The machine must be alive and intelligent

Wednesday, September 1, 2021

“The machine doesn’t write the music. You tell the machine what to do and the machine is an extension of you.”
—Laurie Spiegel

“We are playing the machines, the machines play us.”
—Kraftwerk

RIP Lee “Scratch” Perry. Here are some doodles I drew while watching The Upsetter: The Life and Music of Lee Scratch Perry.

Most of my favorite music that he produced — stuff like Super Ape and The Heart of the Congos — was made in his home studio — the “Black Ark” — with “just a four-track quarter-inch TEAC reel-to-reel, 16-track Soundcraft board, Mutron phase, and Roland Space Echo.” As has been noted by so many, he played the studio itself like an instrument:

I see the studio must be like a living thing, a life itself. The machine must be live and intelligent. Then I put my mind into the machine and the machine perform reality. Invisible thought waves – you put them into the machine by sending them through the controls and the knobs or you jack it into the jack panel. The jack panel is the brain itself, so you got to patch up the brain and make the brain a living man, that the brain can take what you sending into it and live.

In this amazing clip from the 1977 documentary Roots, Rock, Reggae: Inside the Jamaican Music Scene, you can see him at work in his prime:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y651C7aNXRc

Perry would do all kinds of weird stuff to get wild sounds into the music — to inject some sort of aliveness into his machines, to mix the organic into the synthetic — stuff like burying a microphone under a palm tree and beating it for a bass drum. Wikipedia:

He would often “bless” his recording equipment with mystical invocations, blow ganja smoke onto his tapes while recording, bury unprotected tapes in the soil outside of his studio, and surround himself with burning candles and incense, whose wax and dust remnants were allowed to infest his electronic recording equipment. He would also spray tapes with a variety of fluids, including urine, blood and whisky, ostensibly to enhance their spiritual properties. Later commentators have drawn a direct relationship between the decay of Perry’s facility and the unique sounds he was able to create from his studio equipment.

I don’t even know what the digital equivalent would be — opening music files in a text editor and inserting gibberish and secret messages to try to glitch the sound?

In his interview with Rick Rubin, Brian Eno, another producer famous for playing the studio like an instrument, spoke of being interested in that area between what humans can do and what machines can do.

The machines, without us, are without soul, but the machines, and our interactions with them, can also help us bring out the soul. There is a sense, at certain moments, that we are not just working in tandem, but the machine is leading us as much as we are leading it…

Pandemic prayers

Monday, August 23, 2021

I made two batches of newspaper blackouts this weekend, the first batch made after seeing an article with the word “landlord” over and over.

Note that I didn’t say what the article was about — I never “read” the articles I black out, I just try to look at them as raw fields of words. (Here’s a video of this one being made.)

After I made the first batch, I remembered an article I saw about the pop singer Lorde, and I used that to make the second batch of “10 Short Poems”:

I’m often asked if I have an idea for what I want to “write” before I start. The answer is a big No. If I start out with an idea, it will be bad. It’s all about responding to the material. (For example, when “Swift” as in “Taylor” shows up.) Half finding the wave, half surfing it…

https://twitter.com/austinkleon/status/1429097945513828357

Related reading: How to make a newspaper blackout poem

One must cultivate one’s own garden

Wednesday, August 18, 2021

Last night I watched a documentary about André Leon Talley, The Gospel According To André, which begins with this voiceover:

“Voltaire says, ‘One must cultivate one’s own garden.’ Which doesn’t mean to grow garden peas… you must cultivate your own aesthetic in your own universe. Create your own universe and share it with people you respect and love.”

He later explained to the SF Chronicle:

“Every day I cultivate my own garden. That is simply a metaphor for making sure you have the curiosity to learn something new every day. I’m constantly learning.”

Over at the School of Life, they unpack this famous last line of Candide, and “What Voltaire Meant by ‘One Must Cultivate One’s Own Garden”:

Gardening is no trivial pastime, it’s a central way of shielding ourselves from the influence of the chaotic, dangerous world beyond while focusing our energies on something that can reflect the goodness and grace we long for.

“Build your own world,” as Emerson told us, and tend your little plot.

Filed under: gardening

A sacrifice and a risk

Tuesday, August 17, 2021

I barely understand 1/3 of Martin Buber’s I and Thou.

In his good and perhaps unintentionally hilarious introduction to the book, translator Walter Kaufmann warns the reader that “this book is untranslatable,” “overwritten,” and it “has many faults,” and Buber “makes reading very difficult.”

Indeed, he does, but there are many bits in the book that I’ve been turning over in my mind, including one in which Buber talks about the “eternal origin of art,” and how art often comes knocking: “something appears to the soul and demands the soul’s creative power. What is required is a deed that a man does with his whole being.”

This deed “involves a sacrifice and a risk.”

The sacrifice:

“infinite possibility is surrendered on the altar of the form; all that but a moment ago floated playfully through one’s perspective has to be exterminated; none of it may penetrate into the work; the exclusiveness of such a confrontation demands this.”

