Simon Ings

“Ah, bankers, students, workers, officials, servants, you are the cock-suckers of the useful, the masturbators of necessity. I shall never work. My hands are pure.” — Louis Aragon

“I have nothing to say as an artist”

Posted on April 22, 2015 by simonings

An interview with the sculptor Anish Kapoor for New Scientist.

I have said this over and over again: you make what you make, and you put it in front of yourself first of all. Inevitably, a certain concept arises, and exploring that concept is the real work. If I started off with some big message for the world, it would keep getting in the way.

There is an emotional world and an objective world, and the two mesh. Thirty years ago I began working with the idea that for every material thing, there’s a non-material thing alongside it – sometimes poetic, sometimes phenomenological. For example, I once made a stone chamber and painted it a very dark blue. Thanks to the psychological implications of the colour, if you look inside the chamber it’s as though this stone thing had a non-thing inside it. The cavity becomes an object. You get an effect like that when you look at a polished concave surface. The eye wants to fill the hollow with a sort of convex ghost.

I’ve been interested in what I call “void works” for many years: applying deep, dark colour to mostly concave forms so the space and object are confused. This lead me to Vantablack, a superblack made from carbon nanotubes. It’s extraordinary – the light gets in and is not able to get out. (Indeed, Vantablack absorbs all but 0.035 per cent of visual light.) The discovery of a new material like this opens up the most incredible possibilities. I love the idea that one could walk into a room that isn’t dark and at the same time isn’t there. You could have lights on, but the room wouldn’t be there. There’s something magical about that. It’s that wonderful, liminal moment between wonder and fear – that’s what I aim for.

I don’t mind too much when people call me an illusionist. I’m pretty sure that everything we consider to be real is illusory, or has an illusory element. From a psychological point of view, there’s more deep truth in the unreal than there is in the real. After all, objectively speaking, colour doesn’t even exist. So that’s the game. Keep your balance. Whenever subjectivity and objectivity are put into opposition, never come down on either side.

I’ve always been deeply fascinated by raw pigment, which is at once a colour – a pure, psychological idea – and a real substance. It has this otherness you can’t quite point at. My latest works at Lisson Gallery are made with silicone, all very red and very visceral. I work with red a lot, because of its darkness. The psychology of the red generates a much darker dark than black or blue.

And I’ve always been deeply interested in geometry, and I’ve put some of my pieces into motion to get at forms I can’t produce by any other method. Descension is a whirlpool that produces a natural parabola. It took me 20 years to get it to work, because it needs to be built at a certain scale, and be spinning at a certain rate. What surprised me, once I’d achieved those wonderful parabolic curves, was what happened at the bottom of the pool. A void opened up, a form I never expected to find there, for all the world as though this thing was boring its way the centre of the Earth!

Art and science do sit naturally quite close to each other. But making a statement of that sort in a piece of art is just going to get in the way. Science is apparently rational and art, perhaps, more confused. But they both start out as experimental processes, and both are contained by rules. A poetic purpose is every bit as real as an apparently scientific one. There’s objectivity in art, just as much as there’s subjectivity in science.

Sausages of the Anti-Christ

Posted on April 20, 2015 by simonings

A visit to Cravings, at London’s Science Museum For New Scientist, 28 March 2015 (Incredibly, the subs let that headline go through on the print version)

SOME years ago, I was friendly with a family who ran a venison smokery. They were expanding their product line to include a venison salami. On one visit, they presented me with piles of sliced sausage: which recipe did I prefer?

My first mouthful was a disappointment. The sausage tasted of generic salami, hardly even of meat, and though I knew otherwise, it was hard to imagine that any deer had perished in the making of it. My second was just as bad. The body language of my hosts was revealing. My weak-beer praise simply confirmed what this conscientious family already knew: no tweaks were going to save their experiment.

As my friends discovered, you don’t need to be a big food processor to hit big problems. Since mass production renders the best ingredients to tasteless slurry, your job is to rescue, recreate or, frankly, fake the tastes and aromas you killed off in making your product.

