Is It Art? Guest Editorial

Nude Descending A Staircase

There is an apocryphal story (apocryphal in the sense that I just made this shit up right now), that the day after the close of the Armory Show, March 16, 1913, former President Theodore Roosevelt was granted a private tour.

TR did not shoot well, but he did shoot often, and so, armed with his trusty F-Grade A.H. Fox 12-gauge shotgun, TR eventually scored a number of hits on quite a few pieces, all the while roaring his battle cry "THAT'S NOT ART!" The final tally by the curatorial staff was TR: 14, ART: 0. The surviving objects were sent on to show at the Art Institute of Chicago, and then on to the Copley Society of Art in Boston. By then, many other big game hunters had attritted all the works of American artists. Huzzah!

Alright, so maybe it didn't quite play out like that, but the important point was TR's role as, not just a viewer, but an indispensable participant in an informational exchange. With that in mind, Eldest Bro sent me an email, which I now present with commentary (interspersed in emboldened italics).

"Too big to fit in the comments section of your blog, but this is something that has occupied my mind for a long. OK, you have Spoken, so now I will take my turn in the Bitch Box."

As the late, great FZ once said, "Alright, whip it out".

"Many years ago I had an artist as a house mate. He was a cowboy artist, by which I mean that he was an actual cowboy, from Okanagan, Washington, wore a hat, drove a pickup, the whole schmear. And he was in the graduate Art school program -."
 

I remember that guy! Dana something. He was a potter, or a ceramicist. I liked his work. I remember the piece with the psychoanalyst's couch, with the cowboy boots at the foot, and I think a lasso, draped over one corner.

"-Our schedules did not intersect much, so most of the time we spent together was watching big-time wrestling on Saturday mornings. One day, motivated by a big pot of coffee and an especially stimulating match between Mad Dog Vachon and Ivan Kohloff, we had a cerebral discussion about the nature of Art."

Well see, right there, you guys had just watched Art on the TV, in case you are wondering what Art is...

 

"Dana's point of view (and I say this because his name was Dana), was that an object of Art had some ineffable Quality, shall we call it Beauty, that conferred upon it the status of Art. My perspective was much more pragmatic, namely that Art was defined by the presence of a Frame or "boundary", indicating where the Art picked up and the Rest Of The World left off. I am sure this is derivative of a deep philosophical thinker somewhere but, nevertheless, I came up with it all on my own."

Brain Map of the World

I would suggest that Dana was wrong but for the wrong reasons. I think it obvious that there are certain innate gravitation that we, as animals living in this universe, are quite naturally subject to. But a curious consequence of this philosophical stance is that there should exist objects that possess no ineffable qualities, and are therefore completely invisible. (See graph at right).

"My definition was motivated by a few observations:

   1) For just a picture or such, there is definitely a frame or at least the edge of a canvas.

   2) On the occasions I had ventured into his studio, which was shared with several other students, it   appeared to me that the mix on display was about 90% Crap and 10% Art. This was suspiciously similar to the makeup in my own field of practice, engineering.

   3) If there is not a frame, there is definitely a boundary of some kind. In a museum this might be a velvet rope or a guard; in a studio it is an artist shouting "Hey! Don't touch that!". (Me: "I thought it was just a sawhorse.")

Sturgeon's Law: "90% is all crap" originally attributed by him to only his own prose work, has now been shown to apply to every form of human endeavor. I would now categorize it as a Universal Principle, up there with Murphy's. As to context, see the last essay. 

"Another interpretation is that Art consists of a communication between Artist and Appreciator of Art, and that this can take place across centuries or millennia, and across cultures. The Venus of Willendorf springs to mind here. But yet this brings up more questions. Once, on a camping trip, my wife picked up an interesting stone (she has a talent for this sort of thing) which upon further inspection bore a native American petroglyph. Was this art? Or was it just someone relieving the tedium of a long day long ago? (Much as modern teenagers will draw a cock and balls on anything that stands still long enough.)

