Films - Movies - Books

Epistemological Issues: Discovering Reality in Artificial Cultures...
"The Thirteenth Floor," "Dark City," and "Mulholland Drive."
see the article by Gessler & Hayles: "The Slipstream of Mixed Realities..."

These films are artistic interpretations of some of the deep philosophical issues surrounding the question of how we come to know the world around us. This is EPISTEMOLOGY, the enquiry into the question of how we discover reality. We recognize that there is a world that exists independent and outside of ourselves. Our minds have evolved as re-presentations of the outside world within our brains. By reconstructing the external world within our heads we can experiment with it, we can think about the consequences of our actions before we carry them out in practice. In this way we negotiate the world with less peril. What we perceive about the world are representations of that world, not the world itself. What we experience about the world are really representations of representations, constructions nested one inside the other. The challenge of all the sciences to understand this process so that we can distinguish fact from fancy. By experimentation, science seeks to build increasingly reliable representations of the world outside. It is through a critical testing of hypotheses that we weave scientific theory. The discovery of computation is changing the way we know and understand the world around us. It is fundamentally changing our conceptions of ourselves. It is changing the questions that we ask and the responses that we expect of the world outside. It is changing our views of what is real and what is not. It is changing the way we practice science. It is changing what we consider to be an explanation of what is going on around us. In many ways these movies address many of the issues of representing reality that we are studying. We will look at the evolution of how we representing spatial information on maps, from drawings on paper, to images of drawings on paper on our computer screens, and finally to the processes that computation offers that are revolutionizing the representational medium of maps. We will look at the evolution of how we model and simulate the changing world. The films below attempt to question our traditional views of reality. Since film itself is a visual representation it adds its own creative tropes and metaphors expressed in narrative. How do these combine with set design, lighting, special effects, acting, cinematogarphy, directing, editing, and writing to represent the issues that we are studying?

How many layers of representation are represented in these films? How many times do we awake from a dream to find that we are still dreaming, and awake again to find we are dreaming still? How many shells of subjective reality do we construct within our lives? How many representations of representations are constructed in our maps, models and simulations? What do they include? What do they leave out? How can we assess their limitations and their possibilities?

Situation Maps and Dynamic Representations

War Games is a dramatization of the problem of mistaking a representation of reality for reality itself. Although we experience the world through a chain of representations, some are more reliable approximations of reality than others. In situations when different representations convey conflicting messages, which one do we choose, and why? Fortunately, we have never confronted this problem on the tragic scale that this film portrays. However, we have repeatedly mistaken friends for enemies and enemies for friends with deadly results. This film presents a remarkably accurate critique of mistaking fantasy for reality simulations when decisions must be rendered quickly under grave duress.

Pushing Tin is a film about male competition and bonding in an air traffic control center, another place where decisions must be rendered quickly with hundreds of lives are at stake. The film shows some brief but intensely interesting scenes of traffic controllers manipulating aircraft and handing off responsibility for them from one console to the next. It provides some idea of how voice communication, radar, visual sighting, blips on a screen, and tokens are dynamically verified and coordinated in mapping and controlling air traffic.