nevermind the bricolage

the end of anonymity

Came across a very interesting article from Popular Science about facial recognition software that is enabling a whole new level of police work. Apparently, the FBI is going to be rolling out a massive new mug-shot database which, when combined with the new technology allows for an amazing success rate with regard to identifying potential criminals. This can be supplemented by the public's ongoing fascination with posting millions of images online, creating a large database of information which most of us probably give little though to,

"Social media has precisely what facial recognition needs: billions of high-quality, camera-facing head shots, many of them tied directly to identities."

A header in the article gave this little snippet of info about how this is potentially playing out in terms of consumer culture

"When a shopper enters Reebok’s flagship store in New York City, a face-detection system analyzes 10 to 20 frames per second to build a profile of the potential customer. The algorithms can determine a shopper’s gender and age range as well as behavioral and emotional cues, such as interest in a given display (it tracks glances and the amount of time spent standing in one place). Reebok installed the system, called Cara, in May 2013; other companies are following suit. Tesco recently unveiled a technology in the U.K. that triggers digital ads at gas stations tailored to the viewer’s age and gender. Face detection shouldn’t be confused with facial recognition. Cara extracts data from up to 25 faces at once, but it doesn’t record or match them against a database. “The images are destroyed within a fraction of a second,” says Jason Sosa, the CEO of New York–based IMRSV, which developed the software. Most businesses aren’t interested in collecting your face, just the demographic info etched into it."

Very reminiscent of a scene in the film Minority Report in which a character on the run enters a shopping centre and suddenly the stores begin directing ads at him personally, having scanned him and used technology to access both his identity and his buying preferences. On one level this could all seem way out, but if you think about it, there are any number of technologies that already make recommendations to us whether it be musical choices via something like Pandora, or books and the like from Amazon, it strikes me that if the Reebok project proves successful it will become more and more pervasive and a more familiar part of our shopping experience.

It would seem that it it also heralds the ongoing collapse of the private/public equation, another loss of anonymity, this is actually the title of the article.

outrospection

I have for a long, long time, been reflecting on the idea of 'religionless christianity' as floated by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in one of his letters from prison. There is undoubtedly a little bit of an 'industry' and lots of speculation around the phrase, especially as bonhoeffer never got to flesh out what he meant as his life was cut short. The are a couple of things he does raise in his conversation,

"What do a church, a community, a sermon, a  liturgy, a Christian life mean in a religionless world? How do we speak of God – without religion, i.e. without the temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics, inwardness, and so on? How do we speak (or perhaps we cannot now even ‘speak’ as we used to) in a ‘secular’ way about ‘God’? In what way are we ‘religionless-secular’ Christians, in what way are we the ecclesia, those who are called forth, not regarding ourselves from a religious point of view as specially favoured, but rather as belonging wholly to the world? In that case Christ is no longer an object of religion, but something quite different, really the Lord of the world. But what does that mean? What is the place of worship and prayer in a religionless situation? Does the secret discipline, or alternatively the difference (which I have suggested to you before) between
penultimate and ultimate, take on a new importance here? …"

I have been thinking essentially about this sentence for a couple of years--insane, I know, because I havent come to any conclusions yet, but the RSA talk at the top of the post does hint at what I am being drawn towards. This shift from introspection to outrospection in terms of emphasis would seem to be a dynamic of life in the 21st century in many arenas and I think it may be one that religion is slowly coming around to.

One of the challenges I find with institutional or 'organized' religion in general (and I say this principally though my own direct experience with christianity so my views are subjective, intensely speculative and deeply personal and anecdotal) is its fascination with history. It would seem to be in awe of a god who seems to be more interested in the past than the present in virtually every arena from liturgy (whether high or low church expression) to doctrine--there is no future there is only a regirgitation of the past. I don't mean to dismiss history or undercut the importance of tradition, just to highlight the challenge the future presents to communities who must appeal to and honour the past--it's just that honouring the past often means invading the present with ideas and concepts whose sell-by-date is long gone.

