digitaldust

My first Lomo shots. It seems my lomo has experienced a severe reality failure. Here are my first staggering steps into the world of lomography. End of the year 1999.

I was attracted to this Hunter S. Thompson quote when I read it whilst in the states.

As long as the constant speedy lure of… &lt insert current proffesion &gt … seemed more essential and important to me than the ugly, slow-burning reality of writing a novel, any effort to write fiction would have been a part-time, left-handed gig… And in any other line of work except writing, people who try to deal with the world and life and reality off a split focus base are called “schizoid” and are taken off the streets, as it were, for their own and the greater good.

It agrees with and sums up where my head is at. How much is the rent on that little house at the end of Vladimir Illyich Illyanov Street in Archangel.

It seems that my world view has flip-flopped. I am now feeling heavily Nihilistic. Although in recent history I’ve been very materialistic in my outlook I also believed that there was room for an optimistic existentialism on top of that. There was every reason to be alive as long as we look at it from a anthropomorphic view point. Now I’m not too sure. It all seems pointless. Random acts reduce us to powerlessness. There is no such thing as Satrean control. Even if I had exerted more control over my life, stupid and unlucky occurrences would have happened. And anyway, while exerting that control I would have gone crazy from the stress of it. Shit happens for no reason, both good and bad. How do I know that the good things in my life aren’t the result of good luck, as much as the shit that happens is the result of bad luck. Life is a lottery. The incident this weekend of my bike being stolen just goes to prove it. The universe takes away and can give back. There is no reason, there are only patterns or story if we look for it. Life is not a narrative, life is just a struggle against the dancing chaos that is the world around us.

So what should we be doing? Celebrating every minor victory and commiserating every loss? Trying to ignore it and transcend the stupidity of it all like the Buddhists and Schopenhauer? Build religions that tell us we can escape it at the end? Create philosophies that tell us that what we do does count in our lives, or in other peoples? Have children and inflict the same Sysiphean curse on them to continue our gene stock? Build buildings, create art works, write stories so that we will be remembered for a few meaningless years after our deaths?

Whatever it is I don’t want to have written on my gravestone “Here lies Dan Dixon. He was a nice guy.”

I just found this funky little game/simulation/art/interaction piece called FLUID. Keep playing there’s a couple of levels of interaction that go on.

Records Show U.S. Sent Germs to Iraq

“Oh why are these crazy people doing this to us?” Seemed to be the common distilled sound bite from Americans on the streets of New York post 9/11. Directed at these strange rag heads from half a world away who seemed all of a sudden to have started hating the US. Mad dictators and even crazier terrorists lined up to take pot shots at the greatest nation on earth for no good reason. I’m sure that if you did vox pops on the streets of the Middle East the same sound bites would come out… but with a completely different target.

Ask yourselves who’s crazy. If you poke an ant nest with a stick what happens?

Although she continued to make hand movements, after a few days she learned she could control the cursor 100 percent of the time with her brain alone. In a few trials each day during the ensuing weeks Aurora didn’t even bother to move her hand; she moved the cursor by just thinking about the trajectory it should take.

Robot control with the mind alone.

Yet again Science Fiction comes to life. This excellent article from Scientfic American talks about experiments with owl and macaque monkeys to provide direct brain/machine interfaces (BMI) for the control of prostheses. These neuroprostheses they are developing are intended for disabled people, but the applications for everyday use I think are more revolutionary and exciting.

In this article they were already talking about wireless. I think this aspect of the article with respect to the rate of neural connections they were talking about is very interesting. Most sci-fi/cyberpunk stuff has always talked about headjacks, plugs into your brain to connect stuff. But now with the wireless revolution well underway it seems that the bandwidth available for local wireless connections will far exceed the bandwidth that can actually be connected to the brain. I had been thinking about this a few weeks ago, but was concerned about the rate of information transfer in and out. But with prostheses control the required bandwidth would not be very much. For mental control of robotics it’s very small. You would still probably be using all your natural senses and by the time input has been mastered there will probably be even more wireless data bandwidth available. No need for messy sockets in the skull.

Imagine a wireless connection in your head that could control a mouse on the screen, all the devices in your house, drive your car… drool.

Each advance shows how plastic the brain is.