#it's only real outside the reference frame and therefore not important for the object. this isn't just a neat trick it really does matter

[dead-generations]

orbits are straight lines is the fucked up thing. straight lines described by energy! unless they are three body orbits in which case things get really strange, but they are actually still completely straight lines. just dynamic ones. They aren't just straight, they are constant.

[mbti-notes]

I'm an isfj. I know someone with serious mental illness and I don't feel very compassionate when I hear about his life. I feel pity, I feel very helpless/powerless and angry, I feel guilty, or I feel uncomfortable and want to turn away coz it's scary that people's lives can go really badly. I feel really selfish being like that and I don't want to be this kind of person. How can I nurture more compassion?

Assuming typical brain development, you are born with the capacity to empathize. Empathy is an important part of human genetic history because we needed it for survival, specifically for successful cooperation. To work together well, we must understand each other well, we must support each other’s efforts well, and we must help each other contribute well. As with any raw, inborn capability, it’s up to you to develop it to its higher potential through the choices that you make. Your choices have decreased your ability to empathize. There are two common obstacles to overcome in the process of empathy development:

1) Egocentrism: People at low levels of ego development aren’t able to empathize because they aren’t able to recognize other people as subjects. Do you understand the difference between a subject and an object? Many people only know the difference in theory but can’t apply it. In English grammar, a subject is the “active” part of the sentence, e.g., the person who is doing something. By contrast, the object is the “passive” part of the sentence, e.g., the person who is having something done to them. This basic grammatical structure belies the framework that the mind uses to understand relationships in the world.

Everybody has their own experience, which means that your understanding of reality begins from your own personal vantage point - you see yourself as a subject, experiencing and doing things in the world. Your vantage point includes things like your self-concept, thoughts, feelings, ideas, beliefs, values, judgments, schemas, triggers, past experiences, etc. When you look out into the world through your vantage point, you don’t see the world as it is, rather, you merely see the world as it gets interpreted through the content of your vantage point. A simple example: When you look at a painting, what happens? All you see is a canvas with some colored paint smeared all over it? If that’s all you see, then you’re either not human or you don’t have a personality. No, for instance, as ISFJ, you see the colors and whether you like them, you see the image and how it makes you feel, you see the style and how it compares to the aesthetic styles that you’re already familiar with, and so on. 

The same principle holds true when you deal with people. You, the subject, acts upon the other person, the object, with the contents of your vantage point. You don’t see people as they really are but only as you want/expect/hope them to be - it’s all about you. For example: You think about how they make YOU feel, when in fact, they’re not purposely doing anything to make you feel anything. You think about who they remind YOU of, when in fact, they bear no relation to the people you’ve known before. You think about whether YOU are better/worse than them, when in fact, they are simply a person with strengths and weaknesses just like you. And so on.

There’s nothing wrong with having your own vantage point, as we all have every right to our own existence. However, the problem arises when you never learn or never acknowledge that there’s more to the world than your own vantage point, which means that you are, in essence, completely confined by it psychologically. In short, your vantage point gets in your way instead of aiding you. Egocentrism makes it difficult to empathize because you don’t really see people, rather, you only ever see aspects of yourself as you constantly project the contents of your vantage point onto them. This creates ego drama, as you are more concerned with your experience and how you’re reacting than what’s actually going on with the other person. When you’re not grasping the truth of someone, how can you know the most appropriate way to relate to them, comfort them, help them, or guide them, especially when their experience is very different from yours? You’ll be grasping at straws.

Therefore, empathy requires the ability to transcend egocentrism, essentially, to stop approaching the world as though your own experience is all there is (oblivious) or all that matters (narcissist). To have meta-awareness of your egocentrism and understand how it holds you back (in limiting your perception and distorting your judgment) is to create the space to choose differently, i.e., to refuse to be a slave to ego drama. When you finally wake up fully to the fact that you aren’t the center of the world but rather only one equal part of a greater whole, you will possess the humility that is necessary for empathy. Humility refers to the ability to put yourself into the right perspective. A genuinely humble person knows their rightful place because they are no longer a slave to the ego dramas that create craving for strength and superiority and/or fear of weakness and inferiority. Humility allows you to stop treating people like objects and respect them as subjects in their own right. In other words, their experience is just as important to them as yours is to you, and you are both fully equal in that respect, so you know to honor their existence, as you honor your own. This is the basis of the classic golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

What does humility look like in real-life relationships? It looks like LISTENING. To be a good listener is to listen without all the biases, prejudices, and judgments of your ego dramas. Reasonable and sound judgment comes only AFTER you have collected all the facts, which requires listening - only then should you be trying to apply what you know to their experience. But you won’t be capable of listening well if your ego drama is always twisting the facts or if your ego drama always gets triggered every time you interact with someone. To truly hear someone is no small feat. Not everyone who talks about their struggles wants “help”. A lot of human problems arise from never feeling truly seen and heard. Therefore, to be a great friend is, first and foremost, to have the ability to see and hear someone and receive their experience without judgment. Once you are capable of listening empathetically, compassionate action naturally follows.

2) Poor Emotional Intelligence: I have already written about this, so you should read the articles provided. It’s obvious from your description that you have poor emotional intelligence. The development of emotional intelligence is correlated with the development of the F function, so you struggle with using Fe properly. Being confronted by your friend’s struggle with mental illness, your emotions get triggered, your ego dramas start playing out, and in the end, you are stuck in your own head trying to make sense of what’s happening. Your attention isn’t on your friend, is it? You’re not really listening.

It’s common for people who struggle with empathy to frame the problem as “me versus them” - either I protect my own experience or I surrender to theirs. This defensive attitude is rooted in egocentrism. There’s “me”, there’s “them”, and there’s “us”. When you are egocentric, all that really matters to you is "me”, and "they” are only important insofar as they impact you. In “me vs them” mentality, you don’t want to feel any negative disruptions from the outside world, so you close yourself off to emotional influence (a common symptom of Ti loop). By being defensive, you are directly hampering Fe development. Without healthy Fe, establishing a sense of “us” in a relationship is impossible, because the wall of defensive fear never allows anyone to actually reach you. But what about the other side of F dysfunction, such as the people pleasers of the world? They are also egocentric in that they only care about their craving for acceptance and affirmation - it is still ego drama all the same. People pleasers give the illusion of not caring about “me” to get what they want from “them”, but it is actually all about ME and getting them to like ME, not about “us”.

When you have poor emotional intelligence, you aren’t able to accept and resolve your own feelings and emotions, which results in them becoming self-inflicted obstacles - they get in the way of good judgment. Having good emotional intelligence means knowing how to put feelings and emotions into the right perspective, such that they inform you to make BETTER decisions. Resistance to your own emotional life means damaging your decision-making ability as well as resisting all the negative things out in the world. When you encounter negativity in someone else, it reflects back to you your own negativity, and thus begins your ego drama of fighting and trying to bury the negativity in yourself. You are at least aware enough to honestly describe what you feel when you encounter someone that triggers you, but you don’t have the ability to resolve those negative feelings.

One of the main problems of poor emotional intelligence is not being able to tell the difference between thoughts and feelings. Feelings are simple, all you have to do is say, “I feel sad” or “I feel guilty”. That’s it. That’s a feeling. Once you start to say more, once you start to talk about the feeling, then you’re having thoughts. Feelings need not become anything more than what they are, and they come and go like the wind. But thoughts are complicated because they are about analyzing, evaluating, believing, speculating, etc. Thoughts stick to you in the form of ideas and beliefs, and they impair your judgment when you’re not addressing the underlying negativity that creates them. People often try to think their feelings away (i.e. rationalization), which doesn’t resolve anything and even spins you out of control.

You say that you feel guilty when hearing about his suffering. If you feel guilty, then feel guilty. Do you believe that there’s something wrong with feeling guilty? Is it not normal to feel bad for having more than someone when you’re an empathetic person who hopes that everyone can find their happiness? You say that hearing your friend makes you feel uncomfortable because you’re scared of confronting negativity. If you feel scared, then feel scared. Do you believe that there’s something wrong with feeling scared? Is it not normal to feel scared when imagining negative things that could threaten your survival? Why do you view feelings as abnormal or as something to be banished out of yourself? It’s a form of self-loathing.

From these two examples, do you understand that it is your own inability to accept yourself and your feelings that is the root of the problem? As SJ, it is typical to be more concerned with being “proper” than being real, so you consistently deny the truth about yourself because you don’t want to see the many ways that you are “improper”. Resisting your negative feelings and the truth that they reveal about your impropriety only feeds the negativity as you start judging yourself harshly, calling yourself “selfish”, thus your negativity escalates into ego drama and throws you for a loop. By contrast, if you were to simply allow your feelings to inform you about the truth of what’s happening with you and accept that truth gracefully, there would be no need for negative feelings to turn into a big ego drama. 

In the history of psychology, the humanist psychologist Carl Rogers was perhaps best known for his ability to empathize very deeply. He said: “If I let myself really understand another person, I might be changed by that understanding. And we all fear change. So as I say, it is not an easy thing to permit oneself to understand an individual.” 

If you fear change, if you fear your heart being disrupted, if you fear confronting what is strange and unknown to you, if you are easily threatened by difference or negativity, if you fear feeling the heavy moral responsibility of helping someone in need, then you will fear the act of empathizing with people, because they may, at any moment, say/do something that turns your world upside-down. It is that fear which keeps you closed off and stuck within yourself, refusing to empathize when you clearly have the ability to empathize. It’s up to you to acknowledge the fear, accept it, and let it go. Until you make that conscious choice, you are merely stuck on your side of the wall, never able to truly see past it. Only by letting someone into your world, being emotionally strong enough to feel touched without feeling undone, can you establish a connection with them. Once you’re connected to someone emotionally, compassion comes easily (and that is the basis of having a healthy F function). 

[direquail]

An NB reading of Grace in Terminator: Dark Fate

Disclaimer:

Before I start, just want to get this out here: I’m in no way insisting that Grace *has* to be non-binary, that we’re *supposed* to read her as non-binary, or that that’s in any way what she’s “meant to be”. This is just some stuff I’ve noticed that, as someone who sits on the genderqueer/non-binary/transmasc side of things, really resonated with me. Again--read her as entirely woman-identified if that’s what you want to do or feels right to you. I am ecstatic that lesbians and wlw-identified folks have someone that they feel represented in, too. I wish I’d had more characters like her when I was growing up and felt so out of place because of my gender non-conformity. 


But I, for one, would love a non-binary or even trans reading of Grace.

So what I’d like to do instead is just lay out a couple ways someone who is NB-identified *might* connect with Grace as a nonbinary character. Starting with the obvious.

Androgyny Now, I do want to be clear that I know that gender presentation =\= gender identity. And again, obviously, people will latch onto things that they relate to in characters, and I really do believe that there’s no “one right way” to read a character. The character of Grace isn’t a real person; she’s part of a story, told by people, who had something specific to say, and her character reflects that. But from the perspective of the people who watch her, who internalize and connect with her character, there can be points of connection that have nothing to do with the author’s/creator’s intent, and so, Grace-the-character can be many things to many people. The only real way to know how a person IDs is to ask them. That’s it, that’s all. You can’t assume. But also, sometimes, people do “ping” a certain way. They give off a sort of “energy”, and for me, Grace’s energy isn’t the sort of “diaphanous femininity” that even visibly-gender-nonconforming AFAB characters are often framed to exude. Grace’s energy isn’t masculine, either. Her mannerisms don’t seem intended to read that way; rather, they seem intended to read as soldier. I’m not very skilled at breaking down movements, especially when it comes to how actors move and what it all means. It’s totally possible that a lot of what’s unique about how Grace moves is because Mackenzie Davis is, self-admittedly, not the most athletically-inclined person. Grace is long-limbed and rangy and sometimes very stiff/poised, but never stiff through the hips like a Straight Dude(TM), or heavy through the shoulders like a musclebound meathead. She takes up space, too; she’s taller than Dani and Sarah both, and the only recurring characters who are “bigger” than her throughout most of the film are Carl and the Rev-9.

To be clear: Women can be tall, and rangy, and androgynous, and take up space, and that doesn’t make them less women--unless they don’t identify that way. My point with all of the above is just observing that Grace doesn’t move like a “male action hero”—but she also doesn’t seem over-the-top feminine in the way that mainstream-y media will “compensate” for perceived unfemininity, and that’s kind of wonderful. Her stature, her physique, all of that, seem to be chosen and calibrated towards an end goal that isn’t gendered: Combat, efficacy as a warrior. Whether you want to read her as a woman or as nonbinary is largely going to be about your personal preference. This also has the effect of giving the impression that Grace is absolutely unselfconscious about her body and how it looks—and she has no reason to be, not because she looks good or bad, but because what she can do with her body is just so vastly more important, and because she’s so willing to put her body and everything it can do on the line in order to fulfill her mission (and protect Dani). If Grace has a gender, it’d be “Protector” or “Warrior”. And in a way, what makes Grace so appealing to female-identified lesbians is the same thing that makes her appealing to NB people—Her character was explicitly designed not to cater to “the male gaze”, and therefore, she also exists outside the typical gendered confines reserved for “female characters” in media. The emphasis is just slightly different: Instead of a different way of being female, NB!Grace has little to no use for those categories at all. Again, it’s all in how you want to read her. Grace comes from a future where survival and fighting take first priority, and you could project the same tired “Gender isn’t a ~problem~ in the future/after the world ends” approach that a lot of cis and hetero men take to sci-fi--but also, why? It’s tired. Give me a Grace who is preoccupied with survival, yes, who maybe doesn’t have time to think too much about this gender shit--but also, a Grace who finds that this “androgyny” (although she might not call it that) suits her, who takes to this way of moving and being in the world, this way of using her body, and identifies more with that than with being a “man” or a “woman”. 


(Sidenote: as someone who took a fair amount of Queer Studies classes, it does irk me a bit that discussions of mainstream-y speculative media seem permanently suspended between this sort of “genderblind” futurism where “identities” just don’t exist because they’re apparently not needed anymore, or copy-pasting our contemporary discourses about identity into a future that is materially very different than ours. The point of these identities is, in part, to describe our experiences, the good as well as the bad, and those experiences of gender and sexuality don’t exist in a vacuum. So, the words we use will necessarily change to accommodate that—especially in the post-apocalypse. BUT, everything that comes after us will also bear the stamp of what came before it; it’s just a matter of what the creator means to emphasize.) Augments & Body Mods This is a little dicey, because there’s some clear tension in the movie between the idea of robots = inhuman/unfeeling = bad, and humans = good/feeling. And in that light, it’s potentially problematic to (even incidentally) imply that nonbinary/gender-nonconforming = not human.

But I’d like to point out that the film does deliberately challenge any neat separation of “human” and “machine” with Carl’s evolution as a person. 
And based on what I’ve read from James Cameron and Tim Miller interviews, there is some “blurring” intended between human and machine in the franchise.

In fact, Carl and Grace are foils for each other, somewhat, in the sense that they’re on opposite ends of a spectrum where human and machine become blurred, and I love that. As a genderqueer person with a very fluid experience, it appeals to me on a deep level because you could spend literally forever breaking down where does one “gender” end and another begin--emotionally, socially, spiritually, and physically.  


So the fact that there’s (1) no hard binary between human and machine (it’s explicitly subverted), and (2) we’re given multiple points of inflection, especially if you count Sarah and the Rev-9--alleviates a lot of the tension I’d feel otherwise in mentioning this. But I don’t think this is something that should be allegorical or a direct comparison; I think that it operates best on a metaphorical or theoretical level. 


And just, it’s the whole vaguely-cyberpunk idea of modifying your own body, not in a mass-produced or manufactured sense, but in this organic and highly individual sense, born out of contingency and necessity, that makes Grace’s Augments so meaningful. It’s one of the things that makes her read as human, too, because it feels more in line with our tendency to stick ink, steel, bone, what have you, through our skins whenever we get the chance--as opposed to some kind of symbolic dehumanization by “becoming a machine”.

Grace routinely refuses to categorize herself in anything other than the most general terms, or explain the details of her Augments, and she seems very protective of them. Rather than seeming ashamed, this refusal reads a lot like the popular queer identity explanation “not gay as in happy, but queer as in “fuck you’”. Her Augments are part of her, and part of her humanity; she volunteered for them, she owns them, and is even protective of them, viewing CBP’s invasive examination of her Augments as a kind of violation of her bodily autonomy. They’re clearly complicated for her, but they’re anything but depersonalized.

And going even further, the reason why she volunteered for them is so that she can defend humanity--and also someone she loves (Dani). They’re an extension of her sense of family, loyalty, love, and willingness to sacrifice.

And I don’t know for sure, but I imagine that Grace is basically one-of-a-kind, even among other Augments, if only because those Augmentations seem to be performed with the tech that’s on hand--salvaged Legion tech, by the sound of it, at least to start with. So the outcome depends on the parts available, the complexity and maturity of the Augmentation technology and process, and the skill & experience of the surgeons, all of which would vary over time. 


And honestly? If that doesn’t qualify as “beyond the binary”, I don’t know what does.

Some other general observations:

- Grace’s short hair is a constant throughout the post-Judgement Day scenes. As someone who started wearing their hair short as a preteen and hasn’t had hair to my shoulders since age 12, that does seem significant.