The keen home cook’s first-aid kit includes fat, salt and sugar. But the food industry also uses (among many other extras) acids, enzymes, texturisers, blood plasma and grim-sounding powdered dairy essences. In Swallow This, the latest of a string of superior industry exposés, food journalist Joanna Blythman explains how far manufacturers will go to produce cheap foods that taste consistent, while retaining that “just-cooked” feel.

Her page about salami, for example, features company literature describing a meat glue made from the enzyme transglutaminase, blended with animal protein and vitamin B9: “Salami Dry Express B9 decreases ripening time by up to 20 per cent, creates a more… appealing colour in less time, offers improved casing peeling and… sausage aroma. Improved slicing properties reduce wastage by up to five per cent, while shorter processing and storage times also provide financial advantages.”

Each promise listed sounds reasonable. But taken together, they suggest an approach to food that can only disgust consumers. And this, chiefly, is why the food processing industry is growing ever more secretive, ever more insincere, and, more worryingly still, ever more removed from the real science of nutrition. Its prime concern is not food, but keeping up appearances.

Everyone imagines they want an authentic home-cooked meal, even as they “require honeyed cakes, unguents and the like”. This nice turn of phrase belongs to the Greek Cynic Diogenes, one of the philosophers in Michel Onfray’s slim, sly volume of essays called Appetites for Thought. Rather in the spirit of Bruces’ Song, Monty Python’s dipsomaniacal summary of the Western philosophical tradition, Onfray dishes out morsels under chapter headings like “Nietzsche; or The Sausages of the Anti-Christ”.

His simple thesis, that our minds are ruled by our stomachs, acquired a graphic reality in 2006, when Molly Smith, a 16-year-old from Cambridgeshire, UK, received a life-saving transplant. She had been born with much of her intestinal tract missing, and had never experienced hunger, thirst or any food cravings. When Molly finally ate her first solid food – a banana – she felt the stirrings of new sensations. Her guts were beginning to talk to her.

Molly’s is one of the more startling stories told in Cravings, at London’s Science Museum. The rich, mysterious, two-way dialogue between gut and brain that so entertained Onfray is its central theme, and serves as a playful entrée to health advice.

Though the exhibition is full of cautionary information about fat and sugar levels in many processed foods, it left this visitor hankering for the museum café. This is no bad thing. Food, any kind of food, is better than the alternative. And an exhibition about appetite ought to pique it.

Swallow This: Serving up the food industry’s darkest secrets, Joanna Blythman (4th Estate).
Appetites for Thought: Philosophers and food, Michel Onfray (Reaktion Books).

Designs with the world on their shoulders

Posted on April 15, 2015 by simonings

For New Scientist, 18 April 2015: a review of the 2015 Designs of the Year competition at London’s Design Museum.

In friendly competition with Percy Bysshe Shelley, the poet Horace Smith once wrote a poem entitled Ozymandias. Shelley’s version is the one we remember, but Smith’s is compelling for another reason. He imagines a hunter traipsing through the ruins of a future London. Lighting upon a fragment of a monument, he “stops to guess/What powerful but unrecorded race/Once dwelt in that annihilated place”.

This year’s Designs of the Year competition has its monumental entries, but even the most grandiloquent of the 76 nominations at least tips its hat to the idea that the world will not sustain another great ruin, or may end up our next great ruin, unless we respond more cleverly to our environment.

Jean Nouvel’s One Central Park in Sydney, Australia, towers above its architectural competitors, literally. Clad in climbing plants by Patrick Blanc, the leading designer of vertical gardens, One Central’s overriding purpose seems to be to apologise for its very existence.

There is even a motorised heliostat mounted on a cantilever near the roof, to erase the building’s shadow. The arrangement looks terrifying in photographs, suggesting the 50-metre-high moon towers of the 19th century when towns experimented with civic lighting.

