A BUG IN THE SYSTEM

MEDIA STUDIES THESIS [2016]

BY LAYLA FASSA

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Eva Woods
M Mark
Darcy Gordineer
Bill Hoynes
Gwen Broude
Ken Livingston
Karina
Harry
Pirilti
Noah
Lucas
Jake
Charlotte
Imara
Gordon
Lena
Bobby
Brendan
Sofia
Cat
Tomas
Lily
Athena
Gabby
Drew
Sanne
Otis
Ezra
Sara
Taylor
Esteban
Max

TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

GLOSSARY

IMAGINATIVE CYBERNETIC
ARCHITECTURES

10

VIRTUAL ARCHITECTS

14

COPIES & SCANS

18

PHOTOGRAMMETRY

22

IMAGES & INFORMATION

23

SIMULATING DIGITAL ORGANISMS

27

EUSOCIAL SYSTEMS & THE SOCIAL

CRITIC

30

SUBTERRANEAN VISIONS

34

THE COLONY

36

TECHNOTOPIC DREAMSCAPE

37

FABRICATING ALTERNATIVE
NETWORKS

40

PORTRAITS

47

BIBLIOGRAPHY

65

PREFACE

The impetus for this project began in several places,
and I cannot be sure which came first, because they are interdependent, feeding and growing from each others nodes as
a rhizome does beneath a tree. 1 Perhaps more accurate than
the image of a rhizome is to see a series of tunnels, with desire
beginning at the surface, where a pregnant mother begins to
burrow deep beneath the ground in order to give birth, multiplying and distributing pieces of herself from a lonely, fertile
organism, to a superorganism of distributed activity.

It began in dreams, in which I would look into the distance and see unrendered mountains, as in the edge of a videogame terrain. My sleep would be interrupted when I would
look above and see the airplane overhead flickering, in the
visual language of a screen glitch, and I would consider how
perhaps I wasnt actually awake. Even in my dreams I am using my computer to model impossible objects, and they come
spilling out from the screen, animated yet still less-than-alive,
still with that pixelated sheen. On this node, the beginning is
when the world of CGI merged with my dreams to create its
own mysterious universe of SGI (sleep-generated images).

It began in the lab, where I worked on robots, operating
between simulation and hardware, finding a host of variables
that do not translate. In this same lab, researching a method
to create a single robotic ant that could be replicated to fulfill
the needs of a colony. An unmanifested thought experiment, a
well-researched play of science. We desire to see ourselves in
everything. Valentino Braitenberg points out this piece of human narcissism in his short work of fictional science, Vehicles,
making a case for resistance to psychological language. 2

It began as the desire to create an environment that reimagines the ironic dream of a common language in the integrated circuit. 3 What has resulted from this labor of textual and
artistic research is not a clearly defined unity as the premise
may suggest, but a heterotopic weaving of fact and fiction that
illustrates and exaggerates the potential for fear and pleasure
when visualizing systems of control as opportunities for play
(and vice-versa).

The rhizome comes

from Deleuze, Gilles, and
Flix Guattari. A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. (Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota, 1987)

We will be tempted,
then, to use psychological
language in describing [the
robots] behavior. And yet
we know very well that there
is nothing in these vehicles that we have not put
in ourselves. Braitenberg,
Valentino. Vehicles, Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT,
1984), 2.
3

Paraphrased from Donna

Jeanne Haraway. A Cyborg Manifesto, in Simians,
Cyborgs, and Women: The
Reinvention of Nature. (New
York: Routledge, 1991)

photo by Layla Fassa

Being immersed in a culture contingent on digital

images, data and its visual representations, I have
sensed there are phenomena of self-organization
within them. My background in cognitive science,
lab work, and developed practices that question
epistemologies that claim objectivity, have informed my process minutely. The embeddedness
and osmosis of ideas from science to society and
back again, mediated not just through image and
narrative but in the minutiae of our individual actions, are central to my inquiry. This lends itself
directly to the question of timing and drive. Was
the desire to manifest such an environment the
inevitable product of our hypermodern condition,
only possible due to the technics of the time? Or
are the trends we see in in the convergence of
science and art reflecting the re-emergence of a
state of being that is as timeless as the existence
of self-organizing structures, now being realized
in new media?

RESEARCH QUESTIONS
What is a cybernetic organism in the age of digital imaging? Where can we find a historical nexus between the
methods used to model biological and mathematical systems and the increasing velocity of digital images? How is
it possible to remain consistently real when we have interfaced so far with simulated systems that might self-destruct? How do the structures of bodies hold up under
the pressure of hyperreal copying and material appropriation? How is the cycle of sublimation and condesnsation
between flesh bodies and data bodies, human beings
and data points, reflected in the organization or exploitation of physical labor? How do bodies fracture and congeal when integrated in such an environment? How does
image-based modeling move offline, producing and reproducing the systems it was meant to represent? When
does an imaginary architecture become real?