- Grace only introduces herself by name after Diego shouts “HEY LADY” in the factory before dropping an engine block on the Rev-9. Granted, most women don’t like to be addressed as “HEY LADY”, either, but it stood out to me, especially because she refused to give her name only a couple of minutes before that. Either way you read it, the line feels like it expresses some level of discomfort with or objection to that gendered statement. Maybe she finds that particular reference annoying or even offensive, but also, maybe she doesn’t really identify as a woman. She’s just... Grace.

- there were multiple times I mistook the back of her tank top for the back of a binder, even though she clearly was not binding.

- she constantly steals mens’ clothes--partly because she’s too tall for a lot of womens’ clothes around her, partly out of utility (like at the factory and CBP, where a lot of the guards are men). But also, it pleases the genderfucking queer in me quite a bit. And, I should note, when she had the option to take a female guard’s clothes at the CBP facility... she didn’t.

But ultimately, when I look at Grace, I see someone whose gender is “Warrior” or “Soldier”. And it’s so wonderful to see that so purely represented on a character we’re meant to perceive as female. So, please believe me when I say I don’t want to “take away” what Grace means for other people. 
And, for the record, I do mostly default to using she/her pronouns for Grace, because that’s how she’s canonically referred to. But just for fun--try this on for size: Using “they/them” pronouns for Grace. They (Grace) came back in time to protect Dani. It rolls off the tongue, right? It feels nice. Let’s re-try a couple of sentences from above: 


- “multiple times I mistook the back of their tank top for the back of a binder, even though they clearly weren’t binding” 


- “Grace’s Augments are about their ability to be a soldier. They were Augmented in order to hunt Terminators... Everything else is secondary to that, and their mission to protect Dani”

- “Grace only introduces themself by name after Diego shouts “HEY LADY” in the factory before dropping an engine block on the Rev-9 ... Maybe they find that particular reference annoying or even offensive, but also, maybe they don’t really identify as a woman. They’re just... Grace.”

And finally: 


Can you imagine the poor sod who tried to make fun of Grace for having a “girly” name? lmao rip

[ceciliataormina-mp]

MP Research project

RESEARCH REPORT

 This should be a summary of and a critical reflection on your research process so far. You should try to give the reader a sense of the process you have been through - your journey, your thoughts and decisions along the way and what has informed the choices you’ve made. Try to be as honest and as critically reflective as you can.

Please extend boxes as required (length 1000-2000 wordds)

Name: Cecilia Taormina

 Major Project Title

(Or working title - how and why did this title develop?)

My working title at the moment is “Learning these abilities”. It kind of came out naturally, while I was thinking about the people I support. My initial idea was to try to find a way to combine our values as Mencap (caring, trustworthy, positive, challenging and inclusive) and the characteristics of the people we support. In the main office, we have this sentence printed hanging on the door “If I don’t speak, it doesn’t mean I have nothing to say” which is clearly an invitation to listen and observe someone else way of communicating. People might use sign language to communicate, or they can let us know what they want through the sense of touch or smell, or just with the eyes. We need to be aware of. They have their own way to function that took a long time to learn. Therefore they need to be respected. Even if it might sound a simple word game, this title could mean a lot. I developed it thinking about the work I do daily with the people I support. My role is to help them upskill their abilities and to make sure they maintain a high level of learning capacity. That’s why this working title seemed the best so far. I am sure I can come up with something better, but I believe it will take me time. I am sure the more I will get to know the guys, the quicker the idea will come up.

However, with this title, I want to make clear that the picture shows something that, if for some people is regular or it passes unnoticed in their everyday life, in this case, it could be a major change in some others.

Research Methods

(What methods have you used during this phase of the project and how have they helped you develop your ideas and inform your major project proposal?)

The researches I did have been very different, from textbooks to exhibitions, to personal files of the People we Support (PWS).

My dissertation regarding art therapy has helped me a lot to understand how art can be used in a therapeutic way and how photography can help to unveil hidden feelings. The work of Judy Weiser considered one of the leading pioneers of phototherapy, enabled me to understand the relationship between photographer and subject, such as the trustworthy factors that bond their way to interact through the lenses and to pose (or not) naturally.

Instead, the work of Jo Spence helped me to understand how photography can help us to explore your memories and beliefs. She also made me appreciate that not caring that much about the aesthetic or the framing of the picture is not a big issue. The beauty of the photograph is its imperfection.  We are allowed to be silly and get caught meanwhile.

The exhibition at the Wellcome Collection gallery also helped me understand how to work, if versatile enough, can be manipulated and visually constructed and presented in different ways — from wall to book and vice versa, touching videos too. This is what caught my attention the most. I admire the curator of that exhibition for having tried so hard to maintain her work contemporary despite the old fashion aesthetic. This is what I would like to do one day with my work.

Hunting for books regarding how to use photography with people affected by learning disabilities made me understand how little information is available around. Therefore the work should be more powerful than a leaflet or a mere website.

This is what made me go deeper into the discovery of the PWS' routine. They can teach us new ways of seeing if only we would be ready to open our eyes. Therefore, this is what I am aiming to do with my work.

Also, the experience I gain as a Marcus Boyle's assistant during his phototherapy workshop helped me to be confident enough to act silly in primis in front of the camera. This helped the guys to understand that there was a game involved, and it could be played by both of us (subject and photographer).

 Pilot Project

(What have you achieved through the development of your pilot project/s? What have you learned from the process? Identify the main concepts that might direct or drive your major project.) Through the development of my pilot project, I achieved enough confidence with the PWS to be able to stay around with the camera unnoticed and take unposed pictures. I gained their trust, and they started to enjoy playing this fun game with me. Therefore, they are willing to collaborate with me and having their pictures taken. It is a free call for attention to them that make them quite happy.

The concept representing the key point is to stay vulnerable. Vulnerable to feelings (mine and others) to visual effect, to engagement, to free will. I want to force nothing. Therefore, I have to keep my position of outsider fixed in my head, trying to be aware as much as possible of triggers.

Also, I need to keep in mind that I have a duty of care; therefore, I can’t take pictures that, if shown, could cause harm to the PWS or others, violating their dignity and privacy. Because, again, even if they don’t say it, it doesn’t mean they don’t feel it.

  Audience and Context

(Has a consideration of Context and Audience made you think about your project in a particular way? Have you been aware of the histories, conventions and audience expectations of particular contexts? Have you considered different contexts and how have you responded to them?)

The context made me think in a specific direction. Working with people with learning disabilities means to work with ethic and professionalism near vulnerable people. I am for them a point of comfort, trust and assistance in case of need. I can’t allow myself to cause them any emotional or physical harm while taking pictures in a particular situation, causing triggers.

I had to be aware of the permission I needed before being able even to start to shoot with the proper camera. I had to go through a lot of meetings with my General Practitioner, Assistant Manager and Service Manager, to have approval.

Eventually, once I got it, I had to think about how I would have liked to approach the subjects. It has not been easy at all, but I am glad I kept trying.

Regarding the audience, I wanted to create a work easily readable from people of all classes. This is supposed to be a clear, straightforward piece of work, where the significance of the images speaks by itself.

  Production and Presentation

(Discuss the production methods you have been exploring through your pilot project. What effects do these different approaches/ visual strategies have on the work?  What choices have you made in the refinement of your visual approach and why? Is the approach you have chosen effective in communicating your ideas to the identified audience?)

Regarding the production, I realised that there are lots of things I have to take into consideration while shooting. I have to, for example, keep in mind that the use of flash is forbidden, because it might cause seizures or could trigger to some of the guys. Also, the sound of the shutter could cause harm or discomfort to them. Therefore I have to maintain enough distance between me and the subject, in some cases. This brought me to use a lens 18-200mm in some cases over the portrait lenses 50mm that I wanted to use in order to create intimacy and to have a good image quality.

Another thing I had to take under consideration was the fragility of the camera. Since some of the guys are known for being harsh on an object, I had to make sure the camera was always on me or in a safe place.

 Regarding the presentation instead, I think I am still at the beginning of the process. Despite the fact that I have some very strong shots, I am still unsure about the idea of making a book. It might definitely be suitable for storytelling, and it would be more approachable and tactile. However, I don’t know if I would like it better over the wall presentation with the big prints. What I want to do in the second semester is to explore more different ways of combining the images, to choose the best one.

In a matter of visual approach, I wanted to create a deep and concrete atmosphere. I knew I did not want a particular light image because I wanted to keep it still real. The dark gloom helped me to create the right atmosphere around feelings, especially if some of the guys’ expressions were gloomy themselves. It was a great combination that I believe I want to maintain over the second semester. I believe the approach I chose (which is to combine still life and portrait together) is appropriate to engage the chosen audience. The pictures of the guys’ rooms or objects give a clearer perspective regarding the delicacy of the subject matter. It depicts the vulnerability of these people and makes them more human to the viewer.

  Visual References / Bibliography

(List the key visual and critical references you have explored during the research process. Discuss how useful these references were for the project and what you learned from them).

Jo Spence helped me to understand how important it can be versatility regarding the presentation. The more versatile it is, the more connection you can find to have fun with and make the concept clearer and clearer.  

Judy Weiser helped me to understand how important it is to guide the person while expressing their feelings instead of forcing them or putting words in their mouth.

Rosy Martin made me understand the importance of co-creation and how, without the help of someone you can trust, some feelings would have been kept buried.

Erin Lefevre was very inspirational with her own storytelling of his son's autism. She used texts and images to say the truth, empowering difficult situations without sugar-coating them. This is very important because it reminds people that these situations are real.

Marcus Boyle's workshops helped me to act silly in front of the camera and let it go because the feeling will come out at some point when we will be ready to embrace it.

Hannah Gadsby with her show "Douglas" made me realise how difficult it is for autistic people to stay in the community. She is settled in a low level of the spectrum, but her way to explain her decease is. She has also made clear, through comedy, that life can anyway be successful and people need to respect other people's qualities and abilities, without disempowering them verbally and/or emotionally.

[olmopress]

Episode III: The Return of Manovich

week 11: Vincent Miller, “Key Elements of Digital Media” / Lev Manovich, “The Language of New Media”, Principles of New Media: 2. Modularity, 4. Variability, 5. Transcoding

Today I am very Happy. Even if yesterday night AS Roma lost to some unpronounceable and unspellable German team. You know why? No, it’s not because I am going out why someone I like. And neither because I decided I want to try and go to a rage room once. None of these romantics things.

NO

It’s because today, Hideo Kojima’s long-awaited and frankly strange-looking new game Death Stranding is out!

This is me being happy with the copy of the game I just bought from this pedantic guy at GameStop who really wanted to sell me their useless (and of course expensive) fidelity card. I do not fidelize. I do not permanently associate with the revolting logics of media capitalism. Btw yes that in the background is Patti Smith’s Horses signed by herself. I am so cool, I know. What can you do.

ANYWAYS

Why is this relevant? Well, for a number of reasons. First of all because a videogame is a digital object, a digital medium. So it’s important to us. Secondly, because the themes of this game are SOOOOOOO damn interesting and appropriate for what we are doing in this class.

BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY

Because I decided to have yet another theme-based post. So Ladies, Gentlment, and all the other 7456 genders out there in the wide wild world, let me introduce you to this week’s issue of my blog, which will be entirely

VIDEOGAME-THEMED

Yes, I will. Sorry not sorry.

OK so as it is now customary I will skip Miller because I don’t like riassunti and synthesis and also I want to continue my honeymoon with Manovich.

Here’s me with my boy Lev.

Today we deal with the last three of Manovich’s Principles of New Media. Today I also want to be reader-friendly so I tell all of you from the start that I am going to explain briefly the principle and then pick an example, of course from some videogame. OK fellas? Ready to go.

Principle No. 2: Modularity

Well, modularity is quite easy. Manovich uses it to explain how digital objects are assembled through independent parts, which working on their own constitute the totality of the aforementioned object. A good example from videogames is the phenomenon of pop-up textures: that thing that happens when you’re playing a game in 3D graphics which uses real-time rendering, but optimization hasn’t been done well enough (or you’re just pushing the graphics beyond your hardware capabilities) and so you get some textures to be rendered with a delay. And this sucks because, well, it’s not very realistic and it makes you realize you’re just playing a videogame.

:( this is extreme tho. Sometimes it’s just OK.

[Btw pop-up textures are essentially what Manovich is referring to at page 39 when he writes about “distancing” and “level of detail”]

Manovich refers to this also as the “fractal structure” of digital media, which very cool and very LSD-like. So, yeah, cool.

BUT EVEN COOLER THAN THIS

is how this made me think of Aristotle. Your friendly neighborhood Western-culture-generator philosopher loved to talk about how the whole of something is more than the sole value of its components. Which, in some ways, doesn’t really seem to apply completely to digital media.

SOMETHING TO REFLECT UPON

Oh. And I was also thinking that maybe, MAYBE

MAYBE

all this modularity in our daily lives is also affecting the way our minds work. Like we now struggle to create coherent, consistent (“hardwired” Manovich would say) arguments or chains of reasoning, but instead rely completely on modular frames of understanding. Like we now tend to see things as separate and independent from each other, and we have trouble in looking at the bigger picture.

“OF COURSE YOU MUST BE WRONG, WE’RE AS CAPABLE AS EVER IN UNDERSTANDING ISSUES IN THEIR TOTALITY. BUT NO KID CLIMATE CHANGE IS NOT REAL BECAUSE ADMITTING IT WOULD MEAN RECONSIDER THE PRIVILEGES I GREW UP AS EXPRESSIONS OF A POST-INDUSTRIAL COLONIAL SYSTEM OF EXPLOITATION  YESTERDAY SNOWED IN BERGAMO SO NO TROUBLE”

But let us not be distracted by such irrelevant issues.

Principle No. 4: Variability

Now this is obvious but still so cool. However, the question of variability is so multifaceted and complex that is difficult to pin it down to a single definition. I’ll try my best, though. I would say that

the concept of variability refers to all the ways in which digital objects can be modified, altered, or updated at the source of their distribution.

That is, without having to physically change anything. The only thing that variability needs is some form of the refresh button. It is a sort of physically invisible mutation, a “liquid” transformation, as Manovich says. And of course this has to do with Numerical Representation, Modularity, and Automation.

Before getting into the real interesting stuff about variability, Manovich makes seven examples. A couple of them will help grasp the concept better. So yeah, example three reads like this:

“Information about the user can be used by a computer program to customize automatically the media composition as well as to create elements themselves” (37)

In that unfortunately incomplete masterpiece that Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is, you get to play as badass Venom Snake aka (sort of...) Big Boss, a super amazing and incredibly skilled soldier who has to infiltrate military compounds and all sorts of other infiltrable things between Afghanistan and Zaire around the mid-80s. In this game, you can decide what kind of equipment to bring with you, and approach the mission the way you like best. You can bring big-ass noisy weapons and just have a crazy battles, you can use assault rifles of sniper guns with silencers and be very quiet, and you can also use guns with tranquilizers so that you don’t kill anybody. You just put them to sleep.

Now, the cool thing about it is that the more you progress in the game, the more enemy soldiers will adjust to your playing stile. For instance, I remember using only tranquilizers with pistols and sniper rifles. So I would get lots of headshots, because when you headshot someone, he instantly falls asleep. After a few missions, most of my enemies adapted and started wearing helmets! So it was much harder for me to get those headshots.

See? This is an example of automation and variability.

There is also of course example number six. The one about periodical updates. Again, for anybody who ever played a videogame online, this is usual business.

I remember I once was thirteen. Yeah I know that’s hard to imagine, but for a moment just please bear with me. When I was thirteen I was very much into multiplayer FPSs. At that time particular, me and my friends would spend entire days on Call of Duty: Black Ops. Now, the online multiplayer was constantly updated and amended, so that if someone discovered that a certain build for a weapon made that weapon totally over-powered and impossible to play against, the guys at Activision would correct the flaw and balanced the game again. But variability in the game also occurred when DLCs were released: new maps, new weapons, new elements would ‘enter’ the world of the online game and of course alter it. It was cool, really. Cause the game evolved throughout the season. But the you had to buy the new one and spend other money and start back again and… really, can we just say fuck capitalism? That game could have lasted decades. Damn.

ANYWAY

By far the most interesting thing to me came at page 40, when Manovich discusses variability in terms of interactivity and hypermedia. In particular, he distinguishes between two ‘versions’ of interactivity.

Open interactivity: an interactive object “in which both the elements and the structure of the whole object are either modified or generated on the fly in response to the user��s interaction with a program.” (40)

Closed interactivity: an interactive object “that uses fixed elements arranged in a fixed braching structure” (40) and therefore on which users have only ‘liberty of order’. That is, they can only choose in which order to interact with the elements.

Now, try to follow me for a second. I think this distinction opens up one possibility of categorizing videogames. But we need to add one more category. We have

Linear games (Super Mario, the first Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil 4…) which display a ‘limited’, ‘scripted’ interactivity. That is: you have to follow the path that has been chosen for you by the developers. You cannot decide in which order to do things. You go ahead with the game – interact with it, sure, but you basically witness the story unfold in front of your eyes passively.

Open world games (GTA, Spiderman, Pokémon games…), which essentially function on a principle of closed interactivity. You’re free to roam around and do whatever you want, to choose your own ‘order of interaction’ with the elements on the map, but you cannot act on the storyline, which is still linear and scripted for you. The story doesn’t change, no matter what you do inside or outside of the main missions.

pure RPGs (Fallout 4, Final Fantasy, Skyrim, Mass Effect…) which instead function on a principle of open interactivity. Your choices inform the way in which the game unfolds in terms of story, world, and sometimes even gameplay. The interaction is open because it allows to be formed in response to what the player does.

