Telepresence Manifesto (2018 redux)
today in critical theory, we read and discussed a few “manifestos for the internet age”. i’ve got a cold so i called in; when the class broke out to create their own manifestos, i decided to write a “telepresence manifesto” from my sniffly blanket fort.
turns out marvin minsky beat me to it. for context: minsky, who said “i don’t think there is any such thing” regarding human consciousness, co-founded MIT’s AI laboratory. MIT has a long history of military research; in recent years, its public focus has shifted to military robots, drones, and battle suits.
his manifesto creeps me out. i changed “hands” to “drones” to emphasize why. Edits left as strikethroughs; emphasis my own.
unhitching
The possibility, vital for life, of unhitching, which consists… in grasping, during the brief intervals in which our species can bring itself to interrupt its hive-like activity, the essence of what it was and continues to be, below the threshold of thought and over and above society: in the contemplation of a mineral more beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that can be smelt at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books; or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Tristes Tropiques”
making nothing
here’s a post that i wrote during my second week here. now that the showcase is coming up, i need to start making a thing. guess i’d better put this up before that starts :)
one of my major goals during this program is to not make things.
* silence. the sfpc showcase curators back away slowly to discuss what a mistake they’ve made. *
it’s okay, i’ll do the assignments and make a showcase project and all that. i’m still going to make things. it’s hard not to; i’ve already made a lot of Things since arriving, more than i’m comfortable with. but i’m celebrating all the things i think of that i don’t make.
during the binary numbers assignment, i came up with an idea to:
- map binary digits (bits) to piano keys
- find binary numbers that resolve to nice chords
- create a simple matching app that prompts players with a decimal number and celebrates when the correct chord is played