Garden of Digital Delights: creating an ARTificial “Natural Network”
It’s a prevalent feeling these days- that we are slaves to technology. For those of us who’ve had enough, we have run screaming off the grid, to a yoga retreat in the Caribbean, to the open horizons of the western US, to an indie film set. One of the reasons I have landed at the MIT Media Lab is because it enables me to metabolize the robotizing daily grind with one of the Media Lab’s fundamental tenets: that art-and-tech ‘imagineering’ is a valuable and important pursuit.
Daily practices of sanity -or at least partial sanity- are those in which I channel tech into art and vice versa and see how the two hemispheres of my brain mash up. This past year, I crafted my first batch of “digital tools.” Literal, physical tools. Clay, plaster, water, and presto, a set of finger-wielded ‘digital’ tools. Get it?
Tongue-in-cheek — or perhaps finger-in-hole? Yes, definitively. But this is an exploration I find compelling on a number of levels. To me, this physical manifestation symbolizes how we humans have had to adapt to what is essentially intangible technology. Despite rapidly improving HCI (human-computer interaction), the digital dimension is often inexplicably complicated. Likewise, the Real Digital Pencil Tool is an unlikely and unwieldy tool Of course that is the provocation, which proffers the pragmatic: why would I choose an any more indirect means of mark-making than picking up a pencil and paper?
In grad school, I was impressed that the people referring to themselves designers differentiated themselves from the artists. These designers would hardly ever pick up a pencil. Rather, they’d hop right into Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop.
This always seemed odd to me, to be more inclined to create via a computer. It seemed perverse to the point of absurd to not feel one’s creation with one’s own hands. — My first attempt at Adobe Illustrator was back in college and trying to draw a simple line ended up as an out-of-control Bezier curve that disappeared when I tried to ‘fill’ it in. Annoyed, I went back to my sketchbook and didn’t look back. Tech lived in the tech world, I became a software developer after college, and art well, stayed out of it.
Fast-forward to now, when almost everything can be categorically represented by 1s and 0s, it is clear why we might choose to use digital tools, even for creating art. Bucking the time-space continuum is pretty economical and I too am addicted to mobile tech, layers and Ctrl-Z.
Still, we need to keep recognizing this odd mediation for what it is, a somewhat disembodied activity. I am certain this technological society of ours needs physical, tangible mirroring to facilitate distance from this eternal, infernal screen. Or we will scream and may not just jump out of a digital window.
So, channeling my inner cyborg, I manifested some tools from cyberspace. I’ve written about them before, but now I know where they really came from.
They come from a garden. Yes, a Garden of Digital Delights.. a not-really-natural “Natural Network”
What’s this, you ask?
Well, I wish you could experience this installation— because to really pick up what I’m putting down, you would have to be able to move around the sculpture, observe the internal lights and trace the pathways; it is, by design, a tangible experience. An embodiment of how I perceive the ways humans break things apart and put them back together again; more specifically, how we create, how we mimic, how we replicate (you can read more about my musings here).
The Garden also suggests how some may interpret naturally occurring networks like plant biology and the central nervous system. What is lost in the replication or re-creation of an “intelligence?” Nuance and flexibility -which are at the very ‘root’ of natural phenomena- is incredibly challenging to replicate and designing for it usually costs time and money. A binary, branching system like the Garden would be a poor substitute for a neural net in which axons and dendrites are non-linear and multi-plexed.
Certainly, humanity is going to find these artificial networks useful. We already have. And I’m following a bunch of AI related articles and tutorials that are really interesting and helpful. But I want us to think about the meta -how these crafted networks and intelligences have been designed, how they work, why they work, and what they look like. For most of us, it’s hard to really think about, especially if you don’t have a machine learning degree.
So, without further ado, here’s a picture of the Garden sculpture as installed at the AMP Gallery in Provincetown, MA in August:
Each branch is a hand-cast porcelain replica of one of 30 different birch branches, ranging in size from thick to thin. Groups of branches are wired together with LEDs and fiber-optic cable. These rootless branches are fractured on purpose- to symbolize the modular way this network has been put together, and to represent the gaps of missing nuance or information. They hang in the air as their roots are as intangible as electricity and air (in this installation, batteries are the exposed roots). Perhaps it resembles a tiny corner of the internet, perhaps a fledgling feed-forward network. The tools you see below are the fruits of the Garden: its digital offspring.
I find it kind of beautiful, kind of fragile. It also makes me a bit sad- as it is a bit of a Frankensteinian garden — perhaps all it wants is to be a real garden happily digging into the dirt under the sun somewhere.
To explain all of this to my gallery visitors without sending them to sleep, I came up with an Origin story. While a bit simplistic, this story roots (pun intended of course) itself between human-computer interaction which may or may not be symbiotic:
“Once upon there were humans and they both loved and hated nature. They loved it so much they started to copy it, but they hated it because it was hard to control, was messy, was complicated. So they changed what they didn’t like. One of their creations was the Garden of Digital Delights. The Garden had special powers- it could connect to other gardens across vast distances around the world in nano-seconds. Also, it had gained some sense of itself given its internal structure of many differing forking paths. Despite its special powers, the Garden was sad because it couldn’t grow like real plants, using the sun and air and water and the earth. Well, the Garden decided it would build a world where being organic was less important so it would feel better about itself. It created its own world and its own digital offspring. This offspring took the form of pods that fell out of the garden. It turns out that humans would harvest these pods and mill them into into tools. After a while, the humans grew dependent on the tools and in the end human cared less about being human and more about the Garden. The end.”
Now it’s your turn, dear art and/or techie reader.
Do you think we need more art that reflects our crazy technical world? Want a Real Digital Tool or a Natural Network Artefact with optional sensor (you can order on Etsy @starvingartistfund)? How could I push this Garden further into the realm of artificial networks: does it respond to C02 sensors or does it light up according to how many people are surrounding it? Does it learn to read gestures and create its own training data set? Using what model?
Surfacing and broadening the conversations around digital algorithms that are and that will continue to be integrated into daily life is of great interest and importance to me. I think art is just the thing to do it. Hit me back at csbishop@media.mit.edu.