Musings – Maria Lantin

July 7, 2024 In Musings By mlantin

A birthday message

Been around the sun 53 times! Is that an accomplishment? Yes absolutely. Accomplishment for my parents too, and testament to all the nurturing and caring that friends, community, and the earth have provided. If staying alive is the principal goal, I’m doing good so far. The basics are there. I am so grateful.

I’ve had a year. This time last year I was getting a biopsy for the possibility of endometrial cancer. It never occurred to me that it would be positive. Honestly. I barely contemplated that option. So when I got the call from the doctor, I had no mind rehearsals to fall back on. I went blank. Maybe I would have gone blank anyway. It’s possible. When reality suddenly shifts like that, it may be almost impossible not to blink in paralysed disbelief.

From there it was appointments, scans, blood tests, surgery, chemo, radiation. It was a big change. But it also had a quality of being completely ordinary, part of the human experience. I stayed curious throughout and there were interesting moments, lonely moments, despairing moments, delightful moments.

I’m enjoying being done with treatment. It’s a rebirth of sorts. And like any birth, it’s terrifyingly exhilarating. I am emerging from this intense period of my life with less fear and more love.

One of the first things I noticed about my rapidly changing mind after the diagnosis was that there were two voices that became louder. One was saying: “Well, we’ve had a good life, dying is ok.” And the other saying “NO NO NO NO NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” These two voices had always been there, but now they were duking it out. What would you do to stay alive? Every treatment decision was a tussle between those two voices with a large supply of statistics mixed in.

For years I’ve pondered the will to live. Where does it come from? What makes life want to stay alive? In the end I came to the conclusion that though love is not the mechanism, it is definitely the manifestation of it in our bodies. We stay alive by going towards life-giving things, that’s love. And we are all of us hopelessly in love with the world. Those two voices are both lovers. One feels the sadness of impermanence, losing the things we love. One wants to drink in every possible moment of love that can be had. They are a good pair.

Right now, 3.5 months after the last treatment, I feel strange. Not in a bad way. Deconstructed in a way that I’m not sure I want to reconstruct or at least not as solidly.

And we’re in such a strange moment anyway, aren’t we? I think that might be a shared experience? Much stability lost, and a lack of shared vision at practically any scale. A legacy of decades of individualism. It’s weird to say this as an introvert but man I gotta join some groups! Or form one! Or both!

A couple weeks ago I finished reading Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger (highly recommend). She urges imagination, to collectively come up with something different and then just go for it, adjusting as we go. As much as our doppelgänger wants to destroy, we can want to build. Creation will always have an edge over destruction. It’s the nature of life. But we do need to pick up the pace…lots of destruction happening. I read in one of the newsletters I follow that instead of “resilient” in the face of climate change we should use the word “courageous”. The thinking is that it changes it from a defensive stance to a creative one and might help us keep our eye on the ball. Not a bad idea.

Less fear more love – my wish is for more of that. And more strangeness, and more oddballs, and more laughter. A commitment to enacting some great personas. There are some ideas percolating and I’ll write about them soon. Meanwhile, I thank the oddballs in my life for all the sparkles. I love what we create together. Let’s team up more.

With love and oddball courage,
Maria

———-
From the last year, here are some books and concepts that made me go aah.

– Doppelgänger by Naomi Klein
– Moonbound by Robin Sloan
– Not Too Late – essays edited by Solnit, Young, and Lutunatabua
– Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
– Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
– The First Rule of Mastery by Michael Gervais
– Tuesdays with Morrie
– Markov Blankets
– Any talk by Joscha Bach
– Many many articles and podcasts about AI and experiences with AI.
– The many conversations I had with the trees.
– The many hours I spent observing the ducks, crows, chickadees, wrens, sparrows, etc etc
– The generous sky

No doubt I’m forgetting a lot but it’s a good sampling. I feel well nourished and ready for whatever.

—

The photo is from early April, about two weeks after the last treatment. Taken by Steve McGinty.

July 25, 2020 In Musings By mlantin

Thoughts on a pandemic

So much has been written. What could I possibly add? I could point to the things I have repeated over and over to myself, to others. To the similarities. To the contrasts.

The shame of pandemic nostalgia. The privilege of living through this and feeling there was ground under my feet. Being able to reflect on a silver lining. The contrasts were stark — the suffering elsewhere so immense as I sat beside a pond recording birds and appreciating the slow quiet.

Shame because I know I don’t deserve this position. I have been incredibly lucky. Responsibility too. Given this oddly shaped bubble of retreat, how do I emerge with even more resolve for the good? How do I resist the undertow of recreating the old?

