In 1948 the famous Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner did a test on some pigeons (poor things). He kept the pigeons in a box and with a button they could operate a mechanism that provided food. So, not surprisinlgy, the pigeons learned how the system worked: ‘push button, get food’. Lesson: pigeons are capable of learning, no news there. but then Skinner took this test to a different level.

B.F. Skinner

Pigeonrituals

These pigeons did not have the intellectual capabilities of actually understanding what happened when they pushed the button; this button that gave off an electrical signal that set some mechanical device in motion thet released food into the box (or something like that). As far as the pigeons were concerned, this could all just have been magic. What Skinner did, was randomize the dispensing of food in the box. At completely random moments, without any sort of button or switch the pigeons would get food in the box. Skinner then saw that the pigeons started developping all sorts of rituals that -in their minds- preceded getting food. Some pigeons started doing elaborate dances (not unlike a raindance I’d imagine) other started pecking the walls of the box. All of this in anticipation of food, which eventually came. As far as the pigeons were concerned: their rituals worked.

Randomness

The key in this experiment is not the proof that pigeons apparently may learn to operate a button, but are incapable of understanding the mechanism behind a switch; it is that pigeons developped some sort of religious rituals that they believe worked, since they could not grasp the concept of randomness. And, my fellow human beings, neither can we. It is a well known saying that ‘the way to predict the future is to study the past’. But this is also a great misconception.

Pigeons

Divine intervention

If you look back on past random events, our human minds operates in a way that will start seeing patterns, even if they’re not there. Sure, we understand the randomness of the outcome of throwing a pair of dice, but not the randomness in the failure of the crops. For that; there must be a reason. And, if we cannot find this reason; than that must be a case of divine intervention, right? There must be a reason why food drops down your box and the reason is ‘I did this dance’ and if your dance wasn;t followed by food, than you must have done something wrong. And that might just be how religion is born. Religion might just be a way of understanding this very randomised world around us.

Photocredit: Pigeons photo from Melody McFarlands blog.

Making sarcastic comments about the intellectual and philosophical qualities of advertising or financial people is taking cheap shots in front of an open goal. But if they are asking for it, they are asking for it. Last weekend I drove past a billboard of the Belgian financial multinational Fortis on which I read in big letters (images on billboards are overrated anyway): “Life is a curve, where on this curve are you?” (and where on his curve is their new shareholder, the Libean leader Khadaffi? Or, where on this curve is Fortis itself? I’d say on a downslope….).

My first thought was: “Life is a curve? … No, it isn’t” Actually, it may be one of the most stupid comments ever printed on a billboard poster. Many beautiful, insightful, philosophical things have been said and written about life. Socrates wrote that true wisdom is in knowing how little we know about life, I wonder if he would have thought that deeming life ‘a curve’, was perhaps oversimplifying matters a bit. We all know the analogies that have become bad clichés: how life is a rollercoaster, a river. Or perhaps the bizarre quotes like “life is like a tin of sardines, we are all looking for the key.” Every era gets the quotes it deserves and these times may not be bizarre, a cliché, or wise. Our era might deserve populist, unintelligent quotes. Actually, I don’t know who to feel more sorry for, the idiot copywriter that wrote it, or the idiot that approved of it and paid several million euros for this campaign.

At the same time I felt rather offended actually. “Where on this curve are you?” they have the nerve to ask me. Not only do those arrogant people at Fortis have the poor wit to inform about the alleged ‘curviness’ of life, they immediately try to convince me that this is a given fact and, since I undoubtedly accept this fallacy, ask me about my location on this curve. For the sake of argument: would life have been a curve (which, by intelligent and logical lines of reasoning, it isn’t), it would have been completely impossible for anyone to say where on this curve you are. Theoretically, it could be possible to say where you were in life at a given point, after your death, but I doubt that Fortis has informants in the hereafter.

In a press release Adrian Martorana, the Fortis exec that is guilty of this so-called ‘corporate campaign’, states”The ‘Life is a curve’ campaign encourages people to think about their financial needs today and plan for tomorrow, with the help of a trusted partner such as Fortis.” And to make matters even worse: “We carried out extensive global research over 12 months to make sure our message was relevant in today’s environment.” I don’t expect bankers to be good philosophers, I do expect them to able to do a bit of decent research, draw some solid conclusions from it and act according to them. I might be expecting too much.

I should mentally have linked Fortis with qualities such as ‘future financial needs”and ‘trusted financial partner’. How on earth this should have been done by bad philosophy is beyond me. The creatives at their advertising agency Grey EMEA were probably a bit too high on bad cocaine. When they listened to the lyrics of their superior in philospophy, Jessica Simpson, who begins her song “Walkin’ Round in a circle” with the sentence “Life is a curve BALL”. There is virtually no job easier than that of creating a corporate advertising campaign to build a brand image. That’s why, when you fail as a proper artist or writer, you can still work in advertsing (and if you even fail there: ‘corporate advertising’).

