Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Images from the Mind



    These days I am in Berlin presenting my last work: A Brain Computer Interface to reconstruct images based on brain activity (a poster by Seoane, Gabler, and Blankertz). We are presenting it at the Berlin Brain Computer Interface (BBCI) Workshop 2012, where very exciting ideas using Brain Computer Interfaces had been presented as well!



Wednesday, May 23, 2012

forewords to my Master Thesis, and III

To part II


When I woke up I was somewhere in Poland, near the German frontier, just past the Oder river. I saw that the sky over me was the ceiling of my friend's van: a thin panel crisscrossed with random scars. Had I seen the world through those interwoven scars? Could that precarious net hold the insights I had been shown long enough before I would forget? 

My eyes hold there, my brain, the lines... a revelation: they are not the lines what I am reading, nor the universe at all; it is my mind through them. Through them cause they are here, as pits or bumps which corrupt the shadows of the lights and the lights of the shadows. 

I still remember the pale-blue-oranged sky which was breathing and almost made me cry with emotion. I was wheezing, my heart hurt, and a numbness held my left arm stiff. 

Once understood what's beneath the delicate fabric (the ever-shaped, ever-shaping universal fabric), we are just trying to unveil what's underneath the patch of it in which our mind manifests. Does our own mind enclose a complexity enough to unveil the mystery? 

The definitive cave, the uppermost myth of the cave so far. We run a cryptographic race against ourselves. 

forewords to my Master Thesis, II

To part I

  I had to go down to the Spree (now the corrupted Spree to which Europe dropped an unmoral succession of shot bodies) and drink its seminal waters. I had to summon the holy Road to envisage the straight path which runs firm through an ethereal realm. At either side of this, the mists of History were fighting its never-ending war. I crossed the sacred river where the youth sacrifices itself for glory, for the vaterland, the tzar and the emperor. I crossed it and I was still alive and I turned left and there I founded the clearing were I could lie and rest while a web was growing around me.

  Meanwhile my senses had become clearer. I could already hear some of the remote, poietical chords which ruffled the reality since the beginning of time. When I opened my eyes, my eyes had become bigger. When I touched my skin, my skin could sense new shapes. And when I opened my mouth... when I opened my mouth and that obscene bird of the night sung its dark old chants, then my tongue melted away and out my trembling lips.

  The web around me had crystallized in a quite dense woodland but I could still peer into the distance and discern the shadows and lights in it. And so I set off and directed myself to the deep darkness.

  Were they, the people in the woods, scared? Tired maybe, sleepy, and could not bear the sharp light my feet emanated? They receded at every step I took forth. They covered their faces with their forearms or their hands, and they seemed so nebulous notwithstanding my straight sight. They would vanish in a crackling under my steps if I came too close, and the crackling would be followed by a splintered cloud which climbed swirling, playing with the branches up the trees. Had they tried before the path I sought? And had they grown so tired, so scared? What if science also gets me trapped in a random walk? What'd be its dimension? What its substrate... what is it? Such a random walk. So random and so. Random walk.

  I had to hold my self together. Literally. My legs and arms were spread all over the scene, some of my fingers detached as well. My head had landed some meters away from the trunk, touching with the nose my genitalia--deep breath, wet and sweet. So I had to stand up and pick up my parts. Stuff them in my backpack, dry and rigid as they were. And then I dropped the backpack. I was way too heavy to carry my own weight. The reality was so dense: it had to hold all the light and shadows the woods contained. Way too much. It would just break apart.

  Things happen in a space we can't reach. From there, they yield to our world instances we recognize and put names to; so, many events of the history might be projections from the same underlying entity. One example would be what we named god. Once transcended, it's easy to see how some genial and powerful event took place in this hidden world; and its instances in our physical world, we called them god. This same event would take place later many times. But the word god had been mystified, amplified. It had taken rust and weight, acquired harsh layers of reality that usage had put upon. Humans couldn't recognize anymore as godly the instances yielded by the very same event. And so these, as powerful and genial as the original one, were given other names: Cervantes, Leon Tolstoi, Roberto Bolaño, Richard Feynman; blurred with time: Siddhartha, Pitagoras, Euclides... until they are so remote that they melt together in an abstract Unknown from which god drinks.

  Each instance yielded to our world hasn't got the same expression as any other of the same kind. They happen at different moments and they interact with other instances (whether of the same type or different). Each one attains its own, singular realization. Some isolated ripples from different entities can interplay giving rise to phantom items that we identify as independent and that shape our world as well, although no onely transcendental event exists which would project such.

  The reality we see is nothing but a light, subtle fabric which pervades everything; which has been lied over a more essential reality where more essential events take place. And it's their realizations in our world that we can sense and name. We are threads which move freely in this fiber and cross it with the hope of finding something at the other side; but it's the same old fabric we perceive, no matter the dimension we've chosen to traverse it across.