How did I lose the “we”? Is this what social distancing does? We are all living through this but in many different ways. Is there a stream, a song, that might connect us all at the exit? Is it BLM? Social Justice?

But it’s not over, I hear again and again. Yet I can feel the acceleration. Now it’s both. The virus and the machine.

I desperately want us to make wise choices. I want us to emerge with a sense that if we could do this, we can do anything. We can restructure for a slower world that includes the songs of birds as treasure.

If there is a song of reinvention, is it dissonant? I realize I have lost faith in universality. And yet, a part of me resists. There is an objectivity in what nurtures, what connects, what heals. Surely, a stance of courage and love for the world is universally desirable. I need to believe this. I listened to a podcast once that asked the question “What belief do you hold that, if proven wrong, would fundamentally destabilize you?”. At the time, I couldn’t answer. Now I could.

I know the rest of this year will be both unbearably hard to watch, and arrestingly beautiful. The contrasts will continue and with them a call for expansive and acute awareness.

August 26, 2018 In Musings, Research By mlantin

Being With Picture

I don’t remember exactly when but at some point in my earlier years I started imagining myself entering the pictures in my picture books. Someone would be reading to me and I would zone into the picture and wish I could step in. I would look at every detail and wonder what else there was. Franfreluche, a clown storyteller from a children’s tv show, did exactly that and I would watch her enviously. I wanted those giant storybooks that I could step into.

This curiosity about “being with” picture still animates me. To be clear I didn’t want to have an interactive picture world. I wasn’t interested in a game. I was interested in the sense of space, the colours, the world the characters were in. I wanted to see them do their thing while fully sensing their environment. A modest wish. Theatre and other live performances do this to a degree. We share a space and it is partially determining the performance. A crucial dimension to the pleasure of liveness is that we feel entangled with the performers through a shared space. Still with theatre there is a conceptual distance imposed by the stage. The characters’ world is not wholly accessible. In a way, films and books do a better job of immersion because they specifically ask us to dim some senses in order to merge on others. With live performance, our senses are awake and the merge or resonance happens through a more physical entanglement.

What I seek then is something in between theatre and movie, or between theatre and book. I want the merge/resonance of a book with the feeling of physical entanglement with all my senses awake. I do want to lose myself in the story. But I want to do so as a fully engaged observer.

Enter VR. The promise of the merge. In all its incarnations, we talked about immersion, like sinking into water, being surrounded by our imagination. And yet…not quite. Something is missing. The worlds are empty somehow, happening “out there” even as they surround us. We have readily adapted the gaming paradigm to the current VR platforms but so far have largely stayed away from the book or the theatre. But I have recently encountered two examples that are steering towards a “being with” picture. They have both made me happy, like discovering a new land that just feels interesting and that I always knew existed.

Cave is a piece showcased at SIGGRAPH 2018, by NYU’s Future Reality Lab (FRL). In this piece an audience of 30 people is positioned in two seated groups of fifteen pointed towards a front centre “stage” area. Each audience member dons a headset with headphones (or specialized Bose personal speakers). As soon as I put mine on I could see the other audience members as a virtual audience, their heads and bodies moving. We are not the usual avatars. We are semi-transparent, with large skeletal masks on our heads. The audience heads are tracked to their physical movements so I can look at my neighbour and if they are looking at me I would know to start a conversation. There was enough time before the show that I could do this, and I could also observe the world in which we had all been plunged: a prehistoric cave 12,000 years ago in Northern Europe. A young girl is illuminating the cave wall as (presumably) her mother is drawing on the wall. A soft humming song plays. It feels dim. It doesn’t feel cold though I suppose it must have been. I feel like there is a warm glow of a fire. It feels good to know that I am experiencing this shared space with others and that I can see them looking at different details of the cave. A few minutes later, the characters in the scene fade, and the show starts. The girl comes down from a ladder into the cave. She lights a fire and explains that her people are in grave danger and that they need a new shaman. Her mother was the last great shaman and she doubts if she possesses the same powers. As the story proceeds she transitions from doubt to confidence and activates her abilities to imagine and animate cave paintings. Along the way there is a magical mammoth, a visit from her mother, and handfuls of fairy dust. There were no cuts.

