Digital Doomsday

Genetologic Research 27/10/2011 23:01

Leonid Tsvetkov

Remnants of our digital discoveries are being dumped worldwide by the millions. After stripping off some valuable metal parts, the left overs are worthless. So called ‘Motherboards’, the main circuit board of a computer have a short life expectancy since new chips are developed with singularitarian speed*. When exposed to a variety of chemical liquids they become alive again. Never before I’ve seen so much beauty in discarded trash. Oil refineries and skyscrapers surround city grids which are overrun by unknown fungi and bacteria. The Russian artist Leonid Tsvetkov creates landscapes which could become ours in a not so distant future, or as he describes it himself: ‘My work focuses on reshaping cultural waste and exploration of social and physical processes. I am interested in the moments where the hard edge geometry of the city becomes organic or there random activity begins to take a highly organized form’.

(*) Technological singularity refers to the hypothetical future emergence of greater-than-human intelligence through technological means. Since the capabilities of such an intelligence would be difficult for an unaided human mind to comprehend, the occurrence of a technological singularity is seen as an intellectual event horizon, beyond which the future becomes difficult to understand or predict. Nevertheless, proponents of the singularity typically anticipate such an event to precede an “intelligence explosion”, wherein superintelligences design successive generations of increasingly powerful minds. The term was coined by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, who argues that artificial intelligence, human biological enhancement or brain-computer interfaces could be possible causes of the singularity. The concept is popularized by futurists like Ray Kurzweil and it is expected by proponents to occur around 2045.

Christal Cave

Genetologic Research 10/09/2011 22:31

Roger Hiorns
Seizure, 2008

In his latest installation, Seizure, British artist Roger Hiorns has turned the idea of sculpture inside out. Rather than present a sculpture inside an architectural space, hes turned every surface of the architectural space into sculpture. Mixing installation art and chemistry, hes taken an entire abandoned apartment near Londons Elephant & Castle and transformed it into a gemstone. Covering the inside with blue copper sulphate crystals, hes created an other-worldly, mineralized, glinting mirror of an everyday apartment. Jewels literally glowing from the ceiling and lining the floors

The scale and production of Seizure is ambitious. After reinforcing the walls and ceiling and covering them in plastic sheeting, 80,000 litres of a copper sulphate solution was poured in from a hole in the ceiling. After a few weeks the temperature of the solution fell and the crystals began to grow. The remaining liquid was pumped back out and sent for special chemical recycling.

Caves are the earliest forms of dwelling and crystal caves do occur naturally in the form of salt and gypsum caves, Roger Hiorns says. And in a way this project is converting a concrete modernist building into a cave. The work isnt about architecture but there is that element of architectural reversion about it. Plus I am originally from Birmingham, so, for me, being surrounded by concrete is natural.

Encased in ice-cooled orange suits, scientists explore the Cave of Crystals, discovered a thousand feet (304 meters) below Naica, Mexico, in 2000.

Simon Ruehle
O.T., 2005 (speakers, radio)

Technological Evolution

Genetologic Research 01/02/2011 20:19

Charley Reijnders
Evolution, 2009

Like an old fashioned explorer Charley Reijnders wondered around on her self invented ‘Island of Products’ where a remarkable evolution took place after the disappearance of their human creators. Without any interference the new mechanical species evolved from the discarded mass consumer products of a long gone past. In a sketchbook she tried to capture all this new marvels of evolution.

According to Ray Kurzweil, the line between humans and machines will blur as machines attain human-level intelligence and humans start upgrading themselves with cybernetic implants. These implants will greatly enhance human cognitive and physical abilities, and allow direct interface between humans and machines.

‘Once life takes hold on a planet, we can consider the emergence of technology as inevitable. The ability to expand the reach of one’s physical capabilities, not to mention mental facilities, through technology is clearly useful for survival. Technology has enabled our subspecies to dominate its ecological niche. Technology requires two attributes of its creator: intelligence and the physical ability to manipulate the environment. This ability to use limited resources optimally, is inherently useful for survival, so it is favored. The ability to manipulate the environment is also useful; otherwise an organism is at the mercy of its environment for safety, food, and the satisfaction of its other needs. Sooner or later, an organism is bound to emerge with both attributes.

As technology is the continuation of evolution by other means, it shares the phenomenon of an exponentially quickening pace. The word is derived from the Greek tekhn¯e, which means “craft” or “art,” and logia, which means “the study of.” Thus one interpretation of technology is the study of crafting, in which crafting refers to the shaping of resources for a practical purpose.’ (abstract of Ray Kurzweils ‘The Age of Spiritual Machines’)

When a scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
– Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws of technology

Cosmology

Genetologic Research 10/11/2010 21:58

\ Cosmology of Genetology \ CG \ 1
Fourth quire of a larger publication about Genetology, November 2010

Size: 100 x 70 cm (poster) 50 x 70 cm (folded)
Published by CBK Rotterdam
Text: Martin Wen-Yu Lo
Design: Raf Vancampenhoudt
Editor: Willem Vanden Eynde

Without a doubt, the single most important problem in physics and cosmology today is Dark Matter. Consider after all of the incredible advancements in science and technology in the 20th century, today, a decade into the 21st century, we still do not know what more than 96% of the universe is made of! Not a clue!

