Code Societies Day 1: Blenders
2 July, 2018
The School for Poetic Computation was one amongst many reasons I decided to come to New York City to do a PhD, though in computer science, not poetics. New York City seemed to have more strangeness, some particular kind of strangeness I was looking for at the moment, and the School for Poetic Computation (whatever it was, because I didn’t know!) contributed to that feeling.
Yesterday was day 1 of their summer intensive, entitled as and inspired by Code Societies. Code Societies is organized by Melanie Hoff (and TA’ed by Ying Quan Tan), though most of the classes are taught by a variety of wonderful and amazing artists. (More to come on them in later posts.)
The first class was led by Melanie, and the main activity for the evening was conceptual blending. I call it that only because it slots so well into this philosophical term I have been dancing about for the past 9 months. In the class, we each spent 10 minutes alone thinking of some kind of code that affects society, be it a line of actual programming code — like the line of code on a Facebook page that denotes the user as dead or alive — or a more physical one like the social code implied by sticking out your hand for a handshake. Stuck on social codes, like making eye contact with adults (or babies!) or how we avoid each other walking down the street, I tried to think of some programming code that affects society.
What I came up with was random number generators, mostly because I had recently read a thread of tweets in which someone broke down common ways people use random number generators such that the numbers are not evenly distributed. Although I didn’t follow all the details of how people misuse random number generators, I do know that the numbers produced are not truly “random” because computers are not random machines. True randomness can, however, be pulled from the environment. The real world has plenty of randomness. The pseudo-randomness of computation seemed to both literally and metaphorically affect society: there is literal code we end up interacting with based on random number generators which are not truly random; but also there is so much technology we interact with that appears random but is truly not. So I drew a random distribution and then a normal distribution, just to note how often the two come together.
After this activity we got into pairs and trios and had to come up with an invention or interface that combined the codes we had thought of previously. Blending. My understanding of conceptual blending comes from the book The Way We Think by Turner and Fauconnier, in which they describe conceptual blending as the fundamental process of taking two elements and managing to combine them; totally ubiquitous and often subconscious. To even understand “a grandmother” we are blending the ideas of “a mother” and “a parent” in a particular way. But more intuitively I think of analogies or metaphors. “Love is a stream” blends these two ideas to create something new.
I think a lot about metaphors in my PhD research, in particular how to make them and what exists within them. For instance, “love is a stream” is a metaphor, technically, but not a rewarding one because it doesn’t dig into what it means. I see it as a shell of a metaphor — someone needs to come and fill it out. “Love is something that just drags me along; like a stream it is gentle but I’m not in control.” Perhaps there are infinite ways to fill out the metaphor; lots of different elements to grab onto and bring to the surface. I try to figure out how computers can help people fill out these shells. In some ways I see them as these little puzzles — how is love like a stream? — that require complex and creative work to solve. Though there are plenty of “right” answers, there are also plenty of answers that don’t quite fit. How do we find the ones that work?
In Code Societies we each created our own element, pretty complex and unique to our perspective. Then we had to combine them. How? In what way? My partner, Lisa Larson-Walker, had thought of the coded way journalism presents objective truths, and how she has to rely on truths she doesn’t empirically know or experience. Our blend was a news generator that gave you new pulled from locations that matching weather to yours — the same temperature, or wind speed, or sky color. It plays on this idea of finding true randomness by measuring your environment, but also on ideas of breaking out of your normal news consumption in a random, but also pointed, way.
What fascinated me about this activity was how unguided we were in our combinations. With metaphors I have developed notions of what makes some connections good and others less so; these notions rely on their communicative power, which is just to say that multiple people can look at the connection and see how it makes sense. While not the tightest of notions, it is a guiding principle. With my partner, we kind of leapt about in some space of not being too obvious or trivial a combination, perhaps we were trying to find something interesting or unexpected. I’m not really sure.
It is exciting but terrifying to be in this place, which I have been in before but my recent foray into research is certainly not, where the goal is unknown or perhaps undefined or perhaps nonexistent.
