Erotics of Interpretation

I reread Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” yesterday. Amusing and challenging at turns, the essay calls for an erotics of art in the final sentence, rebuking the need for analysis—interpretation—of what art really means. But how can we proceed with this sensual understanding of art? How can we write about it?

Modernism was plagued by form cut away from content, leaving open how exactly any given piece of art fit against our expectations, the semantic churn of meanings that we want to apply to a work of art. There must be a framework but the depth of analysis is really what Sontag is questioning. Take the examples she gives, like Auerbach’s The Scar of Odysseus. In it, we are scanning around a particular event in The Odyssey, namely the recognition of a scar on Odysseus’s thigh. The author asks us to understand how Homer uses the scar as a focus in the verses, then takes us back to the events in his youth when he was injured. The narrative form is then contrasted and compared with the Old Testament, which might have been compiled around the same time frame as Homer’s work. But what might rise to erotics rather than interpretation? Take the following:

The separate elements of a phenomenon are most clearly placed in relation to one another; a large number of conjunctions, adverbs, particles, and other syntactical tools, all clearly circumscribed and delicately differentiated in meaning, delimit persons, things, and portions of incidents in respect to one another, and at the same time bring them together in a continuous and ever flexible connection; like the separate phenomena themselves, their relationships—their temporal, local, causal, final, consecutive, comparative, concessive, antithetical, and conditional limitations—are brought to light in perfect fullness; so that a continuous rhythmic procession of phenomena passes by, and never is there a form left fragmentary or half-illuminated, never a lacuna, never a gap, never a glimpse of unplumbed depths.

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Sentience is Physical, Part 3: Now with Flaming Birds

Moving to Portland brings all the positives and negatives of urban living. A notable positive is access to the arts and I’m looking forward to catching Stravinsky’s The Firebird this weekend with the Oregon Symphony. Part of the program is a new work by composer Vijay Iyer who has a history of incorporating concepts derived from African rhythms, hip hop, and jazz into his compositional efforts. I took the opportunity this morning to read his 1998 dissertation from Berkeley that capped off his interdisciplinary program in the cognitive science of music. I’ll just say up front that I’m not sure it rises to the level of a dissertation since it does not really provide any significant new results. He notes the development of a microtiming programming environment coded in MAX but doesn’t give significant results or novel experimental testing of the system or of human perceptions of microtiming. What the dissertation does do, however, is give a lucid overview and some new insights about how cognition and music interact, as well as point towards ways to test the theories that Iyer develops during the course of his work. A too-long master’s thesis might be a better category for it, but I’ve never been exposed to musicology dissertations so perhaps this level of work is normal.

Iyer’s core thesis is that musical cognition and expression arise from a physical engagement with our environments combined with cultural situatedness. That is, rhythm is tied to a basic “tactus” or spontaneously perceived regular pulse or beat of music that is physically associated with walking, heartbeats, tapping, chewing, and so forth. Similarly, the culture of musical production as well as the history that informs a given piece all combine to influence how music is produced and experienced.… Read the rest

Entanglements: Collected Short Works

Now available in Kindle, softcover, and hardcover versions, Entanglements assembles a decade of short works by author, scientist, entrepreneur, and inventor Mark William Davis.

The fiction includes an intimate experimental triptych on the evolution of sexual identities. A genre-defying poetic meditation on creativity and environmental holocaust competes with conventional science fiction about quantum consciousness and virtual worlds. A postmodern interrogation of the intersection of storytelling and film rounds out the collected works as a counterpoint to an introductory dive into the ethics of altruism.

The nonfiction is divided into topics ranging from literary theory to philosophical concerns of religion, science, and artificial intelligence. Legal theories are magnified to examine the meaning of liberty and autonomy. A qualitative mathematics of free will is developed over the course of two essays and contextualized as part of the algorithm of evolution. What meaning really amounts to is always a central concern, whether discussing politics, culture, or ideas.

The works show the author’s own evolution in his thinking of our entanglement with reality as driven by underlying metaphors that transect science, reason, and society. For Davis, metaphors and the constellations of words that help frame them are the raw materials of thought, and their evolution and refinement is the central narrative of our growth as individuals in a webwork of societies and systems.

Entanglements is for readers who are in love with ideas and the networks of language that support and enervate them. It is a metalinguistic swim along a polychromatic reef of thought where fiction and nonfictional analysis coexist like coral and fish in a greater ecosystem.

Mark William Davis is the author of three dozen scientific papers and patents in cognitive science, search, machine translation, and even the structure of art.… Read the rest

A Mammoth Undertaking: Interviewing the Future of Art

The following is my interview of DeepAI and Stable Diffusion running on an AMD Ryzen with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090.

Thank you for taking the time to discuss this important and interesting topic. Why are mammoths so important to the art world?

That the mammoths were domesticated before the start of the human era seems implausible from a historical perspective. In fact the majority of mammoths that people find in museums, libraries, and other collections are not domesticated mammoths. This suggests there might have been a greater need for mammoths within culture than before. This would make sense, considering that Neanderthals likely hunted other types of other species before settling in our world more than 400 years ago. Because they were not domesticated, they were only adapted to hunting rodents and other plant and animal species that were less domesticated in their wild form such as rabbits, snakes, etc.

