OMG!

Yeah…have put in another couple weeks in on the animation engine for the site and heck-in-zee-bop, was it ever worth it!! It is going to be a VERY interesting space, with text narrative, movies, and game-like interaction all sort of holding up the table evenly. And then everything is wrapped in a Web 2.0 forum by Drupal…

This is more raw coding than I have done in quite some time, and I find that I am enjoying it again. Balancing that with all the ‘R-mode’ artsy stuff makes for better life, no doubt about it. And maybe this psychically ambidextrous form of consciousness actually suits the story as well…I keep seeing the comic as an artifact of the cultures/kosmosii that it describes like an interjected time-portal. Which, besides making a little sense, is a great excuse for me to have fun making the thing just about as alien as possible. But there you go…

I have an opening scene where two micro-citizens of Soo’s mother’s womb are staring up at a fetus which is a subjective kilometer wide. They themselves have bodies modeled after the strange fish-thing we are while gestating, because in their time domain the womb-year will take millions of subjective years – so Soo is like a Sky-Goddess floating at the center of their World. The ancient movies of the zygotic contact between egg and sperm serve as a mythic story of genesis.

…and that segues to the real experiences of Soo’s parents…as they explore the possibility of eating food: a radical move indeed! Send you a link to the new home for this Blog at the end of the month…

Drupaling Along

Well, a couple hundred hours of red and blurry eyed coding later, I am 'there'. The basic mechanics of how to host an animation oriented comix-engine inside of Drupal are known to me...within a few remaining wrinkles anyway. I ended up trying a lot of blind alleys -- my lowest point being when I finally learned about the enormously subtle timing issues in javascript, when your data and your page come together at different moments and can't talk to each other at all. I was in a cafe for 8 hours coding and buying my obligatory muffin every hour and a half and my variables would print to the page...but never feed my animation beast. I went home, and fell asleep.

Waking up at one a.m., I decided to abandon the variable-timing problem and just sneak some script over to the 'other side' of the Drupal core with everything declared in a 'literal'. And that failed too. BUT, when I awoke in the morning and clicked over to my page prototype -- it worked. There was some sort of caching issue, and I was back in black.

And yet! -- my travails had just begun. I had been developing my comic with its pieces in absolute coordinates, which was hosing Drupal when it wanted to move things around. For instance, when the reader wants to write a comment about a given piece, they have this moment where they preview what they have written, and at this moment the comic needs to fly down to the bottom of the page. So...I had to shift to relativistic coordinates...and those are cross-browser badlands, nothing ever is consistent between development and posting, and all the cute thought balloons and special effects wander the page fruitlessly.

Wrestled that...90 percent. Will have to determine some kind of standard dos and don'ts for it and it will be 'relatively' well-behaved. Now I just want to stuff easing and bezier equations into the animation controls! (non-linear motion and curves...the only path to organic feeling)

It's a Code

I wanted to post a section of the javascript that I mentioned in the last post because I found it very beautiful and strangely inspiring, almost like 'automatic writing' -- as I mentioned. Of course, if you have never coded this may leave you quite cold:

//Close to an 'end': If timeleft is less than elapsed time

//from last function call

if(ids_sub[k][m+2][7] <= elapsedTicks) {

//These redundant calls are for IE...and everybody else------

//depending on fadestate, opacity set to max or min

element.style.opacity = ids_sub[k][m+2][6] == 1 ?

ids_sub[k][m+2][4]/100 : ids_sub[k][m+2][3]/100;

element.style.filter =

'alpha(opacity = ' + (ids_sub[k][m+2][6] == 1 ?

ids_sub[k][m+2][4] : ids_sub[k][m+2][3]) + ')';

//------------------------------------------------------------

//Flip fade from transp. to opaque, or versa

ids_sub[k][m+2][6] = ids_sub[k][m+2][6] == 1 ? -1 : 1;

//Depending on FadeState, TimeLeft is assigned

//opaque or transparent TimeToFade

ids_sub[k][m+2][7] = ids_sub[k][m+2][6] == 1 ?

ids_sub[k][m+2][1] : ids_sub[k][m+2][2];

//This block is the main animation of the opacity,

//incrementing time left

} else {

//time left incremented down

ids_sub[k][m+2][7] -= elapsedTicks;

if(ids_sub[k][m+2][6] == 1) {

//Timeleft divided by TimeToFade multiplied by difference

//between opacity max, min

var newOpVal = (ids_sub[k][m+2][7]/ids_sub[k][m+2][1])*

((ids_sub[k][m+2][4]-ids_sub[k][m+2][3])/100);

