#the world he’s in is real but it might not be. the matric isn’t real but it could be. he doesn’t Know and he can’t Tell

[brittlebutch]

never going to get past matrix resurrections choosing to make neo someone with a distorted perception of reality being gaslit and manipulated into compliance by his therapist, i’m so normal about it

[physalian]

The Fantasy Language Translation Matrix

Whether you intend to write your own full-blown lexicon with different verb tenses and formal vs informal language, need unique words for spellwork, or just need new names for all your foreign places, behold… the Physalian patented Fantasy Language Translation Matrix.

(I kid. I have no idea if I’m the first to come up with this)

**Disclaimer!** After rolling out your fresh new vocab off the word assembly line, make sure you google it and that it doesn’t already exist and mean something you don’t intend.

Step 1: Pick your Derivative

You can make it sound completely foreign and like total gibberish, but I find it easier for you and other people to read if they have some real-world reference to compare it to, and so they have a clue for which pronunciation rules to rely on. For example: I did not know who René Descartes was my freshman year of high school. His last name was in my algebra book, and I, thinking he was Greek like so many other ancient mathematicians, pronounced his name as if he were Greek “Des-kart-ees.” I got made fun of.

Spare your readers the humiliation.

So say I want a vaguely… Russian/Latin/Italian influence. As opposed to French. Cool. That’s my starting point.

Step 2: Reorder the most common letters from English to your new language

In English, the average use of the standard alphabet by letter in order is this:

Ignore your vowels for a second. I don’t use charts like this on the regular, I use the Wheel of Fortune method and focus on RSTLNE, then go from there. I also want to make sure this isn’t a complete 1:1 ratio so it’s not super obvious I’m just juggling letters around, so I’ll knock out some “duplicate” letters and swap out singular letters for specific sounds.

The goal of this isn’t to stare at two existing language matrices and perfectly match them up, it’s to take the most common sounds and letters in English and make them new, common sounds in your new language, to sound more uniform and like you have a real etymology.

And I end up with this:

This might look a little confusing on how I got from A to Z so the basics:

All my vowels remain in the same place, they just get juggled around so I don’t end up with 8 consonants next to each other and word garbage

My “duplicate” letters are combined so I have more room for the new sounds, like c/k, f/ph/gh, h/wh, s/z. The new sounds then get the spare letters I had left over

Common english suffixes get reduced down so the pattern isn’t as obvious

If you want to include accent marks, this is your chance

I wanted to really emphasize the long “e” and long “i” sounds, so those got extra attention

Step 3: Translating

Oftentimes this is not perfect, or you end up with a word that just doesn’t fit the rest of your new vocabulary, because English is the bastard lovechild of German, Latin, Danish, and French.

I start with English, usually, but if the English word is too short or too long, I translate it first into another language, like Spanish, and go from there. Like “bus” vs “autobus”.

Using your matrix, go one by one. Let’s use a word like “letter”.

English: L-E-T-T-E-R

New: T-A-C-C-A-Z

Step 4: Polishing

So now I have my new word: “Taccaz”

Which is serviceable. I can throw an accent on either A or fiddle with the Z. I can start with “carta” instead and end up with “kizci”. The matrix is just a starting point. It’s designed to streamline the process when I’m otherwise feeling uncreative and in a rush, and it moves very quickly when I need to come up with full phrases and sentences that someone would actually say.

Step 5: Full sentences

This is only if you’re really digging deep and not coming up with the occasional fantasy curse word or new name for your fantasy land/realm/noun etc.

For this you’re going to need lots of tables. I based mine off romance languages because I know Spanish and romance languages make sense. This is where you decide how many pronouns, if any, you’re going to use, how the infinitive changes based on past, present, or future tense, how many nouns the word references, etc.

This is… a lot. Way more than you’d ever need for your manuscript. Ever. But I did it just for my own sake. Does it get long? Yes. Does it get tedious? Yes. The point here is to have little pre-manufactured word bytes you can plug and play with, with as little mental effort as possible so you can save it for the rest of your work.

I also came up with very common words already conjugated, like “to be” so I can just glance and type without having to remember to take “is” and go through the process over and over again.

Which means that I can take an entire sentence and translate it to my new language in about two minutes.

English: The payoff is worth it, this is so satisfying. New, roughly: Nu kioyb ela fyzip ne, iski ela valo nicenbalaev.

Of course, you can keep tinkering until you get something that’s easier on the eyes (I’ve been working with this language for years so I can read it pretty well), but not all languages are smooth and pretty and simple.

To be frank: Most readers will just gloss over this stuff anyway, but it shows that you put in the effort and it enhances the lore and the immersion when you do this. At least in the written medium. You can’t ignore it if this is meant to be in a screenplay.

Is this what a language professor would do or recommend? Probably not, I have no idea. Does it work? Yes. I have a fully functioning grammatical system where any input can give me a legible output.

To make this yourself, just change the order of the letters around, adjust your shortcuts, and come up with your own common sounds for those last two rows. The conjugation matrix is where you can really make it distinct, assuming you are basing yours off a romance language, which you don't have to.

—

And there you have it!

Don’t forget to vote in the dialogue poll before it closes!

[richardlawson]

After a screening this afternoon, I stood on the busy sidewalk of 29th street and smoked my last cigarette of Cannes (having been home for almost a month). I decided to listen to a sad song while I walked back to the subway rather than finishing the latest comedy podcast droning its way into my ears from LA.

It was windy, but the air was still humid and close. The weather felt big, and the tall, tall buildings of almost midtown were enormous. (It is still so boggling to pop back into Manhattan!) I walked the short distance imagining myself at the cinemascope ending of a movie—what a poignant, subtle conclusion it would be, a person simply making their way to the subway after so much has happened.

It is difficult to grapple with what’s happened. Am I the only one finding that? I know that we must admit the important layers of this: we did not die, loved ones were okay, we kept working, held ourselves in the clench of our lives as so much cratered outside. Past that, though, it was tricky. It still is. More than that. Immediately post-vaccination, I felt the airy lift I was supposed to, the world not cracking open but gently re-revealing itself, a shining, outdoor Shangri La that had been hovering there, only hidden, all along.

That feeling lasted just a few weeks, though, as grim news lapped at the edges of the merriment. But it wasn’t really the news—concerning as it is—that sunk me back down. It was more the sudden weight of life, tossed into the pool and crashing down on me just as I was coming up for air. It was the realization that a year and a half—and quite likely longer—does actually change a life, that things will never go back to being the same. And the realization that I no longer really remember what that same was.

I remember parties, and a kind of cross-city ramble resembling the boozy digression of my 20s, but a bit more assured. I remember a rush, a haze, a feeling like I was living some grand existence without ever touching the ground, ever really connecting to any one thing. Of course, there were dull and dire days during all of that, but who would choose to remember those? No, in the abstraction of my mind there is just a sparkling blur, one I have found myself clumsily grasping for as real life has, allegedly, set back in.

I hope I am not alone in this feeling of mourning, this constant fear—a terror, really—that I am scrambling at something entirely irretrievable. Like I am trying to pick up an anecdote midway through, after a long and pregnant pause. Isn’t it so strange, and so sad, that so much is now definitively over, that we are on the other side of an undeniable piece of punctuation. There is no return, really. There is only carrying on, a new limp a part of the portraiture.

My sister and I took a trip in July, she meeting me in France after the Cannes film festival, and that almost felt like a before thing. Except it was charged with difference—masks and tests and all that necessary protocol, yes, but also an ineffable haunt, this little curl of a voice that whispered, “It’s not like it used to be.” I thought maybe it was France, that I’d somehow grown tired of it (spoiled me!), or it was just the weirdness of rumbling around on trains with my sister for the first time in so long, surrounded by people speaking a different language.

But it wasn’t that, not really. It was "not like it used to be" in a sharper, more persistent way, the pebble in my shoe that has me so startlingly aware of the lines and shapes and matrices of the world, all of a sudden. How could anyone, with death so persistent a topic for so long, not grow to see the frayed and finite threads binding us to everything? How are we supposed to enjoy anything fully again, when we’ve had such a regular reminder of its eventual end?

Luck, I’m aware of. Fortune, too. I know that some maudlin post about how out of step with reality I have been feeling is, well, out of step with reality. But there it is anyway, this nagging feeling like maybe we all died already, that what we're staggering through now is some after-effect, residual but fading. I find myself imagining a membrane that I might step through—back into the life I think I had, or into a future when all of this feels so peacefully settled.

A friend and I found a little tucked away space in a park by the river, a picnic table and an umbrella where we can post up to surreptitiously drink wine and watch the boats on the river. I love those fucking boats, the busy process they confirm, New York chugging along in its infinite capacity. You can see the planes from Newark, too, a view recently stolen from my building's roof by some hideous new condo building tinkering its way upwards to blot out the sky. There, in that park, the East River breezes whispering a calming song, I begin to feel re-clarified, certain again about my mind and my body and their place in—as Mary Oliver wrote—the family of things.

That feeling is fleeting, though. Then it's back into the plainness of life, the sensation that everything has flattened into some tiny fragment of what it once was. I have to trust—I hope you trust, too—that we'll get it all back. Or, rather, that a new and thorough thing will slowly bloom in the old thing's place, for those of us lucky enough to still be alive and, for all the wear of age, healthy enough.

A few years ago, I wrote a poem about a restaurant in Cannes, in which I wondered what it might be like to revisit it in the future. I found it again this year. It was still open, though I think it has a different name. And the little burbling fountain that stood next to its outdoor seating was silent and dry. So there it was, still plugging along, just a bit hobbled by circumstance, a little less pretty than it was in more ideal times.

I hope I get to wander by it again next year. I hope that the person glimpsing it then feels fuller, sturdier, more sure of the weight and consequence of his presence. That he knows he did not disappear into the couch, was not wholly lost to worry, did not irrevocably snap some tether that linked him to the great and troubled and bitterly missed past of his life.

The song I put on, walking to the subway in all that huge weather today, was this. I love its swell, its grandeur, its reminder that some stuff is not entirely reducible. It stays, small and determined and indelible as the new scar on my shin, from when I tripped on my suitcase, the night before I got back on a plane, cursing in the dark, forgetting how grateful I was to be feeling it at all.

[katherinemacbride]

Sticky Metaphors: The Matter of Meaning

Exposition

In living with an awareness of the entanglement of matter and meaning, words have consequences. If you directly translate a metaphor from another language into the one we are speaking, chances are it will carry the shape of the idea but not the historical context. Metaphors reveal connections that have become embedded within a culture to the point of passing unremarked.

One day in the past I wrote urgently: I will be as attentive as possible to my use of metaphor in my writing. I will be mindful of the implicit ideologies embedded into certain metaphors and try to invent alternatives. I came to this writing with a fear of metaphor, grounded in feminist critique of the patriarchal and imperialist power of language as representation. However, while language is indeed an ineffective tool in conveying the complexity of the material world, it is also a tool that I have. Rather than disavowing metaphor, I will seek to engage with it creatively, engaging with its etymological root of “carrying across.”

Metaphors have several components: the “tenor” is the concept and the “vehicle” is the image that carries it across. Leaning too hard into the vehicle of metaphors risks cutting away the tenor, the weight, of what they’re describing. My favourite writing often asks the words to hold tightly to the dual roles and responsibilities of tenor and vehicle, to pack a tense density into metaphors that troubles the insistently not-yet-dead Western notion of the separability of matter and meaning. Leaning into metaphor so the weight of the tenor holds your body in place in the vehicle makes some of the co-constitution tangible; what’s present, what’s excluded, and what’s cutting the present-and-excluded together and apart. It collapses some of that distance. Both/And. Carry over.

Cutting together and apart (entanglement)

In Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad (2007) describes how matter and meaning are entangled. Each apparatus – boundary-making practice – makes “agential cuts.” Barad is initially writing about observing electrons in the lab; how they can behave differently depending on which apparatus is being used to observe them. But she extends her point that there is no “outside” from which to observe “objectively” into a call to responsibility based on the collapsing together of ethics, ontology, and epistemology: matter is performative and discourse is material. Each cut of a boundary-making practice into matter-discourse excludes certain possibilities in order to make others intelligible. An electron appears as a wave or a particle or both, depending how it is observed. 

To give something a name or a category is a boundary making practice. A name brings different possibilities of meaning nearer and farther. A category formation limits or enables, effecting those captured within it and those excluded beyond its boundary.

There is no separability between the boundary-making practice that cuts, the intelligibility it produces, and the matter that uses this intelligibility to make meaning. What the boundary-making practice excludes – cuts out, cuts away – always remains present, even if it is not knowable to the intelligibility it co-constitutes, cuts together. Barad calls this “exteriority-within.” 

Some humans use managerial language to hide or elide the violence of boundary-making cuts that deny the intricacies of interdependency and its responsibilities. In this system of globalised racial capitalism, names like “detention centre” or “managed extraction” mean toxicity and death for many to pay for profit and property for some.

Transformation-in-relation (working models)

In the week-long residential workshop “Mobilis in Mobili: On Space, Time, Motion, and Forces,” organised by philosopher and physicist Gabriel Catren for non-physicists and physicists alike [1], participants use language to make transitions and translations. We move between thinking in spacetimes that feel different to the experience of being on Earth, and the tactile and conversational space of the room where we are learning while sitting on sofas, listening to music in the breaks while birds look in the window.

Wild use of metaphors abounds over meals as people who speak humanities try and integrate maths and physics into everyday speech. During the day “geometry” was a schema of axioms; now it means “a mode of arrangement or relations.” I have struggled with visualising the matrices used to plot the four dimensions of objects in motion. Over dinner I start to use “matrix” to mean "complex field of relations.” The poetry of “worldline” attracts like a gravitational pull. I think it means the totality of all of the positions a particle holds in space and time while it holds to one identity; here it speaks to the stories of matter and the paths I track for orientation through spacetime I have learned how to feel in limited ways. The word “intuition” gains density and strength; a valuable, and fallible, guiding tool that connects to non-linguistic ways of knowing that stretch space and time. A question that’s used frequently to open conversation is, “What is your intuition on that?”

In this multi-disciplinary space people listen carefully to each other and ask thoughtful questions trying to understand one another’s ways of doing things. These conversations happen while bodies cook or stack the dishwasher repeatedly; side by side joint attention on an external object can make it easier to share verbally. Eye contact checks crucial points of meaning but bodies provide most of what is necessary. 

Someone explains to me that mathematicians do not have to speak great English. There is less pressure on words because they can use mathematical formulae. It can hold working models for to all who know it regardless of what other languages they think in. This form of abstraction holds its poetics differently than words – the expressive texture isn’t as loose, the axioms are firmer, the parameters of the abstract space are more transparent – but it’s no less weird or wild.

In this learning space, the workshop leader uses working models instead of metaphors. We’re thinking beyond the visualisable dimensions and properties of space and time on Earth so we stay grounded with thought experiments where dimensions and properties of space and time off-Earth can be broken down into proofs. There is a train leaving the train station. Inside the train there is a clock and there is an infinite array of clocks all along the train tracks. The train and the station and the clocks are all in a vacuum…

Interlude (unnaming) 

We met in the overburdened garden. One of us was already not comfortable identifying as he and had yet to find an articulation for this feeling, but soon would move quickly through they into she. Another of us was freshly out of a long-term relationship feeling the pressure of liminal fertility. One was me, she then, not now. Summer and sage stroked our skin and the resting containers of sun tea. We read, sat beside one another, with texts laid out on the horizontal planes around and between us.

Reading beside [2], not through or into, just with. Looking for ways to talk, without names [3], about what ways of knowing might be possible through the end of the world [4]. We were trying to apply our words differently to the world, to not rely on the pieces of code that we’d built in our schools, our friendships, our amniotic sacs, our visits to government offices, our experiences of being employed when that was still a thing, in all the times we’d done something we didn’t want because someone else did, and in all the times we’d made someone do something they didn’t want but we did. We were searching for a metaphor-less methodology for collective thinking. Reading transversally, without a singular guiding line, without shortcut words to make maps of shortcut worlds, we fumbled.

Transformation-in-relation (fermentation) 

Fermentation is a metabolic process where one compound is broken down through anaerobic respiration into other compounds. For example, a carbohydrate can be fermented into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Fermentation has been used figuratively for a long time to speak about activity and agitation – passion – usually now in relation to the production of ideas and cultural objects. The word “ferment” itself comes directly from the Latin: fermentum for the noun, fermentare for the verb. This latter may itself be a contraction from the Latin verb fervere (to boil or foam). The Proto-Indo-European root of fervere is bhreu-, which I speak in words for food, fire, water, and feelings: bread, bratwurst, braze, burn (the Scottish word for stream), brew, barmy, brood, embroil.

