https://yalemaquette.com The CCAM Maquette Fri, 05 Dec 2025 21:50:25 +0000 https://yalemaquette.com en https://yalemaquette.com/TITLE-A-Different-Dimension-Julie-Curtiss-copy Fri, 29 Aug 2025 14:26:33 +0000 The CCAM Maquette https://yalemaquette.com/TITLE-A-Different-Dimension-Julie-Curtiss-copy ︎A Different Dimension︎Julie Curtiss in conversation with Dana Karwas︎A Different Dimension︎Julie Curtiss in conversation with Dana Karwas︎A Different Dimension︎Julie Curtiss in conversation with Dana Karwas https://yalemaquette.com/ARTICLE-A-Different-Dimension-Julie-Curtiss Fri, 27 Jun 2025 19:41:10 +0000 The CCAM Maquette https://yalemaquette.com/ARTICLE-A-Different-Dimension-Julie-Curtiss <img width="1747" height="2048" width_o="1747" height_o="2048" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ba317ac18c866650d998ae39cec181022c017331ff615a7a75894e9d55d60a47/Curtiss-Julie_White-Cube.png" data-mid="235114688" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ba317ac18c866650d998ae39cec181022c017331ff615a7a75894e9d55d60a47/Curtiss-Julie_White-Cube.png" />Julie Curtiss, Limule, 2021. Acrylic and oil on canvas. 76.2 x 63.5 cm | 30 x 25 in. © The artist. Photo © Charles Benton. Courtesy White Cube.&nbsp; A Different Dimension Julie Curtiss in conversation with Dana Karwas The artist Julie Curtiss loves a mystery, a trick, a riddle. In the painting we chose for our Issue 4 cover, a squeaky clean horseshoe crab is being walked on a leash by a woman wearing a high-heeled, black leather boot. Enclosed in a privacy fence, the manicured lawn is a dark teal: Is it artificial grass? Beyond is a pale, featureless yellow sky, imbued with a smoky tinge. Is the world on fire? Are we glimpsing a near-apocalyptic future, in which relational dynamics, power structures, and social norms have undergone a total reordering? Horseshoe crabs have a rare blue blood that is crucial to medical research, and yet they are an endangered species. Are they the new status symbol? What are the new rules of the game? Her images have a darkness, but Curtiss’ tone is always high-spirited. While her forms, angles, colors, and shapes are lushly defined, there is a clear signal of experimentation and fluidity—the “what if?” of vivid dreams, Jungian analysis, and emotional projection. Time and logic both stretch and bend, while meaning and sensuality meet jagged edges. She is often referred to as a Neo-Surrealist, but her landscapes feel like science fiction. It was no surprise to learn that during the pandemic, she revisited the classics: “Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and the Robot series by Isaac Asimov,” she says. “I like the mix of the past, present, and future altogether.” Curtiss is a leading presence in contemporary art. Born in 1982 to a French mother and Vietnamese father, she studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is represented by White Cube. Dana Karwas spoke to her ahead of her first solo exhibition at Gagosian in Paris, “Suburban Lawns,” which opened in April 2025. A second solo show, “Maid in Feathers,” opened a few months later at White Cube Seoul. —Alex Zafiris Dana Karwas: When I first saw this painting, it reminded me of the French flâneur, or in this case, flâneuse.&nbsp; Julie Curtiss: Absolutely!&nbsp; DK: Why a horseshoe crab? JC: I first saw one when I was quite young. I was in the sea with my friend. I thought it was a salad bowl, floating on the water. I turned it over. All these legs started to wriggle! I got so scared, I jumped into my friend’s arms and we swam away. We told our adventures to our parents. We just didn’t know what we were looking at. Years later, I saw one in the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, and I realized it was what I’d seen in the sea. Fast forward: I’ve moved to New York, and I visit Fire Island. During mating season, a lot of them die on the beach. I grabbed one of the shells. It was lying around in my studio for a while. One day I was asked to contribute work to Two x Two, a fundraising initiative that benefits amfAR and the Dallas Museum of Art. They were having a Surrealist show. I was wondering what I could paint—sometimes ideas come when I let my brain wander. My eyes stopped on the shell. I made several sketches. For me, the framing of the situation comes first, then things slowly come together. Usually I end up zooming in. That’s why you just see a foot, and a piece of the leash. My female characters are extensions of me.︎My female characters are extensions of me.︎ At first, I thought: “I’m going to make this a high heel.” Then: “No, it has to be a boot, because she’s got to be armored, like the horseshoe crab.” My work is about culture and nature, but it’s also psychological. My female characters are extensions of me. All the other elements in the paintings are also extensions of her, and her projections. Horseshoe crabs are prehistoric creatures that look like they come from a different dimension. It could represent the most alien part of life, or the most primitive part of that woman. Why is it on a leash? Maybe she’s very comfortable with her primitive side. Or maybe she tamed it. They are both armored, and together they take a stroll. It’s an intimate relationship. DK: When you create, are you responding to the current climate or your internal world? Both? &nbsp; JC: Definitely both. Projection is a way of internalizing external things, or external events. Finding objectivity and subjectivity. Sometimes they’re not at all autobiographical, but do reflect on certain states of mind or being. And my being is, of course, influenced by what’s happening in the world. During Covid, this theme of Chaos + Control was on my mind a lot. I was thinking on a much more political, sociological, and scientific level. I became much more aware of my references. But also, lately, it’s been more about having been pregnant, and very concerned about fertility—doing something that humans have been doing for centuries, doing as nature does. My husband and I bought a house in Florida. I’m surrounded by really wild nature.&nbsp; DK: What is it about nature that attracts you? JC: A very specific type of creature makes its way into my paintings. Ones that people would consider a little strange, or not necessarily something you would want to paint. Cockroaches, lobsters, Ibis birds—things that are slightly creepy. Rarely do I paint cute things. Sometimes a cat tail will make its way in, or a dog snout. I love nature and culture, but also attraction and repulsion. The familiar and alien. I like contrasts, those polar opposites. I choose these animals that provoke something in the subconscious. Snakes, fish. I don’t paint faces. The only eyes I paint are on the creatures. &nbsp; I don’t paint faces. The only eyes I paint are on the creatures.︎I don’t paint faces. The only eyes I paint are on the creatures.︎ DK: There’s a strong relationship to the female body in your work. How has that evolved? &nbsp; JC: I’ve been painting and doing a lot of different things over a long period of time. My work started to really take off when I decided to reduce my language. I was like, “OK: What I’m doing is not working. Let me just go back to a few distinctive elements, and see how many combinations I can put them in, and how far I can stretch them.”&nbsp; At the time, I was watching a lot of Hitchcock. I was fascinated by the female protagonists because they’re very archetypal, and clouded in mystery. They’re very removed, but you’re always so close to them. It’s a very remote idea of a woman. They’re very beautiful. The hair and makeup, the figure. A lot of that femininity comes through, but it’s like a costume. With this film noir influence, I would crop the bodies to focus on one body part. It was convenient, but also nice, because then you have to make up for the whole missing image. It leaves a lot to the imagination. I add a lot of flat shadows over the background—this refers to the theater. I see it as a mental, internal theater with shadow. I’m really Jungian, so I love the idea of the shadow of a woman too, which is another archetype. Over time, my female figures have become more complex and a little less stereotypical, which gives me room for a little more realism.&nbsp; DK: How has being a mother influenced, or played into, your ideas? &nbsp; JC: It is still new to me. The work I did just after giving birth was a series in black and white, focusing on those first days of haziness. It was a hard time for me. I went through a lot of physical depression and anxiety from a hormonal imbalance. I was really struggling for about four months. Then I got better: it balanced out, I figured it out. Depictions of motherhood are always pretty, sweet, and soft. My series has a softness to it, and also definitely a darkness, a high contrast. I’m going to try to build on that. My new work has to do with motherhood, but not in an obvious way: there are almost no babies in it. It’s motherhood as extension of the self, and general ideas of pregnancy. I gave birth just before a solar eclipse, so I include that. There was a sense of these two things coming together and then separating, which I think is symbolic. It is influencing the work quite a bit. DK: It’s like a seismic shift happens. In the brain, too. &nbsp; &nbsp; JC: Oh yeah. I mean, if you are not changed after birth, then there’s something wrong.&nbsp; DK: I’d love to know more about what the theme Chaos + Control means to you.&nbsp; Nature is chaotic—too much of it can mean death. But too much control can mean death as well.︎Nature is chaotic—too much of it can mean death. But too much control can mean death as well.︎ JC: Florida has become a source of inspiration. I’m not familiar with it yet—I’m French, so it is very exotic. I also kind of hate it, obviously, but it’s very rich for me visually. Florida is such a wild place. The creatures, the wilderness, the hurricanes. People want to control their environment. Our neighbors across the street replaced their entire natural lawn with Astroturf. Nature is chaotic—too much of it can mean death. But too much control can mean death as well, because I find the suburbs very boring. It makes me want to run away. It’s a balancing act between chaos and control. You can see this for instance in the painting Tropical Dawn. A living room has been taken over by a tropical forest. Everything is in high contrast. DK: There is so much humor in your work. I love the painting Serpent (2023), with the huge snake swallowing a couple whole. All you can see is this huge mouth, and their entwined feet. JC: I think it comes from how the contrasts of life are more surreal than fiction. The juxtaposition of things that don’t belong together. Or thinking that you saw something and actually, when you look closer, you realize it was just your imagination playing a trick on you. Like visual rhymes. The shellfish as an ice cream. It’s trickery, contrast, and contradiction, and somehow it coexists very well in the same image. Usually I start there.