//offset from max. opacity

newOpVal = (ids_sub[k][m+2][4]/100) - newOpVal;

} else {

var newOpVal = (ids_sub[k][m+2][7]/ids_sub[k][m+2][2])*

((ids_sub[k][m+2][4]-ids_sub[k][m+2][3])/100);

//offset by minimum opacity

newOpVal = (ids_sub[k][m+2][3]/100) + newOpVal;

}

//These redundant calls are for IE...and everybody else----------

element.style.opacity = newOpVal;

element.style.filter = 'alpha(opacity = ' + (newOpVal*100) + ')';

//---------------------------------------------------------------

} //end if then else

For those of you who could possibly get something from this: all the abstract array entries are substitutes for functions that used to use word-like names, but which I wanted to store abstractly so I could just modify a template literal array for each comic page and therefore be able to compose each animation as a small series of parameters (combined with some url's for graphic content of course).

Note: for those of you appalled by the indenting...I had to compress it for the blog formatting, it really is a LOT more clear in the original...had to be or I wouldn't understand it one hour after I wrote it!

Psycho Java

In a lull of client-sponsored agendas, I have been able to focus on writing a javascript app that will present the webcomic. I am mega-pleased with the result! The basic idea is to have a series of animations that represent dialog balloons and subtly shifting environmental details that are triggered by clicked on arrow keys that go from each ‘statement’ into the next. Of course, all of this has the backdrop of the basic piece of art for that day’s ‘episode’, but there is no need for absolute scene-frames or even a particular left-right up-down reading order…which gives me precisely the language/culture-bias free framework that I have been striving for.

While I was working on the prototype I had a sudden insight aimed at the analogy between the perspective of comics – that of a reader looking at frozen time with an inner sense of narrative flow layered over and under – and that of the higher ‘fast’ time realms of the story. A person who experiences a million years for every year of ‘normal’ time (and 11.5 days for every second!) sees the whole world of ‘slow’ consciousness as a kind of frozen, comic subject.

Working on the code was, in itself, full of artistic weirdness and reflection. My way of doing this task is very hard to describe – but its success usually surprises even me. Basically, I stare at a coded primitive of some algorithm that I have cobbled together as an initial guess. I do this for a couple hours. Then, in a very brief flash, without almost any conscious oversight, I type out a thousand lines of code which is usually fully functional without debugging. Occasionally, like all coders, I run into some deeply mysterious malfunction which is inevitably the omission of a comma or the improper capitalization of a variable and I then spend 80 to 90 percent of all my project time chasing down some awful minutia and/or bug in the software environment I am working in. The inspiration, meditation cycle is deeply creative; the debugging is one of the most profoundly yucky tasks ever devised by the human race. Pure torture…a sense of wasted hours and wasted life. But that’s code.

Anyway: everything works – “so all’s well that ends well”. Now I just have to figure out how to turn this script into a unit of input in a Drupal-based blog and away we go Web 2.0 style. Of course, now that I have empowered animation layers, I have to get my moving image chops back on line. Have been practicing using Camtasia (a screen to video capture tool) and MCell (cellular automata) to create some very compelling gnarly chaos movies which will make just the kind of layer detail I need…I cannot wait for y’all to see this stuff. It is wicked strange, and borders on wonderful from time to time. Will link you up when I can get the prototype properly hosted outside my cozy little sandbox.

Mom and Dad

So…that was the ‘gap’ in postings that one is NEVER supposed to do! The Google-bots are going to think that my weekly update schedule is a lie and never index again! I am a virtual pariah; I have abandoned my ‘post’ (hah!)…and all that. Well, by way of explanation, I have spent the last four weeks baby-sitting my IT consultant business and making sure a couple clients didn’t have a data apocalypse. It all worked out, and everyone seems ok for now – so back to my non-paying, utopian transition into full-time artist which will take…the rest of my life?

I started to work on the writing elements for my first web-comic again today and it felt great. Because the website will have only one or two one-page installments a week, it will be the first thing to get off the ground – pretty soon. I am thinking end of April. It would be even sooner, but I need to get back to consulting IT to myself and S’n’K as ‘client’ and get the Drupal site online. I want the whole thing to be Web 2.0 from the get-go, so you guys can tell me in constant feedback what a putz I am…only then do I have a chance of transitioning from being egregiously bad to tolerably bad!

