THE TRAIN
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SEE THE ANIMAL
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SEE THE MUSIC
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A BRISK SWIM
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UNSEEN FORCES
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SEGWAY
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FLYING FISH
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FETCH
CATCH
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1 minute trailer
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Video documentary 33 min. (2005-2006)
Although Pablo is a master of the Flamenco guitar style, his talent is virtually unknown, but for the few who have heard him play, he is one of the greatest in the world. Born with a brilliant talent for music — he’s been practicing for over 30 years. I wanted to help Pablo find his way into a career in music, so I made a website where people could listen to samples from his album and buy a CD. The website now has over 100 regular subscribers. http://pablokrohn.com
It would 10 people one day to write the same amount as it takes 1 person in 10 days. There’s a mountain of books waiting to be written but they’re being held back while we decide who is the real genius. What happens if the book turns out to be a classic? Who will get the attribution of authorship?
This has always been the fatal obstacle with collective creativity. But the answer is simple. Let the machine that is us receive the accolade. This is the seed that corporate capital is born from, but it’s not the only fruit that it might bear. The technology of mechanized social structures as a productive device has been going on since the beginnings of the industrial revolution but is left almost exclusively for the production of financial profit. By using the same systems of abstraction, individuals may be freed from concerns of originality and authorship and revel in the lofty weightlessness of the collective body. We as the artist(s) will share whatever successes and failures our machine might bring, but only in so far as we might enjoy anyone else’s work, as readers, and the machine will inherit all the sovereignty and rights of the individual, for better or worse. For once in our creative lives, we as the maker will finally be reunited in the complete sense with our soul mates, the audience.
In a workshop that I gave with FutureFarmers at Pasadena City College on March 17, 2008 we implemented an experimental version of this system. The following schematic describes how the system was organized:
The following PDF attachments are the rules that each of the participants of the system were to follow to facilitate interoperability and the text that was produced in process:
writingmachine
seeds
products
Here are some pictures from the event:
There are many situations in life where decisions have to be made by chance operators. Situations where multiple interests are in conflict and the decision has to be made by a impartial decider. These devices are many, including the coin flip, drawing straws, names in a hat, and many more. One of the most common and readily available is the game Rock, Paper, Scissors (RPS). The use of RPS in decision making between friends is common because of it’s simplicity and it’s availability. It is commonly thought of as a truly fair and impartial decision maker, but unlike the other devices listed above, RPS has certain characteristics that make advantage strategies possible. If it is reasonable to imagine the need to make many decisions in one’s lifetime through the use of a impartial mechanism of some sort, it would be beneficial to have some strategies for advantage in one of the most common readily at hand.
People have been using the game of RPS as a random decision mechanism for several thousand years. It is a derivative of the Japanese game Jan-ken-pon1 which was invented in the late 19th century and acquired popularity world-wide throughout the 20th century. One of the most notable features of the game is it’s simple and balanced symmetry. A game for two players, each player may choose one of three symbols, both players reveal their choice at the same time, the player with the superior choice wins. Games are often played in sets of three throws where two out of three wins the match.
From a mathematical perspective all three choices are in non-transitive relation to one another. That is to say, rock beats scissors, scissors beat paper but paper beats rock. In this relationship it should be impossible for there to be one universally superior choice. This is what gives the game it’s balanced tension. But on closer inspection, other factors become relevant.
First, the symbols that players choose from are not arbitrary or abstract. They are references to tangible cultural objects that have connections in many societies around the world. These symbols, while probably having meaning to most people who play the game, do not have absolute meaning to all people who play the game. One person’s connection to the symbol of rock is likely to be different from the next person’s. These aspects lead to various tendencies towards cultural, sexual, and individual bias in the subconscious perception of the inherent balance between the three symbols. For instance it could be possible that males have a higher probability of choosing rock on their opening move where females have a higher probability of choosing scissors.
Also it is important to notice that a RPS does not usually happen in a blind exchange. People usually play the game face to face and there aren’t rules against talking to each other while playing. This introduces the normal competitive advantages and weaknesses found in many forms of gambling, especially card games like poker. Many people have unconscious tendencies that can give away their next move, such as body language, hesitation, or recurring patterns in iterative games. Players also may try to skew the odds in their favor through attempted psychological manipulation. This would include tactics like projecting where a player would suggest to their opponent what would be a good next move or inform them of what they themselves intend to choose. This aspect shares many of the same considerations as the iterative variation of prisoners dilemma.
