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.

As he was flicking through the channels a documentary on Chaos Theory caught George’s attention.
Unfortunately he didn’t quite get all of it.

All characters and situations mentioned in this blog are completely fictional. Anyresemblance to actual people or places is purely coincidental. The publisher cannot be held responsible. For anything. Ever.

Should you injure yourself while laughing, please note that we cannot be held responsible for that.

Should you not get the joke, we cannot be held responsible for that either.
We could, however, help you out a bit.

Don’t ever let your parents tell you that playing online games is a ‘good-for-nothing’ pastime. The University of Washington (Animation Reseach Labs) has created the puzzle-game Foldit. The goal of the game: to develop the cure against the hiv-virus (which causes aids) in the real world. I kid you not!

What’s the deal here? The game Foldit lets you fold proteins, the ‘workhorses’ of every cell of every living being. Proteins can be ‘folded’ in many different ways and each of the different shapes gives the protein a different usefulness. Folded in a particular way could let the protein attach itself to, for example, the hiv-virus and make it harmless.

With the Foldit game, the University of Washington hopes that a dedicated gamer out there might design the protein that will form the cure against hiv/aids, but also ways to fight other diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s. There are so many different forms a protein could be folded into that it would take computers hundreds of years to calculate all of them, the current computer programmes are not sufficient to solve the problem. by watching and analyzing human puzzling and problem solving techniques the university hopes to be able to build better programmes. And perhaps someone will come up with a brilliant protein in the process.

I do not think my intelligence or gaming/puzzling skills are efficient to solve any of the great worldwide problems, let alone a pandemic problem, which wouldn’t really motivate me to play with Foldit for ‘the betterment of mankind’. The Foldit team has anticipated that and actually made the game loads of fun. It’s real easy to get started and very addictive to play. So even if you don;t care about curing any sort of disease…. I recommend Foldit anyway. It’s free, easy to install and available for both Windows and Mac.

Go and Fold!

How can you materialize a concept like ‘time’? In previous posts I have often written about the function of art. In interviews with artists I always ask about their motivation and about a message they would like to send to the world, as a person and as an artist. It’s a personal thing, I like artists that have something to say. Artists that want something more than just an aesthetic quality. But other than sending out a message to the world, art can also be very useful in helping us understand the world around us. Let me explain by warping you to another subject by jumping through a wormhole at hyperspeed.

Stephen Hawking is a very, very intelligent man. Some would argue he might even be the greatest mind alive, but I am not in any position to make a comment on that. But besides ‘knowing a lot’ he is also capable of translating it in a way that even normal mortal souls like myself can understand a bit about stuff like ’string theory’, ‘dark matter’ or ‘the expansion of the universe’. Even though this is all very ‘beta science’, all research takes place at a very abstract level. First you have to accept that there is much more going on around than that which we can observe ourselves. You have to accept that our eyes may be very complex, but what they can actually see is very limited indeed. However, we are all very used to the idea that dogs can smell more than we can, rabbits hear more, eagles see more, et cetera. But all this takes place in the safe three dimensions we know.

A very basic step you have to take to be able to appreciate the things that Stephen Hawking writes about is realise that ‘time’ is a fourth dimension we live our lives in. A lot of scientist think it is very probable that there are no less than eleven different dimensions (according to the so called M-theory which forms the basis for all five string theories). All dimensions other than the four we know -and love- are ‘curled up’. And this is the point where you lose me. A curled up fifth, sixth or even seventh dimension? A concept like that is just so far away from everyday life it’s no surprise that mankind came up with religion to explain ‘existence’. I’d like to take a step through a negative energy field in the universe which is needed for theoretical time travel, so we get back to the point where I mentioned how art can explain the world around us.

In 2002 I visited the contemporary art museum MuHKA in Antwerp. When I visited, there was an exhibition of Japanese born artist Suchan Kinoshita. There are some events in your life that you will carry with you all your life and for me, this was one of them. One of the things that had greatest impact on me was her installation ‘Hok 1′. It’s basically just a wooden box in which, on a table there are a couple of glass sculptures in which different coloured oils were running down at their own pace. If you just see the picture it probably doesn’t even look like something special at all. But art, like life, is not something you can experience by just looking at the pictures. The whole presentation of her work, starting with the way she had redesigned the entrance of the museum, prepared the visitor for the experiences she had designed. The most impressive one, for me, was ‘Hok 1′. It made me actually feel time. The different speeds at which the oils were running down in the different shaped glass canisters presented a strong visual representation of something that you are almost never aware of. For a moment I could feel myself moving through that fourth dimension, which was a very weird experience. It was a fraction of a second, but, especially in a posting like this one, I have to say that it could also have lasted an eternity… depending on the observer.

Hok 1 has had a great influence on my life, it has me rethink choices I had made about my professional career and personal ambitions. But it has also helped me in understanding what Stephen Hawking and all his colleagues are talking about. Suchan Kinoshita’s art has helped me understand the concept of time.

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.