I should totally write a narratology of videogames.

I’ve already written a lot and I want to get to the last principle, but

I NEED

to point out something that comes around the end of page 41. Ready? So Manovich writes:

“The principle of variability exemplifies how, historically, changes in media technologies are correlated with social change. If the logic of old media corresponded to the logic of industrial mass society, the logic of new media fits the logic of the postindustrial society, which values individuality over conformity. […] In this way new media technology acts as the most perfect realization of the utopia of an ideal society composed of unique individuals. New media objects assure users that their choices—and therefore, their underlying thoughts and desires—are unique, rather than preprogrammed and shared with others.” (41-2)

Now, I am not sure precisely where Manovich stands on this argument, but this definitely rang a bell for me.

HEY LEV, EVER HEARD OF A LAD CALLED PASOLINI?

Because yeah, digital media gave us this fantastic possibility of escaping omologation because anybody can see, read, do whatever they want without any authority providing them with univocal content.

But are we really sure this is the triumph of individuality? Couldn’t this be just a new, and much more subtle and devilish form of conformity?

My bro and spiritual-granddaddy PPP believed so. And you, he was writing in the early seventies – not long before being brutally killed by neo fascists with the complacency of the State a Roman kid in Ostia – and virtually all of his predictions are becoming a terrible reality. Because Pier Paolo believed the (back then) new consumer society (which let’s face it gave birth to digital media the way we know it today) was only a new, horrible, de-humanizing form of fascism.

This is for anybody who understands a little italian and loves tragic heroes talking about the horrors of late capitalism on winter beaches.

BUT WE HAVE TO COME TO AN END, DON’T WE?

Principle No. 5: Transcoding

I’ll be very brief, this is easy. Manovich defines transcoding starting from the difference between the “cultural layer” (pretty much the visual, the interface) and the “computer layer” (basically code) of digital media. Using the example of videogames again, the cultural layer of a videogame is all that you see happening on the screen, while the computer layer is the code ‘behind’ it that makes it all happen in that way.

Fine, cool. Transcoding, Manovich says, happens everytime these two layers—these two languages, really—start to mix and mesh with each other.

The best example that I can come up with right now—and I am sorry if I can’t think of anything better but you know I have a graceful lady waiting for me, his date—has to do again with open world videogames.

SO HERE’S THE THING, I THINK

Open world videogames emerged and became the next big thing of gaming when the internet was already a big thing. And there’s a reason for that. It’s because the structure of an open world mimics, in many ways, that of the WWW.

THINK ABOUT IT

An open world is somewhere were you can roam around (I want to say navigate so badly!) pretty much everywhere you want. Most of the times you can jump from one places to another, sometimes using a nice menu/database of possible locations (reminds you of anything? Hyperlinking? Search engines, anybody?). You can’t really create much, but you can see everything. Well, that to me sounds like WWW.

COULD IT BE LOVE? TRANSCODING?

I think it is, baby.

We’re sadly at the end of our ride

:(

But don’t be afraid!

THERE’S STILL ROOM FOR MUSIC AND VISUAL ARTS

Today we celebrate videogames, so what’s better than a collection of some classics in videogame music history? Enjoy.

As for visuals, I want to come full circle. Hideo Kojima’s game have always been blessed with amazing character design and illustrations by his bro Yoji Shinkawa. Death Stranding is no exception. Except that there is an exception, because these times the characters are actors! Great actors! Like beautiful Lea Seydoux who I hope one day to marry. Or at least to hookup with, come on. Anyways, that’s beyond my point. I just wanted to introduce this beautiful promotional picture for Death Stranding.

It really is beautiful.

до свидания!

Image Sources: Parade, Pure Nintendo, Tech in Asia, GIPHY, Know Your Meme

[spamzineglasgow]

PART TWO: Glitching the Collective Mind (Dan Power)

Figure 3.1

“Living in a globalized, economically destitute society has turned us into neurotic Internet-dwellers with our nerves relentlessly racked by political failures and a media industry that runs on the fumes of our panic and anxiety. We do everything we can, from colorfully invoking a better world on Instagram to adopting the fashion trends of a vague past era, to distract us from the existential reality that under late capitalism we are miserable.”                                                                                  - Grafton Tanner (2015)

In the last instalment of this series, we saw how the surplus of online content makes constructing a coherent conception of the world through the internet an impossibility. We’ve seen that this content is produced by and for an increasingly large mass of people. Being active internet users, all of these people must be experiencing information saturation, and producing content which responds to, or at least participates in, this saturation.

> We also saw that the internet is a hyper-object and therefore nonlocal. However, we understand it using a range of spatial terms; we visit different web ‘sites’, using search bars to ‘navigate’ between them. We saw that the internet is a database and so atemporal, and yet we refer the constantly-growing feeds of information on social media sites like Twitter as “timelines”, as if the data isn’t all existing online simultaneously, uploaded then frozen in time. Perhaps as a way to make this info-saturated hyper-object seem less ineffable, a language of repurposed non-digital terms has emerged. This betrays an ontological disparagement felt by internet users who simultaneously are inhabiting real and virtual space. Considered alongside the omnipresence of code/space, which causes the digital world to leak into the physical, this reality-masking language becomes increasingly problematic.

> The surreal short film icced (2017), which we examined briefly before, is a depiction of how non-spatial and atemporal virtual worlds might be understood in physical and temporal terms. Characters in conversation appear in the same frame, as if they’re physically located within the same space, and yet they can float away or dematerialise at will. At one point they appear to be in a convenience store, but later an exterior depiction of the building reveals the store not to be on a street, but floating in an indeterminate part of outer space. The store is a recognisable location, and yet we are given no information which can locate it in any specific place. It is both ubiquitous and anonymous. It is, to use a term from the influential anthropologist Marc Augé, a non-place.

> Augé (2008) writes that “if a place can be defined as relational, historical, and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, historical, and concerned with identity will be a non-place”. While modernity brought with it the establishment of cities and so created a sense of being in a place, supermodernity produces non-places, areas within places which bear no qualities that identify them as being anywhere specific. The “essential quality” of supermodernity, Augé states, is “excess”, and excess creates the need for anonymous public spaces to be mass-produced. Mass-production creates clones, replicas of an original place rather than places which are new and have their own distinct identity. An example Augé provides is “the big supermarket”, a symbol of excess consumerism which was made necessary by people’s desires to purchase a wide range of goods with minimal effort. Aside from superficial branding, the experience of being inside a supermarket is the same regardless of where in the world it is found. Each supermarket is defined not in relation to the area it exists in, but to existing ideas of what a supermarket is. If a supermarket in one country is interchangeable with a supermarket in another, then the experience of entering a supermarket is the experience of exiting a place and entering a non-place.

> Place is important because it provides something around which the occupants can build a sense of identity. When the features which distinguish one place from another are removed, stable sense of belonging and understanding are removed with them. The non-place “creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude and similitude” – its lack of identity strips visitors of their own identity, forces them to become anonymous.

-

Virtual space, being non-local and homogenized in structure, is a non-place also. In order to understand the problems post-internet surrealists are confronting we must update our conceptualization of the internet. Not only is it one single work with innumerable contributors, but it’s a work which the creators and observers can inhabit and interact with. The virtual plaza can be entered from any internet-connected place or non-place on the planet. As such it is not just an artwork which changes our understanding of the world, but by belonging in a place in inextricable from a person’s sense of self, it’s an artwork which makes us redefine our conceptions of identity.

> The ‘virtual plaza’ is a phrase borrowed from the author and experimental musician Grafton Tanner (2015), who uses it to conceptualise the interactions of internet users between content and each other. He describes the plaza as a non-place through which “we drift and consume, lulled by the saccharine tones of muzak”. The lulled drifting through this nondescript plaza evokes the same melancholy as Augé when he says that “The [supermarket] customer wanders round in silence, reads labels, weighs fruits and vegetables on a machine…”. In digital non-space the supermarket becomes a hyper-market, and the alienating dislocation this inflicts on its visitors takes place on a global scale.

> Bridle (2018) writes that the “ubiquity” of smartphone computers make “the entire world” a code/space, and by extension this standardises “culture itself”. Writing on memes and online culture, Shifman (2013) notes that “contemporary participatory culture” consists largely of “user‐driven imitation and remix”, with internet users continually adapting and readapting existing ideas to create new ones. Nothing new is created, and nothing old has immutable associations. Because this has taken place in the virtual plaza for years, the reference points for things which are being remixed are often themselves remixes of other things. The lamb sauce memes we encountered in the last chapter function as in-jokes, with only those who have seen the original lamb sauce clip, the remix, or variants of it being in on the joke. This meme can only be understood in relation to other memes. In the corners of the internet where this meme is popular it has constructed its own virtual space of signification which does not rely upon anything in the real world.

> Bruenig observes that in surreal internet comedy “loops of self-referential quips warp and distort with each iteration… until nothing coherent is left” (2017), but perhaps a more accurate assessment would be that nothing appears to be coherent from an outside perspective. There is an internal logic to each meme which is created and sustained by the internet users who deploy the content or frames in consistent ways. Internet culture, if such a broad concept can be meaningfully invoked, has reached a point where its reference points are also part of internet culture. As such this culture is self-sustaining, and evolves in an entirely separate way to cultures offline.

-

The virtual plaza is inherently anachronistic, with the oldest posts and websites being as instantly accessible as the most recent. Online, the past and present co-exist without contradiction. The past, like the present, is made of data. This makes subcultures within the internet unique, since they have developed without a stable sense of history. Augé notes that the mass-production of homogenised place leads to places being built which bear no signifiers of temporality. Non-places appear one day and immediately function as if they have existed for years, so that a supermarket built today might be interchangeable with a supermarket built in the previous millennium. This not only dulls the influence of history over the feel of a place, but replaces individual understandings of local history with a standardised, globally “collective history”, the “reference points” of which are indeterminate and so “unstable”. Online this instability is further amplified, as Bridle observes when he says that, online, “history is networked and atemporal”. The internet’s database structure takes the identity-stripping atemporality and a-spatiality of non-place to its logical conclusion: by finally creating a place without a physical location, and where cultural artefacts are interpretable only in relation to other data objects, the internet deletes the cultural identity of all those who move through it, and requires them to construct a facsimile of themselves before they can manifest within the virtual plaza.

> We all enter the virtual plaza in a state of anonymity, and in order to lose this a new identity must be constructed. If every individual online is doing this, and if enough people’s constructions resemble each other, then the idea of a distinct and significant post-internet cultural identity becomes a tangible possibility.

-

One subculture which was born online is the vaporwave community, built around the musical genre and aesthetic of the same name. Vaporwave artists take mass-produced commercial muzak and distort it until it feels haunted and unnerving. Vaporwave identifies itself as “a descendant of punk”, and both genres share an output of lo-fi content with anti-establishment sentiment. Like punk, the aesthetic of vaporwave “has been associated with the Situationist détournement, where mainstream culture is edited to convey alternative and oftentimes subversive messages” (Jimison, 2015). In this case, the mainstream culture being edited is the heartless muzak which saturates non-places. As opposed to music, muzak is designed to not make an impact on the listener: it’s background noise, designed to keep you stimulated but pacified as you move through the plaza, or cheery and more willing to spend when passing through a big supermarket. Music is made for listeners to enjoy, muzak to manipulate them into acting in a certain way. By putting this background content at the foreground of their own work, vaporwave artists intend to “wake us up to the corporatist society in which we are trapped”, replacing the “mask” of consumerist art with the “dead stare of unfettered capitalism”.

> All vaporwave art, being a product of the virtual plaza, is a form of remix. What separates this content from the rest is the creators’ uniformity of intent and the execution of ideas. Not only are they manipulating commercial music to reveal its omnipresence within the virtual plaza, but they distort it so that anything which might once have been comforting becomes sinister and dark. Floral Shoppe, released by electronic musician Vektroid under the alias MACINTOSH PLUS (2011 - see figure 3.1 above), is one of vaporwave’s seminal albums, and the track ‘リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー"’ (or ‘Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing’) is almost synonymous with the genre. Throughout this album pre-existing songs are slowed so that the melodies become drowsy, the vocals deeper, and with massively increased reverb they become slurred and ghost-like. Looped melodies are overlaid slightly asynchronously, so the songs feel perpetually on the verge of collapse.

> Vaporwave is a movement bent on alienation. Every aspect of Floral Shoppe– from the convoluted and untranslated titles to the space- and temporality-busting combination of historical artefact and virtual space on its cover (figure 3.1) – exists to serve the deconstruction of artificial reality. Tanner notes how “electronic media’s propensity to glitch and malfunction” can put users into a “sudden state of disarray”, and this same effect is achieved in vaporwave’s clunky deconstruction of highly-polished commercial music. This disarray constitutes a kind of “horror”, a sudden collapse of what we perceive to be real.

> Stephen Curtis (2019) suggests that the glitch is a kind of existential awakening, the systems operating below the surface of the plaza revealing themselves, and vaporwave artists have certainly tapped into this mode of thinking. Their artefacts exist within the non-physical plaza, where sounds and images are the building blocks of a virtual reality. When these malfunction and glitch it appears, from the perspective of an immersed internet user, as if reality itself is breaking. Through its disruptions of the digital diegesis, vaporwave abruptly disengages its listeners from the virtual space, and so frees them of its dread-inducing effects.

-

Escaping the virtual plaza in this way can be blissful, as seen in Lucien Hughes’ S-U-N-D-A-Y   S-C-H-O-O-L(2017). This video remixes clips from The Simpsons (1989-) into a music video for the vaporwave song ‘Teen Pregnancy’ (Blank Banshee, 2012). It depicts Bart Simpson listening to the track and dissociating from reality. The diegesis we perceive is governed by Bart’s internal mood, and only begins to change when he presses play on his cassette player. As he dances through the streets of Springfield the space deconstructs – the sky becomes vectored, the colours saturated and hyper-real. Objects slide over each other unnaturally, as if fighting for space, and the world goes through phases of appearing blurry and distorted. Bart has flashbacks to his early childhood and the space deconstructs further; past and present locations are spliced together, the overlaid glitch effects become more intrusive, and clips unexpectedly skip or repeat.

> The manipulation of diegetic reality through the glitch, manifested as an apparent error in the hardware sustaining the digital object’s existence, allows the filmmaker to alter the film on a fundamental level. As with vaporwave music, the glitch here breaks apart digital reality, and when deployed as an aesthetic tool, reconstructs a reality from the diegetic rubble.

> In a state of dissociative bliss, Bart barely reacts to the environment changing around him. As we drift between day and night, location and year, he continues to smile vacantly and dance away. His new world is infused with signifiers of the virtual plaza: a Windows 95 logo flickers across the sky, the pink grid sky and a cartoon stone bust evoke the cover of Floral Shoppe, and we even an earlier clip of the video loading on a computer screen.

> There is a temporal displacement not only within the video’s narrative but in its composition: the saturated colours and flickering lines across the image give the impression of an old camcorder, while the background shown above is fractured in the style of a digital glitch. The video reflects the atemporal environment in which it exists. The use of a classic Simpsons episode, fixation on Bart’s cassette player, and sampling the iconic riff from Grandmaster Flash’s ‘The Message’ (1982) all invoke nostalgia, while simultaneously the glitching images make the video’s post-internet status apparent. This is a depiction of the past distorted by technologies of the present. The past is only accessible to us through documents and artefacts, and online these become artefacts become files. In the case of S-U-N-D-A-Y  S-C-H-O-O-L, these files have been corrupted.

-

The spilling of the past into the present, and the temporal and ontological disarrays which result, are hallmarks of a hauntological work. Tanner invokes Derrida’s concept of hauntology in regard to vaporwave, which exposes “the haunting of present culture by the past” by generating works which eschew temporality. Importantly, this haunted restructuring of muzak forms part of the genre’s social critique. Tanner explains that “hauntology posits that the past notions of the future have in some way failed”. The emergence of fully networked information through the internet brought with it the promise of digital global enlightenment, but this future hasn’t arrived. As Bridle said in the first chapter of this series, “that which was intended to enlighten the world in practice darkens it”.

> Derrida (2006) describes the haunting of late capitalism as being conducted by “neither soul nor body, but both one and the other”. Hauntology is conceptual, but still provokes a tangible hauntedness. Something “crucial” to the haunted nature of consumer culture, Mark Fisher (2006) explains, is the “temporal disjuncture” from which the hauntological feeling arises. Since atemporality is intrinsic to a database structure, and the internet is one giant database of databases, there is a haunted quality inherent in all internet media. Digital space is saturated with ghosts of the past, and the continuous mixing and remixing on which internet culture is built stirs these ghosts into the liquid concrete of the future’s building blocks.

> Tanner observes that “vaporwave is the music of “non-times” and “non-places” because it is sceptical of what consumer culture has done to time and space”, and this certainly appears to be true. The identity-stripping alienation of non-place is evoked through the layered pseudonyms of artists such as Ramona Xavier (Vektroid / MACINTOSH PLUS), and the temporal instability of networked culture is foregrounded in the movement’s continual remixing and recontextualisation of disparate cultural artefacts. Rather than surrender to the existential crises posed by the haunted virtual plaza, or obscuring them with pacifying commercial entertainment, vaporwave artists confront them directly in an attempt to reconcile atemporality and alienation with sincere artistic practice.