Columbian artists’ collective Laagencia have a practice of creating open programmes called Escuelas de Garaje. The event I write about here, Escuela de Garaje – vol. Fermentation, took place in August 2020 in and around an art space in Rotterdam called Rib [5]. 

We were sitting, standing, moving in the long art space in the neighbourhood where many artists were sitting in subsidised real estate. Some in the neighbourhood were building mutual aid, open-source infrastructures, and friendships with neighbours who weren’t artists; some were grumbling. For the first time, the window to the long art space invited entry. Laagencia had painted basic information across the large shop window about what was happening inside, when, and said that anyone could join. They kept the door open and played music out into the street: salsa, cumbia, reggaeton. People who wouldn’t usually come in stopped by to listen and chat.

Fermentation was encouraged in weekly practices of reading, open kitchen/bread-making, and visiting places together. Laagencia’s gatherings were accumulating a larger, looser collective to mind out for the fostered bacterial cultures. Microbial life was being centred and given human attention. Already-ongoing neighbourhood activities of food production and anti-gentrification organising were also being centred [6].

I joined for “fermentreadings.” People talked, listened, settled, stirred, ate, drank, read, together. Someone brewed coffee. Someone sliced bread. Someone talked about how they made the drink in the bottle they held. Someone put a piece of electronic equipment into a mason jar of polluted river water to learn if microbes might grow in the relation of these substances. Someone cooked sourdough pancakes with leftover starter on a hotplate. Someone washed cutlery. The long art space was filled with life. The table gave bottles and jars of differently coloured liquids and pickled foods; hand-written labels. The reading happened incrementally but non-linearly, by consent, each chunk digested slowly with conversation about lived experiences and effervescent connecting of ideas and matter.

In the practice of Laagencia, fermentation is happening literally and figuratively. They activate multiple processes of transformation-in-relation that remind the humans engaging in these processes of the fragility of the epistemological structures we have been given at school that prop up the state we are standing in, feed its extractive economy, and, in this Dutch neighbourhood six meters below sea level, produce the very ground we are standing on.

Fermentation insists there are many ways of knowing and being that are not to do with profit and property. Bacterial boundary-making practices create possibilities that humans depend on for life. Around these processes of transformation and onto-epistemological humbleness, fermentation as metaphor supports the gathering of heterogenous groups through its affective power. In their self-published pamphlet Garage School Fermentation (2020), Laagencia write: “Through fermenting we learn that matter and metaphors can still be changed.”

Cutting together and apart (listening)

Listen to your body, to your dreams, to your intuition. Listen to the voices of your ancestors, to what the Earth is telling you. 

These are things some people say and other people understand but some people find troublesome. The trouble accumulates around the questions of whether listening is meant literally or figuratively, and where might the edges of literal or figurative be. In Western traditional thought, listening describes what happens when some humans perceive and understand sound. Often it is connected to the ears and the brain, sometimes to the body. But the separation of the senses into touch, taste, hearing, sight, smell (and the subsequent expanding list of nerve-neurology perception pathways with names like proprioception, pain reception, temperature sensing) is only one way of making this cut. 

As a thought experiment, imagine someone raised in a Western knowledge system who experiences the senses as separate and their body as autonomous and independent. Perhaps for this person, listening is a sensory modality where it is easier for them to experience themselves as porous in relation to other life, to feel that their body is an integrated system that cannot be disconnected from other systems. Perhaps this experience and the collapse of separation, autonomy, and independence it invokes is why sound is often gendered and racialised into noise or why sound is used so often as an instrument of torture [7].

Like sound, skin-to-skin touch of human hands is also sensed as an oscillating wave of vibration through the nervous system. Current ways of thinking say that what is being vibrated differs (air, flesh) and the nerves and brain region processing the vibration are different. But that is only one way of cutting this experience into intelligibility. A different cut, towards the category of the waveform rather than the parts of the human it is waving through, could say that what is happening in hearing and touch perception is more similar than different. With this cut, we’d need to find more words for what we experience when we listen to mechanical, electromagnetic, or gravitational waves as they move through us. 

But sticking with the cut of listening being about sound, we still grow complicating connective paths among what the cut has just separated. If listening is hearing – i.e. the sensing and perception of vibrating sound waves within a frequency range that stimulates the auditory apparatus of animals, plus the integration of what is being heard into a form of meaning (Oliveros, 2005) – then listening is an accumulation of experience and memory. 

But sound waves don’t only vibrate within the frequency range of the human auditory apparatus. Some humans learn to interpret technical instruments or the behaviour of non-human life and matter who do sense that frequency range. Listening here involves reading through the accumulation of memory and experience of a trained listener, like a seismologist or a cardiographer. But experience and memory (even only of sound) don’t only live in the brain; they live in the body and its environment, and through cultural and spiritual practices. What kind of listening listens to them?

Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, makes this cut (2020): “…we say that we know a thing when we know it not only with our physical senses, with our intellect, but also when we engage our intuitive ways of knowing, of emotional knowledge and spiritual knowledge. And that’s really what I mean by listening.” 

If I wanted to propose a non-extractive and non-dominating listening then it would need to attend to and integrate what has happened and been repressed from experience and memory, and become aware of effects that are not compressed into a waveform but experienced or remembered in another way. Listening as a description of this more-than-sonic experience might become a temporary metaphor for the kinds of attention and awareness that English doesn’t have so many good names for, like how Fred Moten and Stefano Harney define hapticality in The Undercommons (2013, p. 98): “the capacity to feel through others, for others to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you.”

This is listening as poly-sensory, poly-temporal experience. The frame of this listening is understood differently than in Western scientific understandings of human hearing – listening involves listening to “sounds” that are not normatively “sounded,” and entities that do not produce sound in a normative way are entities one can listen to. It is possible to listen into times other than the present. This listening is a collective activity, in relation with others, although those others do not have to be humans; different forms of life and matter are interdependent and co-constitute the listening possibilities. Understanding is not the only intention and may well not be achievable. Listening to plural ontologies, epistemologies and cosmologies asks for learning from their plurality of stories, memories and experiences; things known and unknown; beliefs.

Coda

We slip into metaphors comfortably like worn-in shoes, borrowing their easy clarity. Metaphors can carry affective energy for gathering political collectivity to change practices of thinking and doing. They can connect actions and materials to ideas and feelings. Depending on how they are used, they can also conceal power. Leaning too hard into the vehicle risks losing the tenor. My metaphors are mixed and made in relation to yours so, how do we take care of them and mind where we are as we use them without fumbling too much? 

1 The workshop was held at Performing Arts Forum, France in September 2018. Performing Arts Forum is a building run on principles of self-organisation by members where individuals or groups may stay for relatively low cost. The reproduction and sustaining of this space by all those who inhabit it is a central aspect of spending time there. Sometimes people organise specific workshops there, such as this one, which are open to all who respond to the announcement.

2 One of the pieces of paper was a photocopy of page eight of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003). There, she proposes “beside” as a prepositional relation that carries more plural (and spatial) possibilities than “beneath” or “beyond,” which invoke linear time through a focus on either origin or telos. In her argument, “beside” is non-dualistic, for multiple things can be beside each other and need not be equal, equivalent, or oppositional. So “beside” offers a mode with which to avoid the dualisms of a variety of linear logics, not only temporal ones. 

3 Other pieces of paper held a print out of Ursula K Le Guin’s “She Unnames Them,” a short story originally published in the New Yorker in 1985. The story describes the aftermath of a societal process of unnaming living beings from categorising nouns: “I could not chatter away as I used to do, taking it all for granted. My words must be as slow, as new, as single, as tentative as the steps I took going down the path away from the house, between the dark-branched, tall dancers motionless against the winter shining.”

4 Yet other pieces of paper held a printed-out scan of Denise Ferreira da Silva’s “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World” (2014). That paper works through two questions: “Would the poet’s intention emancipate the Category of Blackness from the scientific and historical ways of knowing that produced it in the first place, which is also the Black Feminist Critic worksite? Would Blackness emancipated from science and history wonder about another praxis and wander in the World, with the ethical mandate of opening up other ways of knowing and doing?”

5 Laagencia describe themselves as: “an office of art projects that promotes investigation and processes in art + education, stimulates debate on artistic and instituting practices, experimenting with different strategies and methodologies of work to propose formats of mediation, public programs in collaboration, self-publishing exercises, and alternative ways of doing with others…The project is made up of five artists, without any kind of hierarchy, all of them are directors, producers and participants.” https://laagencia.net/laagencia/ [K’s translation.]

6 It is beyond the scope of this text to adequately address the long-term gentrification of Rotterdam. Present in the events I describe are multiple complex local histories of the ways in which some artists have been willingly instrumentalised by the municipality in gentrification processes while others have been active in anti-gentrification movements, the particularities of European white supremacy in the Dutch context, and a regional experiment in running a municipality as a neoliberal form of service provider.

7 Noise is an imprecise category, with contextual meanings in different forms of practice or disciplines of knowledge. It has frequently been mobilised in multiple different ways as one side (bad) of a highly mobile (following the moving needs of a power structure) good/bad binary. Persons, beings, forms, or sounds can be coded as noisy following multiple logics of white supremacist imperialist patriarchal oppression. For just a few examples across a range of disciplines and oppressions see: Weheliye 2005, Kheshti 2015, Stoever 2016, Thompson 2017,  Steingo and Sykes 2019, Robinson 2020.

References

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

da Silva, Denise Ferreira. “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World.” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 81–97.

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013.

Kheshti, Roshanak. Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music. New York: New York University Press, 2015.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. “The Intelligence of Plants,” interview by Krista Tippett, On Being with Krista Tippett, WNYC Studios, February 25, 2016.

Laagencia. Garage School Fermentation. Self-published pamphlet. Rotterdam, August 2020.

Le Guin, Ursula K. “She Unnames Them.” New Yorker, January 21, 1985.

Oliveros, Pauline. Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice. New York: iUniverse, 2005.

Robinson, Dylan. Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

Steingo, Gavin, and Jim Sykes, eds. Remapping Sound Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

Stoever, Jennifer. The Sonic Colour Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening. New York: New York University Press, 2016.

Thompson, Marie. Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.

Weheliye, Alexander G. Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.

[tinycartridge]

Approaching Infinity ⊟

[Guest writer Caroline Delbert brings us a fully unexpected article that manages to be both philosophical exploration and interview-based journalism, at the same time. I couldn’t be happier to share this piece! Find more from Caroline at her Twitter and Medium. -jc]

We live in a golden age of computing power. Our games are filled with giant procgen worlds and RNGs and thousands of ticking background variables. The math is surpassing human ability far faster than we can grasp, and we’ve, I think correctly, put it to work making the grass in Stardew Valley so fun to swoosh through with a sword. But the idea of infinity horrifies people more than almost anything else and remains as confusing and terrifying as ever. As our games get closer to endlessly detailed, I chose four designers who’ve worked on four of my favorite games of the last few years, all with totally different ways of using space, time, and more to give the feeling of an infinite playspace. I’ve also been spelunking the idea of infinity itself and why it makes us feel so uncomfortable and intrigued.

We Contain Multitudes

What is infinity? We aren’t born with an understanding of the idea of something that never ends. Psychology researcher Ruma Falk put together existing studies about infinity. “[C]hildren of ages 8-9 and on seem to understand that numbers do not end, but it takes quite a few more years to fully conceive, not only the infinity of numbers, but also the infinite difference between the set of numbers and any finite set.” You could spend your entire life counting out loud and get to 2 billion. But in calculus, which is all about approaching infinity, a billion is rounded down to zero. An average 2019 computer could count to a billion in about two seconds, depending on the code you wrote. That’s how tiny a billion still is. Falk calls the distance between our human billions and the idea of infinity an “abyssal gap.”

When I talked with Immortal Rogue developer Kyle Barrett about this project, he mentioned Jorge Luis Borges’s famous short story “The Library of Babel.” Borges imagined an infinite-seeming library of books filled with random combinations of letters and punctuation. He sets out 25 total characters and 410 pages. I averaged a few lines from David Foster Wallace’s primer on infinity, Everything and More, which had 57.5 characters per line. For just two lines of, say, 50 characters each, there are over six googol possible versions: that’s a 6 with 100 zeroes after it, for just two lines of a book of 410 pages. The largest math Excel let me do was for about four lines total, which became 3 with 300 zeroes after it.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett has spent decades writing about how humans think about problems and ideas. His 2013 book Intuition Pumps is filled with helpful analogies, including a spin on the Library of Babel. “Since it is estimated that there are only 10040 particles in the region of the universe we can observe, the Library of Babel is not remotely a physically possible object,” Dennett explained. But despite containing far more books than the possible volume of our entire region of space, that number of books is still a real number, not infinite! The takeaway from all this, and then I swear I’ll stop talking about math, is that nothing we can measure in real life is truly infinite. Infinity is a pure concept reserved for mathematicians and philosophers.

Playing with Time: Immortal Rogue

In Kyle Barrett’s 2019 mobile game Immortal Rogue, you begin in prehistory and fight your way through progressive eras in chunks of 100 years. But time is a flat circle, and eventually your progress is bombed back into preagricultural oblivion. The mechanics of Barrett’s game are fun and satisfying and I can’t recommend Immortal Rogue strongly enough, but the framework of endless time is what got my attention.

“It’s not really infinite,” Barrett explained. “It’s a matrix that loops every time you reach the end of it. There’s an x-axis that’s based on time, basically—it goes from agricultural to pre-industrial to the industrial era to the computational era and space age, so time based on human technological development, and if you get too far into the space era you’re gonna destroy the world and go back to the preagricultural era. Then there’s a y-axis that is based on authoritarian control in the world, so at the bottom you have anarchy, at the top you have fascism, and if you go too far into fascism you’ll get anarchy because people will rebel.”

I said I wouldn’t talk about math again, but Barrett brought it up this time. A matrix is just a grid. The Matrix is something else, but if you’ve ever done a “Sally has a blue hat and wasn’t born in March”-style logic puzzle, you’ve used a matrix. There’s also a proper math definition of a matrix and a whole field of operations we do to those matrices, collectively called abstract algebra.

Barrett’s matrix of time and authority determines the overall feel of the levels, but each one is procedurally generated after that. His day job is in mainstream game development, and he originally shopped the idea for Immortal Rogue as the system to power an AAA game. “You can imagine any AAA game with that kind of variety in environment would cost just too much money to make,” Barrett says. “It was a game concept that I had pitched to studios earlier as a sort of introduction piece—not necessarily to make the game, because I know that doesn’t happen, but as far as getting into the industry.”

The way Barrett combined his basic variables means Immortal Rogue does feel endless. My longest life so far is 800 years, and Barrett says a complete cycle in which you beat the game can take anywhere from 1,000 to 4,000 years. I’d love to tell you I believe I’ll beat the game at some point and see that full cycle. I’ll keep trying, at least.

Immortality and Endless Time

Would you want to live forever? This is one of the major philosophical questions that underpins western thought and especially the Christian form of the afterlife. Heaven and hell are each presented as an eternity, but again we run into Dr. Ruma Falk’s findings about how humans conceive of an infinite period of time. “One does not get closer to infinity by advancing the counting sequence because there is no way to approach infinity. Nowhere does the very big merge into the infinite.” If the lifetime of the planet Earth were condensed to one year, humans have lived for less than 30 minutes. We balk at the length of lives of record-setting elders who were born just a few years after the 19th century: imagine living that entire time and then living it again and again for literally forever. Our earthly understanding of time, and how our earthly brains process information, just isn’t compatible with thinking about living forever.

For many people, God or another higher power is the only way that infinity can make sense. In turn, a much longer afterlife helps to also make sense of how tiny and fleeting our earthly lives can feel. In the potentially infinite scale of time, our lives are the meager billions. They round down to zero, and it definitely feels that way sometimes. Falk cites 17th century mathematician Blaise Pascal, himself a late-in-life convert to Christianity and the trope namer of Pascal’s Wager. During Pascal’s lifetime, infinity was still a scandalous idea and a wedge issue for mathematicians and theologians. “When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified,” Pascal wrote. “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”

In her memoir Living with a Wild God, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich describes grappling with the same problems as an isolated teenager in the 1950s. “I didn’t think much about the future when I was a child—who does?” she writes. “But to the extent that I did imagine a future, it held an ever-widening range for my explorations—more hills and valleys, shorelines and dunes. […] The idea that there might be a limit to my explorations, a natural cutoff in the form of death, was slow to dawn on me.”