Well, that would be the Communication Theory of Art, or the Semiotics. Thus:

Emitter ==> Objule (Object/Module) ==> Noise ==> Observer

and the problem with this particular model, at least from an empirical or behaviorist standpoint, is that neither the intent of the artist (emitter) nor the attributes of the objule (the emitted object/module, which I done just made up) have the slightest bearing upon how the observer observes it.  All that matters is the observer (using his associational engine) and the universe in which the objule is embedded contextually. But of course not quite. More kind of like a strange combination of evolution (selection of a species does not occur in a vacuum, but is a global heuristic), and entanglement (granting, if you will, some small universal interactions). Or if you wish, He who Detected It, Ejected It

"For me, some of what I and other engineers do qualifies as Art. By this I mean a nifty trick, or a sweet hack that makes things work in a beautiful way. So, engineering can be Art. We exploit physical principles, same as any other artist, one requires a mastery of the medium. Just open up an i-Whatever or a laptop and think about the cleverness involved in putting all that stuff together and making it hum. Again, 90% Crap (Thigh-Master, Chrysler Cordoba) and 10% Art (DEC VAX, Ferrari Testarossa). I am not sure where the Popeil Pocket Fisherman fits into this scheme."

Absolutely. Or professional wrestling. Or ditch digging. Or nest building. Or dolphin bubbles. Or corvid aerial acrobatics. Or canine frisbee catching. I now feel that it is All Art. 

"The "designation" theory brings up some problems of its own. Who knows what M. Duchamp had in mind with his urinal?"

On more than one occasion Duchamp said that the piece was meant as a joke. But once the audience accepted it as an art object, the genie was let out of the bottle. Duchamp's intent was no longer relevant.

"As it happens I have visited an immense collection of Duchamp artifacts at the Staatliches Museum Schwerin-Kunstsammlungen (pretty obscure I know, but I just stumbled across it on a trip) in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and again, the 90% rule was in effect. (Please note, this is Sturgeon's Law, I deserve no credit.) Was the urinal just a big middle finger to the "Art" establishment?"

Yes.

"Or maybe it just made M. Duchamp feel kinda funny and he wanted to share that with the rest of us? 

Yes.

"(Note that both of those fall into the "communication" theory.) So, by the "designation" or "objet trouve" rationale, could I go into a restroom at SFO, sign and date a urinal, and charge admission to "my work of Art"? Or demand that it be removed and placed in its rightful location at SF-MOMA? 

What about a fully functional urinal connected to plumbing? Can that be Art? What about a guy taking a whiz into "my" urinal? Is that Performance Art? Can I demand that he show up at 11:00 every day and urinate to preserve the Integrity of the Work? 

According to modern art theoretics, if you can find a willing and accepting audience, yes. If you get them to accept it as a performance piece, you can piss in it too.

"So many questions. These are right up there with other imponderables. Why did Walter Payton never score a rushing touchdown in Super Bowl XX? Why doesn't Rex Ryan keep his yap shut and just coach his team like Bill Belichick? Why does Michelob make you fart so much? Why? Why? Why?

A guy could go crazy thinking up the answers to all these questions. Worse yet, a guy could lose his marbles thinking that there are even answers to be had."

Eee-yup.

Yes, But Is It Art?

Yesterday, one of the art faculty assistant professors, named Charlie if that makes any difference, happened to see the book "Survival of the Beautiful" on my desk. An Art Conversation followed.

I really fucking dread those conversations. At least, the part where I don't talk.

Charlie, after asking for a synopsis of the book, proceeded to opine about all things Art. You have to understand, the reason I pretty much dread these conversations is, even though these professor types have a solid university grounding in art-making and art theory, they invariably will pull references from a more general ground of human behaviors to justify their opinions. Since I'm, in 99% of the cases, much more familiar with their references to (take your pick) evolution, natural selection, quantum physics, technological progress, the useless and superstitious topic of memes, group theory, graph theory, psychology, neurology, brain structures, holism, science, culture, the Internet, etc. etc., it gets to be a pretty fucking tedious conversation pretty fucking quickly. Sometimes it sucks to be a smart-ass.