> Jimison writes that, as with "the historical avant-garde, Vaporwave appears to want no part in the institutions of entertainment and art, but to produce a radical space of their own, on their own terms”. Digital networks have made cultural progression in reality increasingly difficult. By operating within the network to start a culture from scratch these artists are forging their own reality, a reality of which atemporality and aspatiality are a part, and in which hauntings are not a horror but part of the enjoyment.

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Tanner argues that “producers making simple, radical vaporwave dissolve the notion of progress both in its creation and in the feelings it invokes in us”. If progress entails the dilution of feeling in increasingly commercialized music, and the dilution of meaning which results from too much information, then vaporwave is wilfully regressive. Importantly, if the future we’re hurtling towards is dizzying and overwhelming, then regression can be its own form of liberation.

> Bridle expresses a similar sentiment when he writes that “we have much to learn about unknowing”. His point might not be that ignorance is bliss, but that unlearning obsolete modes of communication and cultural proliferation are a necessary first step towards progression in a highly-networked world. He describes ‘the network’ as “us and our machines and the things we think and discover together”, meaning that humanity is an active part of the network, implying that cooperation between humans and machines is necessary in order for the network to advance society. The virtual plaza is essential to the running of millions of people’s daily lives, but since it dissolves our fixed conceptualisations of history and identity we must adapt to fit in. This requires casting doubt over some things we believe to be fundamentally true – that history is linear, that identity is individual – but this shouldn’t be alarming. As Bridle muses, “uncertainty can be productive, even sublime”.

~

In the final installment of this series, we will see how post-internet surreal filmmakers are responding to the same concerns of meaninglessness in a networked and atemporal world, and do so in a similar manner to the vaporwave artists before them. They have much to teach us about unknowing. In abstracting the minutiae of daily life almost beyond the point of recognition, and so challenging our most basic concepts of how objects move through space or how a sentence is constructed, they manage to find comedy, insight, and create a powerful dissonance which often borders on feeling sublime.

Full list of works cited plus bonus discography are available here.

This is part two of a three part series. Part one is available here and part three available here.

~ 

Text: Dan Power

Published 8/10/19

[alexanderwhite-artist-blog]

Research Presentation Report Alexander White   MFA Fine Art 11/04/2017

Introduction

The axiom for my research presentation was a series of screen prints, a triptych of sorts, produced digitally through a series of experiments using a very basic computer program. Though I consider my practice to be sculptural for the most part, it may be more accurate to suggest a ‘spatially responsive’ approach, in which works are generated by the spaces in which they are intended to be seen. Though the ‘site’ (referring to place in this context) is important to my way of thinking, I do not consider the works I make to be site, or indeed spatially specific, as site specificity often suggests a work which could not, or should not be removed from its context.   My work often uses materials peculiar to the ‘site’ as a descriptor of place and architecture (or space) to generate form, these sensibilities are transportable; the work may become activated once unanchored from its original site of production, drawing from Robert Smithson’s ideas around the ‘non-site’ in terms of material and a perceived problem in the relationship between artist, object and studio. As Daniel Buren writes: A work produced in the studio must be seen, therefore, as an object subject to infinite manipulation. In order for this to occur, from the moment of its production the work must be isolated from the real world. All the same, it is in the studio and only in the studio that it is closest to its own reality, a reality from which it will continue to distance itself …The work thus falls victim to a mortal paradox from which it cannot escape, since its purpose implies a progressive removal from its own reality, from its origin.   It is this paradox which is of interest to me, what Buren could not have foreseen at the time of writing The Function of the Studio, is that there now exists a third space of production and display, a digital world in which work might exist nowhere and everywhere simultaneously. It has been my position for some time now that my mode of artistic production is merely a response to a given set of conditions and it is the condition of this ‘virtual’ space and its relationship to the real world which has been the enquiry of the work.  

On Language

I consider engaging with materials through making as something of a negotiation. Rather than forcing a material to my will, I prefer to take a path of less resistance allowing the material to push back and in doing so, informing some of the decision making within the work. I apply the same methodology to working digitally, instead of taking a lot of time to learn how to use a modern CAD program or similar (in which the possibilities are only really limited by one’s imagination and technical expertise) I take a much more ‘point and shoot’ approach. Utilising a very basic program has allowed for a particular digital language to develop within my practice, informed by the limits of both my technical ability and that of the program. I found through this digital tinkering, that using straight lines or ‘vectors’ is one of the most simple ways of creating images and forms, but quickly became frustrated by the ‘flatness’ of the work produced. To this end I began downloading images of empty gallery spaces in order to respond in a more spatially generative manner and have a ‘digital site’ in which to anchor the work. Although this seemed for a while to resolve the issue, I was having a hard time understanding the works status, was it in existence or absence? Was this a proposal or a resolution? In order to test this, I started to make the works physically as both sculptural entities and drawings. Once expelled from the digital realm, the most salient feature of the work seemed to be the unavoidable comparison to the visual language of sculptors and artists associated with the Minimalist and Post-Minimalist movements of the 1960’s and 70’s in particular, Sol Lewitt.   The problem with making works that are so aesthetically similar to formalist minimalism is that it can be seen as something of an unwitting anachronism. Because the objects produced in this period are often so content resistant and tend to remove the traces of the maker or mode of production, the fact that the forms were arrived at from a very different direction and time become lost beneath an unfortunate and unintentional veneer of the pastiche. In an effort to counter this, I attempted to make a work which would operate in reverse, a series of pencil drawings of QR codes which when scanned with a smartphone application would take the viewer to the ‘digital sculpture’ the physical object functioning as a signifier for the digital work, as opposed to the digital work being a signifier (or precursor) to the physical object. This however seemed somewhat contrived and did not resolve the question around status, it did however generate a line of thought concerning meta-data, a prefix that in computing usually means an underlying definition or description.

On Architecture  

My interest in architecture as a generative platform informed a trip to La Biennale Architettura 2016 in Venice, an experience I would recommend to any artist with a sensibility toward material. The Biennale is like a giant pick-and-mix of unusual materials and material used in unusual ways; interesting spatial interventions and model making so exquisite, one wonders that if ever realised, whether the final outcome might be something of a disappointment. As this is architecture, an artist might wander round the pavilions without the requirement for any particular critical engagement, taking ideas ‘off the shelf’ with impunity. Architects love to demonstrate not only their ability, but also how something was done, in other words, the work is often supplied with its own ‘how to’ guide. The title of 2016’s Biennale was REPORTING FROM THE FRONT and the stand out exhibit for me was by the Goldsmiths based research collective ‘Forensic Architecture’   In this exhibition, Forensic Architecture presents elements from four recent investigations. Undertaken at different scales, these cases extend from the micro-analysis of a single ruin from a drone strike in Miranshah, Pakistan, to an urban analysis of the city of Rafah in Gaza under Israeli attack…While architecture adds an essential method of investigation, forensics demands of architects the closest attention to the materiality of the built environment and its media representations. It also challenges architectural analysis to be performed publicly and politically in the most antagonistic of forums.   This set me to wondering if abstract formalism would still be ‘content resistant’ were a bomb to be dropped through the frozen sky of the white cube’s ceiling?3 Might it be possible to force an uncomfortable meta-data beneath an aesthetic which would resist it?  

On the Internet as War Zone

We seem to be existing in what might worryingly be looked back on as the ‘post-truth era’ a state in which ‘debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected from the details of policy, and by the repeated assertion of talking points to which factual rebuttals are ignored’  This has likely existed within politics for as long as there have been politicians, however the advent of the internet has highlighted and destabilised political rhetoric, particularly regarding foreign policy, financial and environmental issues. Increasingly wars are fought as much through the media as they are on the ground. It is alleged that the British Government are implicated in a sort of ‘proxy-war’ in Yemen by selling arms to the Saudis, even the most cursory internet search will generate thousands of images of the results of the conflict. I think one of the most poignant signifiers of any such war is the destruction of homes and cities, the architecture itself bearing witness to the destruction and suffering of its people. It is against this backdrop I began to make more digitally generated images, using the same formalist language, but instead of using the architecture of the white cube to form a response, the shattered buildings of Yemen became my source material. One of the problems related with using the internet to find such images is that it is often unclear as to the context of any given image. It is not always possible to know who its author is, what his or her political persuasion might be, or what, if any, agenda is associated with its production. The image has already passed through the framing of the photographer, the lens of the camera, the uploading to the internet, the framing of the webpage on which it is displayed and conceivably any number of framing and re-framing exercises as images are copied, reused and repurposed. It is possible to suggest that by the time an image has arrived on my own computer, it has passed through at least four frames; my own computer screen making it five.   This work then, is certainly not a phenomenological response to architecture in the way Bachelard may have it, nor is it a response to a lived experience of a place and its buildings in the way Walid Raad the Atlas Group might, both these positions require the maker to be on the inside looking out, the multiple lenses of the internet isolates the viewer as outside, peering in.

On Isolations

Responding to fragmented architecture in a purely formal manner presents certain complications, voids once contained within war-torn buildings, spill out into their surroundings and I found myself compelled to fill in the gaps with form, hovering somewhere between reimagining what was once there and creating new forms generated by the debris. The result of imposing this aesthetic sensibility on such an emotive subject matter is deeply problematic, the work begins to take on the sense of a sort of ‘psychotic sculpture park’ like a warzone with a giftshop.   The removal of the source image, leaving only black lines and formalist aesthetic seemed to resolve the work, isolating the content still further from its own reality and origin into abstraction. The landscape of war, western foreign policy and capitalism become submerged as a sort of meta-data, the horror lurking beneath the surface.  The collision of such content and the content resistant is difficult to reconcile, this somehow put me in mind of Brett Easton Ellis’s novel ‘American Psycho’ dramatized in the 2000 film of the same name. The infamous ‘axe scene’ (in which Bateman seemingly dispatches a business rival for securing a reservation at an impressive restaurant Bateman cannot. The victim is sitting above copies of the New York Times ‘style section’ neatly taped to the floor with small black crosses) was the final subject for the ‘Isolation’ series, reminiscent of the guidance visualisations of drone warfare technology and referencing the total madness associated with greed, capitalism and our own complicity within it.

On Ethics and Aesthetics  

There has been much controversy in the media of late (yes them again) concerning a painting by Dana Shutz exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art as part of its biennial exhibition. ‘Open Casket’ is a work of semi-abstraction, the subject matter being the mutilated corpse of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy who was tortured and lynched by two white men in 1955 after being accused of flirtations with white women. Both men were subsequently acquitted. It was the wish of Emmett’s mother Mamie Till Bradley, that the funeral be a public service with an open casket to show the world the brutality of the killing. This galvanised Till as an icon of the civil rights movement. The main bones of contention surrounding the painting is the fact that Schutz is white and middle class and her use of abstraction has been described as ‘an ill-conceived attempt by Ms. Schutz to aestheticize an atrocity’  British-born black artist Hannah Black wrote in an open letter biennial’s curators suggesting that ‘that history simply doesn’t belong to Schutz’  Black went on to argue that the painting should not only be removed from the exhibition, but destroyed as ‘The painting should not be acceptable to anyone who cares or pretends to care about black people, because it is not acceptable for a white person to transmute black suffering into profit and fun, though the practice has been normalized for a long time’  Schutz has acknowledged that it is problematic painting and that she knew this when getting into it.   The ethical dilemma and comparisons between ‘Open Casket’ and my own work are clear, is it correct that a white, male, middle class artist has any right to use the subject matter of war and suffering which is not his? regardless of any awareness or disapproval of his own complicity within the systems of power which fall favourably upon him? This I cannot know and is a source of liberal guilt.   This said, modern western culture in which there seems to be a tendency towards the idea that ‘everybody has the right to not be offended’ contains within it an element (regardless of race, religion or economic status) that seem to enjoy thinking up new and interesting ways of taking offence. The media seizes upon this, giving validity to the claim, because ‘nothing sells a newspaper like a good conflict’ This position however flies in the face of one the last bastions of freedom of thought and speech, the visual arts. I for one wish to live in a society in which to be offended is a right, a necessity even, as a way of highlighting problems and generating discussion. In the end, I think a successful artwork should be problematic, not through uncaring clumsiness or ignorance, but by design otherwise becomes mere decoration.

[1]Daniel Buren and Thomas Repensek, The Function of the Studio:  The MIT Press: Vol. 10 (1979) p53   [2]www.forensic-architecture.org/exhibition/reporting-front (correct as of 10/04/2017) [3] O’Doherty, Brian, Inside the white cube p87   [4]en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-truth_politics (correct as of 10/04/2017)   [5]www.nytimes.com/2017/03/21/arts/design/painting-of-emmett-till-at-whitney-biennial-draws-protests (correct as of 11/04/2017)  [6]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2017/03/23/dana-schutz-responds-tooutcry-over-her-controversial-emmett-till-painting (correct as of 11/04/2017)  [7] ibid

Bibliography

Thing Theory Bill Brown Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No. 1, Things. (Autumn, 2001) Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. by Erving Goffman Review by: Murray S. Davis Contemporary Sociology Vol. 4, No. 6 (Nov., 1975) FRAMING THE BULLFIGHT: AESTHETICS VERSUS ETHICS Nathalie Heinich, British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. _y, 'No. 1, January 1993 Literature and Moral Understanding: A Philosophical Essay on Ethics, Aesthetics, Education, and Culture by Frank Palmer Review by: Victor Yelverton Haines Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 52, No. 2 (Spring, 1994) O’Doherty, Brian, Inside the white cube (expanded edition) University of California Press. Daniel Buren and Thomas Repensek, The Function of the Studio:  The MIT Press: Vol. 10 (1979) www.washingtonpost.com www.nytimes.com en.wikipedia.org www.forensic-architecture.org

[the-utmost-bound]

The Happiness Hypothesis: Chapter 1, “The Divided Self”

[NOTE: I am reading this book for a book club at my work, and I wanted to take notes so it would be easier to discuss.  I don’t really recommend reading this post if you haven’t already read the book!  My summary is long enough that you might as well just go read the original thing.  Haidt writes much better than I do.  I’m just doing this because note-taking helps me remember things.]

The theme of this chapter was: the self contains multiple parts, which are often at odds with each other.

A relevant quote from ancient literature:

St. Paul, Galatians 5:171: For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want.

In order to explain the divided self, Haidt introduces the metaphor of the elephant and the rider (which also appears in his book The Righteous Mind). You can think of the mind as containing two parts, an elephant and a rider.  The elephant represents emotions, deep biological urges, and automatic mental processes.  The rider represents reason, logic, and conscious thought.  The point of the metaphor is that the elephant is much larger, and is basically in control.  The rider can try to control the elephant; it can give directions, and sometimes those directions will even be followed.  But if the elephant really wants to go in a particular direction, there’s not much the rider can to do stop it.

Comparing the divided self to a rider and an animal also has precedents in ancient literature, and Haidt gives a couple of quotes:

Buddha: In days gone by this mind of mine used to stray wherever selfish desire or lust or pleasure would lead it.  Today this mind does not stray and is under the harmony of control, even as a wild elephant is controlled by the trainer.

Plato described the self as a chariot, with two horses and a driver holding the reins: The horse that is on the right, or nobler, side is upright in frame and well-jointed, with a high neck and a regal nose; ... he is a lover of honor with modesty and self-control; companion to true glory, he needs no whip, and is guided by verbal commands alone.  The other horse is a crooked great jumble of limbs ... companion to wild boasts and indecency, he is shaggy around the ears -- deaf as a post -- and just barely yields to horse-whip and goad combined.

Haidt also mentions Freud as a proponent of the divided self.

Then he describes four ways in which the self is divided.

Mind vs. Body

Many people have described the penis of having a mind of its own.

The autonomic nervous system, which governs many bodily functions, exists outside of conscious control.

There’s a whole separate “gut brain” containing over 100 million neurons, which controls digestion and operates largely independently of the real brain.

Left vs. Right

This is referring to the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

The left hemisphere does language and analytical tasks.  The right hemisphere is better at spatial reasoning.  (Though Haidt is quick to point out that the idea of scientists being “left-brained” and artists being “right-brained” is oversimplified.)

Haidt talks about split-brain patients (people whose left and right brains can’t communicate with each other).  The left hemisphere processes information from the right visual field, and vice versa.  So the scientists took some split-brained patients, and showed them a picture of a hat on the right side of their visual field.  When asked what they saw, they were able to respond (since the left, verbal hemisphere was the one that got the information).  When the picture was shown on the left side, the patients would say they saw nothing, but their left hand would still be able to point at the correct object.

The funny thing is, if you show the right hemisphere some information that causes it to act in a certain way, the left hemisphere will generate an explanation for the action, even though it has no idea what the real reason is.  So, like, if you show the right hemisphere the word “walk”, the patient might get up and start walking.  And if you ask them why they got up, they might say something like “I’m going to get a Coke”.

Haidt thinks this is important, because it means there’s a part of the brain that’s totally willing to generate explanations of things you do, even though it has no idea why you actually did it.

Actually, I should just quote him directly about this last bit:

These dramatic splits of the mind are caused by rare splits of the brain.  Normal people are not split-brained.  Yet the split-brain studies were important in psychology because they showed in such an eerie way that the mind is a confederation of modules capable of working independently and even, sometimes, at cross-purposes.  Split-brain studies are important for this book because they show in such a dramatic way that one of these modules is good at inventing convincing explanations for your behavior, even when it has no knowledge of the causes of your behavior.