Randomizing Infinity: Alphabear & Alphabear 2

Game designer Pat Kemp worked on both 2015’s Alphabear and 2018’s Alphabear 2 at Spry Fox. Both have the same core word game, a fresh take on the classic Bookworm where you have to spell words from rapidly deteriorating letter tiles. Unlike in Scrabble and its knockoffs, rare letters don’t have higher point values. And into the mix you throw dozens of different collectible bears, each with a total score multiplier and a specific boost like a bonus for 5-letter words or preventing all Xs and Zs. Both games are free to play with in-app purchases. In Alphabear 2, Spry Fox took the mechanic of the first game and added a linear story, multiple difficulty levels, and a host of other features. Playing the game feels like getting an upgrade at the rental-car place and realizing you have heated side mirrors. I didn’t ask for them, but I love them and now I need them. But why did the second Alphabear get so much bigger?

“I hope this answer isn’t disappointing to you, but the first Alphabear, although it’s a lovely game we’re very proud of and was critically well received and we got lots of features and good reviews, wasn’t much of a financial success for us,” Kemp told me. So Spry Fox went into development of Alphabear 2 with goals to convert more users into purchasers and more purchasers into multiple-purchasers. “The decision-making around making it into a world, and a linear campaign, and building out all the different features […] was creating this rich, interwoven progression system that players can feel invested in and value. Basically how you monetize a free-to-play game is, people play your game for weeks and months and come to really value things in the game.”

In the first Alphabear, each chapter had a set of collectible bears that quickly eclipsed the power of the previous chapter’s bears. “And you would almost never go back and use bears from earlier chapters, just because of the way it was set up,” Kemp says. “So you had this weird ‘disposable’ feel to bears. It was cool when you unlocked them, but the game was telling you, ‘You’re done with that bear, here’s some new bears.’” Now, the bears accumulate over time as one big group, and you can continue to level them up as high as you want, but your progress is paced by how quickly you regenerate in-game energy in the form of honey.

After a certain chapter in the Normal campaign, players can begin again on Hard mode, and then after a later chapter, they can begin Master mode. I don’t know the full length of the basic campaign, but I’m probably 100 levels in and somewhere in chapter 9 on Normal mode. The scope of the whole thing including all three difficulties is staggering, and the game had been out for just seven months when I talked with Kemp. “Have people finished the amount of content you’ve made so far?” I asked. “We know of at least one person who’s completed the master-level campaign,” he said. When I said I was surprised, Kemp said, “Every game developer I know has this experience where they’re surprised by some small portion of their fanbase that is just so into it that it defies all expectations.”

In this case, the fastest player ended up lapping the development team. “It was so far off that we had planned to build whatever happened when you did that later on,” Kemp said. “They sent us a picture of their screen of the campaign board, and all it was was just a black screen, because it was trying to load the next campaign board, which doesn’t exist. We were like, ‘Oh my god, we didn’t even put anything in there, and it looks kinda like you’re in purgatory or something.’” Spry Fox plans to replace the Sopranos non-ending.

Purgatory or Something

Earlier this year, I talked with my friend Tristan about his existential dread. He’s pretty fresh out of college and still figuring it all out. “I was going to write about games,” he said, “and as I entered my last year or so, I was going to write about movies. I don’t know if I’m still going to do that, so that’s a large part of the dread. Not knowing what I was actually doing.” Humans can’t conceive of infinity using numbers, but we can use our pessimistic imaginations. Our set of plausible options is no match for what we dream or panic about.

Christian existentialist Søren Kierkegaard wrote about dread and fear of the unknown in his 1844 book The Concept of Anxiety, where the Danish word angest could be translated as “anxiety” or “dread”. Using the story of Adam and Eve, Kierkegaard posits that anxiety dates back to a fraction of a second after original sin. “The terror here is simply anxiety,” Kierkegaard writes, “since Adam has not understood what was said.” In other words, like a pet in trouble, Adam didn’t know what was being told to him, but he understood it was bad from the tone of voice.

“Anxiety can be compared with dizziness,” Kierkegaard goes on. “He whose eye happens to look into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason? It is just as much his own eye as the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down.” Those who think about Dr. Ruma Falk’s “abyssal gap” between the finite and infinity may be dizzy forever with the uncertainty of what they’re pondering. “A persistent pursuit of the infinite may bring the individual to a blind alley, both emotionally and intellectually,” Falk writes. His analogy isn’t an accident. A blind alley is like another famous philosophical idea, Schrodinger’s cat: without shining a light, we can never know if the alley is empty or full, terrible or fine. And we can never shine that light.

Infinite Reality: Telling Lies & Her Story

At 2018’s E3 conference, Sam Barlow appeared on a panel about the future of narrative. “People will write to me and say, ‘I haven’t played a game in twenty years, and I played Her Story,’” Barlow said. “Or ‘My daughter installed it on my iPhone for me.’” It makes sense: Her Story’s core mechanic is as simple as a YouTube search, and the game is set in 1994, with a Windows 3.1 aesthetic to match. The game also fits with Barlow’s career arc. His 1999 XYZZY-winning interactive fiction Aisle gives players just one chance to type any command before reaching one of the game’s dozens of endings, placing players in a finite setting that even feels claustrophobic, but setting before them seemingly limitless possibilities. He was a natural fit to lead two Silent Hill games after that, and he views Her Story as the surprisingly successful “one chance” he had to make a successful indie game.

“This is something I’ve pitched so many times to publishers, with the rationale that in every other medium, crime fiction, police procedurals, murder mysteries, detective stories—if you have a TV channel and a film company, you’re gonna have a few stories in that world because it consistently works,” Barlow told me. “Games publishers were never into the idea. They felt like the things that sold in video games were power fantasies and superhero stories.” Barlow chose to home in on the interrogation room both as a convenient single setting and the place where his interest in crime stories was naturally drawn. “I wasn’t trying to do the police chases and locations and all those elements which would be expensive, but also, I was zooming in on the dialogue and the interactions and the human side of it,” he said, citing the groundbreaking ‘90s show Homicide: Life on the Street and its Emmy-winning bottle episode “Three Men and Adena.”

“I did a ton of research, reading the interrogation manuals for detectives, academic studies and pieces about the psychology of the interview room, a ton of crime books, movies with notable interrogation scenes and police interviews. This was slightly ahead of the true crime wave that we’ve had since, so I was discovering there’s so much footage online of real-life interviews and interrogations that has been released or leaked,” Barlow told me. “One day, as these things do, I woke up and went for a walk, and my subconscious—which is far cleverer than I am—put all the pieces and all the research I’d been doing together. [T]he detective’s sat at a computer, and there’s always the twist where they stay up all night sat at the computer and then they find that one little bit of information or the one piece of evidence that will break the case.”

Her Story is made of hundreds of discrete video clips, divided into main character Hannah Smith’s answers to an unseen detective’s questions. For his upcoming game Telling Lies, Barlow brought the setting forward into the Skype era and is introducing new mechanical twists to match. “To some extent Her Story was about giving you the writer’s perspective into a story, and here it’s giving you some of that editing room insight, where you spend so much time with the footage, choosing whether to cut out on this frame or that frame,” Barlow said. Instead of separate clips, Telling Lies gives you long, uncut videos that show both sides of a Skype call that you can scrub through—meaning drag the progress bar searching for highlights. “Not only are you coming at these stories in a nonlinear way, but also within a given scene you might end up watching it backwards.”

The text side of searching has also evolved. Because the videos aren’t separated into clips, searching for a specific word drops you into a video at that exact place. “Those conversations are split into two parts, so you can only see one side of a conversation at a time. You have the full seven minutes in front of you and you get dropped in to the point where someone says the word [or] phrase you've searched for,” Barlow said. “So early on, if you search for the word ‘love,’ you get dropped into a moment when Kerry [Bishé’s] character says, ‘Love you!’ and hangs up.”

Including Her Story and now Telling Lies in a group of very big-feeling games runs into a funny obstacle, because they’re both made of a very finite number of minutes of video. Her Story even has Steam achievements linked with what percentage of the total clips you’ve discovered and watched. “Something like 20% of people 100%-ed it. For most games you’re lucky if 20% of people finish the game. It had a display that showed you all the clips you hadn’t seen—that was an incentive and somewhat maddening if you could see there were clips you hadn’t seen. My approach with Telling Lies was to make it so big and huge and messy and colorful that it would feel less like something you could 100%, because I really wanted people to lose themselves in just the joy of exploring these characters’ lives.”

Just Out of Reach

Even with the incentive to find all the clips, in Her Story I found myself revisiting clips I’d already seen as I tried to find new keywords or listen for clues, and I maxed out just past the 75% achievement. The rest eluded me. With Telling Lies, this one kind of mystery will be removed, and that’s a blow against infinitude. In the perfect world of pure mathematics, having one more item just out of reach is one of the fundamental ways we can make proofs of infinite ideas. This structured approach also helps us turn the overwhelming idea of infinity into, at least right now, the one step in front of us. It’s infinity in the form of a child asking a parent for just five more minutes of sleep, then asking for five more, for eternity.

In Daniel Dennett’s book Intuition Pumps he uses this idea as an illustration for why infinity just can’t exist in real life. If every animal evolved from another animal, then there are infinity animals stretching back into infinity long ago, always with one preceding. We know that’s just not true. On the other hand, a study of how children process infinity showed that knowing the names of some large numbers made children think those were the largest numbers. Learning named ideas pushed out the very idea of having unnamed ideas, which makes sense given how large and robust our language brains are. Being strong, clear communicators has shaped our brains and the societies we form as humans. If we all became existentially troubled abstraction peddlers, I don’t think that would necessarily be a step forward.

To consider infinity with a finite mind is a paradox, and as Dr. Ruma Falk explains, “Mathematicians and philosophers are often no less addicted to resolving these paradoxes than some adolescents are to experiencing the limits of existence.” Like the Library of Babel, an infinite world is made mostly of incoherent and random nonsense, compared with a human mind that can only remember its own history in cohesive story form. My friend Martin has a rich life and a beautiful family, and he told me, “My personal greatest fear is probably losing my mind. The idea of being unable to make sense of the world is horrifying.” In fact, studies show that we’re more able to tune out conversations we can overhear both sides of than those where we can hear just one side—this is how deep our need for clear narratives runs, and it’s why we’re not made for an infinite world.

Infinite Liminal: Sunless Sea & Cultist Simulator

In February of 2019, Alexis Kennedy addressed something that had grown beyond his reach, and his post was the catalyst for what eventually became this essay. On the Weather Factory blog, where the developer typically shares updates to 2018’s Cultist Simulator, Kennedy described an alternate reality game (ARG) called Enigma that he’s built into his work—not just Cultist Simulator but 2015’s Sunless Sea and even 2009’s Fallen London. In the Enigma post, he sums up the appeal this mystery seems to have to fans: “If you’re working through things and looking for meaning in your life, then all the hidden meanings in this project may look like they add up to something more important than they actually do.”

I love Kennedy’s work—if we’re friends, you’ve probably heard me talk about it—and while I’ve never mistaken him for a guru, his games have affected and stayed with me more than anything else I’ve ever played. He’s gifted with language, stuffing his work with plausible and evocative neologisms or uncommon historical terms. But his more powerful gift lies in what he chooses to reveal and how long you must wait for it. I’ve thought often of something my friend Diana said nearly twenty years ago, about traveling with other people and seeing their luggage: “They wonder what I’m taking, but I wonder what they’re leaving behind.” I constantly wonder what Alexis Kennedy is leaving behind.

“Gamers tend to be—to borrow a phrase of Mike Laidlaw's—more like dogs than cats in the way they consume content. If the core loop is even moderately compelling, they'll gorge on content and rush through it,” Kennedy told me via email. “As soon as players are doing that, they'll skim text, and if they're going to skim text, text had better not be your A feature. I constantly skim quest text in games, and I'm a narrative junkie. So pacing is a way of saying: hold on, appreciate this, take your time with it.” In both Fallen London and Sunless Sea, one variable shuffles what day it is, so you receive different flavor text or events even when you’re repeating actions or storylines. “I don't think I ever quite recovered from the initial terror, back in 2009, of seeing players consume Fallen London content literally ten times as fast as I expected,” Kennedy says.

Like Sam Barlow, Kennedy reached for inspiration outside of what’s traditionally in the purview of a video game. I asked how he chooses end goals in games with such wide-open mechanics—Cultist Simulator is even more open than Sunless Sea in some ways. “I come at those stopping points from two directions. One is 'what sort of emotions and experiences are we aiming for?' The other is 'what sort of activities would a character in a novel, not just in a game, do in this setting?' So in Sunless Sea, we want people to be thinking about loneliness and survival and discovery, and we also want people to be aiming for the kind of things they'd aim for in Moby-Dick or Voyage of the Dawn Treader or HMS Surprise.” The only ending I’ve reached in Sunless Sea is the most basic one, where you amass some money and retire. In Cultist Simulator, I’ve managed to live a normal working life and then retire, which is considered a minor victory. And still, the game wonders what I’m taking, while I wonder what it’s leaving behind.

Pure Abstraction

“The study of infinity stretches human abstract thinking to some of its loftiest possibilities,” Dr. Ruma Falk writes. “By definition, it calls for modes of reasoning that transcend concrete representation.” What I’ve found most interesting as I researched this piece and talked with these gifted game designers is how thoughtfully they’d constructed gameplay loops that continue to feel fresh and challenging. The games themselves couldn’t be more different in terms of genre or lack thereof, revenue models, or mechanics, but all feel large and immersive inside to an extent that I instinctively ignored whatever seams I might end up seeing.

I asked each designer to share a game that felt infinite to them as players. Sam Barlow answered the question before I even asked it, though. He described wanting Telling Lies to feel like a huge place to explore. “My only go-to reference, which is somewhat ambitious, is the way I felt when I was playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild and the way that Nintendo made me feel, where I could just go off and explore in any direction and I could let my curiosity guide me and I would always enjoy myself. I would always find something interesting.” He called this kind of freedom a form of magic. “To some extent, Her Story was me trying to get some of the magic and—again, this wasn’t a conscious thing—some of the magic of the old text parser games.”

Pat Kemp also chose Breath of the Wild. “The world feels huge and dense in a kind of unusual way even amongst all the other open-world AAA experiences that are out there. There’s this big mountain and you climb up it, and on the way up you encounter two or three little unique-feeling things, and you make your way down and encounter a bunch of other little things, and they’re all handmade little surprises. It feels like the world is just brimming with delightful little nuggets of story or interesting challenges or encounters. It’s really a remarkable achievement and it’s also one of those things where, as a game developer, I can recognize what a monumental task it must have been to create that world,” Kemp said. “Every inch of it feels handcrafted by someone who cares about that itch, which is just incredibly daunting. It must have been so expensive to do.”

Alexis Kennedy chose Elite: Dangerous, and I enjoyed how his answer mirrored how I feel about his games, where some amount of suggestion makes it easy and fun to project the rest with your imagination. “I put a hundred-plus hours into Elite: Dangerous because I so enjoyed the sense of jumping through galactic-size simulated space. I knew perfectly well that the procgen systems were largely identical in all meaningful ways, I knew the space between star systems isn't simulated and you're just jumping between skyboxed instances, but I've spent 47 years learning how space works IRL and I still carry over those assumptions if the sense of resource cost lets me.  I need to feel like I'm working to cross the space and have something that will run out or need balancing.”

Kyle Barrett pointed out that, infamously now, No Man’s Sky sold itself as an infinite game. “The game definitely feels infinite. It also has the effect of what infinity would feel like, which is empty after a while. It teaches people that lesson,” Barrett says. It brought back to mind something he told me before about deciding how much to procedurally generate within Immortal Rogue: “If it’s pure random, I think it normally fails. That’s something designers find pretty quick. So it’s like, what’s the right amount of random and what’s the skeleton that can make the random meaningful?” He mentioned Dwarf Fortress as a game with infinite-feeling possibilities, and Minecraft as something that marries the two. “It feels infinite in scope and the amount of possibility feels infinite, which is why it’s probably one of the best games ever,” he said.

