Several desks have been strategically placed throughout the house for purposes of getting "work" work done within the context of a larger, all encompassing domesticity. One desk is in the study, a place that he shares with Allison on those afternoons that he works from home. The desk is for his computer. The shelves are for his books. The floor belongs to Allison and provides a free range for her toys. The only way in or out of the study is through the master bedroom. There is also a desk in the guest bedroom at the opposite end of the house that he uses when he wants to meditate, contemplate or just take a nap sitting up in the most comfortable leather office chair one could imagine. He is sitting at this desk in this chair contemplating one of the many unsolved mysteries of Microsoft's latest operating system when Anna catches sight of him from the hall, runs through the door and plops across the bed. After a minute or so, during which time she appears to be intently examining the floral design on the bedspread, she looks up and says, "Dad, what exactly is it that you do for a living? I tell my friends you work in computers, but they keep asking."
"Do you want the whole story or just the infomercial?"
"Either one," she says, turning on the television and pressing the mute button on the remote control. The cartoon channel explodes silently into view.
He stops what he is doing and turns in his chair to look at her. "Ok," he says, "It goes like this. I work in the computer business because I like computers. I like them for the same reasons that I like automobiles and clocks. They intersect every dimension of our everyday lives. They are conceptually beautiful. They're the dominant cultural artifacts where time, motion and thought are concerned."
"But they're not TV," she says.
"No. Television is an alternate universe. They're not TV. But I like them just the same. Even so, as machines they are not something I would want to devote my life to. I'm after something else. I used to believe that the machine is the child of language, language of gravity and gravity of love. Now I believe that language is the child of the machine, the machine of gravity, and gravity of love. Love, for its part, is the fundamental force in the universe. A superreality. That's why I believe that everything has purpose. I've believed it from the beginning, like a genetic predisposition."
Without taking her eyes away from the television she says, "I don't believe in god."
"You say you don't. I thought I didn't either at times. But if you're born knowing god, not believing is more like forgetting than not actually believing. You're an intelligent and sensitive person. You wouldn't forget to remember something that important."
"Propaganda and flattery is not the best way to convince people."
"Tell that to the people in Washington. Anyway, it's not flattery or propaganda. We both know the innocent sometimes suffer while the wicked go free, that selfish people lie, cheat and steal in order to get their way. I've seen it. We've all seen it. That's one of the reasons I read. I'm always on the lookout for other people who are as obsessed as I am with trying to figure out whether it's us making up all these things that are going on, or if it's them making us up. I thought reading books by dead people — historians, philosophers, poets and scientists would help me figure out if selfishness was a permanent human condition."
"So, is it?"
"I still can't tell . . . I think that's why I ended up choosing art as a way to make sense out of things. I think that, when it works, art is a good way to share what you see. And when it doesn't work, at least it doesn't kill anybody. Well, actually, some years ago, a giant art umbrella by Christo blew over and killed someone, and Paul Klee died from a skin disease that was partly the result of all the different chemicals he used when he painted, and if you count artists like Leonardo, Nietzsche and Rousseau I guess the idea that art isn't dangerous pretty much goes out the window. But even if it turns out that I didn't have a good reason to do art, I would still do it. I feel the same way about computers. I discovered computers when I was in my twenties and to me they were some of the most conceptually beautiful things I had ever seen. I was fascinated by the way they worked, by the people who invented them. More than anything else, I was fascinated by the way computers used language to create reality. To me, computers are language machines. Each computer, in a way, is like a hologram of society, a mirror of what we collectively think we know and how we think we know it. It was the computer that brought me back to poetry, because I came to believe that there exists a universal language and that this language could be used to describe anything and everything that can be described using language, that ultimately language is our interface to reality. Not only our sensory reality, but all reality. A reality in which every actual and potential thing and its opposite exists. A universe of potentiality. And that what we normally call reality, all the things we agree on, sits on top of language. It's like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. A slice of potentiality bread covered with a little bit of computer jelly, covered with language peanut butter covered with a slice of human-reality bread. And I had to believe that it was possible to take a bite out of the whole thing. Not with your mind, but with your entire being. It's only after you take the bite that you can chew on it with your mind. And even though I knew it was just a model, a general purpose sandwich model, it was good enough. With this model in mind, I spent years looking for a universal language and eventually I found it. I shouldn't really call it a language. It's more like a structure to hold language. All languages. And while I was looking a second thing happened. I began to believe that the computer, not the physical computer itself but the computer as an abstraction, was the original machine, the first machine, the original metaphor from which language emerged. It was this machine, call it gravity or cosmic DNA or whatever, that once created, began in turn to churn out language, that in the known universe the computer becomes the interface between potentiality and language. Language didn't make the computer. The computer made language. I realized that computers didn't come into existence in the twentieth century. The computer was here long before humans ever existed. And the computer is the original machine from which every other machine is constructed. Every single thing that exists began as a computer. Each and every description of a person, place or thing is a computer. Like an apple, for instance. I'll never really know what an apple is. I can see it and touch it and smell it and taste it, but none of those things is the apple. They're statements about the apple spoken in the language of being human. But the apple is no less real because of it. What makes the apple real is the fact that I can perceive it even as it perceives me. I can change it even as it changes me. Language is the machine through