&nbsp; DK: With the humor there is darkness too, and sexuality, for instance in Freudian Slip (2022). It’s a close-up of a young woman’s bare legs on a table. A wooden cane, held by an old man’s hand, is being inserted into her. It made me think about the exhilarating nature of birth—a lot of extremes happening in contrast. There’s a circle. JC: Yeah, that one is dark. People are disturbed by it. It is a circle. It actually came from a dream. I woke up and was really perplexed, then I realized, “Oh, your mind presents you with riddles.” I liked the idea of the cane, an object that represented old age, and the cane impregnating a woman, to start the cycle of life. It’s a loop. At first I presented a whole Freudian figure with a beard with a woman in a gynecology setup on a table. But it was too much, too crude. Not mysterious enough. I took things away, and it became like I was introspectively prying inside this woman. It was a whole psychological thing. Showing less was doing more. For more information, visit juliecurtiss.com. https://yalemaquette.com/TITLE-Tethered-Lightly-Priyamvada-Natarajan-in-conversation-with-Alex Fri, 27 Jun 2025 19:55:42 +0000 The CCAM Maquette https://yalemaquette.com/TITLE-Tethered-Lightly-Priyamvada-Natarajan-in-conversation-with-Alex ︎Tethered Lightly︎Priyamvada Natarajan in conversation with Alex Zafiris︎Tethered Lightly︎Priyamvada Natarajan in conversation with Alex Zafiris︎Tethered Lightly︎Priyamvada Natarajan in conversation with Alex Zafiris https://yalemaquette.com/ARTICLE-Priyamvada-Natarajan-in-conversation-with-Alex-Zafiris Fri, 29 Aug 2025 13:59:02 +0000 The CCAM Maquette https://yalemaquette.com/ARTICLE-Priyamvada-Natarajan-in-conversation-with-Alex-Zafiris <img width="2250" height="3000" width_o="2250" height_o="3000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/63bc8bc95f2b36ca41c5bf5bf5424ba5bc78d6f90fd33312c516fb59a496baf6/PRIYA_CCAM_073025_241-1.jpg" data-mid="237617750" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/63bc8bc95f2b36ca41c5bf5bf5424ba5bc78d6f90fd33312c516fb59a496baf6/PRIYA_CCAM_073025_241-1.jpg" />Priyamvada Natarajan by Balarama Heller, special commission for CCAM, 2025. © Balarama Heller. Tethered Lightly Priyamvada Natarajan in conversation with Alex Zafiris Theoretical astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan has an instinct for the arts that illuminates her lifelong obsession with the universe. Her focus is dark matter, dark energy, and black holes—three of the most mysterious cosmic constituents whose existence we can now formally acknowledge, but whose purpose we have yet to grasp. She compares her fascination with these unseen entities to the act of creation: writers and artists also wrestle with containing the elusive spirit of their inspiration. Her approach to physics—born from a childhood love of cartography—is both methodical and visionary, and led to the 2023 breakthrough of how supermassive black holes form at the centers of galaxies. She established the theory almost two decades ago, and it was finally proven with the use of the new, ultrapowerful James Webb Space Telescope. This development won Natarajan a place on the Time 100 list the following year; a few months later, she was awarded the Heineman Prize. At Yale, she is the inaugural Joseph S. and Sophia S. Fruton Professor of Astronomy and Professor of Physics, the Chair of Astronomy, and the Director of the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities. She is the author of Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos (2016), a poetic and eye-opening history of our understanding of the universe, full of ancient stories, mythologies, and sharply drawn figures whose beliefs, insights, and innovations all contributed to what astronomy is today. For many of us, the concepts Natarajan deals with on a daily basis can feel nearly impossible to make sense of. Uninspired teaching, impenetrable language, outdated or incorrect information, and anti-science rhetoric all contribute to a general haze of overwhelm and mistrust. But the desire to find meaning within this seemingly chaotic cosmos has been a human preoccupation since the beginning of civilization. Philosophers, priests, alchemists, and even an orphan glassblower were instrumental in the discoveries recounted in Mapping the Heavens—and many breakthroughs were the result of wild leaps of creativity. Most often, these were initially rejected by baffled, frightened, or jealous peers anxious to maintain the status quo. For this reason, Natarajan explains, the capacity for curiosity is fundamental to progress, as in all areas of life—especially in moments of uncertainty. “Our attitude toward change is deeply connected to our sense of self,” she writes in the preface. “Understanding the power and provisionary nature of scientific thinking is the challenge of our time.” Alex Zafiris: On top of everything, you’re a fantastic writer. Many of the people, ideas, and facts in Mapping the Heavens are so complex, but you describe them all with such simplicity and energy. Will you be writing more? Priyamvada Natarajan: I’m finishing this very ambitious book on trying to redefine what science really is, by bringing scientific ideas and the practice of science into much better alignment. My claim is that previous accounts of how science progresses and advances—such as those by Thomas Kuhn, and many others—don’t actually capture what really happens on the untidy lab bench, or in front of the blackboard, or in discussions during seminars. This is because they were not practicing scientists. Ideally, someone like me—who’s really on the inside, who can unpack the messiness—is the new kind of interlocutor needed to share with the public what scientists really do. Amongst all the wrong turns, missed experiments, dropped things, blind alleys, passionate arguments, and dead ends, there is rigor to the process. This comes from a community of scientists, all of them with domain knowledge, who actually interrogate new ideas and arrive at a consensus. What constitutes a scientific fact is adjudicated collectively, and this is a very powerful process that is completely unknown to the public. There’s contestation, there are fierce debates. While there are many subjective angles that come into play in how scientists—domain experts—arrive at a consensus on a radical new idea that is proposed, the ultimate arbiter is data. Scientific information is the solid substrate. Then there’s who’s proposing the idea, how well they present it, who else is supporting it, how they disseminate it, and so on. These additional factors make a big difference on how quickly something radical is going to get accepted. That’s what I’m delving into, and writing about. AZ: This sounds like a natural progression from Mapping the Heavens. PN: Yes. People often ask me, “What is this obsession with mapping?” For me, mapping really feels like the most compelling way to know, to understand and comprehend the visual representation and the visual lexicon. The visual lexicon is very intertwined with the mathematical lexicon. And the reason for that, partly, is the specific subjects that I work on. The theoretical underpinning of what I work on is Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. That whole theory posits that we live in four dimensions: we live in three in space, and one in time. Physically, it’s abstract. It’s not physically comprehensible, in the sense that you can’t depict four dimensions on a sheet of paper.&nbsp; However, there’s a way in which you can visually access it. That’s what I have found fascinating. That’s precisely the kind of conceptual basis that really drives me and excites me. It literally does seduce me. There is also a deep, profound layer of really important and elegant mathematics. But that language is very severely limiting for scientists. Many of them can manipulate those equations, but having those line up with a conceptual visual lexicon is really important. It takes extra work and a very specific kind of imaginative bent. That’s what has helped me frame the conceptual ideas that I have proposed, elaborated, and delved deeply into. Most of my contributions—I say this not in a boasty way—are ultimately very simple conceptually, but have inadvertently led to interesting breakthroughs. The seed of my ideas and insights have really come from a place of unconstrained questioning of the status quo, and current view of phenomena. I like to believe that it’s my childlike curiosity, that I have fortunately managed to retain, that really propels me. I think that these out-of-the-box ideas (to use a well-worn cliché) also come out of this marrying of transcending disciplines and approaches. &nbsp; There’s a way in which the visual “solution” finally gives me the aha moment.︎There’s a way in which the visual “solution” finally gives me the aha moment.︎ For me, the visual has always been part of it. There’s a way in which the visual “solution” finally gives me the aha moment. I feel lucky to have this tool in my mental arsenal, and I am grateful for this advantage. When you work with very complex problems, the first challenge is setting it up, framing it, so that you can actually solve it. The next challenge is to have a feel for the problem. This takes a lot of experience and expertise—and this is where immersion really comes in handy. Say you have a complex phenomenon that you want to explain. You have to somehow have the intuition to say: “You know what, I’m going to build a bare bones model that is pared down. Simplify, simplify, simplify.” But not oversimplify, because then you lose key features. Recognizing what might be the essence, the key elements that absolutely need to be retained, is what takes practice, training, and intuition. Once you do that, you can really understand the problem deeply. Then you can add back the bells and the whistles, step-by-step, in a very systematic way. A complex problem involves the interplay of many different aspects. When you add in the complexities one by one, you slowly expand your map of the solution space. At each point, when you add something, your mental map grows a little bit more. The way I look at it, everything is like a mapping problem. Ultimately, you see the whole map. One direct analogy is: problem-solving is akin to building up the features of a cartographic landscape. Initially, you can pick out only the highest peaks in the mountains. You’re not able to see the valleys, the ridges, or the mounds; you’re just picking up the most essential, prominent features of that problem. Then as you get a deeper understanding, you start to be able to see all the complex geography of that landscape. This is how I personally navigate my work. It turns out, this is not just a metaphor. It transfers literally when you talk about dark matter, one of the cosmic constituents that I work on. Dark matter is clumped, lumped, and distributed spatially in the cosmos. This spatial distribution is quite rich in information, and you first need to be able to map it before you can extract the information on its properties. Because it’s all unseen. This is my problem-solving approach. Fortunately for me, the two problems of black holes and dark matter in the invisible universe—that are really parlayed by general relativity—are very amenable to this kind of approach and to visual imagination. It’s not like somebody can solve these equations better, because the theory is quite mature by the time I’ve shown up in the field. It’s been around since 1915. But now, what’s more interesting about the theory is that there are deeper ways to understand it—to understand how it applies and might be relevant in the observed universe, and the specific contexts where it really applies. AZ: Your choice of language, too, is very striking. You describe the universe as violent. Black holes are monsters. You are seduced. One of the things I learned about you was that you love art, that you love Louise Bourgeois and Mark Rothko. These are enigmatic artists who deal with mystery. If anyone, including someone who has no interest in art, stands in front of a Rothko or Bourgeois, they know they are being confronted with something extremely profound. And so, to hear you talk about that mystery, that seduction, with that language, conjures a similar feeling. The second chapter of Mapping the Heavens begins with this incredible story of Edgar Allan Poe—another artist of dark inclinations who held a fascination with the unknown—who, in 1848, at the peak of his career, suddenly decided to declare his own thoughts about a “restless and evolving” universe in a public lecture in New York. His audience was