The considerations that I have noted above contribute to the existence of competitive strategies in rock, paper, scissors. The idea of a strategy in a game that is commonly understood as a random decider is usually met with skepticism and curiosity at first, but a history of tournaments for both human and computational algorithm adds confidence to the idea that competitive strategy could be effective in some situations.
There are three dominant strategies that persist across many forms of competitive rock, paper, scissors. The first is projection and detection where the same basic concepts in competitive card playing apply. The second is random, where the player’s primary goal is to maintain a total absence of any recognizable pattern in the belief that over the long run random (under the assumption that random will provide a stochastic distribution) will render the highest frequency of wins (33%). And the third is gambit play. A gambit is combination of three throws decided in advance of a best two out of three match. With three throws in a game and three states for each throw, there are 27 possible combinations. Inevitably everyone will play one of these 27 combinations regardless of their strategy. The idea behind the gambit play, is that given that some combinations culturally are not as effective as others, and that given that a common and effective competitive strategy is projection/detection, it makes sense to decide in advance on all three throws before the game begins. This has a couple of advantages, one is that it allows the player to focus more concentration on projection/detection during the game. Second, based on the belief that randomness is exceedingly difficult for a human player to maintain dynamically, a gambit strategy is preferable to an accidental improvised pattern.
The aspect I found particularly interesting in gambit play is that there are eight of the 27 that are regarded as more effective than the rest. The idea that one combination could be probabilistically more likely to win is interesting to me because it’s possible culturally but impossible mathematically.
According to The Official Rock Paper Scissors Strategy Guide:
The mathematically inclined will quickly realize that there are only twenty-seven possible Gambits. All of them have been used and documented in tournament play. Each has several names from a variety of locales. There is no such thing as a “new” Gambit.
The Great Eight Gambits are the eight deemed to be the most historically significant and widely employed. They also happen to be the only eight Gambits where there is near unanimous consent upon the names.2
The first task that I undertook was to build a simple model that would spread a random distribution of the 27 combinations Gambits across 1,000 players and have each player randomly paired up for 4,000 games of Rock, Paper, Scissors where a game is best two out of three throws there is no communication between players, no access to player histories and no cultural preferences were made between symbols. What I found was that there was no Gambit strategy that would persistently dominate the system. There were some marginal leaders, but those would change every time the trial was run. This test is not completely representative to an actual lifetime of RPS decision making because there is no preferential attachment to the cultural concepts that the symbols represent, and there was no possibility for bluffing or learning but from a strictly mathematical sense, it should not matter what Gambit you choose from game to game because ultimately it’s a wash.
The problem of cultural preference is exceedingly difficult to model with any realistic accuracy without a more comprehensive survey of games played in various cultures around the world. For instance if there is a theory that Rock is the most common opening throw in a game of best two out of three and that it’s that is attributed to subconscious cultural or sexual influences, there might also be the possibility that it’s strictly a physiognomical reflex to the way the game is played (with three beats of a closed fist leading in to the players revealing their throws), and that’s assuming that it actually is a trend and not just a perception of a trend.
In my study I chose to focus on the strategy of projection and detection and left other theoretical strategies out of the model. I wanted to find out if there was a competitive strategy that constantly did better than other’s in casual games of best two out of three played between strangers who have no information on the other’s playing history or preferences. This is how most games of RPS are played, and especially when it’s used for a random decider.
For every player in the system that I designed there is randomly chosen a preference to project their gambit strategy or to detect the opponent’s gambit strategy:
What I found when I ran this system is that at any number of players and any number of games, there is never a consistently advantageous gambit, but there is every time an advantageous project/detect preference. Players who have the preference to detect and the preference to trust consistently showed better results than the other three possible combinations of project, detect, trust and distrust. What I mean by better results is not however that their average or total wins were much better than the others but that their total losses were significantly lower. Appendix A shows the typical results that this configuration produces. The image below shows a screen shot of a visualization of the system in process:
In this visualization a player is represented by a circle. It’s radius is a representation of the accumulation of it’s wins and losses. When a player wins a best two out of three match it’s radius increases by 0.2 pixels, when it losses it’s radius decreases by 0.2 pixels. It’s color is a representation of it’s specific strategy, if two players have exactly the same gambit and project/detect strategies then they will also have the same color. As the system is running all players have the freedom to move on the X and Y axis. They have a grouping preference with a threshold of 0.5 pixels. The idea behind this kind of visualization was that if islands of homogenous color would emerge in groups, that would indicate that there is a specific strategy that is showing consistent results. As you can see in the image above there is not any significant grouping of color taking place. In the image below however there is, the image below is from the same system with the same number of players with the same rules but this time the color coding was changed to only represent the project/detect strategies and not the gambit strategies:

As you can see, in this version there are clear separations between the colors indicating very consistent performances from all of the the strategies being observed. I found it quite surprising that these two images are from the same exact system. It’s an eye opening experience to be looking for a certain correlation that simply does not exist and then to suddenly discover that there was a correlation all along, but it just wasn’t the one that you expected.
