Jim Mason and the G7 Puppets
"the map is the territory, the territory is the map"
interview by Glen Sparer

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SWITCH speaks with Jim Mason, whose G7 puppets will be presented by SIGGRAPH this summer in Los Angeles. Jim is interested in producing netbased work which maps information over large distances, a form of terrestrial mapping, as well as, net based kinetic sculpture that reembodies information onto physical objects within extensible space. The G7 Puppets are of the former kind. With the Long Now Foundation, he has been working to produce the Rosetta Project, a recasting of the Rosetta Stone for modern man, in which spacial mapping is extended to time as well.


SWITCH - This summer in LA, SIGGRAPH will be presenting one of the Conventions' most dynamic and entertaining exhibits, the G7 Puppets. The G7 presents a heady mixture of net driven data, gargantuan sculpture, stock market parody and a good dose of interactive theatre, to boot. Could you flesh out the G7 and what inspired you to its creation?

Jim Mason - Well the G7 stock puppets are an internet driven kinetic sculpture that tracks the real time movements of the G7 stock markets indices with 7 larger than life mechanical puppets. And as the markets move up and down the puppets move from fetal postures of desperation down on the ground up through postures of elation like the Toyota "oh what a feeling!" commercial thing up in the air. And this obviously started in moments of excessive hubris in through '98, '99 and 2000 here in the Bay area where if you weren't participating in the dot com economy and having your bank account exploded by the stock market, you weren't doing anything. So it was..it's kind of like a one line joke that got really out of hand. I was playing and of burlesque of the market and how much it was controlling a lot of our emotional lives in the Bay Area, and we came up with the notion of doing that with puppets. And I was also exploring a project that would give me a venue to explore electro-mechanical interface work. I've done a tremendous amount of mechanical kinetic sculpture in my life, but digitally I am rather incompetent. I am constantly trying to catch up on that. So this project was going to be a kind of test project on that front, to work out various techniques for real world control of objects that are driven off of net based data streams. I have a whole variety of other projects where I was interested in, which I am using complex data streams off the net to reembody systems that you cannot really see or experience in one localized body-place, things that happen over extended periods timewise or spatially. And I am really interested in projects that old promise of the net, that the net is something that is ultimately an extension of human perception, and is going to allow various types of visual, tactile, auditory, sensual extension of the senses that are based in our bodies. And so, a lot of the projects that I come up with are things that are trying to figure out how we can use the net to have this larger perceptual horizon. The stock market puppets I guess you could say in some way are allowing for that with financial data, but I don't know how seriously I can really claim that. Actually, I presented it at a Silimar Microcomputer Conference a couple weeks ago, and I presented it in this very deadpan like this is the cutting edge of 3 dimensional data visualization, but you know, it is kind of a joke. But all of the elements that make that work are the things that can be mapped onto other natural systems.

Switch - What other possibilities in this area are you considering?

Jim - Well the obvious one people start with the seismic stuff. Ken Goldberg just did a very interesting seismic one, I actually didn't see it. And there is one that I am interested in doing with tides. You can get global tidal information real time on the net. I wanted to create a some sort of sphere like shape as a series of mechanical rams that are attach to it. You would deform this globe or this spherical shape in real time, as the tides around the planet are moving. The whole thing would be filled with lots of scrap metal and stuff. So as these tremendous forces of gravity are pulling the water out, you would do the same thing around this sphere, highly deforming it and getting all this noise from the steel on the inside. The sphere would be huge, 10-15 feet in diameter. It would be in a room. You'd take a room like this one and it would be supported in the air in the middle and then you would have rams coming up from the walls, floor and ceiling. And it would deform as it hyperextenuated. So there are things like that. I had one that was working with traffic data on the Bay Bridge to see if there was any interesting flocking behavior going on there. Yea, the notion of flocking where you can have a very simple set of instructions that each independent agent is reacting to, or following in terms of the car that is next to him. When you put all those mini-mini agents together, you can get some interesting patterns. So, I had one where I was working with that sort of data on the bridge. And there was obvious things having to do with weather or distributions of cultural events like travel. So, the G7 puppets was well to figure how you get from an interesting complex net based data screen to things moving in response to the physical world. It just happened that we had a little funny idea to do it with. But a year and a half later we are trying to make it work. It turned out to not be a trivial problem to make it work.. Parts of it are working...perhaps we shouldn't be talking about this right before the Siggraph event...no we now have a healthy respect for the difficulties of lesser mechanical work. We're working on a very large scale. These things are twenty five feet tall, we're moving hundreds of pounds. We're dealing with cabling that goes up and down twenty five feet, has trailing issues over pulleys. Uh,,It...it's not a trivial problem.