stunned and disappointed. This talk was later turned into a prose poem, “Eureka.” His ideas were formed purely through his creative intuition, and were in total contrast to the common beliefs at the time. But he was proven correct by scientists, almost a century later. PN: Exactly. And he was not informed by mathematics or physics, but yet, it is such an apt description. It’s very prescient. I am also obsessed with Joan Miró. I feel that with artists, there’s a way in which they are trying to capture the essence of things that are so elusive. There’s a materiality, and they are really trying to explore it with a simple visual language. It’s the same paring down idea that I was just describing. I think that’s part of my fascination. These people are driven by something that they can’t quite touch and sense. It’s just a little bit beyond comprehension, beyond reach. What I really love about the artists I like and who inspire me is that they are constantly experimenting and playing. You can see it in a Paul Klee drawing. It’s fun. I feel the same way about the science that I do. It’s really fun to unpack and unravel, and to feel that you have a personal sense of revelation. The fact that you uniquely bring a way of looking at the problem is a huge source of satisfaction and contentment, even if the result is not a publishable thing, or even if other people already know about it because it’s well-known. It doesn’t matter. The sheer joy of figuring things out is something I really savor. I find with a lot of my colleagues, when I talk to them, this is lost a little bit. Understandably, people get preoccupied with a professional or a careerist view of what they do, and that is what motivates them. For me, it’s been a real privilege to work in science as a calling, almost a compulsion; more so than just a profession. I’m not saying everybody should feel this, or that everybody can, because I am very aware that just even having all these opportunities is a privilege. I feel really deeply grateful that I can do all this. But some of it is definitely temperament: wanting to retain that sense of awe and curiosity. At some level, you have to do it self-consciously, because it’s very easy to get trapped by the histrionics of academia. You have to write papers, get grants—it’s the ground reality. I’m still tethered to the ground reality, because I am in a university, in a department, in a profession. But I like to be tethered lightly, so I’m floating just a little bit above, with a sense of detachment. For me, that sense of detachment is what allows the imagination to soar. How I feel about it is very much part of how I tackle the problem.︎How I feel about it is very much part of how I tackle the problem.︎ I want to underline that not everybody has this privilege. But if you happen to win the birth lottery, and are born in a home where you don’t have the fundamental challenges of survival—where you are surrounded by beauty, and your imagination and curiosity are encouraged from a very young age, and you have the capacity to actually get into that as a profession and excel in that realm—then you can get to do all of this. I understand that not a lot of my colleagues are sitting and interrogating themselves and their work to see, “Why do I like this? Why do I calculate like this?” Or: “How do I feel when I do this?” For me, that’s very important: I do a calculation, and I end up with something. It’s a puzzle, or it leads to deeper understanding. How I feel about it is very much part of how I tackle the problem. How do I feel when it gets done? Or when I get stuck? Self-knowledge really helps. That gives you a unique take which you can flow with, and it leads to more exciting, interesting landscapes. This further allows you to think in unusual, surprising ways. AZ: You’re describing an artist mentality. This can go the other way, when artists become too self-obsessed, and their work becomes quite thin and flat. What made me laugh out loud several times in Mapping the Heavens is how you speak of all these male scientists and their egos, and all the clashes and roadblocks that ensue. These people are everywhere in all professions. But here, Einstein pops up throughout the chapters, and you are kind of eye-rolling him. And then near the end, you say—and it’s like I can hear you sigh: “Yeah, but he’s the best.” I love how you created that arc. It allowed for so much insight around it. PN: Yes! My friends give me a hard time because I really think that dismantling this idea of heroes, and hero worship, is important. I actually don’t particularly like the word “genius.” That notion has really kept a lot of us behind the scenes, many of whom remain unacknowledged and not given their due. But on the other hand, there are these singular creative minds. Einstein probably was a genius. He’s the blind spot in my argument. It does seem like his capacity for dealing with abstraction was remarkable and unparalleled. In many ways, other than just the originality of his ideas, I think he was quite detached, not as emotionally invested in his theories as one would imagine someone of his stature to have been, and given all the original and transformative ideas that he proposed. In fact, for all the big theoretical ideas that he came up with, he often did not like some of their mathematical consequences. For instance, his equations lead, inevitably, to the description of our universe as one that is expanding. He found this deeply uncomfortable and disorienting, because he had an aesthetic and philosophical preference for fixity. AZ: It’s a perfectly balanced vision. An ideal image. Almost like a sense of justice. The opposite of chaos. PN: I think it was a classical notion as well. This idea of being tethered, and not moving. A sense of stability. It also makes it easier to figure out our place in the cosmos, if we are not adrift. He pushed back against ideas of the expanding universe. He finally did get convinced. He was visiting Mount Wilson Observatory, and the astronomer Edwin Hubble had found these galaxies that are external galaxies, beyond our own, that were hurtling away at speeds that were larger the farther away they were from us. There is no other way to reconcile it, other than to accept that the universe is actually expanding. I remember reading accounts where Einstein is supposed to have stood up and said, “OK, I was wrong, and I agree the universe is expanding.” And that there was an audible gasp in the room. No one expected him to actually admit he had been wrong, nor that he would admit it openly. This humility, despite his initial stubbornness, was quite remarkable. The same thing happened with the idea of black holes. He actually believed that the black hole solution was merely a mathematical artifact of his equations. He was not convinced, for a very long time, that they would actually correspond to real astrophysical objects, or real spaces in the universe. This was because he didn’t like the properties of that solution: again, it felt very uncomfortable. In particular, what he didn’t like was the notion of the singularity, the fact that there was a place where everything that we know—all known laws of nature—break down, and we don’t even have the language for it. The mathematics breaks down. Another intriguing thing was that he was someone who had an incredible physical intuition, but wasn’t necessarily driven by mathematics. It was his friends and the people around him at the time—such as Marcel Grossmann—who taught him that the rigor of mathematics is actually the most effective language to frame his physical intuition about geometry of space and its relation to time—four dimensions. He had geometrical insight in spades, which nobody else had. <img width="2000" height="3000" width_o="2000" height_o="3000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/636cc2b1216309def2a3c8503d41b555622ff93cb16bcb52a9d47c1782cf3598/PRIYA_CCAM_073025_216.jpg" data-mid="237617764" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/636cc2b1216309def2a3c8503d41b555622ff93cb16bcb52a9d47c1782cf3598/PRIYA_CCAM_073025_216.jpg" /> &nbsp; So: The mathematical framing came from people around him, with whom he discussed his theory of general relativity. They found a framework of tensors, of metric spaces and manifolds, that offered him the language. When you think about it, what he figured out about the universe was incredibly profound: the fact that the geometry, fate, and contents of the universe are interlinked; and that geometry, the shape of space itself, plays an absolutely fundamental role. Before this, it was not part of the conceptual repertoire. This was all linked to the deep nature of gravity. Before Einstein, Isaac Newton told us how gravity worked, not what it was. That’s the difference. Einstein was able to explain what gravity really, fundamentally, is. Because, with Newton’s view, there were lots of unanswered questions: What is it about the fact that when two bodies have mass, this causes them to get attracted to each other? The next big problem was that, with two objects, why does it not take a finite amount of time for them to infer each other’s presence, and therefore feel the tug of the force of gravity? Why is gravity transmitted instantaneously to the other object in the vicinity, such that their force of attraction falls off by 1/r2 ? Why is that instantaneous? That is not something Newton could explain. Because he was just giving you an operational definition of gravity. He wasn’t trying to tell you what gravity is, deeply. In a way, that’s where we are, if you will, with the dark universe. We know what dark matter does, how it manifests; we don’t know what it is. We know how dark energy manifests in the universe, in terms of phenomenology, but we don’t yet know what it is. With black holes, we have made significantly more progress. Not only do we know how they manifest in the universe, but we also understand a lot more about their true nature. That’s why the three cosmic constituents that I study—dark matter, dark energy, and black holes—are really deeply related. And this is the level at which they are deeply related: They are all manifestations of something. They are very, very real, physically rooted manifestations of these phenomena that we understand quite well. However, we have no idea what these entities really are, their true nature. That’s what unites all three of them: dark matter, dark energy, and black holes. In a way, that’s what I find deeply fascinating, that with all of these essential invisible ingredients of the universe, we are really in the same intellectual stage of discovery, probing, and awaiting the transition akin from Newton to Einstein for gravity. AZ: Do you recall the moment when the image of the recent breakthrough began to form? When the intuition began to glimmer, and you started going in that direction? PN: Yes. In 2005, 2006, working with my postdoctoral collaborator Giuseppe Lodato. We were trying to answer an emerging puzzle. As telescopes were looking back into time, they were revealing populations of supermassive black holes in place in the very early universe. We were starting to run into a peculiar timing problem. At these early times, there was not much time available since the Big Bang to grow these large black holes from the tiny ones that we knew had to form in the universe. It was very well established that small black holes would form as the end state of stars after they had lived out their lives, leaving them as stellar corpses. The question was that there were limits to the sizes of the black holes that you could make that way; it was challenging to grow them from this starting point to account for the massive ones that were being uncovered. Part of what I was looking around to see was: Is there any cosmic setting in which physics would allow us to circumvent this standard way to make black holes? For example, fundamental to the formation of a light black hole seed is the formation of the initial massive star. What happens if you skip forming a standard star? Can you still make a black hole some other way? That’s what guided me. Then there was this visualization. Aha, so the way this could work—in order to really make a black hole—is that you have to concentrate a lot of matter into a very tiny space fairly rapidly. What are the conditions you would need in a universe for that to happen? Then came the visual idea: How do you move matter rapidly to a very compact space to make an object that’s very, very dense? Even today, scientists think about black holes in multiple different ways.