Colin Ellard - You Are Here

The space was singing

David Rokeby, Toronto new media artist, talked about his work here in Kitchener last night, in conjunction with the CAFKA-Haptic contemporary art festival.  The installation that he brought with him, a project that obsessed him for over a decade, is called the "Very Nervous System."   In the words of Marcel Duchamp, he now classifies this project as 'definitively unfinished.'  It has much yet to offer, but not in Rokeby's hands.

This incarnation of the installation sits just outside of the front doors of Kitchener City Hall and is almost entirely invisible.  In fact, an unobservant visitor could walk right through it without noticing that it was there at all.  The Very Nervous System consists of a small hidden camera, a few speakers, and some clever computing.  The camera and computer divide a zone of space into a number of small segments, and Rokeby programs a palette of sounds that are produced by movements through the zones.  In keeping with the haptic theme of this year's festival, the sounds are locally produced recordings of hands moving over tools, materials, and hardware.  Though this is not a very difficult thing to do with current technology, Rokeby's first version of the work, in the early 1980's, required him to build his own cameras and to program the entire effort in something that only the bravest go near these days -- 'assembly language programming' - Rokeby's apt analogy was that writing in assembly was a bit like sculpting using atoms. 

There was much to interest me in Rokeby's talk, but one idea captured my mind completely.  Rokeby explained that at some point in the development of the project, he came to feel that the computer was beginning to anticipate his movements.  He tried various kinds of 'gunslinger' games to try to initiate a movement before the speakers announced his movement with a sound, but he found that he could never do so.  The sound of his movement always seemed to precede his decision to make a movement by a fraction of a second.  Rokeby delved into the neuroscience literature and discovered the work of Benjamin Libet, who has shown, astonishingly, that we somehow become conscious of a decision to act some time after the decision has actually been made.  The experiments are clever.  They involve asking a participant to watch a sweeping clock hand while making random and unpredictable decisions to carry out a simple movement.  When they report the location of the clock hand at the time they felt they made the decision, brain and muscle traces always report that the bodily activity accompanying the movement has already begun when the conscious 'decision' is being made.  This finding, fascinating all by itself, has rippling implications.  A friend of mine (in fact the person who introduced me to Rokeby's work about a year ago) advised me to spend a lot of quality time in the Very Nervous System.  "The longer you spend in the space, the better the experience becomes because the computer learns about you," he said.   As it turns out, this is not true at all, but it resonates with Rokeby's experiences with this and other installations that the more closely peoples' actions are monitored, the more detailed and fine-grained the surveillance, the more they feel they are having a truly interactive experience.  Our mental confusion about when things happen, the smearing of event time, can invert our commonplace constructions of causality.

In short:  our conscious selves don't exactly have the kind of access to our decision-making processes that we might think.  Decisions seem not to originate in conscious acts of will, but somewhere else.  Consciousness somehow skiffs along the surface of our actions, noting them, constructing interesting and entertaining accounts of what we do, but not really providing the motive force.  As Rokeby points out, there are some ominous overtones.  Lacking a firm grasp on when we do things, we won't necessarily know why we act. 

Rokeby and Stelarc make a fine pair at this festival.  Stelarc robbed me of my 'where' and now Rokeby questions my 'when'.  This has been a dazzling and slightly disorienting week of ideas for me.