Switch - What exactly are the mechanics of the pulley system? Well the final the final form of it is it has a motor and a right hand drive at the base of each pole with a chain to goes up to the top, turns an axel. Then off of that axel there are nine different pulleys with nine cables, pulleys of different sizes that go down and move features on the puppets, at different rates. So say the arms, that have to go up and down, are on a different pulley. For each rotation of the axel the arm pulleys are pulling more cable so they go up faster than the shoulder ones.

Switch - So the body of the puppets have these separate features each individually moving?

Jim - It's all hinged, it's like a reproduction of the human body.

Switch - And the legs as well?

Jim - Yea, the legs move..

Switch - What about the head..

Jim - It used to move, It doesn't anymore, it's tight .. it's hard now..there's a monitor for the head that has these morphing animations of the faces of the finance ministers. Well the notion was we were going to have.. there are seven different positions as the puppets go up and down. For each position we were going to have a different face animation that reflects the emotional state of the puppet as the market's going up and down. and that kind of flashes back and forth between ticker tape, so we get these big tickers for the eyes that goes across, like the stock symbols that go across..

Switch - ..the eyes..?

Jim - Well the whole head is a monitor. So this is all happening on the monitor face. So when it's stable, when it's sitting in one position you have the ticker. This stock ticker is going across. And when it moves up and down these face animations come in. And when we were doing it out on the desert we had it running at 24/7 so we had seven different markets and three basic time zones. So we could go eight hours, eight hours in the night and eight hours to the morning. So we had to work out 24 global Alan Greenspan figures. So we had to do all this interesting research to figure out the finance ministers of these various countries and then, go find images of them online. .so we could work in these flash animations.

Switch - So these aren't models?

Jim - They're flash animations of the actual images of the actual finance ministers of 24 different nations, excuse me 21.

Switch - Are these actual photographs of finance ministers?

Jim - No, we found them on the net , they're based on images that we found on the net. It started as the G7. But when we were doing it out on the desert we wanted it to run all day and all night have it always going so we had to find markets that were open. So we had like during the night we'd run Asian markets. so we had Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, Indonesia. And then we had a European market section and a Us section. so it kind of varied off of the G7 idea. So at Siggraph we wanted it to run during the day at Siggraph. So we can't run the G7 markets because more than half of those are European. so we're doing the NAPHTA puppets at Siggraph. So there's just going to be three of them. And there's going to be the Us, Canada and Mexico. Those will run from 9 to 5.

Switch - Isn't there a danger of them breaking down?

Jim - No, there's more a danger of them not working at all....no ...yea there's a lot of danger of them breaking down.. Well, actually what we have done.. the data comes it goes to a server machine it goes to a client machine in each one of the towers. each tower each puppet had its own laptop that runs both the graphics and the DA interface to the motors and the position controls. But what we have done is we have built in an autonomy at each level so it can fail at various places. and wherever it fails in the system the next level down it goes into an automated mode and it'll still move around so you have a random sort of thing, so you dont lose the show., you have the drama, it's not going to be accurate. So it can fail all the way down to the basic stamp which is the digital analogue converter. and it will run autonomously off of the basic stamp. So, yes, many things can break in the process, but it will still continue to work.

Switch - You have it programmed so when it fails, it goes into automatic mode, and when it revives it returns to its' normal means of operation.

Jim - And we have canned data in case the whole net connection goes down at Siggraph, we have hours and hours of canned data that we can run through it. Another big part of the installation is betting on the markets. We set a blackjack table up in front of the tower. People can come up and bet on the markets of choice, but you can't bet money you have to bet junk you usually find around Siggraph, you know keys to ex-lovers houses.

Switch - We'll is there interactivity between the objects being bet and the movements of the puppets?

Jim - There's dealer standing there in a tuxedo who like barking the game.