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” Kierkegaard wrote. “Freedom now looks down into its own possibility and then grabs hold of finiteness to support itself.” The games we love might feel infinite, but we only hang around in them long enough to realize this because of the hard work of building structures and feedback loops that make games fun to play. We study infinite math from the security of offices with comfortable temperatures and lighting. As Alexis Kennedy put it, “So it is a design choice, but there's a reason I made that one design choice rather than a million others.”

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New moon in Aries podcast

The moon is new at 15.17 Aries on Friday, April 5th at 4:51 am "From a higher perspective being challenged is a good thing. People resent being challenged by life; they think challenge should not exist. But you may find, if you've lived long enough, then at some point you realize that the world isn't here to make you happy. It can't do that...The evolution of consciousness happens [this way]: you regress and then you go forward a bit more. In other words, it goes in cycles...Humans don't grow unless they face the challenges and crises."  - Eckhart Tolle, Oprah's Super Soul Conversations, Episode 34 Every 29 days, we have another cycle of renewal. The moon grows from nothing to fullness and wanes back again. This dark moon falls within the larger seasonal cycle of spring, as the sun moves through the first sign of the zodiac: Aries. We know that the zodiac is represented as a circle, so there is no clear beginning and end. We know that we are always in the middle of things, and yet multiple things can be true at once: this is a beginning, it is also another ending, and at the same time it is very much in the middle. Aries is the sign of the self; the "I." This sign's key phrase is "I AM." It is associated with the element of creative fire that makes form out of chaos. A being emerges from the primordial void. The house where you have Aries in your chart is the part of your life where, in the best of moments, you lead from your core self. It's a part of your life where you are adventurous, ambitious, and independent. Every part of your chart is a part of you, but the Aries part often shouts a very loud, very proud declaration of identity. This moon squares Saturn, which means that while we have an opportunity to declare ourselves and potentially begin an ambitious adventure, there is also a challenge to overcome. It's not the first moon this year to aspect Saturn, and it's definitely not the last. Saturn in Capricorn, especially as he closes in on his conjunction with Pluto now, is the hard reality we all have to face in these next few years. It's not going anywhere. You won't be able to avoid it. It just is: like winter, like loss, or like a boulder you need to scramble over to keep going up the mountain. I chose to open with that quote from Eckhart Tolle because, if you haven't already started to see your particular Saturn-in-Capricorn challenge as a necessary part of your growth, this is a cycle to look deeper. Ask your challenge what it is here to teach you. Listen for the answer that will come when you get quiet. Fear and resistance come up when we approach growth. It's normal to step backwards and then move forward again. On a small scale, we do this with Mercury retrograde: you're coming out of a one-month period where you may have gone back to old patterns and reviewed issues from the past, felt like you were just treading water to stay afloat, or finally purged your life of some harmful poison. You may have discovered an opening for the new adventure that awaits. This moon is a flashpoint in the cycle when some of us will make that shift from regression to the next evolution. Wherever you are in your personal cycle of evolving consciousness, it's important to know that it's where you should be. Ask this moment what it is here to teach you. Don't forget to listen. I chose the above quote for another reason, too. Aries is the sign associated with the ego, that part of all of us that is concerned with being right, avoiding shame, being different or fitting in--defining ourselves within or against society. If you listen to the whole conversation, you'll hear Eckhart Tolle talk about the ego and the Deep I. The Deep I is the term he says he's been using for the soul. We are in this cultural moment of regression and challenge, where the ego often gets in the way of deeper conversation, because we identify so closely with our politics, our chosen communities, and the ways in which aspects of our identities intersect with larger political systems. And I know, I know--some extreme "political views" are so morally repugnant they don't deserve a conversation. But even within our own communities, we seem to have difficulty overcoming the urge of the ego to be right so that we can listen with some detachment. In some cases, the trauma that people have experienced is too raw to expect that they could have a detached conversation. We're in the process of naming the wound. It's angry, and it's messy. It may or may not involve muting a lot of Twitter accounts. I know it has for me. Muting the conversation and stepping away might be necessary for a while just to get some peace and quiet. Surrounding myself with trustworthy people who validate me for who I am is a good strategy for thriving. But if putting everyone who disagrees with me on metaphorical mute became a habit and then a long-term strategy, I would be avoiding the challenges that lead to my deeper growth. I bring up the ego and the Deep I, because I think that identity politics is an enlightening method for describing ourselves and the world--and, like all ideologies, it has limitations. There is a necessary place for us to demand equal rights for everyone, to heal and validate various aspects of identity, to celebrate and protect diversity, and to examine the matrices of privileges and oppressions that we've all been born into. But the reason that I do this astrology and coaching work is because that I believe real change happens when each individual can go beyond ego, into the soul-level work that changes consciousness. And also because I'm a feminist and I want to see self-identified womxn and non-binary people break through all of the glass ceilings to reach their potential. Many things can be true at once. Your identity matters, you matter, and you have a Deeper I that is beyond how you identify. We have a collective challenge now to consider the Deep I, that largeness of spirit that happens to be housed within your human body. Can we distance ourselves enough from identifying so closely with the ego's desire (to be right, to be accepted, to avoid shame, to have an enemy) that we can see the Deep I in others and listen to something that challenges us? Can we humbly ask the challenge what it has to teach us? It's certainly not comfortable. But then again, growth never is.

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We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads | Zeynep Tufekci

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/were-building-a-dystopia-just-to-make-people-click-on-ads-zeynep-tufekci-2/

We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads | Zeynep Tufekci

So when folks voice fears of synthetic intelligence, very commonly, they invoke photographs of humanoid robots run amok. You recognize? Terminator? You realize, that possibly some thing to recollect, but that is a distant threat. Or, we be troubled about digital surveillance with metaphors from the prior. "1984," George Orwell’s "1984," it’s hitting the bestseller lists again. It’s a high-quality e-book, nevertheless it’s no longer the proper dystopia for the 21st century. What we ought to fear most is just not what synthetic intelligence will do to us on its possess, but how the humans in energy will use synthetic intelligence to control us and to control us in novel, sometimes hidden, delicate and unexpected methods. So much of the technological know-how that threatens our freedom and our dignity in the close-term future is being developed by way of organizations within the business of taking pictures and promoting our data and our attention to advertisers and others: facebook, Google, Amazon, Alibaba, Tencent.Now, artificial intelligence has began bolstering their trade as well. And it is going to look like synthetic intelligence is just the next thing after online ads. It can be no longer. It can be a soar in category. It is a whole specific world, and it has great expertise. It would speed up our figuring out of many areas of gain knowledge of and study. However to paraphrase a noted Hollywood philosopher, "With prodigious capabilities comes prodigious hazard." Now let’s appear at a normal fact of our digital lives, online advertisements. Right? We variety of dismiss them. They seem crude, ineffective. We have all had the experience of being adopted on the net via an advert established on whatever we searched or learn. , you look up a pair of boots and for per week, those boots are following you around all over you go. Even after you succumb and purchase them, they’re still following you around. We’re style of inured to that type of normal, affordable manipulation. We roll our eyes and we think, "you know what? These matters don’t work." besides, on-line, the digital applied sciences aren’t simply ads.Now, to fully grasp that, let’s believe of a physical world illustration. You understand how, at the checkout counters at supermarkets, close the cashier, there is candy and gum on the eye degree of children? That’s designed to make them whine at their father and mother simply as the mom and dad are about to kind of verify out. Now, that’s a persuasion structure. It can be not best, but it type of works. That’s why you see it in each grocery store. Now, in the physical world, such persuasion architectures are kind of limited, considering you could only put so many matters by using the cashier. Proper? And the candy and gum, it can be the same for every body, despite the fact that it on the whole works only for people who have whiny little people beside them. Within the bodily world, we live with those barriers.In the digital world, though, persuasion architectures may also be constructed on the scale of billions and they are able to goal, infer, understand and be deployed at participants one after the other by way of identifying your weaknesses, and they can be despatched to everybody’s cellphone private display, so it can be no longer obvious to us. And that’s special. And that is simply one of the crucial basic things that artificial intelligence can do. Now, let’s take an illustration. Let’s consider you want to sell aircraft tickets to Vegas. Right? So in the historic world, you might believe of some demographics to target headquartered on experience and what you can guess. You might attempt to advertise to, oh, men between the a long time of 25 and 35, or humans who have a excessive limit on their credit card, or retired couples. Correct? That’s what you could do in the past. With significant knowledge and computing device studying, that’s now not how it works anymore. To be able to think that, consider of all of the data that fb has on you: every status update you ever typed, each Messenger dialog, every position you logged in from, all of your graphics that you just uploaded there. Should you begin typing something and alter your intellect and delete it, facebook continues those and analyzes them, too.More and more, it tries to compare you with your offline data. It also purchases a number of data from knowledge brokers. It might be the whole thing out of your financial files to a just right chunk of your searching history. Right? In the united states, such knowledge is usually accrued, collated and bought. In Europe, they have got tougher ideas. So what happens then is, through churning by way of all that information, these machine-finding out algorithms — that is why they’re known as studying algorithms — they learn to realise the characteristics of persons who bought tickets to Vegas before. Once they learn this from present knowledge, additionally they be trained find out how to observe this to new folks. So if they’re provided with a brand new character, they are able to classify whether or not that individual is probably going to buy a ticket to Vegas or now not.Pleasant. You are thinking, an present to purchase tickets to Vegas. I will be able to ignore that. However the crisis isn’t that. The challenge is, we not particularly have an understanding of how these difficult algorithms work. We don’t recognize how they are doing this categorization. It is gigantic matrices, enormous quantities of rows and columns, possibly hundreds of thousands of rows and columns, and now not the programmers and not someone who appears at it, even supposing you may have the entire data, knows anymore how exactly it is running any further than you’ll understand what I was thinking correct now if you happen to have been shown a cross element of my brain. It can be like we’re now not programming anymore, we’re developing intelligence that we do not real understand. And these things most effective work if there’s an big quantity of knowledge, so in addition they inspire deep surveillance on all people so that the computer learning algorithms can work. That’s why facebook wants to acquire the entire data it may well about you. The algorithms work higher. So let’s push that Vegas illustration a little. What if the process that we don’t comprehend used to be identifying up that it can be less complicated to promote Vegas tickets to people who are bipolar and about to enter the manic section.Such folks are likely to come to be overspenders, compulsive gamblers. They would do this, and you’d don’t have any clue that’s what they have been deciding upon up on. I gave this instance to a bunch of pc scientists as soon as and afterwards, one in all them came as much as me. He was once afflicted and he stated, "that is why i couldn’t submit it." I was like, "could not post what?" He had tried to see whether which you can indeed determine the onset of mania from social media posts earlier than scientific symptoms, and it had worked, and it had labored very good, and he had no notion the way it worked or what it used to be deciding on up on.Now, the concern is not solved if he would not publish it, considering that there are already businesses which are establishing this type of technological know-how, and a variety of the stuff is just off the shelf. This isn’t very tricky anymore. Do you ever go on YouTube meaning to watch one video and an hour later you could have watched 27? You understand how YouTube has this column on the correct that says, "Up next" and it autoplays something? It is an algorithm picking what it thinks that you probably involved in and probably no longer to find for your possess. It’s no longer a human editor. It is what algorithms do. It picks up on what you’ve got watched and what folks like you will have watched, and infers that that ought to be what you are interested in, what you need more of, and simply shows you extra.It sounds like a benign and priceless feature, besides when it’s not. So in 2016, I attended rallies of then-candidate Donald Trump to study as a student the motion assisting him. I learn social actions, so I was studying it, too. After which I wanted to write something about one in every of his rallies, so I watched it a couple of times on YouTube. YouTube began recommending to me and autoplaying to me white supremacist videos in increasing order of extremism. If I watched one, it served up one even more severe and autoplayed that one, too. If you happen to watch Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders content, YouTube recommends and autoplays conspiracy left, and it goes downhill from there.Well, you probably thinking, that is politics, nevertheless it’s now not. This isn’t about politics. That is simply the algorithm identifying human behavior. I as soon as watched a video about vegetarianism on YouTube and YouTube endorsed and autoplayed a video about being vegan. It’s like you are by no means hardcore sufficient for YouTube. (Laughter) So what’s going on? Now, YouTube’s algorithm is proprietary, but here’s what I believe is occurring. The algorithm has figured out that if that you can entice people into thinking you can show them some thing more hardcore, they’re extra likely to keep on the site looking at video after video taking place that rabbit hole at the same time Google serves them advertisements. Now, with nobody minding the ethics of the shop, these web sites can profile persons who are Jew haters, who believe that Jews are parasites and who’ve such explicit anti-Semitic content, and mean you can goal them with advertisements.They can additionally mobilize algorithms to seek out for you look-alike audiences, humans who would not have such express anti-Semitic content material on their profile but who the algorithm detects may be susceptible to such messages, and lets you goal them with advertisements, too. Now, this will sound like an incredible example, however that is actual. ProPublica investigated this and observed that you may indeed do that on fb, and facebook helpfully furnished up suggestions on increase that audience. BuzzFeed tried it for Google, and very quickly they located, yep, you can do it on Google, too. And it wasn’t even luxurious. The ProPublica reporter spent about 30 dollars to goal this category. So final year, Donald Trump’s social media manager disclosed that they were using facebook darkish posts to demobilize persons, to not persuade them, but to convince them not to vote at all. And to do that, they unique exceptionally, for example, African-American men in key cities like Philadelphia, and i’ll read exactly what he said.I am quoting. They had been using "nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls in order that simplest the persons we wish to see it see it. We modeled this. It will dramatically impact her potential to turn these persons out." What’s in those darkish posts? We don’t have any inspiration. Facebook won’t tell us. So facebook additionally algorithmically arranges the posts that your buddies placed on facebook, or the pages you comply with. It doesn’t exhibit you the whole lot chronologically. It places the order in the way in which that the algorithm thinks will entice you to remain on the website longer. Now, so this has a number of penalties. You’ll be thinking somebody is snubbing you on facebook. The algorithm may on no account be showing your put up to them. The algorithm is prioritizing some of them and burying the others.Experiments show that what the algorithm picks to exhibit you can have an impact on your feelings. However that’s now not all. It additionally impacts political habits. So in 2010, within the midterm elections, facebook did an test on sixty one million people in the us that was once disclosed after the very fact. So some people had been shown, "at present is election day," the less complicated one, and a few folks have been proven the one with that tiny tweak with these little thumbnails of your pals who clicked on "I voted." this straightforward tweak. Adequate? So the graphics were the one change, and that submit proven simply as soon as became out an extra 340,000 voters in that election, in keeping with this research as validated by means of the voter rolls. A fluke? No. On the grounds that in 2012, they repeated the identical test. And that point, that civic message proven just once became out another 270,000 voters. For reference, the 2016 US presidential election used to be decided by means of about a hundred,000 votes. Now, facebook might also very with ease infer what your politics are, even if you will have not ever disclosed them on the website online. Right? These algorithms can do this relatively effortlessly.What if a platform with that type of energy decides to prove supporters of 1 candidate over the other? How would we even learn about it? Now, we started from someplace seemingly innocuous — online provides following us round — and we have landed someplace else. As a public and as residents, we now not understand if we’re seeing the equal knowledge or what someone else is seeing, and without a original foundation of understanding, little by little, public debate is becoming unimaginable, and we’re just on the opening levels of this. These algorithms can particularly with no trouble infer things like your men and women’s ethnicity, devout and affairs of state, persona traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age and genders, just from facebook likes. These algorithms can establish protesters even supposing their faces are in part hid. These algorithms is also capable to observe humans’s sexual orientation simply from their courting profile pix. Now, these are probabilistic guesses, so they’re not going to be 100 percentage right, but i don’t see the robust resisting the temptation to make use of these technologies simply due to the fact there are some false positives, a good way to of path create a whole different layer of problems.Suppose what a state can do with the enormous quantity of information it has on its citizens. China is already making use of face detection technological know-how to identify and arrest men and women. And here is the tragedy: we’re constructing this infrastructure of surveillance authoritarianism only to get individuals to click on on commercials. And this is not going to be Orwell’s authoritarianism. This is not "1984." Now, if authoritarianism is utilizing overt worry to terrorize us, we are going to all be scared, however we are going to comprehend it, we are going to hate it and we’ll withstand it. But when the people in power are utilizing these algorithms to quietly watch us, to guage us and to nudge us, to predict and determine the troublemakers and the rebels, to install persuasion architectures at scale and to govern members separately utilizing their private, man or woman weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and if they are doing it at scale by way of our private screens so that we do not even understand what our fellow citizens and neighbors are seeing, that authoritarianism will envelop us like a spider’s net and we won’t even understand we’re in it. So facebook’s market capitalization is drawing near half of one trillion greenbacks. It’s when you consider that it works high-quality as a persuasion architecture.However the constitution of that structure is the equal whether or not you are promoting shoes or whether you’re selling politics. The algorithms have no idea the difference. The identical algorithms set loose upon us to make us more pliable for ads are also organizing our political, private and social know-how flows, and that’s what’s got to change. Now, don’t get me mistaken, we use digital platforms given that they provide us with quality value. I exploit fb to hold in touch with associates and household world wide. I’ve written about how significant social media is for social movements. I have studied how these applied sciences can be utilized to circumvent censorship world wide. But it surely’s not that the individuals who run, you recognize, fb or Google are maliciously and deliberately looking to make the country or the arena more polarized and motivate extremism. I learn the numerous well-intentioned statements that these men and women put out.Nevertheless it’s no longer the intent or the statements individuals in technology make that topic, it’s the constructions and trade units they are building. And that’s the core of the concern. Both facebook is a enormous con of half of one thousand billion bucks and advertisements don’t work on the web site, it does not work as a persuasion architecture, or its power of have an impact on is of quality quandary. It can be both one or the other. It’s similar for Google, too. So what will we do? This needs to alter. Now, I cannot offer a simple recipe, on the grounds that we ought to restructure the entire approach our digital science operates. Everything from the way in which technological know-how is developed to the way the incentives, economic and in any other case, are built into the approach. We need to face and check out to deal with the dearth of transparency created by the proprietary algorithms, the structural task of machine learning’s opacity, all this indiscriminate information that’s being collected about us.We’ve a tremendous venture in front of us. We have got to mobilize our technological know-how, our creativity and sure, our politics so that we are able to build synthetic intelligence that helps us in our human targets however that can also be confined by means of our human values. And i appreciate this won’t be easy. We would no longer even with ease agree on what those terms mean. But when we take seriously how these techniques that we rely on for so much operate, i do not see how we will put off this dialog anymore. These structures are organizing how we perform they usually’re controlling what we will and we can not do.And many of these ad-financed systems, they boast that they may be free. On this context, it means that we’re the product that’s being offered. We need a digital economic system the place our information and our attention will not be on the market to the highest-bidding authoritarian or demagogue. (Applause) so to go back to that Hollywood paraphrase, we do want the prodigious competencies of man-made intelligence and digital technological know-how to blossom, but for that, we have got to face this prodigious risk, open-eyed and now. Thanks. (Applause) .