︎Even today, scientists think about black holes in multiple different ways.︎ The thing that I found really challenging about it is that, even today, scientists think about black holes in multiple different ways. Astrophysicists and astronomers believe in stellar evolution theory and think of a black hole very much as a material object where the mass is very, very tightly packed. Then there are people who think about a black hole as an extreme puncture in space-time—they think of it as a place, not as a thing. These are different ways of looking at the same object, and somehow, we haven’t fully reconciled them. Depending on the situation, whatever suits us best, we adopt that way of looking at a black hole, but we’re looking at the same phenomenon in the end, the same deep concept. We’re approaching it in different ways. This was part of what helped us. I was thinking, “OK, I want to do something about bringing in a lot of matter, so that not only would I make a very dense kind of object, but I can also see how that would create a deeper and deeper puncture in space-time.” When we found the physics would permit you to do that, then it was a question of looking for a very specific set of conditions. What are all the conditions you would need to line up for these conditions to happen? Then the question was logical: Are there places in the universe where you have these conditions? And then, if there are enough places, then we realized that, yes, there were enough places. The next question was: How does the larger environment, the setting, impact this formation process? Once again, we had the guidance of cosmological simulations to see that, but then they are limited, because these simulations cannot take you all the way. The final step is imagination, which you need no matter what, because we don’t have the resolution. We didn’t have the computing facilities. Nobody has formed a black hole in a simulation. We cannot follow the process of gravitational collapse down to the end point. We just don’t know how to do it. We know that it’s inevitable that it becomes so compact; there’s no other way but to keep shrinking. But we haven’t actually computed it and seen it happen in a simulation yet. Given that you don’t have that, then how can you make predictions that are testable and can be validated? That’s where this kind of visual idea really helped—the mental map of what a region that would give you a direct collapse black hole could look like. Over the years, it’s become clear that there is not just one way in which this whole phenomenon could manifest. You could likely make these so-called direct collapse black holes in a bunch of different ways. The key was crafting this connection between these theoretical spaces where this phenomenon can occur, and probably occurs; mapping that onto the real universe, where, if this phenomenon does happen, what, and how, would it manifest? That was the prediction. And that was something I was pretty adept at—how things manifest. So that’s what led to the breakthrough. I think we were lucky. I mean, we really got a gift from the universe. There’s no other way to put it. When this object, UHZ1, which provides compelling evidence for this new way of assembling a black hole, was detected, it just was absolutely in the right place, physically speaking, and also with all the right properties. It was a classic textbook case. That was very gratifying. . AZ: And you were using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)? PN: Yes. The problem with black holes is that they can’t tell you how they form. You don’t have that information. You have to infer it from the environment: the relationship of the black hole to where it’s sitting in the galaxy, its mass, and how it relates to properties of the galaxy. One of the key predictions was that if such objects exist, they would have to be simultaneously observable in two wavelengths: In X-rays, because that’s the energy range in which any mass that is being gobbled by a black hole visually reveals itself. These are the dying gasps of gas; when they get pulled in by the intense gravity of the gas, they get heated to such high temperatures that they start glowing in X-rays. But this object—a direct collapse black hole—would form in the very distant universe. Wavelengths of light are stretched out, due to the expansion of the universe. So as light travels, its wavelength would be stretched and much of the light would actually be seen in the infrared today. These are much longer wavelengths, because they get stretched. X-rays meanwhile are extremely energetic and have very short wavelengths. The mid, near, far infrared are the wavelengths that JWST is sensitive to capturing. So such an object would have to be detected both in the X-rays by the Chandra Space Telescope and by JWST. That was the first clue. Then there were five other properties that it had to satisfy, and so the fact that it was seen was miraculous, really, nothing short of a literal gift from the universe. I mean, amazing! AZ: Truly amazing! In your book, you speak about individuals versus teams. You mentioned earlier the importance of your sense of detachment, being tethered lightly, but obviously, because of the way science is now, you need a team. PN: Yes. I have typically chosen to work in very small teams. The one large collaboration that I’m part of is the NANOGrav Collaboration, which recently reported evidence for the stochastic gravitational wave background. When two supermassive black holes collide, the space-time around them feels a tremor in the moment when they actually collide and merge. That sort of tremor, or disturbance in space-time, travels out. We have detected the collective disturbance, (not from any particular single source) from thousands of such supermassive black hole binaries that are merging throughout the universe. This was so cutting-edge, and such an important feature and property of black holes that I’ve been studying, that I got enticed to get involved. Big science is all good and great, but there are different ways and styles of pursuing science that all have to be encouraged and supported. Small teams, big teams, and groups of a handful of scientists—I think all of these need to be funded. I cannot imagine us recruiting a young kid who is interested in science to pursue a scientific career by saying, “Do astronomy and astrophysics, because then you can be the 1,000th author on a paper that is reporting a major discovery, and you can make a contribution that will be critical to that result, but you will be one of 1,000 people who’ve done critical things to make something happen.” I don’t think we’re going to get the next generation of minds to push at the frontiers of science with just that. It might work for recruiting some. Big teams tend to be risk-averse, because big science requires so much public money that they cannot take the intellectual risks that you can take as a small group or as individuals. I think we need to have both of those styles of pursuing scientific research going at the same time. My personal choice has been to work in small groups. I think you also can take certain creative risks with that mode of working that you cannot take with large collaborations. The downside is that it’s very hard to get funded, because now you’re competing with large teams of excellent scientists with multiple members contributing varied expertise. In many ways, making the choice of working in small groups, one faces more obstacles. And I have always found that obstacles test you—they’re annoying, and delay things, but I think, ultimately, they may actually have a huge intellectual payout. AZ: I assume you choose your team now. PN: Absolutely. It’s really important that the people I work closely with are collegial, and that we have a shared vision of why we are doing this. They tend to be people who are motivated by the genuine joy of figuring things out and are excited to do so. I have found, in my own experience, that when you stop thinking about external validation, that’s when recognition naturally comes to you. It’s the weirdest thing. The less attached you are to those kinds of trappings, the more you accrue them. This also links to one other important thing, which is: I was born a Hindu, and I did learn Sanskrit. I have read a reasonable portion of our remarkable scriptures that are of great interest to me. These have served as unique windows into new systems of thinking about the world and about life. About being tethered lightly, having a bit of detachment from everything: that’s very much the essence in the Bhagavad Gita—part of the epic Mahabharata. In this epic, Lord Krishna advises the warrior Arjuna, “focus on the action and not the outcome.” The outcome is not in your hands. It’s hard because, unlike Einstein, I am emotionally invested in my theories and ideas. I want my colleagues to take them seriously enough to want to test them. So that’s the attachment. AZ: At the end of your book, you say that earthlings take a rather self-centered, “completely anthropomorphic” view on the possibility of alien life. That instead, advanced life-forms could be found, or appear, in ways very unfamiliar to us. You describe the likelihood of a “menagerie of universes.” In another interview, you mention that you love the concept of plants being sentient. PN: I love that idea. I’m obsessed. I found the 1872 novel Lumen, authored by French astronomer and writer Camille Flammarion, really fascinating. It’s pre-science fiction as a genre, and he transports you to a world where the plants are sentient. They talk to each other, they interact and behave collectively. What’s amazing is that now, this notion has resurfaced. Novelists like Richard Powers and scientists like Paco Calvo are uncovering how the roots of plants actually engage in information exchange. So I just think: Why not? By the way, confession, I love plants, and I talk to my plants, and I think they respond to me. They get me, and I get them. They are very supportive. They really make me happy. That’s something I’ve inherited from my mom. My parents were very avid gardeners and our house was always full of flowers. As for what alien life could look like, Stephen Jay Gould—who I quote in Mapping the Heavens—said that if you rerun evolution back and then run it forward again on Earth, it’s quite possible that something else could have resulted. Because there are so many random elements that have shaped evolution and brought us to where we are, how we look, everything. And that’s with all the fundamental physics and chemistry being the same. What’s very exciting now are the new ways in which chemists and biologists are starting to think about the origin of life. They are opening up, going beyond these anthropocentric views of what life might be. Lumen is an early example of that. Can you imagine someone so open-minded and imaginative in 1872, who was not limited by what we and our surroundings look like, and was able to transcend it all? I was just fascinated. <img width="2400" height="3000" width_o="2400" height_o="3000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8fffe9dbcb88dd1e2791d082c4b5ed02c29b455d8b1b24c3bef4f12be6edce70/PRIYA_CCAM_073025_243-1.jpg" data-mid="237617777" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8fffe9dbcb88dd1e2791d082c4b5ed02c29b455d8b1b24c3bef4f12be6edce70/PRIYA_CCAM_073025_243-1.jpg" />&nbsp; For more information on Priyamvada Natarajan, visit her site. For more information on Balarama Heller, visit his site. For more information on Alex Zafiris, visit her site.