Tag Archives: language

How to catch an elephant

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Reading The Deorhord: An Old English Bestiary by Hana Videen for the Spectator, 11 November 2023

How to catch an elephant.

Find a tree, and saw most of the way through it, without felling it. Sooner or later an unwary elephant is bound to lean up against it. Down comes the tree and down comes the elephant which, since it has no joints in its legs, will be unable to get up again. Dispatch your elephant with, um, dispatch, lest the herd arrives in answer to its plangent call. In that case the youngest of them, being lower to the ground, will be able to lift their fallen comrade back on its feet.

In her second foray into the Old English lexicon and mindset (The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English came out in 2021), Old English scholar Hana Videen is out to explore a world where animals hold sway. (A “deor”, by the way, is the Old English word for any animal, and opening this volume, you are as like to be confronted with a spider or a dragon, a dog-headed man or a tusked woman, as you are by anything so commonplace as a “deer”.) These living, breathing sources of knowledge, enchantment and instruction provided the feedstock for countless bestiaries, which flooded the Medieval book market for a good three hundred years. No earlier, Old English bestiary survives. Still, there’s lore enough in “tales, poems and medical texts, riddles and travel logs, sermons and saints’ lives” to justify Videen’s putting a synthetic one together from the available material.

Though it helps to know a bit of German, Old English is a captivating tongue. What’s not to love about a language that collides nouns in kennings like “gange-wæfre (walker-weaver) and wæfer-gange (weaver-walker), to name a spider? (At least we’ve retained the gærs-hoppa (grasshopper).)

Where Old English becomes arduous is in its religious texts, that cannot leave anything alone, but must constantly be making things act as metaphors for other things. That stiff-legged Elephant we started with is God’s Law, you see, that ultimately fails to keep us from committing sin. The other adult elephants (prophets of the Old Testament) try to help their fallen brother, but it’s only with the help of the little elephant (Christ) that the fallen can rise again.

There is, Videen explains, nothing particularly dogmatic or esoteric going on here — only people’s ongoing effort to explain their world in the most vivid and entertaining terms available. (We do the same today, and quite as unthinkingly: our plugged-in views over smooth-running power brunches of start-up meltdowns would surely addle the most visionary mediaeval mind: do these people imagine they are machines?)

Old English literature becomes a lot less arduous when we realise that its rhetorical fancies are fancies: they’re a poetic register, not a secret sign, and they aren’t designed to stand much scrutiny. In the Old English Life of St Margaret, for example, poor Margaret is swallowed by a dragon, splits it in two by making the sign of the cross, and steps out into the world again unharmed — making her the patron saint of women in childbirth. If you overthink this, you’ll tie yourself up in knots wondering at a metaphor that kills the mother-to-be while making her the instrument of the devil. The point is: stop being so needlessly scholastic. Focus on the first things the image brings to mind — the blood and the pain and the miracle of birth. Treat the language like a language, not a codex from the Beyond.

Much time has passed, of course, since “doves congregated in multicoloured flocks”. Videen is an excellent guide to lost lore (black doves were associated with obscure sermons, and “blac”, by anyway meant “glossy”) and sees us safely through some disconcerting shifts in meaning. Today we associate owls with wisdom, “yet mediaeval bestiaries compare the owl’s daytime blindness to the spiritual ‘blindness’ of the Jews,” Videen explains, “who refuse to accept the ‘light’ of Christianity.” When other, smaller birds flock around an owl in an Old English sermon, don’t assume they’re paying homage to the wise old bird.

Not every Old English text feels the need to find moral instruction in the birds and the beasts. There is also a sizeable quantity of what Videen charmingly terms “Alexander fan-fic”: imaginary first-person accounts of Alexander the Great’s adventures in Ind, or Ethiopia, or Lentibelsinea (home of the self-immolating chicken, the fabled “henn”), or wherever the heck else he was supposed to have got to (and sometimes, mark you, on the back of a griffin).
“Did people struggle to imagine creatures of Alexander’s campaigns like the teeth tyrant and moonhead?” Videen wonders. “Were the solutions to riddles more obvious than they are today?”

