I sadly missed the announcement that Paolo Soleri died in April of this year. I’m happy that my family and I got to tour Arcosanti during his lifetime, of course, and I pledge to make no further negative comments about his writings during my lifetime, though I reserve the right to passing ambivalent mentions.
Long live Paolo Soleri!… Read the rest
Gary Cutting from Notre Dame and the New York Times knows how to incite an intellectual riot, as demonstrated by his most recent The Stone piece, Mozart vs. the Beatles. “High art” is superior to “low art” because of its “stunning intellectual and emotional complexity.” He sums up:
My argument is that this distinctively aesthetic value is of great importance in our lives and that works of high art achieve it much more fully than do works of popular art.
But what makes up these notions of complexity and distinctive aesthetic value? One might try to enumerate those values or create a list. Or, alternatively, one might instead claim that time serves as a sieve for the values that Cutting is claiming make one work of art superior to another, thus leaving open the possibility for the enumerated list approach to be incomplete but still a useful retrospective system of valuation.
I previously argued in a 1994 paper (published in 1997), Complexity Formalisms, Order and Disorder in the Structure of Art, that simplicity and random chaos exist in a careful balance in art that reflects our underlying grammatical systems that are used to predict the environment. And Jürgen Schmidhuber took the approach further by applying algorithmic information theory to novelty seeking behavior that leads, in turn, to aesthetically pleasing models. The reflection of this behavioral optimization in our sideline preoccupations emerges as art, with the ultimate causation machine of evolution driving the proximate consequences for men and women.
But let’s get back to the flaw I see in Cutting’s argument that, in turn, fits better with Schmidhuber’s approach: much of what is important in art is cultural novelty. Picasso is not aesthetically superior to the detailed hyper-reality of Dutch Masters, for instance, but is notable for his cultural deconstruction of the role of art as photography and reproduction took hold.… Read the rest
My 14-year-old is obsessed with Frank Herbert’s Dune right now, marveling over the complexity and otherworldly ornamentation that Herbert imbued in his strange hyper-future (or past maybe, who knows). Dune might read as an allegory about Middle Eastern oil or about psychotropic drugs or nothing at all, but regardless of any deeper layers in its palimpsest, it is so surprising to a first reader—especially a young one—that it still has the power to fuel daydreams (I obsessed over building a stillsuit at my son’s age, imagining being able to spend days in the harsh New Mexico summer without the need for water).
So it may be surprising that I found myself agreeing with Ian McEwan in The New Republic where he calls into doubt the validity of fiction, though ultimately he rediscovers his love of fiction in Nabakov’s “Caress [of the] divine details” and in John Updike’s controlled descriptions. He comes back again to fiction but not at the expense of wanting nonfiction that brings him new ideas. We are information harvesting machines and the novelty generation rate of nonfiction (there is always the history you do not know much less the cosmology you can’t understand) is just much greater than that of fiction.
But perhaps there is a détente in the middle where fiction and nonfiction commingle. The historical novel is perhaps the best example. The only fear being that the history is too much bent to the requirements of drama and conflict to be at all accurate. Likewise, there might be modern hard science fiction that provides an accurate and deep glimpse into the hermeneutics of real scientific research, and possible scientific futures. Then, at least, there is information beyond the craft of writing embedded within them.… Read the rest
Paul Vitanyi has been a deep advocate for Kolmogorov complexity for many years. His book with Ming Li, An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications, remains on my book shelf (and was a bit of an investment in grad school).
I came across a rather interesting paper by Vitanyi with Rudi Cilibrasi called “Clustering by Compression” that illustrates perhaps more easily and clearly than almost any other recent work the tight connections between meaning, repetition, and informational structure. Rather than describing the paper, however, I wanted to conduct an experiment that demonstrates their results. To do this, I asked the question: are the writings of Dante more similar to other writings of Dante than to Thackeray? And is the same true of Thackeray relative to Dante?