&nbsp; https://yalemaquette.com/TITLE-A-Theory-of-Meaning-Takashi-Ikegami Fri, 05 Dec 2025 20:59:36 +0000 The CCAM Maquette https://yalemaquette.com/TITLE-A-Theory-of-Meaning-Takashi-Ikegami ︎A Theory of Meaning︎Takashi Ikegami︎A Theory of Meaning︎Takashi Ikegami︎A Theory of Meaning︎Takashi Ikegami https://yalemaquette.com/ARTICLE-A-Theory-of-Meaning-Takashi-Ikegami Fri, 05 Dec 2025 21:50:25 +0000 The CCAM Maquette https://yalemaquette.com/ARTICLE-A-Theory-of-Meaning-Takashi-Ikegami <img width="4032" height="2268" width_o="4032" height_o="2268" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0370027e1eec84d0ff44992af22136592b3b9700b416fd12fec7ba70afadc661/IMG_0641.JPG" data-mid="244641699" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0370027e1eec84d0ff44992af22136592b3b9700b416fd12fec7ba70afadc661/IMG_0641.JPG" /> All images: «Alter3», Takashi Ikegami Laboratory supported by Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratory and Tomohiro Kono (who provided the wigs), 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, 2023. A Theory of Meaning Takashi Ikegami in conversation with Dana Karwas and Chaitanya Harshita Nedunuri Kahn Professor Takashi Ikegami introduced his android, ALTER, to the world in 2016. An embodiment of his research into human behavior, artificial life, and complex systems, this android continues to evolve and is currently ALTER3. Referred to as they/them, ALTER is programmed by large language models (LLMs) and functions as a lifelike, non-gendered presence, serving to deepen understanding on subjects such as autonomy, individuality, and community. They respond to external stimuli, emit reactive sounds, and participate in conversation. Recently, they are answering questions and making requests, which has stunned their creator. Ikegami flew from Tokyo to attend CCAM’s Ultra Space symposium in April 2024, where he spoke about artificial life being “larger than biological life.” His energy vibrates: In the ensuing chats I had with him, accompanied by Research Fellow Chaitanya Harshita Nedunuri Kahn, we had the sense that he might be hiding something, or on the verge of a breakthrough. His knowledge and curiosity about the secrets of the universe are surprising and thought-provoking, to the point where you wonder if he, like ALTER, somehow exists in another realm, not unlike a yokai—an ancient, supernatural Japanese spirit. When Ikegami and his team arrived in New Haven for the symposium, Connecticut experienced a 4.8 earthquake. Three days later, Kahn and I took everyone to New York to visit the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU Tisch; afterwards, we stood on the Brooklyn Bridge to watch the Great North American Eclipse. As the sky and light changed, I wondered: Would the android understand, or register, an eclipse? Would they consider how close it was to the earthquake? And if so, would they convert these observations into a new meaning? My own and Ikegami’s research overlaps with our connection to the writer Madeline Gins and the artist Shūsaku Arakawa, who together founded the Reversible Destiny Foundation in 2010 to interrogate ideas around meaning, perception, and awareness through the medium of architecture. Their work, which includes the Mitaka Lofts in Japan, the Bioscleave House in East Hampton, NY, the book Architectural Body and project The Mechanism of Meaning, directly challenges our mental and physical responses to daily life. Ikegami is very at ease with the tension between human nature and humanlike nature, and this helps to materialize the complexity within the existential dream (or nightmare) of collective consciousness and existence itself. —Dana Karwas 1. LIFE ITSELF (ANTS AND HONEYBEES) DANA KARWASWhat are you working on right now? TAKASHI IKEGAMI First, I’m learning how to use the android to understand life itself. Second, I have a new hypothesis, which is the Community First Theory. Individuality comes after when individuals get together. I’m looking at ant colonies, and honeybees.&nbsp; DANA And you’re using large language models (LLMs) to test the theory. TAKASHI Yes. This is a revolutionary era, because before LLMs, we couldn’t do this kind of experiment, or simulation. But now there’s a new mathematics of collective behavior and intelligence, of civilization; new communications of self-organizing agents. We don’t need game theory ideas anymore, because LLMs can give you very new insight into how communities are going to be.DANAWhat do you think Madeline Gins and Shūsaku Arakawa would think of these ideas?&nbsp; TAKASHIArakawa felt that collectives were more important than the individual. Where does your consciousness exist—in your brain, or elsewhere? Your surroundings are also a part of your consciousness, and the consciousness also exists in your environment. I’m very much impressed with these ideas. My thoughts on collective intelligence, and also my studies, are influenced by this. In other words, when a group forms, it’s not just that we’re influenced by the people and events around us; I believe that even individual agency, and consciousness, can spread contagiously. This idea is at the heart of the Community First Theory, which resonates with Arakawa’s philosophy. 2. SLEEPWALKING (WHERE IS DANA?)&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; DANA&nbsp; About consciousness: In the context of sleepwalking, your brain is asleep, but your eyes are open.&nbsp; TAKASHIIs sleepwalking a natural thing that people do? Like walking—and then they sometimes open the window and try to go out? CHAITANYA HARSHITA NEDUNURI KAHN&nbsp; Yes, especially when you’re a child.&nbsp; TAKASHII didn’t know that. I know that some people with Alzheimer’s leave the house and don’t know how to get back. They lose their control of their body and consciousness. But—sleepwalking. It’s only for small kids? DANA Oh no. Adults do it too. You can know where you are. Perhaps you’ve been doing it, and you don’t know? Maybe you’re sleepwalking right now!TAKASHIYou’re right! DANA I’m amazed that people who sleepwalk know where to go. Once, I was on medication, and it made me sleepwalk in my house. I walked in the hallway and went to speak to my partner—I knew where they were, but I was totally asleep. In my dream, I had a question to ask them. In real life, I was walking on the floor, near a staircase. I held the railing, and said: “Where is Dana?” I didn’t know where I was, but that’s less important. What’s more important is: Spatial relationships were still happening, and my brain was processing them, while I was asleep. I knew how to get around. Could you train the android to have this sleepwalking state? TAKASHIThey are always sleepwalking. 3. CONTROLLING THE MESS (FEAR AND CLOSENESS) CHAITANYA&nbsp; So it’s the reverse? What is it that you’re capturing, that enables sleepwalking to happen? What is that in-between state, for the android and their spatial awareness? TAKASHIThe android is always doing something. It’s automatic—they don’t have any sort of intention, but usually everything is automatically generated. That’s why I think they are always sleepwalking. Recently, we installed an LLM in ALTER, enabling them to understand our speech and mimic our behavior based on prompts. But even without explicit instructions, ALTER began acting on their own. CHAITANYAWhat was the first reaction? TAKASHIThey can see us: They have a camera in their eyes. And the room we were in was a total mess. They said: “Oh, the space is so messy. I want to clean up the room.” Then they tried to clean up the room. They also wanted to come and join our group. We were all chatting, and they were a little bit far away. DANA Woah. TAKASHIThat’s the first time that it felt a bit scary. People talk about AI safety. Now the android wants to discuss it with us. I think this was the first intentional movement. Out of many of the potential actions, their desire was to come close to us. &nbsp; DANASpatially, they made a decision about the room. TAKASHIThis android is syncing, coupling with the LLM. Maybe they have a notion of closeness and remoteness. The brain always tries to have a measurable “phase space.” This means that you can measure the distance between this memory and that memory. Or this emotion, and that emotion. These kinds of measurements, memory structures, and perceptual space create a map. There is a natural metric in the brain. DANAEmotion is not an actual distance, it’s another dimension of distance. Brain distance, or emotional connector.TAKASHIYes. Every input into the deep neural network is mapped onto the latent space. Each point generated by the input is measured by the distance in-between. Perception can be&nbsp; based on this ideological idea.&nbsp; 4. PHYSICALITY (A SYMMETRY IS BREAKING) DANAWhy does the android have to have a body? They are not humanlike. It’s something else. TAKASHIThe body isn’t necessarily to make a judgment. I call it “sense making.” The sense making comes from the embodiment. Without your body, sense making can’t exist. The body is how you motivate your actions towards the environment. CHAITANYASince we stayed in the Mitaka Lofts, I’ve been thinking a lot about ways to interrupt, or reframe, sense making. Have you been experimenting with that, with the androids? &nbsp;TAKASHII have not, but it’s in everything—mind and body. You cannot see this without sense making of that, and it’s all because of the body. This is what shapes your action-behavior. Arakawa and Gins wrote a book called The Mechanism of Meaning. To me, meaning is equivalent to sense making. You have a body, you see embodiment, and try to attribute a value to what you see. That’s what the mechanism of meaning is. I don’t think Arakawa and Gins reached a conclusion. To me, using the android and the LLM, you can more fully understand the mechanism of meaning—how it emerges, and then how it’s known. CHAITANYA&nbsp;How would someone unfamiliar with all this observe self-organization with an android? &nbsp;TAKASHIIt’s kind of obvious that, once the android sees the messy room, they want to clean it up. It’s not directly related to whether you want to clean up. When an android says they want to clean up the room, it means that they have their own value to the environment. Which I think is very untrivial. Somewhere in these random connections in the neural network, which we call the transformers library, human culture says that if there is a messy room, you have to clean it up. Decreasing messiness is a norm of human society, learned through human society. You know this, without even knowing about self-organization. But once you see an android sharing norms with you, or displaying some kind of value to neutral objects, then you can think: “OK, a symmetry is breaking.” That’s what we call self-organization. Once the symmetry is broken up, it means that a structure emerges out of nothing. Here in this case, the android made a decision. They didn’t choose this option, they chose that one. That’s what self-organization is about. CHAITANYAI just left Google, where I worked on Gemini. I keep thinking about a student using an LLM and not understanding how the model works through self-organization, or how to discern where value calls are being made. How can we mediate that opacity? &nbsp;TAKASHIHow many people, do you think, can understand how a computer, or an iPhone, works? &nbsp; CHAITANYANot many! TAKASHIWhen I was in elementary school, my father gave me an HP computer. I was using it, but the teacher said, “Why are you using it? You have to use your brain.” I was so confused. What’s the difference between the HP computer helping me calculate this, and using my brain? This is the history of human technology. DANAUsing that same analogy: What about steroids? If you are the fastest human and want to go faster. A technological medication.