So I’m sick, which basically sucks. However, sometimes there’s an upside. Maybe it’s the fever, maybe it’s boredom, but I have the strangest dreams when I’m ill.

So, in this dream I’m taking a test. It’s a specialized test, called a Change Blindness test. Normally, humans are pretty awesome at spotting small changes; we’re good with patterns and narrative, bad with things that aren’t. Change blindness is that strange exception to the rule, where our ability to spot change right in plain view is remarkably poor. This is some pretty interesting stuff because it gets down to the nitty-gritty concepts of perception. One of them is the notion of something called “Cross Modal Sensory Confusion”. That’s just a fancy way of saying we use more than one sense to commonly confirm our impressions. For instance, you might hear a very indistinct name such as Anne or Pam, but if you happened to be watching the person speak it, the specific lip movement would clue you in. But it goes a little further. Sometimes these senses inform each other so much that they actually ALTER your perception; that’s the confusion part. In the Anne/Pam example, if a video was substituted of a person making a pursed lip motion for “Pam” but the audio said “Anne” most people “hear” the word Pam. Another classic example is potato chips. For most people, the crunchiness of potato chips has less to do with their actual texture than it does with their sound. Scientists report that people who have their hearing muffled while eating chips consistently report the chips as less crispy. Cross Modal Perception and Synesthesia both are yielding interesting insights into human cognition.

In my dream I’m being asked to scan large fields of blinking dots with one eye and graphic drawings of items in the other, looking for specific changes. Normally, a small change on a uniform pattern of dots would be easy to spot, but the blinking complicates this. In my dream, this pattern reminds of me of the mechanical screen tones artists sometimes use to shade illustrations. The small dots are printed on clear film. What’s cool is, if you layer the film on top of itself, and angle it a bit, the uniform fields create patterns with themselves. Mathematics refers to this phenomena as a “Beat Frequency”. There are lots of examples of this in nature, but basically any wave crossing over another one can create a new, distinct pattern. A musician friend once demonstrated this to me by setting up two speakers on opposite sides of the room, each playing an individual undulating sound. In the middle of the room, where the two sounds intermixed, a third beat became audible. Anyway, these blinking dot patterns were giving me a headache. As I stared at a drawing of a bunny with one eye, the dots in the other, I would get a sharp pain in my head. But if I blinked either eye I found the headache went away. The two images, coming together in my head, were producing the pain and it occurred to me that some forms of pain might be a function of Cross-Modal Sensory Confusion and Beat Frequency.

Pain, in general, serves many useful functions. It informs us we’re being injured or something is wrong and we should take action –a hand on a hot stove or a toothache for instance. It can inform us we’ve pushed ourselves too hard and we should take it easy –sore muscles after an exercise, a sore knee or back. But chronic pain doesn’t serve this useful function. Unlike the transient nature of acute pain, chronic pain lingers and has a terrible impact on quality of life. Medical science has made enormous strides in repairing the underlying causes of acute pain, but when it comes to chronic pain, it’s as if we’re still in the dark ages. Statistics tell us 1/5 of the adult population suffers from chronic pain. It’s referred to as the “Silent Epidemic” and acknowledged as the most costly health problem in America, yet it remains commonly under-treated, misdiagnosed and misunderstood. Migraines, injury, lumbago, neuralgia, neuropathy, fibromyalgia, arthritis, disease, the list of things that make us hurt are endless. The list of effective treatments is frustratingly small.

In what I can only call a most curious coincidence, this morning’s RSS feed contained an NPR story called How Do You Amputate A Phantom Limb? In it, a doctor has an amputee patient with chronic pain in the phantom limb. The doctor treats the problem with a box and a mirror. The patient sees his other hand in the place where his amputated limb is and is instructed to practice clenching and unclenching it. To everyone’s surprise, the treatment works. The Doctor theorizes that the brain had not caught up to the reality of the missing limb and that the brain’s mental map of the body needed to be reconfigured. What he saw is what he became. Considering sight is a major factor in how we both relate to the world and our own bodies, it seems only logical that it could be exploited as an equally powerful cross-modal therapy. This can hardly be the only example of these principles at work in the real world.

