Sep 18, 2011
Jun 04, 2008
Nov 12, 2007
Jun 06, 2010
Oct 25, 2010
Mar 10, 2013

Visualizing Complex Systems

It’s a fine thing to know thyself, I’m told.  If only that were as easy to do as it is to say.  One of the ironies of the modern era is that the incredible achievements of science and technology have led primarily to knowledge of the natural world–even to the distant edges of the universe and the beginning of time.  There has not been a corresponding increase in the ability to know what it is to be human, to be a society, or to be an individual person–indeed, those goals have become ever more complicated by the advances that have occurred in the natural and human sciences.  Recent developments in imaging technologies provide intriguing demonstrations of how the production of knowledge can bring us both closer to and farther away from knowledge of who we are.

This stunning image presents axion pathways in a live human brain.  It seems to impart immediately an aesthetic knowledge of human consciousness, and reflexively so: I see an essential dimension of neural organization, and my brain looks at another version of itself.  The beauty of the vibrantly interwoven blue tracery against the black background suggests complexity and density, while its visual analogies with hair, helmut, crest, and other natural and artistic forms carries the image, like consciousness itself, across the divide between inside and outside, seen and unseen, self and world.

But aesthetic knowledge alone goes only so far, at least in this domain.  Does this image impart anything else to those not studying axion pathways?  Does it extend the horizons of self-knowledge to include a more articulate sense of our inner world, or does it create an illusion of self-knowledge and of scientific mastery of what remains almost completely unknown?  Consider these additional options as well: perhaps it constructs a model of human being that will lead inquiry down one path but not another–toward, say, reductive knowledge of bodily functioning rather than understanding emergent properties in complex systems.  Or it might offer not merely knowledge but possibility, that is, an ability to visualize complexity in a manner that might lead to productive analogies and genuine insights regarding how human beings are creatures with a remarkable capacity (though not the only one) for transferring information across networks.

Networks like this one, for example.  It could be a circuit board, but it is the city of Milan, Italy.  The radiant energies are palpable yet not threatening, perhaps because of the broad distribution throughout the system.  Though a vast fabrication of streets and buildings on an electric grid, it seems almost organic, as if a life form that had grown through cellular replication in close adaptation with its physical environment.  There is a decorative beauty to the array, which articulates both nodal intensities and patterned expansion.  Frankly, it looks smart: as if intelligence had emerged through the growth of complexity.

As so we know ourselves a bit better, perhaps, for seeing these images, but imperfectly so.  For example, the self-awareness activated by the first image is in fact flawed: the brain belongs to a stroke victim, and, happily, your brain stem probably looks quite different than the one above.  Likewise, the experience of the city on the ground will usually have little relationship to what is seen here, not least when encountering any of the problems sure to be a part of life on the street.

Both of these images provide an opportunity for thinking anew precisely because they are the result of extraordinary instrumentation: we cannot otherwise see into the brain or from the vantage of the International Space Station.   They can be misleading for the same reason.  Even so, I think these and others like them present a marvelous opportunity to better understand the human species, modern societies, and perhaps even how you or I are embedded in complex systems that each are partial analogues of the others.

MRI by Henning U. Voss and Nicholas D. Schiff; and ISS/NASA.

 0 Comments

Sight Gag: A Blue Print for Budget Reduction

Credit: John Sherffius

Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic, satiric, parodic, and carnivalesque performances that are an important part of a vibrant democratic public culture.  These “gags” may not always be funny or represent a familiar point of view, but they attempt to cut through the lies, hypocrisy, shamelessness, stupidity, complacency, and other vices of democratic life.  We typically will not comment beyond offering an identifying label, leaving the images to “speak” for themselves as much as possible.  Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think might deserve a laugh or at least a wry and rueful look.