And usually, they've got it all incomplete and ass-backwards. Artists, like all experts, are not exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer - outside of their field.

And I learned a long time ago that conversations with professors require strategic corrections and a great deal of tongue-biting, and internalizing of cringes and winces as they fold, bend, spindle and mutilate 10,000 years of hard-earned human knowledge - just so that you can keep the conversation moving forwards.

The other cringe-worthy portion of these conversations is that these professors do not realize they are indoctrinated religionists, that their opinions are faith-based. That they, like anyone who spends time specializing in a limited field of knowledge, are brain-washed into certain beliefs. In my case, studying mathematics, we are constantly pounded with the unfounded idea that number is real, that these systems have some existence independent of reality. As a mathematical apostate, a self-defrocked priest, I call this delusion Platonic Derangement Syndrome. It exists outside of the field of mathematics, of course.  It exists in the art world in the following modern tenet: "Anything can be Art".

Of course, the demon of the perverse requires that at some point I take the wheels off of these conservation by offering up an opinion they cannot agree with. I have to commit a heresy. It's my nature, I think. Part pure cussedness. Part drama queen.

Oh, man, lack of consensus, putting up an obstacle, is not something they handle well. It is generally physically displayed by the complete shutdown of facial and gestural animation. The eyes dull. The pupils contract. The frown muscles go rigid. The shoulders slump. The chest caves. It's actually kind of funny to watch.

So, this time out, there came a point where I offered that something like Damien Hirst's pickled shark wasn't really Art anymore. It was a business commodity. A totem. A currency fetish. This was, of course, a blasphemy. The usual response is generally what is considered a mild ad hominem, that I am either a bit anti-intellectual, or ignorant, as in not trained in the field, or a philistine, or even smug, or even reflective of a sad decline in our society that I can't see that this is clearly a great work of art with a capital A.

And the, wow, the response from Charlie was pretty sad. "Um. No. Yeah, it is. It's Art". But there is always that quaver of uncertainty in that assertion.

Now, I have a variety of ways to go here, but this is the response I chose, based on what Charlie had said earlier:

"You claim, because of what Marcel Duchamp did in the 1917 Armory Show, display a urinal as an art object, that now anything can be Art."

"Yes."

"You back up this claim with the use of context. That it is all about context".

"Yes".

"The nature of the work itself is irrelevant -" (and before he can object) "- the intent of the artist and the intrinsic qualities of the work are not what matter, but rather how it is situated, and valued by the audience, by the appreciators of the art work".

"...yes". (Charlie says this only because he himself has at some prior point said this in his lecture to me).

"So - " and here I grab and read from "Survival of the Beautiful" "-the nature of the work itself matters little. It really can be anything, as long as a coherent story has arisen about why the work should be appreciated, and a community of tastemakers and art lovers evolves to celebrate the work (or style) and promotes it strongly enough so that it will endure in society long enough to make a difference".

"...yes..."

"And so, this category you, we, have created is changeable, in flux, not tied down to the standard Boolean binary logic of categories. Like a Venn diagram, it can occupy more than one set. Like an electron, it can be in two places at once?"

"(sigh) yes". (Because he has said this as well).

"So now, you have the general populace, which looks at the pickled shark, and says, 'That's retarded', and rejects it as art, then the audience of the hedge fund manager, who bought it clearly for sake of status, and his social circle, who call it art, but not really. And then that circle of art critics, gallery owners, collectors, who call it art. So, what is it? Whose perception wins out?"

"I... look it's Art. OK?"

"...well done, Charlie."

"Survival of the Beautiful": A Review

I miscalculated and checked out one too many books from the library this past month. As a result, "Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science, and Evolution" by David Rothenburg ended up being the bathroom book, which I only skimmed. I think to need to check this book out again at some future time for a more thorough read.