Haidt equates this “convincing explanation” module with the rider in the rider/elephant metaphor.  The elephant takes some action, and then the rider (without necessarily knowing why the elephant did it) comes up with an explanation.

New vs. Old

New parts of the brain have been added over the course of our evolutionary history.

The oldest parts are in the back and the newest parts are in the front.

The limbic system is an older part of the brain, which controls our “animal urges” (sex, aggression, hunger).

The frontal cortex is a newer part of the brain which contains our critical faculties.

But emotion and reason are not cleanly divided between these two parts of the brain.  Actually, a great deal of our emotional functions reside in the orbitofrontal cortex, which is part of the frontal cortex.  So it’s not “newer, human reason” and “older, animal urges and emotions”.  It’s more like “older animal urges” and “newer human reason and emotions”.

Also, we need our emotions in order to function in life.  When the orbitofrontal cortex is damaged, you don’t get a bunch of perfectly logical superhumans, capable of overcoming problems without interference from emotions.  Instead, you get people who are perfectly able to reason, but who have great difficulty making decisions, since they have no emotions to guide them towards one choice or another.

Haidt emphasizes that it’s not the rider (reason) controlling the elephant (which includes the emotions of the orbitofrontal cortex).  The rider and the elephant have to work together to get anything accomplished.  But it’s the elephant that’s doing most of the work.

Controlled vs. Automatic

The mind contains two processing systems, controlled and automatic (I’m guessing these relate to Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2).

Haidt says that “most mental processes happen automatically, without the need for conscious attention or control”.  These automatic processes also tend to be unconscious.

There are also controlled processes, “the kind of thinking that takes some effort, that proceeds in steps and that always plays out on the center stage of consciousness”.

We can only have one controlled process running at a time, whereas we can have tons of automatic processes running in parallel.

So what is the relationship between controlled and automatic processes?

Automatic processes have existed throughout our evolutionary history, while controlled processes require language and are therefore quite new.  So we’re on “Rider version 1.0″ (controlled processes are the rider, automatic processes are the elephant) and elephant version 1000 or whatever.  That’s why “there are still a lot of bugs in the reasoning and planning programs” but the automatic processes are nearly perfect.  And that’s why it’s easy to build an AI that plays games and solves logic puzzles as well as humans, but much harder to build one that can see or walk as well as we can.

I’m just going to quote the next paragraph because it’s hard to summarize:

Evolution never looks ahead.  It can’t plan the best way to travel from point A to point B.  Instead, small changes to existing forms arise (by genetic mutation), and spread within a population to the extent that they help organisms respond more effectively to current conditions.  When language evolved, the human brain was not reengineered to hand over the reins of power to the rider (conscious verbal thinking).  Things were already working pretty well, and linguistic ability spread to the extent that it helped the elephant do something important in a better way.  The rider evolved to serve the elephant.  But whatever its origin, once we had it, language was a powerful tool that could be used in new ways, and evolution then selected those individuals who got the best use out of it.

One function of language is that it helps to free us from the behaviorist stimulus-response stuff that Skinner and Pavlov studied.  Instead of being complete slaves to immediate temptation, we’re able to think about the long-term consequences of our actions.  But of course, we’re still somewhat susceptible to behaviorist principles.

So the rider isn’t king, or boss, or in charge of the elephant.  The rider can be better understood as an advisor to the elephant, providing guidance but not any actual control over what the elephant does.

Haidt writes:

The elephant and the rider each have their own intelligence, and when they work together well they enable the unique brilliance of human beings.  But they don’t always work together well.

Then he gives three cases where they don’t.

Failures of Self Control

Haidt gives the example of the marshmallow experiment.  He points out that the kids who did best in the marshmallow experiment were the ones who were able to distract themselves from thinking about the marshmallow.

This has the following lesson: it’s hard to control yourself via willpower alone (since the controlled processes will get tired, and the automatic processes will keep on going).  So instead of pitting willpower against “stimulus control” (that is, environmental stimuli controlling what you do), it’s better to either change your environment (so you’re not confronted with the temptation), or change your automatic response to that stimulus (apparently Buddhists overcame carnal temptations by thinking about the body as a rotting corpse).

Mental Intrusions

This section was about the difficulty of “not thinking about a white bear” (or whatever else you try not to think about).  According to Haidt, your conscious mind tries not to think about a white bear.  Meanwhile, your automatic processes continually check in to ask “am I thinking about a white bear?”  This makes you work even harder to suppress the thought, which makes you check in even more, which makes the white bear even harder to stop thinking about.

Haidt says this is where a lot of obsessive thoughts come from.  A scary or shameful thought shows up in your mind, and you try to suppress it, which only leads to thinking about it more.

The Difficulty of Winning an Argument

Here, Haidt talks about his own research.  He gives people a moral situation (in this case, a tale of incest between a brother and sister) and asks people whether it’s moral.  People usually say “no”, but they have a hard time justifying why.

Haidt says this is another case (like in the split-brain patients) where one part of the mind has made a decision, and the rider tries to justify it without knowing why the decision was made.  Haidt says:

In moral arguments, the rider goes beyond being just an advisor to the elephant; he becomes a lawyer, fighting in the court of public opinion to persuade others of the elephant’s point of view.

It’s worth pasting Haidt’s conclusion in full:

This, then, is our situation, lamented by St. Paul, Buddha, Ovid, and so many others.  Our minds are loose confederations of parts, but we identify with and pay too much attention to one part: conscious verbal thinking.  We are like the proverbial drunken man looking for his car keys under the street light.  (”Did you drop them here?” asks the cop.  “No” says the man, “I dropped them back there in the alley, but the light is better over here.”)  Because we can see only one little corner of the mind’s vast operation, we are surprised when urges, wishes, and temptations emerge, seemingly from nowhere.  We make pronouncements, vows, and resolutions, and then are surprised by our own powerlessness to carry them out.  We sometimes fall into the view that we are fighting with our unconscious, our id, or our animal self.  But really we are the whole thing.  We are the rider, and we are the elephant.  Both have their strengths and special skills.

So I guess he’s concluding that, in the light of modern science, the ancient wisdom is true.  But it’s only a cause for concern if we identify too strongly with the rational parts of our minds.

[bettydgunter90]

Profit First Changed My Life. It Will Change Yours Too.

Profit First by Mike Michalowicz radically changed my life.

I don’t say that lightly.

I read a lot of books, and I can honestly say that this is within the top three most impactful books of my entire life.

I feel like I’m an evangelist—I feel like the world needs this book. It should be required reading for every student graduating high school, let alone every real estate investor.

As an industry, we real estate investors struggle with ego.

We flaunt our gross revenue or deal count, painting a picture that we’re ultra-successful when behind closed doors, a lot of us are struggling financially and are stressed to the max!

It’s like there’s a hole in our pocket—no matter how many deals we do, or how much we grow, all the money that comes in simply goes back out.

Sure, we might be growing. We might be doubling the deal flow we did a year ago, but are we actually keeping any money, once it’s all said and done?

For most of us, if we’re honest… the answer is no. We’re no better off financially than when we first started our real estate business.

This isn’t right.

But there is a solution and it’s called Profit First.

Revenue – Profit = Expenses

Accountants have been lying to us.

Revenue – Expenses = Profit is dead wrong.

In Profit First, Mike introduces us to the correct formula for profit:

Revenue – Profit = Expenses

Mathematically, these equations are the same, but psychologically they’re complete opposites.

What we prioritize, we place first.

No one goes to the doctor, and upon being told they’re at risk for a heart attack, decides they’re going to put their health last. We would put our health first because there is a new sense of urgency and importance behind getting our health in order.

In the same way, if we place profit as the last priority after revenue and expenses, expenses will ALWAYS eat up our profitability.

When expenses come first, there will always be another reason to spend (or “reinvest”) our revenue.

The cornerstone of Profit First is exactly that: profit must be the priority for any business.

If it’s not, if it’s left last like traditional accounting frames it, it will always be an afterthought.

Profit First and Parkinson’s Law

Profitability boils down to a decision. We choose to be profitable by designating a certain percentage of our gross revenue to profit. Then we figure out how to run our business on what’s left.

Sometimes you may limit operating expenses if you take out profit first. Limited resources, however, leads to creativity and ingenuity. We can accomplish some amazing things with limited resources when we have no other option.

Mike Michalowicz highlights this principle by introducing something called Parkinson’s Law.

Parkinson’s Law is commonly expressed as

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

As supply grows, demand grows to meet it. This means that if we have an abundance of resources, like time, the amount of work given to a certain task will take up the amount of time allocated to accomplishing it.

The opposite is also true.

Even if the time available to perform a task is limited, we can still complete it—and will most likely be accomplished more efficiently due to the limitation.

In the Profit First book, Mike highlights this point by giving an example of a tube of toothpaste.

When it’s a fresh tube, we’re extremely generous with how much toothpaste we use.

When it’s near the end of the tube, however, we’ll squeeze and squeeze and squeeze to get one measly drip, sometimes even cutting the bottom out for maximum efficiency.

If we use this principle to run our business, we’ll soon discover many expenses we can live without.

In Profit First, Growth Is Not the Number One Goal

I spent half my life in the San Francisco Bay Area, the heartbeat of the tech and startup industry.

During my time there, I must’ve somehow picked up the idea that the ultimate goal of a business is growth at all costs.

This is not the case for most businesses.

“Growth at all costs” is something unique to the tech industry. Most tech startups exist to grow to the point that they can get acquired by another company for several million dollars. It’s similar to the objective of developing a house or sub-division, only it’s with a tech company instead of real estate.

I think that due to the popularity and innovation of the tech industry, a lot of other small business owners have fallen into the trap of “growth at all cost.”

Sure, if you’re in tech, this might be your goal leaving profitability on the wayside… but most companies don’t have this objective!

Especially real estate investors, we’re trying to use real estate as a vehicle to grow our wealth and gain more financial freedom.

So, profitability must come first!

The right amount of revenue and deal flow will present itself as a by-product once we prioritize profit.

The Practicals of Profit First

Entrepreneurs are wired in a certain way. We don’t like accounting software and complexity. For us, if we see money in the account, that means we can spend that money on whatever we need or want for the business. If money isn’t there, we hit the panic button and go into grind mode to move more inventory as fast as possible.

Sure, accountants try to tame us into using tools like Quickbooks telling us, “Never look at the business account!” But what do we end up doing?

Every day, we open our accounts and look.

Profit First is a system built around our natural entrepreneurial behavior to manage our finances through bank accounts. This is essentially the envelope system, modernized by creating several accounts dedicated to specific functions in our business.

At a basic level, Profit First teaches five foundational checking accounts:

Income

Profit

Owner’s Compensation

Tax

Operating Expenses

Two more savings accounts should be held at a different bank.

Profit Hold

Tax Hold

Each checking account serves as an “envelope” or “bucket” for different needs of the business.

Cyclically (the book recommends every 2nd and 25th of the month), predetermined allocation amounts will be distributed to each account based on the current goals and needs of the business.

The income account serves as a place for all revenue to land before serving the allocations designated for each account.

There are target allocation amounts (referred to as TAPs) that Mike recommends in the book based on the revenue of a company.

However, a business might have unique circumstances that hinder its availability to meet TAPs. Therefore, current allocation amounts (CAPs) are what a business actually decides to allocate. These are usually updated on a quarterly basis and, again, are specific to the needs and goals of the company.

There is a maxim around Profit First:

When in doubt, open an account!

As a real estate investor, I’ve added a new account to the five essentials that I call the “OPM” account. This is where I place any private or hard money loans and rent deposits.

If a business owner needs a new place to hold resources for a specific need, they can simply create one by creating a new checking account!

It’s just that simple.

The Difference Between Profit and Owner’s Compensation

When you see the five essential accounts above, you might have noticed that there is one for profit and another for owner’s compensation.

It’s important to understand the difference between these two.

Fundamentally, YOU are the most important employee at your company, which means YOU should be compensated for tasks you perform as an employee in the business. This is what the owner’s compensation account is for—making sure you get paid a salary!

Now simultaneously, you’re not only the important employee in your business but you’re also an owner that works on the business.

This is where the profit account comes in.

The owner’s compensation is the money you make for working in your business and profit is the money you earn working on your business.

Typically, the owner’s compensation is paid out regularly (weekly, bi-monthly, or monthly) and profit distribution usually occurs quarterly.

Why Two Savings Accounts at a Different Bank?

Mike Michalowicz is pretty adamant about making sure you set up at least two savings accounts at a separate bank from where you hold the five essential checking accounts.

Again, these two savings accounts are called Profit Hold and Tax Hold.

If we already have a Profit and Tax checking account, why go through the hassle of setting up these savings accounts at a different bank?

Because we’re all human and are subject to temptation.

If we kept all of our profit and tax allocations in a place where we can see it, and that next “once in a lifetime” deal presents itself, we’ll be incredibly tempted to steal from these accounts to make that deal happen.

To avoid this, he strongly suggests having the profit savings and tax savings tucked away where you’ll never see them. He even goes as far as to say these two savings accounts shouldn’t even have online banking established. It should be extremely difficult to access these accounts!

This is why we set up a checking account and savings account for Profit and Taxes. The checking accounts serve as a holding place prior to transfers taking place.

Transferring funds to an outside bank may take a couple of days to complete and Mike doesn’t want profit or tax allocations to “accidentally” end up in the operating expense account.

Profit First-Friendly Banks

When it comes to the checking and savings account options for Profit First, there are a couple of requirements:

There should be no minimum balance fees or monthly service fees.

The bank needs to allow unlimited checking/savings accounts.

The bank needs to allow you the ability to nickname the accounts.

I personally like a bank called 1st Internet Bank. They’re 100% online, and have options that meet all these requirements. Additionally, they have some very competitive interest rates on their savings accounts, and they allow you the ability to “hide” accounts through the online portal.

This makes it so I can keep my Profit Hold and Tax Hold at the same bank as my essential accounts, while still honoring the system of never being able to see them.

Alternatively, when researching banks, I heavily considered the following:

First Financial Bank

First American Bank

Regions Bank

These banks have limited presence nationwide, and they’re certainly not the only options out there. Most local banks and credit unions have options to meet the Profit First requirements; you may just have to do some research.

If holding my Profit and Tax Hold accounts ever becomes too tempting at 1st Internet Bank, I plan to set up my savings account through Live Oak Bank, which also provides highly competitive interest rates.

Final Thoughts

Again, Profit First has radically changed my life.

I now have a framework to understand how to manage money.

I realized through implementing Profit First in my land business, you need two aspects to become a successful real estate investor.

There’s the side of mastering your craft—being the best at finding deals and working your magic as an investor. But there’s also the side of learning how to run a business, specifically how to run the finances of a business.

These are two sides of the same coin.

To be truly successful through real estate, we must learn to master both sides. And for me, Profit First was the piece that was missing.

The post Profit First Changed My Life. It Will Change Yours Too. appeared first on REtipster.

from Real Estate Tips https://retipster.com/profit-first-overview/

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11 of the most common errors made in the refurbishment of the apartment

The renovation of a house or an apartment can be difficult. Cleaning up the rubble, the mess, the dirt, the dust, the unexpected makes the day’s work of a true chaos in the lives of any resident. And a lot of the time, this reform is inevitable and must be considered to ensure the safety and well-being of those who live in the place. For this reason, care must be taken to minimize any pain in your head that the break-the break can cause. From choosing the right colors of the walls, measure the room to know the size of the furniture to the contract, the equipment, and with the consent of the city, some of the errinhos seem silly, but it can create confusion for the reform of the also result in the unnecessary expenditure of material, manpower, and time.

A lack of planning

To start a project without having a project that is set to an error very grave, and as amazing as it may seem, is very common, when building or refurbishing a house or an apartment. Those who do not plan to ever run the risk of having the job and spending twice as much. The ideal is to know what you want to change, to reform and to move into the property, you can expect your expenses to search for the necessary materials, and qualified personnel, to verify the cash balance available to spend, and make a timeline of the reforms.

A good design is not a mere formality but, rather, a kind of insurance against the unexpected in the middle of the road. It goes on to detail all of the items that are required for the intervention is constructive in what you want to do it, and decrease the likelihood that you will get a nasty surprise.

Not be allowed in the common areas and/or in the city

Depending on how much of your retirement you will need both a permit from your condominium to the city hall of the city.

You must pay attention to the rules agreed upon by the joint owners if you wish, especially, to change the facade of the building. For example, many of the buildings have rules for the closing of a private balcony. In addition, you must adhere to the days and times permitted to work, to keep the common areas clean, and abide by the time limit set for the storage areas in the garage.

Now, from the outside of a building, the rules that are in the hall. If the intention is to extend the built-up area, it will be necessary for a Project of Legal reform, with the extension approved by the authority. Each municipality has its own rules, so check with the zoning department of your city to obtain such a permit. In the city of Sao Paulo and provides a Guide to the Licensing of the Designs for all of its inhabitants, who want to build or renovate in the city.

In addition, once the cave-ins that took place in Rio de Janeiro, in 2012-for the sake of the works are uneven, has been built to a standard which regulates all the works of the reformation. In accordance with the regulations of the Reform of the ABNT NBR 16.280:by 2015, the whole work of the reformation that the change in the property has to have its design approved for the building, with the presentation of the RRT (Registry of Technical Responsibility), and by the architect responsible for the project.

