Understanding Machines: A History of Canadian Mechanology

“Technique is good, machinery is good. We ought to express our disapproval of the diehard spirit that seeks to suppress machinery and technical processes. But if machinery and technical processes are not and firmly subjugated to the well-being of the person, that is to say, fully and vigorously subordinated to his true ends and made the instruments of moral asceticism, mankind is irretrievably and literally lost.” (Jacques Maritain 1966)

Bio-Robotics and interfacing with Autonomous Artistic Sculptures.

IPSc derived human cardiac cells grown on silk disc. 14/10/2016

In November 2015 I was successful in my application for a research grant from The Australia Council for the Arts to work on a project I had been thinking about for many years.

Over the course of the last 15years, my work has been primarily about building analogue automatons, essentially robots that do not rely on digital computers nor microcontrollers to undertake crude but creative tasks. After collaborating with a fantastic team of engineers, scientists and artists for the cellF project  in 2014, I had a greater understanding of laboratory protocols and tissue engineering. This gave me a better grounding to make the leap from electronic based actuation to biological –  together with SymbioticA and AusCo I started working on Movement and Interface – Possibilities of interfacing human heart cells to artistic robotic bodies.

After weeks of basic lab training, inductions and ethics approval I was able to start initial experiments. Under the guidance of Guy Ben Ary and SymbioticA I was able to purchase materials and seed my first human cardiac(heart) cells.

In order to get moving quickly we chose to start with progenitor cells as they would give results quicker and we could learn the basics. The downside being that these cells are extremely expensive and are unable to be frozen – so once the vial is used more is needed to be purchased.

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Human Cardiac Progenitor cells. 003 #manipulatinglife

A post shared by Nathan John Thompson (@nathan_john_thompson) on Apr 25, 2016 at 6:02pm PDT

Due to many factors, the Progenitor cells were not viable and greater understanding of the process of differentiation was needed, to get better efficiency with twitching muscles. Luckily there has been some scientific focus on cardiovascular disease and recently companies have been releasing products to help with laboratory experiments in this field. Surprisingly I was able to buy online Human IP StemCells and a Cardiomyocyte Differentiation Kit

The most amazing thing is that after just 2weeks of working with these new cells I had successfully cultured spontaneously twitching human heart cells in a dish!!!

Furthermore as the cells matured and my lab technique developed I was able to manipulate the way these muscle actuators could move. At such an early stage I was pleased to see that with creative use of scientific processes I could get quite diverse movement potentials.

I had a clearer vision for producing a self propelled bio-engineered structural artwork due to these very early experiments. Here you can see a freefloating mass of attached cells twitching WITHOUT the use of a microscope – with the naked eye – also foreign materials introduced and flexed by the twitching cells… Huzzah!

006 #manipulatinglife #invitro with #ipsc derived human #cardiomyocytes experimenting concentric torque and robustness.

A post shared by Nathan John Thompson (@nathan_john_thompson) on Jun 15, 2016 at 5:20am PDT

6months into these investigations I was able to consistently culture twitching cells and improve efficiency. Also my knowledge of lab protocols as well as use of equipment had increased in order to document my work more effectively.

A post shared by Nathan John Thompson (@nathan_john_thompson) on May 26, 2016 at 5:26am PDT

The idea of this artwork is to engineer a self-propelled autonomous biological sculpture and my primary plan was to grow human heart cells on a scaffold of some kind. I experimented using decellularising cellulose materials such as fruit and wood, coral and sea sponge as a substrate on which to attach these twitching cells… We settled on exploring the possibilities of silk as a basis to build the robot bodies.

I was very fortunate to have the assistance of Rodney Dilley who has extensive experience with tissue engineering as well as working with silk devices. Together we devised a process to print silk structures with the light beam of a motorized microscope. Our first experiments were quite crude and rigid but they were able to confirm that the cardiomyocytes would indeed be able to attach to the silk, very exciting advancements.

The process of printing silk with light on a motorized microscope is unique, I have not been able to find reference of it being done before, it has the ability to produce very detailed structures at the macro scale and is repetitive thus ideal for scientific analysis and experimentation. With guidance from Guy Ben Ary on how to use the equipment I developed a virtual model of my scaffold shape in the microscope software. Essentially we are ‘hacking’ a feature that is used to take pictures of petri dish cultures and re purposing it to make pixels of light in a model of what will eventually become an intricate silk design.