This shift from inside to out, from introspection to outrospection would be an example. When we exist in religious environments we often find ourselves governed by the inside--we speak of spirit/soul, of spiritual disciplines which are essentially internal--prayer, contemplation, reading etc. not bad in and of themselves, but...

What if the spiritual discipliines needed for today are not those that are principally internal in nature, what if life is turned inside-out and now what is necessary is outrospection? Of course, Roman Krznaric offers a way to understand what this might look like and it has a certain connection to theology--empathy. Now some might say there is no need to shift anything, internal, spiritual disciplines are designed to help us be different in the world, to be compassionate (as our father in heaven is compassionate), I would argue differently, and I say this as someone who has embedded himslef wuite firmly at times in various kinds of inwardness--you act your way into new ways of thinking and being, not vice-versa. What Kzrznaric and others put forth is more radical than we realize, they are pointing to a necessary shift in consciousness towards the world and perhaps highlighting how dependent we are upon ways of being that were developed in different eras of human history and consciousness. This is something Jeremy Rifkin picks up in his work on The Empathic Civilization,

 

Bonhoeffer identified religion by at least a couple of things--temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics and inwardness (you wish he had said more than "and so on" :)), and wondered what a connection to god would look like apart from those things. Personally I find that in church environments these two elements are significant challenge as they are the heart of the industrial-religious complex, and given the reliance upon past-conditioned assumptions, they are quite difficult to challenge--unless you appeal to life, then lots of people get it and realize that there is a disconnect between the way we live and think most of the week and what happens when we step into a church building.

This comes back to the issue of whether postmodern ideas can live in the church which was raised at Subvert the Norm II, the answer of course is a resounding 'yes' you just have to start talking from life not history and link history and tradition to life not the other way round.

Anyway, no fully-formed ideas, just processing intersections on my way to possible new permutations.

technology repeats theology

We had a very interesting class Monday. We were joined by some professors from Beijing--who are visiting the school. How they wound up in my class I dont know but they were a delight--there were some language issues, but thankfully one of them was able to translate for the others. They were from the religious studies department of Beijing University--the Dean, who teaches philosophy, a taoist philosopher, a marxist studies prof. and a professor of Christian studies, who recently translated some of Graham Ward's stuff into Chinese. The class topic was theology and the body and we began with a reflection on Catherine of Siena and then moved backwards and forwards considering the various ways in which the idea of 'body' has been understood throughout Christian history, and how we might think about it today. There was an interesting roadblock of sorts when it came down to the idea of the 'soul' between those who were very clear in their belief i its existence, but less clear in their ability to explain it in any meaningful way. I'm not a big 'soul' man, unless it's Marvin Gaye--I believe its simply language trying to get at something beyond words. 

I did raise a point made by John Caputo that "technology repeats theology," meaning that miracles in the Bible become medical and technological miracles today--opening up new space to think about the relation between the material and immaterial worlds.

I have been thinking through a book idea around this--techno-theology, exploring the relationship between technology and flesh-the organic and the mechanical, the material and the immaterial, stuff like that.

Pirate Brewin

  

Kester's poster for his talk at Wild Goose this weekend. An event I was planning on attending, but unfortunately plans have changed so I will be sending good energy from afar.

Criticism of Heaven

In the Art, Cinema and Theology class we have been exploring the role of women in the arts and particularly women painters and their general absence from Western Art History. We found our way to a discussion about Frida Kahlo, inspired by the movie about her starring Selma Hayek and directed by Julie Taymor. I think that there are rich conversations to be had around her life and work, but a question came up during class about how to 'do theology with someone who is a communist and an atheist'--points that I actually think are favourable for a conversation, but somehow seemed to be a stumbling block to at least one person. I guess it all depends on how one understands what theological discourse might be--for me it encompasses at least some aspect of bringing things (anything) into dialogue and conversation. While I part complany with the conclusions of the Radical Orthodoxy mob, I do like Graham Ward's idea that doing theology somehow means 'reclaiming the world'--bringing all the things once ceded to the wider culture back into contact and conversation with sacred communities and with theology. So for me Frida Kahlo offers up some major theological potentials: sexuality and gender; socialism/marxism, theism/a-theism, pain and brokenees just to name a few.