There is a scene in the movie "Apollo 13" where, because the astronauts needed to power down the command module (CM) to conserve battery power, Astronaut Ken Mattingly (played by Gary Sinise), and Controller (EECOM Arthur) John Aaron (played by Lorne Dean) must come up with a way to power up the CM. They have a limited amount of battery power. With Mattingly seated in the capsule simulator back on Earth, taking no breaks, and after several failed attempts at powering up, they finally come up with a procedure they can use to restart the CM.

I would submit to you, based upon the high selection pressures (life or death) involved, that the final powering up procedure was a beautiful thing - a work of art.  

On the other hand, country western music, hip hop, rap, or opera, with generally very low selection pressures involved, is not so beautiful, but still a work of art.

That's one of the things I take from this book. Not so much a question of whether of not something is Art (a stupid question BTW, like asking if something is Elephant), but whether it is high or low. Great or shitty. Especially now, in the 21st century, some one hundred years after Marcel du Champ let the genie out of the bottle and set it up so that anything, and I mean anything, could be Art.

Since I had only a chance to skim, here's a random quote from the book:

"The beautiful things we make aspire to be necessary as the rules of nature and forms of life that time has massaged into being through the evolution of beauty, which is such an important part of the complete development of life. We will never be sure of ourselves as the aesthetic of an single species is. Without thinking or wondering, the peacock knows he is nothing without his tail. Life is beautiful as it lives and endures, not needing to question whether it could have taken another path. Only humanity is plunged into such doubt, and only we have the choice to take the beautiful seriously, or not".

If Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes are Art, then a bowerbird's bower is Art.  That is part of my take from this book. The rest? Well, some things I had already concluded before reading. Like, animals do appreciate beauty. Animals do experience joy and delight. I know this because I am an animal sharing this planet with other animals. Other animals that share the exact same internal brain structures as I do, with a connectome that more or less gets activated by the same stimuli.

Natural selection, it seems to me, favors animals that enjoy living, that avoid the painful and the terrible, as opposed to animals that merely experience and record living. And our forms have been selected on that basis.

Rothenburg explores the idea that forms found in Nature are inherently beautiful. That they are converge on the beautiful, based upon limiting aspects of the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. That animals (including us apes) do indeed appreciate this beauty, take pleasure from it, delight in it, and therefore select for it. That beauty is chosen through the process of sexual selection, in the ongoing Darwinian arms race between male characteristics and female delight. As such, biologists, and more directly evolutionary psychologists, seem to explain why animals desire, but not what animals desire.

To some degree, this theme has been explored in the late Denis Dutton's book "The Art Instinct". However, Rothenberg partially rejects the evolutionary psychologists' approach of explaining away all forms in terms of fitness and function. I tend to agree with this, mainly because their Kipling-esque "just-so" theorizing rarely is based upon empirical observation.

Rothenberg repeats is the whole arbitrariness of form. Again, biologists would prefer that the form have some function, some reason to explain fitness, either as a feature, or a handicap. But there are many cases (think the Darwin's frustrations with the peacock's tail) in which the best explanation for the origin of a selected form is that it is, or was, utterly arbitrary - in keeping with the whole idea of random mutation, or random selection. Though not entirely. There is a ratchet of progress, a conservation of innovation, that occurs in the evolutionary record. And a convergence of functionality as well. When you consider that things like camera-style eye has independently developed six times throughout the history of life on Earth, you start to think about convergence - similar solutions to similar challenges.

How this relates to human art making, I never got to that point. But I just may have to re-read the book "Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind" by Gary Marcus.

The GOP Deserves to Lose!

Once again, I ask the question: "Is Bret Stephens stupid?" And, as always, he answers "Yes".

Not that Bret Stephens is ignorant or undereducated or unable to process a thought, but he is stupid. Dangerously stupid. Take for example, his latest editorial in the Wall Street Journal: "Republicans Deserve to Lose".

