A sexist encounter

Today I experienced my first instance of sexism in an academic setting. I went to a talk by a leading scholar in Artificial Intelligence on how it is to change 'everything'. The room was mostly men but there were some women. I found the talk interesting and while there were certain technical concepts I did not understand, there was a lot I was able to follow, especially in terms of connecting Machine Learning to the human brain.

When it came time to ask questions, I was the first person to raise my hand and nonetheless was the fifth person to have the microphone handed to. When I got the microphone I asked a two part question, the first about morality and ethics with regard to self-learning robots (making specific reference to points he made in the talk), giving an example about drones and automated decision making. The second part of my question was about robot agency and the posthuman and if he thought this kind of AI work would have positive social implications and effects with regard to gender and race.

The first thing he did when he answered was ask me if I had any children. When I said no, he said 'well, you will soon'. The audience laughed. Then he offered a pedantic allegory about how teaching robots to be moral is like teaching children to be moral and gave the example that if a child is burning ants, you teach him that is this wrong. He answered no part of my question. No one said anything and the Q&A continued as normal.

While it may be true that my question was too long and perhaps too 'Humanities' for this context, I thought it was nonetheless a worthwhile question and that scientists who work on this kind of research should be capable of answering questions about the social and cultural impact of their work on the world. I felt this especially deeply given that Art History, amongst other subjects have begun to make an effort at introducing interdisciplinary approaches and bridging gaps between the arts and sciences.

I am convinced that had a man asked this question, he would not have asked him if he was a father. Moreover, there are several more interesting, more intelligent and more respectful ways he could have addressed my question some of which include notions of subjectivity and morality, the possibility or impossibility of controlling robots, how he expects life will be like if and when we live amongst robots as equals, etc. I am truly disappointed by this exchange and sincerely hope that people within the technology and science fields are having important discussions such as these both amongst themselves and with scholars in the humanities and that this was an isolated instance of a paternalistic individual who lacks an open mind.

Ernö Goldfinger re an encounter with Adolf Loos

Goldfinger re Loos: 

“one time we were sitting in the Dôme and a young Austrian architect came up: ‘Master, I have achieved a fabulous thing. I am going to work for Le Corbusier.’ Loos says: ‘My dear boy, when you come to Paris you come to learn French, not Esperanto.’ He hated Corbusier’s architecture, just as I hate his ‘Kasbah’ architecture – all the white stuff” [1].


[1] Stamp, Gavin and Goldfinger, Ernö. “Conversation with Ernö Goldfinger”. Journal (Thirties Society), No. 2 (1982), pp. 19.

2 Willow Road

I'm so excited by my discovery of Ernö Goldfinger's house at 2 Willow Road last week, which will be the case study for my third and longest chapter of my thesis. I went to visit it on Saturday and was blown away not only by the architecture of the house and by Goldfinger's furniture but also by the collection of modern art that was housed inside, which included works by: Bridget Riley, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Fernand Leger, Henry Moore and to my great interest Amédée Ozenfant, who was the art teacher of Goldfinger's wife Ursula in Paris. I'm so thrilled that my research has brought me to this house, which ties together so much of my thematic work on Loos, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Ozenfant of course and that here in London, I will have the opportunity to discover this house in great detail and the objects inside it, both the valuable art pieces and the trinkets Goldfinger brought back from holidays.

Can't stop thinking about the Foundations of Modern Art...

ARE WE REALLY SO MODERN? by Adam Kirsch

Interesting overview in The New Yorker of philosophy and asking fundamental questions about existence, God and modernity. 

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/05/the-dream-of-enlightenment-by-anthony-gottlieb?utm_content=bufferde25f&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer 

"Modernity cannot be identified with any particular technological or social breakthrough. Rather, it is a subjective condition, a feeling or an intuition that we are in some profound sense different from the people who lived before us. Modern life, which we tend to think of as an accelerating series of gains in knowledge, wealth, and power over nature, is predicated on a loss: the loss of contact with the past. Depending on your point of view, this can be seen as either a disinheritance or an emancipation; much of modern politics is determined by which side you take on this question. But it is always disorienting"

"One of the most popular names for the unexplainable is God: God is how we answer questions about creation and purpose that we can’t answer in any other way. Certainly, both Descartes and Leibniz relied on God to balance the equation of the universe. Without him, they believed, the world did not make sense. The philosophers’ God was not necessarily identical to the God of Christianity, but he had some reassuringly familiar attributes, such as beneficence and providential oversight of the world."

Two quotes from Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art"

"The work of art makes publicly known something other than itself, it manifests something other; it is an allegory. In the artwork, something other is brought into conjunction with the thing that is made… the work is a symbol."


"What could be easier than allowing a being to be just what it is? Or is it rather that this task brings us to what is the most difficult, particularly when such an intention – to allow a being to be as it is – is the opposite of that indifference which turns its back on beings in favour of an unexamined concept of being? We must return to the being and think about it itself in its being. At the same time, however, we must allow it to rest in its own nature."

Van Gogh (1888)

Two quotes from Georg Simmel's "Fashion"

Regarding the soul’s duality: "the physiological basis of our being gives the first hint, for we discover that human nature requires motion and repose, receptiveness and productivity – a masculine and a feminine principle are united in every human being. This type of duality applied to our spiritual nature causes the latter to be guided by the striving towards generalization on the one hand, and on the other by the desire to describe the single, special element. Thus generalization gives rest to the soul, whereas specialization permits it to move from example to example; and the same is true in the world of feeling. On the one hand we seek peaceful surrender to men and things, on the other an energetic activity with respect to both."

"Movement, time, rhythm of the gestures, are all undoubtedly influenced largely by what is worn: similarly dressed persons exhibit relative similarity in their actions. This is of especial value in modern life with its individualistic diffusion, while in the case of primitive races the effect produced is directed within and is therefore not dependent upon changes of fashion. Among primitive races fashions will be less numerous and more stable because the need of new impressions and forms of life, quite apart from their social effect, is far less pressing."

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun

I was completely blown away by the exhibition 'Unceded Territories', a solo show of Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC in Vancouver. I first came about his work in a class I took during my undergraduate studies at McGill on contemporary Canadian Aboriginal art. The work that I was taught is 'An Indian Act: Shooting the Indian Act', a performance from 1997 wherein Yuxweluptun shoots the Indian Act, a federal law from 1876 that remains active today limiting the rights aboriginal peoples in Canada. What remains from the performance are the rifles used for the shooting and the document having endured several bullets.

Getting the chance to look at some of his paintings, I was so impressed by his visual eloquence in his efforts to reclaim Aboriginal aesthetics within a modernist canon. Making use of traditions in Pop art and abstract painting (he plays with the tradition of white on white paintings, beginning with Malevich and then continued by Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Robert Ryman), Yuxweluptun becomes the agent who appropriates western culture to serve activist pursuits on the ways in which the west has failed many. 

He is the maker and no longer the subject and repurposes the techniques and history of western art to fulfill he own messages. Addressing a multitude of urgent issues such as the residential schools in Canada's ugly history, oil spills in the ocean and power in today's politics, this exhibition was immense and instantiated thought and concern for world problems that have a bad habit of getting brushed over.