People ask me about cloud computing sometimes and I’m usually ambivalent. Ok, distributed computing is useful, but it’s really just an efficient use of existing resources -a networking optimization. I don’t necessarily buy it as revolutionary concept. People try to democratize the system, but essentially the most-discussed paradigm is informationally asymmetric (the work of the many serves the needs of the few) so there’s not much immediate benefit, or guarantee of one, for most of us. Cloud computing is this year’s “timeshare”. But the idea isn’t a wash if you mix it up a bit. Let’s use music as a metaphor.

I used to listen to music on the radio. That sucked. What few stations I got were awful, and when I heard songs I was interested in, it was random. Ok, it was free… but there were ads and the songs I liked played too often, or not often enough. It was someone else’s playlist and that meant tons of crap to endure between the good stuff. Frustrated, I bought albums and made my own mixtapes. Eventually, my tapes became CD’s and my mixtapes were replaced with .mp3 playlists. The important thing is I went from a limited number of music channels, and someone else’s audio agenda, to unlimited channels and my agenda. Old news, I know. But what both of those shifts shared in common was the limited number of people responsible for creating the playlists. Cloud computing changes this.

These days I listen to music online. Pandora is pretty cool, but sites like The Hypemachine just might represent the future of entertainment. Hypemachine is curiously different than other online music stations because it scans and aggregates music blogs on the web and allows you to listen, from one central place, the contents of the blogosphere. Notice the audio agenda? The playlist is not generated by any single person. It’s generated by what all the people are talking and posting about. People can vote on their favorite songs of course, and seach data is tracked, so popularity searches inside the site are possible. But theoretically, with metadata, the search criteria are limitless. What’s interesting about this is that a computer, performing an unbiased statistical analysis of individual contributions, automates the distribution and exposure of relevant new media customized individually to you. Sorry, that was a mouthful, but that’s a form of cloud computing.

In mass communication, this concept is referred to as a “Gatekeeper”. In my music metaphor, DJ’s used to be the gatekeepers. They controlled which songs were played, they were the filter. If he had similar tastes as you it was great. But if he was taking payola, you got what some record company wanted you to get. As the Information Age progresses, and the sheer volume of data and media we need to sift though becomes larger and larger, we need assistance to find the signal in the noise. Increasingly, software has become the gatekeeper of choice. Amazon is scary in its ability to select book choices I might be interested in. I sift Google News using topical filters. My RSS tracks updates to only the few sites I’m interested in.

Where is this all headed? Some say the Semantic Web. We teach the World Wide Web to index itself, to classify our information automagically, and filter it for us. But the problem is computers don’t think like we do. As we become increasingly dependent on computer algorithms in the gatekeeper role, successful distribution of your ideas will hinge on your ability to be indexed and understood by a machine. In short, data on the web will have to comply to whatever indexing mechanics become popular. We see this now to a limited extent with Google. Search Engines index content by using simple keywords and a few other criteria to determine relevance. Exploiting this system and topping a search list can yield substantial financial gain as well as advantageous memetic fecundity. Complex ideas and metaphorical constructs, the cream of human expression, are largely incompatible with machine logic because they’re heavily reliant on human, not logical, experience. The risk here is that in a rush to accommodate convenience we’re potentially changing our communication behaviors. If the basic building blocks of ideas are formulated using language, linguistically speaking you can then argue this potentially changes the very way we think. I don’t know about you, but I already observe a dangerous amount of literal, mechanical thinking and not nearly enough of the creative thinking accountable for our most progressive insights. To be fair, the Semantic Web can encompass these values, but realistically an implementation will be in place before these technical limitations are solved.

I sometimes wonder what they’ll call the World Wide Web when the Moon gets its own IP address. A thinking human and a thinking computer can parse that statement, but only one might smile. The sad fact is humans are already short-sighted enough as it is, so let’s design informational systems that promote creativity and insight, not ones that limit it. I’ll concede this point when a computer can be programmed to understand my dirty jokes or explain to me exactly why I hate the term “World Wide Web”. But until that time let’s not let them control it.