which these changes pass and can be known. This is the case for every single thing we call a thing. And it happens at every conceivable level between things and groups of things. And each time it happens, its happening is an instance of a computer. Most computer scientists define a computer as something that receives input, translates or transforms it in some way and creates output that may or may not result in some form of response or action on the part of the observer. And they will also tell you that a computer has a memory that it uses to store none, some or all of everything that happens inside itself from the time the input occurs to the time the output occurs. And some of those scientists will ask you, How does that differ from a person's receiving sensory input, thinking thoughts, making decisions, storing memories and responding or acting on those perceptions, thoughts and memories? That's how I came to know that time is a human construction. Time doesn't exist outside of language. That's why you can't find the bottom or the smallest unit of time. There is no smallest unit of time. Time is a relationship that exists between two perceptions, or thoughts or memories. Reality, apart from observation, is a unity. It takes a computer to make language and language to make a thing. Every single thing and every single event associated with every single thing is an instance of a computer, all of them existing both in the world and in our minds at one and the same time. By changing them in our minds we can sometimes change them in the world. That is why language or any aspect of language, meaningful or not, is also a thing in and of itself, a thing occupying space and time just like any other thing. There's no way around it. You can view language as things that are there, like marks on paper, or things that aren't there, like dents in clay, or scientific things like sound waves, electrons, photons, or quantum events in your brain. That doesn't change the fact that every part of language remains a thing in one form or another. And even though language exists as a collection of things, and even though you can act as if those things have no real relationship to things outside themselves, that will only get you so far. You will still be left with certain facts staring you in the face. Like the fact that there used to be really big dinosaurs and now there aren't. Or the fact that you can draw a picture or some words on a piece of paper and a few years later there's a thing in the world that wasn't there before. A thing that is so unique that nobody could have guessed it before it existed. A thing that looks and acts exactly like you think it would look and act by looking at the picture or the words describing it. A satellite for example, or a drug, or a nuclear bomb, or a building, or music. And the rules that we use to make things from words are also words and part of the deal. For the most part, whoever controls the rules of language controls the things that result from words, and that includes not only physical things but beliefs and laws and even society. There will always be some people who will try to use the rules to cheat, to hurt and to control others. And hopefully there will always be a majority of people will use the rules to help each other. The words and the rules themselves don't care. They're indifferent. They have no feelings or values except the feelings and values we give them. They're computers. Computers and language don't create meaning. We do. That's our job. We are the ones who are saying that the universe is composed of an infinite number of computers, interacting with each other in an infinite variety of ways, tying all other things in the universe together and ultimately creating the language-based, rational mind of the universe — us. If you're not careful, you might even conclude that computers constitute a universe in and of themselves, that the entire universe is a computer. It's a mistake if you do. There is another universe than that described by computers, but that universe is unspoken. That other universe is a unity and a mystery and trying to talk about it rationally doesn't get you anywhere. Computers cannot see this other universe. But you and I can. We can have direct knowledge of its existence by simply being aware of our own existence. And if we insist on being rational about it, we can have indirect knowledge of its existence by understanding that there are rational thoughts that cannot be constructed using the rules of language. It's one thing if there are limits to language and you don't know it. It's another thing if there are limits to language and you do know it. Knowing those limits is what makes you different from a computer. It doesn't mean that computers aren't going to keep getting faster and better and that someday they may have their own type of intelligence, perhaps even a global intelligence, but it will be a different type of intelligence than ours. And if that computer intelligence does emerge, it won't be separate and apart but created by and integrated with our own intelligence. So that's what I do for a living. I do it to demonstrate the unity and disparity and the symmetry and randomness of the universe. I've learned that you can't arrive at the conclusion that the world is strictly chaotic or random in nature through the use of reason, and have the conclusion be acceptable to reason. Neither can you successfully arrive at the conclusion that the world is a unity and perfect to the exclusion of randomness. I've learned that reason can show us that the world is what we choose it to be — unity or chaos or both. This doesn't mean that everything is purely relative. Gravity doesn't need anyone's permission to be gravity. And neither does love. I, for one, believe that love exists in the same way that gravity exists, that love exists prior to gravity and is in fact the parent of gravity. So everything is not purely relative. But it's not purely deterministic either. It's a choice. And to be given the freedom to make that kind of choice is the greatest gift I can imagine. Believing this, I do what I do to make these ideas part of the larger world. But what I do I also do to make a living, like everybody else."
He opens his eyes. Sitting on the edge of the bed facing him, his daughter smiles and says, "You sound like a professor. That's a compliment, by the way. So, if this were a test question, what would the short answer be?"
"Between you and me, I actually think of myself as a language artist . . . Tell your friends I prefer to work on problems related to machine translation and ubiquitous computing."
She turns to the TV, presses the mute button again and laughs. "I love you, Dad."
"I love you too."
Michael Harold is an artist and technologist. Lots of different kinds of art. Not so many different kinds of technology. His web site is www.michaelharold.com aka www.azazaza.com. It used to be just www.azazaza.com, but his friends always seemed to have a hard time getting it right (Did you say "zaza aza" or "za zazaza" or "azza azza"?) The full text of Art and Technolgy is offered there, free. He lives in Shreveport, Louisiana.