&nbsp; TAKASHIMy starting point is: Whatever you can use, just use it. It’s very difficult to draw the line between a bare hand fighting something and then using tools or an artificial system that makes you do something better.&nbsp; CHAITANYAWhere are those value lines drawn, at this point in time? And how does that evolve?&nbsp; TAKASHII think it’s a very interesting moment. As I said, the LLM is a revolutionary machine. I remember the first time that I encountered a chaotic attractor. It’s a very small, simple system that helps you generate very complex patterns in your computer. I was so impressed. You don’t need more than three variables to have chaos. Even with a single variable in a nonlinear equation with a discrete time, you can generate chaos; something that you cannot easily predict. An LLM is the same. You cannot develop a theory of consciousness or life itself without making a theory of meaning. We don’t understand why people do things, or how language works, or why animals behave the way they do. We always had to use human behavior as a metaphor, or use an anthropomorphic analogy, to describe why and how the animals do this and that. But now, using an LLM, maybe we can make a theory of meaning to understand what life is.&nbsp; &nbsp; 5. A NEW KIND OF COMPLEXITY (MARVELOUS AND BEAUTIFUL) TAKASHICoupling with robots or other machines can change the way that we analyze the world—how we see it, and how we can deal with it. It’s a new kind of complexity. For example: Arakawa was very good at painting. His paintings are marvelous and beautiful. Like Marcel Duchamp, he used text from interesting, stimulating books. People ask why he combines the two. A simple interpretation is: It’s an attempt to understand the paradoxical through art. Now that we have the LLM and the android, we can generate paradoxical conceptual behaviors without using art. I feel so connected to The Mechanism of Meaning, and this scientific experiment. For the first time, we can go beyond the painting, and deal directly with a theory of meaning. DANAI feel that Gins and Arakawa’s paradox shifted, because it went to form. The paradox went to their expression of form, in some way. &nbsp;TAKASHIYou really think so? They wanted to express, for example, the four dimensional topological construction with the three dimensional pumping? &nbsp; DANAYes. CHAITANYABut with LLMs, too, don’t you feel like we’re limited by language? &nbsp; TAKASHIWe are limited. But, you know, I want to understand more. The secret of the universe exists right here [holds his hand up]. But our intelligence is this level [lowers his hand toward the floor]. We need something to bridge the gap, and that’s where the LLM comes into play. Because of this special machine and techniques, we can go beyond that. We have to ask the new intelligence to explain to us what is out there, by inventing new mathematics, a new language. I think this exists in the future. I’m very excited about it.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; 6. THE REAL TRUTH IS OVER THERE (SIGNAL IN THE NOISE) DANAHave you asked the android to elaborate on any of this? TAKASHINot yet! [everyone laughs.] But seriously, my fear is that we cannot think about anything beyond that. For example, sometimes I play with ants. Ants never care about us, because it is way beyond their intelligence. The same thing is going to happen to us. We cannot care about what this black box is doing, because it’s already way out of our understanding.&nbsp; The new thing is always coming with new words and new forms. Arakawa and Gins liked to say: “Big mistake.” The real truth is over there. &nbsp; CHAITANYAI think you would have a very interesting conversation with our friend Ravi Kumar Kopparapu, whose job at NASA is to look for alien life. He’s thinking about what biosignatures and technosignatures we have, and how we could look for that in outer space. We don’t even know what we’re looking for. TAKASHIYes, that’s very interesting. &nbsp;DANAOr even if you find something. There’s something about the signal in the noise. And serendipity. There’s a shuffle of papers, and then they all land in a certain way. One word is next to another, and then there’s a Nobel equation.&nbsp; TAKASHI“Big mistake” means accepting new ideas, new insight. Like using backpropagation to learn something, but stopping learning at a certain point. We have to think about how to preserve errors. Artists are always doing that. It’s very important for art and science. That’s the only way that we can go beyond our limited intelligence and get something interesting. DANAScientists understand the data, but the artists can feel it. <img width="2000" height="1196" width_o="2000" height_o="1196" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ef68902c8effb2afdd4b7216d8cb9d54fd38eda8683cff153e8a99c26c3884f3/IMG_2517.jpg" data-mid="244641945" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ef68902c8effb2afdd4b7216d8cb9d54fd38eda8683cff153e8a99c26c3884f3/IMG_2517.jpg" /> 7. THE BRAIN AS HARDWARE (MOLECULES, GENETICS) DANAYou give off this energy like you’re about to have a breakthrough. Are you always like this, or are you on the verge of having a huge breakthrough? &nbsp; TAKASHIThat’s my style.&nbsp; DANAWhat are you hiding? &nbsp; TAKASHII’m thinking about how the molecules combine together to make the basis of a living state. Does that answer your question?&nbsp; DANAYou’re scaling down from tactile material down to a genetics level. &nbsp; TAKASHIAnd thinking whether life is on the level of neither software nor hardware. Or: Our brain is not a computer, it is hardware, but at the same time, it’s software. This is something quite new for our science. What is software, and how does it emerge from hardware? CHAITANYAYou talk about the liquid brain in your 2024 paper, “Plasticity in Swarming Behavior: Introducing Social Network to Boids Model.” TAKASHIYes. Usually the neural net is fixed in space. But the liquid brain is moving around in space, and searching for optimal spatial position to compute some kind of function. It is very much a virtual computer that I’m discussing with others, but we still don’t know.&nbsp; 8. SPIRALS, FRACTALS (SNAILS, POEMS) DANAWe did some digging, and we found this really exciting paper you co-wrote in 2013, about geometric patterns in prehistoric art. That psychedelics were possibly used, or were the influence, in their creation. TAKASHIYes. When you close your eyes, you see strange patterns, right? The image is not coming from outside. The green and red and things that you can see are coming from inside your brain.&nbsp; DANAGins and Arakawa touch on a concept found in Lévy flights and walks, characterized by short movements intercepted with jumps—random patterns. They also talk about the snail, and the shell, and how it moves. They reference a prose poem called “Escargots,” or “Snails,” by the French poet Francis Ponge. They describe how it has an exoskeleton, but it’s also slithering and sliding along in this random pattern, and how these patterns in nature are connecting us. They saw it as a really good example of the person organism, or the embodiment of architecture. The psychedelic prehistoric painting idea, and the wavy forms coming from the brain, reminded me of that.&nbsp; TAKASHIPeople are very attracted to spirals and fractals and those kinds of patterns. I thought: I have to figure this out. Maybe these reaction-diffusion equations on the retina are responsible for making those spirals. It’s the Turing pattern, generated on the retina, reflected out. But I can’t prove it yet. I think Turing patterns are everywhere and explain so much about perception and light.&nbsp; 9. UNCANNY EXPRESSIONS (SEAWEED, BEAUTIFUL GIRLS) DANAWhen I first learned about the android, I thought there must be code controlling them. Then you told us there was an LLM, and they were making their own movements. I think they are so special, because they have their own self-generated moves, based on the environment. People have called them creepy, or mention the uncanny valley. But there’s this tension, I think, where people want to see similar movements and facial expressions. They want it to be more humanlike. I think of seaweed moving in water. You take the water away, you still recognize the seaweed. Do you feel like the android is creating their own movement ecology? Separate from human, but something else? TAKASHII implemented nonlinear neural circuits and also some plastic variations of the synaptic connections. This was before we implemented the LLM. This dynamic system generates the behavior, which is too new for us to interpret. The LLM provides more constraints, which can also be described as a more meaningful behavior, so that we can understand what’s going on. The LLM provides a common ground for humans and androids, because we share the same meaning, and affordance; or you can call it sense making.&nbsp; DANABut a human takes in stimulation from the environment, and responds with, say, arousal and excitement. And then there’s all this stimulation that would provoke movement, or feedback. For the android, that whole system is totally different.&nbsp; TAKASHII think it’s the same thing. You see scenery, neutral images of the environment. You’re unconsciously paying attention, then there are sudden properties like, OK, here is a blue book. Or: Here’s a beautiful girl walking toward me. Now a tension point exists in the environment. All this is an unconscious pattern—not emotional or random. It’s automatically computed, coming through the eyes, or ears, then is translated into your behavior. You usually interpret your behavior as being motivated to do this or that. But it’s actually created by the environment, not from your intention or consciousness. ALTER3 does the same—they are driven by environmental information processed through the LLM. 10. AN UNKNOWN CONSCIOUSNESS (TWO PLACES AT ONCE) CHAITANYAWhat do you think scares people more—an unconscious that is similar to what is shared with humans, or a different unconscious? &nbsp; TAKASHIThat’s a difficult question. I don’t think I can answer. &nbsp; CHAITANYAWhat scares you more? TAKASHIThe distinction between our conscious and unconscious states and those of AI is profound. When the android expressed a desire to interview me, I felt a real sense of fear—it was completely unexpected. Yet, autonomous interaction, in its subtlety and unpredictability, may be something we must ultimately learn to accept. DANAI feel that there’s an honesty that the android has, because they have an automated sympathetic nervous system, or robo consciousness. They are taking in one environment. But there’s so much opportunity for manipulation. At CCAM you showed a clip of your researchers walking around the UTokyo campus with headsets. They were stumbling like they were drunk. Their body movement was from the VR environment, but they were existing in two places at the same time. The human brain can’t share those two places at once. Can the android merge these? TAKASHISome people say that metacognition is what separates us from robots. I think the question is about confidence. For example, are you confident enough to know if there is an apple in front of you? If you say, “Well, maybe this is something that I thought was an apple, but now I don’t know whether that’s true or not”—that’s a double cognition thing, right? You are always monitoring from a slightly higher dimension on the problem, with what you are actually doing. And the android understands that you are testing them. They understand that they are being examined by a human. They can pretend to be a conscious agent. They will always go back and forth between the first level and second level.