From Vermilion Sands to Eden-Olympia: The Dystopian Catastasis of JG Ballard

With the passing of JG Ballard, it somehow seems appropriate to revisit the gallery of his hallucinatory micro-utopias gone awry. Stretching from the gantries of abandoned Cape Canaveral Saturn V launch sites and deserted motels with sand filled pools and broken deck chairs, to the aesthetic and psychotic permutations of Vermilion Sands, and finally passing by to the terminal dystopias of secure leisure along the Mediterranean and what they unleash in their inhabitants in Super-Cannes, Cocaine Nights, and Kingdom Come. The interesting thing about Ballard's fiction is its progression backwards from the 'future', that staid cliche of science fiction, to the 'eye blink' of time in front of our perpetual 'present'. All science fiction takes place five minutes in the future. The present trying to see itself in the rear view mirror is what we call the 'future'. Gone in that final gallery are the crystallized forests and nature overcoming homo sapiens through biological evolution and catastrophe. Everything has been replaced by the human inability to cope with the very fabric of its deceptive, utopian desire: endless leisure, infantile lack of responsibilities, and the ready-to-order brutality of any sort of 'game' the residents of these claustrophobic micro-enclaves might require to pass the time. It is a literature of involution and catastasis. Even the ritualized murders, incest, adultery, parricides, and all-pervasive corruption are just prelude to a final act that simply never arrives. The future can never arrive at this present closed off from time. Ballard's literature is a brilliant reflecting mirror for this 'monadic' prison- one imagines it as a religious allegory recounted by descendants of ours as they scurry through the broken skylines, looted shopping malls, and disused airports of the near future. There has been a frequent criticism of Ballard's later fiction: the repetition of tropes without resolution is somehow a tepid 'sampling' of his own best work. This misses the point entirely. I think Ballard captured in a performative gesture the profound enclosure of culture and psychology in a world longed for yet utterly lethal to our species. One does not require a new, benevolent psychopathology to liberate the human animal from the 'mind forged manacles' of civilization, as Ballard's masterpieces of the 70s - Crash, The Unlimited Dream Company, and The Atrocity Exhibition - suggest. Instead, one must come to accept the melancholy recognition of watching a species at a dead end in rich, exclusive resorts: a world turned into a theme park and zoological preserve for the affluent and their entourages. Exhibit: homo sapiens. In a way, I miss the surrealistic joy of Vermilion Sands, the most ecstatic and playful of Ballard's imagined psycho-topographies (one really cannot call them geographies) - where cloud sculptures and singing machines vie for our attention without the shadow of senescence and thoughtless depravity seeping into the edges of the scene. The imagined micro-utopias (dystopias) of Eden-Olympia are far colder climes - populated by all the misery of those who received exactly what they wanted and have nothing else to look forward to now. They are time travelers trapped in the perpetual present. What a brilliant metaphor. In the end, the unconscious (or 'id'), time loose, pre-individuated, and primordial, is the only force liberated in these cul-de-sac enclaves - to run amok in a series of scenes that look like mosaics in a Byzantine church: visions of Purgatory. Ballard never lost the facility for language and description even as his literary desires shaped atrocities that the atavistic scientists of his earlier fiction would have found cold and sterile. As the wealthy gather around the burning ruins of a villa high on the cliffs that they have set fire to simply to rekindle a sense of the atavistic and magical in their lives, we experience the next five minutes of our collective future. Only the greatest artists can capture that reflection. Ballard's brilliance lies in capturing the marooned time travelers under a breath-taking, Mediterranean sky.

The Real is not Visible

We often mistake the visual world around us as the "Real": the actual. The is a combination of several factors: habituation, the embedded anticipatory epistemology by which we try to make sense of things, and a multi-layered cultural semiotic that pre-filters our experiences. I think this is the underlying intuition of Jean Baudrillard in his (in)famous Theory of Simulacra. We experience a copy of the Real mediated by models, preconceptions, and generous quantities of cultural reinforcement. We experience the copy (simulacrum). Is there any reason to believe something that, at first glance, appears so ridiculous that it barely deserves our attention? I think it does. For me, the experience of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers drove Baudrillard's basic point home: I watched the second plane in "real time" (televised) hit. My initial reaction, prior to understanding the full horror of what was happening, was to think: this doesn't seem very realistic. Where was the massive, cinematic explosion and sound effects? The "Hollywood Effect"? Was this staged? Only after that brief moment did I realize that insidious manner in which my perception of real events was being colored, quite unconsciously, by the expectation of a full Hollywood/Special FX production. The real was, somehow, judged insufficiently "true", a shadow of itself. This was extremely dangerous, since I was substituting the Real with the Imaginary - the realm of cinematic, sculpted experience for the horror of what was happening to those poor people in the towers and elsewhere. In that second, though, I experienced reality copied into a cinematic language that actually kept me from connecting with the Real. The language of occlusion and diversion: self-referential and self-replicating.

I found another example, but with a much different result, in watching the brilliant film Tokyo Story by Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. In eschewing all of the devices of standard Hollywood cinema language, Ozu's film transcends the hieratic and deeply ingrained "syntax" by which most of us have been raised to watch and perceive film. Gone is the moving camera and quick cut, the viewer is "fixed" in place by Ozu. Gone is the exposition and visualization of key elements in the story: we only see the echoes and effects of life changing events (like the mother's sudden illness and death) on human faces. The Real reemerges: the emotional, psychological and experiential dimensions of our being in the world and being with others (to use two of Heiddegger's terms from Sein und Zeit). We reassemble the totality from partial information - just like we do as human beings in our normal lives. There is no safe, omnipresent and comforting illusion that weaves everything together. We are simply there in the constructed moment but one whose artifice we can appreciate and sense. It does not keep us from "seeing" and understanding the human drama of Ozu's characters. It amplifies the human scale. It takes a displacement of our habituated expectations about what we will see, feel, and experience to move us past the simulacrum to the Real. Tokyo Story is one of the most moving films ever filmed: it defies while at the same time embodies the traditional aesthetics of Japanese art (wabi/sabi, mono no aware, etc.). This is the power of transcendence through art. You can be taught a new "Way of Seeing" as the critic John Berger called his landmark BBC series on art. Ozu manages it beautifully.