[batterymonster2021]

We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads | Zeynep Tufekci

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/were-building-a-dystopia-just-to-make-people-click-on-ads-zeynep-tufekci-2/

We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads | Zeynep Tufekci

So when folks voice fears of synthetic intelligence, very commonly, they invoke photographs of humanoid robots run amok. You recognize? Terminator? You realize, that possibly some thing to recollect, but that is a distant threat. Or, we be troubled about digital surveillance with metaphors from the prior. "1984," George Orwell’s "1984," it’s hitting the bestseller lists again. It’s a high-quality e-book, nevertheless it’s no longer the proper dystopia for the 21st century. What we ought to fear most is just not what synthetic intelligence will do to us on its possess, but how the humans in energy will use synthetic intelligence to control us and to control us in novel, sometimes hidden, delicate and unexpected methods. So much of the technological know-how that threatens our freedom and our dignity in the close-term future is being developed by way of organizations within the business of taking pictures and promoting our data and our attention to advertisers and others: facebook, Google, Amazon, Alibaba, Tencent.Now, artificial intelligence has began bolstering their trade as well. And it is going to look like synthetic intelligence is just the next thing after online ads. It can be no longer. It can be a soar in category. It is a whole specific world, and it has great expertise. It would speed up our figuring out of many areas of gain knowledge of and study. However to paraphrase a noted Hollywood philosopher, "With prodigious capabilities comes prodigious hazard." Now let’s appear at a normal fact of our digital lives, online advertisements. Right? We variety of dismiss them. They seem crude, ineffective. We have all had the experience of being adopted on the net via an advert established on whatever we searched or learn. , you look up a pair of boots and for per week, those boots are following you around all over you go. Even after you succumb and purchase them, they’re still following you around. We’re style of inured to that type of normal, affordable manipulation. We roll our eyes and we think, "you know what? These matters don’t work." besides, on-line, the digital applied sciences aren’t simply ads.Now, to fully grasp that, let’s believe of a physical world illustration. You understand how, at the checkout counters at supermarkets, close the cashier, there is candy and gum on the eye degree of children? That’s designed to make them whine at their father and mother simply as the mom and dad are about to kind of verify out. Now, that’s a persuasion structure. It can be not best, but it type of works. That’s why you see it in each grocery store. Now, in the physical world, such persuasion architectures are kind of limited, considering you could only put so many matters by using the cashier. Proper? And the candy and gum, it can be the same for every body, despite the fact that it on the whole works only for people who have whiny little people beside them. Within the bodily world, we live with those barriers.In the digital world, though, persuasion architectures may also be constructed on the scale of billions and they are able to goal, infer, understand and be deployed at participants one after the other by way of identifying your weaknesses, and they can be despatched to everybody’s cellphone private display, so it can be no longer obvious to us. And that’s special. And that is simply one of the crucial basic things that artificial intelligence can do. Now, let’s take an illustration. Let’s consider you want to sell aircraft tickets to Vegas. Right? So in the historic world, you might believe of some demographics to target headquartered on experience and what you can guess. You might attempt to advertise to, oh, men between the a long time of 25 and 35, or humans who have a excessive limit on their credit card, or retired couples. Correct? That’s what you could do in the past. With significant knowledge and computing device studying, that’s now not how it works anymore. To be able to think that, consider of all of the data that fb has on you: every status update you ever typed, each Messenger dialog, every position you logged in from, all of your graphics that you just uploaded there. Should you begin typing something and alter your intellect and delete it, facebook continues those and analyzes them, too.More and more, it tries to compare you with your offline data. It also purchases a number of data from knowledge brokers. It might be the whole thing out of your financial files to a just right chunk of your searching history. Right? In the united states, such knowledge is usually accrued, collated and bought. In Europe, they have got tougher ideas. So what happens then is, through churning by way of all that information, these machine-finding out algorithms — that is why they’re known as studying algorithms — they learn to realise the characteristics of persons who bought tickets to Vegas before. Once they learn this from present knowledge, additionally they be trained find out how to observe this to new folks. So if they’re provided with a brand new character, they are able to classify whether or not that individual is probably going to buy a ticket to Vegas or now not.Pleasant. You are thinking, an present to purchase tickets to Vegas. I will be able to ignore that. However the crisis isn’t that. The challenge is, we not particularly have an understanding of how these difficult algorithms work. We don’t recognize how they are doing this categorization. It is gigantic matrices, enormous quantities of rows and columns, possibly hundreds of thousands of rows and columns, and now not the programmers and not someone who appears at it, even supposing you may have the entire data, knows anymore how exactly it is running any further than you’ll understand what I was thinking correct now if you happen to have been shown a cross element of my brain. It can be like we’re now not programming anymore, we’re developing intelligence that we do not real understand. And these things most effective work if there’s an big quantity of knowledge, so in addition they inspire deep surveillance on all people so that the computer learning algorithms can work. That’s why facebook wants to acquire the entire data it may well about you. The algorithms work higher. So let’s push that Vegas illustration a little. What if the process that we don’t comprehend used to be identifying up that it can be less complicated to promote Vegas tickets to people who are bipolar and about to enter the manic section.Such folks are likely to come to be overspenders, compulsive gamblers. They would do this, and you’d don’t have any clue that’s what they have been deciding upon up on. I gave this instance to a bunch of pc scientists as soon as and afterwards, one in all them came as much as me. He was once afflicted and he stated, "that is why i couldn’t submit it." I was like, "could not post what?" He had tried to see whether which you can indeed determine the onset of mania from social media posts earlier than scientific symptoms, and it had worked, and it had labored very good, and he had no notion the way it worked or what it used to be deciding on up on.Now, the concern is not solved if he would not publish it, considering that there are already businesses which are establishing this type of technological know-how, and a variety of the stuff is just off the shelf. This isn’t very tricky anymore. Do you ever go on YouTube meaning to watch one video and an hour later you could have watched 27? You understand how YouTube has this column on the correct that says, "Up next" and it autoplays something? It is an algorithm picking what it thinks that you probably involved in and probably no longer to find for your possess. It’s no longer a human editor. It is what algorithms do. It picks up on what you’ve got watched and what folks like you will have watched, and infers that that ought to be what you are interested in, what you need more of, and simply shows you extra.It sounds like a benign and priceless feature, besides when it’s not. So in 2016, I attended rallies of then-candidate Donald Trump to study as a student the motion assisting him. I learn social actions, so I was studying it, too. After which I wanted to write something about one in every of his rallies, so I watched it a couple of times on YouTube. YouTube began recommending to me and autoplaying to me white supremacist videos in increasing order of extremism. If I watched one, it served up one even more severe and autoplayed that one, too. If you happen to watch Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders content, YouTube recommends and autoplays conspiracy left, and it goes downhill from there.Well, you probably thinking, that is politics, nevertheless it’s now not. This isn’t about politics. That is simply the algorithm identifying human behavior. I as soon as watched a video about vegetarianism on YouTube and YouTube endorsed and autoplayed a video about being vegan. It’s like you are by no means hardcore sufficient for YouTube. (Laughter) So what’s going on? Now, YouTube’s algorithm is proprietary, but here’s what I believe is occurring. The algorithm has figured out that if that you can entice people into thinking you can show them some thing more hardcore, they’re extra likely to keep on the site looking at video after video taking place that rabbit hole at the same time Google serves them advertisements. Now, with nobody minding the ethics of the shop, these web sites can profile persons who are Jew haters, who believe that Jews are parasites and who’ve such explicit anti-Semitic content, and mean you can goal them with advertisements.They can additionally mobilize algorithms to seek out for you look-alike audiences, humans who would not have such express anti-Semitic content material on their profile but who the algorithm detects may be susceptible to such messages, and lets you goal them with advertisements, too. Now, this will sound like an incredible example, however that is actual. ProPublica investigated this and observed that you may indeed do that on fb, and facebook helpfully furnished up suggestions on increase that audience. BuzzFeed tried it for Google, and very quickly they located, yep, you can do it on Google, too. And it wasn’t even luxurious. The ProPublica reporter spent about 30 dollars to goal this category. So final year, Donald Trump’s social media manager disclosed that they were using facebook darkish posts to demobilize persons, to not persuade them, but to convince them not to vote at all. And to do that, they unique exceptionally, for example, African-American men in key cities like Philadelphia, and i’ll read exactly what he said.I am quoting. They had been using "nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls in order that simplest the persons we wish to see it see it. We modeled this. It will dramatically impact her potential to turn these persons out." What’s in those darkish posts? We don’t have any inspiration. Facebook won’t tell us. So facebook additionally algorithmically arranges the posts that your buddies placed on facebook, or the pages you comply with. It doesn’t exhibit you the whole lot chronologically. It places the order in the way in which that the algorithm thinks will entice you to remain on the website longer. Now, so this has a number of penalties. You’ll be thinking somebody is snubbing you on facebook. The algorithm may on no account be showing your put up to them. The algorithm is prioritizing some of them and burying the others.Experiments show that what the algorithm picks to exhibit you can have an impact on your feelings. However that’s now not all. It additionally impacts political habits. So in 2010, within the midterm elections, facebook did an test on sixty one million people in the us that was once disclosed after the very fact. So some people had been shown, "at present is election day," the less complicated one, and a few folks have been proven the one with that tiny tweak with these little thumbnails of your pals who clicked on "I voted." this straightforward tweak. Adequate? So the graphics were the one change, and that submit proven simply as soon as became out an extra 340,000 voters in that election, in keeping with this research as validated by means of the voter rolls. A fluke? No. On the grounds that in 2012, they repeated the identical test. And that point, that civic message proven just once became out another 270,000 voters. For reference, the 2016 US presidential election used to be decided by means of about a hundred,000 votes. Now, facebook might also very with ease infer what your politics are, even if you will have not ever disclosed them on the website online. Right? These algorithms can do this relatively effortlessly.What if a platform with that type of energy decides to prove supporters of 1 candidate over the other? How would we even learn about it? Now, we started from someplace seemingly innocuous — online provides following us round — and we have landed someplace else. As a public and as residents, we now not understand if we’re seeing the equal knowledge or what someone else is seeing, and without a original foundation of understanding, little by little, public debate is becoming unimaginable, and we’re just on the opening levels of this. These algorithms can particularly with no trouble infer things like your men and women’s ethnicity, devout and affairs of state, persona traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age and genders, just from facebook likes. These algorithms can establish protesters even supposing their faces are in part hid. These algorithms is also capable to observe humans’s sexual orientation simply from their courting profile pix. Now, these are probabilistic guesses, so they’re not going to be 100 percentage right, but i don’t see the robust resisting the temptation to make use of these technologies simply due to the fact there are some false positives, a good way to of path create a whole different layer of problems.Suppose what a state can do with the enormous quantity of information it has on its citizens. China is already making use of face detection technological know-how to identify and arrest men and women. And here is the tragedy: we’re constructing this infrastructure of surveillance authoritarianism only to get individuals to click on on commercials. And this is not going to be Orwell’s authoritarianism. This is not "1984." Now, if authoritarianism is utilizing overt worry to terrorize us, we are going to all be scared, however we are going to comprehend it, we are going to hate it and we’ll withstand it. But when the people in power are utilizing these algorithms to quietly watch us, to guage us and to nudge us, to predict and determine the troublemakers and the rebels, to install persuasion architectures at scale and to govern members separately utilizing their private, man or woman weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and if they are doing it at scale by way of our private screens so that we do not even understand what our fellow citizens and neighbors are seeing, that authoritarianism will envelop us like a spider’s net and we won’t even understand we’re in it. So facebook’s market capitalization is drawing near half of one trillion greenbacks. It’s when you consider that it works high-quality as a persuasion architecture.However the constitution of that structure is the equal whether or not you are promoting shoes or whether you’re selling politics. The algorithms have no idea the difference. The identical algorithms set loose upon us to make us more pliable for ads are also organizing our political, private and social know-how flows, and that’s what’s got to change. Now, don’t get me mistaken, we use digital platforms given that they provide us with quality value. I exploit fb to hold in touch with associates and household world wide. I’ve written about how significant social media is for social movements. I have studied how these applied sciences can be utilized to circumvent censorship world wide. But it surely’s not that the individuals who run, you recognize, fb or Google are maliciously and deliberately looking to make the country or the arena more polarized and motivate extremism. I learn the numerous well-intentioned statements that these men and women put out.Nevertheless it’s no longer the intent or the statements individuals in technology make that topic, it’s the constructions and trade units they are building. And that’s the core of the concern. Both facebook is a enormous con of half of one thousand billion bucks and advertisements don’t work on the web site, it does not work as a persuasion architecture, or its power of have an impact on is of quality quandary. It can be both one or the other. It’s similar for Google, too. So what will we do? This needs to alter. Now, I cannot offer a simple recipe, on the grounds that we ought to restructure the entire approach our digital science operates. Everything from the way in which technological know-how is developed to the way the incentives, economic and in any other case, are built into the approach. We need to face and check out to deal with the dearth of transparency created by the proprietary algorithms, the structural task of machine learning’s opacity, all this indiscriminate information that’s being collected about us.We’ve a tremendous venture in front of us. We have got to mobilize our technological know-how, our creativity and sure, our politics so that we are able to build synthetic intelligence that helps us in our human targets however that can also be confined by means of our human values. And i appreciate this won’t be easy. We would no longer even with ease agree on what those terms mean. But when we take seriously how these techniques that we rely on for so much operate, i do not see how we will put off this dialog anymore. These structures are organizing how we perform they usually’re controlling what we will and we can not do.And many of these ad-financed systems, they boast that they may be free. On this context, it means that we’re the product that’s being offered. We need a digital economic system the place our information and our attention will not be on the market to the highest-bidding authoritarian or demagogue. (Applause) so to go back to that Hollywood paraphrase, we do want the prodigious competencies of man-made intelligence and digital technological know-how to blossom, but for that, we have got to face this prodigious risk, open-eyed and now. Thanks. (Applause) .

