Electronic Worlds, Paper Texts, Part I: Digital Mantras ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- You may distribute the text of this article freely, but I would appreciate knowing about anything interesting that you do with them. Tom Maddox tmaddox@well.sf.ca.us ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Electronic Worlds, Paper Texts, Part I: Digital Mantras Tom Maddox Lately various guides to the Internet have spawned in alarming profusion, to the point that their very number has become a joke on the net itself. There are big books, small books, generalized and specialized books; books for users of DOS, Windows, or Macs; books that explain telnet, ftp, SLIP, Mosaic, TCP/IP, along with a host of technical topics. And of course there are books defined by the sophistication of their audience: those for novices (jocularly construed, according to some titles, as "big dummies" or "idiots") or systems administrators, and for everyone in between. For everyone except readers. Most of us believe that there is something else beyond technical description and expertise--even if we believe that getting at that something else might require us to turn completely away from our computer keyboards and screens and pay attention to other things. However, once we do turn to the stacks of manuals and how to books, all the aids to the technically perplexed, we find nothing that will explain to us much of anything about what all this--the emergence of computer networks and allied technologies--means in any large or interesting sense. To put it another way, we can learn what the term "ftp," for instance, signifies and how to use the capabilities the term represents, but we cannot learn much about what using ftp does to us as human beings. For all the noise, there are almost (I nearly said "virtually," a hideous, involuntary pun) no real books about computer networks. (I must mention Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier [Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1993], which I discussed in an earlier column, as an honorable exception. The book has its own narrow focus and what I consider failings, but it tackles some interesting and important questions. For a discussion, see the column titled "The Community Machines," Locus, May, 1994). As a result, those of us looking for something more intellectually engaging than how to books must take a look at books about what might be called related things--topics roughly relevant that perhaps can be transposed into the realm of the networks. We have to read for what we find interesting, moving, and relevant; we have to make our own transpositions. (Perhaps we have to write our own books. M.I.T. Press turns out to be of special interest in this regard. They produce several brilliantly- designed and printed, technically expert, ambitious books on such topics. Steven R. Holtzman's Digital Mantras: The Languages of Abstract and Virtual Worlds (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1994) is a recent example. It has a gorgeous cover designed around a small-scale reproduction of Wassily Kandinsky's "Dominant Curve." Inside, the unexpected: the book's first part includes an opening "Prelude" in the form of what appears to be a journal entry done in India in 1977 concerning the author and a Tibetan listening to incomprehensible radio broadcasts; following this, a series of chapters on Aryan languages; music theory (the role of the circle of fifths in the development of tonal music); linguistics from 150 A.D. in India through Saussure and structuralism in Europe; serial music of the Second Viennese School; Kandinsky's analysis and use of abstract visual forms; post-World War II serial music; Chomsky's generative linguistics; and another interlude, this time from Nepal. By this point we have read 118 pages and come across only passing mention of digital technology. Hold that thought: a book about digital technology that spends its first hundred pages talking about various historical episodes and aesthetic principles of music, art, and linguistics; pages that contain poetic or evocative, perhaps even mystical pieces about the author's experiences in Asia. And the book is published by M.I.T. Press, which would seem some sort of guarantee that it's going to be about what it purports to be about, especially in technical matters. Horrors. In fact, it turns out that all this seemingly irrelevant matter addresses the book's main concerns--and gives a depth and weight to those concerns. Much (probably most) current writing about digital technology suffers from a curious historical weightlessness--like television news, it seems a product of its particular instant, a sort of eternal present (metaphorically fifteen minutes' worth, in Andy Warhol's justly famous phrase) without historical antecedent or consequence. Digital Mantras, on the other hand, establishes a multi-leveled set of correspondences from a broad array of fields of knowledge and endeavor. Holtzman makes very large claims for digital technology, but he also shows his grounds for making the claims and includes in his argument the historical context in which the claims make sense. In other words, this is a book about digital technology, not a description of how to use it, another set of breathless claims for it, or a piece of marketing. Moreover, it has the weight of considered and informed thought and so is welcome whatever the merits of its particular case. With regard to art, music, and linguistics, Holtzman summarizes, in a bare statement that has already been given flesh by the chapters preceding it: All vehicles of communication can be look at in terms of abstract units with positions in a system. All can be understood as abstract systems. And he goes on: Computers are the ultimate manipulators of abstract structures. The widespread views of languages as abstract systems combined with the ability to create precise descriptions with generative grammars forms a foundation for developing expressive systems with computers. Given this foundation, the development of the computer opens new avenues for exploring creative processes and developing new vehicles of expression. And so to one of his most radical claims: We are on the verge of a new age of creative expression. It represents a direct continuity with centuries of tradition in linguistics, music, and the visual arts. In the second part of the book, Holtzman provides details supporting these claims. He surveys, among other things, the fields of computer-aided natural language processing, musical composition, visual art, and virtual reality. In all of them he is concerned with the computer as "a decision-making tool . . . an extension of the mind, a tool to manipulate abstract objects and structures, rather than of the hand or the eye." He quotes Harold Cohen (whose work with the drawing and painting machine AARON I find the most fascinating and beautiful of any of the efforts to combine human and computer creation): There's