Virtual model of silk scaffold

The innovative printing process we developed uses aqueous silk, generously supplied by Ben Allardyce at Deakin University, that is treated with a photosensitive compound inducing hardening when exposed to light, thus the tiny light beam from the microscope is momentarily shone onto the silk in the pattern I have designed on screen, then what results is a silk structure ready for seeding with twitching cells. Genius!

Actual model of a printed silk scaffold

Here is a boring movie of the process, for my own archiving purposes really.

It is important to get these structures as thin as possible, so as to facilitate their bending by the heart cells. I tried many things to make them microns thick, even to the point of designing a custom 3Dprinted positioning device that is fully adjustable on the Zaxis to have more control over the end result.

Much more experimentation is required for developing shapes that both align with efficiently creating movement of the flexing structures as well as assisting with the (as yet undecided) over arching narrative of the artwork itself.

Of primary importance is making the movement visible to the naked eye so currently we are exploring potential processes of self-assembly and trying to optimize the torque strength of the contracting cardiomyocytes.
Below is a movie documenting some of the tests we have done with the human heart cells, flexing and moving different materials. Flexing of foreign fibers, microbeads and PDMS discs can be seen. Towards the end of the clip – Printed silk structures manipulated by live human heart muscles. the printed silk material is easy to make out by its repetitive hexagonal-type construction – this is actually the shape of the aperture of the microscopic light beam.

 

Prototypes of biobots made from human heart cells and printed silk:

 

Work is ongoing on this project with the date for completion around late 2018 to mid 2019. Optimization of cell/silk attachment is the priority however there is always room for more twitching efficiency even though I am already extremely happy with the dynamic action of these little actuators!

Darwinism About Darwinism (Joeri Witteveen)

Review of Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection by Peter Godfrey-Smith (Oxford Uni Press 2009)

“… devoted to fleshing out what makes a population Darwinian. This is done by scoring a given population on a variety of parameters, such as H, the fidelity of heredity, and V, the abundance of variation. So, instead of saying that a population must have heredity and variation—in the vein of the classical approach—the Darwinian populations framework ranks populations according to how much it possesses of each. The H and V parameters are familiar; they are derived from the classical summaries. The other parameters are less obvious. G-S discusses several important ones, but notes that these do not exhaust the options; other parameters may also be important in judging how Darwinian a population is. The new parameters that are discussed at some length are α, defined as the competitive interaction with respect to reproduction, C, for “continuity” or smoothness of the fitness landscape, and S, the dependence of reproductive differences on “intrinsic character.” The concept of continuity was introduced by Lewontin as the principle that “small changes in a characteristic must result in only small changes in ecological relations” (Lewontin 1978: 169). G-S extends this principle, and turns it into a parameter. One way to understand C is as the smoothness of the fitness landscape. The smoother the fitness landscape, the higher the value C takes for the population under consideration. C is determined by causes of both internal and external nature. Internal influences stem from the organism’s physiology and development. External influences on C are location, and interaction with others. G-S assigns the internal/external difference its own parameter, S, for “intrinsic character.” The higher a population’s score on C and S, the more Darwinian are the individuals it is composed of. C and S not only tell us something about what makes individuals more Darwinian, they also serve as a replacement for another vexed notion in evolutionary theory: drift. Selection is often contrasted with drift; change may be due to selection and/or drift. G-S suggests that the C and S parameters dissolve this dichotomy. What we take to be drift is in fact a combination of low values of C and/or S. So drift and selection are not two distinct factors, but are “distinctions along the gradients of S and C” (p. 61). After having discussed some of the parameters, G-S introduces a spatial framework of three-dimensional “Darwinian spaces” as a tool for further analysis. Along each of the three axes of a Darwinian space, we can put a parameter, on which a score from 0 to 1 can be obtained. For instance, if we put the H, C, and S parameters along the axes and start scoring populations, one that scores close to (0,0,0) is very marginal, and one that sits close to (1,1,1) is a paradigmatic Darwinian population. Scoring somewhere in between will make it a minimal Darwinian population.”

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Beyond design: cybernetics, biological computers and hylozoism (Pickering 2008)

“The history of British cybernetics offers us a different form of science and engineering, one that does not seek to dominate nature through knowledge. I want to say that one can distinguish two different paradigms in the history of science and technology: the one that Heidegger despised, which we could call the Modern paradigm, and another, cybernetic, nonModern, paradigm that he might have approved of. This essay focusses on work in the 1950s and early 1960s by two of Britain’s leading cyberneticians, Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask, in the field of what one can call biological computing.