[razieltwelve]

Transformer (Final Effect AU?)

“Systems are reading green across the board.”

“Standing by for activation.”

“Cognitive systems are online. Personality and learning matrices are green.”

“Standing by to activate transformation cog.”

“Transformation cog is good to go. Initiating first transformation.”

The Dia-Farron scientists watched their newest creation with pride… as outside the dreadnought an entire planet of metal came alive and transformed for the very first time.

“Project Primus is looking good.”

X     X     X

Her Imperial Majesty Averia VII took a deep breath. Murdering her relatives was not an option, even if it was very tempting. 

“Let me get this straight,” she growled. “You created a gigantic machine world?”

The Dia-Farron representative nodded. “That’s right.”

“And you made it capable of transforming into a gigantic humanoid robot.”

“Right again.”

“And you made this gigantic humanoid robot a synthetic with his own soul.”

“Correct.”

“So… just to make sure I’m understanding all of this, you somehow made a planet-sized transforming robot with a soul… and you somehow managed to keep me or anyone else from finding out about it. How? How could you have possibly managed to do this without anyone noticing where all the money was going?”

“Actually,” the representative replied. “We used discretionary funds for this, so they wouldn’t have shown up on the usual oversight documents.”

“Discretionary funds?”

“You know how the sales of certain toys can be used to fund special projects? Well, we released a new brand of toys a couple of years ago.” The representative held up a toy. It was a red and blue truck that transformed into a humanoid robot. “They’ve proven to be exceptionally popular, so some of us started wondering… why not build a real one?”

“And you decided to start by building one the size of a planet?”

“Well, the toys made a lot of money. A lot of money. And if we were going to build one, we might as well build a big one.” The representative paused. “By the way, his name is Primus.”

“Good grief,” Averia muttered. “Is he loyal to the Empire?”

“Of course, he is. He was subject to the socialisation protocols just like every other synthetic. We made sure he was good, friendly, and loyal before we put him into his awesome planet-sized robot body. Really, he just wants to help the Empire and civilisation grow and prosper.” The representative paused. “I mean, he’s not all that ridiculous when you consider some of the other things we’ve built. A planet-sized robot isn’t anywhere near as weird as a solar-system-sized weapons array that could, in theory, be used to wipe out significant portions of the galaxy.”

Averia’s eye twitched. “What solar-system-sized weapons array are you talking about?”

“Hmm… I could have sworn we submitted a report about that one. We built it to try to pick off Grimm swarms while they’re still in inter-galactic space. Based on the rate of Grimm swarm evolution, we could be facing dozens of swarms at the same time in the future. Being able to blast some of them before they can reach our galaxy will help thin the herd, so to speak.”

“Again, where did you get the money for that?”

“Trading cards,” the representative replied. “You’d be amazed by how popular they are. Sure, holographic displays and neural input are all the rage, but there’s just something about being able to hold stuff in your hands that makes a difference.”

“You know, I’m just going to go along with this,” Averia said at last. “Organise a meeting with… Primus. I want to meet him. If he’s anything like the usual stuff your side of the family comes up with, he’ll be endearingly quirky. As for that weapons array… I want a full write up. If we’re going to use it, I want to know what to expect.” She paused. “And those trading cards. I want a full set. Consider it the price of keeping secrets from me.”

[gigsoupmusic]

Vinyl Corner : Morrissey 'I Am Not A Dog On A Chain'

Vinyl Corner is a feature where we take a look at vinyl pressings of various albums and weigh them up to see just how good they sound, how well they're pressed and what sort of packaging to expect - as well as giving a brief overview of the music itself. This time we're taking in the latest offering from one of the most divisive yet enduring figures in alternative music history; love him or loathe him, you'll likely have an opinion one way or another. We're talking, of course, about Morrissey - and his latest album 'I Am Not A Dog On A Chain'. The Music: Although Steven Patrick Morrissey has never been one to keep his views to himself, it has in recent years become increasingly difficult to separate the man from his work. Of course, that wouldn't be something that many felt the need to do had his views not become increasingly vitriolic and bitter over the course of the 2010s but, as it now stands, it's difficult to discuss his musical work without first prefixing some convoluted discourse on his worldview. While that's understandable - and, indeed, there's nothing good to be gained from sweeping his views under the carpet - it also shouldn't be allowed to skew perception of his music. It has, however, been easy to dismiss Morrissey's work of late - either on grounds of his politics for those so inclined or, more pertinently, the quality of his work. 2017's 'Low In High School' marked something of a stumble; despite a bold production style and a clutch of genuinely great songs, it was an inconsistent and messy collection that presented the listener with little reason to return to it after those few initial plays. Last year's 'Californian Son' did little to placate those concerns and, despite a few standout moments, its status as a collection of covers gave it the feel of a stopgap release more than a full-blown artistic statement. But the past is another country, as they say, and Morrissey's latest outing arrives in timely fashion, considering his long-term appeal to shut-ins and indie-introverts the world over. Not only that, but it also reconfirms him as an enduring talent. Though fundamentally not dissimilar to 'Low In High School' in certain respects - Joe Chiccarelli's punchy, boisterous production chief amongst them - 'I Am Not A Dog On A Chain' is a far stronger collection of songs. Indeed, Morrissey is on better form lyrically than he has been in years; he's still eager to cook up as much controversy as any one album can hold, of course - but it would hardly be a Moz album if he weren't. More importantly, his signature wit remains unabated; there are some genuinely funny moments here on his thirteenth solo album and his voice remains as remarkably ageless as it has been across the entirety of his career. Long-time musical collaborators make a return here amongst a few new faces, and he sounds comfortable and confident amongst the musical backdrop his group have cooked up. He's not above a few missteps; 'I Am Not A Dog On A Chain' isn't above the odd song that fails to fully convince but, in fairness to him, few artists three and a half decades into their careers are capable of crafting an album anywhere near this engaging. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5hQh1QvPGg Perhaps better still is the fact that Morrissey has freshly regained his sense of adventure. If 'Low In High School' suffered from any one issue the most, then it was relative lack of imagination. Though not exactly formulaic, it did feel like the work of an artist looking back over his work with furrowed brow and wondering quite how he could recapture the magic. No such affectations are palpable here on 'I Am Not A Dog On A Chain'. It's an album that sets his idiosyncratic croon to an urgent, surprisingly excitable backing of bristling synths and snappy drums, the rocking guitars that have come to define much of his output consigned to a more textural, ancillary status here. It's a marked shift and one that sets the album out as the most experimental Morrissey record in over a decade. His ability to balance a regained sense of exploratory vitality with a largely vivid, memorable set of songs has lent him not only his best album since 2014's mostly excellent 'World Peace Is None Of Your Business' but a return to form after the relative doldrums of his past two albums. The Pressing: As with 'Low In High School', this latest Morrissey effort comes in a range of different colour vinyl options. We're reviewing the standard black vinyl edition here but those so inclined should be able to hunt down one of the limited colour pressings without too much trouble. A quick glance at the matrices reveals that this vinyl edition of 'I Am Not A Dog On A Chain' was pressed by Germany's ever-popular Optimal Media GmbH. They're one of the busiest pressing plants in the world, producing such a large quantity of new records that, whether you realise it or not, you probably own something manufactured by them if you've bought even a handful of albums pressed within the last decade. That voracious output does come at a cost, however, and Optimal Media's output can be frustratingly inconsistent in quality. Fortunately, precautions were evidently taken here as this is a quality pressing with excellent sound throughout. With 'I Am Not A Dog On A Chain' clocking in at the best part of fifty minutes in length, there's an awful lot of music here to be squeezed onto just one disc. For an indication of the ideal amount of music to include on one disc, consider the fact that back when LPs were first invented it was advised that no more than 22 minutes of music should be included per side. Although a more cautious label might have been tempted to release 'I Am Not A Dog On A Chain' as a double LP, the sound quality remains excellent throughout this pressing. The fidelity suffers none for the length of each side and the fat, angry synth-basslines roar with no less intensity here that they might have even if the album had been spread across two discs. The mastering, then, certainly impresses - and the extended side lengths offer a definite convenience, if nothing else. But that's not the whole story, of course; there's also the pressing quality to consider. Fortunately, that lives up to the high standard set by the mastering. Although Optimal Media pressings can sometimes suffer from intrusive crackle, the surfaces are consistently clean throughout our copy. The noise floor is low and imperfections such as crackling and popping are notable only by their absence. The record itself is roughly mid-weight; it certainly isn't a full 180 grams but nor does it feel lightweight when handled. Surfaces are also visually clean, being free of the fingerprints and scuffs that all too often appear on new releases. The Packaging: As with most Morrissey albums of recent times, the merits of 'I Am Not A Dog On A Chain's artwork are very much up for debate. Those fond of album covers that consist in the vast majority of the artist's slightly blurry face will doubtless be thrilled but the rest of us may have our reservations. Qualms pertaining to the art direction aside, the packaging and presentation of Morrissey's latest is actually very impressive. The cover is a fairly standard non-gatefold design; it's nothing special in itself - although there's certainly nothing wrong with it - but the cardstock is reasonably solid and the spine benefits from clearly legible text that will help the album to be picked out on even the most crowded of shelves. More impressive by far are the inserts; the record itself is included in a printed card inner sleeve that gives full credits for each track. It's a welcome addition, of course, and it's printed on a nice quality cardstock but, as with any such sleeve, it doesn't provide a great deal of protection for the record. As always, therefore, we'd advise storing the LP in a polylined generic inner sleeve. Better yet is the inclusion a separate insert giving full lyrics to each song; say what you like about Morrissey, but his writing has always been a central aspect of his craft, so inserts such as these are little short of essential. A whopping-great barcode printed onto the back cover is a rather ugly inclusion and it would have been better placed as a sticker on the shrinkwrap but, even so, a definite degree of care has been put into the overall presentation of this release. Final Thoughts: 'I Am Not A Dog On A Chain' is an adventurous, engaging return to form. It's a record that will inspire controversy as sure as the sun is warm but, then again, would it really be a Morrissey album if it didn't? A high quality vinyl release is enough to ensure that those sufficiently impressed with this latest effort can enjoy it in real style. Enjoyed this feature? We're always looking for further albums to highlight on Vinyl Corner - and if you have a vinyl release that you'd love to see written about here, please get in touch at martin.leitch@gigsoupmusic.com - it would be great to hear from you! Read the full article

[perfectzablog]

The Six Must-Have Elements Of High Quality Project-Based Learning

Elizabeth Vega teaches pre-kindergarten at Loma Verde Elementary in Novato, California. Her school and district leaders want to do more project-based learning and have invested in getting teachers like Vega some training. That means she took one workshop on project-based learning, got excited about the possibilities, and then was sent back to her classroom to try it out.

“It sounded all great when they talked us through it,” Vega said, but when she got back to her classroom, and only had her notes for pointers, the whole endeavor became overwhelming. That didn’t stop Vega from trying, but the first project she and her team teachers implemented didn’t go at all how they’d planned.

‘One of the most common things that’s missing from what people call projects is that it’s not intellectually challenging.’Bob Lenz, Executive Director of the Buck Institute

The team noticed the school’s garden was dying and they thought it would be neat for students to design a new watering system. But the kids didn’t care about the project at all. They just said, “use the hose.” Vega wasn’t entirely sure they even fully understood the problem, but she could tell they weren’t engaged in solving it, so her team ended up dropping the project.

“I think it was eye-opening for us,” Vega said. It was a clear example of why students need a voice in the design process, something Vega remembers from her training, but that somehow got glossed over when the teachers sat down to plan. “We need to have that conversation with our students first and ask them what problems we’re having at Loma Verde. That way they have voice in that process,” Vega said.

This first hiccup hasn’t deterred Vega. When she’s had success she can clearly see students are engaged with projects. She does wish she had more support as a way to check the things she’s trying against best practices. She’d really like to have a project-based learning coach, but if she can’t have that, she’d like tools to help her reflect on how to improve.

“I think teachers crave resources,” Vega said. “Right now they feel like they don’t have the tools, and we don’t even know where to start.”

There are a lot of teachers in the same position as Vega. Interest in project-based learning has exploded, and the practice can now be found in some form or another all over the United States. But while interest in projects is high, a deep understanding of what makes project work meaningful and impactful to students is less ubiquitous.

“People are calling a lot of things project-based learning that aren’t necessarily high quality learning experiences for kids,” said Bob Lenz, executive director of the Buck Institute for Education. That’s a concern for many educators, like Lenz, who have worked on project-based learning for decades and know there’s danger in an education trend that goes wild, but isn’t implemented well.

“It could be just another wave of PBL that came and went,” Lenz said. That’s why the Buck Institute convened a broad range of teachers, education leaders, policy groups, foundation representatives, international stakeholders and others to design “A Framework For High Quality Project Based Learning.”

The Buck Institute for Education convened a steering committee of project-based learning stakeholders to write a framework for high quality PBL. (Courtesy/HQPBL)

To write this document, a core group of educators who have taught with projects for a long time wrote a draft and got feedback from the convened stakeholders. They made revisions and then put the new draft out for public comment. They got a few thousand comments within the U.S. and globally, which they used to revise once again. The third iteration went back to the steering committee for final sign-off and touch-ups.

“It wasn’t too hard to find consensus, but some of the challenge was, ‘are we describing what teachers are doing or are we describing what kids are doing?’” Lenz said. Ultimately, the steering group decided that there are plenty of existing materials focused on teachers, but few that describe what student learning looked like in a high quality project-based learning environment. Lenz hopes that by focusing on students, parents can also use the framework to hold schools accountable.

The framework is built around six basic elements that the framers believe must be present: intellectual challenge and accomplishment, authenticity, public product, collaboration, project management and reflection.

“One of the most common things that’s missing from what people call projects is that it’s not intellectually challenging,” Lenz said. He acknowledges that progressive educators often criticize the Buck Institute for coaching teachers that projects should be standards-based, but Lenz said that’s one way to make sure the projects aren’t disconnected from content.

The Mission Project — which until recently was common for fourth graders in California schools — is a good example of “project” that doesn’t hold up under this framework. Usually students learn a lot of history about how the missions in California came to be, and then as an afterthought they build a model mission. The “project” part could be completed by a parent or bought off the shelf. It has very little connection to the learning. This is what some educators call a “dessert project” — it comes after the learning. And according to the new framework, it’s not really project-based learning.

“The big ah-ha for a lot of teachers in our workshops is that projects can be about academic content,” Lenz said. “It’s often seen as something after kids have learned their academic content.” But there are other misconceptions as well.

“A lot of new models are oriented, and have as part of their espoused design, that they want to use personalized learning and skill-based work so kids can do project-based learning,” Lenz said. He’s describing a strain of the “personalized learning” movement that uses online playlists to move students through content, but also tries to blend projects in as demonstrations of learning.

“I don’t think they’re very clear on what makes high quality PBL,” Lenz said. That’s where the authenticity and public product standards come into play. If the project doesn’t mirror the ways people work in the real world then it isn’t authentic, according to Lenz.

“When PBL is done really well the context engages kids and then teachers can apply the same strategies they might have used out of context to kids who are a little more engaged,” Lenz said. He emphasized that teachers have to give students structure and support to get good outcomes, especially when students haven’t experienced projects before.

“The process is what it should be all about,” Lenz said. But in order to move beyond content, teachers have to be clear about teaching skills like setting goals and making action plans, and then teachers have to assess those skills as they would content. As with anything else in the classroom, project-based learning teachers can’t assume kids already have the skills.

DEEPENING PROJECTS

Telannia Norfar teaches high school math at Northwest Classen High School in Oklahoma City — where she was also a student. She’s had a few careers before teaching, but since she entered the classroom 11 years ago she’s been using project-based learning. Norfar is on the steering committee that worked to create the High Quality Project Based Learning Framework.

“With so many practitioners who have been in the project world — and did it even when it wasn’t popular in education — for all of them to come together and come up with common language will be really helpful,” Norfar said.

Norfar’s district isn’t big on project-based learning and for a long time she didn’t have any colleagues who were interested in collaborating with her. But she has continued to use projects to teach the most important math concepts, the ones she really wants students to nail, for one simple reason — she says it works.

“When I think of what is the magic sauce for me, it’s the public audience or public product piece,” Norfar said. “It happens every time, no matter what the project is, as long as it’s outside our four walls, they do amazing stuff.”