GLOSSARY

A few terms will come up once or several times in
this text that need preemptive clarification. System and
body are both terms embedded in the definition and discussion of cyborgs. Imaginative architecture and metadigital organism are two terms that I have made up in the
development of this framework to scaffold the feedback
loop I describe.

When I speak of bodies, it is context-dependent.
A body can be corporeal, as in the system of bones and
organs that are contained within the membrane-organ of
the epidermis. It can be psychological, as in our circumscribing of bodies in perceiving between self-and-other.
It can be social-- not only how ones body is perceived
in the social order, but also an idea of the social body
as community, a system structured by many interdependent individual humans. Knowledge has a body (body of
knowledge) but the body also has knowledge-- so although an ant cannot know the message it carries, its
body carries knowledge as a unit in a system.
A system is a structure of interrelated parts, which
function together in a unity. The function can be mechanical, chemical, physical, etc.
An imaginative architecture is an idea that is both
a conceptual space for specific thought and a potentially
functional physical structure, at once.
A metadigital organism is described as living in the
middle space that is the consequence of digital spaces
creating unreality and reality, and as a producer of digital
architectures and interfaces to occupy. It is an organism
that is like a cyborg, but defined primarily in its psychological dependence on images and data, both indexical
and pretend.

IMAGINATIVE CYBERNETIC
ARCHITECTURES



In 1947, Norbert Wiener coined the term cybernetics to describe the mathematical formalization of information systems, biological or mechanical. 4 In 1960, Kline
and Clynes appropriated the term into a discussion of the
possible modifications to bodies in order to be suitable
for life in space, in short, a guide to becoming a cybernetic organism. The Cyborg deliberately incorporates exogenous components extending the self-regulatory control
function of the organism in order to adapt to new environments. 5

The bodily modifications suggested by Kline and
Clynes spanned biochemical, physiological, and electronic. This is already a much broader field of play than is
suggested by the popular conception of cyborg as a human with a gun for an arm or a camera for an eye. However, there are further expansions to be made on the sorts
of exogenous components that may be incorporated into
adaptive body-based system dynamics. Any interaction
with technology is enough to affect ones adaptability to
a novel environment. In their paper, Kline and Clynes included a section dedicated to the social and psychological toll of technosymbiosis. The body may accept the the
new system components, but the mind, the unified self,
may still reject it. Changing physical components of a system can provide a profound expansion of the mind and
the psychology of a social body. Metadigital organisms
experience a reversal of this equation, in which immaterial components feedback into our collective culture as
images and data bodies, producing psychological states
and expectations that our corporeal bodies cannot perform.

In 1968, the exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity
opened at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.
Sponsored by IBM, it was curated to celebrate the collaboration and integration of contemporary arts and sci-

Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics; Or, Control and Communication in the Animal

and the Machine. New York:
M.I.T., 1961.
5

Clynes, Manfred E., and

Nathan S. Kline. Cyborgs
and Space. Astronautics
Sept. (1960): 26.

Trask, Maurice. The Story of

Cybernetics. London: Studio
Vista, 1971.

ences to the public. 6 The computer was the central artifact, and algorithms were the methodology. The show
sponsored some of the first examples of digital graphic
design and computer generated music. The results were
predominantly playful, with TIME magazine posing the
rhetorical question: Can computers create? Maybe not,
but many of their programmers have a lot of fun trying to
make them behave as if they could. 7

There was one piece that questioned this exhibits
idealization of the computer as sandbox for technoprogressive playtime. 8 Five Screens With A Computer was a
proposal of autodestructive capabilities. The installation
would include five enormous screens made from many
tightly fitted elements of stainless steel, which, with the
aid of a computer (or several), would eject up to 50,000 elements from the screens, steadily destroying the screens
themselves. Imagine the screen-like rectangle of a beekeepers honeycomb, in which the hexagons are individually ejected from its own structure, until nothing remains.
The screens would have projections mapped on to them,
graphically displaying the computer programs probabilistic workings. Some of the element ejections would be
coded to release at random, while others would be programmed into the code intentionally. It was never actually built, but the written proposal was still put on display.
It was the only such self-reflexive piece in a show dominated by a sense of a simulated future of kinetic wonder
sculptures and machinic symphonies. The first celebration of cybernetic art entered the feedback loop of rhetoric, returning as the first critique of itself.

Metzgers Manifesto of Auto-destructive Art speaks
to the necessity for art to appropriate and misuse the
methodologies of science in order to produce alternative points of entry into its vacuum-sealed epistemology. It is a statement advocating for a tactical assault on
a system of values aiming to quantify the questionable
abstractions of objective truth and societal progress, by
targeting its concrete foundations of capital and warfare. 9
Using the tools and methods provided by a system to dismantle it is what is suggested by Donna Haraway in her
Cyborg Manifesto, asserting the disloyalty of cyborgs to

Exhibitions: Cybernetic
Serendipity. Time, October 4, 1968. www.time.
com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,838821
8

Ford, Simon. Technological Kindergarten. Mute.

