Object Americana

Greetings, reader.

I am an artist working at the intersection of Machine Intelligence, digital manufacturing, and 3D space. Object Americana is a project that seeks to define a new medium of sculpture. This genre is defined on the terms that exist between my self and the Machine agents I have created to partner with. I have spent over a year choreographing and refining the process by which we work together, with the ultimate goal to create pieces of physical material that are both fundamentally of the Machine and fundamentally of the Human.

The first sculptures of this new genre are presented here. Machine-Human collaboration has allowed for an uncanny new ability: combining two or more objects into a new hybrid form, a type of feral alchemy with strange semiotic implications.

Combination: Why?

Object Americana began as an exploration of Machine-agent creativity. This question led me to think about how I view my own creativity; I view it as primarily synthetic. To the combinatory act is one of the fundamental building blocks of creativity and happens to the block I am most adept at.

The second motivation for combining things is the concept of semiotics, several fields of research generally considered a sibling of linguistics. The base concept is that meaning is generated as a relationship between a signifier and the thing it signifies. Through the study of semiotics, one (such as a mid-20th century philosopher) may break down societal phenomena into important constituent concepts which might not be apparent at first glance. This project attempts to reverse-engineer this process. Instead of looking at signifiers and determining what they signify, Object Americana starts almost from the middle and works outward toward new signifiers and the signified concepts they might entail.

The true depth of the combinatory act is revealed: if one begins combining objects with well-understood symbolic value, one is necessarily creating new symbols with open-ended interpretations. Signposts that arise at the intersection of two streets but which point off perpendicular to both of them. The goal of Object Americana is to develop new ways of understanding the concept of the United States.

Machine Intelligence: Why?

We are lucky enough to live in interesting times. Machine Intelligence is a major agent (so to speak) turning the wheel of history. I refer to ‘Machine Intelligence’ to emphasize its parallel rather than subservient position to our own. Speaking especially of the wheel of history, I believe we as a species would do quite well to try and end our habit of thinking of silicon-based intelligence as something that exists solely to serve our needs, inevitably economic.

Indeed, what intrigues me most about the Machine agents has already been apparent for many years: Machines have a totally different perceptive ability than humans. They use sensor data and mathematics to form impressions and opinions about the world around them.

The field of Generative Machine Intelligence describes to me an entirely new avenue of perception available to Machines and through them, us Humans. Machine Learning is a process of encoding a vast amount of data into Machine-comprehensible datapoints in a virtual region called the latent space. Once these data are thus encoded, the Machine can draw inferences about fresh data shown to it about where that fresh data likely resides in its established knowledge-field. This process is the basis for nearly all Machine Learning applications, from text translation to self-driving cars.

Generative Machine Intelligence takes this process and runs with it to its logical conclusion: the Machine is instructed to use its latent space to create novel datapoints that did not previously exist in the dataset. What is perhaps the most exciting thing about this incredible process is that a Machine may be trained to interpret many different things in its latent space and then generate examples of data interpolated between existing things. This ability to seamlessly interpolate between understood things is not at all one that comes naturally to Human agents. It is a truly novel perceptive ability, and it is the driving force behind Object Americana.

Sculpture: Why?

Well, I am a sculptor! I am a sculptor because 3D space has always been my primary means of expression. My background is in architecture, sculpture, and 3D printing. 3D printing is especially important because it allows objects which formerly could only be digital to come to life in the physical world. Object Americana embraces the physicality of sculpture while turning it on its head. This project is an attempt to create a new genre of sculpture that is fundamentally digital. Using a generative Machine Intelligence to synthesize new America-signifying objects is an act of creation that can only occur in the digital realm; by using a 3D-printing machine to bring those objects into the real work, I complete the strange circle and establish a new quadrant in the realm of sculpture: fully digital, fully physical, and fully rooted in Machine Intelligence.

Americana: Why?

I am an American artist; even if I left the country and began life anew elsewhere, this would never change, especially since America sees itself as a global hegemony. Further, I am from a state called Michigan which embodies many of the most egregious qualities of my fair country and which bears the distinction of being the prototyping grounds for many of them. It is also a place of great natural beauty and inspiration, and it too has felt the wheels of history on its rough roads. Historically, it manufactured plenty of them. Being from that place created in me a deep sense of loss and tragedy. It is a region defined by how great it was about a generation and a half before I was born, and the sense of this was everywhere even growing up in the affluent, feckless college town I hail from.
The United States of America is an empire in decline. I do not mourn the slow senescence of a empire. Rather, I am trying to observe it, comment on it, perhaps make sense of it, perhaps make confusion of it. This final piece of the artistic puzzle is mine and mine alone.

The Wisdom of Crowds

With the conceptual foundation laid, it came time to build the structure of the project itself. Immediately, the question of which objects precisely to hybridize becomes very important. Early on in the project, I came up with a list myself, a darkly humorous mix of weapons of war, TSA security devices, trucks, and of course, the All-Seeing Eye. However, I soon realized that this was not adequate to the task at hand. My own list of objects reflected too much of my own taste and obscure amusement at the topic. Contrary to that notion, a central aspect of Object Americana and moreover the Machine-Intelligence-based object-combining alchemy at the heart of it is the palpable feeling I have of partnering with a force beyond my control or understanding.