Norfar doesn’t want to simplify the many important pieces of quality projects, but she also doesn’t want interested teachers to feel so overwhelmed they never start trying. She finds a lot of her math projects by talking to people outside of education. In social situations, on airplanes, at networking events for other professions, she asks professionals how they actually use math in their work. She builds projects from there.

“You can start with your friends, especially if you didn’t come from a family where everybody is a teacher,” Norfar said. Many math teachers, she said, haven’t used math in a profession; they were just good math students. To help students see relevance in math, and to empower them to make a difference with the knowledge they are gaining, Norfar wants them to use math in authentic ways.

Norfar has done financial planning projects, architectural design projects, aerospace engineering projects (inspired by a conversation about matrices with an engineer on a plane), and she’s currently exploring a chemistry related project with a professor friend.

Norfar says every year it’s the projects that change students’ minds about their future in mathematics. She remembers one student in a pre-AP class who was struggling. As a class they worked on a project to design a new house for a family that was outgrowing theirs. The student’s father worked in construction, and he helped her draw plans that were blueprint quality. “And it inspired her to become an architect,” Norfar said.

One misperception Norfar sees among many colleagues who are skeptical of project-based learning is the belief that everything has to fit into a project. Norfar says she only spends time on projects for the standards that are most important. To decide, she used the book “Power Standards” to get at the heart of her content standards. She breaks out the six most important units and spends a month on each of them.

“It looks like we’re covering a lot, but even inside of it we intentionally said we really need to introduce this to help them understand, but it’s not the diehard thing,” Norfar said. She’s finally got an algebra teaching team interested in collaborating and it is intentionally spiraling back to the idea of the line, what it is and what it isn’t, because it’s a foundational algebraic idea.

“I could either pretend that I’m really getting through it or I could really care about a few things. And less is always more,” Norfar said. A good example is vocabulary words like domain, range, independent, dependent, discrete and continuous. These words help students talk about the performance tasks Norfar gives them, but they aren’t the “diehard thing.”

Norfar admits that it has been a long journey to get to a place where she’s comfortable owning her content in this way; and she’s still improving. Right now, her focus is on improving how she works reflection into her classes. She says teaching with high quality projects means always believing you can improve.

“I would never say I’ve got this down. That’s not possible. There’s always room to grow,” Norfar said. She’s surprised sometimes about how resistant her colleagues are to change. “I’m like, ‘the world changes, you have to change too,’ “ she said.

That’s why as much as Norfar wants all projects to involve all six of the elements set out in the framework, on a practical level she just wants people to try something new. And she’s worried that unless the value of project-based learning is assessed with more than just tests many educators will abandon it.

“I’m so concerned that we will be the next fad for education,” Norfar said. “I’ll be honest, I have some of the same test scores as the teacher next to me who does not do PBL.” But she doesn’t think the tests reveal the ways students are growing as people and thinkers when they’re engaged in projects. She wishes there were other metrics for the type of growth she sees.

“My students are so much more prepared once they leave high school than the teacher next door who got the test results, but his kids don’t know how to work together,” she said.

The Six Must-Have Elements Of High Quality Project-Based Learning published first on https://greatpricecourse.tumblr.com/

[ps-terrorism-blog]

[dominant, [con-vi, a]ct[or]s-[sh[O,A],choo]shaks, जोश-ए-[जुनूँ,जनेऊ,मौल][-ी]दोष, ofFender, feudal, segregated, organised, ma-jo-ri-ti-es?] ~12-15% [sons-crit-ons: https://www.google.co.in/#q=sons-crit-ons | pseudo-Arya-ns: https://www.google.co.in/#q=pseudo-Aryan | brahmins, k[s]hetri-ya, [jat, patel, gujjar, maratha, reddy]s, https://www.facebook.com/1406663276068678/videos/1424791980922474 et al | Hindu-tvam: https://www.google.co.in/#q=hindu-tvam | Arya(n) and Arya[n]ism: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryanism racial-radical pseudo-proto-crank-Scientists] [complicate, irResponsible, aNTi-aGainst, trap, criminalize, de-predate, victimize, dispute-feud, hostility, enmity] [शोषक-चूषक, मनौती, पनौती] due to [webs, matrices] of [motive, doubt, suspicion, deSire-asPiration]s [मंशा, [आ]शंका, संशय, आकांक्षा-आस:-काश:]एं OR [problem-solver, sophisticator, compl[i,e]mentary, rePresentative, leader]s [कोशिश:, कोशिक्षा, ख़ज़ांची[कोष]पोषक] [dePressed, crushed, sufferers, con-vict-ims, दबे-वंचित-कुचले-[शोष,जोश,दोष]ि-त, separated, disorganised, mi-no-ri-ti-es?] ~90% [Shudra-OBCs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shudra, poor, women|weak, darks|blacks, Dalits-SCs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalit, Ad[h]iwasi-STs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adivasi, trans-sexs|genders, [physic, ment]ally cha[lle]nged, Dasa https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasa |slaves https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_India, B,G,L, religious|eth[n]i-q(u)al-tural minorities [Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Christian, Buddh[ist,a], Jain, Jew, Zoroastrian, et al]s, castrated:eunuchs, et al] [iNTellectuals, aTheists, [a]GNostics] na-s-ty-k =[eQualize]= [m!]th-e(olog,de)ists swa-s-t[h]-i-c !? CritiQue of [Brahmin, Arya-n, k[s]hetriya, aRe-a-n]ist [text, sCript]ures: Osho: https://youtu.be/8QQUJoSA2s0 [वै,वि]ज्ञानि[क]प्रबुद्धं [पौरुष, स्त्रीत्व, आत्मियत] [धा,आ]र्मि[क]प्रभुत्वं #exposé (im)[P]arty[c,fici]al in[ter,tra]dependance|state|rePublic #उघारब [d-ange-r-ous, [he-in, die-n]do-us, communal, so-ci[et,de]al, biGot[ry], re[li]gio-se/us] [tension, po[l-i]se/ce/cy, po[li]t[r][ic,e,y]s, unKnowledgeabilities Too] 15%[Brahmin,k[s]hetriya,Vaishya]ic Con[sPiraCi,seQuenC]es को 85%[अधिकांक्षी,बाहुसंख्यकों] थोपने के हक़? https://youtu.be/bpSCLZpmMpQ [na,ra,fic,fixa]tion-al-i-zation-al [na,la]yak-[lo,qa]yukt[a,iyan] #real[ism] Sons-crit https://www.google.co.in/#q=sons-crit Vs #Myth Sans-krit https://www.quora.com/Is-Hindu-an-English-word-or-Hindi-word/answer/Nimish-Mishra-5 https://www.quora.com/How-do-many-Brahmanic-Abrahamic-Allies-followers-groups-classes-institutions-and-industries-owe-Reparations-and-Restitutions-towards-against-the-enslaved-Humans-and-descendants-Dasa-and-Dalits-and-their-After-Life-Slavery-in-India अधिकांक्षी महिला की स्पीच: https://youtu.be/al-Ozzzi1AI https://www.quora.com/How-do-Indian-teens-feel-about-different-religions/answer/Vva-1 Osho on|about eQualizing Dr BR Ambedkar &|Vs religiose Barrister MK Gandhi: https://youtu.be/XoQ_D5G6sXg भारत के पौड़ानिक-नवयुगी दासतानें[अ]फँसाने [sLavery[en]Trapments]: https://www.facebook.com/MoolnivasiMedia/videos/249559375448580 Gadkari and the 'Brahmin' Janata Party: https://youtu.be/nn98r6yyRp0 [[प्र]जाति, वर्ण, नस्ल-नक्सल-नक्षर-नक्षा-नशा, अखंड-पाखंड-ढोंगी]वाद racism-casteism aMong[st] inDian mammalian nationals aLien-aRyan-aRe-a-n, Buffalo-Brahm[i,a]n, Cow-Gau, Dalits-Dasa: https://youtu.be/E_u-1_-zuwU https://brahminsexposed.wordpress.com [Brahmanic, Are-a-n] [crime, terror-horror, b/p-lunder]ism https://brahminterrorism.wordpress.com Brahm[a,e,i]n[ism,s] eXPosed: https://youtu.be/q2s3AcQZJd0 Brahm[a,e,i]n Girl rePly: https://youtu.be/EQKgVytO-90 Arya-ns https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryanism were aLiens-forEigners to huge iNDi[an,es] subContinent.. https://www.facebook.com/MoolnivasiMedia/videos/249675415436976 The Tyranny Of [Script,Text][s,ure]: https://youtu.be/6BaGHKe5oi0 7 Historic Facts about Indian Hindu organization RSS: https://youtu.be/MntX_MvTLj8 Brah[manism, mins] ocCupied iNDian deMocracy with Jawaharlal Nehru became 1st PM without any election, after: British-Christians [were being-sent-back]/left; Mughals-Muslims were oBLiterated-sideLined with muslim[league, nation]; [Shudra-OBCs, Dr Babasaheb, Dalits-SCs, Ad[h]iwasi-STs, et al] were oBLiterated-sideLined were sidelined with d-ange-r bengal-famine? Puna-pact, etc: https://www.facebook.com/V1jayL0dhi/videos/795389380618307/ https://youtu.be/H3xSe-TzEWc Which religion is truth based or a true religion? https://in.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20160814232734AAMA5zt Is Religion Man Made? How Did Religion Start? 2006: Daniel Dennett: https://youtu.be/Zg5qp_ljcno https://www.quora.com/Is-BJP-an-anti-Dalits-party RSS Genesis & Political Agenda: https://youtu.be/vgXZlFLpWSc Sons-crit is not 2 millennia old/ईसा पूर्व की भाषा नहीं है संस्कृत- राजेंद्र प्रसाद सिंह: https://youtu.be/sKMf8W7P6zQ https://www.quora.com/How-is-RSS-related-to-Hindu-terrorism All Religions are Lies - Masters of Deception: https://youtu.be/PflixBTzi8o support[ers,systems] + sons [en]crypted [Ramayan[a], Mahabharat[a], Wed:Dewa, etc/et-al] (creat|chang|transform-ed cryptic scripts|war|priest-crafts|[after]life|mythical-critters in India-n-world) through sons-crit(i) & [divid|en-slav|[re]creat|rul]ed crit-ters|ani/mam-mals|[after]life by divisive & devising plans, agenda, conspiracies, corruption & propaganda. son-[s(k)ar, gh[i,athan], dig-dh, das, ta[n,p], jai, ki, jeev, nata, son-i, char] https://www.quora.com/Did-the-pseudoAryana-Sons-crit-ona-Varna-bring-the-British-English-for-own-ing-industrial-indian-advances-advantages-representations Hein-do-stan-i https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-chances-that-word-bha-rat-is-a-shortened-form-of-gar-bha-rat There have been too many-much propaganda for [iDeoLogical, feuDal, {p}aRTificial, reliGiose-reLigious, eThnic, reGional] battle-war-priest[Craft]s, inStead of proViding good-better living conditions for its-their nationals. https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Buffalo-not-worshipped-like-cow-in-Hinduism sutch-mutch cow[bull-ox, bullock [castrated]] [butch[er]ing, s-laughter, [after]life] गौ-हत्या सत्य:: Osho: https://youtu.be/eu11_jhEmKM https://www.quora.com/Is-BJP-anti-intellectual-and-anti-artist दोनों[म,व,मा]रनेवाले [ज़्यादा,अधिक]तर [अधिकांक्षी,बहूजन,बाहूसँख्यक]85-90%[शूद्र-OBCs, दलित-Dalits, आदिवासी-Ad[h]iwasis, धार्मिक-अल्पसंख्यक-साँस्कृतिक-नृजात���य-minorities] होते रहे गुज़[-ा]रे-गए। [brahmenब्राम्हणb[al]ramhu[ma]n, k[s]hetriya, tradest] बस घट[-ी,ना] को {स्क्रिप्टित, son-culp-rit, स्वीकृत}अर्थवा[स्कृप्ट-लिखते, [मा,ता][नसिक,न्त्रिक]क्रियान्वित{करते}[अ]हिंसा, तमाश[बीन]बनते[नरसिँहित,गौरीमा]] गुज़[-ा]रे[ते]गए। https://brahminterrorism.wordpress.com https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=414847158909004 राष्ट्र[प्र]देश को वर्ण[su,क़ु,सम्][वर्चस्व,प्रभुत्व]ता के प्रोपेगैंडा[अ,दुर्]बोध[आतुर]एजेंडे से बचाना। an aMazing Fake News Show on Zee News by-through Sudhir Chaudhary : https://youtu.be/fHStIl06CiI जितनी गहराई में जाँचोगे-पुरखोगे, {धर्म के आधार पर बनाईं गयीं, धार्मी[आ]धारित} [शोच,संशोध]नीय प्र[शो,को]ष[ण,क़] व्यवस्थाएं समझ[पा,ते,जा]ओगे। https://brahminsexposed.wordpress.com How to identify Fake News in India?? by Dhruv Rathee: https://youtu.be/Ezcng6hyWp4 राष्ट्र[प्र]देश को [सम्]प्रबुद्ध [पौरुष, स्त्रीत्व, आत्मियत] प्रदान [करें।, कराया?] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-Jains-believe-that-Lord-Krishna-is-in-hell/answer/Maneesh-Kumar-57 What Have i Got aGainst Religion? https://youtu.be/oSZYN8UV6yg बौद्ध धर्म को भारत में कैसे उजाड़-उखाड़-ख़त्म कर गुज़[-ा]रे गए: https://youtu.be/S7gwkMtM8cM भारत के न्यायालयों पर वामन मेश्राम की सुपर स्पीच: https://youtu.be/vaXLsx1D3NI https://youtu.be/j3vbxX-i15A The Big Fight: Are Indians racist? https://youtu.be/OCcgx16e8DQ https://youtu.be/ilo_YRqXH1k https://www.quora.com/Are-Indians-racist-against-black-people iNDians are-racist/ kill-murder fellow nationals according to [beliefs, caste-drama-dharma, faith, iDeology, hypoCrisies, hypo-Theses]; who eat cooked cow-meat, kill those converted to Christianity, kill those dalits-darks-blacks-dasa,  bharat's racist righ!!!! are [racist, rapist, criminal, extremist, separatist, terrorist]s against other fellow indians. [प्र,वि]देश को बर्बाद करने हेतु परमाणु बम नहीं केवल 4 ब्राह्मण[Aryan–aRe-a-n]k[s]hetriya काफ़ी: https://youtu.be/D-EjPme6iL0 God[s,dess-es] Bless [a-nti]Theism! https://youtu.be/y4mWiqkGy-Y Theology as branch of phi-lo-so-phy, re[li]gion OR [re]creative/ecritirve art?. Heaven is right there waiting for you, and all you've got to do is die. That's some price to pay, isn't it for admission to a place which is full of [after]life clergymen and born again [christian, brahmin, aryan, we/a-re-a-n, arian, k[s]hetriya, tradest, et al]s' afterlife, which i reckon makes it literally a fate worse than death [with]in[side] the earth world. But surely people need re[li]gion to answer certain questions [un]like "how better-worse can we stiffle the human[holi]spirit? How much can we squeeze from the poor and gullible? How many palaces can we live without blushing? But there are very many questions it doesn't have answers, so it try to adapt-adopt from modern-science or it cover the phenomena-process-program-etc and {it's [wo]men} makes them up. [a-nti]Theism says you just made them up, religion-theism says this what we call theology. What's the difference b/w doctor of [medicine, theology]? One preScribes drugs, other might as well be on drugs. A theologian is somebody who's an expert in the unKnowable-unKnowledgeability. https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/94/53/34/9453345fae30aa1e50b8cadb2c5c63e1.jpg http://www.thequint.com/hot-wire/2015/10/22/more-than-47000-crimes-against-dalits-in-2014-crime-records [please] Do not use word-phrase {some[one,thing]} upRising[s]. It is [very, too] ofFensive. It had been used world over by [dominant, feudal] [propeller, con-vict-or]s to define-declare protests as upRisings, and then crush those, "by hook or by crook" modi operandi. You can use word like Rising Lagging/Scheduled Classes/Castes/Tribes/Dalits/Shudra. https://www.quora.com/What-is-dalit-crisis/answer/Laal-Musaddi [जाति,वर्ण]वादी न्याय(अ)[न्,नु]याय[-ी] व्यवस्था को ख़त्म करना हमारा उद्देश्य/Our Aim is to end the Racist-Casteist Justice System: https://youtu.be/RWxvvaKussY देखिए, qom-vict-ims:[JNUites, रोहित वेमुला, HCU, कश्मीर-ी-यत] पर बनी feaTure[फ़िल्मों, movies]s से डरी सर[O]कार क्या कर guzare: https://youtu.be/b6PE8gdzIzQ [uTube watch] FalLen Chinar: https://youtu.be/JBUwW5z6aNo Rohit Vemula: NDTV PRiME: https://youtu.be/r4eJsBhUyrc doCU https://youtu.be/beSyOEhh94A tRailor: https://youtu.be/D2drAiFDpqQ 1st d'anniv: https://youtu.be/Loxs_gu1C5U [March x3] https://youtu.be/_KupWieLwH0 https://www.quora.com/Do-Slogans-like-Sonscrit-Sanskrit-Sentence-Satyamev-Jayate-act-as-catalyst-in-helping-getting-true-in-justice/answer/Maneesh-Kumar-57 mahaboret [dubious, ambiguous, [b,f]risky, d-ange-r-ous] chants-mumbling-lingua-slogans!? [d-ange-r-ous] धर्म: के नाम पर साम्प्रदायिक दंगे | Communal Ri-o/gh-ts (Dange) in the name of re[li]gion | Osho: https://youtu.be/8C6-fdhkjQ8 http://www.opindia.com/2015/11/from-dadri-to-haryana-to-manipur-how-stories-about-crimes-against-dalits-and-minorities-have-panned-out [violence, [re,op,de,sup]pression, corruption, [trans,re,ag,di]gression, terror-ism] in the name of [re[li]gion, nature, [oc,diffi]cult[ure,ism], states] which is [non-truthful, unlawful] https://www.quora.com/How-non-correct-is-the-Claim-Slogan-Terrorism-has-No-Religion इ/उ-न्होंने धर्म नहीं/कब त्यागा-तजा!? धर्म ने भी इन्हें नहीं/कब त्यागा-तजा!? [ब्रह्म/भ्राम-ान/इन, आर्य-न,  are-a-n, k[s]hetriya, वैश्य, वर्ण]बाद[आ]दाब[ईर्ष्या, उग्र, घृणा, भय, d-ange-r, आतंक, निरस्कार, डर, बहिष्कार, ख़ौफ़]वाद{-ा, -े,-ी}दाव https://brahminsexposed.wordpress.com https://img.ifcdn.com/images/4c3c9055eaea49a17eb2b2714564a8751eb9d4c0c6f9f0d70e75245fd44c25b0_1.jpg https://www.quora.com/Is-Hinduism-truth-based-or-a-true-religion दलित-SCs-शूद्र-OBCs: Osho: https://youtu.be/QRGGp37lgo0 जाती हमारी मूल पहचान नहीं - वामन मेश्राम: https://youtu.be/LI90h_Gr0Ww She-wa(and) ling(phallus)[um(singular), a(plural,phalli)] https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/4d/d9/20/4dd920da0987c383497d3d3b10a9df55.jpg शि-व-लिंग का/की सच/सच्चाई-सिंचाई: OSHO: https://youtu.be/4IusnrRV8Gw Muslims' hate She-wa-ling[a] hypo[thes,cris(i)]es: https://youtu.be/-IpkjEU9dcc देवदासी मन्दिर प्रणाली[कु]प्रथा DewaDasi ManDir[ty]system: https://youtu.be/jIvlCkrPNqY https://youtu.be/dnKtvFFZ67k सिर्फ़ मुर्ख़ ही पाए जाते हैं [manDir-ties, mosQue-toes] में: https://youtu.be/lM79vDMzFMo inSulting Religion: https://youtu.be/1uTypnaP5X4 It could/can not be sa[i]d more than that "Lord Ram was born at the precise spot where Babri Masjid was located has no truth|fact|evidence" Dr Ram Puniyani: https://youtu.be/HkVAkAyfMXw?t=7m53s The Ayodhya - The Case Against the Temple: https://youtu.be/gJrrJqKm4-o    [must watch] 1991 BAbri MosQue [to] demo[li][sh,te,tion] for — RAm [manDir-tymple] ke NAm: https://youtu.be/OO-VaJBHiik Shameful [right-center-left]wings [bha[t,d]kau, pejorative, wil[le]d, gumrah[i], [ins, assa]ulting, vile, vilifying, de-preDating] legacy of [maha]bhara-t ! [S-laughterer, killer, rapist, looter, [a]chieph[er], murderer]s - Overlords of Caste-Races [caste,rac][ism,ists]  ~1000 years of aParTheid. is|are Buddh[a] [not] an|the Avatar[a] of Vishnu? https://youtu.be/YiQmj278Yqw Osho: दिमाग से धार्मिक[ई]कचरा निकालो! https://youtu.be/JWq6Lzg9lDw "एक[अन]एक बात[ ों] में दम[ख़म] है. मनुष्य-इंसान-धर्म-आस्था-श्रद्धा के अंदर-अंतर की नीति-नैतिकता-नीयत-नियति निकाल-उघाड़ कर सत्य: बता-समझा-व्याख्या दिया।" Best arguments against religion|faith: Richard Dawkins: https://youtu.be/bKMzA_S6X_8 eRaze-delete [enSlaving, pejorative, feudal, pseudoScientific] brahminic[Aryan–aRe-a-n]k[s]hetriya Social-Cult[ural] [re]Conditioning pseudo-aryana-asio-indo-euro{d-an(gel[o]sax)ge-r}m-an-y All Religions Are False! https://youtu.be/Tt4eb6IHTug https://www.quora.com/How-bad-is-was-the-Indian-racial-racist-blame-claim-Slogan-bad-eye-wo-man-your-face-may-be-come-dark-black-en-ed-against-other-Indians मैं धर्म:ग्रँथों की धज्जियाँ उड़ाता हूँ! क्यों? OSho: https://youtu.be/ioKScrmQvAo सस्ता खाना नहीं, हमें हमारी मेहनत के व-ेतन चाहिए/We Need Our Stuff, Not Cheap Food: https://youtu.be/E93AKH2j9Ds छद्म[वि,वै]ज्ञानी [निंदापूर्ण, तुच्छ:-क्षुद्र:, दास:, दल-इत--ि] बनानेवाले ब्राह्मणी-क्षेत्रीय-वर्णवादी-सामन्ती [समाजी, sons-criti]c अनुकूलन: का उन्मूलन [तुरंत, ज़रूरी] आपको अपना उद्धार स्वयं करना होगा - मा. वामन मेश्राम https://youtu.be/2rEd44TfSwY koi bha[g,d]wa-n-bhag[a,u]ts Aye to Apke sonhaar ho sakte hain [zulm-zaalim-shashak-shoshaq-chooshak-jurm](i) poshaq? भारत में लोकतंत्र के नाम पर नौटंकी: https://youtu.be/4LHpOeX3jvI नालंदा बौद्ध विश्वविद्यापित युनिवर्सिटी (भारत) और तक्षशिला युनिवर्सिटी (चायना) की वास्तविकता: https://www.facebook.com/829138893826348/videos/1553500264723537 https://www.quora.com/What-exactly-is-Jumla-and-is-it-a-Hindi-word/answer/Nimish-Mishra-5 [admi, ado]ration of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar!! https://www.facebook.com/MoolnivasiMedia/videos/249560185448499 Why Religion Should Be Replaced - Sam Harris on Danger to Society - 2005: https://youtu.be/TjW0P-JTrdU https://www.quora.com/Who-obliterated-Buddhism-from-india-3000-BCE-1000-ADE/answer/Nimish-Mishra-5 https://www.quora.com/Is-Hinduism-truth-based-business-trade-based-or-justice-based Daniel C. Dennett on What Should Replace Religions: https://youtu.be/N6XX8nPnKIk https://www.google.co.in/search?q=replace+religion https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-worst-U-turns-by-BJP-after-forming-the-Government BjP-ND[A,modi] के अबतक के सब [U-TUrn, perVersion]s तक का कच्चा-चिट्ठा modi-operandi. eXPosed with [proof, truth, fact, eVidence]s https://youtu.be/QT-jYPWMhUQ https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-historical-events-that-are-taught-as-facts-but-are-in-fact-mostly-propaganda/answer/Naman-Mitra https://www.quora.com/Was-not-Ramayan-the-story-of-the-descent-of-Man-from-Ape-Monkey-kind-Mammals-Species-Mythologically-dimensioned Religion VS Reality: https://youtu.be/A-D8Mf9DdQI https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=replace+religion What Comes After Re[li]gion: https://youtu.be/CL--1Z_g4DE https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/b4/ca/16/b4ca1607e6f4a1e9f887f66fa7188265.jpg A Brief hiStory of re[li/di]gio-n https://alejandrokaiser.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/img_30028606224590.jpeg [maha]Bhara-t-i-yana [Racist, Casteist] system http://image.indiaopines.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/caste-system-india.jpg Equal[ity]-Justice&Opportunities-4-all, appeasement-favorism2/&exploitation-enslavement-of[f]/on-none? Study: Atheism Will Overtake Religion by 2041: https://youtu.be/R-ON0Wt25TA God's God: https://youtu.be/ODetOE6cbbc Angst-ridden religious/se-regional {[re]creations, [f/t]act[ion,ivitie]s, [p]art, priest|war|witch-craft, [af,ef,in]fect-us}