The first ‘episode’ of the web comic is going to be focused on Soo’s journey through the womb. No, really, this is going to be a fun topic. The NewBirth Sindikat has quite a bit to do during the gestation of one of their members…really their inventions and interventions begin before that in planning sessions for new parents, nano-bots that interact with the sperm-egg dance, etc. It is key to remember that there are ‘high fast’ elements in this womb-process who experience the womb-year as a million subjective years…or a billion…

And you will get to meet Soo’s folks, which will add a lot of depth to your understanding of her later in life, when she appears as the protagonist of the for-paper-print series (the web-comic is a free, parallel product that will continue after the print version chapters start coming out bi-monthly). I had fun creating how they look using ‘genetic’ algorithms to morph an image of Soo’s face using factors that push mom in a Chinese-African direction and dad in a Russian one.

Some Basic Goals

I have done a lot of technologically oriented posts recently because that was my ‘flow’ at that particular moment in my overall work-stream and I haven’t really had time to be objective about what kind of questions need to be answered in general about my motivations and intentions for the Novel. Now, I would like to take a brief look at some of the deepest thoughts and intuitions that are ‘drivers’ for the project.

1) I have chosen a ‘deep’ future context because I want to force myself (and my readers) to review what limitations we currently perceive -- which in fact are merely historical accidents -- versus what are, in contrast, truly Immortal themes of consciousness: human, post-human, or Other. The context of S’n’K is sufficiently ‘advanced’ that almost everything we now consider a problem has long since been consigned to the ignorance of the Ancients (us!) who ‘were’ deeply confused. There is no poverty, no war, no State, no money, no involuntary death, no involuntary pregnancy, no dominance of nature by a single species, no dominance of politics by a single gender, etc. There IS still love, friendship, the search for meaning in a very much larger cosmos, the search for a balance between freedom and responsibility, between tradition and innovation, between transcendence and immanence, etc.

2) I have tried to characterize what might be considered the current socio-political ‘Antimonies’ – the perceived irresolvable differences, and allow the milieu of the Novel to shed light on paths that might have lead into non-dualistic forms of life and understanding which go beyond these self-imposed boundaries. For instance, I observe that one of the main upcoming ‘wars’ of words and policy to animate our world-culture is the tension between innovation and preservation. On the one side of the continuum you have the techno-utopians who think that no problem is unsolvable if we would merely accelerate our development of machines and tools aimed at those problems. At the other end we have the eco-utopians who are watching the environmental destruction of our planet and are seeking to slow, or even reverse, certain kinds of technical development in order to give our biological context a chance to recover its ages-long robustness. Both sides are right, and both sides are wrong. I will be trying to depict what I call an innecotive paradigm, where the innovations of intelligent species are seen, literally, as phenomenon of ‘Nature’, and where reverence for diversity and ‘life’ extends to both biological and ‘androidal’ forms…where the ‘rights’ of our legal system are extended to the whole inneco-system – the union of ecosystems with innovations. A very deep topic…more later!

3) One of my most challenging goals is to depict world that is post-materialistic, yet simultaneously extremely competent at the material goal of real-world sustainability. Here the traditional bifurcation of the world into ‘spiritual’ vs. ‘secular’ camps will have become untenable. Although competence in scientific and mathematical reason far beyond our wildest imaginations will be common knowledge even to children, most people will also have training in meditative reflection and mystical poesis. Additionally, I am taking the view that physics will have reached an accord with some aspects of traditional metaphysics (not all certainly!) and that the underlying interconnectedness of consciousness and the universe will be an excepted fact of ‘common’ wisdom. Additionally, some technological change will reflect this new ‘aesthetic’ and actually amplify its development. For instance, though most people believe that mind is fundamentally non-local and therefore biological telepathy a widespread (though not reliable) possibility, the use of the Lens for direct mind-to-mind messaging has created an accelerated and amplified historical context where the dream of merging identities is a daily, ordinary activity. In this spirit, the elimination of the distinction between wealth and average health has created a condition where the pursuit of purely material goals (and the concomitant material philosophy behind such action) is not really the most practical position. It is a time of dreams and play, where creativity is the main currency.

And yet…to accomplish the above we will need to move through some very profound, and sometimes scary transitions and I hope to show this in two ways:

1) It is critical to realize that the Universe has gotten a LOT more complex by the time of S’n’K. There are enormous populations of new forms of sentient life living in whole new ‘utanes’. Therefore, for every comprehensive social statement I have made above, there is somewhere a new position of dissent, and varieties of same, to a degree unimaginably more divers than the dissent we experience today. There are ‘Sindikats’ based on almost every conceivable philosophical premise possible – and these diversities will be embodied by characters and interactions within the Novel.

2) There are several key characters who are deliberately ‘retro’ in their beliefs, and they speak to our current concerns by representing our current world-culture(s) embedded in the larger culture of the Novel. For instance, the technological ‘level’ of the Tribes, where the character Steward comes from, is essentially a stand-in for our 21^st Century position, and as Stew moves forward and struggles with integrating in the wider world he recapitulates our future history (our future’s-past, if you will) in a kind of compressed sequence.

