December 20, 2018 Arts & Culture The Truth About AI: A Secular Ghost Story By Zachary Mason Some of Facebook’s AIs invented their own language, one incomprehensible to humans, at which Facebook’s researchers panicked and were compelled to pull the plug. At least, this was the story I heard on a Vanity Fair podcast. The host seemed deeply disturbed by the thought of these alien, almost Lovecraftian beings taking shape under the blithe gaze of an amoral tech giant. I thought it was probably nonsense — scientists spin the truth all the time. I guessed that the underlying reality was that Facebook scientists had designed a program to evolve some kind of communication protocol which, for whatever reason, become hard to understand; seeking attention, they’d played up the drama to an in-house publicist by glossing the technical details and the publicist over-interpreted it to journalists, whose stories drifted still farther from the facts, until the emerging narrative ended up frightening an innocent podcast host. As it turned out, I was right about the technology, but wrong about how the story got inflated. The Facebook scientists had made a sober and unassuming blog post about their research, which journalists took up and inflated without further encouragement. This is one of the fundamental mechanisms of the so-called AI Renaissance, which is essentially a cycle of money, hype and fear. Read More
December 19, 2018 Arts & Culture John Akomfrah, On the Verge By Tiana Reid John Akomfrah, Vertigo Sea, 2015, video installation. When I get to the New Museum’s survey exhibition of John Akomfrah’s work, “Signs of Empire,” I find myself lying on the floor, a bootleg antianxiety trick I’ve been practicing over the past few weeks in many places: on the hardwood floors of a friend’s apartment, the cold vinyl of my kitchen floors, the mat at the university gym, the bathroom tiles of a church basement. The supine position opens up the thorax, where the heart and lungs live. With the back half of my body in contact with the floor, I am obliged to acknowledge that the ground has not fallen beneath me. In Akomfrah’s sensorium, I feel sonic vibrations thumping up my spine. I would rather feel nothing at all. Vertigo Sea, Akomfrah’s three-screen HD work originally made for the 2015 Venice Biennale and re-presented at the New Museum, is mesmerizing. The viewer should not be able to look away. But an anxious mind does not rest: minutes after watching the film, I pull out my phone, eyes averted. Every smartphone user and exec who pays good money to “unplug” knows that small screens, too, can overwhelm. Read More
December 19, 2018 Arts & Culture Restoring a Family Ghost By Yevgeniya Traps Some months ago, I came across a smattering of random family photographs at my parents’ house. The house had experienced some flooding during Hurricane Sandy, and the pictures, having been rather unsentimentally stored in the garage, were damaged—not terribly, but enough to make them brittle, to make them seem older than they were, to make them somehow strange, like daguerreotypes sold at flea markets. In the pile I found a very old group photo: my tiny maternal grandfather plopped on his mother’s lap, surrounded by people who must have been family but whose identities now seemed irrevocably lost. My mother held the fraying sepia image and lamented not knowing, the family history mostly a blank she could not fill in, the details lost to war and displacement, to evacuation and emigration, to the banalities of everyday life that make it impossible to keep track of the everyday banalities that eventually become history. But history, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and so we make do; we make up. We plot against the blank spaces. Frail Sister, Karen Green’s genre-transcendent new book, is just this sort of plotting against: a collage-memoir-epistolary found object willed into the story of a life otherwise lost. Virginia Woolf famously invented Judith Shakespeare, doomed sister of William and a woman of equal talents and missing opportunities, who—abandoned, pregnant, fallen—dies by suicide. Green reanimates her Aunt Constance, a ghost in the family archive. Working with old photos, vintage postcards, stationary, sheet music, newspaper clippings, faded cocktail menus, ration books, military documents, and aerial maps, Green combines and reworks, adding text in snippets and bursts, until—imperceptibly—a story coalesces. In an interview with Art in America, Green describes the book as “an old-fashioned mystery,” hidden in a graphic novel, a memoir, an art book, a biography—though she is adamant that Frail Sister is none of these. I came to think of the work as an immersion, a piece of participatory theater, a way of getting lost among the artifacts of a civilization that eventually shows itself to have been ours all along. Read More
December 18, 2018 Arts & Culture The Endurance of A Christmas Carol By Robert Douglas-Fairhurst Illustration by John Leech. Public domain. On January 2, 1840, Dickens wrote to his printers, Bradbury and Evans, to thank them for their annual Christmas gift of a turkey. He chose his words with care: My Dear Sirs, I determined not to thank you for the Turkey until it was quite gone, in order that you might have a becoming idea of its astonishing capabilities. The last remnant of that blessed bird made its appearance at breakfast yesterday—I repeat it, yesterday—the other portions having furnished forth seven grills, one boil, and a cold lunch or two. It is a generous letter, fully in keeping with the generosity of the people he is addressing. Still, like many people who write to express their thanks for unexpected or unwanted Christmas gifts, it seems that Dickens could not resist poking gentle fun at the purchasers’ taste, not least by hinting that sending him a turkey the size of a small child was perhaps being generous to a fault. Is there a note of reproach in “My Dear Sirs”? There is certainly more than one sense in which a turkey that hangs around for a week might be thought of as “that blessed bird,” as is clear from Dickens’s decision to pump up “turkey” into “Turkey,” the double insistence on its final reappearance “yesterday—I repeat it, yesterday,” and the drawn-out sentence that describes the many attempts made by the Dickens household to finish it off (“seven grills, one boil, and a cold lunch or two”), like a chorus of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” in which partridges in pear trees and