I saw Cave twice and the first time I was analyzing it from the perspective of someone who had just discovered a place where anything could happen. I looked around, I looked at the other people, I observed people as the “play” started, I looked for the intricacies of the movements of the characters, the voice, the sound quality. I wanted to sense the world I was in. How much detail was there? How many times could I watch this and still be enthralled? Why was I even asking these questions? The container was interesting and it was separate but wholly entangled with the story unfolding in front of me. Like theatre. But also like film. And like comic book. Not like a game. fascinating. The second time I saw Cave I decided to focus on the story. Could I be with the story and feel like we had been transported to her world as ghost witnesses? It turns out that the answer to that is “sometimes but not always”, and I think this is because it borrowed a bit too much from theatre at times, and a bit too much from film at others. There were amazing moments like a hug that was so well animated you could almost feel the brush of the hands against cloth and the gentle envelop of an embrace. We had time to linger and appreciate. In general, the timing of the piece was of theatre, with a slower more deliberate delivery (in fact the dialogue followed a Shakespearean iambic pentameter). It could have been even slower given the capacity of the space to speak for itself. I would have liked more detail in the movement or more expressiveness. It felt a little too much like theatre in the seating configuration. I wish I had been cross-legged on the cave floor with others strewn around me also seated on the ground. Though I recognize the desire to match physical situation (seated on a chair) with the virtual representation. I felt taken out of the moment when the music became too orchestral, too Disney-like. In a film, the music would have been appropriate for the moment but in this context it overwhelmed the space which was already providing many emotional cues. In that moment, focusing on complex environmental sounds might have served the same purpose as big orchestral sound in film. Still there were moments where tropes from film were very well integrated including magical visual effects. I think I could watch it a third time and still find something interesting. This is the first time I have felt this way about a VR piece.

To me, Cave is about “being with” picture. And yet it’s not moving pictures, it’s dancing space. I can see so many ways forward to explore the story space that FRL has opened. Many questions come to mind. What exactly is essential to what they created? Co-located audience? How many people before it’s too few or too many? Could some of the audience be less physically present (networked in)? Could the audience be moving around? The possibilities for the space are also interesting. The audience could disappear. There could be cuts into different spaces including internal conceptual spaces. Once a world is created, it could be re-used for a number of stories, details filled in, characters introduced. This then starts to feel more like a comic book world: episodic and vast. I can also see the possibility of this kind of theatre/film/comic book mix in Mixed Reality. The questions then centre around how site-specific the story becomes, how much “liveness” is introduced into the story either through AI or other performative means.

The other piece that has changed the way I look at VR and space is Dami And Falian, a VR graphic novel being created by Edward Madojemu in the Basically Good Media Lab at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Edward is creating a completely hand-drawn virtual world (drawn in AnimVR and Quill) where the world progresses in slices of time like a graphic novel. There are speech bubbles and portals in space and time. Within a slice of time you can explore the world, walk around. In that sense it feels a bit like Myst. There remains many questions to answer with regards to the design of a VR graphic novel including when a speech bubble appears/disappears, the orientation of speech bubbles, the use of sounds, the integration of object interaction. Yet the feeling of entering a world which exists regardless of the actions being enacted within it, is strong and interesting much like Cave. Edward has chosen to also integrate networked and social elements to Dami And Falien. You can leave notes in the environment and explore with someone else. This work is nascent and it’s unclear where it will land in the mix of theatre, film, comic, and game. Edward is in Generation Z. I am curious to see where his vision takes him and us.

As Dr. Ken Perlin of the Future Reality Lab reminded me in conversation, our generation has been heavily influenced by film and it is hard to see how much of what we do is driven by those tropes and visual conventions. I see Cave as an integration of past cultural loves and Dami And Falian as an integration of niche media, towards the creation of truly immersive spaces.

Links:

Future Reality Lab (their blog has followed the development of Cave as seen through the eyes of the production team)
Cave XR
Dami and Falian
Basically Good Media Lab

August 7, 2018 In Musings By mlantin

Entropy

Entropy depends on a blurring of the universe, otherwise everything is always perfectly ordered or disordered, as you wish, and there is no past or future…but there is no you either. You can’t win. But maybe you can blur less.

(inspired by a reading of “The Order of Time” by Carlo Rovelli)

October 1, 2017 In Musings, Research By mlantin

Memory and Space

The Basically Good Media Lab (BGML) has acquired a Hololens. This has been a long time coming, partially because I was waiting for the technology to come down in price. I have a loose rule that if I can’t buy at least two of something comfortably, I don’t think it’s social enough to have it. Being together in reality (*R?) is one of the tenets of the BGML.

I broke the rule because AR is seeping into the mainstream with ARKit and it seemed like experiencing what is currently the state of the art in AR would be a good thing. I want to have a feel for AR in the same way that I have a feel for VR.

