curt cloninger
Since the beginning
Works in Canton, North Carolina United States of America

ARTBASE (7)
BIO
Curt Cloninger is an artist, writer, and Associate Professor of New Media at the University of North Carolina Asheville. His art undermines language as a system of meaning in order to reveal it as an embodied force in the world. His art work has been featured in the New York Times and at festivals and galleries from Korea to Brazil. Exhibition venues include Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Granoff Center for The Creative Arts (Brown University), Digital Art Museum [DAM] (Berlin), Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art (Chicago), Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, and the internet. He is the recipient of several grants and awards, including commissions for the creation of new artwork from the National Endowment for the Arts (via Turbulence.org) and Austin Peay State University's Terminal Award.

Cloninger has written on a wide range of topics, including new media and internet art, installation and performance art, experimental graphic design, popular music, network culture, and continental philosophy. His articles have appeared in Intelligent Agent, Mute, Paste, Tekka, Rhizome Digest, A List Apart, and on ABC World News. He is also the author of eight books, most recently One Per Year (Link Editions). He maintains lab404.com, playdamage.org , and deepyoung.org in hopes of facilitating a more lively remote dialogue with the Sundry Contagions of Wonder.
Discussions (1122) Opportunities (4) Events (17) Jobs (0)
DISCUSSION

On Being - new thread


Hi Pall,

I get what you are saying about it not being a human being, and I think that is perfectly valid. Heidegger distinguishes Dasein (there-being, human-beingness) from a larger horizon of being which includes rocks, trees, and animals. Graham Harman argues that there is a kind of relational/situational being-in-the-world that a rock and a tree have amongst each other that we humans don't have access to, but that doesn't make it any less a kind of being. So here are some provocations I have regarding your project as currently described:

1.
Why use words like 'knowing, self-awareness, understanding, or being' at all? These words seem confusingly anthropomorphic. If it's just a 'software being,' why not simply stick with software words ('running, process checking,' etc.)?
2.
Like Harman's inability to access the relationship between the rock and the tree (also explored by Peter Schwenger in "The Tears of Things," and explored by me here: http://deepyoung.org/current/emily/ ), "things" recede from us. We imbue them with our hopes and desires and memories and names, but ultimately things are very much indifferent and impenentrable to us (other than via atomistic science, which still fails to get at what Heidegger calls "the things themselves"). So as a human, how are you able to assess what this program "knows" about itself and its environment without any output from it?
3.
If you were doing this project on a tree rather than on a piece of software, how would this change your process of inquiry ( http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/DSCN3598_espalieredpeartree_e.JPG )?
4.
If you were a tree doing this project on a piece of software, how would this change your process of inquiry ( http://www.iayork.com/Images/2007/7-30-07/Organic_Computer.jpg )?

Best,
Curt


DISCUSSION

I Don't Run New York City


Cool. Your video runs faster than mine. It would win in a video race.

EVENT

I Don't Run New York City


Dates:
Wed Aug 06, 2008 00:00 - Wed Aug 06, 2008

Location:
United States of America


DISCUSSION

On Being - new thread


Hubert Dreyfus may be useful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Dreyfus#Dreyfus.27s_criticism_of_AI
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0262540673/

He's a contemporary phenomenologist specifically considering some of the things your project is considering (from an admittedly more philosophical, less ironic/poetic perspective).

To me, his most interesting critique has to do with atomized experience vs. flow of experience. Old school AI research assumes that our experience is atomized (literally, digital), when it is actually more continuous (literally analogical). Alfred North Whitehead spends a lot of time contemplating how what happened to us 1/4 of a second ago still constitutes and bears on who we are "now" and "in the future." Bergson proposes that memory and time have been neglected by 20th century science's emphasis on atomistic space. Merleau-Ponty argues for a less atomized, more embodied, gestalt concept of being. And of course I've tried to represent Heidegger's position already.

Even if you decide to side-step the importance of embodiment in the world (because you are a programmer, not a roboticist or a geneticist), you still have to deal with the importance of the persistence of time/memory in constituting an understanding of self. How long has your program been running? Is it aware of its own duration? Does its awareness of its own duration qualitatively change from moment to moment? With each new build, is a new being created, or does it retain a residual memory of previous builds? How would it logistically achieve such persistent self-awareness? How would you logistically evaluate it to determine whether it had achieved such persistent self-awareness? Perhaps a kind of qualitatively evolving output could serve as a kind of litmus test. A Turing Test for continuity of being.

I would be curious to see the project rigorously fail in some of these ways.