Yes, they do. Stephens has at least that right. What he fails to do, consistently, is to connect the dots completely to see the whole picture, which is that the Republican Party is a failed institution.

Ideologically bankrupt. Obsolete. Decrepit. Backwards. The Whig Party of the 21st Century.

After realizing that the Republican clown car currently running the circuit for presidential candidate, and finding all occupants wanting, Stephens offers up this pathetically clueless complaint:

"Finally, there are the men not in the field: Mitch Daniels, Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, Haley Barbour. This was the GOP A-Team, the guys who should have showed up to the first debate but didn't because running for president is hard and the spouses were reluctant."

Seriously? That's the GOP A-Team? How tragically, myopically, profoundly addled is Stephens. Stumbling perplexedly through the conservative wasteland, he does not realized that, aside from the GOP possessing the same lack of integrity as the Democrats, and vastly surpassing them in hypocrisy, they also possess no vision, no clarity of thought, no substantial intellectual metabolism, but instead display only a machine-like propensity to offer up a calcified, fossilized, plodding stale old program of more of the same. Same old failed programs. Time to scrap that rickety old computer.

Stephens mistakes the symptoms for the rot. If the likes of Mitch Daniels, Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, and Haley Barbour represent the intellectual elite of the GOP, then I'm surprised the rest of the party doesn't wear bearskins and use stone tools. Quite simply, there's no there there anymore. There was never any there there.

And it's hard to move forward when all you can do is look backwards.

The Duct Tape Lesson

Back in the late 70s, my younger brother was driving a car that was composed of around 70% duct tape.  I don't know what kind of car it was. I called it the "Death Car".

I made fun of his car a lot. But you know, he was always prepared. The car was such a piece of shit, that he kept spare parts in the trunk (hinged, by the way, with duct tape). But it was a perverse form of preparation, as it turned out that the one part he always needed in a break down was not in the trunk.

Still, the lesson is, be prepared. This past Friday, I was not.

You may or may not have heard about it on the news, as it was pretty much a local weather phenomenon, but we got a big snow in Chicago Friday afternoon. Seven inches in as many hours. Naturally, traffic sucked. Naturally, I had to go down to NW Indiana to help my niece move. What was normally a one and a half hour trip took me about five hours.

Now, that's not that big of a deal. I managed to creep through Chicago before the heart of storm turned the everything into a parking lot. And, being from NW Indiana, which is the western edge of the Lake Michigan snowbelt, this was nothing new or unusual. Take your time. Max speed 35 mph on unplowed roads. The only casualties in ditches in the meridians are the giant SUV assholes who think they are indestructible.

To borrow from Jean-Paul Sartre, "Hell is other drivers".

Chicago Skyway Bridge

So, no big deal. After getting tired of listening to the radio, I sang Beatles songs in a cat voice.

"Meow, meow, meow". I've never had a problem entertaining myself.

The only fly in the ointment was that the driver's side windshield wiper decided to become unhinged, right when I was on the Skyway Bridge (which, by the way, is next to one of my favorite bridges, the Norfolk Southern vertical lift railroad bridge spanning the Calumet River).

I am proud that I had the presence of mind to turn off the wipers before the blade disappeared into Hammond someplace. So, I cranked the defrost heater and blower to maximum, and tried to think what I had in the car I could use to secure the blade.

I like the houses

And the answer was duct tape! Too bad I didn't have any.

So, that stretch of the Indiana East-West tollroad has got nothing on it. I mean nothing. Most exits are tortuously circuitous switchbacks to the entrances, and what with six to seven inches of snow on the roads, I ain't getting off. I drove about fifteen miles without wipers in blizzard.

Really it wasn't all that bad. I've been through much, much worse.

Duct Tape to the rescue!

Finally, though, I made it to a gas stop, and I asked the guy if he had any duct tape. He jerked his thumb at the notions display, and they had some weird imitation duct tape. Which I bought. And wrapped it on the blade, and off I went.