 

 1 Comment

Blogging Images Conference and Workshop

Blogging Images: Photojournalism and Public Commentary

Northwestern University, Saturday, April 30

Because photojournalism is a public art, it exists in part to provoke and inform public discussion.  Likewise, good public discussion includes talking about images as a way of thinking about public affairs and other things held in common.  Although photojournalism has been accompanied by commentary from its inception, digital technologies have provided both new media for image circulation and new venues for critical commentary and audience interaction.  These changes provide an opportunity for scholars in the humanities to become more directly engaged with public audiences, but effective engagement is likely to require different skills and perhaps different attitudes than those that characterize academic discourse.

The conference and workshop on Blogging Images focuses on analyzing and writing about images for a public audience.   The morning sessions will feature presentations by photographer Brian Ulrich and bloggers Jim Johnson and Michael Shaw.  These sessions will focus on the transformation of the visual environment as it has altered photograph documentation, the use of photography in the definition and redefinition of public spaces, and the rhetorical constraints and strategic decisions involved in developing blogs devoted to critical discourse about visual culture.

The afternoon sessions will be devoted to critical discussion of draft blog posts presented by student participants.  Each post will be presented to a small group of other writers, who will help each other improve their interpretive and presentational skills.  The presenters from the morning session and other faculty will be involved as well.  Students who wish to have their work reviewed in the workshop should notify Jesse Baldwin-Philippi at j.baldwin.philippi@u.northwestern.edu by April 22.

Schedule:

Annie May Swift Hall: Helmerich Auditorium

8:30 Continental Breakfast

9:00 Brian Ulrich, Document to Propaganda: The New Face of Photographic Truth

10:00 Jim Johnson, The Uses of Photography: Thinking About Public Space

11:00 Coffee break

11:15 Michael Shaw, BagNews and the Role and Process of Analyzing News Images

12:15 Break

2:00-4:00 Workshops: AMS Hall, rooms 109, 110, 219 (specific rooms will be assigned to workshop participants at a later date)

4:00 Closing Remarks (AMS Helmerich Auditorium)

The workshop is sponsored by the Center for Global Culture and Communication and the Department of Communication Studies/Program in Rhetoric and Public Culture.

Photograph taken in Bloomington, Minnesota by Brian Ulrich.

 1 Comment

Revolutions in the City and the Desert

Remember Cairo?  It seems so long ago.  What was a leap into the future has already become something retreating into the past.  Back then, however, even the dark times were bright.

This image of the city ablaze with both fire and electric light may have seemed a moment more of crisis than of hope.  The lights are signs of the incredible concentration and vitality of the protests, yet they are surrounded by deep shadows, as if the forces of darkness were gathering their infernal legions ready to engulf and devour those massed together in Tahrir Square.  Today we know better, of course.  If the democratic revolution is to be betrayed–a distinct possibility–that will occur through gradual processes of corporate cronyism and bureaucratic inertia.  In the meantime, however, we can yet marvel at how the city was a vital center of human aspiration and activity.   And how the revolution was an unleashing of social energy and productive power.

One reason that seems so long ago is that the Libyan revolution is much more dispersed, ragged, violent, and wasteful.  Instead of the people massing in the capitol, we see insurgent soldiers walking along desert highways.  Instead of high-tech interconnectivity in the urban core, we see one isolated scene after another from a vast landscape that always appears desolate.  In place of an army that wisely assumed the role of referee between the regime and the people, we have a civil war.  And instead of people going back to work while also throwing themselves into electoral campaigning and other reforms, we have refugees.

These men are waiting in line for food at a camp at the Tunisia-Libyan border.  We see men in a line, not The People.  An empty space at the center, but no public square.  And instead of energy and hope, worry and the heaviness of those who know that their survival depends on vulnerably waiting, waiting, waiting with no assurance that they will ever get what they need.

There are good reasons to be drawn to the spectacle of history in the making, but this much less dramatic image is at least as representative of the political realities of our time.  The line in the photograph seems to stretch endlessly, as well it could: there are roughly 40,000,000 refugees and other displaced persons in the world, most of them the victims of war.  That figures includes everything from those fleeing today to second-generation residents of now permanent “camps,” and so this photo does not tell the full story.  But it shows some of the truth of that story: on a planet with room for all, millions are homeless, and in a world that includes marvelous monuments to human productivity, many human beings are forced to waste much of their lives by standing in line, sitting by tents, and otherwise living in suspended animation not of their own making.

