The Artificially Obvious
Culture, Art, and Technology (CAT) 3
SPRING 2008
Instructor: Peter John , Office, PCH 250
[email protected]
Office hrs:
email:
TA(s): (name(s), office, contact, office hours tba)
“As soon as you can forget the naturally obvious and
construct an artificial obvious, then you too will see…”
Steward Edward White, The Mountains
Idea of the Course:
Without technological amplification, many things would remain
invisible to us: atoms, interstellar space, the operation of basic
natural phenomena as the “strong” and “weak” forces, the
electrochemical workings of our own brain, and so on. Even with
technological aids, much that is important to us remains invisible:
the tacit exchange of information within social groups, the
emotions shaping our individual or collective behaviors, the
standards, usually opaque and perhaps ineluctable, by which we
assess adaptive and maladaptive behavior. Even in those places in
which we can use technologies to peer more closely, there are
always instrumental limitations: electron microscopes cannot
depict objects smaller than the wavelengths of electrons;
representing the workings of our internal organs necessitates
interfering with and so altering the normal workings of those
organs; to differentiate portions of a cell or segments of deep
space, we color-code the information we obtain from microscopes
and radio-telescopes.
Our instruments and techniques, in other words, do not liberate
us from the task of imaginative interpretation. Artists and
scientists alike must use their imagination to see; literally, we
must create images either to interpret what our instruments depict
or in order to evoke in our minds an image of what our
instruments cannot probe.
Our brain creates mental images out of the multiple sensory
data it receives; our mental models or “maps” turn what would
otherwise be a cacophony of sense data into useable (though not
necessarily useful) information. Likewise, our attempts to know
what is true about the world—the natural and the human world—
requires that we imagine how to make sense of those fragments of
empirical (observable, testable) fact we can glean from
experiment and observation. Thus we create images—metaphors,
analogies, models—to make sense of what we observe. From
Hooke’s identification of “cells” to Watson and Crick’s
identification of a “double helix,” from Kepler’s apprehension of
orbital “ellipses” to Newton’s apprehension of an “attractive”
gravitational force, from Curie’s insight into “radiating” matter to
the characterization of sub-atomic matter as “waves” and
“particles,” from Darwin’s grasp of natural “selection” to the
contemporary sociobiologist’s use of the concept “meme,”
scientists have had of necessity to make a mental image of the
otherwise ineluctable phenomena that we are observing.
And imagination is only half of it; truth-seeking in a world in
which most things remain invisible demands not only imagination
but courage as well. Kepler’s insights contradicted his deeply
considered faith in the perfect form of celestial motion. The
implication of Darwin’s thesis set him in unwilling opposition to
his Victorian contemporaries. Galileo’s insight set his
contemporaries in opposition with him. For many scientists—
Marie Curie, Lisa Meitner, Antoine Lavoisier, Alfred Russell
Wallace, Rosalynd Franklin--the pursuit of truth has required
unremitting and for some ultimate sacrifices. For nearly all
scientists-artists, the pursuit of truth has demanded a willingness
to confront interpretations which contradicted their beliefs and
expectations.
Texts: Course Reader
Envisioning Information (Tufte)
Heaven and Earth
Assignments:
-Essay one: 15%
-Essay two: (Two versions): 20%
-Visualization Image: 20%
-Essay Three: 20%
-Attendance, Participation, and Events 15%
-Final 10%
Part One: Imagination and Discovery
Week One: The False Dichotomy of Art and Science
A. The Artificially Obvious
1. Main Idea of the Course
2. Root-Bernstein’s thesis
B. Exemplary instances of discovery through imagination
1. Eureka phenomena
2. Other Classic Examples
3. The essential role of imagination in scientific discovery
a. The Metaphorical Foundations of Knowledge:
Lakoff/Johnson, Bronowski, Asimov, Koestler,
Frost
4. Visualizing the Complex and some possible limitations
a. Seeing a Fish (Scudder, Dillard)
b. Myoglobin (Kendrew); Hemoglobin (Perutz)
b. DNA (models and reality); Watson
c. Proteins: Complexity and challenges to our
scientific paradigms (Darwin, the
biochemistry of proteins, Behe, Dawkins)
e. Form and function?
f. Kemp on Art and Science
g. Falsifiability (Popper)
Essay One: use all of the essays from Section One in the Reader
to assess the validity and implications of Root-Bernstein’s thesis.
(4-5 pp; due beginning of 3rd week).
Week Two: Truth and Beauty
A. Is Truth Beautiful?
1. Is what is beautiful bound to be true?
2. “Wow” or “Aha”?
3. Is Beauty, and Truth Quantifiable? (Guest lecture? S.
Dubnov)
4. On the subject of awe (Haldane, Wittgenstein, Nabokov)
B. Blots and Diagrams Revisited
1. Clark’s thesis
2. Dillard and the Artificially Obvious
Part Two: Visualization
Week 3: Why Visualize?