Though her charming, endlessly fascinating book is chock-full of archival detective stories (and not a few shaggy dog stories into the bargain), Videen would rather we entertained the possibility that the early English mind was quite as imaginative as the modern one, and just as intelligent, and had not yet lost the art of appreciating a tall tale or even, Heavens defend us, a joke.

Talking about different worlds

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Listening to Matthew de Abaitua’s The Dolittle Machine on BBC Radio 4, 25 May 2022 for New Scientist

Might we one day invent a translation device, enabling us to talk to the animals — and hear their replies? This could be good for the planet (especially if we learned to say “sorry” to all those species we’ve pushed to extinction). It would definitely be good for us, says science fiction writer Matthew de Abaitua, presenting this deceptively winsome speculation about animal languages.

No two species experience the world in the same way. If animals have language at all, then they are talking and thinking about different worlds. How then can translation progress?

Already we use machine-learning algorithms to translate foreign languages. These algorithms spot which words most commonly appear next to each other. By matching these patterns across languages, a machine can begin to translate from one language into another. The hope is that the same method can, by listening to squeaks, songs and stridulations, find common terms in the languages (if they exist) of other species.

The differences in life experience between species are huge. A loquacious bat may struggle to describe to a human what echolocation is like. A dolphin may not be able to offer a bat much insight into the experience of an animal whose every breath is the outcome of a conscious decision. A human may struggle to explain his taxes to a dolphin. But bat, dolphin and human may still be able to talk about what common experiences exist, like hunger, and danger, and family.

The Dolittle Machine is a superb distillation of a complex field. Best of all, it leaves us feeling a little less alone.

82.8 per cent perfect

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Visiting Amazonia at London’s Science Museum for the Telegraph, 13 October 2021

The much-garlanded Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado is at London’s Science Museum to launch a seven-plus-years-in-the-making exhibition of photographs from Amazônia — and, not coincidentally, there’s barely a fortnight to go before the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference convenes in Glasgow.

Salgado speaks to the urgency of the moment. We must save the Amazon rainforest for many reasons, but chiefly because the world’s rainfall patterns depend on it. We should stop buying Amazonian wood; we should stop buying beef fed on Amazonian soya; we should stop investing in companies who have interests in Amazonian mining.

There are only so many ways to say these things, and only so many times a poor mortal can hear them. On the face of it, Salgado’s enormous exhibition, set to an immersive soundscape by Seventies new-age pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre, sounds more impressive than impactful. Selgado is everyone’s idea of an engaged artist — his photographs of workers at the Serra Pelada gold mine in Brazil are world-famous — but is it even in us, now, to feel more concerned about the rainforest?

Turns out that it is. Jarre’s music plays a significant part in this show, curated and designed by Sebastiao’s wife Lelia Wanick Salgado. Assembled from audio archives in Geneva, it manages to be both politely ambient and often quite frightening in its dizzying assemblage of elemental roars (touches of Jóhann Jóhannsson, there), bird calls, forest sounds and human voices. And Selgado’s epic visions of the Amazon more than earn such Stürm und Drang.

This is not an exhibition about the 17.2 per cent of the rainforest that is already lost us. It’s not about logging companies or soy farms, gold mines or cattle ranches. It’s about what’s left. Ecologically the region’s losses are catastrophic; but there’s still plenty to save and, for a photographer, plenty to see.

Here, rendered in Selgado’s exquisitely detailed, thumpingly immediate monochrome, is Anavilhanas, the world’s largest freshwater archipelago, a wetland so complex and mutable, no-one has ever been able to settle there. There are mountains, “inselbergs”, rising out of the forest like volcanic islands in some fantastical South China Sea. There are bravura performances of the developer’s art: rivers turned to tin-foil, and leaves turned to photographic grain, and rainstorms turned to atom-bomb explosions, and clouds caught at angles that reveal what they truly are: airborn rivers. As they spill over the edge of Brazil, they dump more moisture into the Atlantic than the mighty Amazon itself.

