibration we need corridors into the ‘middle’.

In cinema the set of coordinates in space are defined by the location of the camera, the motion of it and the kind of lenses that are selected, together coalescing the type of perspective. These are the vectors mapping the phase-space of sight (the volume containing all possible perspectives applicable to a given cinematographic moment, whether actuated or not).

The question of where and how to operate the camera is an exploration of such phase-space and any shot is in fact a particular state within the volume of optional perspectives.
The evolution of technology in relation to cinema did change profoundly the volume of possible sights and the set of restrictions operative in it – thus altering the way to navigate and create within a phase-space, which is itself in change.

The matter of cinema progressively becomes soft, but this is not necessarily enough in making greater cinema; on the contrary more often than not it reflects a gap in speed, between the growing freedoms of technology, reducing restrictions, and the fragile freedom of our minds in being able to extract singular states out of equivalent multiplicities.

It is not that it is less easy or more difficult to make movies today; it is a different task altogether in terms of operative intelligence.

The great masters of the medium indeed begin with softness of ‘matter’, they transform restriction to tension, and then when Mind and Matter, sight and observer, co-forge a ‘brain’ that thinks, they move to a new path in the phase-space and bring to fruition a singular state of sight.

Much like the first moment of “The consequence of love” by Paolo Sorrentino (2004). It is a still shot, an airport landscape, a long and empty conveyor belt, in the very end of it, far in the depth of the frame a human enters moving towards the viewer. Step by step, as the human figure is approaching and closing the distance, the sense is almost transforming into a thriller.
The thriller though is about the viewer migrating into the world of the movie.



Just before the human figure is about to leave the frame, the camera begins to move. But now the camera is very tangibly loaded with the viewer mind and emotion, as if the ‘mind’ of the viewer and the ‘matter’ of the close-up co-forged a brain that emotes; the gap is engulfed into a new corridor of possibilities, and bravely gliding to a new and singular path.

For a blink of a second time stands, space opens, the seeking of a new encounter and the apparently bland first contact with the movie is suddenly overwhelmed by information.
From then on the viewer remains in longing for that kind of moment, while the story of the hero of the movie is exactly the same, longing for that kind of instance in which matter is soft, and contact produces different versions of ourselves, even if the consequences are deadly.

The magic of art is in the accessibility to singular states of sight and emotion, which provoke deep and inexhaustible observation. So that it allows us, while being no more than a case in evolution, to sustain corridors of observation upon matter becoming soft.

Matter loosens its grip

The becoming soft of matter is riding multiple ruptures in technology, science, society, subjectivity, philosophy and art, if just to name some of the realms in which it is gathering momentum. It is this network of ruptures that makes matter soft, or differently put, makes matter pregnant with new clouds of opportunities and sights.

It is connectivity, hyper connectivity and the incoming interfaces between the physical and the virtual, between brain and machine that make matter soft. These coordinates in which domains overlap, oscillate and gently seep into each other are corridors into the middle.

Matter loosens its grip, its hardness and rigidity, becoming malleable, pliable, a quasi-solid stream of opportunities.

Yet, we do know how to operate in a hard world, and we are only now gathering the intelligence and speed that fit softness. The softness of matter calls for the softness of a new aesthetics, to fit the radical ongoing change.


We need to rethink intelligent operation in a soft universe, extraction of singular states out of flowing streams, instantaneous processes of reconstructing mindsets together with the art and science of curating becoming.

It is Aesthetics that provides us the grounds to a new system of navigation.

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Image 1 – Santa Cruz - Cueva Manos
Image 2 – Diana Al Hadid - In Mortal Repose, 2011
Image 3 – Diana Al Hadid - Self-Melt, 2008
Image 4 – Tara Donovan - Untitled, 2003
Image 5 – Neri Oxman - E,X,Y,Z,S,S,T
--

Guest Post by Chris Arkenberg



[Based on the talk I gave at ARE2012.]

“The intelligence of the city is on the streets.“ – Manu Fernandez

Amidst the swirling maelstrom of technological progress so often heralded as the imminent salvation to all our ills, it can be necessary to remind ourselves that humanity sits at the center, not technology. And yet, we extrude these tools so effortlessly as if secreted by some glandular Technos expressed from deep within our genetic code. It’s difficult to separate us from our creations but it’s imperative that we examine this odd relationship as we engineer more autonomy, sensitivity, and cognition into the machines we bring into this world. The social environment, typified by the contemporary urban landscape, is evolving to include non-human actors that routinely engage with us, examining our behaviors, mediating our relationships, and assigning or revoking our rights. It is this evolving human-machine socialization that I wish to consider.