Now, we could pursue these questions at many different levels. We might ask scholars, well-versed in the works of each, to compare and contrast the two authors. They might invoke cultural factors, the memes of their respective eras, and their writing styles. Ultimately, though, the scholars would have to get down to some textual analysis, looking at the words on the page. And in so doing, they would draw distinctions by lifting features of the text, comparing and contrasting grammatical choices, word choices, and other basic elements of the prose and poetry on the page. We might very well be able to take parts of the knowledge of those experts and distill it into some kind of a logical procedure or algorithm that would parse the texts and draw distinctions based on the distributions of words and other structural cues. If asked, we might say that a similar method might work for the so-called language of life, DNA, but that it would require a different kind of background knowledge to build the analysis, much less create an algorithm to perform the same task.… Read the rest
David Byrne gets all scientifical in the most recent Smithsonian, digging into the developmental and evolved neuropsychiatry of musical enjoyment. Now, you may ask yourself, how did DB get so clinical about the emotions of music? And you may ask yourself, how did he get here? And you may ask yourself, how did this music get written?
…one can envision a day when all types of music might be machine-generated. The basic, commonly used patterns that occur in various genres could become the algorithms that guide the manufacture of sounds. One might view much of corporate pop and hip-hop as being machine-made—their formulas are well established, and one need only choose from a variety of available hooks and beats, and an endless recombinant stream of radio-friendly music emerges. Though this industrial approach is often frowned on, its machine-made nature could just as well be a compliment—it returns musical authorship to the ether. All these developments imply that we’ve come full circle: We’ve returned to the idea that our universe might be permeated with music.
It seems fairly obvious that the music I’m listening to right now (Arvo Part) could be automatized, but just hasn’t been so far. And this points to the future world Byrne points to, where we are permeated with music and the contrast with silence is the most sophisticated distinction that can be drawn.… Read the rest
With every great scientific advance there has been a coordinated series of changes in the Zeitgeist. Evolutionary theory has impacted everything from sociology through to literature, but there are some very sophisticated efforts in the arts that deserve more attention.
John Frazer’s Evolutionary Architecture is a great example. Now available as downloadable PDFs since it is out-of-print, Evolutionary Architecture asks the question, without fully answering it (how could it?), about how evolution-like processes can contribute to the design of structures:
And then there is William Latham’s evolutionary art that explores form derived from generative functions dating to 1989:
And the art extends to functional virtual creatures:
There is a temptation to be dismissive of “genre fiction” as being merely a fantastical diversion while “serious fiction” and, more relevantly, “realism” retain all of the gravitas that we want to ascribe to writing as an art. And realism must be somehow tied to everyday events because it must be realistic. But what if all art is inevitably bound to artifice in that there is no possibility of chaining a symbolic reference to its ostensible referent?
Thus we chain the crumbling infrastructure of logical positivism to postmodern literature. It is all artifice. There is always a black swan. It is all “mimetic persuasion” (Aristotle channeled through James Wood) where storms of metaphor haloed by limns of allusion and imitation conspire together to push the reader into a caricature of reality that “art…is a disproportioning–(i.e., distorting, throwing out of proportions)–of realities, to show more clearly the features that matter in those realities…” (Thomas Hardy). There is no reality in realism, just the font of imagination that tries to crystallize reality into regularized sheer planes of repetition, of character leitmotivs (oh, poor Proust), of voice, of metaphor, and of estrangement (from Dostoevsky to Nabokov).