People sometimes say “Art is dead. You can’t do anything new, it’s all been done before.” Whenever someone tells me this I know I’m looking at an idiot. For one, it’s easy to parrot the cliché in favor of an original thought. But also, given the popular perception of what we call art these days it’s the safe bet; and worse, a difficult argument for a dignified artist to refute. Generally they’re baiting me; they barf this pronouncement onto the floor, writhing like a parasite in foamy blood, both ill-equipped to defend it and strangely confident with their position. It’s a fallacy of course, if for any other reason because it presupposes the argument that art has to do something new. But the armchair pundits have a point. When the idiots become brave enough to assault the artist in his own territory, it’s clear they sense weakness and the pack grows more confident and starts to circle. How did we arrive at this situation?

It’s no secret art has become extremely ideologically abstracted. “Modern Art” is difficult for the Jacks and Jills to understand. To them it’s no longer relevant, it’s impossible to decipher without a degree, and frankly it smacks of pretension. There are many reasons this has become our modus operandi, and ironically you’d have to take an art history course to understand why. Or, you could do what I do and blame Humanism.

Humanism is a sacred cow in the world of academics, so how could I possibly make such an absurd accusation? By reviewing a little history and with a dash of common sense, it’s simple. They say sacred cows make great steaks, so here’s the argument:

It’s no coincidence that Modern Humanism coincided with the Renaissance. The Catholic Church, divine texts and providence in one hand, maintained a philosophical death grip over their largely illiterate society in the other. At that time, the collected wisdom of man was painstakingly handwritten (generally in Latin) and in the protective hands of an elite few. The manuscripts themselves were works of art, and owning books was actually a measure of power and wealth. And like any treasure, these were jealously guarded. The Church safeguarded their control with a deliberate policy of cultivating their flock’s spiritual enlightenment in lieu of their intellectual development. An intelligent person is far more difficult to govern than an ignorant one; so the trade-off proved advantageous. It’s difficult to imagine now, but this was so much so the case that the interpretation and explanation of love, marriage, divorce, politics, and nearly every important aspect of a person’s life, became someone else’s job. During this time, the Church used its power and influence to commission the best painters of the day to adorn their places of worship, as both a sign of the opulence of God, and perhaps more sinisterly, as a practical method to dramatize and bring to life the biblical stories their illiterate parishioners could not read. The paintings we now refer to as Renaissance classics were, in fact, part of a propaganda campaign to educate morality without having to teach literacy. It was a powerful use of art to establish and maintain social control and mores.

Rapid advances in technology sparked developments which eventually undermined the Church’s control. The advent of the printing press made the dissemination of writing more prolific. Suddenly, information flowed more freely and there was a reason to learn to read, and owning a book wasn’t an impossible dream. Perhaps more importantly, the benefits of learning and science became immediately apparent to the people. Cannons made defeating your enemies more likely, so warfare became a successful venture. Optics gave us the telescope and let us see farther, meaning more trade ships returned with their cargoes. Medicine meant your sick loved ones lived instead of died. The scientific method provided the populace with an alternative to faith for approaching the mysterious world, and the long-deprived intellectual curiosity of the people exploded. These were tangible, relevant improvements that people immediately desired, and these changes came from education not from salvation. This is where the heroic ideal of humanism comes in.

Humanism rejected the dogma of Church, instead celebrating the new-found self-determination of the people. It liberated us from the dark times, empowered both artists and the common man by replacing blind faith in the supernatural with dependence on the practical potential of mankind. And, for 600ish years, our focus on institutionalized intellectualism has refined and specialized our academic disciplines to the point where it has utterly revolutionized every aspect of our culture. But, as a sad footnote, it has left so much of our art sterile and incomprehensible.

Secular Humanism brought with it a wave of changes, some necessary, some good, some bad. But germane to this line of thinking are two notions about how it changed art forever: 1) The loss of the apprenticeship system and 2) the individualization for the responsibility of creativity. These are fundamental paradigm shifts which artists labor under to this very day. Make no mistake, by accepting Humanism and all its benefits, we also lost something valuable.