Above all, I want to write a philosophically ambitious work that is still very sensitive to issues of character. This is a value, and not merely a question of technique. I want my readers to fall in love with some very real and compassionate people who confront big, even cosmic, issues -- but in ways that are deeply felt and deeply personal.

Down and Fast - A Lunchtime Conversation

Below is a reiteration of many of the points of the last few posts, but compacted in the form of an email I sent my father and my brother after we had lunch and I struggled, as usual, to get all the necessary conceptual infrastructure laid our for a Down and Fast world-making exercise:

Folks—

Fun conversation yesterday…as usual! Below is a written version of one of the more sophisticated ‘sections’ we ran through, because I believe that it is sound, well-grounded in other people’s work, and definitely deserves a second chance because of the significance of its implications.

1) Because of the gonzo upper density limits of computation now being thrown around it is reasonable to talk about a miniaturized model of a human brain taking up a volume of space approximately 10^-4 on a side. We would not have to understand this brain, it would be a faithful imitation of neuronal connectivity and functionality from a ‘black box’ input/output perspective without a comprehensive theory of mind (which may or may not come later).

2) It is quite likely that this ‘mind’ would run at a much greater rate than our own for two very important reasons: a) it is smaller, so signal transfer time from one section to another is intrinsically shorter and faster in linear proportion; b) the connective infrastructure is likely to be ‘wires’ using electronic or photonic signaling which has a speed roughly 1 million times as fast the speed of nerve conduction (10-100 meters per second vs. significant percentage of speed of light); c) the calculative infrastructure of the ‘neurons’ themselves, that part responsible for taking the inputs and creating outputs, will likely be hosted on Gigaherz (or faster) microprocessors which are more than a million times as fast as the same processes in biological neurons (roughly 1000/s).

3) A fast mind is undesirable and possibly useless without a ‘body’ and an ‘environment’ with similar speed factors in which to plan, act and respond. One obvious solution is to create a host body at the same scale as the mind, i.e. at 10^-4. The laws of physics are friendly to this plan, but not always in the same way for each aspect, which leads us to…

4) Gravity: in a vacuum gravity scales perfectly – it takes exactly one ten-thousandth as long for an object to fall to the floor in this hypothetical micro-world. However…

5) Add air and things become very interesting. Some engineers working on new nano-bot designs have described water as being ‘like jello’ and air being ‘like soup’ at these specs. Forward locomotion stops almost instantly when propulsive inputs are ceased…stop and go…stop and go. Surface area effects of all kinds are enormous. The laws of physics are the same, but which ones are important has shifted significantly.

6) Of particular interest is our old well-known friend ‘surface area to volume ratio’. Insect legs are insanely thin and strong and fleas can jump a subjective/relative ‘kilometer’ into the air. This aspect of micro-engineering does help things move roughly faster as size goes down but the graph is hardly well-behaved and there are many mitigating factors like inner limb friction.

7) All this being said, in S’n’K these problems have all already been mostly solved by extending limb-like action into the ‘klowd’ of micro-webs surrounding each individual and by using the ‘lenz’ to virtually augment where accelerated perception is more important than ‘actual’ physical speed. So…

8) In the Narrative there are completely functional ‘worlds’ where subjective time is 10 thousand to a million times faster than at our current level. One underlying trope here is that internal experience is plastic under these different time domains, that is it can function pretty much the way it does now by adapting subjective time within internal experience to match useful speeds to the requirements of the ‘local’ environment. I mentioned some concerns I have for a general theory of mind relative to this point, especially at hugely accelerated rates (i.e. 10^15) but while that is interesting, there is enormous head-room here – to quote the inimitable physicist Richard Feynman “plenty of room at the bottom”.

But what would this mean in socio-historical terms? Well…I could go on at length, but I have already received more of your attention than I deserve so I will just quickly say that it would be catastrophic – in ‘good’ and ‘bad’ senses of that word. To have any sector of a society with that much ‘time’ advantage would truly be like living with hyper-powerful Aliens – one year of our dialog with them could allow them millennia of response time. Their technical development would strip our projections by factors upon factors of magnitude. This is the primary reason for my belief that the arrival times for various technologies (Futurist-proposed) are probably much too long in most cases. Even electronic human-level-capable computation at ‘normal’ scale brings this sort of scenario into play, but the additional significance of the ‘dense’ micro-variant is that it also has the distinct advantage of enormous populations!

