Monthly Archives: May 2017

Dearest reader, this week has been much better for me, many thanks for all the condolence emails about Bosley. Not only have I managed to retain the life of my one remaining cat, HMS Tiny Pudding, but Ive also registered for postal voting, thus honouring the nameless women and men who gave their lives for our democracy. Its also been national hedgehog week so, honestly, what more could I ask for in my simple life? More podcasts of course!

Now Ill admit, I love a bit of theology, so this podcast, written by Meghan OGieblyn, leapt from my screen, through my ear tubes and sat squashily and cosily in my brain. This is theology and then some. Like all the best podcasts it mixes personal stories with learning: it begins with Meghan, a former evangelical Christian with dreams of becoming a missionary, losing her faith. She could no longer ratify a benevolent God with all the suffering in the world. But she still longed for there to be a plan, a purpose to being alive, but she also needed evidence, and for most people that evidence is the very broad term of science. Whilst latching on to this notion of science she found herself religiously following the theories of transhumanism.

Transhumanism offered a vision of redemption without the thorny problems of divine justice. It was an evolutionary approach to eschatology, one in which humanity took it upon itself to bring about the final glorification of the body and could not be blamed if the path to redemption was messy or inefficient.

Meghan submerged herself into the various subgroups of transhumanism: the idea that we are all in a computer simulation run by future beings recreating the past, of robots gaining souls, and eventually culminating in Meghan finding Christian transhumanism.

Christ had said to his disciples: Whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these. His earliest followers had taken this promise literally. Perhaps these prophecies had pointed to the future achievements of humanity all along, our ability to harness technology to become transhuman.

What a wobble of a circle that is.

Often we find ourselves listening or watching stories like this with a tone of mockery but that isnt the case here. Its easy to see how Meghan fell into transhumanism in the religious sense, it could just as easily happen to any one of us. These things make sense if you really want them to, you just have to have a little faith.

God in the Machine is a rollercoaster of a listen prepare yourself for information overload. I had to listen to it three times before it all went in, but each time was as good as the first. Though I must admit, I stopped playing the Sims when I was a little girl because of the stress that maybe, just maybe, they were real and I was God.

Another podcast that brought my week oodles of joy was Beginner. Its the story of Misha, a 24-year-old Pakistani-American immigrant, learning to do the things she didnt get to do as a child. When she came to the US she was top of her class, but quickly she began to lose her identity. The show follows her story as she learns to belong by living out a childhood she never had, and it begins with something synonymous with childhood learning to ride a bike.

Sadie Mae wrote in to tell me why she loved it so much:

Beginner shot right to the top of my favourites list, the trailer alone had me in tears, hearing the love and kindness between Misha and her brother. I could relate to almost every part of the first episode, even though I was born in the States. Im an older sister that has had to navigate new places and new things on my own, faking it while I figured out what was right. Mishas storytelling is veracious, drawing you in, and inviting you to be part of her journey. Her vulnerability and honest self-introspection is relatable and captivating, setting this millennial coming of age podcast apart from the rest as it resonates across the board.

We can all relate to that fear of not knowing something we feel we should, the fear of doing it wrong, the fear of feeling out of place, the walls that we build and the hacks we use so we can fit in. Mishas desire for authenticity drives her to confront her fears and explore breaking away from them as she tackles being a beginner. I know this is new but seldom does a budding podcast come off so well-polished and with such a captivating start.

Mishas charm from episode one has me rooting for her and I look forward to hearing more of her adventures, triumphs and potential failures. This storytelling podcast truly is one to add to your podcast subscription list. Who knows, maybe itll inspire you to be a beginner again.

When Ed Boff wrote in to tell me about his absolute favourite podcast Cheapshow, I was initially sceptical, but after a couple of listens I completely understood why. It made me howl with laughter at some points, its really fantastic.

It is an anarchic comedy podcast celebrating the best of the cheap and cheerful. Its a mix of standup, chat show and twisted games and challenges all based around the hunt for long-lost treasures or bargain basement deals. Cheapshow aims to find the humour among the bric-a-brac of charity shops, junk sales and Poundlands in the UK. And honestly, they have achieved it and then some. This is what Ed had to say:

Two guys talking about stuff found in pound stores, charity shops, and/or car boot sales, while occasionally descending into a shouting match. That may not sound like much on its own however, its a question of personality. Hosts Paul Gannon and Eli Silverman bring a lot of themselves to this, both in terms of character and experience.