In Ho Chi Minh City, a project called House for Trees eschews apology for action, albeit of a most eccentric sort. Here, high-density living units double as gigantic containers for tropical trees. Come the rains, a sufficient number of these properties could reduce the risk of urban flooding. At least, so claim architects Vo Trong Nghia, although it sounds like special pleading to me – an alibi for the strange green dream they’re weaving, of wandering lost among giant plant pots.

Where rains are few, a more down to earth aesthetic holds sway. PITCHAfrica’s Waterbank Campus is a 10-acre school site in Laikipia, Kenya, where 4 acres of irrigated conservation agriculture are fed by 7 low-cost buildings, designed to collect and store what little precipitation there is.

PITCHAfrica’s vision extends beyond unassuming architecture to provide resources like clean water, food and sanitation on-site for its students, in the hope they will spread the word about how to manage scarce resources at home.

This vision, of an artificial “ecosystem capable of empowering and transforming communities”, is shared by a great many of the show’s “technical fix” entries. Take the Blue Diversion toilet. This project, led by the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is an all-in-one sanitation, fertiliser, drinking-water and biogas solution. In this cheap, ugly, blue plastic toilet, nothing is wasted – not even sunlight; there’s a small solar panel on its roof.

Other ideas plug in to the smog and mess of cities, and try to make daily life a little more bearable. At the University of Engineering and Technology, Lima, Peru, researchers have invented a billboard that purifies the air in a five-block radius, scrubbing it clean of construction dust and 99 per cent of airborne bacteria – it would take 1200 trees to do the equivalent work, says the team.

Another entry, The Ocean Cleanup, designed by Erwin Zwart with Boyan Slat and Jan de Sonneville, tackles the plastic garbage circulating the world’s oceans. Why not string barriers over the waves to catch the plastic as it moves around? Having raised over U$2 million through crowdfunding, the organisation plans to construct and test large-scale pilot projects.

This is technical fixery at its purest. It doesn’t prevent the oceans being littered: it is an environmental sticking plaster, permitting us to pursue business as usual. But why should designers have to carry the whole world on their shoulders? Designs like these could be part of a broader, political solution. The Ocean Cleanup’s barriers would be a fitting monument for our descendants to puzzle over.

Better, of course, to avoid collapse entirely, but it won’t be simple. It is easier for designers to ameliorate or even disguise problems, rather than to address them head on. Two projects built around the food supply demonstrate this neatly.

Disclosed, by Marion Ferrec at the Royal College of Art, in collaboration with Kate Wakely, is a web-based consumer service that allows you to choose products according to your health needs and ethical preferences. Lacking vast wealth, leisure and self-absorption, I won’t be using it.

But neither am I entirely persuaded by Marcel’s humorous campaign for the French supermarket giant Intermarché – a series of beautifully photographed imperfect fruits and vegetables. The idea is to shift ridiculous-looking potatoes, hideous oranges and failed lemons onto the consumer, and thereby reduce food waste. But the campaign preserves and reinforces (by price offers) the very distinction between perfect and imperfect produce that caused the problem in the first place.

It is, frankly, next to impossible to imagine how we get from a wasteful here to a sustainable there – and for that reason alone, I think Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s design fiction Designing for the Sixth Extinction is the poster-child of this year’s competition. Ginsberg has anatomised the ultimate disruptive enterprise, in which “nature is totally industrialized for the benefit of society”.

Although her fictional synthetic creatures are deliciously creepy (especially the “biologically-powered mobile soil bioremediation device”) it is her business model of saving our civilisation at the expense of the natural world, while replacing it with something better, that fascinates.

If Ginsberg’s vision comes to pass, our descendants won’t be able to puzzle at our monuments. Our monuments will be everywhere, all around them, and inside them.

The past is like Baltimore: there is no there there

Posted on April 7, 2015 by simonings

Longing for the Bomb: Oak Ridge and atomic nostalgia, Lindsey A. Freeman (University of North Carolina Press)
Seeing Green: The use and abuse of American environmental images, Finis Dunaway (Chicago University Press)
for New Scientist (4 April 2015),

THE past can’t be re-experienced. It leaves only traces and artefacts, which we constantly shuffle, sort, discard and recover, in an obsessive effort to recall where we have come from. This is as true of societies as it is of individuals.