The risk:

“Whoever commits himself may not hold back part of himself; and the work does not permit me, as a tree or man might, to seek relaxation in the It-world; it is imperious: if I do not serve it properly, it breaks, or it breaks me.”

This is a bit lofty for me, but I do like this idea of a sacrifice and a risk, and it speaks to why we sometimes don’t make The Thing we are called to make.

The sacrifice is that doing The Thing requires not doing everything else we might like to do, at least when we’re actually making The Thing.

The risk is that The Thing just might not work — in Buber’s words, it will break, or it will break us.

The risk, surprisingly, seems much easier to me. Something will break us, eventually, so why not The Thing? And if The Thing breaks, well, it didn’t even exist before we tried to bring it forth, now, did it?

The sacrifice, on the other hand… the sacrifice seems much tougher. Letting go of all the possibilities to focus on the one, and to imagine the alternate universes we’re denying, that can cause existential FOMO.

But to simply know that some sacrifice and some risk is required for The Thing, that seems helpful to me.

Questions for technology

Monday, August 16, 2021

“Look out honey ’cos I’m using technology
ain’t got time to make no apology”
—Iggy Pop, “Search and Destroy”

Here is an illustration from my book Show Your Work! riffing off of John Lennon (“I’m an artist, man. Give me a tuba, I’ll get you something out of it.”) and Brian Eno (“A lot of my ideas start with looking at a tool and thinking what else you could do with it other than what it was intended for.”)

I was much more optimistic about technology in 2013 than I am now, and as I age, I struggle to maintain my curious elder ethos while also feeling that I need to focus my finite amount of energy and time on the inquiries I’m already making and the tools I’m already using. (In other terms: exploring vs. exploiting.)

Tik-Tok, for example, makes me feel ancient. I see many cool uses of it, but none that I’m sure I want to spend any time on. This weekend a good friend of mine, an artist, was trying to explain NFTs and crypto to me, and I felt like I was talking to someone in a cult!

Knowing what’s worth spending your time and attention on is half the game in life, and, for better or worse, and probably because I’m privileged enough to hustle a little less than I used to, I tend these days to err on the side of technologies that have been around for hundreds of years, technologies like paper and pencils.

The fact of the matter is, McLuhan was right: “We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”

Technology is not just about things and devices, it is about processes and verbs. So you have to be a little careful about what technologies you adopt, because each technology is, broadly speaking, a way of doing things.

Much of my thinking about technology has been influenced by my readings of Ursula Franklin, Neil Postman, McLuhan, Ivan Illich, The Amish, Thoreau, etc., and a whole shelf-full of books my wife read in architecture grad school when she was studying Science and Technology Studies (STS).

One of the contemporary thinkers I find inspiring on the subject is L.M. Sacasas, who publishes a newsletter called “The Convivial Society.” Sacasas was recently a guest on the Ezra Klein Show, talking about his 41 questions concerning technology. Here are the first 10 questions:

1. What sort of person will the use of this technology make of me?

2. What habits will the use of this technology instill?

3. How will the use of this technology affect my experience of time?

4. How will the use of this technology affect my experience of place?

5. How will the use of this technology affect how I relate to other people?

6. How will the use of this technology affect how I relate to the world around me?

7. What practices will the use of this technology cultivate?

8. What practices will the use of this technology displace?

9. What will the use of this technology encourage me to notice?

10. What will the use of this technology encourage me to ignore?

(These questions, btw, would make an excellent structure for a book, something I hope Sacasas will consider.)

Neil Postman had his own questions for a new technology:

1. What is the problem to which technology claims to be a solution?

2. Whose problem is it?

3. What new problems will be created because of solving an old one?

4. Which people and institutions will be most harmed?

5. What changes in language are being promoted?

6. What shifts in economic and political power are likely to result?

7. What alternative media might be made from a technology?

And Wendell Berry, in his 1987 essay, “Why I am NOT going to buy a computer,” had a list of standards for adopting a new technology:

1. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.

2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.

3. It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.

4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces.

5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.

6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.

7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.

8. It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.

9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.

When I first read that list, three years before I wrote Show Your Work!, I wrote:

Berry is a farmer, practicing an ancient form of work. That is, he’s doing work that’s already been done before. Artists aren’t farmers: we’re often looking to do work that hasn’t been done before. That is, when we see a new tool, we don’t automatically think, “Well, what does it do?” we think, “Well, what *could* it do?” How could you push the tool to come up with something really interesting? (Think David Hockney and his iphone.)

How callow I was! Now I realize that some artists are farmers and some artists are pirates, and we all operate on a kind of spectrum. In the early days, I felt like I was more of a pirate, and these days I feel more like a farmer, tilling my little plot of land. (Or, okay, a pirate gardener.)

One thing I will say about these lists: they are written as a way of fortune and future-telling and anticipating what a technology might do. But you often don’t know the answers to a lot of the questions until you adopt the technology.

So it might be worthwhile to adjust the tenses of some of the questions, and use them to re-evaluate the technologies you’re already involved with. So, for example, Sacasas’s first question, “What sort of person will the use of this technology make of me?” becomes “What sort of person is the use of this technology making of me?”