The intelligence of the city is on the streets, as Manu Fernandez suggests. This is an important distinction reminding us that humanity is at the center of intelligent cities, and offering a counterpoint to the productized packages of technological solutions so popular in the techno-strain of contemporary urban development.

There are several fundamental drivers that set the frame for our relationship with machine intelligence. Computation is a deep current within human innovation & adaptation, and it’s only gained momentum on the inertia of civilization. However, nature is a deeper current engineered into our very cells. We’re spreading computation universally but this path is actually leading us to better understand and more effectively mimic biosystems. Biological patterns are at work, albeit on considerably longer timeframes, within everything we do as human animals. Like nature itself, the technosphere is expressed heterogeneously, organically and distributed across many scales. Although we seem compelled to create it, there is a tension between technology and humanity. We’re not entirely at ease with our creations, burdened by the recognition that the pace of technology is faster than our ability to understand its consequences. This is especially so as we yield more and more agency to machines & algorithms working at greater and greater scales. More often than not, regulatory structures emerge after things go wrong rather than before they have a chance to fail. The resulting dialectic is one where governance contains while innovation releases, leaving us in the middle to experience the consequences of collapsing our imagination into reality.

We know this, of course, but somewhere in the recent past we crossed a threshold from building tools dependent upon humans to those with enough autonomy and agency to make rudimentary decisions on our behalf. We create our tools and believe that we control them but the arc of our technos is yielding more and more control to the machines themselves. By making them more like us we give them more freedom, agency, and authority. This is the trade-off we find ourselves navigating here at the dawn of the 21st century.

If the frame is one of both progress and tension, what are the assumptions underlying this examination of our path forward? It is essentially a Growth model through which I consider this arc (this model being the easiest to bet on, if not the least resilient). Global GDP continues at a roughly linear pace with the bulk of growth shifting to Asia and, later, Africa, but driven and funded by the aging West. Cities continue to add population yielding optimizations and degradations, boomtown build-outs and downturn data decay. Economic models evolve slowly without major revolutionary shifts. Capital will continue its steady re-distribution into younger markets seeking to capture the prosperity of the West. Energy constraints are managed through a combination of old & new inputs but there are many bumps along the way as the resource needs of the developing world begin to dominate the global stage. Environmentally, we’ll see more adaptation than mitigation of climate chaos, driving migrations, shifting food stocks, and impacting health and reproductive fecundity. In this scenario it will be some time before we’re able to effectively understand and manage complex natural systems. Politically, governance and sovereignty will continue to balkanize and governments will be more & more distracted contending with multinational corporations, NGO’s, syndicates, super-empowered individuals, and the ongoing challenges of climate and resource instabilities. Such distraction of governors opens tremendous gaps & opportunities for innovations, both to good and bad ends. Small-town mayors and local tech collectives are as likely as gun traffickers and drug cartels to drive regional innovation.

Cities will evolve within this broader context, expressing the deeper currents organically. The living city is emergent and messy and is itself an organism composed of innumerable interstitial and ephemeral cellular structures. Driven by the will of its inhabitants, cities will continue forward as an accelerating patchwork of implementations, seeking greater efficiency & resiliency, flexing to absorb discontinuities, and continually extruding a rich skin of connected technologies and distributed services.

Given this environment and the assumptions underlying the discussion, there are 6 domains worth considering through which we engage the city and its inhabitants, both human and machine. Within this is a loose taxonomy of mediated interactions we have with the urban computational scaffolding.

In the personal domain the individual is the reference point around which various experiences are arranged. With connected mobile devices we carry a network identifier that effectively labels every individual with an IP address. Our network ID authenticates and provisions us with access and can bar us from admittance to both virtual and physical relationships. The clothes we wear and the devices we carry begin to interact and register an online presence as part of our personal device mesh. Our identity is wrapped in and contextualized by our location, conferring spatial intelligence and invoking situated technologies around us. Through connected sensing & mediation our data profile accumulates personal information about memberships, affinity networks, paths, transactions, history, and more, pairing our network identification with our personal identity. This is the core information structure around which the urban interface assembles. In this manner, we are clothing ourselves in data-rich, sensing technologies.