Mute Publishing, 4 July
2003. http://www.metamute.
org/editorial/articles/technological-kindergarten

Ibid.

11

Auto-destructive art and auto-creative art aim at the integration of art with the advances of science and technology. The
immediate objective is the creation, with the aid of computers,
of works of art whose movements are programmed and include
self-regulation. The spectator, by means of electronic devices,
can have a direct bearing on the action of these works. Auto-destructive art is an attack on capitalist values and the drive to
nuclear annihilation.
Gustav Metzger, Auto-Destructive Art, Machine Art, Auto-Creative Art, London, 23 June 1961

12

their militaristic origins. Manifestos provide a framework

of words within which one may explore rhetorical possibilities, and although they suggest space-making insofar as their call for community, they do not specify the
materials and structures necessary for manifesting such
space. Five Screens lives in a realm of immateriality, but
its potential as a built space cements its place as a work
of imaginative architecture. There is great narrative potential in reimagining a space that is unconcerned with
the actual material constraints of its existence, but there
is even more concrete political potential in a system which
invested in both creative ideations and its prospects of
becoming real.

Graphic depicting potential action of four screens; a draft of Five Screens

With A Computer
Cybernetic Serendipity booklet (31)

13

VIRTUAL ARCHITECTS

Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), known as the first computer programmer, may have been the first to write about
the computers potential as a creative machine.

[The Analytical Engine] might act upon other things
besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the
abstract science of operations, and which should be also
susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating
notation and mechanism of the engine Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds
in the science of harmony and of musical composition
were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the
engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of
music of any degree of complexity or extent. 10

Over a century later, the first collection of music
that contains pieces both performed and composed by
computers, along with a variety of other cybernetics techniques, was presented in Cybernetic Serendipity. This
was the very same exhibit that Gustav Metzger presented
his plan for Five Screens and a Computer, Composers at
the cutting-edge, from John Cage to Iannis Xenakis, used
a variety of explicitly mathematical methods, from stochastic procedures to compositions derived from game
theory, to realize complex sonic structures.

Lovelace never saw her program executed because
this computer was never built. The Analytical Engine was
a research project of Charles Babbage, the British mathematician and engineer with whom Lovelace assisted and
collaborated on many occasions, and was meant to engage in complex calculations using a series of gears and
levers which was based on the punch-card design of the
Jacquard loom. 11 Although theoretically sound, the engine
itself was never built in its entirety, only in fragments, with
components being rendered decades apart as funding
precipitated then evaporated. Inside of a mahogany case,
Babbage stored his most elaborate plans for building the
Analytical engine, entitling his work Plan 28 and Plan

10

Ada Lovelace, Note A.

Scientific Memoirs, Selections from The Transactions
of Foreign Academies and
Learned Societies and from
Foreign Journals, edited by
Richard Taylor, F.S.A.,Vol III
London: 1843, Article XXIX:
694. via Toole, Betty A. A
Selection and Adaptation
From Adas Notes found in
Ada, The Enchantress of
Numbers, Biographies of
Women Mathematicians. Agnes Scott College. <https://
www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/ada-love.htm>
.

11

The punch-card Jacquard

loom was a fairly novel
technological innovation
in the weaving industry,
allowing for an unprecedented change in the speed
and complexity in design of
textile manufacture.

28a. 12 Using these papers as the its basis, the eponymous

Plan 28 is the contemporary campaign to physically build
the Analytical Engine in its entirety. An essential step in
achieving this is to first build it in simulation.

Simulating the machine using 3D modeling software and a physics engine would enable us to bring the
machine to life without making any metal parts. Given the
size and complexity of the machine, this step is vital. And
since the final machine would wear out if constantly used,
it would provide a way of demonstrating the Engine. 13

The utility of simulation is severalfold, in that it
gives the machine life without material, that all of its
parts are infinitely interchangeable or replaceable, and
that it is ensured survival as long as the CPU and GPU
remain sound. 14 This step remains prior to and, in many
ways, more important than the actual building of the machine because of the reproducibility of virtual objects.
The recursive looping that we encounter imagining the
first computer being built using a modern computer is
both pleasant and ironic. This is a campaign for actualizing an imaginative architecture to a different level of
unreality-- the middle space of 3D digital imagining, the
step between dreams of a system and its structural, material realization.