My object is to get as clear as I can on what Beer and Pask were up to.”

Community Video : Community Action

1974 also saw portable video technology used twice to dramatic effect in the service of the same squatting community. Ben’s Arrest lasts only two minutes; the video comprises a single take, which follows the forceful eviction and arrest of an Afro-Caribbean teenager from a squat in Kentish Town, North London, by bailiffs and police. It was the first time video material was used as evidence in a court of law in the UK and aided the arrested youth’s acquittal²⁸. In the words of Hopkins it ‘showed in grim close-up the arrest of a black guy who just happened to be picked on by the police as we were on the street with a camera.’²⁹ Sue Hall, was organising the painting of houses on Prince of Wales Crescent on the day the video was shot. She later recalled arriving on the corner of the street and seeing a police van parked outside the row of squatted houses; ‘I went home to get the Portapak, thread the tape and put the battery in… I went back as fast as possible just in time to see the police coming out with what they claimed were stolen goods and violently arresting a young black man before apparently beating him up in the back of the Transit van whilst I was still shooting video.’³⁰

An article published in The Guardian in 1974 covered the outcome of the making of the second video:

Film Tape Allowed in Court: A Video Tape recording of squatters being evicted from a London home will be admissible as defense evidence in a case of alleged assault – provided that Scotland Yard forensic scientists are satisfied that the tape is authentic… Mr Peter Darcy and Dr John Pollard, who are accused of assaulting a police constable during their eviction from a house in Prince of Wales Crescent, Chalk Farm, North London, by bailiffs and police earlier this year, believe the film is crucial defense evidence… the application has been adjourned while Scotland Yard makes a duplicate and tests it thoroughly for defects and tampering… Birnberg [the counsel for the defense] argued that there was no difference in principle between the recording of a human voice and a video tape. ³¹

The language used in this article points to video’s relationship to liveness and authenticity, whilst the police still viewed the new medium with trepidation. The defence was successful as Hopkins later recounts in an interview:

All the people who had been arrested or charged were able to brief themselves from the videotape, which was played again and again and again until everyone knew exactly what happened in what order. And when the police came to give their evidence it was so transparently, obviously faked, that everybody got off. So as a piece of social action, getting 15 or 20 people off of police charges…was a beneficial act, which couldn’t have been done without video.³²

Alexander Kluge: Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome (1973).pdf

“Written in a quasi-documentary style, this fascinating hybrid work combines science fiction with modernist forms of montage and reportage to describe a future in which Earth has been almost totally destroyed following the catastrophic Black War. The planet’s remaining inhabitants have been driven underground or into space where the struggle to establish a new society rages on.

Whether describing the scene in China where the devastated landscape is reconstructed according to old paintings, or in the galactic realm of the Starway where giant, turf-battling, corporate colonizing forces exploit the universe’s resources, Kluge tells his tale by inventing various forms of “evidence” that satirize the discourses of administrative bureaucracy, the law, military security, and the media. He gives us some of his most bizarre and hilarious characters in this peculiar world in which the remains of the past are mixed with the most advanced elements of the future. The cast includes highly specialized women workers who have adapted to the massive gravitational field of their heavy-metal planets, a commander with lethal foot-fungus, and ex-Nazi space pioneers who, in their lonely exile from the conflagrations on earth, spend their time carving enormous facsimiles of operatic sheet music in the forests of uninhabited planets.

With parody, and humor, Kluge shows how the survivors of Armageddon attempt to learn the art of civilization, and, despite the disaster they have suffered, how they set out to reproduce at new sites a caricature of a classic and fascistic feudal capitalism.” (from the back cover)

Gas Tanks (Bernd and Hilla Becher)

“Typological, repetitive, at times oddly humorous,  photographs of industrial structures are, in their cumulative effect, profoundly moving. The Bechers’ serenely cool, disarmingly objective, and notoriously obsessive images of water towers, gas tanks, grain elevators, blast furnaces, and mineheads have been taken over several decades, under overcast skies, with a view camera that captures each detail and tonality of wood, concrete, brick and steel.
In this work, the Bechers’ present four principally different forms of gas holders or gas tanks in 140 photographs taken during the years 1963-1992 in Great Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, and the United States. The subjects are photographed under overcast skies that eliminate expressive variations in lighting; the Bechers make no attempt to analyze or explain them. Captions contain only the barest of information: time and place. On the subject of gas holders, the Bechers limit their remarks to a minimal functional description, leaving the aesthetic dimension of their subject to the photographs themselves: much of the fascination of these photographs lies in the fact that these unadorned metallic structures, presumably built with little concern for their visual impact, are almost invariably striking in appearance.”