Third ears, teleportation, and the end of bodies

I had an utterly mind-stretching hour last night listening to Stelarc's tour through the history of his performances, beginning with his astonishing and eye-catching "suspensions" series that had him hovering naked over city and sea, impaled by huge meat hooks attached to wires, and ending with his presentation of a "prosthetic head" -- a five metre high projected image of Stelarc-head, complete with animated facial expressions and eye movements, and ready with witty, ironic, deep, or sometimes just plain silly replies to questions from the audience.  It's not hard to get the impression after a quick scan through his website that the main objective of much of Stelarc's performance art has been to draw attention to himself through a series of actions that almost seem to revile living flesh, provoking visceral, head-averting reactions from the audience.  At times, it was hard enough to look at the pictures, let alone experience the real thing.  But listening to Stelarc's words, ruminating on the thematic threads that run through all of his work, it is hard not to stand in awe of his approach to the delivery of his message.  Stelarc's artistic argument is that "the body is obsolete."  Technology that delivers instant messages from one place to another has had an enormous impact on how we see and use physical space.  In a sense, space as Newton understood it has disappeared.  But what Stelarc has done is to find ways to use this effect of modern technology to make clear what he sees as a deep truth about the illusory nature of self-hood.  The everyday notion that we human beings are embodied causative agents, he says, is nothing more than a mirage.  Things happen.  Our bodies, or perhaps just parts of them, participate in these events, but don't cause them.  And whatever the nature of this participation might be, it is a mistake, he says, to locate it in our bodies. 

To demonstrate the argument, Stelarc finds ways to blur, distort, or reverse the connections between human bodies and the dynamic events taking place in vast, disconnected spaces.  By means of muscle stimulators embedded in his arm, he surrenders control of his own body to a foreign operator, either human or computer.  By growing a third ear in his forearm using cutting edge cell culture biotechnology, Stelarc turns a part of his body into an auditory portal tuned using Bluetooth to the Internet.  Eventually, we will be able to dial up Stelarc's brachial ear on the Internet and listen to what his arm is hearing.  Perhaps he will even think of re-inserting the muscle stimulators so that we can tune and direct the ear.  If so, then whose body, whose causes, and whose acts?

I wasn't the only audience member to notice Stelarc's peculiar references to himself as "the body", and it reminded me of a year spent sitting in a group with a remarkable Buddhist teacher, who encouraged us to work towards a state of detachment or 'equanimity' from our own minds, the point being, I think, that each of us participated in a vastly complicated nexus of cause and effect that transcended the individual.  Just as Stelarc argued last night, personal agency was an illusion.

The sense of self fascinates me.  Converging evidence from neuroscience suggests that there are specialized circuits in our brains whose function is to put a sense of self, or personal agency together.  Certain pathologies, produced by strokes or other diseases, can fracture self-hood.  Even some pathologies of sleep, most likely connected to the same brain areas, can produce peculiar shifts of self-hood, such as the out-of-body experience.  Imaging studies are suggesting that experienced meditators may have found ways to 'quiet' or alter this part of their brains.

In our laboratory, and following the leads of some others, we have begun to experiment with virtual reality methods to encourage the breakdown of the sense of self.  This can be done by having someone wear virtual reality goggles which are connected to cameras showing a remote view of themselves.  People see themselves move and act from a remote perspective, and we stand by, ready to mix and remix the connections between the actions they see and the effects they expect.  We're doing this to try to understand more about where selves come from and how they locate themselves, but Stelarc's talk last night reminded me of the bigger picture, that such questions lie at the root of much human philosophy, religion, and art. 

The years immediately ahead of us, where the interests of scientists, artists, and other thinkers converge to produce striking new views of the connections between minds and spaces, may well produce some of the defining moments of our evolution as a self-reflecting species.

Art and science

One of the most enjoyable parts of being involved in the new virtual reality centre at the University of Waterloo is that I've had a chance to meet people who are interested in many of the same things as me (it's amazing how often the words 'space' and 'place' come up in ordinary discourse -- everywhere from conversations among teenagers who 'need their space' to discussions of architecture, politics, engineering, psychology and the arts).  Among the most intriguing of these interactions are those I've been able to have with new media artists.  As a scientist, I'm still getting used to the idea that one might want to build a complicated virtual reality installation not to understand, explain and take control of something (hopefully for some productive purpose) but rather in much more playful way -- to make a non-verbal commentary on some aspect of the natural or built world or the connections between the two.

This weekend, I've been spending time at an ambitious exhibition of such work, headlined by Stelarc, an Australian performance artist who often insinuates himself into his performances by means of real physical (and, by the look of it, painful) connections between man and machine.  I've seen a wild variety of performances, installations and exhibits -- a responsive blanket that senses your movements to more effectively wrap itself around you, a customized rainshower that caresses you with gentle raindrops while serenading you with an interesting palette of sounds, a space that invites you to use your ears to reinterpret your own movements so that your connection with the external world is recalibrated. 