--M

Down and Fast, Part 3 - Population and Freedom

In the last essay in this series we discussed the emergence of enormous populations of sentient beings in the near future, in numbers so large that as one person is to the current human race, the totality of our current population is to these new beings…and then some. Roughly speaking you and I are one ten-billionth of humanity, and yet ten billion is far less than one ten-billionth of the kind of numerical surge in this scenario. Of course, life and culture are more than just about masses, yet on the average enormous congregations of beings create technology, political power, and historical influence according to their resources. We are facing a very concrete reason here to consider a post-human epic.

And that is just about taking up space, but at risk of sounding like a broken record, let’s take another look at time. If a population is living at Fast6, they have a million years for every year of Fast0. I need to give that some reality – imagine our technologically accelerated culture and everything it could accomplish, if it does not destroy itself, in the next million years – now imagine that happening every year inside these new cultures. Even without large numbers this would be stunning, but considered together the effects of dense sentience and accelerated time and we approach a much firmer foundation for the contention that conventional futurisms are swallowed by a tsunami.

No matter how technically challenging the creation of these new utanes of complexity, the citizens who will live in them have the numbers and the ‘time’ to achieve the limit case. No invention, no artistic problem, no cultural development that is fundamentally possible can be prevented from emerging somewhere…and possibly a billion somewheres. Within that, what agreements or covenants can even cohere enough for any sort of general assurance of mutual survival? There is still a shared infrastructure of physics and ecology at the Down0 foundational level – and that must be preserved enough to ‘host’ every other level!

Furthermore, now that a utane can hold its billion-billion-billions of selves in a space within ‘weapon’s range’ of a simple attack, even personal-scaled violence is completely disastrous. Under these conditions the expanded freedom of new worlds is balanced by an enormous increase in responsibility and most probably a necessity for monitoring and Platform intervention in the finest granularities of action and interaction. Given the plasticity of the Klowd in manifesting any physical design requested, a constant need to interpret intent becomes the primary task of ubiquitous computation. Do our current notions of privacy and freedom have much relevance here?

Down and Fast, Part 2

Now let’s talk about Time (“Let’s talk about makin’ love”)! Say, for a moment, that I had the project of making an exact replica of your brain out of silicon and fiber optics, substituting gigahertz micro-computation for neuronal activity and speed of light transmission for nerve signals. Since the rate of axon-firing in the human brain is approximately 1000 times a second and the speed of nerve transmission is approximately 100 meters per second what we would have is your brain running a MILLION times faster!! But what about your ‘mind’-- your consciousness, your feelings, your Experience? Would these be a million times faster as well?

We don’t really know the answer to that question, because we have no idea what consciousness really is. Is it some basic attribute of Nature that emerges whenever certain systems of complexity and inter-relationship are evolved? Is it everywhere, but taking different forms and focus depending on where and who is interacting with it? All worthy directions of pursuit towards a great Mystery. But let’s propose a working hypothesis for the purposes of this Graphic Novel: Consciousness adapts to whatever conditions it would be ‘relevant’ to exist in. So, if I have a ‘mind’ that operates a million subjective seconds for every ‘ordinary second’ AND, importantly, I have a ‘body’ and a ‘world’ where those thoughts can ‘act’ out a living scenario at the same speed – then consciousness takes a form in the domain of subjective time that functions effectively. What is the upper bound…can Consciousness exist a BILLION times faster (or slower, for that matter)? Can a being experience in a single ordinary decade the subjective equivalent of the entire history of the known universe? I suppose it depends on whether a ‘world’ could be built to live in - operating in this enhanced form of time – and whether that world would be primarily ‘actual’ or ‘virtual’. We may get to find out…soon.

Let me coin some more terms (sorry, but to talk about this sort of unprecedented change old vocabulary just comes up lame): a subjective time-space ‘domain’ that is ten times faster than our current ‘native’ one we will call Fast1, a hundred times faster Fast2, a million times faster Fast6, etc. It simply follows powers of ten. Now, a being whose body and environment operates at a size one tenth our regular human-realm size we will call Down1, a hundredth Down2, a millionth Down6 and so on…

So, one solution to the seemingly inevitable result of having Fast6 minds is to operate them in Down6 body/environments. After all, if I drop a rock on my foot in Down6 space, it only takes a millionth of the time to fall as it does up ‘here’ in Down0. Reality would not be so simple of course – we could ask how fast could I move a ‘limb’ to pick up that rock? Surely, a lot faster than us huge, monstrous current bodies as anyone can see who has closely observed insects. The surface-area-to-volume ratio of tiny beings guarantees that there relative strength and speed is epic; a flea can jump a subjective ‘kilometer’. But it isn’t a direct linear conversion, so some things multiply thousands while others multiply millions. However, for the beings in Skinz’n’Klowdz, this is almost a non-issue, with physically and perceptually enhanced ‘realities’ subjective perception and environmental rates can be perfectly matched.