According to the Council of Architecture and Urbanism of Brazil (CAU/BR), the activities that may be undertaken by a suitably qualified professional are:

• The construction or demolition of walls and partitions

• Replacement of floor coverings (floors, walls, ceilings)

• The opening or closing of the openings

• A change in the electrical installations, hydraulic and sanitary

The installation of the furniture, fixed

The use of unsuitable materials

The floors polished, and the slip-on indoor and outdoor; wood flooring, without the proper treatment, in wet areas, use a carpet on the bathroom floor or in the wall material of questionable quality just to save money. These are some of the mistakes that can happen, usually due to lack of technical know-how, and tend to compromise the safety and security of its people, and for the life of the building, and, also, generate extra costs and a delay in the completion of the project.

The supply of the coating, and the finish is immense, but the love of a material it is not enough to want to use it. Take a look at its functionality within the context in which it will be used. Why it is important to consult with a professional. He’s going to help you select the right material for every environment.

Purchase of material is insufficient

Mistake in the calculation of the quantity of material required is fairly common, and it can create pain in the head and be cruel to you. In the case of the covering (porcelain tiles, glazed tiles, ceramics, etc.), this mistake may require the purchase of a product from different batches, which often differ in tone and/or size. There are many cases that the product is out of line, and there is more and more difficult to fix the problem. Other materials can also be broken at the time of repair and in need of replacement. In order to avoid such a lack of material, the ideal is to be based on the calculation of the design of the building. In the case of ceramic tiles and porcelain tiles, for example, to calculate the area to be covered, after the removal of the doors and the windows, if that is the case, and, for a margin of safety, to purchase up to 10% more for the product. The same is true for the mind.

Forget about all the wiring and plumbing

Imagine that you disorder and you have to break through the wall, or doing an install, and indeed put in more outlets, or more of the valves. Put the plugs in the least, or put them in the wrong places and is very common, as not to think of how many bulbs are required in each room or where you want to install the light fixtures.

Manage the part that is shown on your real estate property is always more interesting to paint a wall, change the flooring, change the tiles, and so on. But if you forget about all of that hidden under the floor, and on the inside of the wall, it can cause severe pain in the head. A good project for electrical and plumbing, carried out in accordance with the standards for the safety and well-sized, are essential for the comfort and safety of the residents.

For this reason, the ideal situation is to set up the project with the architect or the person responsible for it according to your needs, including a made on a site-specific drivers of the intensity of the light is split, and the piping for the air-conditioning, and hot water in the kitchen and the bathroom.

To accumulate the trash, and forgetting to schedule the removal of debris

Know what I would do with the debris that accumulated at the end of the day, it is also important, especially if your retirement is in a gated community, as you may end up generating a fine for the mess and the dirt are caused.

At this point in time, it is interesting to choose a professional in the workforce, to be responsible for the maintenance of order in the place. In addition, provide for laundry detergents, cloths, floors and others with products and tools that can help them.

The problems with sizing

Get the dimensions of the spaces and this is another mistake that is quite common in those who reform. And, in a number of instances, people make mistakes when investing in real estate a very big affect on the circulation in the atmosphere. For this reason, all rooms should be to have your ‘layouts’ are defined in advance, and aiming at the harmony between the space and the objects within it.

In addition to this, there is the question of the mix of materials and textures. It is normal for the furniture to be purchased on the day and finishes on another. Then, when all the elements are put together, it can happen to you when things don’t match up to each other.

Before you buy mobile big easy chairs, bookshelves and tables, or household appliances, such as refrigerator, washing machine, dishwasher or stove, be sure to measure the size of the door to the apartment and to the elevators. Also make sure that the part you have to go through the bends or very narrow aisles.

To choose the trader is wrong

Before you hire an engineer or an architect, make sure he has it because of a license to practice. For the first one, you can search for your registration at the CREA (Regional Council of Engineering and Agronomy), and in the second, the AUC (the Council of Architecture and Urban planning). Also, look for references on their work and ask them to see the projects completed or in progress. The healthcare professional may recommend that the staff of the works that you will need, such as the master builder and the builders. Otherwise, you will also look for a professional with good references and you are qualified to get the job done.

Choose from the paint, without testing the color of the environment in the light of the day

The tone is always composed of a number of pigments and, therefore, when applied on the wall may be different from what is expected. The ideal time is before you go out buying dozens of gallons of paint, try to color in one square metre, wait for it to dry and see the results in the light of the day and by artificial light. In approving the result, go ahead with the painting.

The floor, no trim

A small detail that can easily be overlooked is the trim on the floor that leads the water to the drain. The result is that the puddles and the flooded areas that build up in the bathroom, in the kitchen or on the terraces and in the garden. A professional in charge of the work shall verify the need for these trims. And don’t dismiss the importance of this: if, by some chance, any of your bathrooms have standing, then the only way to resolve it is to break down everything and re-do!

The water that seeps out of the window

Another small detail, but it is not less important, is to seal your home to prevent leaks. Remember that the opening between the frame and the wall? Not even noticed, have you? But, at the time of the installation, a lot of people forget to pass by the silicone structural post between the window and the bricks and mortar, which over time, causes the infiltration of rain and it’s all across the wall.

Like the other tips? You want to know more?

Take the opportunity to read it as well:

• Apartment from the plants to see the benefits

• How to set up a home office that is productive? Here’s 7 tips!

Be sure to check out anything new on the new blog Design. We are sure that you will be pleasantly surprised!…

Article Source: 11 of the most common errors made in the refurbishment of the apartment

[gravitylink-blog]

Who’s Better: Google Coral USB Accelerator and Intel 2nd Generation Neural Compute Stick?

As artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) gradually move from science fiction to real life, we now need a fast and convenient way to prototype this type of system. Although desktop computers can also be sufficient to meet the operating requirements of AI/ML, even single-board computers such as Raspberry Pi can meet these requirements. But what if you just want a simple plug-in device to make your system run faster and more powerful?

Don't worry, you actually have a variety of choices, including Google Coral Edge TPU series hardware USB Accelerator (Coral USB accelerator, hereinafter referred to as CUA) and Intel's Neural Compute Stick 2 (NCS2). Both devices are computing devices plugged into the host via USB. NCS2 uses a visual processing unit (VPU), while Coral USB Accelerator uses a tensor processing unit (TPU), both of which are dedicated processing devices for machine learning. Today I will give you a test and comparison: What is the difference between the two? As a developer, should you choose Coral or NCS2? Please check below.

Coral USB Accelerator

-ML accelerator: Edge TPU ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) chip designed by Google. It provides high-performance ML inference for TensorFlow Lite models (MobileNet V2 400 + fps, from the latest official updated data).

-Support USB 3.1 port and cable (SuperSpeed, 5GB/s transfer speed)

-Dimensions: 30 x 65 x 8 mm

-Official price: $74.99

Intel Neural Compute Stick 2

-Processor: Intel Movidius Myriad X Visual Processing Unit (VPU)

-USB 3.0 Type-A

-Size: 72.5 x 27 x 14mm

-Official price: $87.99

1. Comparison of processor and acceleration performance

Unlike the way you compare traditional computer CPUs, the details of comparing each processor/accelerator are more subtle, depending on how you plan to use them. Although the output format is slightly different (every inference time and the number of frames per second), we can still compare the two devices in some overall performance modes.

When evaluating AI models and hardware platforms for real-time deployment, the first thing to look at is their speed. In computer vision tasks, benchmarks are usually measured in frames per second (FPS). Higher numbers indicate better performance. For real-time video streaming, at least about 10 fps is required to make the video appear smooth.

Operational performance: First, when CUA is added to the desktop CPU, the performance can be increased by about 10 times, and the operation performance is relatively good. (Depending on the selected CPU model, the 10x performance fluctuates slightly) NCS2 "cooperates" with the older Atom processor, which can increase the processing speed by nearly 7 times. However, when paired with a more powerful processor, the results presented by NCS2 are not surprising.

NCS2 can theoretically perform inference at a speed of 4 TOPS. Curiously, CUA also has the exact same rate, although both use different operations to perform ML. In addition, Intel claims that the performance of NCS2 is 8 times that of the original neural computing stick. (If you like, you can choose NCS2 instead of the original neural computing stick, although the price is lower.)

NCS2 can use MobileNet-v2 to run the 30 FPS classification model, which is not bad. However, object detection at 11 FPS is a bit difficult. A frame rate of about 10 FPS may not be sufficient for real-time object tracking, especially for high-speed motion, and many objects may be lost, and developers need very good tracking algorithms to make up for this "hole". (Of course, the official benchmark results are not completely credible. Often, these companies compare their manually optimized software with competitors’ out-of-the-box models.)

User evaluation

Power consumption: NCS2 has lower power consumption. As far as CUA is concerned, the official does list 0.5 watts for each TOPS. Users can also set CUA to the default speed or maximum (2 times the default value) as needed.

It is worth noting that Google’s official documents do clearly remind: the power transmission when the device is running at maximum speed and the maximum ambient temperature may burn your skin. So personally, unless you really need additional processing power, it is best to run it in normal mode.

It is also important to remember that Python is not the first choice for good performance on devices. Both of these devices support the C++ API, which is also my "trick to get the best performance from the device in my tests."

2. Software support

NCS2 can be used with Ubuntu, CentOS, Windows 10 and other operating systems. It can support TensorFlow, Caffe, ApacheMXNet, and PyTorch and PaddlePadle through open neural network conversion.

CUA does not support Windows, but it can run under Debian 6.0 or higher (or any derivative version, such as Ubuntu 10.0+). It is worth mentioning that CUA can only officially run TensorFlow Lite models.

3. Comparison of size, prototype design and other details

After covering the software support, computing power and power consumption, what is the specific situation of the two in the actual construction of product prototypes?

Frankly speaking, both devices look very cool. The CUA is a slightly silver-white checkered body with a partially transparent body and what appears to be a heat sink. The NCS2 is a sleek blue design, and the blue body and integrated radiator look more fashionable.

Of course, appearance is only secondary. The important thing is that NCS2 does, like CUA, will become hot during operation. However, its radiator design allows you to hold it on a cooler integrated heat sink without having to hold it with your fingers in the middle, which is very clever.

The design of NCS2 allows users to use multiple computing sticks together to enhance its processing capabilities. You can arrange them neatly in a vertical USB docking station. Similarly, a host can run multiple CUAs, but you may need to find another way to save each CUA. It is worth mentioning that although both have similar dimensions, the thickness of NCS2 (14 mm) is almost twice that of CUA. In addition, it is inserted through a USB plug (such as an extra large thumb drive) instead of a flexible cable like CUA, which means that in some operating scenarios, NCS2 will make you very difficult to deal with space issues. difficult. You have to use data cables and docking stations extensively. This is something you need to consider before you make a choice.

Finally, NCS2 and CUA seem to be dedicated devices designed for edge computing applications. If you need to run on a Windows system or need to run outside of the Tensorflow Lite framework, then NCS2 has obvious advantages. For its part, Coral USB Accelerator's peripheral supporting hardware, there are more simple and rude development board Dev Board, PCI accelerator designed with Coral Edge TPU as the core, and SoM module similar to the development board, etc. If your need is to quickly bring product prototyping to the market, then Coral is your best choice, and it is more attractive to developers.

Coral USB Accelerator development environment requirements: a Linux computer with a USB port; support Debian 6.0 or higher, or its derivative systems (such as Ubuntu 10.0+); x86_64 or ARM64 system architecture with ARMv8 instruction set.

Therefore, from the above requirements, Coral USB accelerator supports Raspberry Pi. However, it must be Raspberry Pi 2/3 Model B/B+ and run Raspbian system (or other Debian derivative systems).

At this point, the functions between the two are very similar. If you want to add AI/ML to Raspberry Pi or similar projects, both devices can work normally.

Many pre-compiled network models allow you to get better results easily and quickly. Nevertheless, fully quantifying your network is still an advanced task. Conversion requires an in-depth understanding of the network and how it operates. In addition, when I upgraded from FP_32 to FP_16 and from FP_16 to UINT, the loss of accuracy was also great. Interestingly, Myriad can handle half of its floating point, and CUA can only handle 8-bit floating point. This means that Myriad can obtain higher accuracy.

Intel and Google obviously adopted two completely different "routines. Google's advantage is that products can help developers easily build prototypes and promote a complete set of solutions from Google Cloud Platform to edge-tpu. I personally like how all the components are Work together. On the other hand, Intel provides Openvino plug-ins, developers can use them to optimize their network, so that it can run on a variety of hardware. OpenVINO currently supports Intel CPU, GPU, FPGA and VPU. At Intel The challenge ahead is that these "combined punches" are always difficult to use the optimal function of each component.

Google Coral USB Accelerator can train network models online, which is essential for migration learning. Obviously, Google believes that their pre-training network and migration learning provide developers with an efficient combination. In addition, Intel NCS2 has three pairs of built-in stereo depth hardware, which are valuable in many use cases (such as obstacle avoidance).

Application scenario:

Intel NCS2 also provides prototype, verification and deployment of DNN. For driverless and driverless vehicles and IoT devices, low power consumption is essential. For those who wish to develop deep learning inference applications, NCS2 is one of the most energy-efficient and lowest-cost USB sticks.

For example, the upcoming Titanium AIX also has built-in Intel Movidius Myraid X computing acceleration chip, which lowers the threshold of AI learning and development, and helps AI enthusiasts and developers quickly build AI applications and solutions that can listen, talk, and watch.

Google Coral is more than just hardware. It easily combines the functions of custom hardware, open software and advanced AI algorithms and provides high-quality AI solutions. Coral has many application cases in helping industrial development, including predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, robotics, machine vision, and voice recognition. It has great application value in manufacturing, healthcare, retail, smart space, internal monitoring and transportation sectors.

[codeavailfan]

How long does it take to learn Javascript for Beginners

Learn Javascript  

Almost every web programmer wants to know How long does it take to learn Javascript for Beginners. If you want to become a programmer, this could be two of the first questions that occur to you.

Can I learn Javascript in a week? How long does it take to improve that language? Many people easily learn CSS and HTML. But when it comes to learning Javasvava, it's hard to teach. JavaScript is a relatively simple programming language to learn. The amount of time needed to learn JavaScript is directly proportional to the time you will invest in learning.

To develop a way of thinking, it is important to learn it well, which will enable you to work in difficulties. You can learn some JavaScript in a week, but the middle level takes up to nine months. In this post, we discussed several strategies that will help you become a great programmer for the interface. It will also give you an idea ofHow long does it take to learn Javascript for Beginners. It may take you less time or more to learn JavaScript, depending on your experience.

This guide has been separated to the following parts:

Information on how long to learn Javascript

JavaScript is the first to learn to become an advanced web programmer. Some people need longer than they need to learn JavaScript. Many beginners first learn jKueri because it is a popular JavaScript library. The reason some students learn the jKueri first because they think it is easier to learn from JavaScript and that is their biggest mistake.

It is not necessary to become an expert at jKueri.

Many beginers have a fuss about what part of JavaScript you need to learn first. This post will send you all steps on how long it takes to learn JavaScript. Your first purpose is to gain enough knowledge about where you are comfortable with medium JavaScriptom.

Javascript syntax learning

If you want to learn Javascript or any other language, it's important to understand the language syntax first. Learn about the following:

JavaScript variables are containers for collecting data values.

Javascript statement is "instruction" which web browser needs to "perform".

keywords used as tokens have a specific meaning in JavaScriptu: case, debugger, delete, void, finally, type, function, Nev, switch, throw, if, otherwise, continue, and Debuger.

 In Javascript to create a single-line comment, you give two dashes  "/" before the text or code that you want to ignore JavaScript interpreter.

In JavaScript, features are one of the main building blocks. The function is a collection of statements for JavaScript that collects the value or performs the job

.

Like other program languages in JavaScript, objects can be linked to objects in real life.

By learning Vanilla JavaScript

Vanilla JavaScript refers to JavaScript that is not enhanced with any frame or library. The level of difficulty is ranging from the linguistic basis to medium, and then advanced programming concepts that include the closing and prototyping of object-oriented programming. If you want to get a job as a Internet programmer, you should at least have a high knowledge about these concepts. Functional programming or to have knowledge of all aspects of the prototypes chain is not necessary. But it is important for you to understand common functions such as reporting, bonding, and calling. You can learn JavaScript in the middle level for 6-9 months, depending on your experience. You can use Colt Steel's web Developer Bootcamp to speed up your education. It's good for those who struggle to learn JavaScript.

You should know if you need to teach the jKueri or not before learning React. js.

 This is a library that covers many older JavaScript courses, so it is important that you know about it and why it was developed.

jKueri is the most common JavaScript library. Some of the new courses are not handing over to jKueri. The reason for Web developers is no longer needed tools. To know why you only follow the short history of jKueri and why he was created.

2006. The year when it was invented by jKueri. It helped solve problems that were incredibly important. Many web developers have had problems with writing JavaScripta due to wars in search engines that behaved in several browsers. The jKueri Library regulates the manipulation of DOM in different browsers and has solved the problem of improper behavior for web developers.

jKueri is so popular, you might end up as an employee for those who already have a website that jKueri is still using. These are the reasons that help you decide whether to teach the jKueri or not.

If you make new Web applications, it's best to use vanilla JavaScript and React, a newer and best front-end library.

React. JS is the front library that enables you to build user interfaces.

It is important to learn React. js If you want to work as a front-end web programmer. Reaction is best for Web pages and mobile devices for one page.