a fundamental difference between what we traditionally call a tool, which requires feedback to be conducted to and from the human user for operations to take place, and a device that contains its own feedback paths, that can conduct its own investigations and modify its own behavior on the basis of what it's able to feed back to itself from the results of what it has done. A difference indeed: the computer as metaphorical hammer that chooses which nails to strike and carries out the operation on its own. These sets of concepts in hand, Holtzman considers notions such as the "metaartist" (the software that makes art), that goes on creating long after its builder or programmer has died; and, finally, a fundamentally different creative process enabled by the technology whose products must be seen through a new, digital aesthetic. The digital aesthetic poses certain problems, ones Holtzman himself addresses in a short chapter called "Dissonance." The key problem is simple enough: "People generally do not like modern music," he observes. He then goes on to argue for perceived dissonance and to pose the question, "But is the key issue to understanding music what it sounds like?" I would argue that the question is not one of understanding but of experiencing--most listeners want to enjoy music rather than to understand it (which is more properly a composer's or performer's domain). Thus I would ask: will the digital aesthetic result in works, in whatever medium, that are, by whatever definition, enjoyable? Holtzman says, Few, perhaps, will appreciate many of the sounds or images that are idiomatic to computers. . . . Furthermore, intelligence and meaning may be conceived in terms other than human terms. These are interesting notions, and as Holtzman admits, we cannot know either what the digital aesthetic will look and sound like. Sounds and images "idiomatic to computers" can only be imagined, and many current artifacts pointing in that direction offer grounds for pessimism. Also, what we might call Holtzman's neo- Pythagoreanism has broader problems. He views language, music, and visual arts--in fact, as he says, all communicative arts--as abstract structures, and while this kind of scrutiny can be very powerful analytically, it generally leaves the roots of our experience of these "arts" untouched. That is, structuralist analyses of all sorts have a certain arid quality to them, a bloodlessness. Further, this view of formal systems, which has dominated much of the discourse on topics such as artificial intelligence, has been severely criticized in recent years. For instance, Holtzman concerns himself with Terry Winograd's SHRDLU program, one of the early (mid-to-late 1960s) and ultimately unsuccessful attempts at constructing a computer system that could speak and understand language; however, he does not take into account Winograd's later work, which treats language very differently. In Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores, Understanding Computers and Cognition (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1987), Winograd says: The rationalistic approach to meaning that underlies systems like SHRDLU is founded on the assumption that the meanings of words and of the sentences and phrases made up of them can be characterized independently of the interpretation given by individuals in a situation. And this kind of approach--Holtzman's being very much the same sort--Winograd now rejects, as do many others. Ultimately Holtzman arrives at conclusions that are forthrightly mystical. At the end of a discussion of Pythagoreanism, Buddhism, and Jainism, he asserts: "Technology is a tool for investigating the cosmic truths found in structure. The computer--the ultimate tool for manipulating structures--can reveal a new dimension of Brahman: a digital reflection of Brahman." Far out, as we said several billion times during the 60s. Many people will find this conclusion immaterial or irritating or both, but I believe it represents a reasonable conclusion given Holtzman's premises--he finds these traditions important for understanding the interrelationship of self and universe and soberly and straightforwardly applies them to formal structures and digital technology. We seem to have come a far distance from the relatively mundane concerns of the Internet-- "revealing a new dimension of Brahman," indeed. Yet I would argue that the kind of exploration that makes plain its presuppositions and is historically deeply informed is of more lasting value than another celebration of the latest technological advance, no matter how mystical its conclusions--or how controversial the general approach. With regard to the Internet and computer networks in general, Holtzman says nothing, but what he says has relevance there. In particular, his notions of digital world creation and digital aesthetics apply to MUDs, MOOs, MUSHes, and so forth--the imaginary worlds of the Internet described in detail by Howard Rheingold and already the subjects of intense speculation by sociologists of computer-mediated communication. These virtual worlds began as transformations of existing role-playing games and role-playing game-like habitats: hence terms such as "Multi-User Dungeon." But in the compressed time of the networks they have quickly evolved into something more than and different from their origins. What Holtzman leads us to look for is further evolutions that will lead toward more purely digital worlds, freed from the conventions, and so the constraints, of mundane ideas such as the dungeon or the role-playing game itself. Computer networks will find purer expressions--rich, strange, digital. This is hardly a startling idea on its own--in fact, one can find it in various forms in the usual places:, such as magazines on the order of Wired and Mondo 2000. However, these ideas have a different weight when given historical and formal context. Holtzman is not claiming that our lives will be transformed or that we will become perpetually groovy (which seems implicit in Mondo's worldview); he is claiming that new modes of expression have been made possible by digital technology and that the quest for new modes of expression has important continuities with old and honorable traditions of philosophical, religious, and aesthetic exploration. However, one of my central points in this look at Digital Mantras is that it is a real book for real readers, one that requires reflection, hence time to absorb it and think about its consequences. I am still not sure how much of Holtzman's argument I accept-- for instance, I tend to side with Winograd on issues of meaning in formal systems--but I am certain that Holtzman has given me an interesting framework for thinking about formal systems and artistic expression. (E-mail address: tmaddox@halcyon.com) ======================================================================= This document is from the WELL gopher server: gopher://gopher.well.com Questions and comments to: gopher@well.com .