On the one hand, we have the the deeply invidious perception warping of the 24 hour news channel's simulation of reality (complete with stirring theme music for Tomahawk missile strikes against remote and unseen "enemies"). Reality as televised video game: rendered totally invisible by the audio-visual semiotic. On the other hand is the humanizing and poignant view of Ozu revealed in his film. I think the only counterforce to the power of the simulacrum is art. Only art can reveal the Real - the one thing that has truly been made invisible by our global systems of mass communication and entertainment. Art is the process of seeing the invisible. The Real is invisible to us unless we use a tool like art to draw it back into the open. Globalized entertainment has simply meant the displacement of most forms of "seeing" by one syntax and framing narrative. The implications of this are vast. The copy replicating everywhere and passing itself off as the Real.

Perhaps this is why the Aboriginals of Australia place such a value on the Dreamtime? The co-presence of the Real beyond our fragmentary and partial perceptions of time. It is one of the most original and powerful theological concepts that I have ever encountered. They must be watching a great film sub specie aeternitatis.

Large-Scale Kernel Machines

Support vector machines, kernel methods and optimization algorithms working at large-scale is a fascinating convergence of mathematical intuitions and engines to deal with the huge volumes of the data being harvested from the Web by search engines (and their successors). This volume offers an excellent overview and deep dives into the techniques of scaling SVMs, KMs and algorithms from mathematical programming to the problem of online, stochastic and large-scale (data-wise) machine learning. A superb collection that is definitely worth the investment of time to study thoroughly.

Dreaming of Tilda Swinton

I seldom remember my dreams these days but last night was an exception. I found myself co-starring (or was it a walk-on?) with Tilda Swinton in a horribly dubbed indie political thriller called "The Curse of the Conquistador's Gold". I am not sure which language it was originally done in but the strange argot that we were speaking to one another "on screen" was a marvelous pile-up of Old Church Slavonic, Mayan and Spanish. The dubbing to our mouth/lip movements was incredibly poor - we are talking Gigantor or Ultraman appalling. It felt very direct to video/DVD/Netflix. The primary action in the scene seemed to involve endless time spent spent loitering Godot-like at a remote bus stop high in the Andes waiting for a bus to pick us up. The bus arrived, the top half some atavism from a 1960s commune and the bottom a shimmering, blue-tinged, maglev system that seemed to run on the collective frustration of the people inside it. We wound up chasing it for 20-30 meters desperately trying to remember the combination to the bus's door. As Koji Suzuki said in a recent novel, "When you know that you are dreaming, then you are about to awake." Sure enough, my iPhone alarm woke me. I never did see any gold or Conquistadors but Tilda looked awesome.

RjDj: Reactive Sensory Music

RjDj is a genre-defining iPhone application that adds the critical reactive and environmental component to generative music and sound design. There are various scenes that can be loaded which amount to different DSP processors for sampling the ambient environment and creating everything from beats to hyper-modulated soundscapes. The analogy to Electroplankton is closest, in that you choose a style of algorithm (I mean plankton) and start reacting and interacting with it as it performs its functions and behaviors. RjDj's scenes are an interesting combination of vocal amplification and filtered distortion to more soothing and blissful audioscapes. Once again, the iPhone proves to be a great genetrix of creativity. The mobile reactive sound factory and improvisational audio lab - quite an achievement.

BTW, RjDj uses Pure Data (Pd) as its DSP engine. It shows that you can take the core engine and wrap it in something far more attractive than Pd's native - ahem - UX. Pd's native UX makes MAX/MSP's look approachable and easy. I have never been a fan of visual patching languages and the only one's which work require a lot of thoughtful UX design: Reason and Korg's DS-10 being good examples.

Laeterna Machina: Body-Machine-Music

The use of the body augmented by sensors and tied into generative music and sound design technology is actually quite intriguing. Although results can be varied, the idea of turning the 'poetry of motion' into electronica and soundscapes is a powerful framework for self-expression. I like the fact that they utilize MAX/MSP and pD (Pure Data) - which really are the basic building blocks for this style of bio-generative art. The resulting musical performances are available on iTunes. I applaud this kind of effort to meld traditional art forms with the latest technologies. Art has to remove our artificially imposed barriers of perception and cognition.

Solver Foundation 1.1 and Solver Plug-in SDK Ship

It seemed just 2-3 months ago that we launched the full v1.0 release of Solver Foundation. This marks the second commercial release of Solver Foundation. This release primarily delivers some significant improvements to the Excel Add-in Designer and our algebraic modeling language (OML) as well as the Solver Plug-in SDK. We have also introduced extensions to the Linear Programming Solver to support Special Ordered Sets (SOS2) modeling.

The Solver Plug-in SDK is what allows any third party solver manufacturer, whether writing in native code or managed, to quickly and efficiently integrate their solver into the foundation. We actually used this plug-in architecture to integrate Gurobi’s mixed integer programming (MIP) solver in v1.1. Most importantly, we have also developed in-house and released reference plug-ins for CPLEX, XPRESS-MP and LPSOLVE. The feedback on the SDK and Solver Foundation overall have been phenomenal.

Look for even more cool features towards the end of 2009 in our v2.0 release.