Learning important front-end frameworks

Before you explain which frame you need to learn, it is important that you know the difference between frames and libraries. Libraries allow you to choose the methods and features that you need to add to your existing code, frames have a different structure based on which to add your code. Therefore, it is important that you have knowledge about JavaScript before you begin to study the frames. Learning the front-end JavaScript framework learning depends on the type of project you want to build.

The approximate study dictated two things. Amber. js, for example, is best for Web applications. On the other hand, Angualr. JS is ideal for complicated projects and needs stability. It's used by a vast developer community.

The JavaScript frame comes and goes, but it can't be learned all.

You can bring the necessary decisions about which frame you want to learn first. Currently, the two most important framework of Vue and Angular.

Other frames are: Backbone, Amber, Meteor and Knockout.

Learning back-End web development:

Back-end Web development includes learning ecpress. JS, Mongo DB, and Node. JS, which is a relational database. The Node. JS moves JavaScript to the background or server and allows you to run JavaScript code outside your browser. Because of the number of contributing developers, Node. JS has a large number of packages. With these packages, managers facilitate programming jobs. A regular programmer can also learn the basics of Noder. js in a few weeks.

How long does it take to learn Javascript

You do not have a specific time if you want to learn JavaScript. It depends on the level of your experience and how much time you can save. If you want, you can teach it in a few weeks, and if you want, you can also learn in the months. With the help of these councils and strategies given in this post, you will help in how long you need to learn Javascript and learn this programming language, you can reconcile your approach.

If you are on the path of learning JavaScripta, setting goals can be a powerful tool. Set goals for your activities, such as building a destination page, to make it easier to prepare and continue.

Conclusion

Don’t be scared. These are just an estimated timeline. If you are dedicated to your work, you can learn it in weeks also. There is nothing like commitment and hard work. You can finish your learning faster then you think if you hit the right resources.

Just follow this post to get the best guidance on how long does it take to learn JavaScript. It is not compulsory that one should have the knowledge of Java, C++ or C JavaScript, you can learn JavaScript without these programming languages.

[cltreherne]

Applications of 3D Essay

From CGI in movies to creating entire worlds in games, 3D Modelling has become an incredibly helpful asset to many sectors of the creative industry.  

In product design, 3D modelling can be used to render packaging work for a client. A designer can simply create a model of a can, bottle or packet based upon the product that the client provides, the artists can design the packaging, and finally display it on the model to pitch that work to the client.  

Before 3D modelling, these companies would need to create 2D renders in programmes like photoshop or illustrator. This provided a neat but less realistic image of the potential product and took significantly longer than simply applying the design to a model that had potentially been made weeks ago.  

3D modelling has become crucial in the games industry for some of the worlds, characters and stories that many designers want to create. Before the application of 3D modelling, companies would make 3D spaces using 2D images and animations. This can be seen in classic games like Qbert which are entirely 2D but try to create 3D worlds. 3D has allowed the games industry to use photorealistic graphics and real-time raytracing which becomes more and more accessible with every generation of graphics cards and consoles. With designers and artists learning to make 3D models from the comfort of their homes, the games industry is seeing better talent and original work from younger people who are passionate about games and their creation.  

Similarly, with the Visual Effects companies working in film and TV, 3D has provided a great number of opportunities. 3D modelling allows VFX artist to capture realistic scene lighting, create characters to visualise in the real world and create spectacles that completely defy reality. A fantastic example of this is Christopher Nolan’s ‘Interstellar’. The blackhole known as Gargantua was a 3D model that had painstakingly accurate physics simulated for it and the result of that simulation created a beautiful and awe-inspiring model to be used for the movie. Without 3D modelling, simulations for physics and lighting like this would be far more difficult or even impossible.

3D Development Software

3DS Max is a proprietary suite designed to do particle effects with 3D modelling. 3DS Max saves projects in .3ds format, which is made up of the textures, polies and lighting of a model. The programme can also support motion capture, resulting in more realistic animations. This can be seen in James Cameron’s Avatar which features a whole race of CGI people in a CGI world. However, the programme can also place CG images into a real-life scene. Other examples of films made using 3DS Max are Alice in Wonderland, 2012, Blade Trinity and Cats & Dogs.

Maya is designed to be used along-side 3DS Max, using the proprietary file format .mb. This format is lossless but saves space using binary algebra. Maya is used for loads of things from texturing, lighting and particle effects to modelling and animation. Maya has the capability to transfer files to programmes like Unreal or Unity for games. Maya is currently used by Rooster Teeth Animation to make the series ‘RWBY’ which is modelled and animated within the programme. Other films made using Maya are Finding Nemo, Hugo, Rango and Frozen. Games created with Maya include Mirror’s Edge, For Honor and Dead by Daylight.

Cinema 4D is used by a wider range of industries such as architecture and science, and has been used to make Inception, The Golden Compass and Monster House. The programme uses .c4d, which is another proprietary file format. C4D focuses on motion graphics and sciences because of its simulation capabilities with particles and fluids.

Plugins are added to these programmes to add features that the default suit couldn’t use. Maya features a number of plugins that make the application easier to use. In Maya, Massive has been used for games on the Wii and the XBOX wherein it simulated crowds which, before the plugin, would have needed to be created manually. When your project is facing a budget, Massive bridges the gap and saves you time and money.  

Application Programming Interface

Games are written in one language and machines like your PC or console use a different language. The API acts as a translator between these systems so that the game can use all of hardware that it needs to be able to run. There are two key APIs made for this process. These are Direct3D and OpenGL.

Direct3D is a part of Microsoft’s DirectX. PCs running windows primarily use DirectX as well as Microsoft’s XBOX which is where it got its name.  

OpenGL is open source, meaning it can be changed by anyone who has access to a copy. Open GL is cross platform and so can run on PC and consoles. This means a game can be made for PS and also be released for PC or XBOX.

These two programmes are the leaders in the API market because of their complex nature and ongoing support. Around 60% of all computers use DirectX as it’s Microsoft Windows proprietary software. However, OpenGL can also be used on Windows as well as all other operating systems it supports such as OSX, IOS, Android, Linux and Playstation. Being open source, OpenGL receives constant community support but no official support. On the other hand, DirectX is proprietary so receives no community support, but Microsoft is constantly working on it.  

3D models are made up of lines, vertices, faces and polygons. Working as dimensions, a vertices is a dot anywhere on an x,y,z axis and creates a line when two vertices are connected. When you join 3 or more vertices together you make a polygon and when you join polygons together, they act as faces of a mesh. More complicated models have more polygons and therefore a higher ‘Poly Count’, making a model take longer to render book look far more realistic. 3D software usually features pre-made meshes called Poly Primitives which can be moulded and modified to make different shapes such as a sphere being turned in to a head. Basic primitives are a cube, sphere, cylinder, pyramid and a Torus (Ring). Starting with these primitives can save an artist a lot of time and effort; This is called Box modelling.  

With Box modelling, the artist usually needs to create many subdivisions in the primitive to be able to model it concisely and flexibly. Another way of modelling is with extrusion, where you stretch individual faces of the model which creates more faces and doesn’t require subdivisions. Both these methods can be used together to achieve more complex models.  

When an artist is creating 3D models, they face limits and constraints. One constraint is the polycount. Considering rendering time, polycount may need to be lowered to complete the project for a deadline. As well as time saving, lowering the polycount allows the model to perform better when used in console games. Limiting compatible platforms by heightening the polycount makes for a smaller market and having to high a polycount can cause performance issues as they take more processing power to load in. When a company wants to render high quality assets quickly, they use a Render Farm. Other effective methods are also used such as fogging and draw distance so that objects in the distance are either fogged out and invisible or dynamically changed to a lower poly to save on performance whilst still being immersive for the player and saving on memory.  

Lighting in 3D space can be crucial and has 3 core types: Point Light, Spot-Light and Area Light. Point lights are common for studio lighting effects and are close to real life lightbulbs. In this way, they emit light in every direction and disperses over distance. Spotlights operate like torches, being mainly directional in a cone shape and is typically used as a torch that the player can use. Area lights represent windows or screens, with a square of directional light. In Portal 2, Windows with fully lit offices behind them provided a large light source for the level scene. When lighting has been built, shadows are created relative to the 3 types of light used. Shadows add depth and realism to a scene and can potentially be built with raytracing when a light source is added.  

Texturing is also important to 3D models as it provides realism and feel to an object. An artist can add colours and materials to an object and the object can match the properties of the material. With clear materials like glass, light is reflected and dispersed differently to hard opaque surfaces. Changing aspects like these when modelling leads to photorealistic graphics and convincing immersive worlds. To simulate lighting for textures, normal mapping and UV mapping are used. This makes clear what parts of the texture to pop out, and that has an effect on how lighting affects the model. UV Mapping refers to opening out a shape as a 2D net to best apply a design and tailor it to each face.  

Pixel shaders are used with normal mapping to create more detain without eating up processing power, determining the characteristics and colour of a pixel to bring out more detail in models during animations. When rendering a scene as a 2D image, projection and clipping come in to play. Essentially, only what the camera sees is rendered and anything outside of the frame or obscured by an object is ignored. ‘Rendering’ itself refers to creating the 3D model using the aforementioned tools, tricks and methods. In this process, raytracing or radiosity can be employed to create a more realistic image. Radiosity is mainly used for real time rendering in games as it takes less processing power and runs more smoothly. Raytracing, however, is best used when rendering a single image as it works out lighting down to the individual pixels. Raytracing is becoming more accessible as technology improves and is beginning to find its way into film, TV and some games; though the gameplay performance does suffer significantly.  

When rendering many frames of an animation or many images under a strict time budget, Render Farms are used to distribute work between multiple servers. This saves a lot of time as one computer doing every frame of a CG sequence in a movie is ineffective and very time consuming. These servers will be running Rendering Engines, which translate the 3D model or scene into a two-dimensional image or frame. Many different engines produce different results as they use a variety of different methods. The three leading Rendering Engines are Lux, Maxwell and Blender. Lux is the fastest of the three, but the results are less detailed and blurrier with the poorest lighting. Maxwell handles colours the best, but each frame takes the longest to render. Blender produces images with sharp, crisp lighting and shadows and looks more realistic but lacks the colours that Maxwell can produce.

[angrycollectordaze-me-blog]

Paper代写：Theory of illusion

下面为大家整理一篇优秀的paper代写范文- Theory of illusion，供大家参考学习，这篇论文讨论了幻象理论。幻象是精神分析理论中的一个核心概念，往事的回忆总是与无意识欲望息息相关，总是在无意识欲望的影响下不断变换、重塑自身，在这一过程中，幻象扮演了重要的角色，它是无意识欲望上演的场景。后来齐泽克把发端于弗洛伊德精神分析学说的幻象理论用于意识形态分析和批判，他的幻象理论启示人们，我们必须穿越幻象，认识到那种把阻碍社会正常发展的因素归因于某个种族或族群的意识形态只是一种幻象，阻碍社会发展、侵蚀社会肌体的“病毒”不是某种外在、外来的入侵者，而是社会自身的必然产物，也就是社会内部深层的矛盾性与对抗性。

Illusion is a core concept in psychoanalytic theory, which first appeared in Freud's works. In his earlier works, Freud argued that memories of early childhood sexual attraction were sometimes the product of illusions rather than actual traces of abuse. This seems to imply that illusion and reality are incompatible, that illusion is the product of illusion and imagination. Not really. According to psychoanalytic theory, reality is not purely objective. "reality is not an undisputed established existence, in which there is only an objective and correct way of perception, but it is constructed by discourse. The memory of the past is always closely related to the unconscious desire, which constantly changes and reconstructs itself under the influence of the unconscious desire. In this process, illusion plays an important role, which is the scene of the unconscious desire.

Later, pull Kang Jicheng Freud's this view, is the illusion as desire, however, show in the illusion is not the satisfaction of desire, is simply the desire itself, because, in essence, desire is not satisfied or implementation, desire often into the opposite of his, or sliding from one object to another object, never attached to a fixed object. "The basic essence of psychoanalysis is that desire is not given in advance, but constructed afterwards." Illusion provides the coordinate and frame for the subject's desire, designates the object of desire for the subject, and makes the subject learn how to desire. Lacan also highlights the protection and defense function of illusion -- illusion protects the subject, making the subject resist the emasement of symbolic order and the lack of the other. The desire built up by the subject in the scene of illusion is to resist the desire of the other.

Lacan to algebraic expression ﹩ derive a to describe the structure of the illusion, for this formula, we can read: split the body of the desire in a small object with a. Symbol ﹩, refers to the division, hit cross-court subject S. In lacan's view, the subject with independent consciousness in Descartes' proposition of "I think therefore I am" is just a myth, and the subject is essentially an other, which is the result of emasculation after entering the symbolic realm. The symbol ◇ is the combination of two Angle brackets, representing "encirclement -- development -- union -- separation", we can understand as the desire of the subject for the object little a. The symbol a, means little a.

For the object little a, we cannot simply understand it as the object or object of desire, but as the object of desire -- the cause, which is not only the object of desire, but also the cause of our desire. "The object little a is not what we desire and pursue. It defines how our desires move. It is a formal framework that gives coherence to our desires. Desire, of course, is metonymic; It always transfers from one object to another; Through these substitutions, however, desire retains a minimal formal coherence, a set of phantasmal features that we desire when we encounter them on a particular object. As the cause of desire, the object little a is nothing more than this coherent formal framework." Zizek points out here that no real object can fill the inner void of desire, and that any object can be an object as long as it constructs our desire and gives our desire coherence, forming an illusion of formal framework.

The object small a is a remnant of the original pleasure. The so-called primary pleasure, refers to the infant and the mother when the original state of integration. When the baby in the mother's arms, food and clothing, feeling love, for the baby, the mother's arms can be said to be an Eden. The subject is eager to return to the state of unity with the mother all his life. However, due to the castration and repression of the "father law", the subject must give up the desire for the mother and place the desire for the mother in some residual objects to pursue the residual of the original pleasure, namely the object small a. The object little a is both within and outside the subject, and it hangs between the subject and the other. So to speak, because the object model of small a mother's breast, voice, eyes, etc., although these objects to a part of the parent, but because the body always have a kind of illusion, namely, he and his mother together, is a part of the mother, so these objects belong to the mother, also belong to him, both within him, and beyond him, between the subject and the mother.

Object small a is never available to us. From the perspective of space, we can only recognize the face of the object small a by "squinting" it in a distorted way. In terms of time, it can only exist as something expected or lost, only in the form of not yet and no longer, and never in the pure here and now. It's like Achilles' tortoise. You can either stay behind it or surpass it. You can never keep pace with it. Therefore, "objectively", the object little a is "empty". This means that human desire is like a bottomless black hole, which can never be filled and can never be satisfied.

For lacan and zizek, our reality, our society, is supported and constructed by illusion. Illusion is a barrier to the real world, once the illusion disappears, too close to the real world, our mansion of reality will collapse and disappear.

According to zizek, "the symbolic order is constructed around a certain traumatic impossibility, around something that cannot be symbolized, that is, around the reality of the original music." The reason why it is impossible is not that it does not exist or do not happen, but that it cannot be symbolized or expressed by linguistic symbols. Occasionally we encounter the reality, but the encounter with the reality causes trauma; The trauma is so heavy and painful that we can't admit it or describe it in words. One of the functions of illusion is to fill in the gaps in the other, the symbolic order, hide the inconsistency of the other, and shield the traumatic impossibility of the other. Illusion can cover the traumatic reality, so that we have a consistent, coherent perception and experience of the symbolic world and the other. Of course, this experience is of a certain illusory nature.

In order to explain the construction and support of illusion to reality, zizek quoted the fable of zhuangzhou's dream butterfly analyzed by lacan in the four basic concepts of psychoanalysis. In one day, zhuangzi's idea on the idea of even things is an idea. "in one day, zhuangzhou dreamed an idea just like a hu butterfly. Russia's natural sleep, QuQuRan weeks also. I wonder if zhou's dream is hu die and hu die's dream is zhou with? Zhou and hu die, then must divide. This is objectification." As for this fable, we can't just interpret it as "life is a dream". Its real ideological connotation lies in the fact that it represents the experience of zhuangzi in his dream and his desire. Zhuangzi and butterflies can be expressed as the relationship between ﹩ derive a, means: chuang tzu thought the butterfly. In reality, in the symbolic world, zhuangzi is of course a person rather than a butterfly. The butterfly is zhuangzi's desire object, which constitutes zhuangzi's illusion -- the framework and structure of identity. However, in the real world of zhuangzi's desire, he is a butterfly dancing without desire. Therefore, we can say that in the real world, zhuangzi is a "real" butterfly; Only in the reality supported by illusion and symbolic order, zhuang zhou was a man. The reality of zhuangzhou as a social person is constructed by the illusion of "zhuangzhou dreams butterfly". If zhuangzhou is too close to the object butterfly of desire, it will lead to the collapse of reality and the collapse of personality.

The unfortunate career of Jonathan hogg, a famous science fiction by heinlein, an American science fiction writer, reveals the illusory nature of reality and the shielding effect of illusion on the real world. At the end of the novel, Jonathan hogg, a mysterious character, tells the randalls, a private investigator, the truth about the universe: the current universe was created by some mysterious species, and there are many similar universes. He himself is a critic of this universe. He discovered several flaws in the universe that he will fix in the next few hours. He warned the detective couple not to open the window of their car on the way back to town, whatever happened, so that they would not notice anything. Hogg closed his eyes and did not wake up. On the drive back to the city, the detective and his wife were initially restrained, but when they saw the policeman on the side of the road, they finally decided to open the window and report the location of hogg's body to the policeman. However, "outside the open window, there was no sunlight, no police, no children -- nothing. Only a grey, invisible mist was moving slowly, as if it were the beginning of chaos. Through the mist they could not see the city ahead, not because it was too foggy, but because there was nothing behind it. There was no sound in the mist, no sign of movement."

