Oscar Schwartz

research notes twitter: @scarschwartz essays my website

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A project towards a universal library. By this art you may contemplate the variation of the 23 letters.

Amazing resource: an online version of Borges’ Library of Babel. Currently 10 to the 4677 books. Also includes background on Borges’ ideas and the art of combination.

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How Machines Write Poetry

It’s easy to write software that creates legible poetry. But computer scientists are interested in the next step: a program that’s actually creative.

Great overview of cutting edge in computer-generated poetry: exploring ideas such as creativity, metaphor and figurative language.

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This is a diagram of all 64 hexagrams of the yijing. It was sent to Leibniz by a Jesuit missionary called Joachim Bouvet, who studied yijing and China in order to illustrate its connection with Christian spirituality. Leibniz found in the diagram a type of confirmation of his binary system, the notion that all possible knowledge can be generated as a progression of contradicting dualities, a series of on-off, yes-no possibilities. 

If you read the diagram from the bottom and proceed counter clockwise, you’ll notice that the hexagrams proceed as the binary system does...

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Nor should we conceive too high an opinion of this dexterity of our wisdom when at times we are excessively surprised by the wonderful harmony created by the playing of our instrument—a harmony that sounds too good for us to dare to give the credit to ourselves. Indeed, now and then someone plays with us—good old chance; now and then chance guides our hand, and the wisest providence could not think up a more beautiful music than that which our foolish hand produces then.

Nietzsche, The Gay Science

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A Good Follower

A difficult thing about Twitter is deciding how to tweet: Am I the type of person who retweets a lot? Am I the type of person who tweets about their thoughts? Do I make jokes? Do I have a specific topic and not stray from it? Do I cover whatever news is trending? Do I interact with people a lot?

But recently, I’ve started to think more about how I read on Twitter, and therefore, how I follow on Twitter. Instead of “How do I get more followers?” I’m thinking about “How do I become a good follower?”

The reason I’ve started thinking about following more is because I’ve realised that the people I follow are the filter through which I interpret the world.

I try my best to follow a diverse group of people, but inevitably I am constrained by my interests and my biases. In a lot of ways, my Twitter follow list probably says more about me and my interests than my actual feed.

Recently, though, I’ve been feeling stifled by my follow list, and the way it filters my world. This may be a function of following more people than I used to - I’m at 637 (is there an optimal number of people to follow on Twitter?) But I also think that it is because I have become overly familiar with the filter that my Twitter creates for me - and when it becomes too familiar, the fact that it is just one of an almost infinite number possible follow lists dissolves; the world my follow list presents to me has become the world and it has taken on the illusion of a fixed, unchangeable reality.

I figure that the relativity of Twitter - the way it creates and sustains different worlds for different people with different interests - could be made obvious via experimental following practices. So I’ve come up with a few conceptual following practices aimed to help break out of a type of following that confirms one’s biases, outlooks.

1. Start deleting 1 person you follow every day and replacing them with another until you have a completely new follow list.

2. If you follow someone with a certain political or ideological position, make sure you follow another person with complete opposite opinion.

3. Follow exactly the same people as someone you admire.

4. Then follow exactly the same people as someone you despise.

5. Only follow people from a town with less than 50,000 people.

6. Only follow people on Twitter with your first and last name.

7. Only follow people with less than 40 followers, then less than 10 followers, then with more than 1 million followers.

8. Only follow bots.

9. Follow news outlets exclusively.

10. Only follow people who speak a language different to yours.

11. Try follow only people under the age of 20 and over the age 60.

12. Only follow people you know personally.

13. Don’t follow anyone who follows you. If someone you follow follows you back, unfollow them.

14. Follow 10,000 people

15. Only follow women

16. Only follow men

17. Go through current follow list and flip coin - heads = keep following; tails = unfollow.

A lot of these seem quite frivolous, and they are. They are meant to be. Frivolity might be a good option on the Internet these days. It’s like taking a holiday from your Twitter by inventing yourself a new Twitter. Either way, it’s a good way of coming to know and understand the world from different perspectives.