The Analytical Machine became real not by being
physically built, but by opening up a theoretical framework for imagining what an algorithmic machine might
look like. Metzgers plans for Five Screens intended to not
reproduce the code of wartime computing, but to perform a simulation of the wartime system he found himself
embedded in. The revolving-door relationship between
speculative text and cybernetic reality is one that has
been commented on, but there is a dimension to these
discussions that has not been fleshed out, 15 the metareality produced by images. Always, somewhere between
text and material, there an image, whether it is an arrangement of objects in the physical world that are being
transcribed as words or the mental prototyping of an invention that has previously existed only in dreams.

12

John Graham-Cumming.
The 100-Year Leap. Radar.
OReilly Media Inc. Oct. 4
2010. http://radar.oreilly.
com/2010/10/the-100-yearleap.html
13

Ibid.

14

Computer processing unit

and graphical processing
unit, respectively

15

Katherine Hayles writes

extensively on this subject in
How We Became Posthuman:
Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,
Literature, and Informatics.
Chicago, IL: U of Chicago,
1999)

15

Simulating the machine using 3D modeling software and a

physics engine would enable us to bring the machine to life
without making any metal parts. Given the size and complexity of the machine, this step is vital. And since the final machine
would wear out if constantly used, it would provide a way of
demonstrating the Engine.

16

(previous page) Functional but not accurate 3D Model by

Karl Garnham made in Bryce 6.2; Unrelated to Plan 28,
this is an example of fan-art being made with ubiquitous
3D modeling software to create and preserve a historical
relic independent from funding.
Karl Garnham, Analytical Engine. sharecg. Internet Business Systems, Inc.
http://www.sharecg.com/v/61466/related/5/3D-Model/Analytical-Engine

(above) John Cage Fontana Mix Use, 5 sheets of transparent paper. 1. sheet
with curved lines only 2. sheet with dots only 3. graph only 4. straight line only
5. superimposed sheet with straight line added as shown.
Cybernetic Serendipity booklet (25)

17

COPIES & SCANS

Image and text have great power to catalyze material
change. One can be a cyborg without explicitly incorporating such exogenous components into the biological body.
The systems that compose a body go beyond the interior
unity of an individual, that is, what is typically thought of
as a self-regulating unit in space. Technical artifacts, along
with the imaginings that are the precursor to their existence, are included in the cybernetic system.

I may use a Xerox machine as a tool to copy this page.
It uses a method of optical projection to grasp the information of this page, this model unity, to make another like
itself. However, it is never an exact replica. There are blemishes. The edges may be dark from a slight misalignment.
My eyes see a difference that the optical projector does
not. If I feed that copy back in, the blemishes increase. After a few more copies, this page becomes illegible.

In parsing the replication, reproduction, and copying
of system unities, this Xerox example was given by Maturana and Varela to illustrate one manifestation of historical
drift in the process of copying. In The Tree of Knowledge,
the researchers work on historicizing the unity of a living
being, which, at the multicellular level, often results in a
structure we think of as the body. 16 The blemishes found on
a Xerox copy are artifacts of the medium; the device becomes visible when it feeds back on itself, leaving traces
of its mechanical personality.

A Xerox machine is structurally made to only accept
things shaped like paper. However, modern Xerox machines are often always accompanied with scanners, which
allow for a wider range of materials for input. A barometer,
a brush, a rabbit, a face. Are these copies? In a sense, but
this sense is limited to what the machine can see. It scans
in two dimensions, so it is coupling light, reflected over
time, with pixels. It takes our depth away.

18

16

Humberto R. Maturana &

Francisco J. Varela, The Tree
of Knowledge: The Biological
Roots of Human Understanding, Boston 1987/1998,
59-60.


Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a technique
that uses a magnetic field and radio waves to create
detailed images of the organs and tissues within your
body. 17 It is a type of body scanning. In a sense, it captures more of what an individual is than a photograph.
It scans in three dimensions, and an fMRI reads an individual by scanning the movement of their biomarkers
through space over time. It measures interiority. A scan
can be used to produce 3D models of the body, interactive using a screen interface. We are told to stay still
for the duration of the scan, realigning our protons to
the magnetic field as our body is fragmented across
so many images. Our diagnosis is dependent on a collaboration between body-modeling algorithms and the
attuned eye of a doctor. We are looking at data, or certain manifestations of data. We are living in the space in
between, defined increasingly less by the metaphysical
than by the metadigital.

17

Mayo Clinic Staff. MRI.

Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research.
Aug. 17, 2013. http://www.
mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/mri/basics/definition/prc-20012903

19

http://lgalloway.dmu.ac.uk/ahrc.html

(right) MRI scan of

the heart and spine
of artist Annie Cattrell

(left) Centered, a sculpture

by Annie Cattrell, rendered
in three dimensions from the
same MRI data via rapid prototyping. This sculpture uses
data points that would normally be filtered out by a lab technician searching for a diagnosis.

http://image.issuu.com/100116110031-b28d089957424c31891d58f55fbc92ed/jpg/page_7.jpg

20

scans by layla

21

PHOTOGRAMMETRY

Photogrammetry is an image-based science, a
methodology for making measurements from data derived from photographs. There are two classifications
based on camera use. Aerial photogrammetry utilizes aircraft positioning and camera verticality to gather data for
map-making, surveying, and, most likely, surveilling. But
what if the object or person of interest is too small to see
from an aerial view, or is obscured by a canopy of trees?
What if the subject is subterranean, a buried artifact, or a
mummified shell of a human, unsurfaced only when the
dirt is moved away? Close-range photogrammetry (CRP)
gathers data through photographs taken close to the
subject, deriving measurements to output drawings, 3D
models, and point clouds. 18

Mummification is the process of preserving the body
from the metabolizing force of death, but even mummies
are subject to time and oxygen, especially during excavation. Architectural preservation and restoration attempts
to save buildings from crumbling to the same fate. CRP is
used to preserve architectures and artifacts from deformation, damage, and permanent loss of heritage assets,
by preserving these assets digitally. Preservationists use
CPR to output 3D models of their subject. In realizing
imaginative architectures and finding occupants for their
structure, CRP is an invaluable tool. 19

22

18

http://www.photogrammetry.com/

19

https://www.researchgate.
net/publication/280737273_
Close-range_photogrammetry_enables_documentation_of_environment-induced_deformation_of_architectural_heritage

IMAGES & INFORMATION

It is through interfacing with screens that we encounter a tidal flow of images. My eyes are saturated with
the glow of LCD, flicking diagonally to cover space most
efficiently, worming my way into hyperlinks to get my
next image-fix. Images are made of pixels, which is really to say they are made of light. Which might be infinitely replicable. Katherine Hayles updates our understanding of the floating signifier, writing that, textual fluidity,
which users learn in their bodies as they interact with the
system, implies that signifiers flicker rather than float. 20
She terms this the flickering signifier, and although her
explicit discussion of signifiers is linguistic in form, her
discussions of corporeal interaction with machines point
to the slippery boundary between textuality and affect,
metaphor and body. The flickering screen still has a material presence for the user, with the users actions making the screen flicker, acting as a prosthesis for language
and action.

Images are an instantiation of information that are
accessible to the human eye (a simulacra of eyesight).
The close, or simultaneous, evolution of the dominance
of screen-based image consumption and computing is
not a coincidence-- they are expanding in the same direction in the same system. And just as information, with
its velocity in the enterprise of cybernetic studies, has
suddenly appeared materially ubiquitous, images have
likewise made the leap. Data, sounds, and images are
now routinely transitioning beyond screens into a different state of matter. They surpass the boundaries of data
channels and manifest materially. 21 Hito Steyerl is writing
on how sounds, images, and quantities that have already
sublimated into data clouds are now raining back down to
form new realities, askew from the ones they originated
from. It provides a cloud-computing update on a French
theorists claim that the Gulf War did not happen as a war
per se, but manifested as a war when regurgitated then
consumed through dinnertime television. 22 If the collec-

20

Katherine Hayles. How

We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,
Literature, and Informatics.
Chicago, IL: U of Chicago,
1999), 30.

21

Hito Steyerl, Too Much

World: Is the Internet Dead?
e-flux, #49, November 2013
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/too-much-world-is-theinternet-dead/

22

Baudrillard, Jean. The Gulf

War Did Not Take Place.
Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1995.

23

tive community wants to see a war, instead of an atrocity,

they will record a war. They will model the system of a war
through selective reporting and interpretation, determining relevant data from noise through their projected lens.
This is not just a question of poor politics, but also of bad
science.

The move from mechanical reproduction to digital
production and duplication of images, coupled with the
fluid medium of the internet, has been integral in the rise
of image-based lexicons, spreading the ability to produce and consume pieces of pixel-based visuality. However, what is most relevant to this argument is the tipping
point that has been reached (or is about to be reached).
The internet, along with servers and hard drives, is becoming a graveyard for images, a space saturated with
pixel collections that lack context. Instead, it is the ways
in which images enter the social and cognitive systems of
the offline world, IRL, that is providing them with impact
velocity.

24

http://canadianart.ca/features/amy-luos-top-3-2014-poetic-politic/

http://www.whitelinehotels.com/blog/harun-farocki-serious-games/

Two stills from Harun Farockis video series Serious Games. The top image
documents a military training session, displaying the user and the tank-avatar
simultaneously. The image below that is a document of a therapeutic game,
used on soldiers with PTSD, which utilizes virtual reality to assist in handling
war time trauma.