It's still on there. The way I am, it will be on there until it falls off, sometime in June.

But I did go out and buy some proper duct tape, which is now in my car.

Keystone XL

Senate Republicans "held a gun" to President Obama's head, and he rightly decided not to succumb to the threat. I mean, children and guns, they usually don't go well together. Playing cowboy, I just can't see Mitch McConnell doing that well, unless it's the "Brokeback Mountain" kind of cowboy.

Pipeline map courtesy www. theodora.com

In any case, the Republican Superpac commercials are getting one thing right - not building the Keystone XL pipeline will not produce jobs (and it won't produce as many jobs as advertised). They probably could have (uncharacteristically) erred on the side of virtue and left it at that, but no, they have to go and fucking lie about how it threatens America's energy independence.

So, yeah, Transcanada is temporarily foiled, and does not get to ship the tar sand oil down to Houston for refining into diesel, loading into supertankers for export, and shipping to Europe and Latin America. Because that was the plan. No oil for US. Period. So all that bullshit about US energy independence is a fucking lie. It's all about the money. Big surprise.

You know, in my neck of the woods, the BP oil refinery in Whiting, Indiana just spent a shitload of dollars (~$3.8 billion) updating the works to handle bitumen - the Canadian extra heavy tar sand oil.

It's thick, heavy, caustic, nasty shit. It requires a lot of energy to extract it and refine it.

You know, uh, the refineries in Whiting and East Chicago aren't as bad as they used to be. I remember having to let lose with some major farts to sweeten the air inside the car when I'd drive by them.

Now it's all invisible, odorless carcinogens being pumped into the community - much, much better.

You would think the Republicans would be calling for expansion of the existing Keystone pipeline, since that actually does end (sometimes) in American gas tanks.

Or better still, build a pipeline from Cushing, Oklahoma to the Gulf coast. This would help alleviate a persistent price differential between Brent crude, the global benchmark oil, and West Texas Intermediate. Cushing, where most American oil is delivered, is landlocked. There is not nearly enough pipeline capacity to the Gulf where global markets set prices. So, local Texas refiners are probably real happy to buy just cheap Cushing crude and then sell their refined at the much dearer global prices. Nice tidy profit there, like they don't profit enough, right?

But Whiting and East Chicago? It don't make money the way the foreign markets do, and you can't ship the refined stuff on supertankers through the Saint Lawrence Seaway, so... America needs that Keystone XL Pipeline! Well, certain Americans do! People like Thurston Howell the III, I mean, uh, Mitt Romney, and the Party of Fuck You, We Got Yours!

Low-Hanging Fruit

I want to apologize to myself and my readers for this essay, "State of the World: 2032". I originally figured it would be a great deal of fun, just wild-ass speculation with no holds barred. Somewhere along the line it got all conservative and boring. Why, I even promised three game-changing predictions and carried through with nary a one.

I don't know, are we going to count room temperature superconductors as one of them?

Oh sure, but let's develop it some. So, let's start with superconductors. This property was discovered by accident one hundred years ago, in 1911, when Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes cooled a bit of mercury to the temperature of liquid helium, 4 degrees Kelvin (-452F, -269C). All electrical resistance in the mercury droplet disappeared, and it became a perfect conductor of electricity.

Fast forward some seventy years, ignore a lot of incremental advances, and witness something of a breakthrough in the mid 1980s, when, of all things, ceramic insulators where found to lose all electrical resistance at around the balmy temperature of liquid nitrogen, some 77K (-321F, -196C). Well, specially formulated ceramic insulators, doped with cuprates (chemicals involving oxides of copper), but the idea of higher temperature superconductors has gripped researchers and triggered a quest in the physics community ever since. Problem is, they still don't know why it does what it does. Such is the way of technology. Theory, for the most part, almost always lags behind effects.

