This summer we began work on the third of three autonomous entities we’ve been developing with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and Renew Media. It’s an “unmanned surface vehicle,” or water robot, made for protests on or near aqueous points of interest . Of course, it’s too dangerous for people to do such protests, so we need robots.

It’s early days on the project, which is essentially control systems, power, and software to convert a commercially available $400 kayak. We are hoping for DIY imitations, and encouraging other technologists to get involved, as our resources are pretty limited. If you’re thinking about joining the effort, let me just assure you that nothing makes your month like building a robot kayak that demands the restoration of habeas corpus.

The project isn’t flip: there has been a lot of chatter that parts of the executive branch of the US Government are interested in closing down Guantanamo. It’s important that we keep this in the public consciousness, as — without pressure — it would be easy for the Bush administration to simply pack people up to various black sites to be tortured. I’d argue that it’s better that they come to the US, and we end this shell game. I’ve heard wingnuts argue that it’s too dangerous to bring “terrorists” to US soil, but I don’t understand that argument as we seem to be doing alright with the ones we already have.

Video of first tests here.

Friends and collaborators at the Fabrica de Cosas Bonitas successfully deployed their ANA robot at the G8 summit. They used a version of a design we’ve been working on for a small, inexpensive, and relatively easy to build robot for protest and progressive political actions: designs will be available on this site by the end of July. Julio Fernandez Ostolaza built and programmed the version pictured above, and the mission was successful. One more step in our shared mission of allowing robots to move from military employment to non-violence. Congrats, Cosas Bonitas.

Years ago, I was working in a sculpture courtyard at the visual arts building at UCSD. I looked up just as a professor of mine, BM, was walking through the courtyard with a fellow graduate student of mine, AJ. AJ was dragging a roll-on suitcase, and they looked very serious. BM’s dog, an old, lame mutt who BM had inherited from a loved one, had died. They were going to bury the dog in the canyon behind our offices, no doubt illegal, but a good idea.

After burial, we lay flat stones over the grave. Both AJ and I had heard to do this, because the coyotes that circled the campus eating house cats were also quick to dig up graves. I could understand the coyotes doing that; they’re animals. As a human, though, I felt pretty good about honoring the little mutt, and felt like our little ceremony might have been the most respectful and honest funeral I’d ever been to.

Speaking of foul smelling animals feasting on fresh corpses, take a look at this Fox News obituary (h/t crooks and liars). I remember those students in High School who were too busy torturing flies or ogling the young teacher to pay attention to the books they were assigned; I guess I know what they do for a living now.

After watching this bizarre video, take a moment to reread some Vonnegut. This excerpt, from Slaughterhouse 5, tells the story of a war vet who slips in and out of time:

…He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from a airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at the backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments for some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly into racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids.

One of Vonnegut’s editors, purportedly hearing that Vonnegut was writing a novel about war, purportedly said, “Why not write about glaciers?” By which he meant, according to Vonnegut, that both phenomena were equally unstoppable, especially by a novel. Vonnegut wryly admitted, in the intro to S5, that his editor was right. But humankind has successfully proven that, working together with the power of technology, labor, and globalism, we can successfully destroy glaciers. Global warming is severing them from their mountains and sliding them, dramatically, into the sea. Maybe we can do the same with war.

“By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas in December.”

I’m not going to say that Kurt Vonnegut was the most subtle novelist I’ve ever read, but he was clearly one of the most talented social critics to have lived and worked in the US in the last century.

When I was living in Troy, NY I read Player Piano, a novel about engineering and automation, set in a town called Ilium. I am embarassed to say it, but I actually looked on the map, because Ilium was supposed to be equidistant to Albany and Schenechtady — both real towns. It was supposed to be full of engineers, which, of course, is true for much of upstate New York. My father pointed out, to my chagrin, that Ilium was the latin name for Troy. That immediately tripled the resonance of the book, about the process by which peoples’ skills and intelligence are taken, turned into mechanisms, and made obsolete. I was working on the DJ I, Robot project, and the novel was more or less describing what I was doing. Even later I learned that Player Piano was a direct response to Norbert Weiner’s Cybernetics, published four years afterwards and still at the beginning of the cybernetics bubble.

I am trying to imagine what kind of heaven Vonnegut would have wanted to go to, and I’m torn about whether he’d have wanted to watch the planet or not, as he felt and expressed extraordinry pain for human folly. But Vonnegut wasn’t a misanthropist. He didn’t hate the player, he hated the game (and the player piano). He hated what people seem capable of doing to each other, precisely because he loved the people.

Perhaps the amateur astronomer Charles W. Juels figured out the whole heaven thing ahead of time. In 1999 he named an asteroid — #25399 — Vonnegut. Peaceful, but close enough to keep an eye on things. And to potentially still have an impact.

I’ll be speaking at the Media Technology Day at the Kungliga Tekniska högskolan, aka KTH in Stockholm. I spoke to a nice mixed group there in the late 90’s when I was a graduate student, and remember being corrected when I misquoted Althusser. Tough room.

13.50 – 15.00 April 19.

News from the New York Times that US Army troops will now be serving 15 month tours instead of 12, in addition to being sent unprepared, poorly equiped, and sent back on successive tours wounded. This will shatter the lives and families of even more domestic victims of this deeply stupid and unnecessary war.