But what does it mean personally and socially to have subjective states where on the one side is a single year and on the other is a million years? Where my second-long pause in ‘conversation’ is 11.5 days to my partner? And even more mind-boggling, where parts of my own mind span these same subjective domains?

Down and Fast, Part 1

A number of researchers and theorists lately have tried to answer the question of how densely packed calculation, and possibly intelligence and consciousness, can be in a given volume of space. The initial impetus is to determine how much more intensely useful and pleasurable our computers can get in the coming years…but the implications go far, far, far deeper than that. I will not go into the technical details in this posting, because there are so many things to consider: the nature of information at the quantum level, the requirements of intelligence, the actual complexity of natural environments, etc. So, let’s take a top level view:

Synthesizing some readings in Kurzweil and Lloyd I will throw out the following hypothesis – human intelligence is only 1 in 10^20+ space efficient. OK, in English what that might mean is that we could fit 100 billion billions of intelligent beings of roughly human capacity inside a single human body, if we pursued the maximum capacities of Nature. Holy carp Batman…if that does not blow your mind nothing will!!

If we borrow the essential point of Feynman’s famous essay ‘Plenty of Room at the Bottom’ the realization implied here gets even weirder; once intelligence starts designing and giving birth to ensuing generations of intelligence an accelerating process brings the upper end of capacity in a MUCH shorter time than expected by ‘linear’ thinking. Kurzweil is on record as saying that this incredible moment in history may occur as early as 2080, based on current technical trends.

I myself am a hesitant Singulatarian…we have been promised many things in the past that turned out to be a lot harder to implement than supposed. The gestalts of living systems are indeed a LOT more interesting than merely amped up logic can perceive. BUT! the very real possibility remains that we are entering a historical period as different from its antecedents as the Big Bang is from the vacuum. An exaggeration? I don’t think so…not any more.

Let me coin some terms: a) let us call a ‘planetane’ a space in which intelligent participants experiencing interaction with each other and their environment at the complexity level of our Earth…roughly 10 billion sentient humans on 500 million square kilometers of land with various populations of other creatures, i.e. 10 trillion fish, several quadrillion ants, etc.; b) let us call a billion to a trillion planetanes a ‘galactane’; c) let us call a billion to a trillion galactanes a ‘utane’. A utane, or utanic domain, is an environment as complex as the entire known universe, AFTER it has been inhabited completely by a space-faring ecology-building intelligence.

Now, back to the question of the ultimate ‘density’ of intelligence; the basic query to absorb here is that it appears possible that our creative progeny will be able to generate complexity at the level of inhabited Universes ON THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH IN THE RELATIVELY NEAR FUTURE!!!! Individual bodies may reach utanic complexity, and trillions of these ‘entities’ can safely and ecologically inhabit a planetary environment. Under this regime a grain of sand can contain a planetane, and you can hold multiple galactanes in your hand. Not one, but billions of universes are born the blink of an eye – maybe the Big Bang comparison is not strong enough……

Why a 'Graphic Novel'

In the last few years I have felt, inside my mind/spirit a kind of 'pressure' which appears to me to be a great need to speak, to tell of stories and visions. In a way, it is a summing up of decades of thought and experience that now seem to me to be 'of one piece'...that there is a possibility of organizing around a 'message', though not a simple one. Of course, this is to some degree an illusion, because summing up even my own life's events is clearly beyond my meager skills of expression - and if I hope to say something about Nature and my larger Society, well -- that is perhaps ludicrous!

And yet the pressure is still there, and I have at least learned over the years that such a thing is difficult and unwise to ignore. Also, I have met a great many highly intelligent younger people, who seem to be completely disaffected with the 'standard motifs' of Futurism, as presented to us by experts, authors, film-makers, etc. When I consider their complaints I see that I have some possibly useful nuggets hidden away in my consciousness, some ways out of the current malaise maze. And, if it is to them I wish to speak, than I must do so in a medium and context where that would make sense. To put it simply, young people do not read books anymore - they play video games, go to movies, watch tv and...they read manga/comic books. (Some people like to call books of narrated pictures 'graphic novels' to make them seem more 'respectable'...which is deeply weird when we review how long the Novel itself was denigrated in its early history!).

