Piecespeak #16 - 27-07-09

This week, Pieces once again spent a little too much time playing dumb computer games. When will we learn that there's a world outside with people in it waiting to be talked to...

Last week, it was revealed that biological engineers in the US have been successfully working on one something that could change the way we live, and I’m willing to bet quite a lot that hardly anyone noticed. The Journal of Biological Engineering reported that bacteria have been genetically engineered to solve mathematical problems including the Hamilton Path Problem and the Burnt Pancake Problem. This news could mean the beginning of a new age of computing that moves us away from silicon-based modes of calculation to biologically based systems. I know that sounds pretty dry, but I reckon this could lead to a massive shift in the way we view computers, intelligence, and the world around us.

Right now, when I use a computer, I bash keys and click mice to input data into something that doesn’t actually think. It just processes, theoretically with the same output every time given the same input, like a washing machine. Obviously, most of my experiences of computing involve some kind of loud shouting because this doesn’t happen, but the idea behind the computer as we know it now is that it it’s very definitely a machine. It comes in a box, it makes a soft humming noise that tells me it’s actually doing something, it clicks and clunks its way through most of the stuff I need it to do, and then I turn it off. I have no cerebral connection to it because it handles information in such a different way to my own brain, and more obviously, it’s made of metal. Once we start interacting with biological systems, all of this could change. Even if it’s still housed in a little box, when I ask it to do something, it will (in it’s own special, bacterial way) think its way to the answer. It won’t just clunk through every possibility one at a time and assess which was correct; it’ll lock onto every permutation at once and instantly know the answer. Like a brain. This won’t just be a thing that I switch on, demand some answers from and turn off again – this’ll be a living thing that I ask questions.

And once we have a world in which this kind of intelligence, as opposed to artificial, silicon ‘intelligence’ is recognised, what happens to the way we view ‘intelligence’? At the moment there are a few tests of artificial intelligence that are deliberately designed to anthropomorphasise computing functions – playing grandmasters at chess, the Turing test, etc. – and one of the key reasons for this is that the intelligence that computers display is so very different from our own. The idea is that when inanimate objects are able to mimic our way of interacting (not thinking), we’ll be able to consider them truly intelligent. The flaw should be obvious – it’s like saying you’ll declare that an amazing drag queen is actually a woman because his make-up is so utterly convincing. But if we start to work with organically-based intelligence, the distinction is removed. All of a sudden, there’s no need for a Turing test, because there’s no need to prove the strength of an act of mimicry. The system doesn’t need to be humanised, because it’s not artificial in the sense that a box full of wires and chips is. It’s also very different from the dumb logic gates that populate our TVs, our kettles, our toasters, everything, unlike the box I’m typing this into. I wonder what will happen to those ‘why aren’t you doing what I tell you to’ computer moments, when we’re talking to thinking machines instead of metal boxes.

Not only that, but there’s every possibility that there’ll be as big a shift in the role of technology in the wider world as there has been with the growth of computing in the last 30 years. Only halfway through the last century it would have been unimaginable that virtually every household in the western world would have a little computing device inside it. Now we can start to think of similarly outlandish things that we might all learn to live with in the next 50 years – imagine a world where every home has a bacterial growth brewing slowly in the corner of the living room in a little petri dish. Designer petri dish, of course, someone’ll find a way to make them fashionable and make money from them. The slightly more scary thought is that once we start regularly relying on a form of intelligence that’s much closer to our own, we have to consider the ethics of every decision we make based on their calculations much more closely. Do computers have souls? Not really, it’d be difficult to argue that just because mine seems to willingly choose to disobey its master (me, allegedly) it has any kind of sense of self. Big dumb question I know, but it becomes a bit harder when you’re talking about something that doesn’t cease to exist when you turn it off, that doesn’t rely on the solid state of an electrical current and that forms answers based on a similar configuration of pathways through neural networks to your own brain. All a very long way off, probably, but the big stuff comes from big ideas that start in little petri dishes.

Now, this week’s playlist comes to you courtesy of…the same people as last week. And it’s just as much of a riot. Click below to hear it. Banzai.