Lindsey Freeman, an assistant professor of sociology at the State University of New York, Buffalo, is the grandchild of first-generation residents of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Once a “secret city”, where uranium was enriched for the US’s Manhattan Project, Oak Ridge opened its gates to the world in 1949 as America’s first “Atomic City”: a post-war utopia of universal healthcare, zero unemployment and state-owned housing.

In Longing for the Bomb, Freeman describes how residents of Oak Ridge dreamed up an identity for themselves as a new breed of American pioneer. He visits Oak Ridge’s Y-12 National Security Complex (an “American Uranium Center of Excellence”) during its Secret City Festival, boards its Scenic Excursion Train and cannot decide if converting a uranium processing site into a wildlife reserve is good or bad.

It would have been easy to turn the Oak Ridge story into something sinister, but Freeman is too generous a writer for that. Oak Ridge owes its existence to the geopolitical business of mass destruction, but its people have created stories that keep them a proud and happy community. Local trumps global, every time.

This is good for the founders of communities, but a problem for those who want to wake up those communities to the need for change. As historian Finis Dunaway puts it in Seeing Green, his history of environmental imagery, “even as media images have made the environmental crisis visible to a mass public, they often have masked systemic causes and ignored structural inequalities”.

Reading this, I was reminded of a talk by author Andrew Blackwell, where he told us just how hard it is to take authentic pictures of some of the world’s most polluted places. Systemic problems do not photograph well. Some manipulation is unavoidable.

Dunaway knows this. Three months after the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in 1979, the worst radioactive spill in US history occurred near Church Rock, New Mexico, on lands held by the Navajo nation. It took a week for the event to be reported, once, on a single news channel.

The remoteness of the site and a lack of national interest in Native American affairs might explain the silence but, as Dunaway points out, the absence of an iconic and photogenic cooling tower can’t have helped.

The iconic environmental images Dunaway discusses are essentially advertisements, and adverts address individuals. They assume that radical social change will catch on like any other consumer good. For example, the film An Inconvenient Truth, chock full of eye-catching images, is the acme of the sincere advertiser’s art, and its maker, former US vice-president and environmental campaigner Al Gore, is a vocal proponent of carbon offset and other market initiatives.

Dunaway, though, argues that you cannot market radical social action. For him, the moral seems to be that sometimes, you just have to give the order – as Franklin Roosevelt did when he made Oak Ridge a city.

A feast of bad ideas

Posted on March 18, 2015 by simonings

This Idea Must Die: Scientific theories that are blocking progress, edited by John Brockman (Harper Perennial)

for New Scientist, 10 March 2015

THE physicist Max Planck had a bleak view of scientific progress. “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents…” he wrote, “but rather because its opponents eventually die.”

This is the assumption behind This Idea Must Die, the latest collection of replies to the annual question posed by impresario John Brockman on his stimulating and by now venerable online forum, Edge. The question is: which bits of science do we want to bury? Which ideas hold us back, trip us up or send us off in a futile direction?

Some ideas cited in the book are so annoying that we would be better off without them, even though they are true. Take “brain plasticity”. This was a real thing once upon a time, but the phrase spread promiscuously into so many corners of neuroscience that no one really knows what it means any more.

Other ideas, especially in the more anthropocentrically inclined sciences of economics and computer science, reflect more our natural bent for binary oppositions and good stories than they reveal real things about the world. This is where things get very interesting indeed, making Brockman’s latest book essential, as well as enjoyable, reading.

More than any amount of pontification (and readers wouldn’t believe how many new books agonise over what “science” was, is, or could be), Brockman’s posse capture the essence of modern enquiry. They show where it falls away into confusion (the use of cause-and-effect thinking in evolution), into religiosity (virtually everything to do with consciousness) and cant (for example, measuring nuclear risks with arbitrary yardsticks).

