Iterating Perceptions: A brief ramble…

The Eames’ took the paper by Claude Shannon and the supporting text by Warren Weaver and wove together these two iterations on a mathematical theory of Communication through the use of film, thus collating & scripting ‘A Communications Primer’. This practice of artists/designers working with relatively raw scientific research and shaping it into another form, a new iteration, for the purpose of clarifying the message and communicating it more effectively to a wider audience is one that seems to be continuously emergent, growing more common day by day. Today visualisations and iterations based upon scientific research & data are taking many forms, predominantly digital some might say, but often too manifesting in more traditional, even theatrical ways – through sound walks, installations, and interactive experiences (for example, take a look at Duncan Speakman‘s Subtle Mobs).

Recently, CTVR took two secondary school interns on board for a 3 week period. Amongst other things, they were set the task of ‘mapping’ and ‘visualising’ in some way the electromagnetic wireless signals around the Trinity campus using ‘detektors‘ created by Martin Howse and Shintaro Miyazaki. The two interns created ‘Prezis‘ of their research, an account of the kinds of actions they took with the detektors, how they recorded the sounds of the electromagnetic signals through the detektors, and supplemented these sounds with visual maps and photographs. They made assumptions about the wifi signals based on how audible they were through the detektors, ultimately determining that a wide open space with few buildings or objects and few people is an ideal condition for obtaining a strong signal.

Interns Robert & Darragh set up their prezi's to share their research with the CTVR team

Essentially the exercise was set in order to catalyze (not prescribe) a communication of their perceptions of the field of wireless telecommunications research, that might in turn lead to an enlargement of their thinking, and perhaps, in some small and particular way, the thinking of researchers at CTVR. This kind of thing is being done all the time, albeit on a grander scale, across the fields of science & humanities. For example, earlier this morning I came across this short video about musicians who are making music with radiation (via Brainpickings):

Edward de Bono (who I’m sure I’ve mentioned in this blog somewhere already) has written a book called ‘Teaching Thinking’ – and in it he calls into question the assumption that one needs language in order to think. He says:

It would be wrong to assume that a skilled language-user is a skilled thinker. It would be wrong to assume that a person poor in verbal expression is therefore poor in thinking. We need a language in order to let other people know what we are thinking, but gramatical coherence is not of itself the same as thinking…. Thinking does not have to take place in words. Nor are concepts limited by the availability of words to describe them. Thinking can take place in images and feelings which are quite definite but too amorphous to be expressed in words.

[De Bono, Teaching Thinking, 1976]

What have all these items got to do with each other? Well, I’m not sure exactly, but I think there is a relationship to be made here. We have means now more than ever to re-formulate & re-iterate information, concepts and ideas from one particular context to another – we can translate things with more and more efficacy through various appropriate media. We are largely more fluent in our use of  Media phenomena,  they are more common, but what is the effect? Is the effect an illusion of generative thinking? De Bono says elsewhere in his book “Fluency and the power of coherent expression are tools of thinking, not thinking itself”. There is always a danger of mistaking the cart for the horse, and getting stuck wondering about the chicken & the egg… so the problem here may lie in a series of conflations & misguided definitions between the concepts of information, knowledge, thinking and communication.

Claude Shannon’s idea of communication is one which he defines as distinct from semantics – the meaning of the message does not have any bearing on the problem of delivering the message intact.

The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.

[Claude Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, 1948]

The problem of direct & unaltered deliverance is the priority, it seems that it is almost an entirely physical matter. The Eames’ seem to circumvent this distinction somewhat in their film ‘A Communications Primer’, by integrating a visual poetics (film) into the verbal rhetoric (narrative), and by drawing together again & again the metaphor of physical transference with a kind of alchemical or spiritual transposition. They use the idea of the feeling of Love to annihilate redundancy. They mercilessly incorporate the technical with the emotive. And they use film to do this. They use a medium naturally riddled with gaps in order to communicate their understanding of the Mathematical Theory of Communication.

So, to end this ramble rather shoddily & incoherently, the fact remains that there are rising numbers of ‘trans-disciplinary’ projects happening, particularly across the sciences & arts, projects supposedly to explore & transfer meaning, technical expertise, and innovations from one set of perceptions to another, with a view to an enlargement of the view on everything. The Eames’ made ‘A Communications Primer’ off the back of a task based project centered around improving teaching methodology within the Art School (Art X). They went on to make the ‘Primer’ out of sheer interest, one imagines, and out of a determination to, well, communicate their understanding effectively & appropriately.

They created their film quite independently, it seems, from the mathematicians and scientists (no evidence has been found yet of correspondence between the Eames & Weaver/Shannon, but it could indeed emerge from the archives yet). The question is, I suppose, whether there is a formula for the kind of ‘technical poetics’ that the Eames’ seemed to develop in their films, particularly in the ‘Primer’. Where the Mathematics & the Poetry are combined in such a way as to complement each other in a truly symbiotic manner. The Eames’ might have been on to something. De Bono hints at what might be the holy grail of communication – the transposition of thought & meaning, lamenting:

If only we could translate all situations into definite symbols & relationships we should never need to look beyond mathematics for our thinking. One day we may be able to, but that day is a long way off because any problem involving human perception and values will always contain a lot of unknowns and unknowables.

[De Bono, Teaching Thinking, 1976]