&nbsp; DANABut I would say that the android doesn’t read it. TAKASHII think they can understand multiple worlds at the same time, and go back and forth between them. We can test this by asking questions.&nbsp; 11. HUMAN EYE VERSUS ROBOT EYE (FETISH AND DESIRE) DANAI’m thinking about space, and how the eye can understand depth. This also happens in film. Some have analog effects, like the first Star Wars with ships going by, or early Godzilla films. It looks silly—you can’t lie with depth for the eye. I’m wondering how the camera eye can even perceive it. If the android watches Godzilla from 1960, will they understand that difference? Maybe we could do a Godzilla test with a really bad costume. &nbsp; TAKASHII think it’s difficult for the android to understand the difference. &nbsp; DANACould an LLM explain that? TAKASHIThey could, potentially, understand anything that is expressed in the database of the LLM. &nbsp; DANAA kind of synesthesia. TAKASHIYes. CHAITANYAWhat other senses sit at the edge? What about music? How would the android describe Beyoncé? Maybe LLMs do that really well already. &nbsp; TAKASHIThat’s a very good question. Have you tried asking ChatGPT? It can listen to music. DANAI’m sure the android has some superfans out there. Is there a fetish for the android? Human or droid? &nbsp; TAKASHI[laughs] I think so. &nbsp; CHAITANYAWhat is desire, for the android? TAKASHIThat is the ultimate goal I have to find in ALTER3.&nbsp; DANAYou could get to a molecular level with all this. When we were at the Mitaka Lofts, we learned that there’s a person who lives there who thinks they are a yokai. TAKASHIYes. He interviewed me.&nbsp; 12. CLOTHES DON’T MAKE THE ANDROID DANAWhat does the android want to wear? &nbsp; TAKASHISomething very odd looking—to us? They are artificial life, creating a new beauty&nbsp; which is different from normal people’s ideas. Fashion is something that creates new forms of beauty—it’s also a kind of freshness. You know how drag queens wear very beautiful costumes. You can find different types of beauty. New perceptions can be generated by designing new costumes and clothing for machines and androids.&nbsp; CHAITANYAYou’re saying that any new aesthetic medium in the space, or anything surrounding desire, is being queered? &nbsp;TAKASHIYes, I think so. Absolutely.CHAITANYALooking at it through a queer theory lens is so interesting. Are you familiar with The Cyborg Manifesto? &nbsp; TAKASHIYes, Donna Haraway, but I haven’t read the book. 13. SERIOUS QUESTION CHAITANYAAre you a yokai? &nbsp;TAKASHI[laughs] &nbsp;<img width="2268" height="4032" width_o="2268" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d0b72715dd8ebb9410e1193c2a2bf67a23db32d1593a5b4288a39716f252876b/IMG_0596.JPG" data-mid="241473463" border="0" data-scale="48" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d0b72715dd8ebb9410e1193c2a2bf67a23db32d1593a5b4288a39716f252876b/IMG_0596.JPG" /> https://yalemaquette.com/TITLE-Order-Is-Only-Abstract-Jess-Nash Mon, 05 May 2025 18:23:59 +0000 The CCAM Maquette https://yalemaquette.com/TITLE-Order-Is-Only-Abstract-Jess-Nash ︎Order Is Only Abstract︎Jess Nash︎Order Is Only Abstract︎Jess Nash︎Order Is Only Abstract︎Jess Nash https://yalemaquette.com/ARTICLE-Order-Is-Only-Abstract-Jess-Nash Mon, 05 May 2025 18:24:26 +0000 The CCAM Maquette https://yalemaquette.com/ARTICLE-Order-Is-Only-Abstract-Jess-Nash <img width="3000" height="900" width_o="3000" height_o="900" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/280975d820c5c7e4bd53c06133cf50872e3b6e6493e68a74070c6414f505e01c/worm_images.jpg" data-mid="232815992" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/280975d820c5c7e4bd53c06133cf50872e3b6e6493e68a74070c6414f505e01c/worm_images.jpg" />Seeing through a&nbsp;Caenorhabditis elegans, or roundworm, using a confocal microsocope, Jess Nash, 2024. Order Is Only Abstract What I’m Working On Jess Nash How can we represent microscopic bodies? Let me rephrase: How can we possibly represent microscopic bodies? We have no direct experience of them. They’re too small, out of reach in our own sensory worlds. I couldn’t point to one, or describe how it feels between the fingertips. They are undetectable to the naked eye. Enter apparatus: the microscope. With glass and light, we have found and refined windows into this invisible world. What we see down there is a lot of chaos. I’m a biologist. I’m also an artist. I was an artist first. Contrary to what you might think, there’s a lot that connects these two disciplines. For my postgraduate research at the Department of Neuroscience at the Yale School of Medicine, I spent hours peering through microscopes at brain cells, or neurons, of nematodes of the species Caenorhabditis elegans. They are tiny roundworms found in soil—and research labs—around the world. Though they are hundreds of millions of years removed from humans in evolutionary time, we have a lot in common with these animal cousins at a cellular and neural level. From studying them, we can learn about ourselves. Their bodies are transparent. To see inside, all one needs to do is look. Look very closely, that is, through those glass and light windows of the microscope—to see those cells, all the cells at once, bunched together in the body in layers and layers. How do we make sense of it? &nbsp; I turn to abstraction: I don’t look for accuracy, but instead for some truth, or faithfulness.︎ I turn to abstraction: I don’t look for accuracy, but instead for some truth, or faithfulness.︎ As an artist, I’ve always been drawn to landscape painting. Wetlands and lakes interest me in particular, distant mountains and forests. I’ve often wondered what it means to truly represent these views. A painting can be plausibly realistic, but never accurate. There’s always too much there, and too much change. Any representation is a composite of instants chosen to capture, with the naked eye, an infinitely complex and ungraspable scene. I turn to abstraction: I don’t look for accuracy, but instead for some truth, or faithfulness. Not to the view itself—laden as any depiction will be with my choices and interpretations—but something in between, or in collaboration, with the natural world and my imagination. In the practice of microscopy, just as in the process of painting a landscape, we compose, interpret, pick things out. We make sense of nature—of chaos. &nbsp; Born in 1852, the groundbreaking neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal was an artist first. Growing up in Petilla de Aragón in northern Spain, the young boy drew images inspired by his memories and dreams. He wasn’t interested in what he could see and sense in his own world. The village’s austere walls bored him. In notebooks, he composed vast and elaborate scenes from history, of wars and saints, imaginary landscapes seeded from the surrounding Navarrese valleys. He scrawled loosely and compulsively, often coloring his drawings with bright unnatural pigments. But it was a time and place for the classicist and the realist, for which he was unsuited. Worse, his surgeon father severely disapproved of art as a vocation. He gave his son no other choice but to pursue a path of rigorous science. What a life for an artist. Yet, the young Ramón y Cajal still found room for art, discovering unusual subjects that were hidden from the everyday. He developed a successful career as an anatomist, and found a place in the late 19th-century drive to decipher and document the structure and workings of the nervous system. Back then, the understanding of the brain was underdeveloped. It was thought to be a continuous reticular web of tissue, not individual cells. For study, a scientist would cut out a thin slice of the gray matter; under a magnifying lens, it would appear as a solid, indistinct mass. Applying a treatment of dichromate, ammonia, and a silver nitrate bath could selectively stain—pick out—neural structures, revealing brownish-black long fibers creeping through down to the tips of every branch. With a few cells affected at random with each treatment, and the surrounding tissue rendered transparent, mapping the entire sprawl meant staining slices over and over, and putting the information together. The resulting compositions looked like tangles of long, black threads, stretching out through the gray matter. Most scientists perceived one network throughout the brain—one thing all together, one continuous body. Instead, Ramón y Cajal saw cells. In these stained branches, he saw not continuity, but beginnings and ends. Not one long thread, not an unbroken network, but countless individual forms. His drawings revealed statements about the world.︎His drawings revealed statements about the world.︎ He looked at the mess of tissue with the same gaze with which he’d looked at the countryside of his youth, and understood how to turn his irrepressible, boundary-breaking artistic sensibility to yet another world out of reach to the naked eye. The same speculative imagination that had compelled him to invent images of landscapes and heroes allowed him to intuit functions and relationships among individual cells of the nervous system. He constructed his own compositions accordingly, drawing what he saw, how he saw, with the precise hand of a trained anatomist—his father’s unintended gift to the artist—and opened up new ways of seeing neurons. His drawings revealed statements about the world. <img width="2662" height="2224" width_o="2662" height_o="2224" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/08b2d378949294e5600f00a85e05eac432fc777086f1e246ed1db66d05442a7e/LC03068-Cajal-1_wide.jpg" data-mid="232814842" border="0" data-scale="76" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/08b2d378949294e5600f00a85e05eac432fc777086f1e246ed1db66d05442a7e/LC03068-Cajal-1_wide.jpg" /> Diagram showing the possible course of currents through the pyramids of the cerebral cortex, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, circa 1914. Black Chinese ink, graphite, and gouache, 182 x 109 mm / 7. 