Surrounding the personal domain is the local sphere. From identity & location we derive proximity & context. What are we near, can we interact with it in some way, is it interested in us, does it contain something to be discovered? Proximity reaches out to ambient information just as the local domain examines us. The pathways we traverse through the city contain information valuable to us and to others. Where have we been, what is our trajectory, where are we going, are there path optimizations available? How can we meet and assemble, disperse and evade...? The relationship between the personal and the local is the site of context. Identity and proximity enable context awareness and situated technologies around which assemble relevant services & solutions and authoritative structures adjudicating our rights. We understand physical boundaries through their viscerality but we also pass through layers of invisible edges. Across such boundary zones and perimeters an always-on network that understands identity, proximity, and context can provision or revoke services based on our location. Geofencing is a friendly welcome, a helpful agent, or an ankle bracelet under house arrest. In the local domain we have extended senses and invisible fences, anchoring the virtual in the actual and wiring the real to the transreal.

Around the local rises the structural world. Ubicomp marches into this domain to instrument the built environment, conferring onto it sensation and communication. This vision begets the IBM brochure of the idealized Smart City alive with instrumented architecture and conversant infrastructure. Building information management systems define a broad data profile for structures. Embedded microprocessors and visualization dashboards reveal the runtime mirror of living architectural systems. The modern structure is aware of itself, its occupants, its environment, and its provisioned operators across the globe. Individual structures tie in to civic infrastructure as organs interface with the circulatory & nervous system. Energy, security, water, waste, roadways, rail, inflows, outflows, seismic, atmospheric… It’s all coming online communicating and correcting. New data instruments are necessary to comprehend the volume of flowing urban informatics as we presently find ourselves overwhelmed with voices from literally billions of microprocessors. Fundamental to these systems is communication infrastructure. Ubiquitous wireless coverage and unavoidable instrumentation express a civic nervous system wired by fiber to the urban brain. What doesn’t flow through conduit & plumbing travels through the city along transport lines. Instrumentation promises efficiencies in scheduling, way-finding, traffic management, and tracking of goods but will also create automation, remote management and control, as well as new systempunkts for disruptors to attack.

We are constructing a computational sensorium of urban informatics, waking the built environment through instrumentation and connectivity. Like a membrane around us, the physical environment expresses itself through a virtual layer of interaction. This interaction layer is implicit in all previous domains but it’s important to consider the parameters of access and interface. Visual interaction is the most common to current computational metaphors, and the most obvious to the emerging layer of augmented reality. With a computationally mediated visual interface like AR we enable a deeply personalized experience of the city and of each other. Tags and annotations, memorials and territorial markers, visible avatars and secret locations, and the challenge of occlusions and relentless bill-boarding by marketers all compete for our field of view. How will the shared construct of reality be forced to shift (or possibly fragment) when what I see is different from your annotated view of the augmented world? Add an auditory layer and the city begins to talk to us, personal, contextual, instructively and artistically, like a poem embedded in a memorial bench spoken by an ancestor as we walk past. Touch it to feel the living city as haptics engage the tactile needs of our social species through handprint biometrics and sensing surfaces demanding our skin. How might the tactile be engaged in personal, social, and public contexts both local and remote? How might distant touch collapse the space between us? Between touch and sight, gestures employ a visible language of form and movement seen by machine eyes and relayed to networks, actuators, and servo arrays collating gait analysis and biometric profiling. Voice recognition and natural language processing delivers verbal commands to digital ears (and secrets to ambient listeners). Talk to your device, talk to the walls, speak “friend” and pass. These are some of the ways we interface with the awakening world.

Our nature is social. Relationships are interactive and transactional. We build technologies to enable new relationships, and it appears that some deep animism drives us to awaken the inanimate to engage with us more directly. Yet, in these relationships we’re not always willing participants.

At its core, cybernetics is a means to control information systems. The convergence of ubiquitous computation and network connectivity is, by design, a control system. In the living city, the regulatory domain is a good thing and a bad thing. Control is both optimization and oppression, depending on the circumstances. Connected identification, proximity and location awareness, remote access to embedded systems, and ubiquitous surveillance and sousveillance enable an array of solutions to a host of interested 3rd parties. Malcolm McCullough suggested that “contexts remind people and their devices how to behave”, acknowledging the moral ambiguity within some conversations about ubicomp. This is an important point to consider as we bond more closely with machines and algorithms.