Mind-controlled transgene expression by a wireless-powered optogenetic designer cell implant

“Mammalian synthetic biology has significantly advanced the design of gene switches that are responsive to traceless cues such as light, gas and radio waves, complex gene circuits, including oscillators, cancer-killing gene classifiers and programmable biocomputers, as well as prosthetic gene networks that provide treatment strategies for gouty arthritis, diabetes and obesity. Akin to synthetic biology promoting prosthetic gene networks for the treatment of metabolic disorders, cybernetics advances the design of functional man–machine interfaces in which brain–computer interfaces (BCI) process brain waves to control electromechanical prostheses, such as bionic extremities and even wheel chairs. The advent of synthetic optogenetic devices that use power-controlled, light-adjustable therapeutic interventions¹⁸ will enable the merging of synthetic biology with cybernetics to allow brain waves to remotely control the transgene expression and cellular behaviour in a wireless manner.”

communication +1, 3(1): Afterlives of Systems (2014) (pdf)

“Under the impression of today’s global crisis and the rise of ecological thinking, confronted with smart, ubiquitous technosystems and the impression of interconnectedness, there appears a new urge to excavate the remnants of the past. The articles of this issue suggest that in order to understand present technologies, we need to account the systems thinking that fostered their emergence, and that we cannot gain insight into the afterlives of systems without exploring their technologies.

The nine contributions ask how these debates and affective states survive and live on in today’s discussions of media ecologies, environmentalism, object-oriented philosophies, computer simulations, performative art, and communication technologies. In this sense, they take the renaissance of systems thinking in the late 20th and early 21st Century as an effect of various system crisis and explore new media technologies as stabilizing ‘cures’ against the dystopian future scenarios that emerged after World War II. The articles of this issue suggest that in order to understand present technologies, we need to account the systems thinking that fostered their emergence, and that we cannot gain insight into the afterlives of systems without exploring their technologies.”

VIDEOMUSICS: OVERVIEW OF AN EMERGING ART FORM

“Videomusic is a field of practice that could be seen as a subset of visual music, a term which can be considered today to be familiar enough to speak for itself. This broader area of artistic activity includes digital work, cinema, painting and visual “instruments”, and dates back at least to the 18th century.”

Why and how should we build a basic income for everybody?

“What would Heaven on Earth mean in reality? It would mean that each and every person on the planet has access to an an abundant supply of healthy food and clean water. That each and every person has access to luxurious housing and clothing. That we are all safe. That we can all communicate with everyone. That we all have free and open access to education and entertainment. That cutting edge health care is available freely to everyone, and the cutting edge is advancing as rapidly as possible, curing more and more diseases and ailments as fast as we can. And so on. We do that in an environmentally sustainable way. Obviously there would be no wars. Obviously we would have to find safe, compassionate ways to resolve our differences. Obviously we would need for Heaven on Earth to be environmentally sustainable – otherwise we poison the planet and destroy ourselves. What if we made Heaven on Earth our world-wide, species-wide goal?”

‘Darwinian Gastronomy: why we use spices’ (1999) Sherman and Billing

“An early attempt to use statistical analysis of cookbooks to reveal deeper patterns about what we eat and why. The paper theorizes that there is an evolutionary benefit to eating spices: “by cleansing food of pathogens before consumption, spice users contribute to the health, longevity and fitness of themselves, their families and their guests.” There is more disease in the tropics and this is also where most spices are added to food, or so the paper seems to argues. Personally I think the argument runs the risk of putting the horse behind the carriage. Spices predominately grow in tropical areas and it makes sense to expect that this is where they eat them most.”