So, let's say the doped rare earth/cuprate ceramic idea pans out, but it ends up being a ferrate ceramic jelly - a cheap, easy to make and bake, flexible, sturdy material that loses all electrical resistance below, say, 97F. The important idea here being that its cheap.

What happens? Well, superconductors can be used for magnetic levitation for trains, very efficient magnetic resonance imaging, lossless power generation, transformers, power transmission, supercomputers, particle accelerators, 

The obvious consequences are all power lines are stripped out. Well, maybe not right away, but ongoing. Oh, hell, more than that, the whole electrical grid gets updated and metering of electricity for the consumer should drop to the absurd. Literally absurd, as in tenths of pennies per kilowatt (really think the savings will be passed on to you?).

The jump in efficiencies is mind-boggling, but that's the obvious stuff. Particle accelerators go from CERN or Fermilab to much smaller than tabletop stuff  - gigawatt emitters that fit in the palm of your hand. Not phasers exactly, or blasters, more like lightning guns. (But, uh, wear protective gear to avoid french-frying yourself). Oh great, practical ray guns for dipshits.

With extremely efficient magnetic discriminators, combined with tiny petaflop computers, something like a hairnet can be worn on your head that takes the place of those giant donut MRI machines. Aside from the obvious medical imaging uses, it also means telepathic beanies, or teeper skull caps. These ultra-tiny, ultra-sensitive, super-powerful magnetic sensors can read your brain. Or write to it, if that's your clever hack.

I predict some one will be mind controlled with one things, maybe a robot zombie act, like a robot drone, or better still, if the resolution and bandwidth is sufficient, someone can use a suitably skullcapped porn star to enjoy a vicarious sexual experience, - telefucking.

Okay, there's a lot more there, bit I promised three game changers.

I should note, as an aside, that I have a feeling that the Singularity predicted Ray Kurzweil and all of the extropian hopefuls, the whole Rapture of the Nerds, just ain't gonna happen. I have a feeling that we've gone through all the easy stuff, and now we have entered the realm of diminishing returns. Here's a graph to summarize my thoughts, where 1.0 is the the maximum material instrumentality allowed by the laws of physics. I could be wrong. After all, a hundred years ago, physicists figured all the hard stuff was figured out, and that all future work would just be adding decimal places to precision. So, the next prediction is strictly way out there.

Before 2032, a whole new branch of materials science will open up called "Transmaterials". Unfortunately for me, the term "transmaterial" has already been coined and defined. Too fucking bad. "Creepsicle" was also already taken, and that didn't stop me from using it.

You've heard of metamaterials? Regular materials behave based on the atoms that make them, like, wood, stone, metals, glass. Metamaterials behave based upon the sum of their parts, like a emergent behavrio not predictable from mere atoms alone. Metamaterials are just getting started, but so far they have been used to make invisibility cloaks, superlenses, optical computers, stuff like that. For my prediction, a transmaterial is a material that alters physical reality, that changes both itself and its environment. It may be that a transmaterial can only make a change within a closed environment, something that will not affect the larger universe (at least, I should hope so), but can still produce amazing effects. In short, a transmaterial can't alter the laws of physics, but it can bend them.

My chosen transmaterial is based upon a really cool experiment done last year which may or may not be a landmark experiment. In 2011, scientists coaxed light out of a vacuum. This is a result of one of the predictions that come out of quantum mechanics, which says that the vacuum is empty. It is filled with evanescent virtual particles that are constantly popping in and out of existence over extremely short time periods. (The Casimir effect is another result). 