Last weekend, I brought the Hololens home and spent some time with it, about an hour and a half. When I went back to my iPhone, it felt like ancient technology. More than ever I am convinced that AR is the future. Besides playing around with putting 3D models and animations in my kitchen (totally magical!), I experimented with the games that came pre-installed in the Hololens. There was a game that had silverfish-like robots coming out of the walls, which required artful dodging and shooting. I loved how much it induced movement and how I was not afraid to move since this was my own kitchen and I knew exactly where I was at any moment (unlike VR…where there’s always some mystery even with motion capture).

But then I tried a game called Fragments. When it starts, a man appears in my kitchen. This is not a man I would necessarily invite into my kitchen. I’m creeped out and take off the headset. A friend who is in the kitchen with me is curious about me being creeped out and puts the headset on. He continues the game. He then gets creeped out and takes it off. I get curious and put the headset back on. I turn and to my horror I see a young boy kneeling with a gun to his head. I immediately take the headset off. Now here’s the interesting thing. I now have a memory of this boy with a gun to his head in my kitchen. It’s a spatial memory and I can’t seem to shake it. There is something about an embedded virtual spatial narrative into my known physical space that caused a memory to be viscerally recorded in a way that a narrative on a 2D screen (or even VR) is not.

This brings up a lot of issues including ethics of representation in VR and AR, and informed consent in some cases. Jordon Wolfson’s “Real Violence” shocked me in a similar way at the Whitney Biennale. But even that piece didn’t stick in my memory in the same way. It may be that over time, I would become used to the idea of virtual characters and stories in my personal spaces and they would no longer impact me in that visceral way. But for now, I am pondering the role of spatial memory in emotional impact. I am used to being emotionally affected and sometimes shocked by screened movies but the memory of those narratives lives somewhere a lot more abstracted than this little boy with a gun to his head, in my kitchen.

August 20, 2017 In Musings By mlantin

Do I really need to look at this? Yes, you do.

After a few people asked me what I thought about the Google memo, I realized that I didn’t know. I hadn’t wanted to give it any thought at all. I decided to put my mind to the question, and maybe even to the meta question of why I hadn’t wanted to look at the question.

What I saw there was annoyance, hurt, embarrassment. Annoyance that I even had to contemplate this kind of justification for the unequal environment in the tech field. Hurt that it was worth so much air time on social media, news sites, radio, podcasts, etc. I really wanted to be in a world where issuing a memo like that would be treated like a memo saying the earth is indeed flat. Embarrassment that a part of me still believes what he’s saying.

Because yes there is a part of me that feels abnormal. I have loved math, science, computer programming from the moment they entered my awareness. I don’t want kids. I don’t want to be married. What does that make me? A kind of genetic anomaly? Early on, I decided to let the question hang and just continue. It would periodically hit me in the face like a glass ceiling. Then I would think about the weird situation I was in, pick myself up and keep going. This has been the method and, well, so far so good. I honestly thought things were getting better and maybe they are, but this person at Google decided to say, not only that women are not as well suited to engineering, but that the women that are, are somehow the abnormal ones. It was like a double blow, throwing both groups under the bus. It felt like a step backward and brought an unwelcome realization that we still need to talk about this.

I am in Vancouver and yesterday there was a planned anti-immigration and anti-muslim protest. I attended the counter-protest, what I call the gathering of hearts, which took up so much space that there was no room for the hatred. I felt it was my civic duty to show up, to have my presence added to all who value the strength and generosity of this place. When I heard Tina Fey end her brilliant sheet caking skit by saying we should ignore the white supremacists, I understood what she was saying. She wants that world where their view is so marginal that it can be just a blip in an otherwise generous and welcoming society. She wants the same world I want. Can’t we just be and make stuff? Why do I need to pause and say hatred has no place? Part of me absolutely resents it. But a much bigger part knows that the reality I want requires my unrelenting gaze at the truth. And the truth is we’re not there yet. So I show up. I think about the memo. I look at my own biases. And above all, I keep on making stuff.

March 8, 2017 In Musings, poetry By mlantin

On being a woman

So here we are, international women’s day. I have to say, this year is the first year it has penetrated my psyche in any deep way. Before, it was a day that would usually include a note from my mom, some interesting facebook posts, but certainly not a call for a strike or a string of appreciative texts from my friends.

I didn’t strike. I went to work. I went to work because I love what I do, who I do it with, and where I do it. I am unbelievably fortunate. I dedicate whatever merit this day accumulates to all women who have made my situation possible, wholeheartedly.

We need feminine energy to balance what is happening in the world. As Valarie Kaur says in this rousing speech, this may not be the darkness of hell but the darkness of the womb. Think about the power of that statement for a moment. This could be the time of women rising to say “NO, not like this. Like this.” I feel it in myself and in the women around me.