Images of human beings being being forced to do next to nothing may seem to be dull pictures, but they remind us that human beings create both cities and deserts.  It remains to be seen which will outpace the other in the 21st century, or if there is anything like a middle way in a world of increasing inequity and polarization.

Photographs by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images and Emilio Morenatti/Associated Press.

 0 Comments

A Late Modern Crusade

This photograph reminded me of Private Jackson, the sharpshooter in the movie Saving Private Ryan who takes strength and solace by prefacing each kill, executed with surgical precision, by reciting scripture from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.  In one scene near the end of the movie he cites from Psalms, 25:2, “Let me be not ashamed, let my enemies try not to fool me.”  It is not enough to save him, but the point is made as he dies a martyr to the cause of the “good war.”  Or at least that is how World War II and those fighting for the allies are  remembered.

The marine in the photograph above is fighting the war in Afghanistan—“Operation Enduring Freedom,” the longest war in U.S. history—and it is hard to know exactly how it will be remembered in the next century.  But there is an important distinction between it and WW II that the photograph here elides and underscores at the same time.  The allied troops fighting in the European theater of WW II may have taken comfort in identifying with a Christian god, but their “enemies” no doubt prayed to the same god, however misdirected they were. This soldier, however, is part of a predominantly American—and yes, implicitly Christian—military force occupying a thoroughly and explicitly Muslim nation.  And however else we might justify U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, there is no getting around the fact that it was initially characterized as a crusade and continues to bear the earmarks of a holy war; and  surely that is how the indigenous, Muslim population might reasonably be inclined to interpret it when official military weapons and other accouterments such as helmets continue to bear the visible signs of a crusade.

To the extent that the War in Afghanistan is a war on terror its success or failure will turn in no small measure on winning “hearts and minds” throughout the Muslim world.  It is hard to imagine how displays such as this can serve a productive end.  But more, it should give us all just a little bit of pause to wonder what it is that truly animates our persistence in a war that seems to know no end.

Photo Credit: Adek Berry/AFP/Getty Images.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

 

 1 Comment

Sight Gag: A War By Any Other Name …

Credit: Mr. Fish

Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic, satiric, parodic, and carnivalesque performances that are an important part of a vibrant democratic public culture.  These “gags” may not always be funny or represent a familiar point of view, but they attempt to cut through the lies, hypocrisy, shamelessness, stupidity, complacency, and other vices of democratic life.  We typically will not comment beyond offering an identifying label, leaving the images to “speak” for themselves as much as possible.  Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think might deserve a laugh or at least a wry and rueful look.

 

 2 Comments

Fox News Research Team Develops New Life Form

Scientists at a Fox News lab known as the “weasel works” were giving each other high fives yesterday on receiving decisive confirmation that they had created a new life form.  After years of research involving genetic recombination of primitive cellular memes, a research team successfully created the laboratory conditions for the emergence of life.  In doing so, Research Group Alpha beat out several other teams in a race to the bottom of the gene pool.  “We knew that the breakthrough would come to whoever could isolate the most simple forms of cellular response,” lab director Gene Shelley remarked, “and that has been the Fox News objective from day one.”

Shelley emphasized that the new species was fully formed.  “Since evolution wasn’t involved, the designers are confident that the species will continue to exhibit its initial characteristics in perpetuity.”  Those characteristics are admittedly not found at the high end of the food chain, but they are likely to have considerable survival value.  The creature remains suspended in a state of continuous consumption, moves in whatever direction it is manipulated, bonds exclusively with its information source, and never risks cooperative behavior.

Fox News was quick to point out the implications of this scientific breakthrough.  “We know that this isn’t the first case of successful biological invention,” PR director Mary Shelley remarked, “but it is the first one that has obvious political significance.  Our lab has finally produced what the network only dreams of: the perfect citizen.”

Photograph by Rolf Vennenbernd/DPA/ZUMAPRESS.com.

 1 Comment