25

http://aecmag.com/software-mainmenu-32/293-rhino-grasshopper

(above) 3D render of Zaha Hadids Gugghenheim Hermitage Museum in Vilnius, Russia,

generatively prototyped using AutoCAD platform Rhino. It was never constructed due
to corruption allegations.
(below) Scaled-down physical model of the Gugghenheim Abu Dhabi, a planned and
in-progress art museum in the United Arab Emirates, designed by American architect
Frank Gehry. With the rising popularity of AutoCAD platforms, there is more uncertainty
regarding the objects existence in space. Scale and material are difficult to confirm.
The project has been subject to a variety of human rights abuse allegations of the manual laborers employed,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/arts/design/guggenheim-threatened-with-boycott-over-abu-dhabi-project.html

These architectural
projects are examples of the malfunctions that can occur
as the border between an imagined
space dissolves into
a system of working
bodies.

26
http://www.constructionweekonline.com/pictures/guggenheim.jpg

SIMULATING DIGITAL ORGANISMS

The project of cybernetics is one of mathematically modeling systems in order to build or understand
their physical instantiations. This methodology applies
to the gamut of systems, from mechanical to biological.
Modeling does not necessitate the mediator of a physical image if the programmer can read the code like a
computer. These models are difficult to hold in the public eye because of their invisibility. Network Tierra was a
project meant to model the complexity of evolving life
by simulating it in a digital environment. At one point in
this projects development, the researchers discovered
that their system was not as complex as they had predicted, so they put together a network of 150 computers to give the digital organisms enough space in their
environment to evolve with greater complexity. The New
York Times wrote on Tom Ray, the head researcher: The
concept of organisms evolving in cyberspace is very difficult for most people to grasp, Dr. Ray said. The creatures are invisible, two-dimensional entities represented
as simple mathematical equations that are logically connected. 23 In the video is produced in conjunction with the
Santa Fe Institute, the USs preeminent institute on projects of complexity, we are provided with a visualization of
the process. 24 They needed to manifest their process in a
three-dimensional animation in order to add validity and
provide a mechanism for understanding for the general
public and people of the media who would be the audience to the publicity video. The researchers attempt to
make very clear that the three dimensional simulation of
the process is in no way literally connected to the computer program that is evolving their digital organisms. A
skull bounces across colorful, geometric shapes. A second monitor is behind them. They point out that this one
is connected directly to the code of the simulations. It
shows, real-time, what is happening in the simulation. But
it does not catch our eyes or our understanding like the
bouncing skull. It is a series of two-dimensional, flipping

23

Sandra Blakeslee Computer Lifeform Mutates in

an Evolution Experiment
The New York Times. Nov 25,
1997 http://www.nytimes.
com/1997/11/25/science/
computer-life-form-mutates-in-an-evolution-experiment.html

24

Project Tierra. Directed

by Linda Feferman. Filmed
[1995]. Youtube video,
22:37 Posted [Jan 2011].
https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=Wl5rRGVD0QI

27

and flickering lines, representing some opaque process

of genetic evolution. They call their 3D model a conceptual representation. After this clarification, we are brought
inside--we are now inside the memory. The 3D animation grows textual labels to illustrate the points the researchers are elaborating on. Are we really inside the
simulation, or the memory? The memory would be some
sort of code, instantiated in silicon. In place of imagined,
potentially functional technics, the researchers of Network Tierra have instead constructed a purely conceptual imaginative architecture, with the utility of exploring
previously invisible and opaque phenomena.

28

Two screenshots from Project Tierras simulations. These are abstract,

conceptual simulation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl5rRGVD0QI

29

EUSOCIAL SYSTEMS AND

THE SOCIAL CRITIC

Ant colonies are one of the most studied examples
of biologically complex living systems, because they are
ubiquitous, visible, and quantifiable. Their organization is
viewed as in-the-world complex system modeling. What
is ironic about this is that these organisms are not modeling anything, but behaving as themselves. 25

In her discussion of superorganisms, Deborah Gordon writes:
[We are comparing] the ant colony not to a kingdom but
to a single organism, with the queen and workers all acting as cells that contribute to the life of one reproducing
body. Because ants do not make more ants, but instead
colonies reproduce to make more colonies, a colony is
in fact an individual organism in the ecological sense. 26

The study of ants has not always followed this communitarian model. The way field biologists and lay people
characterize the social organization of ants (and most animals for that matter) are reflections of idealized human
social relations. 27 The monarchist kingdom of past centuries, the totalitarian state of the cold war, and the Pixar/
Dreamworks-informed corporate control model are iterations of this. 28 Scientists, just like the images they create,
must claim a standpoint of objectivity while admitting to
looking for something. A model system or a model image,
both show not only what is there, but also what is being
looked for. The gaze of the observer produces the system
it gazes upon. 29

Gordon writes that she was searching for a system
that exhibited organization with non-hierarchal control. Is
this an example of a subject produced by a scientists
gaze? The careful emphasis on the visibility of the system
over its immediate mathematical formalization means
that she spent time with the system at hand instead of

30

25

Hofstadter, Douglas R.
Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York:
Basic, 1979.

