I’m leaving Slack, so I have been leaning heavily on ChatGPT to help me set up possible open source alternatives like Rocket Chat :thumbsdown: and Matrix :thumbshalfwayup:. I’m not much of a Terminal wizard, but from this experience having ChatGPT guide me through using the command line, I’ve learned a lot. One of the things I’ve learned is you basically always get stuck – eventually – down one or several blind alleys when explicitly following its instructions. And then it just runs you down them again and again (but still did better than Gemini in the one time I tried it for an intractable Matrix Synapse server settings issue).
Anyway, that’s why I’m quoting this Dave Winer bit here, cause I’m apparently not the only one:
As a programming partner, ChatGPT is encyclopedic but is not good at strategy. It will drive you down blind alleys. It’s also really irritating that it rewrites your code to conform to its standards. And it has a terrible memory. Forgets things you told it specifically not to forget. It does not keep promises.
Also, because it does not suffer from human impatience, it has no problem telling you to repeat the same 5-6 checks again and again, no matter how many times you say it didn’t work and yes you already triple checked that config file in nano. Frustration, in a way, is actually valuable. It tells you when things really aren’t working and make you question whether it’s actually valuable as a human to continue down a given path. But you can’t rely on the program itself to bring that kind of guidance to you – you have to rely on your human faculty of annoyance. Which, the more I think about it, might somehow be connected to intuition: knowing when to fold and try something else.
Still though, I would not have ever learned so much so quickly about the command line without ChatGPT backing me up. And, of course, if the programs I am trying to run were not so finicky and buggy. I finally got Matrix up and running (accessing via Element), but never did sort out the correct subdomain issue I messed around with solving forever and ever. And who the hell knows if my m.room.retention settings are going to be honored. At least it will be encrypted if it’s not deleted in a purge job eventually (though hard deletion is always best policy for stale data, imo)…
Biobots is the latest name I have come up with to house the art explorations I am doing around building IRL drawing machines of the low tech and human (or nature) powered variety.
The first one I did used a little motor and battery. The second was a pulley system rigged up to control a gondola with a marker taped onto it to be able to drawing lines on the wall. It worked, but imprecisely. This is my third iteration, tentatively titled “Gondolier” since that word describes the human oar-bearer who directs the flow of action on the river.
Apologies for the shitty photos, but I have a small studio space:
So the device functions by the user standing in the middle, and rotating the wood dials clockwise or counter-clockwise. The dials are glued to toothed timing pulleys, which engage with a mating toothed timing belt. So as each dial turns independently or manually synchronized, it causes the gondola to move around (itself weighted with batteries), and an acrylic paint marker is duct-taped to the bottom.
Here is the close up of the v2 version of the dial-pulley mechanisms:
Wood dowels are 8mm, as are the bores of the timing pulleys, so they had to be filed down and sanded out a little to allow for free spinning. There was a failed earlier prototype of this I won’t go into, but suffice it to say having good quality dials securely connected to the pulleys is essential to having this be a fun and fluid experience to use.
An early stage of the initial test:
While I think the motorized and electronic controlled wall plotter stuff is interesting, I’ve learned something about myself, that I don’t enjoy tinkering with coding stuff (Arduino, etc) more than absolute minimum, but I love tinkering with physical stuff.
So my theory behind all this is, why not take things that are commonly robotic, and sort of rip out the robot part, and replace it with a human processor, a human being? In effect, a biobot?
Turns out, of course, like everything, that “biobot” is a term already in common use, but it’s meaning is incredible, and strangely complementary thematically to the ideaspace I am trying to explore with this series. I blogged about them previously as xenobots & anthrobots, but biobots also speak to this “third state” that is supposedly emergent for some kinds of cells in some conditions after the death of the host organism. Popular Mechanics quote:
Unlike some cells such as tumors or organoids that continually divide after death, these xenobots took on new behaviors beyond their biological roles. Studies have also found this ability in human lung cells, creating anthrobots capable of self-assembling and moving around.
I think this makes “biobiots” an acceptable area of overlap thematically with the project I’m undertaking (Freudian slip), in that it speaks to breaking the duality between accepted positions of “life” versus “death” or “good” versus “bad” or “human” versus “technology,” and moving beyond all that to a third state where new behaviors and ways of being become possible, self-assembling, and autonomously moving around and having this new kind of life which serves purposes we’re only just beginning to understand.
This was an important solution, a hole drilled through the dowels once they were mounted on the wall to prevent the dial-pulley assembling from traveling off the dowel. Then a nail slotted in holds it in place:
It might not be evident in these pictures (or in person) what’s going on with the plastic bags, but they contain dead batteries as weights, where it actually ended up being easy to find three sets of approximately the same weight batteries to put into each bag as resistance and into the gondola itself.
In future versions, I will cuteify those into some other form (maybe small vertical willow baskets?), but for this solidly working prototype, it’s “good enough.”
Here’s the first finished painting in this series, all done entirely using the Gondolier drawing device and paint markers taped to the bottom.
I’m really excited about the level of control I could get out of it after some initial experimentation and learning. I haven’t processed my videos yet, but the motion is very smooth and satisfying to use. It could probably be “better” somehow but there’s a lot of experimenting left to do here to know in which specific directions to take it next to find its best form. It’s wonderful and raw feeling right now though just like this in person. A video won’t express that anyway.
The only current drawback is that the dials are mounted fairly high up, above shoulder level, and somewhat far apart. I’m still adjusting as to what is actually the maximum usable drawing space, and the relative dimensions of the arrangement, this is just what presented itself in the moment. After a few hours of playing with it though, it’s absolutely tiring to use with your arms up in the air for a long time. In shorter stints (an hour or 2 maybe) it is highly usable and enjoyable.