This is a book to argue with – even to throw against the wall at times. Several answers, cogent in themselves, still hit nerves. When Kurt Gray and Richard Dawkins, for instance, stick their knives into categorisation, I was left wondering whether scholastic hand-waving would really be an improvement. And Malthusian ideas about resources inevitably generate more heat than light when harnessed to the very different agendas of Matt Ridley and Andrian Kreye.

On the other hand, there is pleasure in seeing thinkers forced to express themselves in just a few hundred words. I carry no flag for futurist Douglas Rushkoff or psychologist Susan Blackmore, but how good to be wrong-footed. Their contributions are among the strongest, with Rushkoff discussing godlessness and Blackmore on the relationship between brain and consciousness.

Every reader will have a favourite. Mine is palaeontologist Julia Clarke’s plea that people stop asking her where feathered dinosaurs leave off and birds begin. Clarke offers lucid glimpses of the complexities and ambiguities inherent in deciphering the behaviour of long-vanished animals from thin fossil data. The next person to ask about the first bird will probably get a cake fork in their eye.

This Idea Must Die is garrulous and argumentative. I expected no less: Brockman’s formula is tried and tested. Better still, it shows no sign of getting old.

The science of desperate fumbling

Posted on December 17, 2014 by simonings

How Sexual Desire Works: The enigmatic urge by Frederick Toates (Cambridge University Press)
Fuckology: Critical essays on John Money’s diagnostic concepts by Lisa Downing, Iain Morland, Nikki Sullivan (University of Chicago Press)

for New Scientist

SEX. It’s one of the few subjects about which we know everything and nothing: a paradox facing all who study it scientifically. Sex doesn’t have to be private, but most sex acts are, so even when shame is put aside, it’s a tricky thing to study. How do you make a science out of more or less desperate fumbling?

To judge by an exhibition on sexology, the first show at a newly refurbished Wellcome Collection in London, researchers were more upbeat in the 20th century.

Take Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish radical who collected books, documents and artefacts on sexual behaviour, charted his proclivities in coloured inks, and fought discrimination against homosexuals. His Institute of Sexology, which was ransacked by the Nazis in 1933, gives the name to the Wellcome show.

Then there is Alfred Kinsey, who brought taxonomic skills gained studying gall wasps to the complexities of human sexual behaviour. And in the 1960s and 70s, William Masters and Virginia Johnson observed the sexual responses of anyone for whom they could get ethical approval.

One of the strongest elements of the show looks at Marie Stopes, who was a vigorous advocate of contraception and was opposed to sexual shame.

Today, the British National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, set up in 1990, is one of the few globally to gather the broad information that would have fascinated Stopes. Most of today’s cash funds brain-imaging studies or “performance” drugs.

Leaving Wellcome’s quiet, informative show, you would be forgiven for thinking its unblushing researchers have gifted us a profounder understanding of ourselves. On reflection, however, it’s hard to say what their work adds up to.

Is sexology a science, or a series of well-intentioned, evidence-based campaigns? Maybe labelling this messy field as science is helpful, securing funding in an age of austerity. For it is the absence of understanding of our needs and desires that matters, showing up over time in illegal abortions, gay-bashing, sexually transmitted diseases and more.

How Sexual Desire Works is psychologist Frederick Toates’s stab at a proper scientific account. He maps the mess as rigorously as he can, and the book is worth it for its bibliography alone. But sexual desire turns out to be as much about boredom, habit, disgust, rage, self-image, disappointment and the like as it is about desire. How to make a science out of this?

John Money, a New Zealand-born psychologist who died in 2006, applied boundless energy to the problem, creating concepts, with their own neologisms, such as “troopbondance”. In Fuckology (another of his), Lisa Downing and co-authors capture his story ably.

Money was interested in gender identity, and the possibilities for gender reassignment. Depending on what you read, he either tried to eradicate “man” and “woman” as categories, or to link sexuality and gender with a scalpel. After a botched circumcision, David Reimer had gender reassignment surgery at age 2, on Money’s recommendation. His miserable life and suicide in 2004 defined the psychologist’s reputation.