[micaramel]

Artist: Steven Parrino

Venue: The Power Station, Dallas

Exhibition Title: Dancing on Graves

Date: April 5 – June 16, 2017

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of The Power Station, Dallas

Press Release:

“I want to be profoundly touched by art, by life. I came to painting at the time of its death, not breathe its last breath, but to caress its lifelessness. The necromancy of the pietà, Pollock’s One, timed with the birth of a synthetic star, 1958 BLACK PAINTINGS, DEATH & DISASTERS, modernism at its most powerful, before the point where circuses began. / The dust clears (just barely), and I stand in my own graveyard. I hear the constant din of BLACK NOISE.” – Steven Parrino

Dancing on Graves is five minutes of video shot by Steven Parrino (1958-2005) in 1999. He might describe it as a “sex and death painting thing.” But, before that, it’s grainy footage (handheld) of a woman dancing on a stacked platform of black-enameled aluminum. She looks into the lens, turns her body and bends over. Sits in a chair and opens her legs. Distortion blasts off-camera and the dancer’s body, suddenly all-vector, forms a “V.” It’s been suggested that Eros is a form and Thanatos a kind of entropy. And these two extremes seem to inform the dialectical friction one encounters in Parrino’s work. The video abruptly concludes with a cut to Parrino sawing into a black sheet of painted aluminum. A black screen. A loud silence.

Parrino comes to painting at the time of its death in the 1980s. He produces intensively reductive paintings. Black monochromes (painted with ‘one-shot’ sign-painters enamel) that he mishapes and distorts into bi-products of formed material. Canvas is unstapled, folded and restretched without a rigorous or declarative narrative. He intentionally avoids “melodramas” and “fantasy.” Instead, he reduces the structure of painting to the status of equipment (as per Heidegger, not just a specifc tool, but a system (Parrino would call it a “black system”) of tools that are collectively put to use), adhering to its materiality through a practice of applied distortion. Entropy endowed with form.

The paintings aren’t ‘pictures.’ Sometimes an inverted pyramid leaned against the wall (Untitled, 2004) or a kind of sensuous drapery (3 Units Aluminum Death Shifter, 1992).[1] But Parrino continues to unstretch, pull and contort the canvas to negotiate the literal boundaries of possible action while simultaneously limiting them. It’s his system. Disciplined and uncompromising. This isn’t formalism gone wrong, but formalism laid bare. A real thing. Fucked-up. And it gives Parrino the ability to un-ironically speak about the “reality” one finds in “abstract painting” because “reality” itself is incomplete and fucked-up. If the “the world is falling apart,” then painting should too. Like distortion (power chords and feedback), painting should “vibrate until it disjoins.”

The distortion “thing” is important. In conversation, Parrino would never not talk about noise. His sometimes collaborator Jutta Koether describes the vibe of Parrino’s group Blood Necklace in terms of his visual output: rigorous, stripped down, hard.[2] He listens for the constant din of black noise in the white static of Manhattan’s traffic and attempts to channel this into his work. He is as attracted to a New York Post cover (“A Murder Most Posh”) as to the Black Square of Malevich.[3]

In this sense, Parrino’s work is committedly realist. Not because it shows us a picture of reality, but because it participates in reality’s entropy. Even when real materials are historical or necrophied artifacts (the monochrome, the action paining or modernism) subjected to “theoretical distortion” (his words) or appropriation. Parrino directs attention to the structuring of painting’s “facts” through their destruction. And it’s through their mutual fragmentation and intercession (the gloss of black enamel or shine of crushed aluminum) that we get a glimpse of what’s at stake in painting’s entropic undoing. Adorno says “the splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass,” because distorted vision is the only way to confront something objectively. Like running into an object in the dark.

The selection of works on view at The Power Station adhere to Parrino’s elemental vocabulary: black, white and aluminum. Like Titian, Parrino begins his paintings with a fundamental contrast. Black. White. A positive.

A negative. Not to outline a form, but to establish matrices for possible action and intervention. Here, Parrino’s decision to limit painting to a narrow economy seems to amplify the works’ materialism and “heighten” their exteriority, context or “social feld.” The problem isn’t to stop paring away, but to produce paintings that destroy themselves in their making. Because “all creation hinges on destruction.” Because “all things destroy themselves or are destroyed.”

Steven Parrino was born in 1958 in New York, and died in 2005 in New York. He received his A.A.S. in 1979 from SUNY Farmingdale, New York, and his B.F.A. in 1982 from Parson’s School of Design, New York. Parrino’s work has been exhibited in major exhibitions around the world including the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland (2000); Ludwig Museum, Köln (2000); Contemporanea, Milan (2001); Nuremberg Museum, Germany (2002); The Swiss Institute, New York (2002); Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2003); Le Consortium, France (2004); Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt (2005); P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2005); and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2006). Recent solo shows include Massimo De Carlo Arte Contemporanea, Milan (2000); “Exit/Dark Matter,” FriArt, Switzerland (2002); “Steven Parrino Videos 1979-Present,” Circuit, Lausanne, Switzerland (2002); Massimo DeCarlo Arte Contemporanea, Milano Galerie Jean Brolly, Paris (2003); “A Retrospective (curated by Fabrice Stroun),” Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva (2005-07); Palais De Tokyo, France (2007) (curated by Fabrice Stroun and Marc-Olivier Wahler); “Born to Be Wild: Hommage an Steven Parrino,” Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland (2009); and “Steven Parrino: Armleder, Barré, Buren, Hantaï, Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni,” Gagosian Gallery, Paris (2013).

The Power Station thanks the Parrino Family Estate and Gagosian Gallery for their assistance with the exhibition. – [i.] Bob Nickas. “Steven Parrino at Palais de Tokyo.” Artforum, September 2007. [ii.] Jutta Koether and Bob Nickas. “Dark Star, Bob Nickas and Jutta Koether on Steven Parrino.”Artforum , March 2005. [iii.] Artforum , September 2007. [iv.] Most quotations taken directly from Steven Parrino’s The No Texts, (1979-2003) (Abaton Book Company: New Jersey: 2003) – Screened on the third foor of The Power Station throughout the duration of the exhibition: Drew Heitzler and Amy Granat T.S.O.Y.W., 2007 Two channel projection, 16mm flm transferred to digital video TRT: 3 hours 18 minutes 21 seconds Edition of 5, 3AP Courtesy of the Artists and BLUM & POE

Filmmakers Amy Granat and Drew Heitzler collaborated to makeT.S.O.Y.W., a two-part flm based on Wolfgang von Goethes loosely autobiographic, tragic novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Following the style of the American road movie Easy Rider (1969),T.S.O.Y.W. chronicles a dysfunctional love story between a man and his motorcycle while representing what the artists call Americas wartime malaise. Werther, portrayed by artist Skylar Haskard, steals a friends Harley-Davidson to cruise the desert, eventually arriving at art historical destinations including Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Walter de Maria’s The Lightning Field, and James Turrell’s Roden Crater. Granat and Heitzler’s variations on the theme which they edited from 16-millmeter footage that they shot simultaneously on identical Bolex cameras are screened as dual projections.

Link: Steven Parrino at The Power Station

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