Signs of Life

Allen Sayegh

As­so­ciate Pro­fessor in Prac­tice of Ar­chi­tec­tural Tech­nology
Har­vard Uni­ver­sity Grad­uate School of De­sign

Signs of Life

FM radio head­phones were given out at the door. Each set was tuned be­fore­hand to re­ceive a broad­cast from my pre-pro­grammed sta­tion.

Vis­i­tors were then in­vited to walk around the room, con­tem­plating the ar­ti­facts of the ex­hibit. A V-di­pole at one end of the room cap­tures the broad­cast and dis­plays a real-time spec­tro­gram of the radio waves on a small dis­play.

Across the room, a satel­lite dish points back, cre­ating an align­ment across the pro­jected GOES-16 "full-disk" image an­i­ma­tion of the Earth. Along the back wall, a few dozen im­ages show de­mod­u­lated sig­nals from the NOAA 15/​18/​19 satel­lites as they passed over Cam­bridge, Mass­a­chu­setts in the months of Oc­tober and No­vember 2018.

The ex­pe­ri­ence demon­strated my in­terest in tap­ping into an in­vis­ible (wire­less) en­vi­ron­ment of dig­ital in­for­ma­tion. A USB, soft­ware-de­fined radio (SDR) dongle helped me reach the satel­lites.

In lis­tening to the trans­mis­sion, the vis­i­tors are en­gaging in a shared ex­pe­ri­ence, but are somehow still alone and un­able to com­mu­ni­cate while wearing their head­phones. The per­for­mance of the ex­hi­bi­tion is de­signed to be a place which sim­u­lates the real dis­con­nec­tion of techno-hu­manity. The "re­flecting pool" of the earth spin­ning on the floor might pro­vide a metaphor­ical re­flec­tion of hu­manity and progress

Nar­ra­tive for Signs of Life ex­hi­bi­tion

12/​5/​2018

Read by Steve Ervin As­sis­tant Dean for In­for­ma­tion Tech­nology at Har­vard De­sign School, Di­rector of Com­puter Re­sources, and lec­turer in the De­part­ment of Land­scape Ar­chi­tec­ture, at the Har­vard Grad­uate School of De­sign

Written by Daniel Tomp­kins

Nar­rator: So it was after 7 o’ clock— he said he had just gotten home from work; he was tired, and was sit­ting down to take his shoes off and, of course, the phone rings— right then— and I’m sure he was thinking:

1: “What now... who needs my at­ten­tion right at this mo­ment, right as I’m sit­ting down...”

Nar­rator: He’s a bit of a grouch, but he de­serves his time off. He said he didn’t rec­og­nize the number, but for some reason he picked up:

1: “Hello?”

Nar­rator: He said “hello” like he had some­thing im­por­tant going on— like this person was re­ally wasting his time. I think he was ex­pecting one of those recorded tele­mar­keters. I know he hated those tele­mar­keters... He said they didn’t re­spond at first. I’m sure he was al­ready thinking about cracking a beer and turning on the TV...

2: “Hello?”

1: “Hi. Can I help you?” He said im­pa­tiently.

Nar­rator: He thought he rec­og­nized the voice, but he couldn’t hear them very well through the re­ceiver.

2: “Um... Is this... 8... 8, 1 ,5, 5, 5, 5, 6, 2, 2... 2?”

1: “That’s my number... who is this?”

Nar­rator: And right then— right as he’s asking that ques­tion, all of the lights go out snap— just like that. His cell­phone too! The lights, the heat— even the street­lamp out­side his window. Every­thing’s dead; but he looks out­side— it’s just his block, the houses fur­ther down the street still had power. Every­thing there went com­pletely black, though.

He likes watching a little TV after work, so I’m sure he was frus­trated... More­over, he had no idea what that person on the phone was calling him about! He told me that he’d had a strange feeling about it. It felt like they were about to tell him some­thing very im­por­tant. I re­member him saying that.

So, he’s looking around for a flash­light; and he finds one— but it’s dead too. He thinks, maybe a lighter and some can­dles. So he’s sit­ting there— sit­ting in the dark with a few can­dles burning in his living room. It was freezing out. So, he doesn’t want to go out­side; but he can’t even read a book with these dim can­dles he has.

He can’t talk to any­body, can’t check Face­book, can’t even check his cell­phone to find out what’s hap­pening... He re­mem­bered a little portable radio that he kept by his bed­side. So he car­ries a candle into his room, sets it down on the side table, sits on his bed, and flips on the radio...