The Chalmers experiment, done by Christopher Wilson and his co-workers, succeeded in getting photons to leave their virtual state and become real photons, i.e. measurable light. The cool thing is, well, here, let me quote the article:

"predicted way back in 1970 that this should happen if the virtual photons are allowed to bounce off a mirror that is moving at a speed that is almost as high as the speed of light. The phenomenon, known as the dynamical Casimir effect, has now been observed for the first time in a brilliant experiment conducted by the Chalmers scientists.
“Since it’s not possible to get a mirror to move fast enough, we’ve developed another method for achieving the same effect,” explains Per Delsing, Professor of Experimental Physics at Chalmers. “Instead of varying the physical distance to a mirror, we've varied the electrical distance to an electrical short circuit that acts as a mirror for microwaves.
The “mirror” consists of a quantum electronic component referred to as a SQUID (Superconducting quantum interference device), which is extremely sensitive to magnetic fields. By changing the direction of the magnetic field several billions of times a second the scientists were able to make the “mirror” vibrate at a speed of up to 25 percent of the speed of light.
“The result was that photons appeared in pairs from the vacuum, which we were able to measure in the form of microwave radiation,” says Per Delsing. “We were also able to establish that the radiation had precisely the same properties that quantum theory says it should have when photons appear in pairs in this way.”
What happens during the experiment is that the "mirror" transfers some of its kinetic energy to virtual photons, which helps them to materialise. According to quantum mechanics, there are many different types of virtual particles in vacuum, as mentioned earlier. Göran Johansson, Associate Professor of Theoretical Physics, explains that the reason why photons appear in the experiment is that they lack mass.
“Relatively little energy is therefore required in order to excite them out of their virtual state. In principle, one could also create other particles from vacuum, such as electrons or protons, but that would require a lot more energy.”"

 The point being that (and hopefully you got the jist of the dynamical Casimir effect) is that when you pump more energy into these vibrating "mirror"s, the vacuum fluctuations will produce particles. Now, a synchronized bank of these mirrors should produce coherent vacuum fluctuations, basically lasing spacetime. No, this isn't some type of Zero Point Energy bullshit scam that hucksters want to sell you.

The device I predict, a spacetime laser, will produce mini-Einstein-Rosen bridges, little teeny tiny wormholes. (And actually, it's probably a lot easier to make wormholes than we imagine - the same way its easy to create nuclear fusion, it's just that you always get less energy out of it than you put in. It's keeping those wormholes stable is where the problem is).

Adult Swim's "Squidbillies"

So, in the scenario I envision, and let's let Doctor Wilson and his colleagues at Chalmers have the honor, is that they set up my predicted apparatus (which must be done in a vacuum chamber), notice that the dial of the vacuum pressure is way, way past what the pumps are capable of, like intergalactic space kind of vacuum. They freak out big time, since they think have created a black hole. Some are afraid to turn the machine off for fear the black hole will sink to the center of the Earth and devour the planet. Others want to shut it off for fear that the black hole is growing. But then they all realize that such a black hole that could create such a vacuum would also create a gravity gradient that would have spaghettified them all to their doom, so Phew! And what the fuck is going on? Eventually, they figure it out. They've created a stable wormhole. They can grow it. Make it big enough for people to go through, and foof! the Universe is ours. Okay, maybe not all ours. I predict the first alien race we run into looks a lot like the Squidbillies from the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. Do I really need to map out those consequences?

Okay, last game changer. Wow, after giving you all the larger Universe to play in, this one is kind of a let down. But here goes. Robot swarms. But not killer robot swarms. I know, the killer robot swarms are really easy to make, less than a hundred bucks to make a killer robot swarm that can swoop down and dismantle that neighbor's dog that has been keeping you up at night, but I'm not that kind of person. No really, I try not to do evil things like, or encourage them.

I predict friendly helper robot swarms, that can keep track of people, maybe the high risk behavior types, the accident prone, and the just plain unlucky. And since robot swarms use distributed intelligence, the way bees do, which is kind of alien to the way we think, these robot swarms may develop the ability to detect the accident prone behaviors in a predictive way. Maybe some people will just always have a cloud around them. Or maybe, out of the blue, kind of like guardian angels, they just happen to appear in the nick of time. You know, catching rock climbers. Holding opens the jaws of great white sharks to keep surfers from getting chompled. Stuff like that.

No, on second thought. No. That's just fucking stupid.