I found my next project last night in the biobots series, a combination of these two, a syringe-driven hydraulic robotic arm, but as a SCARA arm capable of drawing on a table. So the control system from the first video used to replace the electronics and motor in the second:
I also happened to finally fall down the Theo Jansen Strandbeest rabbit hole last night while investigating mechanical linkages, and this video interview of him is the best one I’ve seen so far. The Strandbeests totally seem to be “biobots” to me, as they have behaviors of their own, powered by natural forces (wind) and responding to different kinds of stimulus, like walking into the ocean, or bumping into something with its feeler. Incredible:
The only thing I don’t like about these is they are made of plastic, but having seen his method for assembling them using heat to form custom joints, I can see why it is desirable for his application. I’m left wondering though, what kinds of biobots could be made out of locally-grown willow branches?
The last bit that has been on my mind here is thinking about “robots” that might pass through the legendary Butlerian Jihad of the Dune universe, where all thinking machines were destroyed and outlawed, to be replaced by human calculators, mentats, etc. And how these biobotic “robots” I’m exploring seem like they could pass by without arousing the ire of the Butlerian Jihad authorities… plus, these kinds of devices would survive an EMP blast, since they have no electronics at all.
Interestingly, as I was writing this, I asked ChatGPT for the relevant quotes from Dune’s Orange Catholic Bible, which I believe to be canonically is:
“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”
However, ChatGPT then came up with its own plausible other quote:
“Man’s flesh is his own; the maker has given it form, and man’s spirit is free.”
Totally non-canonical, but fits the style and themes to some degree. As I understand it, Herbert didn’t leave us the complete text of the Orange Catholic Bible, so… you never know! Also this neatly illustrates why we might not actually want to over-rely on thinking machines either…
Tim Boucher’s “Organic Data Weaving” seamlessly merges the organic vitality of nature with the abstract logic of digital hyperreality. Woven willow sculptures, embodying the natural profusion of growth, stand alongside AI-generated projections that evolve across the gallery walls. The dynamic interplay between the physicality of willow forms and the insubstantiality of digital projections invites viewers to contemplate the convergence of artificial and organic intelligence.
The woven willow structures reflect the interconnectedness of data networks, echoing the visual representations of data relationships in the projected images. The sculptures’ interlocking patterns and dynamic curves mirror the fluid and shifting nature of data itself, presenting a dialogue between natural growth and the abstract forms of digital information. By juxtaposing these tangible and intangible elements, “Organic Data Weaving” reveals the complex, evolving narrative of our relationship with technology, nature, and the blurred boundaries of hyperreality.
That’s a curatorial statement I had ChatGPT help me write for a recent project of mine, an exploration of what woven willow sculptural forms juxtaposed with AI projected lights and imagery might look like. Photos from the “exhibit” are here.
I’ll pull out a few of my favorites to highlight below.
Without any more context or knowledge about the origins of these images, I would personally be hard-pressed to not take them at face value and believe they were actually cool sculptures which exist somewhere, or did at one time.
But in actual fact, they are nevermades which exist in a hyperreality adjacent to ours. They are aspirational image explorations on a theme, some using Dalle, some Ideogram AI. They are part of a larger experiment in misinformation as art.
But these raise a million other important questions for me as an artist. Namely, if I could essentially simulate a lifetime’s worth of artistic achievements in an evening, and get basically high-quality gallery photos of them as though they were real physical things, where does that leave us existentially relative to actual real physical things? Where does that leave us relative to a lifetime’s worth of artistic achievements?
In a world increasingly centered on the cult of the Almighty Image, and the Almighty Image is continuously exposed as a liar on its own altar at every turn, how are we to proceed?
I saw “real” photos from an art gallery setting in London earlier, and thought to myself, some of these look less high-quality than what I was able to generate with AI. They look literally better than the real thing…
I think that’s hyperreality, is getting sucked down that wormhole, and it’s exactly where we’re stuck now collectively and individually.
Charlie Warzel’s piece in The Atlantic on hurricane disinfo goes down a parallel path in a somewhat different direction, interesting at least here though with our current one:
What is clear is that a new framework is needed to describe this fracturing. Misinformation is too technical, too freighted, and, after almost a decade of Trump, too political.
Hyperreality stands out to me as a relevant and still potentially useful analytical framework that is wider and not so fraught, and which can encompass this idea of the “artist as propagandist” who creates unreal things in order to change or influence real things.
Also from Warzel’s piece:
But as Michael Caulfield, an information researcher at the University of Washington, has argued, “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”
Interestingly, in other contexts outside of conspiracy fear-mongering, we often refer to be people who can cling to an alternative vision of reality in the face of overwhelming opposition “visionaries,” and we culturally usually cheer them on as they succeed in implementing that vision in actual reality. Unfortunately, an exceedingly great number of such “visionaries” in our day and age have been subsumed by vanity and wealth, and where they might have been or might believe themselves to be luminaries, emit only a kind of sticky darkness…
To me these willow-works, both my IRL ones and my ORL (outside real life?) hyperreal ones, play somewhere in a space that lays orthogonally in opposition to all that. Willow to me is profusion, proof of abundant life, of generous, ridiculously abundant and productive life, of reified embodied living sunlight. The reality of that when you feel it in your hands shatters all false darknesses, and returns us somehow deeply, instinctually, ancestrally, immediately back in tune with the Overwave, the wave from which all other waves are born…