Most people who know me also know that I am a cinemaniac...I LOVE films - watching them and talking about them. But I do have some frustrations with that medium. It simply isn't as 'contemplative' as literature. It is a blazing flow of timespace dumped into your head. Some critics watch movies with their fingers on the pause button, and stop and start to see if they can achieve a deeper view, but movies were meant to happen, like music, in a fluid motion. So, if one has a big philosophical 'agenda', some form of 'literature' may be the only context for the user/reader to have the time and space to stretch out inside a world of your creation, simultaneously truly making it their own.

Now let me say this...most Graphic Novels blow...they are terribly written and they are terribly drawn. It is a new-ish medium with major growing pains! But when it works, it really works: Neil Gaiman's Sandman, Alan Moore's Promethea, Grant Morrison's Invisibles...these seem to me to be among the most important narrative achievements of the human race in the last hundred years. So, we DO have reason to believe that a truly New Literature can be born out of comics...and it is getting more easy to envision every day. The quality of self-awareness and mutual critique in the field grows by leaps and bounds. Early theoretical programs by meta-practitioners like Eisner and McCloud seem to be wearing well, and we are figuring out how to talk about the visual-textual medium in terms that sometimes borrow from other disciplines but that also create new words and ideas when required.

This is fun, and it may one day make things possible that we have not even thought of yet. Some people think that the coming rise in ubiquitous internet bandwidth will cause all literature to be drowned in an ocean of video (or, later, VR-scapes) but I don't think so. The trend toward co-development of related comic and movie 'properties' shows a couple of things: a) these two media perform different tasks; b) we are undergoing an early 'imitative' phase where comic books are trying to be more 'cinematic' which will hopefully die out. The cross-fertilization is productive, but the uniqueness of both is far more interesting in the long term. In fact, in my own approach to comics, I hope to elevate the 'page design' to a much more 'simultaneous' fusion of different time-streams than in the mainstream page and frame sequencing technique. Think of what we sometimes see in 'graphs' or in good paintings -- a kind of frozen gestalt which is stillness and yet, paradoxically, also conveys movement and relationship.

Maybe there is a reason that so many young people are switching their interests and their habits of self-education. I am in no way saying that books are obsolete...that would be a very incoherent stand on my part because I am still reading 1000 pages plus of them a week! But, to paraphrase (and extend) the thesis of the fascinating author Leonard Shlain - a medium which is verbally abstract AND visually concrete may take us farther into our left and right minds than we have ever gone before. AND that, may suit a future which literally 'goes beyond words' better than anything else we could do.

WHAT'S IN THE NAME

In S'n'K, a 'skin' is a virtual layer of perception added to 'reality' by means of a technology called the Lenz. This 'device' is really a whole range of devices and networks, but what it does is pipe light into the eyes (or nerve signals into the optic nerve), sound into the ears (or auditory nerves), etc. after receiving the incoming sensory data and filtering and/or embellishing it according to programs, designs and live artistry on the part of the perceiver and his/her collaborators. In other words: let's say I wanted to see my immediate environment 'as though it were painted by Van Gogh'. The incoming light would form the basic shapes, but the Lenz would then reinterpret these shapes by processing them with an algorithm designed to evoke the techniques of the 19th century oil painter and then transfer that information back into sensory channels so that I can have the experience of original sense perception completely transformed by my chosen imaginal theme. Of course, the Lenz-user can also choose a more 'accurate' information oriented approach:

• enhanced perceptual ranges - infra-red, ultra-violet, radio waves, contrast enhancement, telescope/microscope, etc.
• data-feeds - personal information about nearby people, camera views from distant perspectives, etc.
• private and public forms of communication/conversation, artificial telepathy, etc.

This is really an enhanced (and perhaps extreme) form of current proposals in both 'virtual reality' and 'augmented reality'. In S'n'K this is, however, not so much a 'pastime' or an 'art form', but more a fundamental issue of one's way of being and personal 'world construction'/cosmology. It also forms a context for communal mind and culture because skinz can be shared or private, which is called 'freking in' or 'freking out' with one or more partners ('frek' comes from 'frequency').

A 'klowd' is swarm of microscopic machines which is embedded in, at varying densities, the air, the water, even people's bodies (though inside the flesh it is called the 'prossie', named after the word 'prosthetic'). It can, in a short period, reformulate, reconnect and construct any design given to it. If you want to sit down you can communicate the concept 'chair' to the klowd and it will coagulate and construct a functional structure for sitting down according to any design known to the vast public libraries/databases of your World. When you are done sitting the klowd dissolves the structure and the parts are available for whatever requests occur next.

