Evolving Meanings in Xu Bings Art a Case Study of Transference
1993-1994
Enclosure: 500 x 500 cm
Performance at Han Mo Arts Center, Beijing, 22 Jan 1994
徐冰
"一个文化转换个案的研究"
装置及表演，两只种猪，猪圈及印刷
1. With 'A Example Written report of Transference' (1993-94), Xu Bing radically extended the scope and philosophical import of his quantum work 天书/ Tiānshū orBook from the Sky (1988). In that vast, composite installation, for which he devised 4,000 pseudo-characters, he raised questions near the Chinese writing system and its classical, paper-based media — printed books, scrolls, placarded newspapers. Now he took issue with the Latinate ('alphabetical') writing system and the 'Western' book course equally well. In improver, by creating a live installation in an art gallery using real pigs in a pen littered with books, he brought the wordless, extra-literate world of non-human animals into view.
1.1 As the photo above intimates, this created an intricate play of perspectives as well as an element of unpredictability. While monoliterate spectators at the Han Mo Arts Heart in 1990s Beijing might have assorted the evidently asemic Chinese characters on i pig with the potentially legible English (?) words on the other, those able to read both scripts might take fabricated more of the deviation between the nonsensical characters on the ink-stamped pigs and the legible print in the books. Yet, as the expressions on the spectators' faces propose — read them every bit yous will — the real, challengingly Zen-inspired dissimilarity in this performance slice is between the earth of awkward (?), embarrassed (?), puzzled (?), meaning-seeking (?) human beings and other, less conceptually and ethically troubled forms of warm-blooded life. Every bit Xu Bing commented of the pigs:
These ii creatures, devoid of man consciousness, yet carrying on their bodies the marks of human civilization, appoint in the almost primal form of "social intercourse." The accented directness of this undertaking produces a result that is both unthinkable and worth thinking about. In watching the behavior of the two pigs, nosotros are led to reverberate on human behavior.
Thinking the unthinkable, or at the limits of the thinkable, lies at the heart of Xu Bing's koan-like artistic practice. The shift in perspective 'A Case Study' demands recalls Rabindranath Tagore's aphoristic poem, no. 147 from the collection Fireflies (1928): 'The worm thinks it foreign and foolish / that human does not eat his books.'
2. From today'south perspective, these early asemic works do more than invite u.s.a. to think about human behavior. They inquire us to reflect on the bio-cultural peculiarities of human learning and intelligence, where the pertinent contrast lies non only with the natural intelligence of non-human animals but with the bogus intelligence of machines. This is specially truthful for the literate — now the overwhelming majority of the world's population (see Fourth Suggestion) — for whom culture lonely effects a radical transformation of the brain. Whereas we have evolved to option upward speech naturally — hence Steven Pinker's 'language instinct' — we must be taught to read and write, a process which, equally Stanislas Dehaene and others have argued, re-purposes parts of the visual cortex evolution produced — hence 'bio-cultural'.
3. As any user of Google, Weibo or Facebook knows, motorcar learning has been developing rapidly since the 1990s, re-shaping societies and everyday life across the globe for better or worse. Think only of landmark spectacles like IBM'due south Deep Blue beating Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, or Google DeepMind's AlphaGo defeating Ke Jie in 2017. Still over the same 2 decades ordinary literate brains held their own in one vital domain. Different the AI machine learners, they could solve the semic or asemic Latinate letter-strings known since 2003 as CAPTCHAs. Named later on the English polymath Alan Turing (1912-54), CAPTCHA (later reCAPTCHA) stands for 'Completely Automatic Public Turing examination to tell Computers and Humans Apart.' They are most commonly used for online security purposes and to block spam.
4. The first-generation, text-based CAPTCHAs exploited the human brain's extraordinary ability to abstract generalizable patterns from very footling experiential data and many, often distorting contexts: first, during the 'natural' learning phase, picking out phonemes like /w/ from many differently accented voicings of the due west-sound, and then, during the 'cultural' phase, extracting graphemes similar 'w' from countless written, printed, or digitized forms of the letter W/w. Learning to read Latinate systems involves the further process of connecting these abstract sound-letter types neurologically, and, for Anglograph readers, mastering the many exceptions — as in the word 'write.'
As early on as 2007, reCAPTCHA (version 1) took reward of this bio-cultural prowess, turning all its users into proofreaders for various newspaper and volume digitizing projects — hence the visitor slogan 'stop spam/read books'. Later acquiring it in 2009, Google continued to use free human brain ability in this mode to recoup for the limits of the OCR scanners information technology was using for Google Books.
five. All this inverse in 2017 when Dileep George and his colleagues developed a probabilistic algorithm for cracking text-based CAPTCHAs with human-like efficiency, obliging us, once again, to think at the limits of the thinkable. As literate viewers of Xu Bing'southward 'A Case of Transference', nosotros may once have wanted to say (or at least think) 'I read therefore I'm not a pig.' But for how much longer will we feel and then assured well-nigh our bio-cultural uniqueness when we tick the box 'I'm non a robot'? For Stanislas Dehaene, the leading gimmicky neuroscientist, the answer clear: 'this calculator algorithm, however sophisticated, applies only to CAPTCHAs. Our brains apply this ability for abstraction to all aspects of our daily lives' (Dehaene, 2020, 29). For instance, when it comes to natural language learning, 'children rapidly manage to surpass whatsoever existing artificial intelligence algorithm' long earlier they tin read (67):
Past the time they blow out their first candle, they accept already laid down the foundation for the main rules of their native linguistic communication at several levels, from uncomplicated sounds (phonemes) to melody (prosody), vocabulary (lexicon), and grammar rules (syntax).
So, for Dehaene, the prospect of machines posing a existent threat to our precarious bio-cultural uniqueness is a long way off. The challenges developers face getting bots to unscramble catchy visual cues offers some reassurance likewise. I contempo case: OpenAI'southward otherwise highly avant-garde 'neural network' Prune continues to exist derailed by some elementary mixed-messages — the percentages measure out the accurateness of the algorithm'southward object classifications. For the broader question of AI and natural language, come across Stefanie Ullmann, "'Can I encounter your parts listing?' What AI's attempted conversation-upwardly lines tell united states of america virtually computer-generated language", 28 April 2021; and Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis, "GPT-3, Bloviator: OpenAI's language generator has no idea what it's talking nearly", 22 August 2020. For the latest on AI and human creativity, encounter 'Fine art for our sake: artists cannot exist replaced by machines', three March 2022. And, finally, for an entertaining demonstration of machine learning and the Latinate alphabet, meet Tom White potato'south video (and associated paper) Uppestcase and Lowestcase Letters, Apr 2021.
Source: https://artefactsofwriting.com/2021/03/21/i-am-not-a-robot/
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