  It's so that it emerges the goddess of History: the eternal tailor. Our free will as a naive struggle against her firm and expert hands. We play childishly; but when the moment arrives, she pulls our threads and the fabric gets wrinkled. And so the rugged and ramified shapes our lives take, and so the universe complete collapses into a moment which joins the tension points that our stitches made.

  We are the projection of a standard event from this hidden realm. This standard event yields a human in our physical world each time it takes place, and this event is always one and the same. It was this same event which yielded god. We are the closest to god it ever existed. We have our lives to reverberate, make the fabric shiver, reach with the hands and push the world. Later, later enough so we won't ever see it, the coarse-graining of generations will preserve our name or will scribble it in a huge gravestone the size of the earth; so humanity can regret-less forget us, melt all of us together so the gods get fed, so the gods moved the world.

To part III

forewords to my Master Thesis, I

  At the beginning, Neuron sat on the top of the Teufelsberg and he masturbated while contemplating the virgin world below. His orgasm was like the tremble of a Guitar which stroke the earth so hard that its strings broke up free releasing the chords which fell over the earth during the next 2666 years; and the chords were sacred sperm. And so Neuron created Berlin and the flattened land in its surround. And so he created the Spree, and he created the length that the hand can reach. So was born the Road and the roads, the Night and the nights. The sun was born and the moon, and while the chords would fall, then would appear the (wo)man as well. And all (wo)men stood drinking that holy milk, never growing old.

  Well after the chords had posed underneath Berlin, they remained as a tidal wave for ever bending the floor of the city, for ever enlightening whoever would drink the Spree, whoever would listen to its string.

  And then in a final shake, huge as a spike which traverses the spinal cord of the universe, Neuron released the remains of the Guitar from his trembling, stiff and ecstatic hands; and those remains rose up and became unsung chords and fell over the young earth for many centuries more.

  So the universe was born and made: with its structure and its maths, and everything would behave accordingly. But if we were to look at it, its very essence would not be revealed. A dislocation of the being had to take place so we could see.



To part II

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Thre Nazi tales: III, people who wish to carry the fire in Europe

    Months ago I had planned Three Nazi tales: III as a small paranoia stressing analogies between 1930's and nowadays sociopolitical situations. Telling, for example, the festive Zeitgeist in Berlin at both times while Europe is/was sinking. Pieces from great movie Cabaret (torrent) would be placed among the intermittencies of today's techno-quantized Berlin night. It was indeed an optimistic tale dubbed People carrying the fire at Mauerpark. The climax was to be a scene I lived last summer: I saw how the spoke person of embryonic, demagogic party called Die Partei (The Party) was kicked out of a stage--the sacred stage where every Sunday the joyful Berlin youth (a youth which goes beyond any age) stands up to sing and play. I couldn't see at the time how resembling that scene was of the opening sequence of Cabaret, when a Nazi party member is spelled out of the club. The guys from Die Partei running desperate among the merry people exposing their crazy ideas about splitting the city into two again, rebuilding the wall. Meanwhile they looked down on me and my friends because we were Südländer (yeah, that word which dangerously approaches the semantics of Untermenschen). But people rejected those guys (that actually happened!) and that little stage at Mauerpark gleamed as a conspicuous torch with the fire that people were carrying.

    I wish to keep the optimistic point, but I'd also like to fine-tune the target of that fire that shone that last summer. Recently I visited Berlin again. A Tuesday at midnight a gang of Italian kids (age around 15) was traveling with the U1 metro line towards Warschauer Straße talking aloud and singing even louder. I've seen many such gangs in Berlin and one thing I can say: they don't know of nationalities. Whether Germans, Spaniards or Russians: they cry aloud and sing and play all the same. These just happened to be Italian. Also there was a passive-aggressive man (around 35 or 40) shutting them down, not by direct request as you would do with actual Menschen but with repeated "Ssshhhhhheses" as you would command dogs or Untermenschen. The kids ignored that man, so at a point he stretched towards one of them (I picture him out reaching the weaker of the boys) and punched him on the face. It wasn't an exaggerated punch, but it split the time into two and made patent all the violence that that train was bearing though the suddenly death-silenced night.

    I looked at the man horrified. In that moment, because of the unexpected situation, I didn't know how to proceed; and that embarrasses me. Nazism is in the details: a man capable of punching a kid to make him obey an unwritten law about being quite in the train at night. Nazism scales: as many more such men meet and recognize each other among nations a bird dark and cruel will raise its flight from the streets of Europe and eclipse the sun once more, screen that summer fire again. Nazism is in the absence of details: my inoperancy towards evil, the generalized passiveness towards evil encourages it and this is the hand which opens the jail for that dark and cruel bird which is already pecking in the rotten European apple. As always, the devil is in the details: let's don't let that happen. Let's carry the fire.