A. Why Visualize
1. McCloud’s thesis
2. Tufte on envisioning information
3. Tukey on envisioning information
B. The Graphic Imperative (Guest lecture?; T. Knight)
Essay Two and Project: identify or invent a salient fact, defend
why it is salient, and create an image visualizing that fact. (Essay
and preliminary version of image, due week 5)
Elaboration of the essay/project prompt:
Your task is to identify what you
judge to be a salient, empirically-verifiable fact (or facts, if you’re really ambitious) about the
world, and then to create or arrange the image(s) that will most effectively communicate to others
(including skeptics) the full significance of the fact(s). Your individual essay (5 pp) should justify
your project, but in a manner attentive to the relevant details of the course readings and lectures.
The initial problem is to identify a fact. There are, of course, more facts than we could ever, as
the saying goes, “shake a stick at.” How might we locate the really salient facts, and of those,
which should we choose to amplify? And how to represent your choice in a visually compelling
manner?. There exist, of course, many compelling visual representations of significant facts: E.O.
Wilson’s image of four planet earths, to convey what would be necessary to sustain on a global
scale Western levels of consumption [from “The Future of Life”]; the image of the everdiminishing pinnacle of a pyramid to represent Moore’s law concerning the exponential growth in
the capacity of microcircuits; the image of our capacity to rebuild the world commercial airfleet on
the basis solely of recycled aluminum cans [from “The State of the World, 2004”; akin to the
images evoked by the ratios presented monthly in Harper’s Index]; the image of being able to fit all
the remaining apes species—apart from Homo sapiens—in a single football stadium [from UCSD
primatologist Jim Moore].
Note that—as these examples may suggest--the patterns (cognitive, somatic, ideological)
that give our facts significance are not simply recognized but also imposed. You must therefore
justify the significance of your chosen fact(s). At least three methods are available to you for this
purpose. The most obvious, but perhaps most problematic and therefore difficult, is to demonstrate
the unassailable authority of the source of the fact. Another technique is to devise an experiment
(for our purposes a “thought experiment” might be ideal, so long as it serves to demonstrate the
validity and significance of the fact(s); for a model of a thought experiment, you might consult
something such as Einstein’s thought experiments about traveling on a photon or Schrodinger’s
equally famous thought experiment concerning a cat and quantum physics or perhaps even Turing’s
thought experiment about how to distinguish a human being from a computer). Another method
would be to measure some phenomenon which directly or indirectly affirms the validity of your
chosen fact(s).
Week 4: What to Visualize?
A. What’s salient?
B. Lies, damn lies and statistics
1. Dillard on death and numbers
2. “attention economics”
3. Village of 100 (compression vs. accuracy;
macrocosm-microcosm.)
4. The Metaphysical Club (Menand) ; “Extrapolated
matter analyses” (Trin Tragula, Laplace)
5. Harper’s Index
6. State of the World 2007
Week 5: More than meets the eye: Scaling and complexity
A. The challenge is not just to visualize isolated
facts, but to visualize the connections
between facts
1. What the Bleep?
2. Herbert’s thesis
3. “Stranger than we can imagine”?
(Haldane)
4. A Sense of Proportion (Heaven and Earth)
[Possible field trips: visualization labs (computer center; CalIT)
B. Asserting the “right not to know what we do not know”
(Montaigne)
1. To know one thing completely (Thomas)
(guest lecture? J. Jaffe)
2. Scaling and some other attempts at modeling
3. Powers of Ten
4. Fractals (Mandelbrot)
5. Small world problem and Six Degrees of separation
(Milgram, Watts)
6. Multidimensional scaling (McMaster)
7. Thought-experiments
Week 6: Scale and complexity in Human culture
A. Modeling real world phenomena
1. Pollan on food.
B. The Wire (Guest lecture?)
Week 7:
A. First round of Student Presentations of Visual Arguments
and of the Final Draft of Second Essay
B. Identifying a Topic for your third essay: An overview of
subjects and theses from science, nature and technology essay
anthologies
Essay Three: tba
Part III: Beyond Consilience
Week 8: The Cultural Dimensions of Truth-Claims
A. The idea of consilience and its assumptions
1. The importance of Wilson’s objective
2. Its problems and limitations
3. “That Noble Dream”
B. Consciousness and cultural interference of objectivity
1. Ted Porter on Objectivity
Week 9: The Politics of Knowledge
A. The Politics of Display
1. Of facts
2. Of words (G. Nunberg)
B. Articulation and Assemblage
1. Technology as politics by other means
Week 10: Remainder of student presentations
Essay Two and Project: Identify or discover a salient fact(s),
defend why it is salient, and invent some combination of means
(e.g., images/numbers/words/sounds) for visualizing or otherwise
communicating that fact to others.
The final draft of your essay and the intermediate version
of your project is due Tuesday of week 6. The final version of
your project is due in the first section of week 9.