The solution to the problem was to create a questionnaire for people to respond to and take their responses as a much more genuine reflection of the concept of “Americana” than anything I could personally come up with. Thus, the first step of Object Americana is a bit of crowd-sourced wisdom. The poll was primarily focused on immigrants, people who were born in other countries and raised there for a significant portion of their life, and received 31 full respondent answer sets. Not a huge number but plenty for my purposes. The questions were divided into sections about the past, present, and future, and was centered around asking about the objects people associate with the USA from those three eras in their own personal history.

The results of the questionnaire will shortly become apparent!

Choreography of Object Americana

The process described here modifies and extends the work of Dong Wook Shu, Sung Woo Park, and Junseok Kwon in their paper “3D Point Cloud Generative Adversarial Network Based on Tree Structured Graph Convolutions,"¹ which is a 3D point-cloud GAN as the title implies. A GAN, Generative Adversarial Network, is a type of Machine agent that learns through trying to fool itself into believing the things it is generating are real examples of data. A point-cloud is a set of point data in 3D space; these are commonly produced data types of 3D scanners, but they can also be created algorithmically as I have done here. Generally, a single point-cloud represents the surface of a single object; the points in the cloud reside directly on the surface of the object.

The full steps of Object Americana are as follows, arranged as a description of the step followed by the parenthetical tool which is used to carry it out:

1. Pick objects (questionnaire data + Human intuition) 2. Generate point clouds (Grasshopper for McNeel Rhinoceros, a CAD program) 3. Make the point clouds into Machine-readable datasets (Python file processing using custom-written scripts) 4. Train new GAN Machine agent (TreeGAN, a Machine Intelligence GAN program that runs on PyTorch for Python) 5. Extract Machine-generated point clouds (Python) 6. Import and do preliminary algorithmic meshing of GAN training session point clouds (Grasshopper for McNeel Rhinoceros) 7. Compile training session meshes into a video showing the training process, in order to judge which object combinations result in viable sculptures (Grasshopper for McNeel Rhinoceros) 8. Fine-grain examination of generated meshes, picking ‘contenders’ to be the final, representative mesh for the given object combination; of the contenders, finally the best (Grasshopper for McNeel Rhinoceros) 9. Manually edit and connect the algorithmic mesh fragments of the final contender into a single cohesive, comprehensible, and fully 3D-printable mesh (several hours of artistic labor in McNeel Rhinoceros)

At the end of this process, fully 3D-printable objects, created both of Machine and Human intelligence, are complete.

liberty--mcds-1e117{Our Lady Of Liberty And The Perpetual McDouble}

The object created from the past section of the questionnaire data, a combination of the Statue of Liberty with the McDonald's logo. To my mind, this object represents the way in which the old notion of the American dream was, even at its root, wrapped up so strongly with base commercialism and the physical products this country has exported throughout its history. In many ways, the American liberty has always meant freedom to buy something; more often than not, something created under negative if not horrific circumstances. I think of the promise this country held in eras bygone, and how food security was a driving force behind many waves of immigration to this territory. How many people, arriving at Ellis Island with lady liberty in plain view, had their first meals in America on their minds? At the same time, in the contemporary era McDonald’s has taken on a decidedly sinister hue: extremely unhealthy, extremely cheap food offered to the millions of the country’s destitute residing in food deserts, in lieu of effective nutrition. This same food offered around the world as a primary symbol of the United States’ soft-power cultural empire. As they say, “Billions and Billions Served!”

trump1--mcmansion-2e49{Excavation Of The Contemporary Nero In The Ruins That Birthed Him}

The object created from the present section of the questionnaire data, a combination of the head of Donald Trump and a suburban "McMansion" house. To my mind, this object bears the weight of recent American history heavy on its slumping shoulders. The political system in this country has been in a state of collapse for the entire span of my life, close to thirty years at the time of this writing. The governmental state of affairs has grown more cartoonish and grotesque with an unrelenting, inverted sense of progress. I have observed with an increasing sense of panic and absurdity as my fellow Americans have moved to embrace ever-more-ignorant ways of seeing the world around us, as well as each other. It is a personal belief of mine that one root cause of this bewildering process has been the suburban places set out for us as the ultimate goal of the American lifestyle. Single-family houses in endless suburbs, serviced by single-family automobiles, single-family lawns, and single-family dogs. As the personal lives of Americans has shrunk to some weak parody of a Libertarian fantasy, the meanness, militarism, and outright avarice of our politics has followed suit. It is clear that President Donald Trump is not an aberration.

guillotine--ebike-?-???{name TBD}

This object has not yet been completed, but hopefully will be shortly!

wavingflag--ar15-3e107{Object Americana}

The object created from the overwhelming totality of the questionnaire data, a combination of an AR-15 assault rifle and the American flag. The apotheosis Object Americana. To my mind, this object is a frightful visage of the reality of the American century. A country built perforce on the backs of slaves, compelling itself forward into the arc of history at the point of a gun. A country of self-taught myths and self-reinforcing hegemony. There is nothing quite so American as the insistence upon owning a deadly weapon, and believing that liberty itself, not political power, flows from the end of a gun. As the wheel of history grinds this empire under its inevitable path, we would do well to remember what brought us to this moment: perhaps more than anything, a belief in the healing power of might, economic and military. The door closes on the American empire, a process that may well take longer than the years any of us have left on this or any other planet. For the sake of Humanity, let us hope this chapter of history ends in a swift, peaceful way.