Over the next few days I'll be going to some talks, going back to some of the installations to revisit and think about them a bit more and, whenever possible, I'll write about these projects in this space. 

Math games

                    

Late for school, but not really very concerned about that, as long as we were there to drink each other's company without too many distractions, my daughter and I stood at a busy corner , counting cars, waiting to cross.  She has had some rough tumbles with her math textbook lately.  I saw a teachable moment.

"Hey, kiddo, how many of these cars have just one person in them?"
"All of them do, Dad."
"How many people can fit into one car?"
"At least four."
"So, if these people got together and shared rides, how many fewer cars would we have just counted, and how much easier would it be for us to get across the road?"

I'm brilliant.  Brilliant!  Eco-mathematics.  Quantitative urban planning for grade 4 math.

My daughter tilted her head up at me with a crooked smile. She fixed me with dark pools of eyes, little dimples of amusement forming.

"Dad.  I know what you're trying to do.  But we're studying 'area' in math.  Not cars."
"Oh, ok.  So how big is your room?  How many meters across?"
"About as big as this road.  20 meters."
"Really?  How tall am I?"
"10 meters."

The traffic cleared.  We crossed the road.  I had to duck underneath the telephone wires.

Changing spaces

I've been experiencing a dizzying array of spatial changes this week, but on vastly different scales.  First, a story that has splashed across many newspaper front pages shows that the Arctic sea ice has retreated so much that, right now, there is a navigable sea passage across the top of Canada.  Though the passage won't stabilize for a few years yet, this change in the shape of the human planet has a remarkable number of consequences.  For one, it reduces the length of the sea route from Europe to Asia by about 6000 km.  For another, it opens the possibility of considerable marine traffic passing through a sensitive part of the globe.  For a third, the politically sensitive issue of who actually "owns" these waters is likely to heat up.  Every few years, Canada sends a small marine presence across the top of the country in hopes of laying claim to the passage, while other countries mostly withhold judgement.  We've known this  change was coming, but it wasn't expected quite so soon.  It's a remarkable remapping of human geography.

On the tiniest of scales, I've experienced a similar sea change in my own human geography.  In an effort to wrest more livable space from our house, we are moving walls, windows, and doors.  We watched a delivery man stand on our front porch on Friday, vexed by the fact that where there should be a door, there is now a window.  My young son wanders around the main floor of our house, perplexed by the new wall that we've put up to reorganize an entry way.  He circles around, peering at the new vantage points that have been opened up, scratching his head at what used to be open space but is now closed wall.  We carefully avoid placing anything on the floor in front of what used to be a doorway but is now a closed wall.  Every time I walk through the house, I am surprised by what can and cannot be seen.  I can't avoid stopping, standing in front of the changes, and thinking about the possibilities. It's a remarkable thing to recognize how the shapes of our lived spaces and their connections with the outside world influence us.  The walls we put up aren't much -- sheets of drywall, rows of bricks, panes of glass, yet they exert an enormous effect on how we move, feel and think.

Space and time

There's much in the news this week about speed.  Transport Canada has unveiled a pilot program to encourage drivers to adhere to posted speed limits.  The idea is that a small computer containing a GPS device will compare actual speed with recommended speed and drivers who do the right thing will be rewarded with points that can be cashed in for some kind of swag (as yet to be determined).  Apparently, previous attempts to achieve the same end by 'punishing' speeders using chiming alarms or by forcibly throttling down the accelerator failed.  As both a psychologist and a parent, this doesn't surprise me at all. 

Future plans, which interest me a lot, include the idea of embedding intelligence into our roadways so that the point system can be geared to prevailing conditions -- weather, traffic, and so on.  This idea of ubiquitous or ambient technology, in which our lives are made more comfortable and easier by gizmos that adapt to both our own internal workings and the greater environment, holds promise.  A curmudgeon might complain that we're giving up some freedom, but I think the more enlightened view is that our minds, especially our limited capacity for focal attention -- the mental bottleneck of most of what we can do in a day -- are being freed to focus on what matters.  Who wants to calculate a safe driving speed when they could be planning an efficient route or even just enjoying the views?

