Mosaic Santa by Ryley

My nephew at 11 is a huge Lego fan and a big Minecraft player. We often must ask him to pause the game, get off the Kindle, take a break from his legos. Fortunately, he also likes art, and so I enjoy pulling him and my other nieces and nephews out of the digital world and into more of an analog creative one. Yet, it is a fascinating phenomenon how they take what we may refer to as ‘digitally native’ concepts and experiences and apply them back into the analog world rather than the other way around. Such may seem backwards to anyone born before the millenium, but for kids these days, they are just as immersed in digital experiences as they are within analog ones.

To give you an example, this past holiday season, we undertook tile mosaics. After first prototyping with paper, my nephew decides he wants to make a Santa. Unaware of the ancient origins of mosaic-making, his description of the result of that Santa gave me pause — he referred to it as a “Minecraft-Santa-slash-Lego-Santa.” I said “Yes! That’s right! Mosaics are like the 2D version of legos!” and then winced. Reflecting further, as an artist also immersed in the digital world of programming and algorithms, I think about the myriad ways I am re-interpreting what was once the origin of media as a secondary medium. Reality redux.

Relating the digital world back to our analog world and more importantly noting how we do it is increasingly critical as we become more and more a highly proficient technical society. Have you caught yourself from trying to literally pinch open (magnify) a page of your book so you can read the fine print? How about using a Sharpie and wishing there was a Ctrl-Z to erase the previous stroke? While these are fun and light-hearted examples, it’s ever more true that we should examine how a digital and technological framing affects the deeper aspects of how we see the world around us.

I lived in the port authority area in Boston for the past year — South Boston. The distant container ships tiny on the horizon, easily mistaken for one of Boston’s Harbor Island, approach slowly, gradually morphing into the Sea Giants of Commerce that they are. Laden with hundreds upon hundreds of containers, they move things unit-by-unit, block-by-block, ship-by-ship from here to there and back again. The crane-like objects await them (I like to call them Urban Dinos), and engage in a systematic exchange of blocks, re-stacking and ordering the containers from here to there for land distribution. What should we make of all of these building blocks, large and small? Mosaics, Minecraft, Lego blocks, software modules, containers, ships are all discrete objects, distinct and separate from each other, used to constitute a vast range of composite objects, whether they are tiled mosaics, digital art, toys, iPhone Apps, robots, vehicles of transport and commerce.

Boston Harbor, Summer 2017

Then there is how these building blocks are put together, swapped out, re-categorized. These are the algorithms that drive our world. Again, noting how we may be affected by the systematic way these building blocks are stacked together is of critical importance going forward, especially with Machine and Artificial Intelligence looming large on the horizon. Is it a natural process to systematically do the same thing in the same way over and over? Often the answer is no, but many artificial intelligences are trained exactly in this way.

As an artist and a software developer, you’d think I’d be all over the new tech du jour, whether it’s Adobe’s Creative Suite, the Microsoft Kinect, VR Goggles, 3D printers and all the new ways we have of making art in the digital world. And while I do really appreciate these tools and like working with them, I find no substitute for a tangible interaction with my materials. When I first entered the software field, software creative tools felt rigid and inflexible- and despite the advances these days — Microsoft’s Surface, Google’s Tiltbrush, the fantastical virtual world free from the rules of physics, for me the results still feel somewhat too uniform, too intangible, too distant from the hand that is making them. Ultimately, the way those platforms — or the way its building blocks fit together — rarely jibes with the way I want to experience or create something. An expert like Seymour Papert would probably refer to what I seek as a transformational experience. I crave more of a direct, physical connection to the tools I use as well as the ways I may or may not fit things together.

I wonder if my nieces and nephews will feel the same way. They have made compelling, fantastic structures in Minecraft and undoubtedly have been markedly affected by their time with this game. And actually, I have too. I love Minecraft. But I don’t want to play it all the time, and digital blocks are not my preferred medium. But, I was raised in the 70s, and I have all sorts of familiarity with all sorts of creative endeavors. Many studies have raised concern regarding the young folks who may be missing exposure to all that is beyond the digital realm (read anything by Sherry Turkle for more).