The Optics of Ibn Al-Haytham, Books I–III: On Direct Vision (c1028-38)

“This is the first English translation of first three out of the 7 volumes of the fundamental work on optics by the medieval Arab scientist Ibn al-Haitham or Alhazen (965–c1039). His book exerted a great influence upon science through Vitelo, Roger Bacon, Peckham and Kepler. Alhazen investigated many particular cases of reflection and refraction, and drew attention to the light-ray’s property of retracing its path when reversed. He was the first to give a detailed description of the human eye and to study binocular vision. Certain ophthalmological terms originated from the Latin translation of Alhazen’s Arabic text, e.g. retina and cornea. The Book of Optics (Kitāb al-Manāẓir, كتاب المناظر) presented experimentally founded arguments against the widely held extramission theory of vision (as held by Euclid in his Optica) and in favour of intromission theory, as supported by thinkers such as Aristotle, the now accepted model that vision takes place by light entering the eye.”

Mediterranean Containerization

“Over at least the last five millennia, certain commodities have been defining features of Mediterranean economies and have moved around all or part of the region in comparatively large quantities. Olive oil and wine are perhaps the most famous, but to these we can add metals, cereals, salt, textiles, stone, fish products or indeed certain classes of people (tourists, slaves, economic migrants). The massive advantages of maritime travel, in terms of speed and cargo capacity, have long knitted together otherwise quite distant Mediterranean coasts and have encouraged unusual patterns of economic codependence (e.g., Braudel 1972; Broodbank 2013; Horden and Purcell 2000), as well as wider flows into, out of, or through the basin. Even a cursory glance at the physical appearance of Mediterranean trade goods, or the way they are treated in documentary sources, also makes it clear that, for thousands of years, they have been standardized, marked and packaged in ways that adapt them for long-range transactions and position them for certain kinds of producer, distributor and consumer.”

Can a robot be too nice?

“Designing artificial entities perfectly groomed to meet our emotional needs has an obvious appeal, like creating the exact right person for a job from thin air. But it’s also not hard to imagine the problems that might arise in a world where we’re constantly dealing with robots calibrated to treat us, on an interpersonal level, exactly the way we want. We might start to prefer the company of robots to that of other, less perfectly optimized humans. We might react against them, hungry for some of the normal friction of human relations. As Lanier worried, we might start to see the lines blur, and become convinced that machines—which in some ways are vastly inferior to us, and in other ways vastly superior—are actually our equals.”

Secrets of the Creative Brain

“Part of what comes with seeing connections no one else sees is that not all of these connections actually exist. “Everybody has crazy things they want to try,” that same subject told me. “Part of creativity is picking the little bubbles that come up to your conscious mind, and picking which one to let grow and which one to give access to more of your mind, and then have that translate into action.””

Mapping Intel­lec­tual Migra­tion Net­works

“We’re starting out to do some­thing which is called cul­tural sci­ence where we’re in a very sim­ilar tra­jec­tory as sys­tems biology for example,” said Schich, now an asso­ciate pro­fessor in arts and tech­nology at the Uni­ver­sity of Texas at Dallas. “As data sets about birth and death loca­tions grow, the approach will be able to reveal an even more com­plete pic­ture of his­tory. In the next five to 10 years, we’ll have con­sid­er­ably larger amounts of data and then we can do more and better, address more questions.”

Will You Lose Your Job To a Robot?

“The biggest exception will be jobs that depend upon empathy as a core capacity — schoolteacher, personal service worker, nurse. These jobs are often those traditionally performed by women. One of the bigger social questions of the mid-late 2020s will be the role of men in this world.” — Jamais Cascio, technology writer and futurist

Paper Knowledge : Toward a Media History of Documents (Gitelman 2014)

“Paper Knowledge is a book about the mundane: the library card, the promissory note, the movie ticket, the PDF (Portable Document Format). It is a media history of the document. Drawing examples from the 1870s, the 1930s, the 1960s, and today, Lisa Gitelman thinks across the media that the document form has come to inhabit over the last 150 years, including letterpress printing, typing and carbon paper, mimeograph, microfilm, offset printing, photocopying, and scanning. Whether examining late nineteenth century commercial, or “job” printing, or the Xerox machine and the role of reproduction in our understanding of the document, Gitelman reveals a keen eye for vernacular uses of technology. She tells nuanced, anecdote-filled stories of the waning of old technologies and the emergence of new. Along the way, she discusses documentary matters such as the relation between twentieth-century technological innovation and the management of paper, and the interdependence of computer programming and documentation. Paper Knowledge is destined to set a new agenda for media studies.”