From these results it’s possible to say that there is no specific gambit strategy that will give you a consistent advantage over your opponent in a random pairing with no profile or history on the other player. It is advantageous to choose a gambit for the other benefits discussed earlier in this paper, but the specific gambit you choose shouldn’t matter unless additional information about your opponent is available. You can have a probabilistic advantage if your opponent is trying to project by trusting their projection and playing the gambit that beats it.
APPENDIX A
1,000 players randomly select one of 108 possible combinations and play 4,000 games of best two out of three in randomly paired partners. The results show the trends of project and detect strategies with no regard to individual throw strategies.
APENDEX B:
Here are two videos demonstrating the difference between color coding as described above.
This one shows a different color for every possible combination of gambit and bluffing style:
This one shows a different color only for each of the four bluffing styles:
FOOTNOTES
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janken [↩]
- The Official Rock Paper Scissors Strategy Guide; Fireside Books (November 9, 2004) by Douglas Walker and Graham Walker [↩]
Custom software that acts like a chat client was sent out to 16 selected participants. When the application is launched the participant is presented with a small collection of words and are asked to respond to the words with the first sentences that come to mind. Behind the scenes the software is busy filtering the response and uploading it to a weblog on the internet, and then retrieving the next response to show to the participant. Messages are filtered by subtracting the 300 most common words used in the English language. This filtered version of the entered text is used only to prompt the next participant while the untreated text is posted to the weblog in the order that it is received.
The results can be seen at:
http://socialrecord.com
A copy of the book can be purchased at:
http://www.lulu.com/content/1465555
These chairs are simple props that are meant to give a hands on demonstration of opposing co-operative forces.
Two chairs made from pine and plywood and a 3minute23second video demonstrating the chairs.
I have invented a game. It’s called, What’s Your Pattern. This is a game to be played by four players and requires only a writing implement and a surface to draw on. Players take turns adding numbers to a grid, one of the players is writing numbers at random while the other three are following a secret arithmetic rule. The objective for these three players is to individually determine which one of the other players are not following any pattern. The objective for the player who is writing numbers at random is to deceive the others for as many rounds as possible.
This activity could be thought of as an attempt at applying the formal syntax of natural number sets and simple arithmetic to the rhetorical argumentation of post-modern critique and specifically Foucault’s theory of governmentality. The use of natural numbers and simple arithmetic acts as a layer of abstraction that would hopefully allow a group of individuals to experience some the basic principals of self governing normative behavior as demonstrated through this simplified model without having to process excessively complected language.
In order to better inform players, I have produced an instructional video that demonstrates the basic rules of this game. I see both the creation of the game and the production of an instructional video explaining the rules of the game as good representations of the logical process of my artistic production. All of the work that I make comes out of a similar motivation. I feel that my work is successful if it creates a change for the audience but I see my work as more successful if I can create change using materials that are already around us.
This is a collaboration that I did with Scott Barry. He sent me the the shapes and I put the words to them. The process was conducted entirely through email communication.
colaboration with birdstand.com
In an assignment for one Amy Franceschini’s courses at SFAI, she asked us to make a zine on any topic of our choice. We were limited in materials to any cutting implements, adhesives, and a copy of the New York Times that she provided. I chose for the topic of my zine a set of instructions that would enable anyone to be in control of the media that they consume.
Bean Torrent is a game in the Mancala family that is designed to create a living memory of the file sharing protocol BitTorrent. The game is like other Mancala games in the sense that it consists of a simple board design and some type of bean, seed, or stones for the game pieces, and that game play consists of moving the pieces from one place to another.