How is this possible when we are able to peer through powerful telescopes in spacetime back to the beginning of the universe, almost at the instant of the Big Bang, that we dont know what constitutes most of the universe? It brings into question our concept of knowledge, the world, reality, our very being. What is this dark universe to which we belong yet without awareness for so long?

And yet, the world is even more marvelous than we can ever imagine. I present here only one of many theories of dark matter that is being studied by scientists today. It is one which I think is the simplest and the most elegant, called the Brans Conjecture, named after the general relativist, Carl Brans, who first conceived this theory in 1991. The Brans Conjecture explains dark matter as a phenomenon created by a topological property of spacetime called exotic smoothness. We shall explain these strange sounding terms shortly, but for now, the point is that there may not be any real dark matter at all according to Brans theory. Instead, just as Einstein told us that spacetime is curved by gravity, Brans is telling us that another geometric property of spacetime may be a new type of smoothness. When viewed from a part of spacetime with ordinary smoothness such as our own, the distant regions of spacetime with exotic smoothness will appear to have extra forces appearing as dark matter and dark energy.

What is smoothness? The Chinese word for smooth consists of two characters: . means light , empty, free of things that can obstruct. means slippery, the three dashes on the left is the radical for water, and the character to the right is for bone. My interpretation is that the water makes the floor slippery so you can break your bone on it. Mathematically, this concept can be made very precise: something smooth can be locally approximated by flat surfaces, which is the differential a linear approximation which forms the basis for calculus. Hence smooth objects are also known as differentiable and the smooth structure on a smooth object is called its differential structure.

Since the invention of calculus by Newton and Leibnitz, mathematicians have taken for granted that there is only one kind of smoothness or differential structure on an object of any dimension. These smooth regular objects are called manifolds, conceived and described first by Riemann in the early 19th century. Ever since Descartes coordinatized space by Cartesian Coordinates like the regular grids of vertical Avenues and horizonal Streets used to coordinatize Midtown Manhattan (New Amsterdam), we think of N-dimensional space, called RN, as the set of points each with a lable [x1, x2, xN] where x1 is the coordinate in the first dimension, x2 is the coordinate for the second, and so on. From this point of view, there really isnt that much difference between a 3D world coordinatized by [x1, x2, x3] and the 4D world coordinatized by [x1, x2, x3, x4]. You just add another coordinate and everything is more or less the same or so it seems.

In reality, each dimension is an entirely different beast. Although coordinate-wise all dimensions look the same, [x1, x2, xN], geometrically every dimension is different in its own way. The situation is so utterly fantastic that even mathematicians themselves had a hard time believing this phenomenon. In 1954, while researching the fabled Poincaré Conjecture to characterize the simplest manifold we know, the sphere, John Milnor chanced upon the discovery that S7, the 7-th dimensional sphere, had more than one smooth structure! He called these exotic spheres. In fact, there are exactly 28 different smooth structures on S7. More over, it is different in every dimension! The computation of the number of exotic structures in each dimension is very complicated involving Bernoulli numbers.

Now, you will notice from Table 1 that in every dimension from 1 to 20, the number of exotic spheres is known except in dimension 4, the dimension of spacetime in which we live. This number is the famous Smooth Poincaré Conjecture in Dimension 4 which is still an open problem. In fact, dimension 4 is truly unique in the context of exotic smoothness.

> In every other dimension, exotic manifolds (high dimensional surfaces) can have only finite numbers of distinct exotic smooth structures. In dimension 4, every known exotic manifold has infinite number of exotic smooth structures.

> In every other dimension, the N-dimensional Euclidean space, RN, given by the set of all coordinates { [x1, x2, xN], where x1, x2, xN is a real number}, has only one smooth structure. In dimension 4, RN has an uncountable number of smooth structures.

One cannot help but see that dimension 4 is truly unique in a way which we are still grasping to understand. These facts about exotic smoothness in dimension 4 were only discovered in the 1980s.

As strange as the ideas of invisible dark matter/energy and exotic smoothness seem to us today, one day in the near future, we will understand what they are and how to manipulate matter, energy, and spacetime with these new concepts. Consider Einsteins equation E = MC2 and the vast consequences it brought to the world, we cannot but sit up and pay attention when something so fundamental as our knowledge of the nature of matter has been put into doubt! What we think we know best, our material world, is now but a mere shadow of a vast universe we have absolutely no knowledge of. And we cant even see it! It goes right through us, like phantoms and ghosts. We will turn our attention to the three key aspects in which these concepts touch our lives.

