December 16, 2023

The question was raised: if the point is to build an autonomous cybernetic system, why start with a manual control mechanism. The answers to this are both pragmatic and philosophical in nature.

I’ll begin with the pragmatic: some amount of manual control will be necessary just to understand the system that I am building. Bluntly: it’s easier. The experience of working with the apparatus via manual control (which, by the way, still needs a cool name other than “the apparatus”) will open new possibilities for reflection.

In many ways I am doing a kind of “action research.” I am doing, reflecting, doing, reflecting. This is my process - and it is one that is both quite cybernetic and phenomenological in nature. Rather than reduce a system to its pieces, I am building a system upon which I am turning my phenomenological eye towards

There is, however, a second, related, more philosophical dimension to this approach. Mark Martinez quotes Gilbert Simondon in Photography as a machine organism: the cyberneticization of the photographic and techne as ethics:

In fact, this inherent contradiction in our culture arises from an ambiguity in our ideas about automatism — and this is where the hidden logical flaw lies. Idolators of the machine generally assume that the degree of perfection of a machine is directly proportional to the degree of automatism. Now, in fact, automatism is a fairly low degree of technical perfection. In order to make a machine automatic, it is necessary to sacrifice many of its functional possibilities and many of its possible uses…

Having manual controls allows me to gain access to the full horizon of possibilities for The Apparatus. This will, in turn, inform the kind of form of automatism I should build in order to produce new ideas and insights.

This brings us to the second concern in today’s dispatch: data. Let me be honest: my background is critical theory/philosophy, which, for the most part is just words and ideas. This is not to be taken derogatorily, it’s just that given that, I’m going to be a little hesitant, a little nervous about doing anything that involves, “proper scientific research.” However, there’s another side of this, which is that because my background is critical theory, I haven’t actually had a chance to do science, at least not in the popular sense.

I see this project as an opportunity to change that, so that when I go to apply for my next grad school, where I do intend to deep dive into the hard sciences of complexity, chaos, and systems, I can point out that - here, I’ve done this work before, and I want to do more of it. I started with philosophy, and now I’m going into the hard sciences, and that’s a perfectly natural and intriguing academic trajectory. I think you can do a lot with words and ideas, but I think I’m reaching the limit of what I can do with words and ideas, so broadening my experience with this project is totally natural if not always easy.

However, I do think the question of what data I need to be collecting and preparing — I think this question is a bit premature, as I’m still very much in the discovery stage of this project. Through the feedback process above - the process of doing and reflecting - there will be many ideas and threads I uncover. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that I will try to uncover every thread. Some ideas will be chronicled and left for later when I might be more ready or prepared to think about them. There will be some ideas in these dispatches that I will say - that’s too grounded in philosophy, let’s not try to muddy the waters by crossing that chasm through science (which doesn’t mean the ideas aren’t perfectly valid.)

My tripod arrived and I have already began tinkering with my camera; I have already taken shots of the atmosphere from my rooftop. I am however a bit limited as my tripod head doesn’t fit on my tripod, and using the tripod and camera together by hand is a bit clumsy and difficult. I have a better tripod on the way that will work with my fancy tripod head. In the meantime I will continue to practice using my camera — my goal is for me to become comfortable enough with my camera that it effectively becomes an extension of my eyes, but I am far from there. More practice is needed.

As mentioned above, I finally read the essay Photography as a machine organism: the cyberneticization of the photographic and techne as ethics. Several intriguing ideas emerged but I need to dive into the web of citations; dive into Simondon