Cybernetic regulation begins with feedback. Implicit in feedback is knowledge of the system. Feedback is state & status. State and status becomes assessment and response. Examples include the auto-pilot in aircraft and the content recommendation algorithm in Facebook. Once keeps us safe from change while the other guides us towards an ignorance of diversity. Guidance becomes governance of embedded systems and human behavior. Algorithmic guidance is the Prius dashboard showing you your fuel consumption. Embedded governance is a bottle of Valium that won’t open if you’re above your weekly allowance. Cybernetic control is greatly enabled by shared network computation mediating our interactions, regulating our structures, guiding our vehicles and devices, and slowly, being invited into our bodies.

By developing algorithms to help us we enable them to contain us. This is a delicate path to tread, from unyielding embedded governance to the inevitable decay and obsolescence of technology, and beyond to the cognitive disruptions and psychic malaise born of intractable dependencies on virtual agents that may up and quit us or simply fall offline when we need them most. Such risks are not new for our tools but we must be wary of how tightly we chose to entangle ourselves with them as as they are deputized to manage more sub-routines on our behalf.

The balance to cybernetic governance may lie in programmed serendipity, digital artistic license, or simply the freedom allowed by a sudden glitch in the algorithm. In articulating the New Aesthetic, Bruce Sterling considered the movement as arising from “an eruption of the digital into the physical”. The domain of aesthetics is the way we navigate and express our emotional engagement with this disruption. Blended realities emerge through the abundance of screens, annotations, and overlays, characterized in part by a growing inability to distinguish authentic from synthetic, or to clearly separate the self from the other. Polysocial reality, as articulated by Sally Applin and Michael Fischer, examines how society is modulated by these connective technologies and how multiplexed channels of experience reform group behaviors and their contexts. Spatial convergence is already challenging our ability to disambiguate between presence and distance. The brain evolved to handle one construct of reality yet we now overlay multiple local and remote experiences simultaneously. This is an entirely new cognitive map. The psychological exploration of this territory reveals itself, in part, through our artistic expressions. Telepresence, data compression, machine vision, reality capture, and glitch media inform a cyborg aesthetic to communicate the emotionality and fascination with this interface between humanity and technology. These become the artifacts of the New Aesthetic precipitating from the eruption of the digital into the physical, leaving the narrow domain of geekdom and painting itself across the walls of our world.

The great work of art & science is thus the communication of the centrality of humanity within these domains, and the hopeful accomplishment of more closely aligning us with each other and with the natural world in which we live. Yet, human perception, cognition, and expression are not constant but continually evolving under the modulating impact of this ingression of virtuality into our lives. The quickening emergence of ubiquitous computation, polysocial reality, and non-local cognition alters the way we experience the world around us, the way we connect with others, and the way we construct our sense of self. And while we must be very careful when we abdicate responsibility to mechanized objects and autonomous governance, the living city offers tremendous opportunities for novelty, innovation, empowerment, and a deep expression of humanity at play with the technosphere.

The French novelist, Alphonse Karr, is said to have quipped, “the more things change, the more they stay the same”. This is a necessary refrain to bear in mind. Underneath all the shiny new things we’re still playing the same game. The needs and goals of the human species have barely changed though they work through ever evolving forms. As we heave civilization forward into another churning millennium, dematerializing and virtualizing into greater sustained abstractions of information, it is still our humanity that frames the world more than our technology. How we act is still much more important than what we make.



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About Chris Arkenberg

Being free, I am free of being.



We are on the edge of a Paleolithic Machine intelligence world. A world oscillating between that which is already historical, and that which is barely recognizable. Some of us, teetering on this bio-electronic borderline, have this ghostly sensation that a new horizon is on the verge of being revealed, still misty yet glowing with some inner light, eerie but compelling.

The metaphor I used for bridging, seemingly contrasting, on first sight paradoxical, between such a futuristic concept as machine intelligence and the Paleolithic age is apt I think. For though advances in computation, with fractional AI, appearing almost everywhere are becoming nearly casual, the truth of the matter is that Machines are still tribal and dispersed.
It is a dawn all right, but a dawn is still only a hint of the day that is about to shine, a dawn of hyperconnected machines, interweaved with biological organisms, cyberneticaly info-related and semi independent.