In zizek's view, the chaotic world outside the car window is actually the realm of reality; The sunny and busy real world we see through the car window is just a kind of fiction. The car window serves as a barrier separating social reality from reality. The consistency, the coherence, of our hard reality is only an illusion, and at any moment the real world may overflow into reality and be absorbed into it. Once the realm of reality invades reality, the edifice of reality falls apart. "This is the picture that psychoanalysis provides of everyday reality, of a fragile equilibrium. When trauma strikes in an accidental, unpredictable way, that fragile equilibrium can be broken."

To illustrate the obscuration of the real world by illusion, zizek also cites the case of the "burning child" dream explained by lacan in his lectures on the four basic concepts of psychoanalysis. This is an example from Freud's dream interpretation.

A father stayed at his child's bedside for days and nights. When the child died, he went into the next room and lay down, but the door was open so that he could see from his bedroom the room where his child was lying, with tall candles burning around the body. An old man, who had been hired to look after the corpse, sat down beside it, muttering a prayer. After a few hours of sleep, the father dreamed that his child was standing by his bed, shaking his arm and softly complaining, "daddy, can't you see I'm burning?" He awoke, noticed the light in the next room, and hurried towards it, finding the hired man fast asleep. A lighted candle had fallen, setting fire to the shroud and the arm of his beloved child.

The usual explanation for this father's dream is that the main function of dreams is to help the dreamer extend his sleep. The dreamer is often stimulated from the outside world, from reality, and in order to prolong his sleep, the dreamer will quickly construct a dream when the stimulus comes. But when the stimulus was too strong, the dreaming father was awakened.

Lacan's interpretation of the four basic concepts of psychoanalysis is different. The logic of his father's awakening, he thought, was very different from that. The father constructed a dream in his sleep to prolong his sleep and avoid waking up to reality. But in the dream he encountered the reality of his own desires, the child's rebuke to his father: "do you not see that I am burned?" The child's rebuke suggests that the father felt guilty about his child's death. A father is, of course, a loving father, but when the child is sick for a long time, the father unconsciously wants the child to be free from pain. In the dream, the father encounters the reality of his desires: he secretly hopes that the child will simply die in order to be freed from pain. This reality of desire is so sad that it is even more terrible than the external reality, so my father woke up from a dream to escape from the nightmare of his own reality of desire. So "for those who are overwhelmed, reality is a dream." Reality is an illusory construct that shields us from the reality of our desires and prevents us from directly encountering the suffocating pain of that reality.

Illusion structure of people's desire, build people's reality and society, if the invasion, offend the illusion of others, the consequences will be very serious -- will lead to the collapse of the reality of others and collapse, cause fatal blow to others and destroy. For zizek, two short stories by Patricia highsmith are perfect examples of this argument. Her novel black room tells the story of a small town in America. At night, the men of the town would gather in the bar to talk and reminiscence about their youth, always about a desolate old building on a nearby hill they called the black house. The dark room was rumored to be haunted by ghosts and to contain a mad man who would kill anyone who entered it. In addition, the black room is associated with the men's youth memories: there, they smoke for the first time, the first taste of forbidden fruit. So, people warned each other: do not go near the dark room. One day, however, a young man named Tim came to town. After hearing all the stories about the black house, he announced that he would visit the mysterious black house himself the next day. The town has a lot of cynicism about this. The next night, Tim returns to the bar from the black room, crowing that it's just a run-down, dirty building, with nothing mysterious or glamorous about it. The crowd panicked and eventually one of them launched a deadly attack on Tim, who was killed on the spot. According to zizek, the moral of this novel is that illusion is the scene of people's desire, the place of people's desire to bet, and for the residents of a small town, the black house is such an illusion. Tim claims that the black house is just an ordinary bleak house, which no doubt strips away the mysterious aura of the black house, equates the illusion with plain and boring reality, and thus destroys the illusion of infinite charm in people's hearts. The collapse of illusion is the collapse of reality, so Tim is fatally attacked.

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[johnkobra1108]

Know about the tools that help you in the SEO Optimization Process:

If you want to grow sales of your products or services, SEO companies in Orange County CA will be able to support you in developing a real Web Marketing strategy.

A 360° Digital Marketing project in which SEO and SEM are combined with techniques such as Content Marketing and Digital Marketing to achieve certain objectives.

Doing SEO orange county in a professional way means having a scientific and strategic approach by defining specific objectives, measurable and achievable within a given time frame. An approach of this type involves different phases of both analytical/strategic and operational type.

For this reason, search engine optimization orange county offers you a precious list of the best free SEO tools that can help you in the SEO optimization process.

Analysis:

It represents the starting step for any SEO project. Before carrying out an analysis of the keywords on which to work to position a website, or even just to create a new website, it is necessary to understand who our client is, what it offers and how the target to which it refers is composed.

Through appropriate tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console and SEMrush, it will be possible to have a starting framework on which to develop the subsequent phases of the project.

Choice of keywords:

One of the most important steps of any SEO campaign is the choice of keywords with which you want to position yourself in the search engine sites.

We at search engine marketing orange county, consider the search volume produced by each individual keyword, the competitiveness and usefulness of the most relevant keywords. And then make an estimate of the traffic and potential accesses for these keywords. After making sure that the keywords chosen are the best, we develop a targeting strategy, to bring only the really interested people into our customers’ site.

On-site:

Having an optimized site that helps the search engine positioning, is the first step to get positioning results. Search engines use special software (called robots or spiders) to scan the network and index web pages. On-page optimization can, in turn, be divided into two areas: optimization of the HTML code and the structure of a site. And the optimization of textual content and images of a site.

Off page:

Although it is essential to have optimized pages, this is rarely enough to achieve the desired results. Off-page optimization (outside our web pages), essentially concerns the management of links on other sites that link to ours. The "off-page" activity, therefore, consists mostly of managing link popularity through appropriate link building campaigns and is a very important phase of the positioning process.

[photographerguide-blog]

The future of photography is code

New Post has been published on https://photographyguideto.com/must-see/the-future-of-photography-is-code-2/

The future of photography is code

What’s in a camera? A lens, a shutter, a light-sensitive surface and, increasingly, a set of highly sophisticated algorithms. While the physical components are still improving bit by bit, Google, Samsung and Apple are increasingly investing in (and showcasing) improvements wrought entirely from code. Computational photography is the only real battleground now.

The reason for this shift is pretty simple: Cameras can’t get too much better than they are right now, or at least not without some rather extreme shifts in how they work. Here’s how smartphone makers hit the wall on photography, and how they were forced to jump over it.

Not enough buckets

An image sensor one might find in a digital camera

The sensors in our smartphone cameras are truly amazing things. The work that’s been done by the likes of Sony, OmniVision, Samsung and others to design and fabricate tiny yet sensitive and versatile chips is really pretty mind-blowing. For a photographer who’s watched the evolution of digital photography from the early days, the level of quality these microscopic sensors deliver is nothing short of astonishing.

But there’s no Moore’s Law for those sensors. Or rather, just as Moore’s Law is now running into quantum limits at sub-10-nanometer levels, camera sensors hit physical limits much earlier. Think about light hitting the sensor as rain falling on a bunch of buckets; you can place bigger buckets, but there are fewer of them; you can put smaller ones, but they can’t catch as much each; you can make them square or stagger them or do all kinds of other tricks, but ultimately there are only so many raindrops and no amount of bucket-rearranging can change that.

Sensors are getting better, yes, but not only is this pace too slow to keep consumers buying new phones year after year (imagine trying to sell a camera that’s 3 percent better), but phone manufacturers often use the same or similar camera stacks, so the improvements (like the recent switch to backside illumination) are shared amongst them. So no one is getting ahead on sensors alone.

See the new iPhone’s ‘focus pixels’ up close

Perhaps they could improve the lens? Not really. Lenses have arrived at a level of sophistication and perfection that is hard to improve on, especially at small scale. To say space is limited inside a smartphone’s camera stack is a major understatement — there’s hardly a square micron to spare. You might be able to improve them slightly as far as how much light passes through and how little distortion there is, but these are old problems that have been mostly optimized.

The only way to gather more light would be to increase the size of the lens, either by having it A: project outwards from the body; B: displace critical components within the body; or C: increase the thickness of the phone. Which of those options does Apple seem likely to find acceptable?

In retrospect it was inevitable that Apple (and Samsung, and Huawei, and others) would have to choose D: none of the above. If you can’t get more light, you just have to do more with the light you’ve got.

Isn’t all photography computational?

The broadest definition of computational photography includes just about any digital imaging at all. Unlike film, even the most basic digital camera requires computation to turn the light hitting the sensor into a usable image. And camera makers differ widely in the way they do this, producing different JPEG processing methods, RAW formats and color science.

For a long time there wasn’t much of interest on top of this basic layer, partly from a lack of processing power. Sure, there have been filters, and quick in-camera tweaks to improve contrast and color. But ultimately these just amount to automated dial-twiddling.

The first real computational photography features were arguably object identification and tracking for the purposes of autofocus. Face and eye tracking made it easier to capture people in complex lighting or poses, and object tracking made sports and action photography easier as the system adjusted its AF point to a target moving across the frame.

These were early examples of deriving metadata from the image and using it proactively, to improve that image or feeding forward to the next.

In DSLRs, autofocus accuracy and flexibility are marquee features, so this early use case made sense; but outside a few gimmicks, these “serious” cameras generally deployed computation in a fairly vanilla way. Faster image sensors meant faster sensor offloading and burst speeds, some extra cycles dedicated to color and detail preservation and so on. DSLRs weren’t being used for live video or augmented reality. And until fairly recently, the same was true of smartphone cameras, which were more like point and shoots than the all-purpose media tools we know them as today.

The limits of traditional imaging

Despite experimentation here and there and the occasional outlier, smartphone cameras are pretty much the same. They have to fit within a few millimeters of depth, which limits their optics to a few configurations. The size of the sensor is likewise limited — a DSLR might use an APS-C sensor 23 by 15 millimeters across, making an area of 345 mm2; the sensor in the iPhone XS, probably the largest and most advanced on the market right now, is 7 by 5.8 mm or so, for a total of 40.6 mm2.

Roughly speaking, it’s collecting an order of magnitude less light than a “normal” camera, but is expected to reconstruct a scene with roughly the same fidelity, colors and such — around the same number of megapixels, too. On its face this is sort of an impossible problem.

Improvements in the traditional sense help out — optical and electronic stabilization, for instance, make it possible to expose for longer without blurring, collecting more light. But these devices are still being asked to spin straw into gold.

Luckily, as I mentioned, everyone is pretty much in the same boat. Because of the fundamental limitations in play, there’s no way Apple or Samsung can reinvent the camera or come up with some crazy lens structure that puts them leagues ahead of the competition. They’ve all been given the same basic foundation.

All competition therefore comprises what these companies build on top of that foundation.

Image as stream

The key insight in computational photography is that an image coming from a digital camera’s sensor isn’t a snapshot, the way it is generally thought of. In traditional cameras the shutter opens and closes, exposing the light-sensitive medium for a fraction of a second. That’s not what digital cameras do, or at least not what they can do.

A camera’s sensor is constantly bombarded with light; rain is constantly falling on the field of buckets, to return to our metaphor, but when you’re not taking a picture, these buckets are bottomless and no one is checking their contents. But the rain is falling nevertheless.

To capture an image the camera system picks a point at which to start counting the raindrops, measuring the light that hits the sensor. Then it picks a point to stop. For the purposes of traditional photography, this enables nearly arbitrarily short shutter speeds, which isn’t much use to tiny sensors.

Why not just always be recording? Theoretically you could, but it would drain the battery and produce a lot of heat. Fortunately, in the last few years image processing chips have gotten efficient enough that they can, when the camera app is open, keep a certain duration of that stream — limited resolution captures of the last 60 frames, for instance. Sure, it costs a little battery, but it’s worth it.

Access to the stream allows the camera to do all kinds of things. It adds context.

Context can mean a lot of things. It can be photographic elements like the lighting and distance to subject. But it can also be motion, objects, intention.

A simple example of context is what is commonly referred to as HDR, or high dynamic range imagery. This technique uses multiple images taken in a row with different exposures to more accurately capture areas of the image that might have been underexposed or overexposed in a single exposure. The context in this case is understanding which areas those are and how to intelligently combine the images together.

This can be accomplished with exposure bracketing, a very old photographic technique, but it can be accomplished instantly and without warning if the image stream is being manipulated to produce multiple exposure ranges all the time. That’s exactly what Google and Apple now do.

Something more complex is of course the “portrait mode” and artificial background blur or bokeh that is becoming more and more common. Context here is not simply the distance of a face, but an understanding of what parts of the image constitute a particular physical object, and the exact contours of that object. This can be derived from motion in the stream, from stereo separation in multiple cameras, and from machine learning models that have been trained to identify and delineate human shapes.

These techniques are only possible, first, because the requisite imagery has been captured from the stream in the first place (an advance in image sensor and RAM speed), and second, because companies developed highly efficient algorithms to perform these calculations, trained on enormous data sets and immense amounts of computation time.

What’s important about these techniques, however, is not simply that they can be done, but that one company may do them better than the other. And this quality is entirely a function of the software engineering work and artistic oversight that goes into them.

A system to tell good fake bokeh from bad

DxOMark did a comparison of some early artificial bokeh systems; the results, however, were somewhat unsatisfying. It was less a question of which looked better, and more of whether they failed or succeeded in applying the effect. Computational photography is in such early days that it is enough for the feature to simply work to impress people. Like a dog walking on its hind legs, we are amazed that it occurs at all.

But Apple has pulled ahead with what some would say is an almost absurdly over-engineered solution to the bokeh problem. It didn’t just learn how to replicate the effect — it used the computing power it has at its disposal to create virtual physical models of the optical phenomenon that produces it. It’s like the difference between animating a bouncing ball and simulating realistic gravity and elastic material physics.

Why go to such lengths? Because Apple knows what is becoming clear to others: that it is absurd to worry about the limits of computational capability at all. There are limits to how well an optical phenomenon can be replicated if you are taking shortcuts like Gaussian blurring. There are no limits to how well it can be replicated if you simulate it at the level of the photon.

Similarly the idea of combining five, 10, or 100 images into a single HDR image seems absurd, but the truth is that in photography, more information is almost always better. If the cost of these computational acrobatics is negligible and the results measurable, why shouldn’t our devices be performing these calculations? In a few years they too will seem ordinary.

If the result is a better product, the computational power and engineering ability has been deployed with success; just as Leica or Canon might spend millions to eke fractional performance improvements out of a stable optical system like a $2,000 zoom lens, Apple and others are spending money where they can create value: not in glass, but in silicon.

Double vision

One trend that may appear to conflict with the computational photography narrative I’ve described is the advent of systems comprising multiple cameras.

This technique doesn’t add more light to the sensor — that would be prohibitively complex and expensive optically, and probably wouldn’t work anyway. But if you can free up a little space lengthwise (rather than depthwise, which we found impractical) you can put a whole separate camera right by the first that captures photos extremely similar to those taken by the first.

A mock-up of what a line of color iPhones could look like

Now, if all you want to do is re-enact Wayne’s World at an imperceptible scale (camera one, camera two… camera one, camera two…) that’s all you need. But no one actually wants to take two images simultaneously, a fraction of an inch apart.

These two cameras operate either independently (as wide-angle and zoom) or one is used to augment the other, forming a single system with multiple inputs.

The thing is that taking the data from one camera and using it to enhance the data from another is — you guessed it — extremely computationally intensive. It’s like the HDR problem of multiple exposures, except far more complex as the images aren’t taken with the same lens and sensor. It can be optimized, but that doesn’t make it easy.

So although adding a second camera is indeed a way to improve the imaging system by physical means, the possibility only exists because of the state of computational photography. And it is the quality of that computational imagery that results in a better photograph — or doesn’t. The Light camera with its 16 sensors and lenses is an example of an ambitious effort that simply didn’t produce better images, though it was using established computational photography techniques to harvest and winnow an even larger collection of images.

Light and code

The future of photography is computational, not optical. This is a massive shift in paradigm and one that every company that makes or uses cameras is currently grappling with. There will be repercussions in traditional cameras like SLRs (rapidly giving way to mirrorless systems), in phones, in embedded devices and everywhere that light is captured and turned into images.

Sometimes this means that the cameras we hear about will be much the same as last year’s, as far as megapixel counts, ISO ranges, f-numbers and so on. That’s okay. With some exceptions these have gotten as good as we can reasonably expect them to be: Glass isn’t getting any clearer, and our vision isn’t getting any more acute. The way light moves through our devices and eyeballs isn’t likely to change much.

What those devices do with that light, however, is changing at an incredible rate. This will produce features that sound ridiculous, or pseudoscience babble on stage, or drained batteries. That’s okay, too. Just as we have experimented with other parts of the camera for the last century and brought them to varying levels of perfection, we have moved onto a new, non-physical “part” which nonetheless has a very important effect on the quality and even possibility of the images we take.

Read more: https://techcrunch.com