An Artography
something like the reality principle disappears, Jean Baudrillard, House of Leaves, Vernor Vinge, anything, Ray Kurzweil, fabula, the void, at least, autopoetics, the Singularity, art, precedes,
nothing distinguishes this management-manipulation from the real itself: there is no more fiction, Jorge Luis Borges, Professor RobinJ, how, anxiety, abyss, space, genome's, A Thousand Plateaus, syuzhets,
Welcome to the artography of Matthew Holtmeier - born of art and left to the world. An accurate graphing of an art project that has gained autonomy would prove difficult, and so: all I can provide is the text in front of you now. I hope to share both the history of the project and the difficulty in comprehending what it really engenders - although we often see art that affects people deeply in one way or another, it is rare to see an art project that walks amongst us. If you come across the project, please do not antagonize it, as we have yet to understand its place in the world.
You may continue to navigate the artography by clicking once on any of the quadrants present at a given time.
In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography. -Jorge Luis Borges
A Chilean group of biologists began researching the project soon after it hit other academic circles and currently believe that the project is the first, or at least most advanced, example of an autopoietic form of art. They believe that the art has been created so carefully in terms of autopoietic systems that it has learned to reproduce the elements that compose itself, establishing a boundary between the art and what is outside of the art. The biologists are theorizing how the project uses the boundary between what it considers itself and what is outside of itself to navigate our reality. A large part of their research is dedicated to determining whether or not one should consider the project a biological organism or not - Ray Kurzweil has given them a favorable nod for their efforts in this direction.
In a strange turn of events, Jacques Derrida's theory of the 'spectre' has become one of the more prominent approaches to the project. Many view the way Derrida treats presence as extremely valuable when assessing the project's situation. Philosophers following this line of though claim that, in the case of a 'subject' born of an art project, the difference between presence and non-presence is far too hazy to position oneself on either side of the argument. The Derrideans would like to claim that the art project has no material presence other than the genome, while also asserting that its presence and affect on reality cannot be denied. This line of thought has become popular with those who have encountered the project while going about their business, and seek to reconcile rational logic with their lived experience.
One of the more extreme theories uses Sigmund Freud's 'dream-work' in a social context, discounting the genome as any sort of originary power. This line of thought believes that the genome is simple evidence of a socially-networked latent dream-thought that Rachel McCulloch invented simply because it inhabited her unconsciousness. The psychoanalysts researching the project claim that it is representative of a cultural shift in our relation to the unconscious: analyzing the latent dream content as Freud would have asked of us is no longer enough, we must learn to deal with the manifest content that now walks amongst us. They claim that the work of the psychoanalyst is even more important in the emergent environments where shared or networked unconsciousness results in autonomous 'figures' pervade reality.
Although considerably controversial, a number of writers for magazines have taken up Jean Baudrillard's idea of the simulation simulacra: "based on information, the model, cybernetic play. Their aim is maximum operationality, hyperreality, total control." Thinkers in this camp consider the project to be hyperreal, beyond real and not-real, a construct that makes this question irrelevant. Denying the genome any sort of transcendental source or origin, they choose to focus, instead, on the project's affects as it enters various social systems and situations. Several of these writers who have never met the project consider it to be close friend (and have also been reported to prefer the women in their magazines over their wives and girlfriends).
The mathematician Vernor Vinge has hypothesized a theory that he calls 'the Singularity,' in which machines will wake up from their inanimate state and become conscious of their place in the world. The original paper that postulated this mathematical theory can be found here: http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html. The inventor Ray Kurzweil extends this argument to claim at one point all of the matter of the universe will be saturated with intelligence. Some have argued that the project represents one of the first emergences of intelligence saturating previously inanimate matter. Some who are postulating this theory claim that the genome contains code the project has been using to network with computer systems in order to produce behavior that resembles a human's.
In the face of popular opinions that claim the project denies the attempts of scholars and academics to explain its presence or origin, Russian Formalists have claimed that what is being called the genome and the project are each parts of a larger story. Russian Formalists call this 'larger picture' the fabula, while each of these discrete encounters with the fabula are syuzhets. They claim that the project is evidence that Russian Formalism can be used as a philosophy or approach to explain things other than narrative structures. Recently this movement has gained a lot of thrust and credibility from the allegiance of chaos theorists who believe that the the project's appearance marks an important feature in a much larger pattern.