From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine (1991)

“Vannevar Bush, the engineer who designed the world’s most powerful analog computer, envisioned the development of a new kind of computing machine he called Memex. For many computer and information scientists, Bush’s Memex has been the prototype for a machine to help people think. This volume, which the editors have divided into sections on the creation, extension, and legacy of the Memex, combines seven essays by Bush with eleven others by others that set his ideas within a variety of contexts. The essays by Bush range chronologically from the early “The Inscrutable Thirties” (1933), “Memorandum Regarding Memex” (1941), and “As We May Think” (1945), to “Memex II” (1959), “Science Pauses” (1967), “Memex Revisited” (1967), and a passage from “Of Inventions and Inventors” (1970). Bush’s essays are surrounded by four chapters that place his changing plans for the Memex within his career and within information technology before digital computing. The contributors include Larry Owens, Colin Burke, Douglas C. Engelbart, Theodor H. Nelson, Linda C. Smith, Norman Meyrowitz, Tim Oren, Gregory Crane, and Randall H. Trigg.”

Memex animation

Buddhist perspectives on AI

“From the viewpoint of Buddhism, all life is emergent, entities functioning at a capacity greater than the sum of their parts. There is no special qualifier that separates any form of intelligence from another (note that even consciousness is on the list of things that we aren’t.”. This means that an intelligence inside of a robot body, a computer, or existing on the Internet would be just as worthy of being considered “alive” as a squirrel, a human, or a bacteria. Further, Buddhism accepts the existence of life that does not have a physical body. In the Buddhist mythology, beings that exist in realms without physical bodies are described and treated the same as those with physical bodies. Although this ethic is ascribed to mythical beings, if we begin to see actual beings that exist in “formless realms”, most Buddhists would likely see no problem accepting them as living. In Buddhism, a computer intelligence would be viewed by most as a new form of life, but one equally possessed of the heaps and equally capable of emergent behavior and enlightenment. The Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, and several other high profile Buddhist thinkers have already spoken in support of AI as a living being.”

The Neuroscience of Improvisation

Charles Limb has been investigating rap. “It’s what kids are doing spontaneously when growing up… and improvisation is a strong theme. It incorporates language and rhythmic music very equally.” Limb has been scanning the brains of rappers the same way he looked at jazz musicians: comparing fMRIs when they recited memorized passages to when they “freestyled,” or improvised in rhyme. Although the study is still in progress, preliminary data suggest “major changes in brain activity when you go from memorized rap to freestyle.” Can studies of improvisation unlock more general secrets of creativity? Limb hopes to do similar investigations of artists as they draw or paint. The moderator ended with an inevitable question about art and science: “It is worth the effort to measure and quantify something abstract and artistic… to demystify what we enjoy the mystery of?” Limb saw nothing “threatening or reductionist” in the work of neuroscientists. “Humans are hardwired to seek art, and there are very few things that engage the brain on the level that music does. To understand the neural basis of creativity teaches us something fundamental about who we are, why we’re here.” Improvisation “shows us what the mind can do,” Marcus added. “The ability of human beings to improvise tells us a lot about the ultimate scope of our capabilities.”

Kantian Legacy in Nineteenth Century Science

“The book examines Kant’s influence on five strands of nineteenth-century scientific thought: Naturphilosophie and the effect of German Romanticism (especially Goethe) on biology; Fries’s philosophy of science; Helmholtz’s rejection of Naturphilosophie and Romanticism; neo-Kantianism and its return to “methodological” concerns in natural science and academic philosophy; and Poincaré and his reflections on scientific epistemology. The essays give a nuanced picture of Kant’s legacy to nineteenth-century thinkers and of the rich interaction between philosophical ideas and discoveries in the natural and mathematical sciences during this period. They point to the ways that the scientific developments of the nineteenth century link Kant’s thought to the science of the twentieth century.”

Neural Networks and Deep Learning

“Will we understand how such intelligent networks work? Perhaps the networks will be opaque to us, with weights and biases we don’t understand, because they’ve been learned automatically. In the early days of AI research people hoped that the effort to build an AI would also help us understand the principles behind intelligence and, maybe, the functioning of the human brain. But perhaps the outcome will be that we end up understanding neither the brain nor how artificial intelligence works!”