The authors are ironic about Money’s approach to his work: “To admit the potential of being wrong, or to settle for the productive tension of ambiguity, is not a feature of Money’s rhetorical range…”

But Money is in good company. Sexology lures big personalities: Sigmund Freud was its founder, after all. Have these strong egos bequeathed us a science? It’s hard to say. Sex, when push comes to shove, is not for the faint-hearted.

The toughest job

Posted on December 1, 2014 by simonings

Parentology: Everything you wanted to know about the science of raising children but were too exhausted to ask by Dalton Conley
and
It’s Complicated: The social lives of networked teens by Danah Boyd
reviewed for New Scientist

As early as page 14 of Parentology, a neonatologist explains to Conley that his sure-to-be-premature daughter should stay in her mother’s womb as long as possible, since “each week is ten more points of IQ”. Conley was furious. “A spark of rage landed on my sleeve. An urge to grab the doctor’s head and bash it against the sharp corner of the sonogram machine seized hold… I wanted to smash his head one time for every IQ point,” he recalls.

For all its insightful, funny, fully researched, conscientiously cited, Freakonomics approach to science and statistics, what really powers Parentology is a species of loving rage. The numbers teach us a great deal about what parents cannot do, cannot change and cannot help. However, we learn something quite different and very valuable from Conley. Love, care, interest and empathy won’t change a child’s chances, but they render most of the measures discussed in this book profoundly unimportant.

By all means keep score – it’s a tough world out there, and your kids need all the help they can get. But if you measure your worth as a parent by the numbers, you’ve missed the point of the enterprise.

If parenting is about learning how little influence we have over people and events, then pity also the youths interviewed by Boyd for It’s Complicated. Patronised, legally marginalised and even subject to curfew, US teenagers – to hear Boyd tell it – have but one means to engage with the outside world: via the imperfect medium of the computer screen. “Obsessed” with social media, they are simply trying to recreate, for themselves and each other, a social space denied to them by anxious parents, hostile civic authorities and a mass media bent on exaggerating every conceivable outdoor danger.

Of course, a life online is not simply a life lived behind glass. There are serious problems with social media: chiefly, the obstacle they present to self-reinvention, and the ease with which bullies can weaponise them.

But Boyd has little time for technological determinism. Her fieldwork with worried-well parents and their kids reveals the fault is not in our computers but in ourselves, that we scare our kids into their bedrooms, then spy on them constantly once they’re there. And she marshals a huge body of sociological evidence, anecdotal and statistical, to support this.

Parents, you’ve had your chance. Of course you blew it. Now leave the kids alone.

Creative. Interactive. Wrong.

Posted on November 26, 2014 by simonings

People are by far the easiest animals to train. Whenever you try to get some bit of technology to work better, you can be sure that you are also training yourself. Steadily, day by day, we are changing our behaviours to better fit with the limitations of our digital environment. Whole books have been written about this, but we keep making the same mistakes. On 6 November 2014, at Human Interactive, a day-long conference on human-machine interaction at Goldsmith’s College in London, Rodolphe Gelin, the research director of robot-makers Aldebaran, screened a video starring Nao, the company’s charming educational robot. It took a while before someone in the audience (not me) spotted the film’s obvious flaw: how come the mother is sweating away in the kitchen while the robot is enjoying quality time with her child?

We still obsess over the “labour-saving” capacities of our machines, still hanker after more always-elusive “free time”, but we never think to rethink the value of labour itself. This is the risk we run: that we will save ourselves from the very labour that makes our lives worthwhile.

Organised by William Latham and Frederic Fol Leymarie, Human Interactive was calculated (quite deliberately, I expect) to stir unease.

Beyond the jolly, anecdotal presentations about the computer games industry from Creative Assembly’s Guy Davidson and game designer Jed Ashforth, there emerged a rather unflattering vision of how humans best interact with machines. The biophysicist Michael Sternberg, for instance, is harnessing the wisdom of crowds to gamify and thereby solve difficult problems in systems biology and bioinformatics. For Sternberg’s purposes, people are effectively interchangeable components in a kind of meat parallel-processing system. Individually, we do have some merit: we are good at recognising and classifying patterns. Thisat least makes us better than pigeons, but only at the things that pigeons are good at already.