But perhaps all this is my mistake. The fact that all I think about is their poor ability in logical reasoning, and not their superior qualities in banking, is all my mistake. Or maybe I just have it wrong. Maybe ‘life is a curve’ actually makes wonderful sense. I don’t think I’ll be taking any of my banking to the lovely people at Fortis. But they probably don’t care anyway. I don’t have a clue about where I am on my curve.

Sometimes you’d think that ‘we the people’ are in control since everything is rapidly becoming a popularity contest. Voters get to choose their political leader, consumers get to choose what products are on the shelves, fans get to choose their next idols. There are polls on everything and this also means that serious discussions can get cluttered and important decisions get made on the basis of uninformed opinions, fed back to us in incomplete and misleading questionnaire reports (”53% of population opposed to roundabout” usually means, 53% of online voters are not completely satisfied with the current plan of a roundabout for various reason and 47% of online voters don’t care one bit, which is a completely different result than the headline in your local weekly.)

Dutch artist and webdesigner Jacco van de Post has made a cool online application that let’s everybody vote
on the news. It would simply be the next democratic step to take; news we like can make it to the final and news we don’t like, gets voted out. If news is injected in us with this big hypodermic needle, than at least let it inject us with a big dose of ‘happy’ (or perhaps, ‘denial’).

Besides it being a clever comment on our voting addiction his work also comments on the media-age we live in. bringing news is one thing, but what if you only bring news that (potential) viewers don’t like? That would cost you loads of money from advertisers wouldn’t it? So clicking and voting would bring CNN (which is where the app gets its headlines from) valuable information which, I am sure, Jacco would be willing to sell to them for loads of money.

Start the application by clicking here.

I have a special interest in online storytelling. CultBlender artist JMDKM and myself have written the storyline of ‘Trip Fontaine‘ an online non-linear road novel. Upon completion, it is also a genuine art 2.0 project, where readers (or: visitors) add their own art to the project and thus expand it. Making it a true multimedia experience.

I stumbled across a very poetic online interactive story recently (Even though the makers themselves call it ‘a game’), called ‘the graveyard’. The only character in this story is an anonymous elderly lady who you walk across an ominous graveyard towards a bench. On this bench you sit the old lady down and a Flemish song starts. If this song isn’t your cup of tea, you simply get up and walk out of the graveyard again. End of game. Well, end of the demo game that is. You can also buy the full version which doesn’t add much…or: adds everything. The full version also provides you with the possibility of death. (let’s hope that they do not mean the possible death of your hardware or yourself.)

The images of the short walk are really nice, they give you the actual feel of being on a rainy stormy graveyard at the early evening. visitors that are born ‘n raised in the computergame era will undoubtedly start looking for ways to shoot enemies that jump up from behind tombstones, but I didn’t see any enemies, nor weapons. The walk towards the bench is slow and your character obviously has difficulty walking. Annoying, but you also start to feel sorry for the old lady. Then, when she sits down the song starts playing and a lot of different possible storylines go through your head. That experience is what made The Graveyard worthwhile for me.

Adding to the ‘interactive’experience, from the website you can also click on to the Graveyard forum where I found a very useful link to a graveyard photo-community Death by Light.

Conclusion: I recommend this Graveyard experience to anyone that would liek to have a bit of a poetic online experience.

Hey, just forget about the philosophical question ‘why are we here’. I have got something way better than that for you: I am going to tell you why you are here. And with here I mean; on this blog. And with why I mean; statistically speaking. If you read all this… you’ve got wayyy too much free time on your hands. Or you’re one of those lists-of-trivia fetishists. If you are: enjoy.

If you made it all the way down here… you are scary. And in for some good news. Because what would follow a ‘why are you here’ list? Exactly! A ‘where are you going’ list… but please be patient… the wait is half the fun.

I believe that over 85% of all e-mail traffic consists of so called ‘unsolicited spam’ (what ’solicited spam’ would be… I have no idea). You would think that if an industry is as big as the spamming industry, where you reach so many consumers just waiting to spend their money on stuff they don’t need, that it would employ state of the art copy writers. Writers of spam e-mail can potentially reach an incredibly large audience. With just a little scientific research you could upgrade the response on your spamming from, I guess, o,0001% to 0.001%. This would make you a tremendous amounts of money! I know spam sucks and we really shouldn’t advocate it, but all the other advertising sucks too and that industry brought us beautiful artists and philosophers like Roy Lichtenstein, Matt Beaumont and Paul Arden. ‘Even evil will spawn good’ which sounds like an awful quote from a Star Wars film, but in fact; I just made that one up. I apologise.