26

Gordon, Deborah. Ant

Encounters: Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP,
(2010). 3

27

Haraway, Donna. 1984.

Teddy Bear Patriarchy:
Taxidermy in the Garden of
Eden, New York City, 19081936. Social Text, no. 11.
Duke University Press: 25.
28

See films: Antz

(DreamsWorks Studios,
1998) and A Bugs Life (Pixar,
1998)
29

Hayles reviews the history

of observer-implicated,
second-order cybernetics in
How We Became Posthuman

falling back on the ease of cybernetic short cuts, giving

her a more credible framework to draw conclusions from.
In observing colony interactions, she saw emergent complexity that was greater than any computer simulation or
algorithm could predict. 30 This complexity emerges from
stochasticity, the unpredictable elements of a system.
The formalization of systems in cybernetic control theory
prioritizes pattern, but it necessitates noise. The ways in
which randomness is inherent to the reactions and what
is being reacted to is essential to the emergence of complex behavior and the survival of the superorganism.

Studies of animal behavior in the field strive to be
the least invasive and disturbing, in order to reduce variables in natural patterns of being. Gordon utilized a technique of dabbing tiny droplets of paint on the ants she
wished to track, color-coding them according to certain
categories of interest. This technique enabled the close
analysis of encounter and interaction rates, which are by
and large the greatest quantifiable data piece to predicting the overall organization and state changes of individual ants, and thus, although greater than their sum, a look
into the state of the colony.

It is difficult to know what is happening below the
surface with ants. Their subterranean activities are notoriously mysterious, and to observe them is to disturb
them. One technique has been to pour plaster or a molten
zinc alloid down the entrance-- destroying the colony in
the process, but preserving its shape. This static form reveals patterns in lifestyle and movement in its pathways
and chambers, solidifying the rhizomatic transformation
of energy that occurs beneath the surface. The setting
of the medium within the confines of those tunnels provides in archival casting that is a moment frozen in time,
a sculptural, material scan of cachd activity.

30

Gordon, Deborah. Ant

Encounters: Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP,
(2010). 8

31

Nest morphology is observed by

myrmecologists by pouring plaster or zinc alloid mixtures down
the entrance hole(s), letting the
material set into the negative
space, and then digging the resulting structure out from the
earth.

http://www.taringa.net/post/ciencia-educacion/18898778/

32

http://www.taringa.net/post/ciencia-educacion/18898778/

http://antclub.org/node/4212

http://www.myrmecos.net/page/2/

33

SUBTERRANEAN VISIONS

Recently, radar technology has advanced to the
point of being able to penetrate the hidden world of ant
nests with such accuracy as to be viable for imaging
and study. No longer dependent on destructive material
methods, but instead contingent on electronic tools and
specific imaging software, this advancement is referred
to as hands-off mapping. 31 The radar, coupled with the
specialized software, output 3D graphics that are ready
for immersive exploration by scientists and amateur entomologists alike.
The GPR data are first spliced together and software
then fills in the finer textural details. The result is projected onto five screens arranged in a semicircle. Visitors then don stereo-vision glasses to give a true sense
of space and use a handheld controller to navigate the
virtual colony with an ants-eye view. 32

I have a personal suspicion about such a project.
Will objects begin to be ejected from the five screens
on display? What sort of technological personality is revealed in the details the software fills in? Is this virtual
reality inserting the viewer into the virtual reality, or allowing a point of escape for the images to crawl back into
the corporeal world?

We may imagine ways in which to incorporate aspects of social stochasticity into critical artistic models
for reimagining the integrated circuit we are embedded
within. We must dictate manifestos that specify structures, even if they are to forever remain a fiction. The simulation of such systems is both exciting in its novelty and
potential for community, and frightening in its threat of
gridlock and self-destruction. As we gaze down in a newfound curiosity at our feet, searching for tiny harbingers of
complexity, we may remember to take off our VR glasses,
look up in front of us, see five screens projected with 3D
models, and realize that what we see-- is ourselves.

34

31

Exploring the Virtual Ant

Colony,BBC, last modified
August 18, 2008, http://
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7563372.stm

32

Ibid.

35

THE COLONY

There is a virtual reality called the colony-- or perhaps it is a social reality. Its not really a game, but it pretends to be a game, or party, or social event.
The more one accesses the colony, the more ones self is distributed among
the superorganism of the collective. The colony is somewhere between a collective, a commune, and a corporation. It advertises body uploading, in order
to immortalize the surface form of participants bodies.