Dotted about the exhibition space are oval “forest shelters”: dwellings for intimate portraits of twelve different forest peoples. Selgado acknowledges this anthropological effort merely scratches the surface: Amazonia’s 192 distinct groups constitute the most culturally and linguistically diverse region on the planet. Capturing and communicating that diversity conveys the scale of the region even better than those cloud shots.

The Ashaninka used to trade with the Incas. When the Spanish came, their supreme god Pawa turned all the wise men into animals to keep the region’s secrets. The highland Korubo (handy with a war club) became known as mud people, lathering themselves with the stuff against mosquitoes whenever they came down off their hill. The Zo’é place nuts in the mouths of the wild pigs they have killed so the meal can join in with its own feast. The Suruwahá quite happily consume the deadly spear-tip toxin timbó, figuring its better to die young and healthy (and many do).

The more we explore, the more we find it’s the profound and sometimes disturbing differences between these peoples that matter; not their surface exoticism. In the end, faced with such extraordinary diversity, we can only look in the mirror and admit our own oddness, and with it our kinship. We, too — this is the show’s deepest lesson — are, in every possible regard, like the playful, charming, touching, sometimes terrifying subjects of Selgado’s portraits, quite impossibly strange.

“Me, Washoe”

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Watching Nick Lehane: Chimpanzee  at Barbican Centre, London
for New Scientist, 20 January 2020

The puppet, a life-sized female chimpanzee, is made out of wood, rope, carved hard foam and paper mâché. She gazes out at the audience from a raised platform and, through movement alone, weaves her tale. When she was young, she lived as part of a human family. Now she is incarcerated in a research laboratory, deprived of company, her mind slowly deteriorating.

Rowan Magee, Andy Manjuck, and Emma Wiseman operate the chimpanzee, the sole actor in a puppet play running at the Barbican Centre in London. The play, Chimpanzee, by Brooklyn-based actor and puppeteer Nick Lehane, is a highlight of 2020’s London International Mime Festival. It is a moving story that is attracting attention from neurologists and cognitive scientists along with the usual performing-arts crowd.

Lehane conceived the show after reading Next of Kin, a memoir by psychologist and primate researcher Roger Fouts. Fouts’s tales of experiments in fostering young chimpanzees in human homes had obvious dramatic potential. Then, as Lehane looked deeper, he discovered a much darker story.

The Fouts family’s own chimps enjoyed a relatively comfortable life once they outgrew their human home. But other chimpanzees in similar programmes found themselves sold to research labs, living out almost inconceivably solitary lives of confinement and vivisection.

Modern efforts to communicate with chimpanzees began in 1967 at the University of Nevada, Reno, when primatologists Allen and Beatrix Gardner set up a project to teach American Sign Language (ASL) to a chimp called Washoe. These experiments have so transformed our view of chimp culture that many of the original researchers are campaigning to end the practice of keeping primates in captivity. (It is still legal to keep primates as pets in the UK.)

Chimpanzee vocalisations aren’t under conscious control, but the apes can communicate using body gestures. “This happens naturally in the wild,” says Mary Lee Jensvold, who advised Nick Lehane on his play. A former student of Roger Fouts, she too campaigns to end primate captivity. “And because chimps live in communities that are relatively closed and quite aggressive with each other, each community has its own repertoire of gestures. Where there’s some overlap, there are differences in how the gestures are articulated.”

In other words, each community speaks in its own accent, and this, says Jensvold, “really speaks to chimpanzees being cultural beings“.

As the sign-language studies grew more ambitious, the Gardners and their colleagues Roger and Deborah Fouts took the chimps into their own homes, acculturating them as humans as far they could to encourage communication.

The obvious question – what is it like growing up in a family that contains chimpanzees? – is the only question Roger Fouts’s son Joshua struggles to answer: “The reality is it’s all I knew.” Joshua, now a media scholar, was raised in a family whose rituals involved members that weren’t human, whose human members would sign to each other so the chimpanzees wouldn’t feel left out of the conversation, and the experience has left him with a profound sense that every non-human has inherent sapience. “When I’m walking down the sidewalk, and I see a human walking with their dog,” he says, “I tend to greet the dog.”