It doesn’t turn on ei­ther! I think at that point he re­al­ized some­thing strange was hap­pening; but he was so tired and ag­gra­vated at that point I think he just dis­missed it all. He was on his bed then, and he just fell back across the middle and laid there. He was thinking about the call then.

It was Sat­urday the next day— he had fallen asleep. He told me he woke up to the radio playing— it was the Christmas sta­tion, I think. He shut it off, and found that all the lights in the house were back on again; but his cell­phone was still dead. He plugged it in, and turned off the lights— the sun was coming in through the win­dows at that point; and he made a pot of coffee. He got a good amount of sleep— said he felt well-rested. I asked about the can­dles— said he should be careful falling asleep with some­thing burning.

I think he had just fin­ished break­fast around 10 in the morning. He pulled his laptop out at the kitchen table and was checking his email. There was some­thing from his su­per­visor at the of­fice, a few things to have ready for Monday. He tells me these things— he didn’t re­ally have anyone to talk to there; so he had to tell me every little de­tail about his day any­time we got on the phone.

Any­ways, he says he’s re­sponding to some­body at work about some pro­ject dead­line, or some­thing, hap­pening later that week— and it hap­pens again! Same as be­fore, he’s fin­ishing up his email and pop, his laptop screen freezes, glitches out, and fades black. He stands up, goes over to the wall, flips the light switch up and down, up and down— nothing. It’s the middle of the day, so he can’t just sleep through the outage like he did be­fore. It was some kind of surge too, so the bat­tery didn’t seem to have any charge.

He calls the power com­pany, but they seem as clue­less as he did. So, he went out on his front porch— sip­ping his second cup of coffee; and he just sat there. He had his car— he could have come to my house or run a few er­rands... but I guess he didn’t re­ally have any­thing he needed to buy.

So he just sat on this old wooden bench he has, on his front porch, sip­ping his coffee. He said it was the first time he’d had a mo­ment to just SIT. He told me how much he en­joyed him­self— it was an un­usu­ally nice day for De­cember. He just sat there, watched the leaves scratch along the side­walk, heard the neigh­bor­hood chil­dren— laughing and playing, dogs barking, the cars going by, saw the clouds moving over­head, and just sat there— taking it in.

He fin­ished his coffee, but stayed seated on his bench and just breathed the air for hours. Even­tu­ally he went back in­side— at that point the power was back on. It might have been on for a while, but he had lost track of time. He sounded a bit odd when he told me about it... like he had some­thing else to say. But that’s all he told me.

Signs of Life, Qual­i­fying Pro­ject

In fall of 2017, I was ac­cepted to the group Art, De­sign, and the Public Do­main (ADPD) at Har­vard's grad­uate school of de­sign with this straight­for­ward mis­sion: con­nec­tivity. Dataists, ex­am­ined in Yuval Noah Harari's book Homo Deus , be­lieve that life can be re­garded as the flow of in­for­ma­tion of data. Con­se­quently, the Dataist would equate death with a lack of data. The ul­ti­mate goal of the Dataist should be to at­tain a state of total con­nect­ed­ness: si­mul­ta­neous ac­cess to all data at all times.

In a Dataist sense, the pre­sent epoch is de­fined by con­nec­tivity. David T. Hill, a lec­turer at the Uni­ver­sity of Liv­er­pool, com­pli­ments Harari's di­ag­nosis of human de­vel­op­ment by laying out a thesis of cog­ni­tive labor in The Pathology of Com­mu­nica­tive Cap­i­talism . Here, Hill elab­o­rates on the com­mu­nica­tive economy and how con­nec­tivity has en­abled the ex­pan­sion of a first-world Dataist so­ciety.

Hill is quite con­cerned with the re­sulting psy­cho­log­ical dis­tress of an im­ma­te­rial economy— an "al­ways not-of­fline" so­ciety. His dis­turbing con­clu­sions aren't new. In 1959, in fact, Peter Drucker in The Land­marks of To­morrow coined the term "knowl­edge worker", saying:

"The most valu­able asset of a 21st-cen­tury in­sti­tu­tion, whether busi­ness or non-busi­ness, will be its knowl­edge workers and their pro­duc­tivity."

As the economy shifts to con­sider knowl­edge— the product of di­ver­gent and con­ver­gent human thought— as the dom­i­nant com­modity, ma­chines will likely sub­sume most other forms of phys­ical, te­dious, or oth­er­wise "un­in­tel­li­gent" labor. Both au­thors share an anx­iety for this pro­gres­sive rev­o­lu­tion, the pin­nacle of which would be the res­o­lu­tion of a cred­ible theory of mind and the in­evitable tech­nical un­der­standing of con­scious­ness.