Switch - Is he real human dealer or virtual human dealer?

Jim - ..no he's real , he's a guy called Chicken John..

Switch - Chicken John ?

Jim - ..who runs a circus..He would bark it. So you get people to come up. You stop the puppets..people put their bet out..you hit the button and whatever the market has done since then, the puppets go in that direction. And then, if you win there will be a pile of like junk that people are betting.

Switch - I can't wait to put my bet in.

Jim - Yea, we're actually redoing all the visual of the whole thing. its being redone as this circus casino sort of thing. we're playing up a lot of that, like the bodies of the puppets are going to be covered in money from the individual countries and lit form the inside so they'll kind of glow and they're other things we're going be doing. I didn't like the way it looked last year. It looked like a lynching scene last year..

Switch - ..because of the suits..

Jim - Yea, because of the suits it looked like a combination of a lynching scene and a crucifiction. Some people actually like those associations. I didn't think that it was the proper place to play with the associations. Really, this is suppose to be humorous, it's not really that serious of a critique of the stock market. So it's..if it is a critique its better played through humor than heavy handed seriousness..

Switch - I think so.

Jim - So we're trying to make the visuals much more light and entertaining. So there's going to be more lights around it, it's going to look casino like.

Switch - For instance..

Jim - Well we're probably going to have blinky lights running up the poles and the monitor faces when they move are probably going to have slot machine wheels that spin for the eyes. I'm going to have money running down the body. I'm going to have keno dealers walking around taking bets..free drinks at the blackjack table. I think that it is going to be more in the performance area. So were going to play up the whole casino environment through people. And this is being done in the hallway that goes into one of the main areas of Siggraph. It's not in the actual gallery. It's in the hallway to the conference rooms ..where they have the classes. The problem is that it's really tall. it's twenty five feet tall, so it wont fit in the gallery. and it's really a question of whether we will be able to get them in there or not

Switch - Twenty five feet?

Jim - Over twenty five feet..yea it takes a crane to set them up.

Switch - Have they been set up?

Jim - They have been set up twice..I bought a truck so I have a place for these things to live in. I have a huge Ryder box truck for these things to live in.. It's heavy. It's like 10,000 pounds of stuff that puts this together. So it would have been much more wise to build it as a screen saver. An online digital installation.

Switch - You do things always in a big way..

Jim - Yea, that's a problem ..

Switch - ...that is a problem..

Jim - That is a problem...So we actually do have a guy who is rebuilding this as a screensaver. where you'll be able to assign your stock portfolio to individual puppets, so when your not using your computer it goes to the seven stock puppets tracking your portfolio.

Switch - You assign it?

Jim - You assign them..You have seven puppets..it may be more than that. there is a whole variety of ways we will be working on. then you assign stocks to particular puppets. and then let it go and it will track those stocks with the puppets.

Switch - Is that going to be on the G7 site..

Jim - That's actually something that we are going to distribute as a screensaver.

Switch - With the G7 you are mapping data flows onto objects of a fairly large proportion, however, with the Rosetta Project you seem to be doing exactly the opposite, which is mapping large amounts of data onto the infinitesimal and minute.

Jim - The Rosetta Project is an attempt to create the historical iteration of a historic Rosetta Stone. And in this iteration our goal is a meaningful survey and archive of the 1000 of the 7000 languages on the planet. We want to create the same thing that for the contemporary environment is a useful research and educational platform. But for the unknown future environments, it's something that might function as an archaeological tool that can help recover lost languages, or aid in research in languages that have vastly change or languages that have disappeared. So we're trying to create a record of global linguistic diversity, as we see it right now. And put that on a variety of media that have extremely long longevity characteristics and distribute it globally in a very large number, 10,000 -100,000 number. By having very many copies of this, and in very many places, you greatly up the possibility, that these things will survive and be available for whatever uses, they're available for, in the deep future.

Switch - Do you plan to have any of them buried on the planet for future generations to discover?

Jim - People are going to able to do with them with whatever they want. We have commitments to get them back to some primary representative of each of the speaking communities on the disk. Others will be given to universities, museums, others will be given to people that are interested, donors to the foundation. Some will be sold. They are intended as an object that is aesthetically curious, and people are going to want them. And we have come up with a design that so far has had exactly that response. It's a very curious object, doesn't look like most objects in the world. And hopefully it becomes an object of the popular imagination, that it'll be fun for people to have.

