Klemm and Fantasy Articles Response

Klemm and Fantasy Articles

In regard to Klemm's article, I have made the point before that performance rides in the same metaphorical vehicle as other art; some raw material is rearranged on a scene to create some sort of new representation/environment/message. Anything can be art, by this metaphor, but we personally use our preferences to distinguish between "good" and "bad" and "weird" artworks.

In regard to the article on interactive art, I think that there is much more controversy here than just involves a systematic, generating system. What was explored recently by the hollywood film "Her", and many other films such as Tron, Wall-E, and more, is the idea or sentience arising from highly advanced machines. Naturally, we like it when things are more like us; that is, they have emotion. Certainly "her" is just a computer program, but does she not have enough of a personality for Joaquin Phoenix' character to fall in love with her?

But as I said, and as the text even mentions, this whole idea has a scope reaching far beyond just film and intermedia. As we reach new eras of technology every decade or so, we come to new possibilities that can make a human like system a reality, whether it is just in the way we look and move and react, or, the greater task, how we think (about 10:00, 40:00, and 150:00) and feel. While we currently hold endless lectures and have enormous corporations and firms looking into the idea of artificial intelligence and the like (such as Facebook and Google), it still remains an incredibly difficult task to tackle for several reasons, as Noam Chomsky discusses (about 42:30).

Chomsky, and earlier, Minsky, both gather attention not just to how a machine might have a mind, but how our brains indeed are machines, by many respects. At least by the mechanistic view of psychology, we are nothing but machines that have a neurologically programmed mind, and our emotions and thoughts are nothing but complex cognitive behaviors that arise from our neuronal wiring. It would be simple to say, then, that all we need to do to emulate the human mind in a machine is to also emulate our own physical computing system in their hardrive. Not so simple, in fact, when you consider the trillions of synapses that exist in the brain, and the hundreds of different specialty brain areas etc. Many use this argument that we cannot simply re-create the human mind as a counter to mechanistic theory, but the machinist simply insist that the complexity of the brain is simply too overwhelming, and that it is possible, yet too difficult a task to achieve at this age.

For the time being, however, we are caught in a stage of robotics and engineering and programming that is somewhat unattractive. This is distinctly because we are making machines that emulate humanity. That is we are stuck in the uncanny valley , where most of the most recent developments in artificial intelligence and humanoid robots just creep us the fuck out. So if any of the earlier videos made you a little unsettled, it was for good reason , since our brain naturally looks to recognize humans, and any human like thing that is distinctly not human looks just like a flawed, unnatural human, possibly diseased and someone our evolution should make us want to stay away from. We are making astounding progress in this field, for sure, and what we have done so far is cool, no doubt, but we still have a long way to go before we climb out of the uncanny valley.