Starting at the earliest part of your collection, the mammoth is an unusual theme for Rembrandt, isn’t it?

It’s hard to believe that after all the success of their latest work, The Lord’s Prayer doesn’t want to let their “biggest hit yet”, the classic The Lord’s Prayer, disappear. The actor’s latest film, The Wrestler (via Warner Bros., which produces on their own, and in the U.K.), has garnered more than 15 million views on Amazon Instant Video (the company’s preferred store for Netflix-wielding subscribers, not the usual suspects Google Video), and has become so popular that when the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival, it was deemed the top film at the fest. The star-studded line-up has included the likes of Peter Lorre, Michael J Freberg, Colin Farrell, and Peter Sellers (both of whom made it to a Hollywood winery).… Read the rest

Making Everything Awesome Again

Yeah, everything is boring. Streaming video, books, art—everything. It is the opposite of “everything is awesome” and, once again, it came about as a result of the internet attention economy. Or at least that is what Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times tells us, rounding up some thoughts from a literary critic as a first step and then jumping into some new social criticism that suggests the internet has ruined snobbery.

I was thinking back to the 1990s after I read the piece. I was a working computational linguist who dabbled in simulated evolution and spent time at Santa Fe Institute studying dreamy artificial life concepts. In my downtime I was in an experimental performance art group that detonated televisions and projected their explosions on dozens of televisions in a theater. I did algorithmic music composition using edge-of-chaos self-assembling systems. I read transgressive fiction and Behavioral and Brain Sciences for pleasure. I listened to Brian Eno and Jane Sibbery and Hole while reading Mondo 2000. My girlfriend and I danced until our necks ached at industrial/pop-crossover clubs and house parties. An early “tech nomad” visited us at one of our desert parties. Both in my Peace Corps service in Fiji and then traveling in Europe and Japan, I was without a cell phone, tablet, and only occasionally was able to touch email when at academic conferences where the hosts had kindly considered our unique culture. There was little on the internet—just a few pre-memes struggling for viability on USENET.

Everything was awesome.

But there was always a lingering doubt about the other cultural worlds that we were missing, from the rise of grunge to its plateau into industrial, and of the cultural behemoth cities on the coasts.… Read the rest

The Art of War

I was moved today by images and video of Ukrainian citizens taking up arms against Russian aggression. I contrasted those images with a drier, intellectualized stream of essays and opinion pieces from WaPo, NY Times, CNN, BBC, Atlantic, and others. I now know the history and conflicted consequences of NATO expansion, as well as how it was blocked in Georgia and now Ukraine by corrupted roadmaps for implementation. I expanded my understanding of Taiwan and colonial states’ self-determination after World War II. I read up on how Javelin missile systems work. I dipped into Honoré de Balzac’s “The Girl with the Golden Eyes” because, well, it was waiting for me. I bought Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H and watched half of it because Sally Kellerman died recently. It was all war, security, brutality, hopelessness, idealizations and global order, plus a layer cake of 19th-century Parisian capitalist critique wrapped up in interminable verbiage to resemble a short story (I stumbled along in French, truly, as well. It didn’t make it better.)

What was left to do?

Music, clearly. There must be perfect pieces and composers for this moment. First, we start with Ukraine itself, and Lysenko. Qobuz gives us Solmia Soroka and Arthur Greene’s Mykola Lysenko: Complete Music for Violin and Piano. Lysenko was an ethnomusicologist who specialized in Ukrainian folk music and represents the Romantic trends of his time, doing for Ukrainian fiddling what Brahms did for Hungary (cultural appropriation much?) or Dvořák and Smetana for Czech sensibilities.

But what of war, invasion, and resistance? We can start with Sibelius’s Finlandia because a day with Sibelius is always an epic adventure, and winter ups the ante. Finlandia served as an artistic attack on Russian censorship and russification, performed using alternative titles and lyrics.… Read the rest

Gimmicky Nonfictional Fictional Futures

Salman Rushdie’s new collection of essays, The Language of Truth, begins with an ecstatic celebration of the magical tales of old worlds—wonder tales as he would have it. As the foremost magical realist of the East in the West, Rushdie has thrived on collecting his own dreams against the literary trends of the times (realism/formalism/transgressivism/whateverism). Sage advice from a master: “Don’t write what you know unless it is really interesting” or just dream better dreams. Having myself drifted away from reading fiction in recent years (a known trend in the publishing industry) and towards more and more detailed nonfiction, from the mind-control capabilities of cat shit to the mathematical learning algorithms embedded in the universe, I am certainly guilty of exactly what Rushdie rails against (a damned philistine of sorts), though I am equally skeptical of the Knausgård-style auto-fiction that is recently idealized as a contemporary answer to the vexing question of what new literary hell we deserve.