Cheap discoveries often include items with a strong nostalgia factor (like their recent special on TV game show-based board games), and this is where Paul shines. Eli, with his work as a DJ, provides a love of all things music, particularly vinyl records. So theres plenty to talk about, including Elis spectacular tales from the dance floor. Not that this is purely a dry exercise in consumer analysis the comedy here runs from merciless mockery of the concepts at work, to often sheer surrealist confusion. Quite a lot of the stuff on cheap eats will make you wonder for what species this foodstuff was meant for. The hosts are never exactly above the level of what they look at, they self-deprecate (and deprecate each other) mercilessly, such as calling out Pauls own brand of spoonerisms, Gannonisms.

There is nothing amusing about austerity when times are tough, places like Poundland may be your only option so its good to know theres someone out there braving the culinary delights they have to offer, before you go in blind ... If they dont end up killing each other in one of their arguments first! Highly recommended.

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Transhumanism and cheap laughs: podcasts of the week - The Guardian

Miloslav Dvoak, Le Golem et Rabbi Loew prs de Prague (1951), oil on canvas, 244 x 202 cm (Prague, idovske Muzeum Jaroslav Horejc) (all images courtesy of muse dart et dhistoire du Judasme, Paris, unless noted)

Noise-math philosopher Norbert Wiener once aptly compared the old Jewish myth about the golem with cybernetic technology. Viewed through that lens, everything from transhuman artificial life cyborgs to anthropomorphic robots to humanoid androids to posthuman digital avatars bear the mystical mark of an artificial body madly turning on its creator. This oily tale is the oldest narrative about artificial life and is now subject of the exhibition Golem! Avatars dune lgende dargile at Muse dart et dhistoire du Judasme.

The golem was first mentioned in passing as in the Bible in Psalm 139:16, but the first golem story was spun by the 16th-century Talmudic scholar Rabbi Loew ben Bezalel. In it, he supposedly used Kabbalistic magic, Hebrew letters, paranormal amulets, or mystical incantations to conjure into existence the Golem of Prague: a colossal figure built from mud or other base materials, who protected the Bohemian Jews of the country from the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. Though initially a savior, the Golem of Prague eventually became harmful to those he had saved and had to be destroyed. There are myriad subsequent versions of the story, with many variations and contradictions. It is generally agreed that what animated this mystical entity was an inscription either applied to its forehead or slipped under its tongue, and the golem has largely been understood to be an artificial man that is part protector and part monster, but many other differences abound. This specious aspect makes the golem particularly interesting to artists because such contradictory vagueness yields opaque and elusive visual iconography.

The legend spread in the late 19th century, popularized by the 1915 novel The Golem by Gustav Meyrink and three movies by Paul Wegener: The Golem (aka The Monster of Fate) (1915), The Golem and the Dancing Girl (1917), and The Golem: How He Came into the World(1920). An essential general reference for the golem-phile is Idel Moshes 1990 book Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid, published as part of the Judaica: Hermeneutics, Mysticism, and Religion series by the State University of New York Press in Albany. In it, Moshe maintains that the role of the golem concept in Judaism was to confer an exceptional status to the Jewish elite by bestowing them with the capability of supernatural powers deriving from a profound knowledge of the Hebrew language and its magical and mystical values.

I first encountered this titillating thesis mixing creation and destruction at Emily Bilskis 1988 show Golem! Danger, Deliverance and Art, which she curated for The Jewish Museum in New York City. I still remember seeing Louise Fishmans fine painting Golem (1981) there, and I was disappointed that the plucky street performance artist Kim Jones (aka Mudman) wasnt included.

This show in Paris follows on the heels of the Golem exhibit at The Jewish Museum Berlin. Both venues had the idea for an exhibition on the golem at the same time, and the institutions cooperated on loans and exchanged ideas. The Muse dart et dhistoire du Judasme show has 136 works, including paintings, drawings, photographs, cinematic clips, literature, comics, and video games by the likes of Charles Simonds, Boris Aronson, Christian Boltanski, Joachim Seinfeld, Grard Garouste, Amos Gita, R.B. Kitaj, and Eduardo Kac. Animated films included are Jan Svankmajers masterful Darkness Light Darkness (1989), Jakob Gautels First Material (1999), and David Musgraves Studio Golem (2012). But the best dramaturgical presentation is the humanoid robotic metaphor of an awakening of posthumanity in School of Moon (2016), a dance choreographed by Eric Minh Cuong Castaing for the Ballet National of Marseille in conjunction with digital artist Thomas Peyruse and roboticist Sophie Sakka. Their impish portrayal blurs our perception of the human and the nonhuman by mixing ballet dancers with children and anthropoid robots.