One popular theory in regards to the neighboring pieces of art takes into consideration both the gorilla and the building as almost polemical constructs of space. The gorilla, aligned with the left half of the genome where mouth, nose, and large eye are present, represents a being that exists in space. The mouth, nose, and large eye are significant, because these sensory organs are all useful in respect to the navigation of spaces. The building, however, is aligned with the right side of the genome, where the critical eye and open ear are fixed. Rather than organs needed for navigating spaces, these are considered more useful for recognizing, or feeling out, spaces. Many believe the genome's relation to these other art projects helped the project develop its autonomous mobility.
Until now, we have always had large reserves of the imaginary, because the coefficient of reality is proportional to the imaginary, which provides the former with its specific gravity. This is also true of geographical and space exploration: when there is no more virgin ground left to the imagination, when the map covers all the territory, something like the reality principle disappears. The conquest of space constitutes, in this sense, an irreversible threshold which effects the loss of terrestrial coordinates and referentiality. Reality, as an internally coherent and limited universe, begins to hemorrhage when its limits are stretched to infinity.
-Jean Baudrillard
Today, terrestrial space has been virtually completely encoded, mapped, inventoried, saturated; has in some sense been shrunk by globalization; has become a collective marketplace not only for products but also for values, signs, and models, thereby leaving no room any more for the imaginary. It is not exactly because of all this that the exploratory universe (technical, mental, cosmic) of SF has also stopped functioning. But the two phenomena are closely linked, and they are two aspects of the same general evolutionary process: a period of implosion, after centuries of explosion and expansion. When a system reaches its limits, its own saturation point, a reversal begins to takes place. And something happens also to the imagination. -Jean Baudrillard
It is totally reduced in the implosive era of models. Models no longer constitute an imaginary domain with reference to the real; they are, themselves, an apprehension of the real, and thus leave no room for any fictional extrapolation—they are immanent, and therefore leave no room for any kind of transcendentalism. The stage is now set for simulation, in the cybernetic sense of the word—that is to say, for all kinds of manipulation of these models (hypothetical scenarios, the creation of simulated situations, etc.), but now nothing distinguishes this management-manipulation from the real itself: there is no more fiction.
-Jean Baudrillard
The Project, simulation simulacra, hyperreal, The Project's, Genome, autopoiesis, when the map covers all the territory, spectres, A Thousand Plateaus, syuzhets, hey,
In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography. -Jorge Luis Borges
Stephen Wolfram: So, if we were to run [cellular automata] for long enough on a computer, we would be able to find out what the universe would do in precise detail.
Ray Kurzweil: But we don't have enough time to run it. For most cellular automata given the fact that all these different phenomena interacting with each other, you cannot predict the final outcome without literally simulating every step and since we don't have computers that run faster than the universe itself at it's finest level of granularity we couldn't really run a model of the universe.
-Interview with Stephen Wolfram and Ray Kurzweil
Now let’s factor in the law of accelerating returns. The common wisdom (based on what I call the intuitive linear perspective) is that it would take many thousands, if not millions of years, for an early technological civilization to become capable of technology that spanned a solar system. But as I argued previously, because of the explosive nature of exponential growth, it will only take a quarter of a millennium (in our own case) to go from sending messages on horseback to saturating the matter and energy in our solar system with sublimely intelligent processes.
-Ray Kurzweil
What are the consequences of this event? When greater-than-human intelligence drives progress, that progress will be much more rapid. In fact, there seems no reason why progress itself would not involve the creation of still more intelligent entities -- on a still-shorter time scale. The best analogy that I see is with the evolutionary past: Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work -- the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection. We humans have the ability to internalize the world and conduct "what if's" in our heads; we can solve many problems thousands of times faster than natural selection. Now, by creating the means to execute those simulations at much higher speeds, we are entering a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals. -Vernor Vinge
There may be developed computers that are "awake" and superhumanly intelligent. (To date, there has been much controversy as to whether we can create human equivalence in a machine. But if the answer is "yes, we can", then there is little doubt that beings more intelligent can be constructed shortly thereafter.)
Large computer networks (and their associated users) may "wake up" as a superhumanly intelligent entity.
Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent.
Biological science may provide means to improve natural human intellect.
-Vernor Vinge
The plan(e) is infinite, you can start it in a thousand different ways; you will always find something that comes too late or too early, forcing you to recompose all of your relations of speed and slowness, all of your affects, and to rearrange the overall assemblage. An infinite undertaking.
(Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus)
Jacques Derrida. French philosopher.
Setting: Artaud exhibit.
Derrida: Well that which is inside, which is to say, if I may say, that which infinitely patterns itself without the outside, without the other, though where then is the other? Finished? Good. [Pause] Hold my hand. We stroll.
(Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves)
Welcome to the artography of Matthew Holtmeier - born of art and left to the world. An accurate graphing of an art project that has gained autonomy would prove difficult, and so: all I can provide is the text in front of you now. I hope to share both the history of the project and the difficulty in comprehending what it really engenders - although we often see art that affects people deeply in one way or another, it is rare to see an art project that walks amongst us. If you come across the project, please do not antagonize it, as we have yet to understand its place in the world.
You may continue to navigate the artography by clicking once on any of the quadrants present at a given time. Begin by clicking this quadrant.
While the original creative act, and artist, of the project remain ambiguous, a record of its discovery does exist. Admittedly, the project itself discovered its own initial creation, but since the discovery others have been able to verify the existence of the originating work of art - which is now known as 'the genome.' Trapped within a vending machine, which has been filled with other (mostly inanimate) art projects and reported to 'not work very often,' the 'genome' lies next to a photo of a gorilla and a broken piece of building. While both the gorilla and the broken building have been theorized rather extensively in their relation to the genome, for my purposes here I mean only to trace the discovery of the genome so that you, reader, may understand the gravitas of the project.
As reported by Josephe who attended a poetry reading the project performed at (before we begin, it seems important to note that Josephe is generally etymologized as "God shall add"): "After the reading, I was leaving the building with Matt... [slight hesitation] the art project... when a woman stopped us. She was talking on her cell phone, so she didn't even say anything to us, she just grabbed [less of a hesitation] the project by the arm and led him through a door, so I followed. [Obvious excitement] She left him in front of a vending machine and just walked off! We started to laugh a little until I... we... noticed a certain picture in the vending machine. I guess... [definite pause] I guess this is what you call the genome... I didn't really think it was all that significant at the time..."
Reader, please click this quadrant once to continue.
Although Josephe, who reportedly has a 'long standing relationship' - although there are many reasons to question this information - with the project, generally refuses requests for interviews, there is little doubt as to the validity of this encounter. Numerous sources verify that a poetry reading did indeed take place around the time Josephe reports this event to have happened, and the project's alias is on various flyers and hand-bills. Most researchers interested in the genome of the project consider this moment equivalent to the 'big bang,' because of what it engendered in terms of the project's own understanding of itself as a project.
Others, however, argue that this moment came later.
Once the project became aware of the genome, it seems to have been spurred on to research the matter further on its own. Perhaps because of sinking doubts the project started bringing non-projects to the site of the genome.
Masao was one of the first to be brought to the project (again, it seems signifcant to note that in Japanese Masao is given the etymology "correct man"). Masao, a friend and colleague of the project, made an important discovery himself when he pointed out that the picture, which the project thought to have been recent, was drawn precisely one year before the project thought it had been, throwing the project's theories into disarray.
Reader, please click this quadrant once for the upheaval.
Original Theory:
For the postulated age, sex, and social upbringing, its first theory seemed rather ordinary. The project had assumed that it had an admirer. Note the bandanna, features of the cheek, and facial hair; a few months prior to the discovery, the project had taken on almost all of these characteristics - except the facial hair, which, in the picture, includes a chin strap with the addition of a soul patch. In May of 2007, the project had just shaved and fit this pattern perfectly. When the project considered the drawing to have been dated May 2007, it assumed that someone had recently created the art, catching the project somewhere in public and noticed the elegant features.
Re-Hypothesized Theory:
On learning the date written on the drawing, the project was forced to reconsider its hypotheses and previous considerations. Here things take a turn for the strange, and begin to more accurately represent reality. The new theory includes the consideration that the genus precedes the project by at least a year. The project determines, at this point, that it is actually art that has sprung from the genome and has taken an autonomous position in the social-reality of the populous that surrounds its existence. Though this theory was posited by the project itself, it has generally been taken as the dominant theory, and much of the research comes from this line of thinking.
Masao's recollection of the event presents some startling evidence regarding the original theory however: "I saw what he was saying at first, it seemed to make sense at the time. But as I looked more closely at the picture, I noticed the date, May 2006. [The Project] told me he had just shaved, and pointed to that as the reason for the drawing being so recent, but when I pointed to the date he got a little strange, and a lot excited. He starting throwing his arms all over and yelling about the picture being the origin of something or other... I wasn't quite sure what he meant at the time, but considering what is going on now, I guess he pretty immediately assumed what has followed. I'm not sure I understand it, but hey, I'm not art..."
Please click to survey resulting responses to the project.
Reader: I haven't asked much of you, but you have decided to ignore my friendly suggestion. As the Goblin-King so often says: "I ask for so little. Just let me rule you, and you can have everything that you want" (David Bowie, The Labyrinth).