Your essay must include an accurate paraphrase of those
observations from Tufte most relevant to your project. Also,
integrate, where it is pertinent, the material from the Reader, pp.
44-99.
Elaboration of the essay/project prompt: Your task is to identify
what you judge to be a salient, empirically-verifiable fact (or facts, if you’re really ambitious)
about the world, and then to create or arrange the image(s)/numbers/sounds, so forth, that will
most effectively communicate to others (including skeptics) the full significance of the fact(s).
Your individual essay (5 pp) should justify your project, but in a manner attentive to the relevant
details of the course readings and lectures.
The initial problem is to identify a fact. There are, of course, more facts than we could ever, as
the saying goes, “shake a stick at.” How might we locate the really salient facts, and of those,
which should we choose to amplify? And how to represent your choice in a visually compelling
manner?. There exist, of course, many compelling visual representations of significant facts: E.O.
Wilson’s image of four planet earths, to convey what would be necessary to sustain on a global
scale Western levels of consumption [from “The Future of Life”]; the image of the everdiminishing pinnacle of a pyramid to represent Moore’s law concerning the exponential growth in
the capacity of microcircuits; the image of our capacity to rebuild the world commercial airfleet on
the basis solely of recycled aluminum cans [from “The State of the World, 2004”; akin to the
images evoked by the ratios presented monthly in Harper’s Index]; the image of being able to fit all
the remaining apes species—apart from Homo sapiens—in a single football stadium [from UCSD
primatologist Jim Moore]. (Note that—as these examples may suggest--the patterns (cognitive,
somatic, ideological) that give our facts significance are not simply recognized but also imposed.
You must therefore justify the significance of your chosen fact(s). At least three methods are
available to you for this purpose. The most obvious, but perhaps most problematic and therefore
difficult, is to demonstrate the unassailable authority of the source of the fact. Another technique is
to devise an experiment (for our purposes a “thought experiment” might be ideal, so long as it
serves to demonstrate the validity and significance of the fact(s); for a model of a thought
experiment, you might consult something such as Einstein’s thought experiments about traveling
on a photon or Schrodinger’s equally famous thought experiment concerning a cat and quantum
physics or perhaps even Turing’s thought experiment about how to distinguish a human being from
a computer). Another method would be to measure some phenomenon which directly or indirectly
affirms the validity of your chosen fact(s)).
Essay Three: After completing the remainder of the readings from
the course Reader, revise and extend your essay by approximately
2-3 pages to address the following questions:
1) Is it possible, and if so how, for your visualization
project to adequately address the issue of scale and other problems
of complexity raised by McMaster, Mandelbrot, Watts, and
others?
2) Explain how your project pertains to the problem of
adaptation as they have been explored in the CAT program. Your
explanation should demonstrate your comprehension of the
concepts of culture, art and technology as they have been applied
in this writing program. Your explanation should also demonstrate
your consideration of how the artistic and technological efforts
manifest in your project may look from a cultural perspective—a
“web of meaning”--other than the one(s) with which you are most
familiar.
3) How effective were your attempts at communicating
or discovering a salient fact? Could, and if so how, you measure
your effectiveness?
Suggest as a project idea the choreographing of “Heaven and
Earth”
Essay Three: After completing the remainder of the readings from the course Reader, revise and
extend your essay by approximately 2-3 pages to address the following questions:
1) Is it possible, and if so how, for your visualization project to adequately address the
issue of scale and other problems of complexity raised by McMaster, Mandelbrot,
Watts, and others?
2) What particular observations, examples or arguments from the guest lectures can you
integrate into your thesis about salient facts?
3) How effective were your attempts at communicating or discovering a salient fact?
Could you, and if so how, measure your effectiveness?
4) Explain how your project pertains to the problem of adaptation as they have been
explored in the CAT program. Your explanation should demonstrate your
comprehension of the concepts of culture, art and technology as they have been
applied in this writing program. Your explanation should also demonstrate your
consideration of how the artistic and technological efforts manifest in your project
may look from a cultural perspective—a “web of meaning”--other than the one(s) with
which you are most familiar.
Essay Three: After completing the remainder of the readings from the course Reader, revise and
extend your essay by approximately 2-3 pages to address the following questions:
1) Is it possible, and if so how, for your visualization project to adequately address the
issue of scale and other problems of complexity raised by McMaster, Mandelbrot,
Watts, and others?
2) What particular observations, examples or arguments from the guest lectures can you
integrate into your thesis about salient facts?
3) How effective were your attempts at communicating or discovering a salient fact?
Could you, and if so how, measure your effectiveness?
4) Explain how your project pertains to the problem of adaptation as they have been
explored in the CAT program. Your explanation should demonstrate your
comprehension of the concepts of culture, art and technology as they have been
applied in this writing program. Your explanation should also demonstrate your
consideration of how the artistic and technological efforts manifest in your project
may look from a cultural perspective—a “web of meaning”--other than the one(s) with
which you are most familiar.