Sternberg would be mortified to see his work described in such terms – but this is the point: human projects, fed through the digital mill, emerge with their humanity stripped away. It’s up to people at the receiving end of the milling process to put the humanity back in. I wasn’t sure, listening to Nilli Lavie’s presentation on attention, to what human benefit her studies would be put. The UCL neuroscientist’s key point is well taken – that people perform best when they are neither overloaded with information, nor deprived of sufficient stimulus. But what did she mean by her claim that wandering attention loses the US economy around two billion dollars a year? Were American minds to be perfectly focused, all the year round, would that usher in some sort of actuarial New Jerusalem? Or would it merely extinguish all American dreaming? Without a space for minds to wander in, where would a new idea – any new idea – actually come from?

Not that ideas will save us. Ideas, in fact, got us into this mess in the first place, by reminding us that the world as-is is less than it could be. We are very good at dreaming up scenarios that we are not currently experiencing. We are all too capable of imagining elusive “perfect” experiences. Digital media feed these yearnings. There is something magical about a balanced spreadsheet, a glitchless virtual surface, the beauty of a symmetrical avatar under perfect, unreal light.

Henrietta Bowden-Jones, founder and director of the National Problem Gambling Clinic, is painfully aware of how digital media encourage our obessive and addictive behaviours. Games are hardly the new tobacco — at least, not yet — but psychologists are being hired to make them ever-more addictive; Bowden-Jones’s impressively understated presentation suggested that games may soon generate behavioral and social problems as acute as those thrown up by on-line gambling.

The day after the conference, Goldsmith’s College hosted Creative Machine, a week-long exhibition of machine creativity. In a church abutting the campus, robots sketched human skulls, balanced pendulums, and noodled around with evolutionary algorithms.I expected still more alienation, a surfeit of anxiety. In fact, Creative Machine left me feeling strangely reassured.

Those of us who play with computers, or know a little about science, harbour what amounts to a religious conviction: that that somewhere deep down, at the bottom of this messy reality, there is an order at work. Call it mathematics, or physics, or reason. Whichever way you cut it, we believe there’s a law. But this just isn’t true. Put a computer to work in the real world, and it messes up. More exciting still, it messes up in just the ways we would. Félix Luque Sánchez’s simple robots on rails shuttle backwards and forwards in a brave and ultimately futile attempt to balance a pendulum. Anyone who’s ever tried to balance a book on their head will recognise themselves in every move, every acceleration, every hesitation – every failure.

Even a robot who knows what it’s doing will get entangled. Patrick Tresset has programmed a robot called Paul with the rules of life drawing and draughtsmanship. Paul, presented with a still-life, follows these rules unthinkingly – and yet every picture it churns out is unique, shaped by tiny, unrepeatable fluctations in its environment (a snaggy biro, a heavy-footed passer-by, a cloud crossing the sun…).

If an emblem were needed for this show, then Cécile Babiole provides it. She has run the phrase “NE DOIS PAS COPIER” (literally: “one shouldn’t copy”) through a 3-D copier, over and over again, playing a familiar game of generational loss. And it’s the strangest thing: as they decay, her printed plastic letters take on organic form, become weeds, become coral, become limbs and organs. They lose their original meaning, only to acquire others. They do not become nothing, the way an over-photocopied picture becomes nothing. They become rich and strange.

Maths, rationality and science are magnificent tools with which to investigate the world. But we commit a massive and dangerous category error when we assume the world is built out of maths and reason.

With a conference to beat us, and an exhibition to entice us, Latham and Fol Leymarie have led us, without us ever really noticing, to a view of new kind of digital future. A future of approximations and mistakes and acts of bricolage. It is not a human future, particularly. But it is a future that accommodates us, and we should probably be grateful.