I recommended that anyone interested in grappling with Kahlo familiarize themselves with some Marxist theory--there is no doubt that the early twentieth centuries fascination with Marxist theory, and revolution, factored quite heavily into her life and work. She was a communist and was married to Diego Rivera, muralist and  influential Mexican communist--they welcomed Trotsky into their home during his exile, and of course her work and writing is filled with reference to the people's struggles. I put Roland Boer's masterful work, Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology, on the table for anyone interested in pushing deeper. It is a dense work, but offers up some great insights into eight Marxist critics covering a spectrum of views, Catholic, Biblical and Protestant--a nice handling of Zizek. From Louis Althusser we get this delicious quote,

"Marx did not 'say everything', not only because he did not have the time, but because to 'say everything' makes no sense for a scientist; only a religion can pretend to 'say everything.'"

We looked at some of Kahlo's works, including the top image entitled, Moses, which represents the Sun as the source of all religions. The painting was inspired by Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, which makes a link between Ancient Egyptian beliefs, Moses, and the origins of monotheistic religion. It's a three-tiered painting--the top layer featuring gods; the second layer full of heroes and includes Hitler, whom Kahlo called, 'The Lost Child' and the lower level featuring the masses and refers to the evolutionary process.

Kahlo's life was marked by an accident that left her with life-long pain, unable to have children and forced to endure at least thirty-five major surgeries to attempt to correct her physical disabilites and alleviate her pain-none of which seem to have worked. Pain of all kinds--physical, emotional(her troubled relationship with Rivera, a renowned womaniser addd another layer of heartache to her already burdened life) and spiritual--again a rich source of opportunity for theological conversation.

Memories of the Future

"My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony." Fernando Pessoa

I went to a great Zocalo event tonight. Neuro-scientist Antonio Damasio gave a talk about his new book, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. Some of his thinking was a bit beyond me, neuroscience is not my expertise, but I figured going in that it would be a stretch, but the brain is fascinating to me and I thought that it be worth the brain stretch. He talked a lot about consciousness, where it comes from, how it develops and what the implications are. He talked about consciousness as being an instrument of both survival and well-being. My favourite idea, well one of the many favourite ideas, was that we live consciously, poised between our lived past and our anticipated future. He spoke about having memories of the future---we have memories of the future we hope to have! I am sure that I am not doing justice to his theories but they were challenging and inspiring. As his talk drew to a close he read the stanza from the poem quoted above by Fernando Pessoa, from his work, The Book of Disquiet. He expressed his love and respect for the work of Pessoa but then went on to say that where he differs in temrs of understanding the self and consciousness is that he believes unlike an orchestra, which has a score, a conductor etc. our mind is being "made is we go," and "there is no conductor either, because in and of itself, we made him up to." I wished that there would have been the opportunity to dig into that thought a bit, it seemed that he was essentially saying that we create our own conductors (read gods), that they are an invention of the mind. I dont think I disagree. For some time now I have been giving much thought to the idea that our conceptions of God might be some sense of collective consciousness, or deep consciousness, or something like that.

There was a lot to this lecture, so many threads to think about and pick up on. He referenced some interesting-sounding books, Jerry Edelman-The Mind is Wider that the Sky and Julian James' The Origins of Consciousness, and talked about Spinoza quite extensively. You can actually watch or hear the lecture for yourself on the Zocalo site and I would recommend you do.

Mandelbrot

I am not much of a mathematician, but I appreciate the mathematical beuaty of Benoit B Mandelbrot's fractal. Mandelbrot died a couple of days ago leaving behind a rich legacy of contributions to the world of mathematics. He coined the term fractal and developed the Mandelbrot Set, a simple definition to capture a complex structure. Apparently his work in this area began when he was looking at maps of the UK and trying to determine if it was possible to measure the coastline-this question gave the world a great gift-the fractal a non-Euclidean approach to mathematics which visualized and offers a reminder of the universe's complexity. There is a nice obituary in today's Guardian which explains his work in a bit more detail. I love the fact that the 'B' in his name is just that, a 'B'--he had no middle name, he just added it because he liked it.