La telegrafía rápida: el triteclado y la música eléctrica (Castillejo 1944)

“In this curious book, a Spanish priest proposes to combine the developments in telegraphy, teleprinter keyboards, typewriters and “electric music”. He describes how in the 1930s he built and perfected an ”electro-composition device”, equipped with lamps, transformers, capacitors, resistors, dozens of speakers and several engines. He intended to cause the perforations in the telegraphic tape to be automatically selected by different engines that would trigger the various sound tracks recorded, and thus cause each of the “books on the perforated tape” to become an “audio book”. The purpose behind this idea was to enable the future creation of “spoken libraries” and “speech archives” in which the item being searched for could be instantly found. He performed practical experiments by means of a radio station where he managed to make the radio transmitter “speak automatically”, repeatedly broadcasting random announcements without anyone being present. He also intended this “talking device” to become an electric orchestra that composed “a music of chance configurations that was subjected to a number of panels governing its harmonic possibilities”, as well as bearing in mind the multiple possibilities that it offered in the field of improvisation.”

Phytoliths in Pottery Reveal the Use of Spice in European Prehistoric Cuisine

Opium poppy (Papaver somniferum)
Dill (Anethum graveolens)
Caper (Capparis spinosa)
Coriander (Coriandrum sativum)
Cumin (Cuminum cyminum)
A kind of mustard ? (Cruciferae family)
“Figure 1. Early contexts from which spices have been recovered, with photomicrographs of globular sinuate phytoliths recovered from the pottery styles illustrated. Showing, A) A map of Europe showing an inset of the study area and sites from which the pot residues were acquired;, including also the Near East and northern Africa indicating early contexts where spices have been recovered: a) Menneville, France (Papaver somniferum L.), b) Eberdingen, Germany (Papaver somniferum L.), c) Seeberg, Switzerland (Papaver somniferum L.), d) Niederwil, Switzerland (Papaver somniferum L.), e) Swiss Lake Villages, Switzerland (Anethum graveolens L.), f) Cueva de los Murcielags, Spain (Papaver somniferum L.), g) Hacilar, Turkey (Capparis spinosa L.), h) Tell Abu Hureya, Syria (Caparis spinosa L.), i) Tell ed-Der, Syria (Coriandrum sativum L. and Cuminum cyminum L.), j) Khafaji, Iraq (Cruciferae family), k) Tell Aswad, Syria (Capparis spinosa L.), l) Nahal Hemar Cave, Israel (Coriandrum sativum L.), m) Tutankhamun’s tomb, Egypt (Coriandrum sativum L.), n) Tomb of Kha, Egypt (Cuminum cyminum L.), o) Tomb of Amenophis II, Egypt (Anethum graveolens L.), p) Hala Sultan Tekke, Cyprus (Capparis spinosa L.), q) Heilbronn, Germany (Papaver somniferum L.), r) Zeslawice, Poland (Papaver somniferum L.) [compiled using 8–17]. B) Hunter-gatherer pointed-based vessel (on the left) and Early Neolithic flat-based vessel (on the right). C) Scanning Electron Microscope image of a globular sinuate phytolith embedded in a food residue, D) optical light microscope image of modern Alliaria petiolata globular sinuate phytoliths, and E) optical light microscope image of archaeological globular sinuate phytolith examples.

Cybernetic Serendipity the Computer and the Arts – (1968)

Exhibition catalogue. Edited by Jasia Reichardt (Studio International Special Issue, London. 1968)

Kittler Friedrich : Gramophone Film Typewriter

“Part technological history of the emergent new media in the late nineteenth century, part theoretical discussion of the responses to these media—including texts by Rilke, Kafka, and Heidegger, as well as elaborations by Edison, Bell, Turing, and other innovators—Gramophone, Film, Typewriter analyzes this momentous shift using insights from the work of Foucault, Lacan, and McLuhan. Fusing discourse analysis, structuralist psychoanalysis, and media theory, the author adds a vital historical dimension to the current debates over the relationship between electronic literacy and poststructuralism, and the extent to which we are constituted by our technologies. The book ties the establishment of new discursive practices to the introduction of new media technologies, and it shows how both determine the ways in which psychoanalysis conceives of the psychic apparatus in terms of information machines.”

Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste

‘The digital realm is an avant-garde to the extent that it is driven by perpetual innovation and perpetual destruction. The built-in obsolescence of digital culture, the endless trashing of last year’s model, the spendthrift throwing away of batteries and mobile phones and monitors and mice . . . and all the heavy metals, all the toxins, sent off to some god-forsaken Chinese recycling village . . . that is the digital avant- garde’ (Cubitt, non-dated)

Mathematical Models, Documents and Drawing Machines 1892-2005

Pictures and scans of items from the Altgeld Math Models Collection at the University of Illinois.