The master/apprentice method to teaching, which was popular with trade artisans and artists during the Renaissance, was largely supplanted by the university model. To this day, a typical artist is educated by committee; handed off from specialist to specialist. True to the precepts of Humanism, they are impressively independent, rational and exceptional critical-thinkers. They are exposed to a far greater number of concepts and methodologies than previous generations. It is difficult to argue with the brutal effectiveness of a well-executed modern art education, in the hands of an smart student is a formidable tool. But the system isn’t without weaknesses, and chief among them is the notion of relevance. If you, as an artist, are taught -deliberate or otherwise- to celebrate the tenants of Humanism, it’s only natural for your work to feature some measure of expression of Humanistic ideals. Humanism has become the central axis around which artistic expression now rotates. And a precious few artists are even aware this basic influence. In fact, for many of them, it is the unvoiced reason they became an artist, a source of pride, strength and inspiration. But it has also lead us down a primrose path of defining, redefining and specialization which terminates at our current problem. Modern Art may be the worthy and logical progression of art, but it has finally come full circle in that, as once the Church’s writings were inaccessible to the populace, so too has the narrative of Modern Art become indecipherable to today’s patrons. Universities mass-produce cookie-cutter artists who’s work becomes increasingly irrelevant to mainstream audiences… and like poets, these artists find that the only people that can truly appreciate their work are… other artists. This is an error in relevance, made possible by committee education, because at no time was any single educator made responsible for teaching the discretionary use of the education this artist received. In Jurassic Park, Jeff Goldblum’s character highlights this nearly ubiquitous trend when he quips, “Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” The master/apprentice model of training solved this problem by placing the responsibility of a complete training curriculum on the master; by tying the master’s reputation to the the student’s performance, it acted as a natural selector and safeguard not only for excellence, but also of discriminatory application of craft.

A University education is deemed complete in, what seems like an almost arbitrary length, of four years. Compare this to the master/apprentice system when the education was tailored specifically to the student and the duration lengthened or shorted depending on the student’s ability.

Additionally, instead of a “General to Specific” idea model like we use today, they employed the exact opposite approach. By this I mean apprentices weren’t presented with a holistic exposure to ideas and theory, from which they adapt more and more precise techniques as they sub-specialized, but rather they were taught a very specific craft, a specific set of techniques and set lose upon the world to find a way to define and adapt their expression to what they saw. This fundamental change radically effects the artist’s approach, because the model employed by the master/apprentice system, by it’s very nature, fights to make the subject relevant to the artist, the technique and the viewer. The university system guarantees no such assurances. If you assume the challenge of the artist is understanding or communicating the world around them through their work, and that the work produced by a more modernist university model has grown to where it can only be understood with the presumption of assumed prior knowledge, it has ironically betrayed the principles of Humanism because it appeals to a quality which is now externalized from man and no longer self-evident except thorough the practice of disciplined dogma.

My second point is that Humanism has internalized the responsibility for creativity with each and every artist. This gives rise to a wide array of expression, but just as in the master/apprentice argument, this advantage has also come at a price. Prior to Humanism, the notion of creativity and genius was divorced from the individual. The Greeks considered genius to be a form of madness, because they often observed a more-than-casual relationship between the two traits. They thought these people were touched by the Gods, that the source of their insight was divine. Many cultures shared the notion of a muse, a creative force external to men, who whispered or breathed inspiration into artists. This “channeled” view of creativity was greatly beneficial to early artists, who were free to focus on the role of interpreting instead of editing, observing instead of self-dialoguing. Today’s artist bears the terrible weight of pushing creative boundaries alone, and with less time devoted to observing or playfully manipulating concepts in a manner which doesn’t reflect on him or herself personally. Artists have always been risk-takers and will continue to be, but to what degree? With the modern focus on commodification of artists and their work, the freedom to dissociate themselves personally, to create an environment conducive to creativity -free from the fear of failure- is a luxury that is difficult to afford. And, in fact, what we see now is that the reputation of the artist has grown in importance independent to, and often times more important than, the success of their work. Think about that for a moment: the artist’s masterworks are no longer the fruitful triumph of thought or technique, self-evident in the work itself, but rather emblematic evidence of the process, an extension of his reputation and observable only in the context of all his work.