For an art project I decided to jump into my spamfilter and read the spam I received (over a weekend, this amounts to over 1500 messages), or actually… I just read the subject lines. I was very eager to be seduced into actually opening an e-mail that I thought would make interesting reading. “Come on, show me those creative, witty, intriguing subject lines that lure me into worlds of pleasure, self fulfillment, comfort and profitability!” Instead, I found creative, lingual carnage.

“‘Do you want a -insert designer name- replica at -insert number-% discount?” How is that going to seduce me? Personally, I am not triggered. Or how about ‘university small business loans’ (you can replace university with government, insurance, national, small business or whatever) as a subject line. That’s not really going to make anyone think that’s an e-mail worth reading, is it? Not even an attempt to target on sex: ‘I wanted to get even with my cheating girlfriend‘ with could appeal to me, being a man - even though I don;t have a cheating girlfriend, as far as I know) became ‘I wanted to get even with my cheating partner’ thus making it even more impersonal. ‘I wanted to find out if I could get that girl in bed’ is turned into the hideous ‘I wanted to find out if I could get that person in bed’. Yep, that makes me curious… NOT!

Personally I think that that is adding insult to injury. Those b#*tards are clogging up my e-mail server and they’re not even taking it seriously. Come on guys; if efficient communication was that easy, would Coca Cola spend all those millions of dollars on making their 3D commercials? Just put a little effort into it, you lazy slackers.

A raw selection of poor copywriting material is being refined at the CultBlender site.

Art advances science, but science also advances art. Science continually provides the artist with new possibilities to create. In my previous posting I wrote about ‘art in 50 years‘, in which I made some vague predictions about ways in which art could develop. There was, perhaps, nothing very spectacular there, with the possible minor exception of the creation of interactive 3D worlds. I must admit, however, that I forgot to mention another area that art and artists are already exploring now. This field may eventually grow out to become a large new segment of the artworld, even though it worries me just thinking about it; it is the field of genetic engineering.

Ofcourse, there are the fairly safe ‘genetic arts projects’ like the ones by the company Genarts, which uses genetic algorithms to create visual effects that you can even fool around with for yourself in a demo version. What concerns me are ‘art’projects like creating a fluorescent green rabbit (like the bunny Alba) or pigeons that produce purple, erm, ‘crap’. The people repsonsible for these projects probably failed to see the scientific value of their work and subsequently filed it as ‘visual art’. It can nonetheless be argued that the artistic value of their work is very close to ‘zero’ as well.

A fluorescent bunny may be in poor taste, and show little respect for the little creature, it is a quite harmless experiment. In about 50 years time, genetic modification will probabaly be a piece of cake. At least for medical scientists. It may very well become possible to use living cells as building blocks with which we can create limbs, organs and other complicated living tissue (big steps are made by using -believe it or not- adapted inkjet printers with which living tissue is actually printed). As with all knowledge, it can be used for both good and evil. Lose an arm in a car crash We’ll just make you a new one? Need a harttransplant? Give us your creditcard details and we’ll bubblejet you a new heart. But what might happen if the technology isn’t well protected?

If gen-tech becomes available for artists, who are not concerned with ethical matters like doctors, we may see the birth of all sorts of new living creatures (not necisarilly creatures that have any form of awareness, but creatures built with ‘living’ tissue). And probably not just animal-like figures. Someone will eventually create something like a ‘living’ house, car or vacuum cleaner and call it art. Undoubtedly the artist will say its intended purpose is public debate (’what does it mean to be alive’), or social awareness (’this is what medical science today is capable of’).

I may not agree with such a development, and I don’t, but I do really think that it is something that will happen. Artists always seek the boundaries of the moral and what is acceptable and when found, they will cross the boundaries. In many cases, that is what makes them ‘artists’. So, without advocating it, I think I have to same ‘bio-art’ as a future development for the artistic world. The new breed of curators may have studied biology.

This morning I watched a DVD made by the German broadcaster ZDF; the future in 50 years time. Although it didn’t go into the matters quite deep enough (in my humble, geeky opinion) it was a very enjoyable pastime. And I cannot deny the fact that I learned a thing or two, and was inspired by one or two others. So, no bad. One thing that does sort of annoy me about those recreational and educational films, is the need for a storyline that really gets in the way of the stuff you’re actually interested in. The storyline is usually bad, the acting is actually appalling. (For those of you that have seen ‘What the bleep do we know‘, you will know what I mean. Interesting science; horrible acting, stories, SFX et cetera).

But it’s not my intention to write a documentary review here. The central thought of the DVD ‘the world in 50 years’ go me to thinking about the question what art would be like in 50 years time. A couple of posts ago I argued that painting will undoubtedly still be around, for obvious reasons and I would imagine so will music, theatre and other forms of live performances. I would expect that recorded music will by then serve as advertising for bands that you might want to go see live. You may download 3D images of sculptures and perhaps various forms of advertising will make the new Hollywood blockbuster available to you for free. Cinemas may struggle when home-cinema sets increasingly get better and allow you to download Rocky 214 in a couple of seconds time with the click of a button.