Al­ready, as pointed out by Harari, sci­en­tists and en­gi­neers have suc­ceeded in rat mind-con­trol , men­tally-ac­ti­vated ro­botic pros­thetics, and hel­mets that can di­rectly ma­nip­u­late your neural ac­tivity (pro­ducing or in­hibiting feel­ings sim­ilar to a psy­choac­tive drug). Dataism is based in pat­tern, pur­pose and process. When ma­chine in­tel­li­gence sur­passes human in­tel­li­gence, we will be forced to ei­ther con­tinue aug­menting our bi­o­log­ical, carbon-based selves or face some sort of apoc­a­lyptic ex­tinc­tion.

In re­cent decades, hu­manism has ex­panded to be­come the new global doc­trine, rooting so­ciety— de­spite its cul­tural, re­li­gious, and tech­nical di­ver­sity— in the core be­lief that human life is sa­cred.

Ad­di­tion­ally, most people still col­lec­tively be­lieve in the ex­is­tence of a soul and some form of af­ter­life. In The Land­marks of To­morrow, Peter Drucker also wrote:

"It is al­most fright­ening how fast the ob­vious of yes­ter­year is turning in­com­pre­hen­sible."

Rapid ad­vance­ments in tech­nology chal­lenge our most an­cient and dog­matic be­liefs in what it means to be con­scious, feeling, living crea­tures. At the point that a ma­chine can im­i­tate the com­plex al­go­rithms of the human mind well enough to re­place us— even in cre­ative roles— what then will be the value of Homo sapiens? I am an artist, a cre­ative tech­nol­o­gist, a re­searcher, an ar­chi­tect, a de­signer, a media the­o­rist, an an­thro­pol­o­gist, and so­ci­ol­o­gist— but, first of all, we are all human be­ings. I have written ex­ten­sively on net­works, their be­havior and pro­to­cols, and on my new­found knowl­edge of con­nec­tivity. Data can be used for po­lit­ical ma­nip­u­la­tion as easily as it could fa­cil­i­tate the col­lec­tive as­sembly of al­ter­na­tive com­mu­nity net­works like the Cuban street net­work (SNET), or the na­tion-wide Guifi net­work in Italy.

Con­nected ob­jects and en­vi­ron­ments (the In­ternet-of-Things, or "IoT") can au­to­mate your ex­pe­ri­ence at Star­bucks, elim­i­nate traffic with au­tonomous ve­hi­cles, and keep our air con­di­tioned from home to work and back. How­ever, these might also en­able mass sur­veil­lance, put hun­dreds of thou­sands out of work, or un­sus­tain­ably con­sume pre­cious nat­ural re­sources.

Col­lec­tively, my ADPD group has con­cerned it­self with po­lit­i­cally-en­gaged in­ter­ven­tions in the built en­vi­ron­ment— es­pe­cially those which are ac­ces­sible in the public do­main. Through this pro­gram, I have had the op­por­tu­nity to per­form an in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary role— bridging many unique aca­d­emic com­mu­ni­ties. In this way, we've each con­ducted thor­ough re­search on human cul­ture, be­havior and his­tory with unique aca­d­emic per­spec­tive. Si­mul­ta­ne­ously, we en­gage this un­der­standing to in­form thoughtful prac­tice.

Tech­nology is en­abling new forms of media that have the ability to aug­ment our ex­pe­ri­ence of space. In this re­gard, my re­search is often con­cerned with the hy­bridiza­tion of ar­chi­tec­tural, urban, and formal lan­guage with ex­isting and emerging dig­ital spaces, ar­ti­facts, and al­go­rithms. Using my ex­pe­ri­ence, I'd like to en­gage in the pro­duc­tion of new con­nected spaces, in­tel­li­gent en­vi­ron­ments, and phys­ical com­puting sys­tems; and to as­sure my cre­ative, pro­fes­sional rel­e­vancy in a rapidly evolving economy.

Ac­knowl­edge­ments

Spe­cial thank you to Pieter No­ord­huis, cre­ator of goestools— the GOES Python li­brary for re­ceiving and trans­lating sig­nals to im­ages— for let­ting me borrow his “full-disk” im­ages for the pro­jected an­i­ma­tion. Also a thank you to Steve Ervin, for his voice in recording the FM broad­cast nar­ra­tive. Lastly, Allen Sayegh for being my ad­visor and helping me re­alize this Qual­i­fying Pro­ject.