Creative thinking requires the ability to wear many masks, yet the penalty for creative failure now is so intrinsically linked by Humanism to the artist, that it is a failure not only of cognition, but a failure of person. This new association, placing the onus of creative success or failure directly on the artist is, in my estimation, a large contributing factor to the epidemic degrees of depression and suicide associated with creative personalities. The act of creativity now carries with it an inescapable risk which, when coupled with an incomplete artisitic identity, can lead to a creative chilling effect. So, while Humanism leads to a wide, and often stunningly original breadth of creative expression, the depth of these insights can be remarkably shallow and their pertinence is questionable. This raises some serious questions about the efficacy and sustainability of the system, as well as its safety.

The question really isn’t if Humanism has forever changed art, because it has, but rather what comes next? Maybe this time life will imitate art. If you were to return to our fairy tale, instead of Jack and Jill heading up the hill to fetch a pail of water, maybe they’ll dig a well in the valley where it should have been dug in the first place. Who digs a well at the top of a hill anyway? When the absurd circumstances of art are swapped with the rational circumstances of life, when the metaphorical exchanges positions with the literal, we can learn from Jack and Jill’s fall and art can hint at the changes to come by providing us insight to the way we think and what we choose to do. That, my friends, is proof-positive that it art isn’t dead.

All of this brings me squarely back to some idiot and his ugly, wiggling idea on the floor, lathering itself in its own blood, and the circling pack impatiently waiting for an answer to his profound challenge. I usually look them right in the eye, and I suggest you do as well, take a breath and tell them with a straight face, “Art is dead? I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about art. I’m just here for the free wine and cheese.”

Intellect is an admirable quality. But being smart is like being right; even if you’re right all the time you’re still trumped by someone who’s lucky all the time. So it goes with intellect: no matter how intelligent you are, you can always be bested by an idiot with greater insight. This is the value of perspective and why creativity is the hallmark of genius.

Humans, like most animals, are bilaterally symmetrical. For the most part, if you divide us down the middle, one side looks pretty much like the other side -just flipped. I heard an interesting notion that humans developed a base ten counting system because we had ten fingers. That makes a certain sense; we start with the truth of our bodies and naturally relate that to the world. I wonder if we’ve done the same for our bilateral symmetry. We have a strong predisposition towards a philosophy of dualism, two opposites competing, yet part of a large whole. Like Yin and Yang, man and woman, light and dark, or even the two hemispheres of our brain. But bilateral symmetry isn’t the only structure in town. It’s rare, but there’s also radial symmetry. That’s being symmetrical around a central axis, like a jellyfish or a flower. I wonder, had they evolved intelligence, what their philosophy would be? How would the truth of their bodies cause them relate to them to the world?

Notes to myself. Flee in terror unless you need reading material to put yourself to sleep, or you have an interest in genetics, retroviruses or human evolution.

Been reading a lot about diseases lately and it occurs to me there might be an evolutionary argument to explain discrimination. The biology of bigotry, if you will. I don’t, in any way, condone discrimination or racial intolerance of any sort, but the reality is that many people still do. I also feel a blanket acceptance of tolerance, simply because it’s an approved societal notion, could be almost as disastrous. So, I think about things like this in an attempt to understanding the argument from both sides.

Nature has a good way of trimming away anything that isn’t really needed for survival, so why has the practice of discrimination survived? The common argument is that it’s cultural, a learned behavior which flourishes in the absence of education. But there could be a more fundamental reason, it could have survival value. The argument goes something like this: Biological diversity is nature’s hedge fund against extinction. A species with a more diverse genetic code has a greater chance of avoiding extinction from a biological epidemic. Generally speaking, viral or bacterial infections evolve to exploit specific cellular weakness, or avoid triggering immune responses. Populations which are homogeneous -those which share similar genetic traits- are more at risk from a disease perspective, if a method to exploit their common structure evolves. Non-homogeneous populations decrease the chance that specific biological mechanics related to that type of exploit will become pandemic.