1. Slave - Roots

2. The Residents - Blue Rosebuds

3. Tom Waits - Martha

4. White Williams - Smoke

5. Chas & Dave - Rabbit

6. Flanders & Swann - The Gnu Song

7. Francoise Hardy - Tout Ce Qu'on Dit

8. Roy Ayers - Can You Dig It?

9. Can - Mushroom

10. Beastie Boys - Looking Down The Barrel Of A Gun

11. Kid Koala - Music For Morning People

12. Friendly Fires - Jump In The Pool

13. Atlas Sound - Winter Vacation

14. Ralph Vaughan Williams - 5 Mystical Songs, No.3, Love Bade Me Welcome

15. Nat King Cole - Lovelight

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/5or7X55QlPSnmhPryN6Hhd

More next week.

Pieces x

Piecespeak #15 - 20-07-09

This week, Pieces suffered a cultural overload – Shakespeare, proms, libraries; if it had all been consumed by one person instead of three it would have probably led to some kind of breakdown.

This last week has seen a flurry of anniversaries relating to the Apollo 11 mission to land two people on the moon. On the moon. That’s really far away. Sorry to point out the obvious, but every time I think about it at the moment my mind starts to boggle. Here’s the thing: there’s a plan to take people to the moon again, by 2020 or something, but I’m not excited by it at all. It’s a bit like watching a big blockbuster movie with loads of CGI explosions: now that computers can do pretty much anything for us, there’s not really any thrill any more. Of course we can send a person to the moon: whatever the problems and difficulties, we can chuck a computer at them and everything will be fine. But 40 years ago, people were walking on the moon. 40 years ago, when people drove clunky dirty cars and steam trains had only just been taken out of service on British railways. It’s just staggering – and for someone like me who was born a really long time after all of this, it’s amazing that it has that much of an impact hearing about it and watching footage. But it really does; it’s like reading about sea voyages around the world (and even better because there’s less inherent imperialism and colonialism…).

A big part of the excitement surely comes from the well-documented primitivity of the technology that was available to the space program in the late 60s. To me, its not even statistics about the computer power in the spacecraft or whatever gets thrown around all the time. It’s thinking about what was available to an ordinary person at the time. Right now, I’m typing on a computer that’s pretty powerful, that can probably do a lot of the things that would be required to get someone to the moon again. That’s not me showing off my computer (anyone who’s ever seen it clunk and grind into action will no there’s really nothing to show off about…), it’s just a sign of how attitudes to technology have shifted since 1969 because what’s available is so much more sophisticated. Rewind 40 years and the most complex piece of machinery in your standard family home would probably be either the car or the television set. Imagine watching Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon’s surface and knowing that the stuff that got him there is only a few steps up from the car on your driveway. Whereas a computer can do anything it’s programmed to do, it takes imagination and a lot of adventure to get a dumb petrol-powered box to the moon.

As well as the thrill of watching what’s basically a big hunk of metal with no brain somehow fly a perfect course to a tiny object thousands of miles away, the moon landings show us that it is actually possible to achieve great things by being humble and quietly brilliant. Once you get past the big Kennedy speeches about doing things because they’re hard, and the All-American we’re-gonna-beat-your-asses cold-war approach, you’re left with three men in a spaceship, on a mission. Of those three men, it was apparently ‘Buzz’ Aldrin who was originally chosen to take the first step on the surface of the moon. But he was switched with Neil Armstrong at the last minute. The reason? The leaders of mission control felt that the softly-spoken, modest Armstrong would be better equipped to handle the pressures and notoriety of being the first man on the moon. So he did. And he’s spent 40 years being a nice guy, or just generally not showing off about it. No-one has a bad word to say about the guy.

Above all concerns about machinery and gung-ho bravado, the achievement that really sticks in my imagination is the imagery of a mission for all mankind. Obviously, it’s naïve to think for a second that the concept of landing a man on the moon wasn’t dreamed up as a riposte to Russian cosmonauts beating American astronauts into orbit around the Earth. But bearing that in mind, what a wonderful thing to be able to watch footage of men on the moon and have them talk about a ‘giant leap for mankind’ – not America, not ‘the free world’, but mankind. Just once, we were all able to say that, whatever its origins, something had happened that was actually, truly, attuned to the human craving for exploration without the destructive impulse that usually pollutes it. What a great thing.