Thus, there is very little (if any) need for 'property' as we conceive of it today in S'n'K...'things' have become temporary energetic processes so ephemeral that 'ownership' has dissolved into a question of 'access'. The klowd has both private and public components, so there is a kind of 'meta-propertarian' claim, but this doesn't involve 'wealth' or 'poverty', as these assets are distributed according to complex, chaotic patterns more like the 'state of nature' than a monetary and legal system as we would think of it currently. This brings up a very sticky, and important, aspect of the central plot dynamic of the series. The public klowd, when referred to 'in toto', is called the Platform. At the deeply public level, the klowd is capable of limiting participants' behaviors. For instance, if one person reaches out to strike another person, the klowd can quickly manifest a barrier that will prevent that from happening. This proved a necessary development because the klowd is so powerful that, without rules, it could become the ultimate weapon within reach of absolutely everyone.

In order to define what the klowd can interfere (or assist) with, people (sentient actors) are organized into Sindikats, which replace what we currently call 'governments' with a set of rules for the Platform in a given location (or trans-locational, networked 'context'). There are countless Sindikats based on countless philosophies of 'governance', so this is a much more diverse universe of sentient action than we are currently accustomed to. Nonetheless, very genuine issues of freedom and responsibility are involved with defining Sindikat and Platform rules; the situation is made much more challenging by the fact that Platform computation and intelligence have become so complex that no one truly comprehends them anymore. Effecting change in the Platform has morphed from an activity of writing and advocating law into a process of expressing opinion into 'fields of polling' where actors collaborate (and compete) philosophically in real time to create coherent societies and principles.

So, on the one hand we have a totally fluid reality of perception which can make one's world into any shape desired...and on the other hand we have a kind of analogous capability that accomplishes that in the physical world. But(!): when conflicts arise, it is tempting to retreat (or demand the same of others) into one's own world and simply create a simulacrum of an ideal. But, this then creates a tension where a trend toward insular private spaces pulls away from any dream of a physical Commons and that ultimately could be deadly to any sort of coherent, unified 'actual' World.

And that, my dears, is something I find so interesting, that I cannot resist creating characters and situations that explore this 'space' from many illuminating angles!

Soo: A workflow sequence

Here is an initial pen on paper concept sketch for the main character of S'n'K, Soo.

Below is a computer graphic version of the pen-sketch, which was derived using a neo-classical technique where shading and coloring were handled on different layers, somewhat akin to the old-school oil painter portraits. Also, we see here a nice recursion image where Soo's inner cartoon, Pla2, reaches down toward her in the form of a book, within a book, within a book...

Below is a surprisingly successful transfer of the 2d workups above into a genuine animation-ready 3d model using the conversion program known as FaceGen. It 'guessed' the volumes and then offers 150 facial tuning metrics that can make the guess closer to the original vision. This only took two hours!

Below is an initial nude study with the 3d face integrated.

Below is a body-form study of Soo's wings and tentacles as well as her double-pectoral frame that supports the wings and breasts. Notice also the 6 fingered hands with two thumbs.

To see her final appearance with wings and tattoos and pointy ears and all that...you will have to get Episode Zero! ;o)

Zscape Gallery 2

Here is another little gallery of landscape studies, all using the Zbrush technology (note -- you can click on any image for an enlarged view window):

Zscape Gallery

Here is a little gallery of landscape studies, all using the Zbrush technology (note -- you can click on any image for an enlarged view window):

Landscape studies: Intro

The picture below is one of many 'landscape' studies I am doing in preparation for providing settings for the action in S'n'K. These 'studies' are done in a wonderful 3d modeling program called Z-brush (from Pixologic) which was chosen because of a special technology in the software which allows virtually infinite complexity without additional computing resources. It does this by demanding that the artist choose a singular perspective initially, and then erasing everything that is visually obscured from that viewpoint as complex layers are added...the freedom to change point of view is lost but in exchange for maximal layering depth.

This choice of technology seemed appropriate to me because S'n'K 'scapes' are essentially fractal 'cosmosii' that have detail all the way down to the molecular level. Traditional 3d would require billions of facets and mega-computer workstations to pull off this sort image.

Hello

This is the 'Pre-Blog' for the Skinz-n-Klowdz Drupal site...which is complicated and still under construction. So, needing a container to 'dump' all sorts of fun stuff in and needing also to get the conversation around Skinz'n'Klowdz started: we find ourselves here.

What it is: S'n'K is a graphic novel I am illustrating and writing that is the summation of my whole life's work in futurism -- in the technological, philosophical, and spiritual senses of that word. It is a far-future, 'speculative fiction' (SF) piece set in a world where money, work, nation states, poverty, and even death have become obsolete. Without the traditional focuses and fears of our current civilization, what are the fundamental motivators that would lie at the center of life?