This is an interesting notion in many regards, but what interests me the most is that it implies that disease has played a largely unrecognized role in shaping our social behavior. If avoidance of other populations had survival value for a very long time in our evolution (because it meant less exposure to foreign diseases) what a fascinating concept that discrimination might be hardwired into certain segements of the population as a proven survival trait. Historically, early populations which were open to strangers were selected against in the event of catastrophic disease. Cortez, smallpox and the Incans are a very dramatic example. Obviously, cultural isolation carries with it its own dangers; primarily because contact with other cultures can result huge leaps in all aspects of culture, and these advantages have proven to be decisive in competition. Our ability to cure infectious diseases has grown radically in the past century, as well as out ability to spread them. As we rush towards a global community, might we become a more homogeneous population, increasing our risk of global pandemic? Perhaps the lesser of our instincts, to shun that which isn’t like us, is something we shouldn’t be so quick to shed.

This all comes on the heels of some pretty interesting revelations in AIDS research. There is an utterly fascinating (and pretty technical) interview with Dr Ronald Collman conducted by Marc Pelletier in Futures in Biotech #32 where it’s suggested that virology has played more of a role in the development of our genetic code than natural selection. Think about that for a minute. The logic behind natural selection is fairly ironclad; dead organisms don’t reproduce and therefore can not pass on their genetic code. Except, that might not be the case. If there is a retroviral genetic influence occurring on such a scale, and the origin of virii is undetermined, we have an unaccounted for partner in our evolutionary dance. The past and the dead could quite literally still be affecting the course of our evolution, and outside the confines of natural selection. A staunch supporter of natural selection would counter that the theory accommodates mutation, and s/he would be right. However, the crux of natural selection is that heritable changes not selected against will be passed on and become prevalent in a population through the mechanic of reproduction. Selection and mutation are the twin fuels that power the engine of reproduction. However, viral tampering of the genetic code introduces the possibility that changes can consistantly arise in a population due to viral exposure outside of heritable reproduction. In other words, in a viral model of co-evolution, reproduction or natural selection are not necessarily needed for evolutionary progress. The degree to which an exogenous retrovirus can affect genetic change seems largely centered around propagation, however current research indicates that much of our genetic code is what is referred to as “Junk DNA”. Large portions of it can be turned on or off or even modified with seemingly little result. But evolution works in time frames which are difficult to observe and these minute changes may be more important than we realize. A recent Harvard study concludes that evolution is not tinkering as much with the actual genes themselves, but rather the regulatory controls which control when genes are turned on or off. In studies with opossums, 180 million years of evolution separate marsupial mammals from humans, yet we share virtually the same protein encoding genes and there has been as little as 20% change in the regulatory instructions between the two. They suspect Junk DNA plays a role in moving between chromosomes switching DNA on and off. More interestingly though, is the emerging data that an endogenous retrovirus can affect protein changes which block competing exogenous retroviruses. Catching one can inoculate you from another.  Potentially this protection may extend past the mechanical into the behavioral. What if there is a mechanism in effect which compels you to protect yourself from a competing infection which is expressed behaviorally as discrimination, or ally yourself with similarly infected hosts which is expressed as tolerance? Farfetched? Perhaps not as much as you might think. There are examples in nature of parasite/host relationships where the parasite fix, repairs or protects the host —or even alters the host’s behavior to serve their needs. If viral agents are discovered to play a part in this Junk DNA mechanism, and our genetic code is the combined result of an external Darwinian natural selection, an internal Lamarckian immune response, and both of those affected by viral manipulation and competition, it could quite literally redefine our notion of evolution. I’m a layman, so the potentials I posit here may be unlikely for a variety of reasons.  Yet, there can be no denying that these interesting developments raise startling questions which challenge our very notion of human genetic development and it bothers me that this isn’t a higher priority for study.