Archive for the ‘Scientific Culture’ Category

#323 – Does Not Compute

Saturday, July 4th, 2009

cheeful robot, ghost in the machine, or imprisoned soul?

We know that men can be turned into robots—by chemical means, by physical coercion, as in concentration camps, and so on, but we are now confronting a situation more serious than that—a situation in which there are developed human beings who are cheerfully and willingly turning themselves into robots. – C. Wright Mills

For anyone who spends inordinate amounts of time in front of a computer, “HI, A Real Human Interface,” a video by Multi-Touch Barcelona, will resonate. The short film imagines the personal computer as, quite literally, a person, the proverbial little man inside the machine.

The video is at once playful and distopian, cute and dark, fluffy and profound. Transforming complex computer codes into summer-camp art projects of cardboard, construction paper, and glue, HI seems warm and fuzzy at first. But the more you watch the man inside the machine, the more uneasy you grow with his labors, his containment, his monotony. He seems more and more a slave trapped in a cubicle, at the whim of buttons and buzzers, not running the machine but run by it.

His last glances seem restless, as if he longs to bust out of his cell.

The video is not particularly didactic, but it does raise the question: if machines are increasingly becoming like people, and people, if Mills was right, are more and more like machines, then where do they meet? What will the human-machine interface be like?

If Touch-Barcelona are onto something, this future will be simultaneously — and ambiguously — friendly and ominous.

Hi from Multitouch Barcelona on Vimeo.

Posted in Culture Rover, Digital Culture, Popular Culture, Private Culture, Scientific Culture | 2 Comments »

#319 – The Rest Is History

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

the past before the past, and after.

Once a self-replicating system develops from chemicals, this is the beginning of genetic history, since each molecule carries the imprint of its ancestor. Dr. Crick, who was interested in the chemistry that preceded replication, once observed, “After this point, the rest is just history.”

— From Nicholas Wade, “New Glimpses of Life’s Puzzling Origins,” New York Times.

Posted in Culture Rover, Historical Culture, Scientific Culture | 1 Comment »

#309 – It’ll Blow Your Mind

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

neuroscience is like Pink Floyd laser show night at the planetarium.

…You are trying to get at some true vision of the basic material, but there isn’t one. – Antonio Damasio

Rocking light show, for sure, but the most significant thing about Bruce Adolphe’s composition, “Self Comes to Mind” — which was inspired by Antonio Damasio’s neuroscientific research on emotions, creativity, and the brain — is that it is not reductionist.

brain_300

This is your brain on music.

“I think the topic of neuroscience,” Adolphe told NPR, “is like nature has been in a more traditional way.” To Adolphe, science can serve “like the inspiration of mountains or looking at the sky full of stars.”

This is a better way to think about the relationship between the arts and sciences, which we often place in opposition when in fact they have much in common if we think of them as deepening our sense of wonder rather than solving questions once and for all.

In Adolphe’s composition, there is a sense of mystery, complexity, and celestial fullness to the music. As the brain lights up the screen behind the musicians, we see the brain as representation and the thing itself, all at once. It is simultaneously material and it is filled with abstraction. The music wanders, meanders, unsure of itself. With each note, you lose yourself and, at the same time, grow more mindful.

You can hear the composition on NPR’s website.

Image: Hanna Damasio / Dornsife Cognitive Neuroscience Imaging Center, USC

Posted in Aural Culture, Culture Rover, Musical Culture, Scientific Culture | No Comments »