informal

For those who are in Boston, I will give a talk about my recent work as part of
Upgrade! Boston. Next Month at Mass. College of Art.

Two days ago, I was in a workshop at Paris with RATP, the French authority of public transportation in Paris. During dinner we had an interesting discussion with the head of R&D. We talked about vision, myopia and glasses. He told me that when his parents noticed that he was myoptic, they got him a pair of glasses making him not enjoy the state of myopia again. Now being trapped in the world of focus and clear sight, he has to look and see in focus…. And perhaps never be truly myoptic again.

My response was immediate and naive perhaps. I told him that when he has the option of wearing the glasses, he can still take them off. It is the option that matters and not being bound to that single state. You shall choose what to look at not be blinded by your lack. He smiled.

But now, I understand. Once you have the option, you can never take off the glasses again. The tyranny of focus never lets you go back to the state of the blur. The once gained intimacy will be lost once for all.

Sometimes life brings you decisions, successes and failures. When you fail, you feel like you dropped your glasses somewhere. You can’t see your front or your back, your future or your past. It is an annoying state of (involuntary) myopia.

But then, soon, you realize that this uncanny state replaces the desire to see with the desire to mourn for the loss of the glasses. You don’t admit yourself that you can’t see anymore but rather prefer to think that you just lost the glasses. The tyranny then becomes the fear of the loss that imprisons oneself inside the very moment of the loss. I just lost my glasses. Help!

The one who loses sight eventually wants to see again, perhaps even finds other ways to see: further, closer, different, even without glasses… But the other one, will just be after not losing the glasses again whenever he/she finds another pair. The desire to see again, replaced with the desire to not loose the glasses, gets rid of the eyes.

Then, how can one can see again until one gets rid of the idea of the loss? Perhaps, it is better to drop the glasses or let others take it every once in a while. It is afterall a tough ride, one shall enjoy the bumpy road that brings both success and failure…

For those who can read in Turkish, I recently added the PDFs of the articles I wrote for the Turkish Design Journal TM published by Tasarim Merkezi (Design Center) in Ankara. The publication coordinator of the journal is Prof. Dr. Haluk Pamir, whom I used to work with while designing XXI (Architectural Culture Journal).

Here is the link for my tm articles.

Being interdisciplinary, it is often amusing to observe how artistic and scientific traditions approach ‘newness’ in their own way. When Picasso rendered his vision as cubism in 1907 with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and opened the door to a new paradigm of representation, we saw only a couple of artists following his style (e.g., Léger, Braque… etc.). Even though the cubist style was considerably shaped by Cézanne, we mostly associate this avantgarde move with Picasso himself, give him the major credit and acknowledge the rest of the family of cubist painters within his framework. Therefore the door he opened for others is really not a big door for a new world, but something only as wide and tall as him, that needs to be avoided by the others as the traditional avantgarde almost always feel the need to carve their own doors from the pages of history.

On the other hand, scientific disciplines kindly enjoy the practice of building on top of each other’s work. Not simply acknowledging the former’s work, but also using it as a building block to reach something higher. Once there is an open door, it is fair for the scientific community to excavate the field in every possible way. If the current paradigm that rules computer science is statistics, it is normal to see how every single branch of it becomes influenced by it. It becomes quite normal to observe machine learning, pattern recognition ruling over older schools of AI (e.g., KR), or believing that stochastic analysis will suddenly provide better models for understanding human cognition, social dynamics as well as electron movement. The doors opened by others can easily turn into hard lenses (or cookie cutters) where whole fields base their research on each other’s vision.

Very much like the hammer and nail problem, every research question can look like the nail that can be hammered down with the new hammer you borrowed from the neighbor. Universal scientific recipes can easily turn into lack of creativity in research… The doors opened for others can be less and less questioned by those who are eager to find immediate results and explanations for thousand year old problems.
Skeptical artists who scratch their heads after Picasso probably had hard times to replace his paradigm. But the itch for the ‘new’ was probably strong enough that they moved on and now hundred years later, we are way beyond the vision of cubist paintings (which were, strangely enough, reported to be the quite literal representations of the figures and artifacts stolen or forcefully taken from African tribes by French colonizers).

While art does not often enjoy much the doors opened by the precursors, it has a strong instinct to pursue alternatives. Unlike analytic fields, it worries less about successful results, but more about singular statements. Blame the ego of the artist or the immense burden of art history that only remembers the history of the victor, the avantgarde; the restless quest for the “new”, in art, does not allow the artist look at the world simply with the monoculars of the others.

As usual, the hybrids of both worlds will benefit most from different ways of looking at the same problem. Probably the key is to acknowledge that both are inherently doing the same thing, attacking similar problems with their singular methods/concepts/vocabularies. Those who are more interested in their similarities and differences, may find Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? (Part II) interesting.

But while sadly waiting for other Gödels to remind us that the statistician king might have forgotten to put his clothes on, we can remind ourselves that it is stressful, risky but still a lot of fun to find different doors to other places, without necessarily worrying too much about who will fit in and come after us.

We have been thinking about social networks for quite a while. How and why they form, what will be their future, how can we improve the communication and exchange among them… etc.? However, it is interesting to think about the future of “collectives” in general. Tribes, mobs, mafia, gangs, bands, crowds, neighbourhoods, cities, countries, nations and so on. People who agreed upon to become part of the same collective historically had many definitions. But it is not easy to think about myspace networks as a nationality as the kind of relations determining that network is not defaulting to language, race, nationality or geographical proximity. Your little network of friends perhaps never had the same past or will never be destined to have the same future. It is quite an abstract level of collectivity defying previous regimes of organization. Some people call them virtual but I am a little more careful using that word.