Dark matter cannot be directly observed since they reflect no light thus is completely dark. Hence the only way to detect it at the present is to infer its existence from the way it affects the motion of nearby ordinary matter which we can see. This is how it was discovered. While studying the Coma galaxy cluster in 1933, Fritz Zwicky first noticed that the motion of the cluster indicated there was missing mass in order to account for the faster velocities of the galaxies observed. He coined the term Dark Matter for this missing mass. It

When Suddenly It Hit Me

Genetologic Research 07/11/2010 23:00

Rinus Van de Velde
Physical Items Themselves Are Not Evidence, 2009

Rinus Van de Velde uses signs as a means to put a recalcitrant reality in order. His starting point is shaped through the world of photographic representation. Having an extensive personal archive of images ranging from (semi)scientific magazines such as the National Geographic to biographies of artists and scientists, these images form a rich source for series of drawings in which the source material is still recognizably present. The resemblance between all these pictures is not so much what they show but how they show it. By using the photographs as material for a drawing and by situating it in a different context by adding text, Van de Velde ignores the facts and creates space to tell a personal story. The aim isnt to tell the reality behind the photo but to create third degree myth. Many of the photographs that Van de Velde references are part of an ideology that isnt completely right or which hasnt survived the test of time: like the deep rooted faith in the myth of the artist as authentic or autonomous, scientific progress or paternal exotism. Instead of dismantling, Van de Velde weaves through text and reciprocally references a new story. The result is a sort of mirror-universe, inhabited by brave alter-egos that map the world around them and function as ideal representatives of the actual artist.

When Suddenly It Hit Me, 2009

Maarten Vanden Eynde
Dip-Stick, 2005

Small wooden sculpture, planed square on one side, the other is inflicted like a burned lump or black tumor, like a stick dipped in dark matter.

Paper Moon

Genetologic Research 03/11/2010 23:13

Paul Ramirez Jonas
Paper Moon (I Create as I Speak), 2007

Consisting of sheets of paper tiled to represent an image of the moon, upon closer inspection, the design is made up of text that reads, I Create as I Speak. A single sheet is removed from the wall and rests on a lectern, with a microphone and a portable amplifier, inviting the viewer to interact with the work. The text plays with words; I Create as I Speak translates to ABRACADABRA in the ancient Aramaic language.

Toril Johannessen (with Vilde Salhus Røed)
Large and partly spectacular solar eclipse (08.01.08), seen from a hill between our houses, 2008

Air-Port-City

Genetologic Research 02/11/2010 01:16

Tomás Saraceno
Iridescent Plant Medium with Lamp, 2009

The luminous and roughly human-height Iridescent Plant Medium with Lamp consists of a sphere dressed in a billowing sheath of iridescent foil in a dark room. Thoroughly otherworldly, the orb shivers and cowers in the corner like a specimen from space. NASA, it should be noted, sent plants on early space missions and began experimenting with aeroponics in the late 1990s. One can imagine the possibility of future cosmic plantations, a vision clearly encouraged by Saracenos installation.- Based on a text by Erin Rouse -

Sunny Day, Air-Port-City, 2006

As an architect Saraceno has for years been looking into the possibility of using large balloon-like constructions to enable the free circulation of persons and goods across the entire globe.

Folding Space

Genetologic Research 01/11/2010 12:00

Martijn Hendriks
Gradually, then suddenly (white version), 2009

Still from a single channel altered video of a 1965 studio performance by Bruce Nauman, 1 min 59 sec

The existence of wormholes, shortcuts through spacetime, is still hotly debated. Stephen Hawking gave a lecture touching on the possibility and the implications of traversable wormholes. In theory, they would allow quick travel in space to even the most remote galaxies (you wouldnt actually be travelling faster than the speed of light, but you would beat light to your destination, because it had to travel all the way around). More baffling still, they would allow time travel too. Hawking stated that if you could travel from one side of the galaxy to the other in a matter of a week or two, you could return through another wormhole, and be back before you started your journey. The theory only allows travel back in time, and only to the moment of the initial creation of the time machine. Hawking again: a time machine will be built someday, but has not yet been built, so the tourists from the future cannot reach this far back in time.

- Based on a text by Brooke Ballantyne -

Dark Energy

Genetologic Research 31/10/2010 16:20

Maarten Vanden Eynde
Gravitational Bending, 2010

Even weirder than dark matterthe invisible stuff constituting most of the mass of the universeis dark energy, a mysterious force pushing the universe apart at an ever-faster rate. Dark energy has been around for most of the history of the cosmos. Nine billion years ago, dark energy was already wielding its repulsive influence on the universe, explains Johns Hopkins University astrophysicist Adam Riess. But the repulsion didnt exceed the force of gravity until 5 billion years ago, when cosmic expansion kicked into high gear and began accelerating.

A pioneering space mission called the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) delivered the first accurate account of the overall makeup of the universe. The answer is decidedly strange. Dark energy makes up 73 percent of the universe, dark matter another 23 percent. Atomic mattereverything around us and everything astronomers have ever seenaccounts for just 4 percent.

Comparing images from the Hubble Space Telescopes high-end cameras with the WMAP heat signature map of the early universe, Riess and his colleagues retraced the growth history of the universe with unprecedented accuracy and depth. Its as if you mark the height of a child against a doorframe to measure growth spurts, Riess says. For reasons as yet unknown, the antigravitational effects of dark energy are greater now than they were in the distant past. One theory, supported by the Hubble data, is that empty space is impregnated with residual energy from the Big Bang. As space expands, so does dark energy, while matter is spread out, weakening the inward pull of gravity.