So, I think about these blocks and all of these discrete units, and also how we are putting them together and I start to read Seymour Papert, Tim Ingold, Mitch Resnick. And they have me thinking that my hunch is right — we are missing something in our discretized, containerized world — at least in the US if not beyond. In our pristine slide presentations, our plastic-wrapped products, and our insistence on perfect angles and things properly fitting into each other, we are missing some kind of interstitial … mud.

Literally, I think we are missing the mud. The dirt. The clay. The essence of the connection, an alleged origin of humanity. What you can touch, what gets messy and that which doesn’t make things fit nicely in a box or into a stack. The embodiment of a person’s self perhaps. Ingold would say we are missing the continuity of substance — that there is rarely a hard beginning or ending to substance and form and that it is more about the movement and interplay of that substance and form than the physical stuff itself. In many ways, we as humans work hard to separate things out in order for clarity and conveyance, conveyance of ideas, materials, everything. You could call this computational thinking, or more broadly speaking, a form of digitality that precedes and supersedes anything to do with computers.

Don’t get me wrong — all of this is entirely natural — humans by nature are pattern-matchers and categorizers. I’m hardly saying technology has to be all things to all people. However I do think it is important to be aware of how and why we are doing what we are doing in both the digital and analog realm. And so, what of this — that we are separating the substance — the mud — from its integral movement and interplay — the act of molding, of casting, of getting wet slop on your hands, the dust in the air and your hair? In the digital realm, does mud become just like any other material — a icon selection in the Minecraft menu? When we build something in the digital world, are we making decisions regarding representation, construction and creation that are fundamentally different than how we would go about it in the analog world? Is that something that might affect our everyday perspective of the world? I think for sure it would if all you are doing is something analogous to stacking legos or boxes in Minecraft on an everyday basis.

One of the creative toys I gave my nephew was a String Art kit. I really enjoyed doing this with him because it is so very different from the toys with which he usually plays. There are no pieces to put together. Rather, it is any organization of pins, and then the way-finding of the string around these pins to make a desired shape. To me, it is an excellent embodiment of Ingold’s rubric: the influences and interactions of the mind and body are not easily interpreted and we should be cautious when they go missing from the way we mirror our world. Between legos and string art, I find an important distinction.

String Art Robot by Ryley

But, let’s get apples and oranges out of the way first. The low-hanging distinction here is that stacking the same kind of things in the same kind of way makes anyone dull at a dinner party. Plenty has been discussed in a myriad of dystopian sci-fi novels about the danger of roboticizing humanity. Really I’m talking less about systematic, repetitious instructions in a 10K-piece Lego Set than I’m talking about the systematic divisions of substance. If we can assume that the underpinning algorithms (pun intended) between legos and string art is fairly similar: assuming that that the author is making up his or her own instructions versus following rote instructions, then we can focus on the distinction of the material itself. If all ‘act of creations’ were to require using Lego-like blocks, we would be missing a fundamental creation principle — some things cannot and arguably should not be cut up into pieces and systematically stacked. String art would not be string art if you had to build it with pre-determined lengths of string. Threads are threads because they are woven into something, water is only liquid in one of its forms, and dirt gets all over everything. As Ingold says, a mountain is not made of discrete bricks, but is a folding of the earth, made by the forces and gestures of itself. If a human experience is more like a web of continuous strings, what does it mean if and when our rapidly advancing technology does not reflect that? Is the material — or lack of materiality —now McLuhan’s message?

What now that almost every analog medium can be represented by the same ones-and-zeros in the digital realm? Digital camera pixels can look a lot like 3D object pixels which can look a lot like any sort of software instructions. Just because we can treat concepts the same way as Lev Manovich observes, both in the stacking and in the categorization, doesn’t mean we should lose the essence of the representation. How to represent the essence of something or someone is a critical decision point as we train artificial intelligences and robots on image and facial recognition and how we teach them to learn (thanks for that important distinction Rahul Bhargava).

So amplifying a challenge made by a most excellent lecturer and designer, Lucy Siyao Liu, as you go about your day, do you see yourself stacking lego blocks, or making string art or something in-between? What is the material experience of your digital life? Or your digital experience of your material life?

I for one am going to think about this more as I continue on my digital-to-analog interpretation. Currently I am thinking about how to put ‘the mud’ back into Photoshop. My question for myself: can I bring embodiment back to these operations in an interesting and thought-provoking way? Aren’t fingers the original digits anyway? Look for “Real Digital Tools” soon!