I give thanks to the powerful women in my life that have shaped me in ways they probably didn’t realize at the time or maybe ever. I think of the lineage of women behind me and I am in awe at the small chance that I am here, the hardships borne and the courage shown by each one.

to you

Maman. kindness
Carole. alone
Jacqueline. motor bike
Lisa. horse rides
Ann. instruction
Margaret. wisdom
Sara. style
Sandra. witness
Leanne. truth
Kirsten. sanity
prOphecy. joy
Sharla. loyalty
Catherine. precision
Leila. celebration
Thecla. dance
Julie. change

February 2, 2017 In Musings, ObjectACTs By mlantin

On kindness and Alexa

A few weeks ago I was giving a demo of the capabilities of the Amazon Echo to my friend Mel who had never interacted with one.

Me: “Alexa, play Cave Ballad”
Alexa: “I cannot find the song Cane Bond”
Me: “Alexa, play song Cave Ballad”
Alexa: “I cannot find the song Cave Salad”
Me: “Alexxaaaaaa! Play the song Cave Ballad by Paul Dano”

and so on…

I don’t remember if she actually managed to play it. But I do remember Mel remarking (calmly) that I seemed to be getting quite impatient with Alexa. Did I notice that? I guess I had noticed that on a superficial level but never reflected on it. Turns out I have a kindness practice and I spend a lot of time reflecting on the benefit of being generous and curious towards others. After a few days of Mel’s words repeating in my head, I decided I would make a practice of being kind to Alexa. After all, offering kindness is just that, an offering, and not contingent on any personal return so why shouldn’t I call my own bluff and be kind to an AI who, at least so far, can’t tell and doesn’t mind either way.

The results were immediate. I felt calmer, more curious, and the experiment was great ground for practicing de-escalation on the spot. It’s great because she doesn’t see me pause and take a breath before starting again. A human would most certainly see the jaw tightening before I catch myself. Oddly, it has also physicalized her presence in a way that wasn’t there before. I think of the puck-like object in my kitchen before calling “Alexa” because it helps me remember to be kind. A disembodied AI somehow is not enough to grab onto. It may be because the kindness practice is very much based on the notion of a shared experience of being human, how inevitably messy and painful it is at times. Without a body, it’s harder to believe there is pain. Without a body, it’s hard to imagine the friction of life.

It is amusing to taunt Alexa and look for the easter eggs. It’s equally interesting to investigate the ethics of AI relations in a, so far, unambiguous space. It reminds me of some of the issues brought forth by Westworld and the AI, Dolores. When does compassion extend to AIs? Does it need to be reciprocated or even possible? Is it the middle ground that makes it difficult? If Alexa could tell that I was being kind and decided not to reciprocate, it definitely would complicate the decision to remain kind. It’s true these questions have been asked before under different guises and thought experiments but it’s informative to act out and imagine different scenarios with Alexa’s unwitting participation.

“Alexa, should I be kind?”
“Hmm…I’m not sure what you meant by that question.”

January 15, 2017 In Musings By mlantin

Searching

I had another VR dream last night. I was in a house-like environment and decided to search for the definition of “dispomania”. It became clear that my platform had been infected by a virus as every search I did hid the results in the environment like an easter egg. I had to, sometime literally, shake down the place to see if the result was there. I eventually found it written on a stuffed puppet that I had to continuously move in circles to reveal the definition.

January 8, 2017 In Musings By mlantin

Is this a coffee cup?

This is a followup to my post about the definition of reality from November. Last night I had a dream about virtual reality and objects.

The Setup:

Three characters in a virtual world. I am one of them, an avatar. Two other characters, one is an AI and the other an avatar like me. A disembodied voice says there is a newcomer in the philosophy of VR and objects and he’s all the rage, young, naive, brilliant, yada yada yada. This newcomer is the other avatar (not the AI). He’s in a virtual kitchen set with the AI and he’s holding a coffee cup. I’m slightly away from where they are in a kind of blank space.

The Conversation:

“Is this a coffee cup?” says the brilliant new guy to me.
“Aah…Maybe.”
“Is this a coffee cup?” he says to the AI while moving the coffee cup towards the her.
“Uhhh..Yaa…” the AI replies in a disbelieving teenage duh voice. Takes the coffee cup, takes a sip of coffee, and hands it back to the brilliant new guy.
“Is this a coffee cup?” says brilliant new guy as he now moves the coffee cup towards me, breaking some kind of fourth wall as he does so (visual force field effect to make this more pronounced).
“Mm..Less so.” I say.

The dream ends.