swans a-swimming have been usurped by this one “blessed bird.” Even the reference to the turkey’s “astonishing capabilities” seems suspended between wonder and worry, as if a turkey that produced so many leftovers came close to being a real-life version of those enchanted objects and creatures—pots overflowing with porridge, or geese laying limitless supplies of golden eggs—that throng the pages of fairy tales. Four years later, Dickens had written something that possessed still more “astonishing capabilities.” A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas was first published just before Christmas in 1843, and since then it has never been out of print. Originally written as a tract for the times, this cautionary tale about the ongoing tussle between greed and goodness has been thought of as timely whenever it has been read. Enjoyed by its first readers as a modern expression of the spirit of Christmas—as modern as Christmas cards, which were sent for the first time in the same year as the Carol’s publication—it has since become popular for quite different reasons: the sense of tradition it is thought to embody, a reminder of the simple pleasures that seem to have been lost sight of in the seasonal scrum of shoppers, an annual invitation to the pleasures of nostalgia. Reproduced so often, and in so many different forms, it has become as much a part of Christmas as mince pies or turkey, with the key difference that, as Martin Heidegger argued was true of all classic works, it has never been “used up.” There have been dozens of films, starring everyone from Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson to Mr. Magoo and Mickey Mouse, operas and ballets, an all-black musical (Comin’ Uptown, which opened on Broadway in 1979), Benjamin Britten’s 1947 Men of Goodwill: Variations on ‘A Christmas Carol,’ even a BBC mime version in 1973 starring Marcel Marceau. So regular are the annual returns of the Carol to our stages and screens, in fact, that it has become something like a secular ritual, an alternative Christmas story to its more obviously religious rival, in which the three wise men are replaced by three instructive spirits, and the pilgrimage to a child in a manger is replaced by a visit to the house of Tiny Tim. Even people who have never read the Carol know the story of Scrooge, the miserable old skinflint who repents after being visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. So widely and deeply has this story entered the popular imagination that phrases such as Bah! Humbug! have floated free of their original context and acquired the force of common proverbs, while Scrooge himself has entered the language as a piece of cultural shorthand “used allusively to designate a miserly, tight-fisted person or killjoy” (OED, “Scrooge”). Read More
December 14, 2018 Arts & Culture Letter to a Stranger By Remedios Varo Fans of the surrealist painter Remedios Varo likely won’t be surprised that her writing is as wide reaching and imaginative as her work on canvas. She crafted uncanny fables and strange recipes intended to conjure dreams, but perhaps her most significant achievements on the page are her letters. Varo had a habit of writing to strangers, a practice immortalized in her friend Leonora Carrington’s novel The Hearing Trumpet, in which the character Carmella Velasquez “writes letters all over the world to people she has never met and signs them with all sorts of romantic names, never her own … These wonderful letters fly off, in a celestial way, by airmail, in Carmella’s delicate handwriting. No one ever replies.” Below, read Varo’s letter to a man whose address she picked at random from the phone book. Albert Edelfelt, Dam som skriver brev (Lady Writing a Letter), 1887. Dear Stranger, I haven’t a clue if you’re a single man or the head of a household, if you’re a shy introvert or a happy extrovert, but whatever the case, perhaps you’re bored and want to dive fearlessly into a group of strangers in hopes of hearing something that will interest or amuse you. What’s more, the fact that you feel curiosity and even some discomfort is already an incentive, and so I’m proposing that you come and spend New Year’s Eve at house No.—— on —— Street. Read More
December 13, 2018 Arts & Culture Yan Lianke Illuminates Contemporary China By Carlos Rojas Yan Lianke. Photo courtesy of Grove Atlantic. History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. —James Joyce, Ulysses Near the beginning of James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus famously compares history to a nightmare. It was also in 1922 that Lu Xun penned the preface to his first short-story collection, Call to Arms (published in 1923), in which he asks whether he should try to use his writing to wake up his fellow countrymen still trapped in the proverbial “iron house” of Chinese feudal values. In these almost simultaneous texts, two of the twentieth century’s leading modernist authors both equated history with sleep and dreams. Whereas Joyce’s Dedalus wants to awaken from the nightmare that is history, Lu Xun worries that his works might in fact succeed in rousing his blissfully oblivious readers, causing them to awaken to a state of historical awareness for which they would then have no easy remedy. Nearly a century later, Yan Lianke appeals to a similar set of oneiric metaphors in his novel The Day the Sun Died. Centered on a fourteen-year-old boy named Li Niannian, whose parents run a shop that sells items for funeral rituals and whose uncle runs a crematorium, the story describes a night during which most of the residents of the boy’s village suddenly start sleepwalking—or, to translate the Chinese term for somnambulism more literally, “dreamwalking.” The community degenerates into chaos, as many villagers act out the urges that they had kept suppressed during their normal waking state. Like Ulysses, which famously unfolds over the course of a single day (June 16, 1904), the main narrative of The Day the Sun Died takes place over the course of a single night, beginning at five P.M. on the evening of the sixth day of the sixth lunar month, and concluding early the following morning. The novel is divided into a series of “books,” each of which opens with a header that notes a temporal interval using the traditional Chinese geng-dian system, and each book is then divided into sections that similarly open with a header that notes the corresponding temporal interval using the Western twenty-four-hour system. Read More