Other findings released this week suggest that our evolutionary forebears were trudgers.  Lacking an Achilles tendon, early hominids would have been slow and inefficient runners.  This would have made it difficult for them to hunt live animals for food.  The slow evolution of the biomechanics required for fleetness of foot was a key development for our species, but little is known about how this came about.

Two stories, one rooted in our ancient history and the other looking forward into a hyper-technological future, but both of them about how the marriage of space and time to make speeds both fast and slow influence the episodes of our everyday life.  Slow me down and space expands.  I may see and notice more, but perhaps my opportunities are limited.  Speed me up and space contracts.  Put a telephone or a Blackberry into my hands and space, in a way, disappears.  How do our minds accommodate to the waxing and waning of life's velocities, and what effect does this have on the shapes of our lived spaces?

The anniversary

We all know where we were six years ago.  I remember walking through the history department at the University of Waterloo, on my way to meet my first class of the semester, wondering why every room I passed seemed to contain a television tuned to CNN.  It was only hours later that I completely understood the magnitude of the thing, and we're still coming to terms with how the world has changed since 9/11.

Who flies an airliner filled with ordinary travelers into a gigantic building filled with ordinary office workers?  What kind of anger precipitates that kind of action? The answers are complex, to say the least.

Mohamed Atta, one of the masterminds of the attacks, was trained as an architect and an urban planner.  In an interview with the Australian Broadcast Corporation, Dittmar Machule, Atta's thesis supervisor for his Master's degree, offers some insights.

One of Atta's greatest passions as a student of the built environment was the manner in which he perceived modern Western forms of building to have invaded ancient Muslim designs.  Muslim streetscapes and buildings are designed to help reinforce cultural norms -- family hierarchies, gender segregation, privacy.

In the interview with Liz Jackson, Machule described Atta's concerns: "It's a problem with destroying our little narrow courtyards. It's a problem that somebody builds high rise towers in our neighbourhood so that the people can look at our courtyard and that was what he was dealing in and what he was interested in."

It might seem an overstatement to suggest that Atta was driven to jihad by the evolving shapes of the streets of Damascus, but it would also be a mistake to underestimate the power of space's shape to move us, make us feel, and motivate us to act.

Getting to the 'ask'

In an article today in the online publication Grist, Michael Tidwell argues that there's a possible downside to encouraging people to undertake small, local actions to combat climate change.  The heart of the argument is that those "10 Things You Can Do to Combat Climate Change" lists published in well-meaning magazine articles could either have the effect of minimizing the scope of the problem ("If my changing a few lightbulbs will right our course, then the problem must be a small one so I needn't worry") or causing us to despair ("If all I can do personally to fix this is to pay a few dollars for carbon offsets when I fly, then we're doomed").  Tidwell argues that personal action needs to be augmented by sweeping, dramatic, legislative reform of "Churchillian" magnitude. 

I think parts of this argument are correct.  There is a real risk that  grassroots campaigns to fix the environment will be derailed by despair.  In fact, I bet that Tidwell's motivations in writing this article were driven to some extent by despair.  People aren't changing their ways voluntarily, so perhaps it's time for the jackboots and the truncheons.  I understand the feeling.  I stand at a busy streetcorner every morning, waiting for my turn to cross a road crowded with cars filled with single occupants commuting to city jobs from McMansions in the suburbs.  I watch parents sitting in cars waiting for their children to come out of school, engines idling to keep the A/C running.  Waiting for their children.   I see people clamouring to find $5 t-shirts at discount stores, either oblivious to the human costs of getting those shirts on the shelves, or feeling helpless economically to do otherwise.

When election time comes, what would those people do to the politicians who proposed legislation that forced us to live in an environmentally responsible manner?  People are basically good, thoughtful, well-meaning.  We care about what happens to our children, and their children. But we're not making the connections between our own actions and what is happening to the planet.  Psychologically, we're not 'wired' to make those connections easily.   Ironically, many of the technologies that we've been able to develop with cheap carbon-intensive energy sources (rapid transit, instant telecommunication) have conspired to disconnect us further still from our spatial relationship with the rest of the planet.