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Just casually reading Cicero’s On Divination and come across this beautiful question: Can a pig write poetry?

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This twitter account @alltheminutes retweets every minute of the day according to some random person who tweeted about this minute.

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Computers Demanding Money

1. One of the first things my poetry teacher said was, “poetry is the opposite of money.” Then he taught us about how Rimbaud transformed poetic language through a “systematic derangement of the senses”, how he lived in poverty in London with Verlaine, and then how he made a fortune trading coffee, ivory and guns in Abyssinia.

2. I just finished reading Franco Berardi’s weird book, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance.

3. The central argument of the book is this: by breaking the link between the word and the world, modernist poetry pre-figured financial capitalism. What finance learnt from Rimbaud was how to separate the signifier from signified. Rimbaud allowed “language” to exist as its own bodiless material. The logic of finance similarly separates value from commodity and allows money to exist as abstract value without a body.

4. “The financialization of the capitalist economy implies a growing abstraction of work from its useful function, and of communication from its bodily dimension. As symbolism experimented with the separation of the linguistic signifier from its denotational and referential function, so financial capitalism, after internalising linguistic potencies, has separated the monetary signifier from its function of denotation and reference to physical goods.”

5. In 1965, A. Michael Noll, an engineer at Bell Labs, won first prize in an art competition for computer-generated works. He won with an algorithm that created works that were more or less indistinguishable from Mondrian’s line works. Part of what interested Noll in computer-generated art was how it undermined the Kantian notion that art stems from a type of genius “for which no definite rule can be given.”  

6. Computer-art researcher Grant Taylor describes the difficult Noll faced when trying to copyright the images his algorithms created:

“When Noll attempted to register the copyright for Gaussian Quadratic with the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress, they refused. Their refusal was on the grounds that a “machine had generated the work.”  Noll patiently explained that a human being had written the program, which incorporated randomness and order. They again declined to register the work, stating that randomness was not acceptable. The copyright was finally accepted when Noll explained that although the numbers generated by the program “appeared ‘random’ to humans, the algorithm generating them was perfectly mathematical and not random at all.” Thus Gaussian-Quadratic became the first example of copyrighted digital art. By registering copyright, however, Noll took the position of creative artist, a designation that he was ambivalent about.”

7. An underlying principle of the Turing Test is that the ability to use language in a human-like way is an essential part of intelligence. Turing constitutes “intelligent being” as a thing that talks well enough.

8. Internet marketers tell us that if we can tell our story “authentically” we’ll get an audience and make money. There is now an industry of “authentic communication”. The human constituted as one-person media company.

9. Michael Hardt defines affective labor as work that primarily consists of "the constitution of communities and collective subjectivities.” Hardt thinks that because affective labour has traditionally been unpaid, it is often understood as an “alternative to the processes of capitalist valorization.” However, the capitalisation of online sociality that occurred during the transition to Web 2.0 positioned affective labour in a way that made it directly productive of capital. That is, on free social networking platforms, it is the "constitution of communities and collective subjectivities" that creates the platforms’ value.  

10. The confluence of authenticity, language, capitalism and data.

11. Who gets paid when software tells you it loves you?

12. Turing could imagine thinking machines but not the automation of language, the reduction of affective language to exchange. 

13. A computer passes the Turing Test when it demands remuneration for the time spent talking to you online.

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A website that let's you see how many people around the world are breathing in sync with you.

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Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more when they affect the word… Technologies are artificial, but – paradox again – artificiality is natural to the human being.

Walter Ong

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Pictures of people wearing hermeneutically interesting t-shirts in Hong Kong.

From: hongkongpeoplestshirts.tumblr.com/

And more here at The New Inquiry

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We are breeding a new generation of human beings who will learn more words from a machine than from their mothers.

Rose Khon Goldsen