The colony exists as a social reality, but it is also an imaginary architecture for metadigital organisms-- it is an inbetween space. All communications
are digital, via the digital interface and colony representative Layla Joon. Layla
Joon is a character and artistic persona I have been developing over various
digital projects for over a year. She (they) is not always the same across platforms-- facebook, instagram, email, and now the Colony. It is with this Colony project that Layla Joon has entered the material world for the first time.
However, no physical recording of the Colony event or of Layla Joon exists,
so it is uncertain if even this alter ego was real. She is more of a scanner than
a human, attempting to render herself invisible and objective as a flesh-andlight interface for observation. She verbally and gesturally interacted with all
participants at an absolute minimum, allowing them to choose their own poses, and rarely forcing groups. However, who knows how much control she truly
attempted to concede, or if coercian, or even exploitation, resulted? All that is
left is a digital paper trail, a collection of body scans, and the memories of the
participants.
The colony is not real.

Current research in systems theory suggests that we are not individual,
closed systems governed by classical mechanics but that we are made up of
and make up many complex and open systems. The concept of being an open
system must be accompanied by discussions of the dangers and opportunities
of border-crossing and hybridity in interfacing our varied bodies.

36

TECHNOTOPIC DREAMSCAPE

I have seen the shells of these structures a thousand times, existing as
monuments to a time when surveillance was conducted at close-range. These
architectures have turned to ruins. I dream of these ruins-- or maybe, I dream
of an image made from corrupted pixels. The mesh isnt quite right. The doors
dont work the way they should. The walls are fractured and the floor is breathing.

I chose the shed as my first subject to upload because it is hidden in
plain site. It is an above ground node to an underground history. Once you notice one, you begin to notice them everywhere, as if they have popped from
the soil overnight, fruiting bodies from the mycelium below.

It is safer to upload a structure than it is to upload a person. It is made of
straight lines and solid geometry, and translational mistakes do not evoke the
same horror of an uncanny face. I thought-- if I upload this model, it will leak
back into our dreams and visual lexicon, and we will notice these forgotten
shelters once again.

I revisited the site of the uploaded shed about a month after I performed
the original data gathering process. I needed to gather a greater variety of photographs in order to construct higher quality models. At the site of the upload,
the shed was gone. It had been removed. Or it had been swallowed by the
ground. The process of uploading had overextended its reach, It is no longer
archival. It seems to discourage redundancy in the system-- why keep it in the
real when it has been digitally preserved? A seemingly passive act of preservation might be an active force in destruction. I encourage you to investigate
this hypothesis for yourself.

former location of site of one shed-node

37

HTTPS://VIMEO.COM/177857769
38

HTTPS://VIMEO.COM/177857769
39

FABRICATING ALTERNATIVE NETWORKS

Colony morphology indicates many things about the behavior, movements, and needs of a colony in their most invisible space: underground. In visually theorizing alternative spaces for storing uploaded models, I created two
digital prototypes of imaginative architectures.. Still images of interactive 3D
models of imaginative colony structures for occupation through the projection
of metadigital bodies.

After fabricating these morphologies, I wanted to ground my digital desires back into the real. I employed Layla Joon to represent the shell company
C.Comm, and to host an event that brought together a system of social interaction and communal body uploading. The technique of photogrammetry and
the promise of uploading were used to catalyze a feedback loop in the social fabric. The resulting portraits were not quite reproductions, but blemished
copies, forming mutations in the mesh. Fractured pixels and scattered textures
place themselves in the imaginary three-dimensional space of the program
and then, all of the sudden, are brought back to life in front of the screen whe
the subjects return to gaze upon themselves, changing the flow of information
and energy in the complex, dynamic system that is all a part of the Colony.

40

41

42

43

44

45

A MANIFESTO

THE COLONY IS
AN ADVANCED DISTRIBUTED ARCHITECTURE
A PROTOTYPICAL THREE-DIMENSIONAL ENVIRONMENT
A HOME FOR YOUR PROJECTED IMAGE
A VESSEL FOR BODIES AND PATTERNS OF INTERACTION.
A CRUCIBLE FOR COMMUNITY TRANSFORMATION
A VISUAL DATA NETWORK
A SOURCE OF EXTERIOR KNOWLEDGE
A SIMULATION OF SYNERGY AND COMMUNAL HARMONY
A SOCIAL FANTASY MANIFEST AS A FEEDBACK LOOP
AN IRONIC DREAM FOR A COMMON LANGUAGE IN THE INTEGRATED
CIRCUIT

THE COLONY IS NOT REAL

46

Layla Joon

photo by Tomas Guarnizo

47

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M029NjsgVQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M029NjsgVQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M029NjsgVQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M029NjsgVQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M029NjsgVQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M029NjsgVQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M029NjsgVQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M029NjsgVQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M029NjsgVQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M029NjsgVQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M029NjsgVQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M029NjsgVQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M029NjsgVQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M029NjsgVQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M029NjsgVQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M029NjsgVQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M029NjsgVQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M029NjsgVQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M029NjsgVQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M029NjsgVQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M029NjsgVQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M029NjsgVQ

48

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