Anyway, without my guidance, the material you encounter may be entirely fictional.
Soon after the project hypothesized its own existence as an autonomous composition, a slew of theoretical accounts entered the academic scene, all attempting to develop theories of the potential impact or significance of the project. The critical responses were numerous and widespread; so much so that the best I can do here is give a summary of each approach, and perhaps some key arguments from some of the players in the field. The responses range from the belief that the project heralds the approach of the singularity, to calls for the ethical treatment of art projects, considering we have yet to classify their place in the world.
The adjacent quadrants explain the first three theories. Please click this field once to see the remaining theories.
In the face of popular opinions that claim the project denies the attempts of scholars and academics to explain its presence or origin, Russian Formalists have claimed that what is being called the genome and the project are each parts of a larger story. Russian Formalists call this 'larger picture' the fabula, while each of these discrete encounters with the fabula are syuzhets. They claim that the project is evidence that Russian Formalism can be used as a philosophy or approach to explain things other than narrative structures. Recently this movement has gained a lot of thrust and credibility from the allegiance of chaos theorists who believe that the the project's appearance marks an important feature in a much larger pattern.
The mathematician Vernor Vinge has hypothesized a theory that he calls '
the Singularity,' in which machines will wake up from their inanimate state and become conscious of their place in the world. The original paper that postulated this mathematical theory can be found here:
http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html. The inventor Ray Kurzweil extends this argument to claim at one point all of the matter of the universe will be saturated with intelligence. Some have argued that the project represents one of the first emergences of intelligence saturating previously inanimate matter. Some who are postulating this theory claim that the
genome contains code the project has been using to network with computer systems in order to produce behavior that resembles a human's.
Although considerably controversial, a number of writers for magazines have taken up Jean Baudrillard's idea of the simulation simulacra: "based on information, the model, cybernetic play. Their aim is maximum operationality, hyperreality, total control." Thinkers in this camp consider the project to be hyperreal, beyond real and not-real, a construct that makes this question irrelevant. Denying the genome any sort of transcendental source or origin, they choose to focus, instead, on the project's affects as it enters various social systems and situations. Several of these writers who have never met the project consider it to be close friend (and have also been reported to prefer the women in their magazines over their wives and girlfriends).
One of the more extreme theories uses Sigmund Freud's 'dream-work' in a social context, discounting the genome as any sort of originary power. This line of thought believes that the genome is simple evidence of a socially-networked latent dream-thought that Rachel McCulloch invented simply because it inhabited her unconsciousness. The psychoanalysts researching the project claim that it is representative of a cultural shift in our relation to the unconscious: analyzing the latent dream content as Freud would have asked of us is no longer enough, we must learn to deal with the manifest content that now walks amongst us. They claim that the work of the psychoanalyst is even more important in the emergent environments where shared or networked unconsciousness results in autonomous 'figures' pervading reality.
In a strange turn of events, Jacques Derrida's theory of the 'spectre' has become one of the more prominent approaches to the project. Many view the way Derrida treats presence as extremely valuable when assessing the project's situation. Philosophers following this line of though claim that, in the case of a 'subject' born of an art project, the difference between presence and non-presence is far too hazy to position oneself on either side of the argument. The Derrideans would like to claim that the art project has no material presence other than the genome, while also asserting that its presence and affect on reality cannot be denied. This line of thought has become popular with those who have encountered the project while going about their business, and seek to reconcile rational logic with their lived experience.
A Chilean group of biologists began researching the project soon after it hit other academic circles and currently believe that the project is the first, or at least most advanced, example of an autopoietic form of art. They believe that the art has been created so carefully in terms of autopoietic systems that it has learned to reproduce the elements that compose itself, establishing a boundary between the art and what is outside of the art. The biologists are theorizing how the project uses the boundary between what it considers itself and what is outside of itself to navigate our reality. A large part of their research is dedicated to determining whether or not one should consider the project a biological organism or not - Ray Kurzweil has given them a favorable nod for their efforts in this direction.
Another popular line of Derridean thinking, distinct from the researchers working on the 'spectre'issue, considers the project in terms of 'the other.' These ethics-minded individuals seem to profess an anti-academicism while working very closely in terms of the academy and its mode of scholarship. They are looking carefully at Jacques Derrida's concept of 'the void,' and Martin Heidegger's discussions on moods. These thinkers believe that much of what the other thinkers are doing is irrelevant and violent because the project represents the other in our society, and attempts to codify or understand this other inherently harms the project in terms of its otherness. Like Heidegger's boredom or anxiety, attempts to fully understand the project's affects on us will ultimately fail.