It's been said so many times before, but I'll muster the breath to say it again.  In a democracy, people get the government that they ask for.  Governments will only enact tough laws to curb carbon outputs if we ask them to do so in very large numbers.  It's getting to the 'ask' that matters, and that's where those local actions count.    Getting to the 'ask' means understanding how we're connected to the planet and its problems, and this is a psychological problem, not a technological or political one.

Why this book?

I’ve always been a believer in the power of long walks to unravel hard problems and to even out sour moods. The problem is – I’m inclined to get lost. One of my favourite walking spots is a small area of forest with the apt name, Sudden Tract. I’m not sure if the name comes from the way that the park suddenly appears on the side of an ordinary stretch of Ontario county road, or if it is more because of the sudden events that seem to take place there. On my first visit there, some years ago, I suddenly became lost in Sudden Tract.  

 It was a cold, January afternoon. I was a few weeks into my first sabbatical, casting about for ideas for a long textbook on the evolution of the brain that I thought I wanted to write. I went for a drive to liberate some thoughts. There’s something about slipping along quiet highways with a rush of blurred colour passing by the windows that always jogs free unexpected ideas from my murky mental backwaters. On this occasion, though, I saw the Sudden sign, let loose a squawk of delight, and took a hard turn into the gravel parking lot. A single, winding trail led from the lot into the woods, offering just the right combination of mystery, expectation and promise to lure me quickly out of my seat and in among the trees. I wasn’t dressed for the cold, and my sneakers didn’t do well in the deep snow, but I only planned to stay for a few minutes, just the first few turns in the trail. I came quickly to a choice point with four criss-crossing pathways. I chose one, continued on for a minute to a crow’s foot intersection and then picked another path at random. The twists and turns, the interesting bumps and hills, and the perfect mix of softwood spruce and birch trees pulled me out of myself and made me lose track completely of time and place. My mind wandered over the hills, around the next corner, and farther afield. I imagined myself high above the forest, looking down at my path, trying to imagine where I was in the bigger picture, a dot among the fallow, snow-covered corn fields of southwestern Ontario. Then my mind flew home, in my basement study, making notes about peculiar arrangements of receptors in insect eyes. The inevitable conclusion of this nimble mental voyage was the presence of a flabby, out-of-shape psychologist, standing breathless in the middle of a perfect quiet winter forest without a clue about where he was or how he was going to get home. As the sun began to set and the cloud of frosty breath around my head betrayed the drop in temperature, I had my first thought that, absurd as it might seem, I could be in some trouble here. The overcast sky blotted out the sun’s position, giving me very little clue as to direction in the deepening dusk. The woods looked equally inscrutable in all directions. All of that wonderful mystery had now converted to a growing unease and a quickening feeling of anxiety in my guts. In a way, this was crazy. I knew from faint recollections of maps of the area that this must be a tiny space, probably no bigger than a large shopping mall. I knew I’d have to be ineffably stupid to freeze out here, but I sensed a growing possibility that I’d emerge from the park at some other place than the parking lot and then I’d have to beg a passing driver for help. What if no-one came by? I could wander the roads for hours trying to find the turn-off where I’d left my car. I hurried off down the first trail I saw, picking paths through the labyrinth by trying to guess whether I’d seen each vista before or not. Clinging to a faint sense of the familiar to make my choices, I made mistake after mistake, once even turning up in another empty parking lot that looked so much like the one where I’d left my car that I entertained fleetingly the idea that the car had been stolen. Eventually, my remaining stamina, the mathematics of the random walk which always eventually returns you to where you began, and probably a bit of luck found me standing at my car door breathless, freezing, and soaked with sweat. On the humbled drive home, I had found a new topic for my research and for a book. I wanted to know why we get lost.

Welcome

Welcome to my new blog. My book, A Natural History of Space, will be published by HarperCollins Canada in 2008.