Bean Torrent is different from many other types of Mancala games in that the formal design of the board is nonlinear and that the objective is to distribute the pieces rather than collect them. In Bean Torrent the objective is to distribute all of the pieces evenly throughout the board in the least amount of moves. The reason that I was interested in the Mancala family is that it has had the ability to transcend culture, time, and technology. I thought that by using Mancala as a conceptual vehicle it might be possible to maintain and preserve the fundamental principals of a network protocol outside the constraints of the technology that it evolved from. This effort is important because it makes accessible certain social developments that are evolving from within networked culture to a much wider population and reconnects the virtual politics with the real life. What kinds of effects could the BitTorrent protocol add to an indigenous agricultural society? What ever kind of changes that are taking place in social interaction as it exists on the world wide web and other digital read/write networks are normally unavailable to any population that might be limited by it’s access to technology. Many theorists believe that this difference may create the rise of an ever more drastic split in social classes based not on monetary capital but instead on access to informational transactions. Some people believe that the answer to this problem is bringing technology to the people who don’t have access to it. Leapfrogging projects that try to develop an inexpensive laptop or ad hoc wireless networks in effort of leveling the technological playing field seem to me only part of the solution. Today, the majority of the worlds population does not have direct access to the network, those few who do have access are struggling to understand why their online relationships are also defined as consumer generated content and how their life online relates to their life off line. There are no constructive tools available to individuals for building an understanding of informational transactions and network presence. This is an area of research that is conducted almost exclusively by corporate interests alone. When we think of social programs that are trying to provide cell phones to people in Africa and are sponsored by a multinational corporation we could see that as an explicit attempt by the corporation to gain early access to an untapped natural resource, which is namely a social network that has not yet been formed. The idea of Bean Torrent is important also in the sense that if all p2p network protocols could somehow be regulated or restricted at some point, the ideological principals that are built into the protocol could survive off line to be rebuilt again at some later point in the development and evolution of the network. Even if the game itself is simple and maybe boring, that’s not what’s important. The linkage between the virtual and the real is what is important to me in this work. An idea that was developed out of a need that existed in a virtual space instantiated in a real space to create new uses and at the same time preserve the concept redundantly.
download Bean Torrent
This is a print on demand book that I made using processing. It was originally designed as a game to be played by two people using graph paper, markers, and a pair of 30 sided die. I was making a series of drawings using this game and my friend asked why should I waste my time making these drawings when someone could easily write a program to make them instead. I thought the idea of autonomy versus monotony was interesting and I was also curious to experiment with the differences in randomness created by software trying to resemble randomness created by dice.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 | import processing.pdf.*; boolean record; int[] storage = {5, 5}; int padding; void setup() { size(3000, 3000, PDF, "notRandom.pdf"); padding = width/10; background(255); smooth(); } void draw() { fill(255); rect(0, 0, width, height); for(int i=0; i<width; i+=padding) { stroke(0); strokeWeight(0); line(0, i, width, i); line(i, 0, i, height); } for(int i=0; i<2; i++) { float density = random(0, 8000)+4000; for(int x=0; x<density; x+=100) { int a = int(random(11)); int b = int(random(11)); strokeWeight(7); if (i%2!=0) stroke(0, 0, 255); else stroke(255, 0, 0); line(storage[0]*padding, storage[1]*padding, a*padding, b*padding); storage[0] = a; storage[1] = b; } } PGraphicsPDF pdf = (PGraphicsPDF) g; pdf.nextPage(); if (frameCount == 350) exit(); } |
I have developed a type of furniture that I call the We Desk that aims to facilitate the same level of abstraction as an anonymous bulletin board system by using the formal elements of the cubicle but reconfiguring it’s dimensions into a wedge instead of a square. The cubicle can now be arranged in a radial mass that forms the spacial requirements for social interactions that are stripped from the notion of individuality. In the front of each We Desk there is a covered mail slot and on each desk there is a typewriter. Through certain rules of interaction peers within this We Desk network pass messages through the mail slot to the other side where a messenger who also acts under certain rules of abstraction delivers the message along to another peer. In all this interaction each individual is under the charge to try to connect to the collective intellect of the group. In some way this could be thought of as a micro-socialist system that could be implemented within a larger metropolitan space. Where instead of money, the economy is based on informational exchange as a way of solidifying a community and creating political leverage.
These are some examples I’m working with to show how formal languages may be reused to address a more general audience.