Anyway, enough of the cheesy schoolboy star-eyed wonder. On to this week’s playlist, which features not a single moon-related song. Unless I’ve missed a really subtle link, in which case feel free to let me know and you’ll get a prize. Or something. Click the link below to hear all of this:

1. Steve Reich - Electric Counterpoint III: Fast
2. Roy Ayers - Can You Dig It?
3. Public Enemy - Who Stole The Soul?
4. Helen Shapiro - Tell Me What He Said
5. Dinosaur Jr. - Pieces
6. Francis Poulenc - Sonata for Two Pianos: II. Allegro
7. Paul Simon - The Coast
8. Panda Bear - Bro's (Terrestrial Tones mix)
9. Lionel Richie - All Night Long
10. Psychic TV - Just Drifting
11. Radiohead - Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2)
12. The Boo Radleys - Martin, Doom! It's Seven O'Clock
13. Randy Newman - The Great Nations Of Europe

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/38J1Zmf6bvgUX9xZe1KgU9

See you next week for more.

Pieces x

Piecespeak #14 - 13-07-09

This week, Pieces grappled once again with the never-ending quest for the perfect band name, for the benefit of a good friend. For some reason, he was less than impressed with our suggestion that ‘PRICK’ would be a good name for a Modern Jazz quartet…

The last week saw at least two events involving culture-related injuries. the Pamplona bull run saw its first (human) death in six years, and at least two other grizzly gorings that had newspaper readers turning away in disgust as they saw more-graphic-than-necessary pictures. And it was revealed that Tate Modern is fighting at least two claims for compensation from people who have injured themselves at exhibitions including Carsten Höller’s slides and the recent recreation of Robert Morris’ Bodyspacemotionthings.

Both of these revelations made me think about the role that danger plays in our cultural experience. There’s not many traditional art forms that can offer us real danger as part of the thrill of experiencing them – difficult to think how you would produce one, although a painting that reached out and grabbed random viewers and strangled them a little bit would be pretty amazing. But the experiences that do offer us something that we just can’t get anywhere else – that feeling that it could be the last thing you ever do if you’re not careful. Obviously people work in the armed forces and on building sites are exposed to this kind of dangerous environment on a daily basis, and it’s not necessarily a thrill to do so. I think that makes it all the more remarkable that the rest of us would ever choose to put ourselves through things that could potentially do us a lot of harm, and not only that but under the guise of a cultural encounter.

All of this has to be kept pretty distinct from experiences that provide us with simulations of danger, like rollercoasters or going to watch a horror movie, because they don’t (intentionally) expose us to any real danger. You can sit all the way through a horror movie and be a real killjoy by smiling the whole way through, safe in the crystal clear certainty that nothing bad will actually happen to you, just the same as you can ride a rollercoaster without any serious repercussions unless you have some kind of heart condition – in which case you should really have read the safety bits at the start of the queue. No matter how much anyone tells you about how going on thrill-rides at theme parks is all about pushing the boundaries of fear, the fact is they’re designed to be completely safe. Now no-one who’s ever been on Air at Alton Towers could ever say this makes them boring – all I’m saying is that this kind of ride is not where the real danger lies.

The real danger lies in the blood and gore you could see at the bullfight, the bones that could get cracked falling from large wooden structures in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, even the thought that one of Anthony Gormley’s ‘statues’ might slip and fall of the plinth in Trafalgar Square. All of these have been described as Art rather than Sport or even Recreation, and the Art comes from a knowledge that there is beauty in the willingness to gamble life (or even just an eye or two) for experience. This would have been Ernest Hemingway’s argument anyway, as anyone who’s read Death In The Afternoon will know (and if you haven’t, check it out – best book about bullfighting you’ll ever read). We even get thrills from watching other people go through this kind of pain – think about how, even if you tell everyone you hate them, you still secretly giggle at Jackass, Dirty Sanchez, Tokyo Shock Boys etc. Only here it’s not art, it’s in the same category as sport – it can be glorious (a great catch in cricket that nearly breaks the catcher’s neck), heroic (think of Terry Butcher or Paul Ince bleeding profusely through bandages while playing for England), even moving (German goalkeeper Bert Trautmann being hailed as a hero after winning the FA Cup even though he broke his neck in the 75^th minute). But they’re not beautiful. Beauty through danger, beauty as the result of danger, that’s the preserve of art.

And so to this week’s playlist, which is another hour of little cool noises. Click the link below to hear it all.