We have, then, a bad theory in any scientific sense, where the theory has been overridden time and time again, making psychology look comparatively moored in its modest aspirations. At least psychology is converging with biology. But realism remains subdivided across the aesthetics of literary preference. It lives in fiefs and forts, much like architecture or modern art in general. There is not even local predictability to the grammar of aesthetic change. It may be that theory is not even the right word. Literary theory should be replaced with literary analysis and aesthetics should be untied from the dock of rationalism.… Read the rest
I recently came across an ancient document, older than my son, dating to 1994 when I had a brief FAX-based exchange of communiques with Brian Eno, the English eclectic electronic musician and producer of everything from Bowie’s Low through to U2’s Joshua Tree and Jane Siberry. Eno had been pointed at one of my colleague’s efforts (Eric in the FAXes, below) at using models of RNA replication to create music by the editor of Whole Earth Catalog who saw Eric present at an Artificial Life conference. I was doing other, somewhat related work, and Eric allowed me to correspond with Mr. Eno. I did, resulting in a brief round of FAXes (email was fairly new to the non-specialist in 1994).
I later dropped off a copy of a research paper I had written at his London office and he was summoned down from an office/loft and shook his head in the negative about me. I was shown the door by the receptionist.
Below is my last part of the FAX interchange. Due to copyright and privacy concerns, I’ll only show my part of the exchange (and, yes, I misspelled “Britain”). Notably, Brian still talks about the structure of music and art in recent interviews.
I started reading James Wood’s How Fiction Works while on a business trip to the unequivocally nice Orange County or The OC. The trip was less than pleasant for me personally because I apparently tore my rotator cuff earlier in the day while engaged in mildly excessive exercise activities. I say “apparently” because it took me a day or two to figure out what the source of pain really was, living through brief panic waves about what was happening to me while trying to avoid lifting my left arm in a manner that might give away the agony I was experiencing during business meetings.
Note that this is the literary critic, James Wood, not the actor, James Woods; not the guy from Videodrome or any of the dozens of ecclectic roles the actor has been associated with.
James Wood, the critic then, is trying to operationalize the vast, categorical shaping of Roland Barthes or Milan Kundera in their efforts at criticism. Wood is not a pure theorist, but a careful reader who looks intimately at texts, unpacking the intent of the writer while defining the historical perspectives that informed the artistic effort. Looking intimately at Flaubert, Wood sees the flaneur of realism that began modernism and led, in turn, to post-modernism. Characters transform from our acquired fog of beloved personalities into flat extensions of English sensibilities in the Theophrastus of Jane Austen, or lurk behind the Russian tradition of estrangement that assigns extravagant and unlikely terminology to everyday things (Nabakov’s “leggy thing” in Pnin), and everywhere is the transition from description to internal dialog that drops the formality of specifying dialog at all. That is modernism. That is realism.… Read the rest
We (meaning my family) visited Paolo Soleri‘s Arcosanti in the high desert north of Phoenix today. Arcosanti is an attempt at an “arcology” meaning a dense urban structure that lives in harmony with the ecosystem around it. The term is a portmanteau of “architecture” and “ecology,” and the original motivator for the site was to prove that dense urban living without cars and yards could be ecologically sensible and could inspire a sense of connectedness and community that has been lost in the suburbanization of America.
The facility is both amazing in its vision and somewhat dated in its approach. The limitations arise from its beginnings in the 70s and the available technology at that time. Only recently have photovoltaic panels been introduced. There is no real exploitation of wind power. Food self-sufficiency is only beginning to be addressed with greenhouses. It’s no biotecture but, arguably, it is a primary intellectual bedrock for new urbanism and green building.
We hiked out to the observation platform, we toured the ceramics facility and foundry, we bought bells and T-shirts, and I picked up a copy of Paolo Soleri: What If? Collected Writings 1986-2000.
It’s a flawed book filled with a unique form of craziness. I remember that Teilhard de Chardin-style abstract craziness from my late teenage years when I read Omega Seed, but early on in this new compendium there is an admission by the compiler that there very well may be a private aspect to the ideas that fuel the Soleri way of art that are inaccessible to rational thinking and imperfect in any linguistic rendering:
… Read the restFor the best artists, thought runs on a track alongside art and does not touch it, does not converge, leaving for the art the nondiscursive, the ineffable part that cannot be treated adequately by thought, by ratiocination.