Roger Fouts and his colleagues found that their animals used ASL to communicate with each other, creating phrases by combining signs to denote novel objects.

Washoe was the first chimpanzee to wield ASL in a convincing fashion. Others followed: when Washoe’s mate Moja didn’t know the word for “thermos”, he referred to it as a “metal cup drink”. When Washoe was shown an image of herself in the mirror, and asked what she was seeing, she replied: “Me, Washoe.”

The researchers could hardly credit what they were seeing – and some of their peers still don’t. Jensvold believes there may be a cultural conflict at work. “In the US, comparative psychology has historically been a very lab-based science, where you set up these contrived experiments in order to answer your research questions,” she says. “Out of Europe comes an ethological approach, which is really more about taking the time to observe.”

The sign language research has drawn Jensvold and her colleagues into animal welfare and protection. “We can’t keep doing to them what we’ve been doing,” she says.

Joshua recalls the moment his father reached the same conclusion: “About midway through his career, Roger realised that this was an experiment that should never have been done. Out of the desire to determine what it is about humans that makes us special, we’ve effectively condemned these chimpanzees to a life of incarceration. They’re enculturated to our behaviours. They can never be reintroduced to the wild.”

There are no captive chimps in New York, so Nick Lehane’s research for his play consisted almost entirely of watching videos. According to Jensvold, he couldn’t have picked a better form of study. “With video tape,” she says, “you can take close observation down to a minute level.”

By the time Jensvold got involved in Lehane’s project, there was already a performance ready for her to judge. For Lehane, that was a heart-in-mouth moment: “I was afraid that despite our best efforts, we had missed the mark. If anyone was going to think that we had missed something vital about chimp movement or behaviour, it would be Mary Lee.”

He needn’t have worried. “Chimpanzee was phenomenal,” says Jensvold. “I was spotting things that I knew other people in the audience, people who weren’t experts, weren’t going to notice. He captured these incredible nuances.” She pauses: “So the level of suffering that he’s depicting: he gets that right, too.”

How does Lehane’s chimpanzee convey emotion, given that chimp and human expressions don’t overlap at all precisely?

“A lot of it is in the miming of breath patterns,” says Lehane. “Short little pants and hoots look happy; deep intense heaves and cough will register as a different emotion.”

“One of the things I think is so cool about puppetry is that the audience fills in so many blanks,” he says. “I can’t tell you the number of times that someone has said, ‘How did you make the puppet cry?’ ‘How did you make the puppet frown?’ ‘I loved it when the puppet blinked!’ It tickles me because I just didn’t do any of those things.”

Is there a danger here that the audience is merely anthropomorphising his subject, interpreting his chimpanzee as little more than a funny-shaped human?

In answer, Lehane quotes primatologist Frans de Waal: “To endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us.”

 

Can you use a bottle opener?

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Visiting the Baltic in Gateshead for Animalesque: Art across species and beings.
For New Scientist, 15 January 2020.

EXHIBITIONS about our relationship with the environment tend to be bombastic. Either they preach doom and destruction, or they reckon our children will soon be living lives of plenty on artificial atolls.

Animalesque at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, UK, knows better than this. In an international selection of art, sculpture and film, curator Filipa Ramos points out how little we know about other species, and how much we might still learn. With this humility comes hope that we can reform our relations with Earth.

Research has a major role to play, but it can only go so far. One unassuming TV monitor is screening a video from Tupilakosaurus, a long-running project by Danish-Greenlandic artist Pia Arke. It is a telling but not unsympathetic satirical film, in which examinations of a fossil dinosaur throw up folk tales, mangled histories and surreal mountains of paperwork as researchers try to represent and classify the Arctic’s life and history.

Often, we find out about other species only as we are evicting and replacing them. This happened to the Malayan tiger, which now numbers just some 300 wild cats in the Malay Peninsula. 2 or 3 Tigers (2015) by Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen is a 19-minute, two- screen video, made using CGI and some very dodgy operatic singing, about the were-tigers of Malayan folklore. As ancestors, companions, competitors, protectors, destroyers and gods, tigers were central to the indigenous culture. Western settlers couldn’t find any there, however, until one sprang out of the forest in 1835 and attacked a hapless surveyor’s theodolite.