Still, magical realism or Rushdie-an wonder tales are essentially gimmicks for conveying sometimes lofty (say the shaping of thinking by modernity in Gabriel García Márquez or the effects of colonialism in Rushdie’s own works; Devapriya Roy suggests all “global novels,” which is code for New York/American, are idealizations of liberalism that work towards world peace in some suffused sensibility), but also often trivial observations about ancient human traditions. Calling this a cornerstone of truth begs a deeper question about what truths are being exposed. Is it this universality of the desire for power or the vanity of men and women? Is it the threat imposed by female eroticism to the stability of society? Rushdie likes to think these are answered by these olden forms but a most modern mind begs for explanations of a different sort when trying to map them to our most modern experience of society.… Read the rest

Fiction in a Preeminent Reality

Young Adult fiction almost always has a simple theme. The hero or heroine is slowly unveiled as a unique and salutary figure, special by birth or heritage, and ideally suited to save the world. Their coming of age is a progression of minor crises, often spread out over multiple volumes, and the reader identifies herself with the protagonist thus lifting her thoughts from the humdrum life of school and social expectations that crowd in from daily life. It is escapism in the most earnest sense, but it is also a form of narcissistic manipulation through fantasy and play. Think of Harry Potter, the Twilight books, the Lightning Thief, Katniss. There isn’t anything to learn as the characters pinball around and the onion’s layers are peeled back to reveal the primary conflict that is finally resolved with a grand confrontation. It’s anesthetizing in the grandiose fulfillment of teenage hopes for being desired and special. And it sells and sells, and with plenty of merch, too.

Literary adult fiction can have a similar anesthetic effect. In this case there is the solemn effort to draw out characterization until the reader identifies parts of themselves in the personas. Katy Waldman at The New Yorker takes on the du jour authors Naoise Dolan and Sally Rooney, both earnest young Irish writers claimed to represent the souls of millennials, in a recent review of Dolan’s Exciting Times. But the books come across as dull counterpoint to YA fiction in most ways. Where Harry Potter is on a journey to confront his familial nemesis, this literature has characters nodding to class struggle while “reflexively” (per Waldman) engaging in self-awareness about that struggle. There is no revolution going on because these bourgeois women and men are rebelling only cognitively to the Sturm und Drang of crusty Hong Kong life.… Read the rest

Originality, History, and Twee Cliché

The American composer John Adams recently complained during a stay-at-home streaming interview from his composing shack on California’s Lost Coast that Baroque composers had it easy. Their compositions had to conform to about four patterns. But for a modern composer every single piece has to be an original invention. It is daunting, intellectually and emotionally. I’ve noticed this in my own search for new voices in writing, whether my own or those of others.

I’ve been an enthusiast in the past, from the crystalline inward revelations of Goethe in translation to the angry unreliable narrators of 90s transgressive fiction. I reveled in Nabokov’s multilingual estrangement and in Pynchon’s anachronistic dialect in Mason & Dixon. In essays there are the hollowed-out abstractions that form an evocative background in writing about art and architecture, the verbose polysyllabic scrums of political writers at the fringes of liberalism and conservatism who are trying to trace out a living intellectual history, and even the conceptual ambiguity of Continental Philosophy that seems to purposefully undermine its own analytical efforts at clarification.

Martin Amis, in his collection of essays, The Rub of Time, has one central message: don’t do cliché. His second message is don’t write memoirs because they are just crude weapons for attacking your historical enemies, from family to critics. Yet there is a feeling, in retrospect, that the reverse-time narration of Time’s Arrow or the end-reveal of London Fields are a bit gimmicky. The writing is more accessible than a Pynchon, but the mechanics are more akin to short stories from 60s sci-fi, just labored at with greater literary travail.

So, yes, I’ve been an enthusiast in the past but am a critic now.… Read the rest

The Elusive in Art and Artificial Intelligence

Per caption.
Deep Dream (deepdreamgenerator.com) of my elusive inner Van Gogh.

How exactly deep learning models do what they do is at least elusive. Take image recognition as a task. We know that there are decision-making criteria inferred by the hidden layers of the networks. In Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), we have further knowledge that locally-receptive fields (or their simulated equivalent) provide a collection of filters that emphasize image features in different ways, from edge detection to rotation-invariant reductions prior to being subjected to a learned categorizer. Yet, the dividing lines between a chair and a small loveseat, or between two faces, is hidden within some non-linear equation composed of these field representations with weights tuned by exemplar presentation.

This elusiveness was at least part of the reason that neural networks and, generally, machine learning-based approaches have had a complicated position in AI research; if you can’t explain how they work, or even fairly characterize their failure modes, maybe we should work harder to understand the support for those decision criteria rather than just build black boxes to execute them?

So when groups use deep learning to produce visual artworks like the recently auctioned work sold by Christie’s for USD 432K, we can be reassured that the murky issue of aesthetics in art appreciation is at least paired with elusiveness in the production machine.

Or is it?

Let’s take Wittgenstein’s ideas about aesthetics as a perhaps slightly murky point of comparison. In Wittgenstein, we are almost always looking at what are effectively games played between and among people. In language, the rules are shared in a culture, a community, and even between individuals. These are semantic limits, dialogue considerations, standardized usages, linguistic pragmatics, expectations, allusions, and much more.… Read the rest