All that is about survival of the current artforms. The emergence of new media will probably also give rise to new forms of art, that we may not even dare imagine right now. 30 years ago; who would have imagined any digital art, let alone ‘internet art‘. Or 150 years ago I do not think that someone that predicted photography as an artform would have been taken seriously (catching an image on a plate? Are you mental??). One new technology that is sure to lead to new works of art, perhaps even a whole new category of art, is the possibility of creating 3D worlds that you can actually emerge in. And by that, I do not mean that you would have to put on special glasses or something. You just walk into a gallery (or not even that) and a 3D environment would be projected around you that you can interact with. I guess it is also quite safe to assume that the new artists of the future will at this moment be educated to become game designers. They have an understanding of interaction and the technical knowledge to build their visions.

Technology will surely play an increasingly important role in the world of art, as in all other aspects of life. And art wil play an important role in advancing art as well, pushing scientists forward by thinking up new dreams and creating new visions. To boldly go where no one has gone before… and beyond…

Please read this post, you might win an i-pod. Upon reading this post, we will save your ip-number and store that data on our servers. We will combine that data with the information we will obtain from your internet access provider, which they are required to store for several months by our governments. Obviously, with all that data, on all those servers, it is easy to find a backdoor somewhere and get access to your websurfing information.

By snooping around your personal surfing data we will find out what your personal interests are and start sending you some tailored spam. So far, so good. Chances are also good, that we find out where you do your online banking. From your myspace page we will find out some essential data, like your date of birth et cetera, but do not worry. We are not thieves so we won’t actually get into your accounts. Not unless we have also found out that the way you actually made that money say… you are a an international money trader or something, is by stealing it yourself. In which case we will invest it in saving rainforests and educating children on your behalf. No need to thank us. With you accounts, date of birth, and address we are set up for obtaining your social security number. Luckily for us, your government will doubtlessly have all information we need to… erm… ‘own your arse’… linked to that one number.

This will save us a lot of needless hassle. Your credit-card details, your health insurance, the amount of super-saver points from the supermarket and the products you bought to earn those, if you have any debts, if you were ever active in politics, where you work(ed), who you called on your mobile phone, when and how long, when your drove your car past what toll-booth, who you talked to at the mall (unless that person is an unknown terrorist, obviously)… this information might all prove to be useful. We don’t know for what exactly, but rest assured. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about.

The great thing about all that personal data that is so conveniently linked to each other is that it provides jobs for government officials, nothing else. And it helps fight terrorism. And should you ever recover from a coma and suffer memory loss, isn’t it easy that your government can tell you all about your old life? From your favorite restaurant to your usual brand of undies. Storing and combining data is great!

But we lied about the i-pod. Sorry.

The book ‘primates and philosophers - how morality evolved’ by professor Frans de Waal tries to explain to the reader how ‘morality’ is not a unique human trait, but something that evolved. Various forms of morality can be found in other species and, not surprisingly, the nearer these species get to human species, the more evolved their sense of moral gets. That’s the basic idea. I won’t get into details about the book and whether it’s any good or not (I liked it though), if you’re interested in that, go and have a look at the Amazon reviews or something.

What I was triggered by was something de Waal wrote in between making two points about the central mater of moral: Is it ridiculous for animals to have rights? It seems to me that De Waal thinks so, because he started with something of joke in which a Gazelle was suing a leopard for chasing her. Also, he made the point: if it is okay for a fox to eat a rabbit, why should it not be okay for me to eat a rabbitThe afterthought to that would be: if it is okay to eat a rabbit to keep you alive, why would it be wrong to do medical tests on animals to keep you alive? Since I believe that De Waal is a smart man, I think it’s safe to conclude that these are thoughts shared by a lot of people, and not just the stupid ones.

I am no attacking people that meat. Nor is my central point here that it would be wrong in all cases to perform medical tests on animals if it will save human lives. I have a opninion on those matters, but I won’t bother you with that right now. What I am saying here that even if you are in favor of medicak tests andeven if you truly believe humankind consists of carnivores; that’s not an argumant to want to set up legislation for human rights. And the way I see it; it shouldn’t have to be all that difficult (De Waal seemed to think it wold even be impossible).

Shouldn’t the central point of universal human rights simply be:

And I honoustly do not believe that that’s naive. Obviously there will a lot of small matters that lawyers and legal experts need to sort out, but they’ll work it out in the end. If we, humans, have such a strong sense of morality, it should have to be that difficult to agree with such a rule of thumb. And if you are absolutely convinced that you have to have your pork sausage, steak or bacon… at least give those animals a happy life.