v.1
with the showcase coming up, i’ve been ignoring this blog to fill my sketchbook with desperate project ideas. it’s been a process. i’ve built a few prototypes to 50% but haven’t been satisfied yet.
this evening (less than two days before the showcase) i finally had an idea that stuck. i’m writing from the subway home after building the enclosure and v1 of the software:
the project is called depression. i’m excited to write more about it soon!
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”