The show kicks off with a large straightforward illustrative painting by Miloslav Dvoak, Le Golem et Rabbi Loew prs de Prague (1951) but soon turns weirder with a 1964 Dennis Hopper photograph of the great beatnik Wallace Berman. Berman is known for his underground film Aleph (195666), in which he uses Hebrew letters to frame a hypnotic, rapid-fire noise montage into a bit of wonder. Moving on, I was fascinated by an odd printed book page from the Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Creation) (1562), in which Kabbalists, wishing to bring a golem to life, looked for the aid of alphabetic formulae. Other powerful pieces include Lionel Sabattes redolent sculpture Smile in Dust (2017), Philip Gustons cartoonish painting of a cuddly Ku Klux Klanner In Bed (1971), Anselm Kiefers crusty stout block Rabi Low: Der Golem (19882012), Antony Gormleys rusty condensed sculpture Clench (2013), and Niki de Saint Phalles swashbuckling Maquette pour Le Golem (1972), her model for the architecturally scaled triple-tongued monster slide Le Golem (1972), which she built in Jerusalem, that represents the three monotheistic religions plummeting from a golem-monsters merry mouth.

One of the more delightful displays was the room full of Ignati Nivinskis 1924 watercolors made for the costumes of the 1925 theatre piece The Golem, on loan from the Russian National Archives of Literature and Art. The play was based on the 1921 text The Golem: A Dramatic Poem in Eight Scenes by H. Leivick, a Yiddish poet and political radical who served jail time in Siberia. On the other hand, I was startled and disturbed to see Walter Jacobis distasteful 1942 book Golem, a flagrant anti-Semitic propaganda text concerning a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory within the Czech Jewry, issued during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Seeing it made me think that a Trump-era cyber-golem would busy himself with public relations, propaganda, market research, publicity, disinformation, counter-facts, censorship, espionage, and even cryptography (which in the 16th century was considered a branch of magic).

The show winds down wonderfully with Walter Schulze-Mittendorffs sculpture Robot from Fritz Langs film Metropolis (1926), which was recreated by the Louvre in 1994, standing in front of Stelarcs Handwriting: Writing One Word Simultaneously with Three Hands (1982). The combination of these works suggests that golems have to do with an abiding conviction that cold and inert matter may be brought to life through the correct application of words. But rather than a sign of human accomplishment, the golem casts a sour shadow onto our gleaming technological age. The power of human language to summon golems to artificial life is experienced as hubris in this exhibit. This vanity enhances the sexy love-hate of spooky computer-robotics we feel at the root of Alex Garlands 2015 film Ex Machina, a poster for which is on display. We cannot and do not escape the triumphal attraction of the golem here, as we are confronted (again) with the fetid fact that a determinative force in human life is the virtual merging with the actual. As such, the golem is the minotaur at the heart of our viractual labyrinth.

This brave new word-world was suggested back in 1965 by Kabbalah philosopher Gershom Scholem, when he officially named one of the first Israeli computers Golem I. Because just as the golem is brought to life by combinations of letters, the computer (which is behind any artificially intelligent robot) only obeys coding language. And that coded situation slots us back into Norbert Wieners excited trepidation toward machine learning. While learning is a property almost exclusively ascribed to self-conscious living systems, AI computers now exist that can learn from past experiences and so improve their operative functions to the point of surpassing human capabilities. This posthuman transcendence raises concerns both aesthetic and ethical, casting around the art in this show an apologetic air heavy with ambivalence toward human cunning and trickery and seductive art and technology.

Golem! Avatars dune lgende dargile continues at Muse dart et dhistoire du Judasme (Htel de Saint-Aignan, 71, rue du Temple, 3rd arrondissement) through July 16.

The rest is here:
From a 16th-Century Book to a Robot-Assisted Performance, Artists Explore the Legend of the Golem - Hyperallergic