Our most stable cross-species relationships are with domesticated animals, even if they are sometimes discomforting or guilt-ridden affairs. In French artist Pierre Huyghe’s Untitled (Human Mask) (2014), a macaque explores an abandoned restaurant in Fukushima, Japan, an area gutted by the 2011 tsunami. Identifying the species of our protagonist takes a while. You would be forgiven for thinking you were watching a girl, because the macaque is wearing a wig and an eerily beautiful mask (pictured above).

The uncanny collision of categories (girl and pet, puppet and creature) only becomes more dizzying when you discover that Huyghe recruited his “star” from a Tokyo restaurant where the macaque spent many apparently happy hours working as a waiter.

It is a film of great pathos, more moving and less disturbing than this bald description suggests. It speaks to our difficulty understanding other animals, steeped as we are in human concerns.

The difficulty is real, can research help us? Degreecoordinates, Shared traits of the Hominini (humans, bonobos and chimpanzees) (2015) attempts it. For this, UK artist Marcus Coates worked with primatologist Volker Sommer to list questions relevant to all three: do you resolve conflicts using sex? Can you use a bottle opener? Do you kiss? Are you preoccupied with hierarchy and status?

Human answers vary, but so do those gleaned from studying individual chimps and bonobos. The differences between individuals of each of the three species far exceed those across species. Animalesque celebrates what we share – and what we can learn.

 

Fatally punctured by a sword-swallower’s blade

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Visiting Flop: 13 stories of failure at The Octagon, University College London, for New Scientist, 6 November 2019

Quitting your job? Then remember to clear out your locker. One former employee of University College London left a bottle of home-made plum brandy in a drawer. The macerated plum was eventually discovered, mulled over (sorry), misidentified as a testicle (species unknown), and added to the university’s collection. Now that same collection fuels Flop, in UCL’s tiny Octagon gallery.

It’s not so much an exhibition as a series of provocations. (A notice by the last case asks you to share your own accounts of failure on a postcard “so we can all start learning from each other’s mistakes.”) After all, what is a failure? Do failures exist outside of the realm of human judgement? (“Can animals have accidents?” is a favourite undergraduate philosophy question. Humans can: one of the more gruesome exhibits here is a human heart, fatally punctured by a sword-swallower’s blade.)

How we define failure depends on our changing needs and circumstances. There was a time, not very long ago, when the plethora of human languages seemed indicative of some deep, Biblical failure to establish amity across our species. Concerted efforts were made to establish a single, synthetic language through which we might all be understood. There’s a fascinating page here from an essay by John Wilkins, whose Royal Society language project attempted to establish an analytical language that would allow people to communicate despite not sharing the same tongue. It foundered because the Royal Society couldn’t agree on how many essential concepts existed in the world.

Now that we live among artificially intelligent agents, the best of whom are more than capable of translating even spoken speech in real time, we find failure in our reduction of linguistic diversity. We bemoan the loss of languages (3000 of them have perished since 1910) , and mourn the cultural deficit left by their demise.

Can objects fail? Only in the sense that they fail to perform an expected action. Silly Putty, a perenially popular toy, was the result of a failed attempt to produce a synthetic rubber substitute during World War II. People can “fail” in much the same way. Percy Wyndham Lewis was kicked out of the Slade School of Fine Art for arguing with his lecturers, and went on to become the foremost avant-garde artist and writer of his generation.

If these examples of failure feel a bit tenuous, well, that’s really the point Flop wants to make: what’s interesting is how we deal with failures, not how we define them.
“Perhaps contrasting failure with success is the real problem,” the introductory material explains. “If every activity has to end in either one or the other, it denies the nuanced and messy complexities of life.”

Praying to the World Machine

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Attending Belief in AI in Dubai for New Scientist, 4 January 2018

In late spring this year, the Barbican Centre in London will explore the promise and perils of artificial intelligence in a festival of films, workshops, concerts, talks and exhibitions. Even before the show opens, however, I have a bone to pick: what on earth induced the organisers to call their show AI: More than human?