Switch - I held one in my hands. It's quite stunning. Could you describe it more detail?

Jim - The actual disk is a 3" diameter disk. It's a nickel disk with 27,000 language or text pages are microetched into it with a gallium processor that is similar how you make silicon chips. You can't see it with the language pages on it. You can read it through a microscope. It's an actual physical etching, an imprint into the nickel, so there isn't any platform dependency of digital systems, there isn't any ones and zeroes that you have to decode. If you can get a microscope that's a thousand times, you can read it. So the actual disk is this shiny nickel disk and then on top of that are some larger scale graphics. It had an earth map in the center, a series of spokes, where all the data pages are, and out alongside the outside rim are the tapered text rings which have instructions for how to read the disk in eight major regional languages. Those start at readable scales and taper down past where you can see, suggesting the instructions - get a magnifier and there's more.

Switch - This is good. .who initially came up with this. Conceptually and design wise -- it's really pretty brilliant.

Jim - The design happened through a yearlong collaboration between a variety of artists, linguists, anthropologists, designers, most of the board of the LongNow foundation. The main people who were involved in it were Kevin Kelly, who was the executive editor of WIRED, myself, Stewart Brand, Alexander Rose, Brian Eno, Paul Donald, who was the final designer who put it together, the kind of general LongNow board members.

Switch - Is it going to be on only one disk or can you expand the number of languages as you go along?

Jim - Well, were going to have a thousand languages that will be described with eight different components. There is a main parallel text. We're going to use a biblical text because that is the one the translations have been done in. So we're using Genesis Chapters 1-3, there's a vernacular text with a grammatical analysis, a core word list, an orthography, which is a writing system of the language, there is an inventory of phonemes, which are the basic sound units, there is a morphology of syntax sketch, which is how words are formed and how words go together to form sentences, basically a grammar of the language, and there is a meta description of the language which says where it is spoken, what its family relationships are, it's basic structural type and other historical..

Switch - That's for each language?

Jim - Yes, each language has each of these seven or eight components. So we're trying to do that for a thousand languages, which is larger than anyone has attempted it for, and in the end it's available on three different media. It's on this micro etched nickel disk, we're doing it on a CD rom, we're also doing it as a book, which will be a large format book, a 1000 pages, each of the pages has the 27 pages that are micro etched on the disk but done in a size you can read with your eye. Actually its done in microfonts you can't read them with your naked eye, but you can use the magnifying glass that comes with the container and rub it over, guide it over the book and see the text pages.

Switch - That's the magnifying glass on the ball..

Jim - Actually, I didn't finish describing the Rosetta. So you have the three inch disk and it fits inside a four inch diameter sphere. The bottom half is stainless steel and the top half is optical glass. So the top half is also about a five times viewer. Which is again communicating the notion that there are more things than meet the eye, get a magnifying glass and there is more.

Switch - The actual text is embedded in the spokes?

Jim - Yes, the text pages are written in the space between the spokes, which you see in the etched design. In the bottom of the container there is also a hollowed out hole, which you probably saw. There's a little metal strip that goes in there. It's intended as an ownership, or pedigree strip. So, as this thing passes through hands, people can write names and dates and curious things that happen around it's ownership. So each object develops a pedigree, as it passes through time and adds to its value, and therefore, adds to its likelihood of surviving. The old objects that we like to keep are typically things that aren't simply old, but things that have marks of some sort of concern.

Switch - We're writing our own history in the exchange of history..

Jim - Yes, so the more we can get people to write on it and specialize the object the higher likelihood it will survive.

Switch - Interesting -- it exists in time and eventually space..

Jim - We had an offer from one of the commercial space flight outfits to get it to the moon. I don't know how much good it will do to get it to the moon. But it's kind of fun that someone wants to take it. I told them it can only go if I get to go.

Switch - It would be interesting to find, on walking around in some future somewhere, discovering it and asking -- did I make this or does this come from some distant as yet unknown future? And not knowing the difference..perhaps...

www.longnow.org
www.stockpuppets.com
www.rosettaproject.org:8080/live
www.WhatIAmUpTo.com