One really wonders whether sometime in the future if online social networks gain more political autonomy and become new social structures for collectives that enable them govern themselves. By becoming part of a network perhaps one can be exempt from some regulations. Perhaps youd don’t need to be the citizen of the country you or your parents happen to be born.

Then, can social networks set-up your own value system, tax system, law system, trade agreements or religion? Can one be exempted from doing military service if the other members of the network agree that it is fine? Can one get residency from a country by becoming a member of a small network of individuals (of another country)? Does it sound very much like EU? But very influential religious networks or mafia are defining their borders with economic power anyway without necessarily being confined within a known territory?

In safe little worlds, like second life, people try many interesting social phenomena while not necessarily expecting an impact on their lives in the real world. It looks like a stretch to think the youth in myspace, the gangs in second life and the nations in middle east together and consider them social networks. But they all are still about access, exchange and connectivity.

Perhaps it is a matter of evolution in the history of civilization that is going to introduce new kinds of collectives that will extend not only our connectivity with high-school friends, but also let us create new modals for self-governance, where the networks can articulate more on our social, political and cultural existence.

I am curious to see what media will play role in their lives. What will social networks need when the ability to communicate becomes as important as the geography you live, or the language you speak?

Being recenly drifted into self-publishing, I have been thinking about “the” audience. Who is the audience one writes to? Michael Warner, in Publics and Counterpublics, writes about how mediums themselves invent their own public. A “publication” therefore translates into an act of public-making. Does an imaginary crowd of strangers emerge, at least like a silhouette, as a type this post?

But then who is the adressee? Does it really matter who the public is? Freud is said to adress his writings to an imaginary reader. Orwell’s character Winston, contemplates on his diary knowing that he is writing “For the future, for the unborn” as in “1984″ it is not possible to imagine a free audience that can freely read the diary without the gaze of the ruthless brother. Warner asks how does one communicate with the future while Orwell’s character doesn’t even believe in an imaginary audience for the present or the future who is available to read.

Nevertheless Winston writes and manifests himself through words as an imaginary character for us, to the unimagined imaginary audience. The very internalized audience perhaps, lets him write. The diary circulates in-between and we read Orwell through Winston…. Pretty complicated.

Warner points out a necessity for strangers, the voices of others that populates one’s sentences. Or their substitution with an inner voice caused by an alienation from oneself. Writing displaces. Like the famous sharp razor that splits toughts into words, it splits the author into, at least, two halves. Initiates the respiration, the circulation of thoughts. Oh, finally, writing is back, alive, breathing…

Writing, as a self-propanda machine, needs to imagine its audience. The writer probably needs to start by quoting from himself. Then others, then from the imaginary audience. Writing circulates, alive and breathing, casts another audience before being written…. Leaving another question behind. Who is the one that is actually writing?

After reading this New Yorker article on the mass-observation movement , I began to think more on the reasons for our curiosity on reading/looking/observing the everyday life of others. We have to admit that there is a strange kind of voyeurism hidden in reading blogs especially those that are about the nutrition facts of people’s everyday meals or miles of miles of log data of daily runs. There is an emerging kind of data voyeurism, that is slightly different than the traditional form of watching others on the silver screen. We are getting more and more fascinated with looking at numbers, pie charts, histograms of behavior.. Now there are even more tools for you to visualize the calories you had from your last visit to McDonald’s (Many eyes) and discover your performance in negating healthy food. In its own world, the visualization of everyday data is providing its own aesthetics and probably its own voyeurism habits. One was always curious to know about each other’s details but what does it mean to know about how many books you read last month? It is a deep question for me. We are not looking at each other’s pictures anymore. We observe their behavior through the world of numbers. More and more myspace profiles will probably incorporate statistical data in the future. We will be able to browse each other’s data via personal gadgets and have a peak into data-image. Not necessarily a private one though. This is a very personal-public-image that awaits to be surveyed by the curious spectator.

How many times I kissed my girlfriend last month? Did I perform better than the previous month? Are you ready to look?

Thinking is hard. Especially when you sense that something is coming but you cannot figure out what it is, how it will show up on the radar… etc. It really becomes a nightmare, a burden to think. Today, we had a brief discussion with Sajid on where I stand in my research. Am I on the tip of the iceberg, waving a flag, trying to convince that I am sitting on something big? Can people see the tip and trust me further for the rest? Or am I the penguin with a booklet in his hand? A self-propaganda machine that just speaks without knowing much about what lies underneath. Having spent most of my previous time in the world of words and images, I believe in the reality of representations…. Perhaps even too much. I guess, it is time to sail a little further into the dangerous waters with my iceberg. Leave the safe world of representations for a while to see what is really out there if I need to show the iceberg. One needs to dig more and more so that we can see what it really is lying underneath. Nothing? What if you are not sitting on an iceberg? Oh, well. Too bad. Then, I guess, you need to make one for yourself. Just pick a good shovel and start working…

Yesterday and today, I participated to the “Eat your media” event at the lab. While my group (Sajid, Jeff, Seth, Pranav) wasn’t rewarded with any ipod shuffles at the end, I guess we did well. We presented “Massive Discount” as a reward program at supermarkets for people who keep their BMI ( Body Mass Index) in shape. Right at the cash register, you are weighed and rewarded with instant discounts and cash backs for your purchases depending on the status of your current BMI and the selection of foods . A super easy technology to implement, and I think I good strategy to both inform people how they are doing in terms of their weight and also reward them for healty behavior.

While everyday we are informed about the extreme seriousness of the obesity epidemic in the American culture, there are not many options to think about the matter in a serious way. It was a nice experience to do a “micro collaboration” in the lab and also have the chance to shape some corporate minds about what we can do better the situation. Congrats to other participants.