December 3, 2023

I am interested in the development of a photographic apparatuses as a kind of cybernetic machine capable of making aesthetic “judgements.” I propose to use this apparatus to explore complexity in the atmosphere and the relationship of air, life, and organisms.

Currently this system consists of the following technical components:

• A tripod (waiting for delivery)
• A Nikon P1000 camera, which is a point and shoot camera with a massive 3000mm lens, which can be remote controlled through Bluetooth or wifi
• A Benro Polaris Astro edition, a smart motorized tripod head capable of being remote controlled over wifi

This setup, in theory, should allow me to pan, zoom, and tilt the camera from my balcony across the entire horizon. Currently the plan is to pipe all this in to my living room TV over HDMI and have the ability to control the system remotely. However, the built-in controls are very janky, so the immediate technical challenge will be reverse engineering the control protocols to provide a centralized mechanism for controlling the camera — unifying the zoom controls on the Nikon and the pan/tilt on the tripod head into a single control mechanism, likely using a joystick. From there I can build more sophisticated and automated ways of controlling the camera.

What, then is the academic goal of this project? In truth, I am still formulating more concrete hypotheses and approaches beyond the technical aspects of this project. I am hopeful that the process of building this machinery and the phenomenological experiences of interacting with these images and apparatus will open the doors to more concrete hypotheses. However, a few have already been proposed, including:

• What parameters are required to program a camera to take an humanly aesthetically pleasing image of the sunset?

These are the sorts of ideas I intend to be working with. This opens the doors to questions involving ecology, philosophy of photography, cybernetics, complexity theory, etcetera. While I am building out this apparatus I plan on reading more into existing work that should provide more ideas as well.

Some related readings I have already encountered include:

• Photography as a machine organism: The cyberneticization of the p…: Ingenta Connect (to read)
• From the Gun Controller to the Mandala: The Cybernetic Cinema of John and James Whitney (to read)
• Contemporary art and cybernetics: Waves of cybernetic discourse within conceptual, video and new media art (to read)
• The cybernetic stance: my process and purpose (read)
• Digital Performance A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation | Books Gateway | MIT Press (partially read)
• Chaos: Making a New Science by Gleick, James (read)

I am also reminded of this quote from which I just read yesterday in At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others by Sarah Bakewell, emphasis mine:

Perhaps fortunately, so far, our computer technology just as frequently reminds us of what it cannot do, or at least cannot do yet. Computer systems perform poorly at navigating the rich texture of lived reality: that complex web of perceptions, movements, interactions and expectations that make up the most ordinary human experience, such as entering a café and looking around for your friend Pierre. They are not even good at distinguishing foreground shapes in a visual image. In other words, as Dreyfus and others have long recognised, computers are bad phenomenologists.

I need to find that original source (who is Dreyfus?) and do some more research into that. Can we teach a computer to be a good phenomenologist? If not, can we enter a dance of agency in which the system described above plays an active role as a partner in doing phenomenology of the atmosphere? Tantalizing thoughts. More to come.

Brett Puerto Vallarta, Mexico