A comic novel about the death of God

Posted on November 9, 2014 by simonings

F by Daniel Kehlmann reviewed for the Guardian

It cannot be an easy thing to write a comic novel about the death of God. Still, the German novelist Daniel Kehlmann may just have pulled it off. “F” is the protagonist of a book within a book, the debut novel of Arthur Friedland, a rather disorganised buffoon who never had any success as a writer until an encounter with a hypnotist gave his life its chilly purpose: “This is an order, and you’re going to follow it because you want to follow it, and you want to because I’m ordering you, and I’m ordering you because you want me to give the order. Starting today, you’re going to make an effort. No matter what it costs. Repeat!”

My Name Is No One is so exuberantly nihilistic, its readers are throwing themselves off TV transmission towers. As Kehlmann says: “The sentences are well constructed, the narrative has a powerful flow, the reader would be enjoying the text were it not for a persistent feeling of somehow being mocked.”

If Kehlmann played this intertextual game to the hilt – if F itself were as unforgiving as Arthur’s novel – then we would be looking at a less important book, as well as a less enjoyable one: some Johnny-come-lately contribution to the French nouvelle vague. The spirit of Alain Robbe-Grillet, the movement’s greatest exponent, illuminates the scene in which Arthur takes his granddaughter to an art museum to study a picture by her missing uncle: “She stepped even closer, and immediately everything dissolved. There were no more people any more, no more little flags, no anchor, no bent watch. There were just some tiny bright patches of colour above the main deck. The white of the naked canvas shone through in several places, and even the ship was a mere assemblage of lines and dots. Where had it all gone?”

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There are many such moments, they are all as beautifully judged as this one, and they are not the point. The point of F is not its humour (though Kehlmann, like Robbe-Grillet, can be very funny indeed), but its generosity. Arthur’s three sons, in their turn, make superhuman efforts to give their lives significance, and these efforts tangle and trip over each other to generate the comic business of the book. The eldest, Martin, a Rubik’s Cube expert, embraces the priesthood despite his lack of faith. Of Arthur’s two sons by his second marriage, Eric enters the glass-and-steel world of high finance to help control his fear of cramped spaces. His twin brother, Ivan, is a would-be painter turned art dealer, and author of Mediocrity As an Aesthetic Phenomenon.

“When I was young, vain, and lacking all experience,” he recalls, “I thought the art world was corrupt. Today I know that’s not true. The art world is full of lovable people, full of enthusiasts, full of longing and truth. It is art itself as a sacred principle that unfortunately doesn’t exist.”

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Ivan, like all the others, lives in a nihilistic universe, but he is not himself nihilistic. It worries him that the world cannot live up to his expectations and those of the people he admires. These people include his lover Heinrich Eulenboeck, an artist with a true calling but only mediocre ability. What kind of world is it that plays such a trick on a person? “How do you live with that, why do you keep on going?”

The answer seems to be love. In a godless world, love counts for a great deal. And failing love, ordinary human decency goes a long way. Since Kurt Vonnegut died, there has really been no one to tell us this; the reminder is welcome.

F is again translated by Carol Brown Janeway, but it is a better book than Kehlmann’s last, Fame, whose narrative gymnastics caused characters to lose or swap their identities, and even to topple into their own or other people’s fictions. Fame was knowing, driven by its own absurdity. F is about the world’s absurdity, and this makes a huge difference morally. The world is big, and ultimately unknowable, and life is short and memory pitifully limited.

In the absence of God, Kehlmann’s protagonists hold themselves to account, and they give themselves hell. Sometimes, they give each other hell. “Something terrible has happened and the people seem to be wanting to cover it up. If you were to look a little longer, hunt a little better for clues, you’d be able to figure it out, or at least you think so. But if you step back, the details disappear and all that remains is a colourful street scene: bright, cheerful, full of life.”

It is very hard to express how funny this all is. But laughter matters most in the dark.

Wonder in an age of collapse

Posted on November 9, 2014 by simonings

We still have to live here, however absurd the world becomes…

for New Scientist.