WASHINGTON, April 11 — All active-duty Army troops now in Iraq or Afghanistan or headed to either country will serve 15-month tours of duty, up from the usual 12-month tours, effective immediately, the Pentagon announced today.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates called the change “a difficult and necessary interim step” and said it would at least give soldiers and their families more predictability than they have now…. Mr. Gates said the impetus for the increase in Army combat tours had come from the service’s leaders, who saw a demand for “more clarity and fairness.”

Time to watch the most inspiring documentary produced yet about domestic class politics in the war in Iraq, Eminem’s Mosh. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a smart, stylish attempt to radicalize Americans — especially those directly affected — towards political opposition against the war. Why aren’t we seeing dozens of videos this good?

We were filming a brief video segment at the Lab today, with journalist John Hockenberry, on some of the non-standard interpretations of assistive technologies our group is working on. The last segment was with Alyssa Wright, and Hockenberry strapped on her pamphleteer/ performance technology, Cherry Blossoms.

Alyssa began working on Cherry Blossoms last semester, wondering how to think about — and feel about — the civilian war deaths in Baghdad. She found an artist’s site that superimposed the map of Baghdad over San Francisco; it was a lovely project, but it failed to engender the empathy and sense of tragedy that remarkable works of art can. She felt this was important, because the average American believes that about 9000 Iraqi civilians have died so far in the war. The truth is very different.

Cherry Blossoms is a backpack that uses a small microcontroller and a GPS unit. Recent news of bombings in Iraq are downloaded to the unit every night, and their relative location to the center of the city are superimposed on a map of Boston. If the wearer walks in a space in Boston that correlates to a site of violence in Baghdad, the backpack detonates and releases a compressed air cloud of confetti, looking for all the world like smoke and shrapnel. Each piece of confetti is inscribed with the name of a civilian who died in the war, and the circumstances of their death.

Alyssa’s genius was in sacrificing herself. After all, it’s not an easy piece to perform. You don’t know when it’s going to blow. It’s shocking and loud, and one has no sense of how others will react. Of course, she won’t get hurt by the compressed air, but she might well be confused for a suicide bomber (or, more appropriately, a mooninite) and arrested.

I’m writing about the project because even though I knew exactly what was going to happen, even though I’ve seen test runs, even though I worked with Alyssa from the inception of the project, I was completely rocked, as was Hockenberry, when the backpack exploded. He was brave to wear it, but he was dumbstruck by the effect of it blowing. Lives, fluttering, pale and light as souls, covered him like ash.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau considered empathy the most primary, most basic human emotion; the one that allows civilization to exist. His Second Discourse was written, for the city of Geneva, to offer a moral basis for the abolition of slavery. It’s incredible to imagine the necessity of building a moral basis to oppose slavery, but at one time it was. It’s no less incredible that the average US citizen underestimates how many innocent civilians their tax dollars have helped to kill by several orders of magnitude. Our system of public media and government has developed in a direction that systematically helps reduce empathy. And, as a result, civilization is going elsewhere.

I have a brief article in Bidoun, journal of Middle Eastern of arts and culture, on the ways that new American weapons systems use images. These remotely piloted vehicles relay video back to operators, who then make decisions based on what they see. The process is pretty complicated, and none of the contingency of the meaning of images — these guys aren’t reading Mulvey, Sekula, or Sondheim — makes it into the official training documents.

We have little reference for understanding images of this nature; they are like documentary, in that they offer a view, with implicit and explicit perspective, on a non-fiction event. But they are like computer games in that the viewer is supposed to interfere in that event. Drone-generated video is unlike documentary or video games — or indeed any other visual media — in that the decisions made based upon them are both immediate and possibly fatal.

One cockpit video that swept the Web in 2004 showed the obliteration of a large group of men in Fallujah, based on no apparent information other than that they were men, and walking out of a mosque. Do the millions of dollars of imaging equipment used to make this film present a neutral image? Is the suspicion with which these images are taken not transmitted through the apparatus to the viewer? My guess is that these technologies, while deadly and effective, are increasingly isolating Americans to the point that they are unable to gauge their own telemediated actions… After seeing the real-time video of the Falluja bomb obliterating a score of anonymous pedestrians, the overwhelmed pilot simply sighed, “Oh, dude.” He was flying blind.

Check out Bidoun…

I have two brief texts in the new Sensorium catalog, an abecedarius edited by the inimitable Caroline Jones for the List Arts Center show of the same name. It’s a lovely book, and several of the other contributors are among my favorite scholars.

One entry is on robotics, where I argue that there’s a close relationship between the popular culture around robots and academic robot research. Robotics is looking to be similar to AI in the ratio of its promise to its societal contribution (i.e., approaching infinity), but those of us who love the promise love it faithfully. I think we’re in the lead-up to a second generation of automata as popular entertainment artifacts, a sort of R2-lipomania, if you will. You won’t? I can’t blame you.

My entry on control borrows heavily from Miriam Levin’s introduction to her edited volume, “Cultures of Control,” but moves on to look at what I see as one of the defining motivations of technologists, their urge to control:

Understanding the relationship between creating technologies and the “pleasure of being the cause” can help demystify many themes in research and development. A scientist, engineer, or artist may pursue a particular project to advance knowledge, end human suffering, increase productivity, or any number of other conscious, stated reasons. But in any case, they are usually doing so also — or even primarily! — because of this innate animal pleasure. Successful pedagogy in technical education seeks to introduce the joy of control to students early on: The thrill of the successful compile, the grace of the kinematic motion, the correct spin of the electron all release endorphins as surely as a nice risotto.