More than human? What are we being sold here? What are we being asked to assume, about the technology and about ourselves?

Language is at the heart of the problem. In his 2007 book, The Emotion Machine, computer scientist Marvin Minsky deplored (although even he couldn’t altogether avoid) the use of “suitcase words”: his phrase for words conveying specialist technical detail through simple metaphors. Think what we are doing when we say metal alloys “remember” their shape, or that a search engine offers “intelligent” answers to a query.

Without metaphors and the human tendency to personify, we would never be able to converse, let alone explore technical subjects, but the price we pay for communication is a credulity when it comes to modelling how the world actually works. No wonder we are outraged when AI doesn’t behave intelligently. But it isn’t the program playing us false, rather the name we gave it.

Then there is the problem outlined by Benjamin Bratton, director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, San Diego, and author of cyber bible The Stack. Speaking at Dubai’s Belief in AI symposium last year, he said we use suitcase words from religion when we talk about AI, because we simply don’t know what AI is yet.

For how long, he asked, should we go along with the prevailing hype and indulge the idea that artificial intelligence resembles (never mind surpasses) human intelligence? Might this warp or spoil a promising technology?

The Dubai symposium, organised by Kenric McDowell and Ben Vickers, interrogated these questions well. McDowell leads the Artists and Machine Intelligence programme at Google Research, while Vickers has overseen experiments in neural-network art at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Conversations, talks and screenings explored what they called a “monumental shift in how societies construct the everyday”, as we increasingly hand over our decision-making to non-humans.

Some of this territory is familiar. Ramon Amaro, a design engineer at Goldsmith, University of London, drew the obvious moral from the story of researcher Joy Buolamwini, whose facial-recognition art project The Aspire Mirror refused to recognise her because of her black skin.

The point is not simple racism. The truth is even more disturbing: machines are nowhere near clever enough to handle the huge spread of normal distribution on which virtually all human characteristics and behaviours lie. The tendency to exclude is embedded in the mathematics of these machines, and no patching can fix it.

Yuk Hui, a philosopher who studied computer engineering and philosophy at the University of Hong Kong, broadened the lesson. Rational, disinterested thinking machines are simply impossible to build. The problem is not technical but formal, because thinking always has a purpose: without a goal, it is too expensive a process to arise spontaneously.

The more machines emulate real brains, argued Hui, the more they will evolve – from autonomic response to brute urge to emotion. The implication is clear. When we give these recursive neural networks access to the internet, we are setting wild animals loose.

Although the speakers were well-informed, Belief in AI was never intended to be a technical conference, and so ran the risk of all such speculative endeavours – drowning in hyperbole. Artists using neural networks in their practice are painfully aware of this. One artist absent from the conference, but cited by several speakers, was Turkish-born Memo Akten, based at Somerset House in London.

His neural networks make predictions on live webcam input, using previously seen images to make sense of new ones. In one experiment, a scene including a dishcloth is converted into a Turneresque animation by a recursive neural network trained on seascapes. The temptation to say this network is “interpreting” the view, and “creating” art from it, is well nigh irresistible. It drives Akten crazy. Earlier this year in a public forum he threatened to strangle a kitten whenever anyone in the audience personified AI, by talking about “the AI”, for instance.

It was left to novelist Rana Dasgupta to really put the frighteners on us as he coolly unpicked the state of automated late capitalism. Today, capital and rental income are the true indices of political participation, just as they were before the industrial revolution. Wage rises? Improved working conditions? Aspiration? All so last year. Automation has  made their obliteration possible, by reducing to virtually nothing the costs of manufacture.

Dasgupta’s vision of lives spent in subjection to a World Machine – fertile, terrifying, inhuman, unethical, and not in the least interested in us – was also a suitcase of sorts, too, containing a lot of hype, and no small amount of theology. It was also impossible to dismiss.

Cultural institutions dabbling in the AI pond should note the obvious moral. When we design something we decide to call an artificial intelligence, we commit ourselves to a linguistic path we shouldn’t pursue. To put it more simply: we must be careful what we wish for.