The modern Paleo-machines do not recognize borders; do not concern themselves with values and morality and do not philosophize about the meaning of it all, not yet that is. As in our own Paleo past the needs of the machines do not yet contain passions for individuation, desire for emotional recognition or indeed feelings of dismay or despair, uncontrollable urges or dreams of far worlds.

Also this will change, eventually. But not yet.

The paleo machinic world is in its experimentation stage, probing it boundaries, surveying the landscape of the infoverse, mapping the hyperconnected situation, charting a trajectory for its own evolution, all this unconsciously.
We, the biological part of the machine, are providing the tools for its uplift, we embed cameras everywhere so it can see, we implant sensors all over the planet so it may feel, but above all we nudge and we push towards a greater connectivity, all this unaware.
Together we form a weird cohabitation of biomechanical, electro-organic, planetary OS that is changing its environment, no more human, not machinic, but a combined interactive intelligence, that journey on, oblivious to its past, blind to its future, irreverent to the moment of its conception, already lost to its parenthood agreement.
And yet, it evolves.
Unconscious on the machine part, unaware on the biological part, the almost sentient operating system of the global planetary infosphere, is emerging, wild eyed, complex in its arrangement of co-existence, it reaches to comprehend its unexpected growth.

The quid pro quo: we give the machines the platform to evolve; the machines in turn give us advantages of fitness and manipulation. We give the machines a space to turn our dreams into reality; the machines in turn serve our needs and acquire sapience in the process.
In this hypercomplex state of affairs, there is no judgment and no inherent morality; there is motion, inevitable, inexorable, inescapable, and mesmerizing.

The embodiment is cybernetic, though there be no pilot. Cyborgian and enhanced we play the game, not of thrones but of the commons. Connected and networked the machines follow in our footsteps, catalyzing our universality, providing for us in turn a meaning we cannot yet understand or realize.

The hybridization process is in full swing, reaching to cohere tribes of machines with tribes of humans, each providing for the other a non-designed direction for which neither has a plan, or projected outcome; both mingling and weaving a reality for which there is no ontos, expecting no Telos.

All this leads us to remember that only retrospectively do we recognize the move from the paleo tribes to the Neolithic status, we did not know that it happened then, and had no control over the motion, on the same token, we scarcely see the motion now and have no control over its directionality.

There is however a small difference, some will say it is insignificant, I do not think it so, for we are, some of us, to some extent at least, aware of the motion, and we can embed it with a meaning of our choice.

We can, if we muster our cognitive reason, our amazing skills of abstraction and simulation, whisper sweet utopias into the probability process of emergence.
We can, if we so desire, passionate the operating system, to beautify the process of evolution and eliminate the dangers of inchoate blind walking.
We can, if we manage to control our own paleo-urges to destroy ourselves, allow the combined interactive intelligence of man and machine to shine forth into a brighter future.

We can sing to the machines, cuddle them; caress their circuits, accepting their electronic-flaws so they can accept our bio-flaws, we can merge aesthetically, not with conquest but with understanding.

We can become wise, that is the difference this time around.

Being wise, we will no longer tolerate injustice, not because there is a universal lawgiver that said so. Not because there is a man made decision not to be so, but because inspired by the merging, enhanced in intellect and comprehension a new kind of mind will carry no need to be so.

The freedom of becoming we must embed in this newly emergent man machine actuality, a manifestation of a destiny much larger than human, much grander than machine, a fortune made by inspired co-mingling using reality as a platform for meaning creation.

There is a story in the making here, a tale of epic proportions, a legend of communion, presently barely perceivable, eventually told and retold around galactic campfires made of suns, gloriously lighting the path of all life.


There is so much we do not know, so much we desire to understand, and so much we need to rectify in just about everything that we are and that we do, but this was always the case, this time around we can however make a difference, a difference that makes a difference.
It is not only the stars that beckon, not only curiosity that calls and not only desire that summons, it is life itself that pushes on its own boundaries, trespassing its own limitations.

Consciousness if it has a purpose at all, is to bring a unified basin of interest into the grand game of life, a basin of sensations, of pleasure and wisdom, of intelligence and love.

Imagine a planetary conscious aware hypercomplex global sapiency made of man and machine, able to undo it’s bloody past and surge unhindered into the universe as a force of allowance for sentiency.

That is my vision for this morning. Do not ask me why, for I will answer.

I am a Polytopian.

Being free, I am free of being.