1. Ubu Dance Party - Pere Ubu

2. Swell Maps - Big Empty Field

3. The Mekons - The Shape I'm In

4. Classics IV - Spooky

5. Matmos - For Felix (And All The Rats)

6. Tal Farlow - Fascinating Rhythm

7. The Johnny Mann Singers - Up Up And Away

8. Lizzy Mercier Descloux - Fire

9. The Harmonising Four - Pass Me Not

10. Babatunde Olatunji - Aiye Mire

11. Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band - Abba Zaba

12. Fennesz - Caecilia

13. Camera Obscura - French Navy

14. Igor Stravinsky - Symphony In Three Movements: I

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/3eJvOPavlMWum2gCXNIU6m

This week, Pieces missed the last set of the longest and tensest Wimbledon final ever, but we’re not bitter. We’ll just make sure that if Roger Federer or Andy Roddick ever come to a Pieces gig, they leave before we play our last 3 songs. We know it wasn’t their fault. But someone has to pay…

In a week where all kinds of events have forced us to reconsider the merits of past achievements and figures, the idea of critical reassessment has loomed large. As the world watched Federer become the first man to win 15 tennis majors, we were bombarded with commentators, pundits and former players telling us that he’s now without a doubt the greatest player ever to grace the game. All well and good, and statistically sound I suppose, but imagine how Rod Laver, who was in the crowd on Sunday to watch Federer and until the end of that match had the title of ‘Best Ever’ in the palm of his hand, must feel. In the space of a couple of break points, his achievements shift from the pinnacle of on-court dominance to the second-tier, where the Great players fight for the right to polish Federer’s tennis shoes. Even if you don’t care about tennis at all (which, as everyone knows and accepts, not many of us do except for 3 weeks of strawberry-and-cream love-in in summer), you have to feel sorry for the guy. Once someone’s come along to top your trophy count, all you’re left with is the die-hards to fight your corner on the grounds that ‘the game was different then’.

The same can happen retro-actively, bizarrely. It usually disguises itself as nostalgia, like when (god forbid…) you’re forced to sit through a TopTen Best Ever Selling Mega Smash Hit Saturday Night TV ITV3 Filler show, and the last things to appear are from years and years ago and are championed by people saying ‘they just don’t make ‘em like that anymore’. They’re doing the same thing as the tennis commentators, only in reverse: once you’ve found a set of criteria to judge something on, you can raise the best performer above everything else and treat it as if there’s no need to pay any attention to anything other than ‘the winner’.

You would expect this trend to run pretty strongly through music, given that we as humans do tend to get over-excited about most things in this way. Just think about the glut of magazine articles devoted to reviews of ‘criminally underrated’ albums, or ‘lost gems’, or, even better, ‘[Terrible Album X], [Artist X]’s true career high’. (Check out this painful example). All set up in tandem with the unconscious drive we all have to plot the ‘development’ or ‘progression’ of music, even of an individual band, in a single linear direction like a story with a beginning, middle and projected end. Of course it doesn’t really happen like that – although people like Pete Frame create brilliant, fascinating pieces of art based on this idea, and www.bandtoband.com is also pretty fun. But think of how many bands you’ve heard being dismissed because you’ve heard someone, somewhere, do something better than them. The Beatles? Well, my mate said they just copy Chuck Berry. The Sex Pistols? Well, they would have got nowhere without the Ramones to lay the ground. Let’s just have done with it and declare Robert Johnson the best ever musician of all time ever, and leave it at that so no-one actually needs to listen to any music except his collected works, over and over again. Until they unearth the guy that taught him to play guitar, and we have to whitewash our taste all over again…

Thank goodness no-one (well, almost no-one) actually thinks this way. But what a strange brutal world we’re surrounded by that constantly reinforces the idea that all we should ever be aiming for is the biggest number. Mahatma Gandhi phrased the answer better than anyone, and you can see his words on billboards all over the London Underground at the moment: ‘There is more to life than increasing in speed’. Well put. So I guess that makes him The Most Quotable Commentator On The Human Tendency To Rank Achievement, EVER! See what I did…

So, to this week’s playlist, which includes probably the best song Blur didn’t play at Glastonbury (well, the best Blur song anyway).

Click the link below to hear it all, Spotify-ers.

1. Blur - Ambulance

2. Kurtis Blow - The Breaks

3. Karl Bartos - Electronic Apeman

4. Parliament - Do That Stuff

5. Caravan - The Dog, The Dog, He's At It Again

6. The Bar-Keys - Soul Finger

7. Donovan - Barabajagal (Love Is Hot)

8. Siouxsie And The Banshees - Switch

9. The Smiths - Hand In Glove

10. The Kinks - People Take Pictures Of Each Other

11. Lonnie Liston Smith - Expansions

12. Bobbi Humphrey - Blacks And Blues

13. The Birthday Party - Release The Bats

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/3LaUhEXeL3TrVTmsO78hpA

More next week.

Pieces x