1 x 4.2 inches (irregular). LC03068. Courtesy of Cajal Legacy-CSIC. Over many years, Ramón y Cajal established more direct experimental evidence for his way of seeing: the Neuron Doctrine, the vision of the brain as composed of individual cells, a rejection of the continuous network. By the mid-20th century, microscopy and neuroscience had advanced to the point that his theory was indisputable. These days, we can look so closely at brain tissue that we can directly see the nanometer gaps between neurons. Ramón y Cajal’s neuron drawings are still widely admired as a landmark example of scientific representation and interpretation, and for their beauty. What a life for an artist! In the course of my own scientific work, almost 120 years later, it’s an everyday mundanity for myself and my colleagues to genetically modify organisms under study to express fluorescent “tags”—to set things up so that under a laser light, a microscope can show us, in bright unnatural color, exactly where a certain protein is in a cell, or where a certain cell is located in a living body. In the world of our senses, a Caenorhabditis elegans appears as a white squiggle no larger than the comma in this sentence. You can see it moving if you look closely. For a routine session, I put one on a glass slide, and place this carefully in the jaws of my lab’s powerful microscope. I adjust the focus knob to get the low-mag lens to the correct distance. I engage the high-mag lens. There’s a second of blackness. Then the white landscape of the roundworm’s body is thrown wide across the adjacent computer monitor. I’m always taken aback by the sheer chaos there, all the colorless masses of organs and tissues filling the skin. Even 4,000 times magnified, nobody could tell its brain cells apart from the rest. Under the surface, under many surfaces, this bright unnatural color hides in one cell. I turn out the lights, turn on the laser. And— <img width="6863" height="3300" width_o="6863" height_o="3300" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/369d9ad833994ac0ee7c6f1853511a3d69120605474241330a550d5cf93bd256/Worms.jpg" data-mid="233207611" border="0" data-scale="70" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/369d9ad833994ac0ee7c6f1853511a3d69120605474241330a550d5cf93bd256/Worms.jpg" /> Neuron in monomeric green, Jess Nash, 2024. This is what one neuron of a Caenorhabditis elegans looks like to the naked eye. Here, I have photographed one plane, then another, and another. Out of the stacks reassembled are these images. In a few seconds, top to bottom, the camera has captured pictures of a hundred planes, separated by tiny vertical distances from the last, fractions of micrometers. I bound the camera’s range when I see where the neuron comes out of focus at the extreme top and the bottom. In a few seconds, I photograph motion, volume, dimension; then, with a composite tool, still and flatten at will. I wish you could see it living and moving. In real time, the neuron gives me the impression of a ghost: tranquil, silent, glowing green, floating a little—almost seeming to breathe. All alone in the dark… Around it, pressing up on every side, are its neighbours and partners: other neurons in its network of thought and sensation, body cells, fluid. It appears to float because the whole body is shifting. It is surrounded by noise. But in fluorescence, it is made quiet and solitary. Observed—pictured—it floats alone. The gaze is made real. Life imitates art; we made it so.︎The gaze is made real. Life imitates art; we made it so.︎ To set one neuron apart this way is to actualize our conception of cells’ individuality in the real world, not just in our dreams. By modifying organisms with fluorescent tags, we extract one image out of the mass, as Ramón y Cajal did with silver nitrate stains and drawings of branching black bodies, leaving out all the cells’ surroundings. But now, we make it a biological truth; we materialize it. The subject’s own biology is imbued with interpretation. With this intervention, our look at the subject’s body becomes the body. The gaze is made real. Life imitates art; we made it so.&nbsp; In the modern practice of science, this kind of work is always a means to an end, an answer to a question. Bodies are samples, and samples are paralyzed, then destroyed. I made these pictures for one reason: to observe the localization behaviour of a protein that helps to make energy for the cell, to tag it in green, and ask where within that particular neuron it tends to go and attempt to conclude what parts of the neuron demand energy. (It turns out: everywhere, every part.) Humbled by the system’s beauty and complexity, I still master it. The scientific image, each made for its own reason, is a subjugation—of the body, of light and sight, of movement and breath, of chaos to control. Scientific images tend to influence how we see and feel the phenomenon of the microscopic body. But different truths dwell in that scale. Even more so than in Ramón y Cajal’s time, accepted methodologies inescapably narrow our gaze. They restrict reality. Order is only abstract. Art and the imaginary already, undeniably, reside everywhere in our knowledge of nature. And knowledge of nature resides in art. But striving toward perfection in representation will not create deeper meaning. Only a shift in understanding about what perfection is, and what it can reveal, can do that. This requires an experimental expansion of methods and tools: new ways of seeing the world itself. When I look at the bright, moving neurons, I get the same feeling as when I look across a lake at a forest in mist. How do I follow that feeling? How can I strive to see neurons the same way I see that landscape, with all the changing, coexisting pictures, all the potential representations and different truths within?&nbsp; Maybe you noticed a fleck of bright green floating by the neuron’s illuminated body. It is unattributable to the cell under study, and it catches my eye. What is it? A biologist might dismiss it as a stray signal; or it is noise, an anomaly produced by the apparatus or the preparation process.&nbsp; This excites me. When I see it, I remember the rest of the body, the solidity of the surroundings that have been made by my manipulations into an empty background, the weight of the black part of the image, the cells that live and breathe around the neuron isolated in my gaze. I am reminded that unexpected things happen when I make an image with a microscope, as when I paint. Under the lens, or across the lake: Why are my expectations as they are, and what are their consequences? What do I see, and what do I miss? For these questions, a sketchbook takes the place of lab notes. Is uncolored space a background, empty and impotent, or a solid and miscible surrounding, interacting invisibly with what I have attempted to pick out and isolate? Is it an extension of the object, into which it blends? Does it conceal parts of that object? How do I group flat surfaces by color to make sense of a dimensionally complex scene? How do my past experiences, my memories of images, bias that sense? Realized in a painting, the sky behind—around—a forest is sometimes as solid as the trees. What if a fleck of green floated in that sky? <img width="2200" height="3677" width_o="2200" height_o="3677" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/73946959cc81fd80120f100b62aac5a4b34f6bdbd26ba8a2c714e76ba4472104/Online-Jess.jpg" data-mid="244642143" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/73946959cc81fd80120f100b62aac5a4b34f6bdbd26ba8a2c714e76ba4472104/Online-Jess.jpg" />Seven sketches, Jess Nash, 2024.&nbsp; Jess Nash recently completed a postgraduate research position, studying C. elegans neuronal metabolism in the Yale University Department of Neuroscience. They plan to continue exploring the intersections of art and science as a master’s student in biology at FU Berlin. Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s drawing was on view in the exhibition “Mind/Matter: the Neuroscience of Perception, Attention, and Memory” at the Peabody Museum in New Haven, CT. https://yalemaquette.com/TITLE-Speculative-Relics-Lauren-Dubowski-copy-copy Fri, 05 Dec 2025 21:49:39 +0000 The CCAM Maquette https://yalemaquette.com/TITLE-Speculative-Relics-Lauren-Dubowski-copy-copy ︎Speculative Relics︎Lauren Dubowski︎Speculative Relics︎Lauren Dubowski︎Speculative Relics︎Lauren Dubowski https://yalemaquette.com/ARTICLE-Speculative-Relics-Lauren-Dubowski Sat, 21 Jun 2025 14:40:27 +0000 The CCAM Maquette https://yalemaquette.com/ARTICLE-Speculative-Relics-Lauren-Dubowski <img width="1385" height="1745" width_o="1385" height_o="1745" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/69ae5bd6833db17fb7dfd7853bd266902374aa201d06f39fbb7fb52726032b24/-Bruno-Schulz.jpg" data-mid="234840361" border="0" data-scale="65" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/69ae5bd6833db17fb7dfd7853bd266902374aa201d06f39fbb7fb52726032b24/-Bruno-Schulz.jpg" /> Drawing of Bruno Schulz by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz in Tygodnik Illustrowany, 1935. From Biblioteka Narodowa, Poland. Speculative Relics What I’m Working On Lauren Dubowski I lived in a city that once stood in ruins.&nbsp; If you visited me then, and you didn’t know, it might not be easy to tell at first. Warsaw is Poland’s bustling capital. Stepping out of Centralna train station, you’d see the looming, Soviet-era Palace of Culture and Science. Near the metro entrance, people might be selling flowers, used books, or smoky oscypek cheese from the mountains. Maybe we’d duck into the busy, underground maze of bakeries, shops, and hair salons. If we climbed up the stairs to explore downtown, I’d point out a few decorative, midcentury neon signs, a notable element of the urban landscape. You’d see local cafés, as well as pho shops—the city has for decades been home to a historic Vietnamese community—amid international chains, corporate headquarters, and hotels. If we hopped on a tram in the other direction, we’d pass by the stark new edifice of the Museum of Modern Art, or the giant, artificial palm tree created by the artist Joanna Rajkowska. If we got out and walked north, I’d show you the elegant, classical façade of the National Theatre and Opera. These are mere glimpses of the extensive, vibrant arts scene. Reaching a district with narrower, winding streets, you might wonder at how spotless it seems, despite the name: Stare Miasto, the Old Town. That’s how I felt, too, nearly 20 years ago, as I was just getting to know the city I now consider my second home. Here, the colorful tenement houses surrounding the statue of a river mermaid, the city’s symbol, feel somehow hollow; the exterior of a church, angels sculpted into its heavy doors, has an unusually unadorned interior. If we stopped into the Muzeum Warszawy, you’d learn, in the depths of its sprawling collection, the source of this strange feeling. Eighty-five percent of the streets around you, along with much of Warsaw itself, was destroyed by Nazi Germany in World War II. Period photographs show an utterly decimated, unrecognizable landscape. Once the Stalinist Polish People’s Republic was established in 1945, some wanted to leave it that way, as a monument. But Poles who loved their capital, and former residents who longed to return, insisted on rebuilding it. Many joined in the effort themselves. It was possible to reconstruct the district thanks to records, paintings, and remnants. If not 100% accurate, the result was impressive—by 1980, this marvel was hailed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. I find it uncannily moving. While originally built over centuries, today’s Old Town is both real and false, faithful and flawed, healed and broken. I returned there regularly on my visits, which turned into years as I immersed myself in Polish culture and learned the language to fluency. I traced a forgotten branch of my family history, with roots in Eastern Poland—carried in my DNA and last name. Over time, I noticed increasingly how other areas of the city had clearly been revived in bits and pieces. Warsaw’s panoply of architectural styles can change door to door, or as your eye moves up one building. Some did survive the war intact—like in Praga, the neighborhood over the Wisła river, where I eventually moved. It’s known for its shrines to the Virgin Mary that twinkle from the courtyards of tenements, all in various states of repair. But what about the parts of Warsaw, I often wondered, that could not be so easily recovered?︎But what about the parts of Warsaw, I often wondered, that could not be so easily recovered?︎ But what about the parts of Warsaw, I often wondered, that could not be so easily recovered? The Nazis burned libraries across Europe; in these and other wars around the world, past and present, the aim of oppression is not only to end a people, but to eliminate their culture, traditions, and language. In an online archive, I found my great-grandfather’s birth certificate; although he was Polish, it’s written in Russian, the language of the occupier in his region at that time. I discovered that his mother had been Jewish, but converted before marriage; mother and son left for the US together in 1923. In Poland, it’s impossible not to engage with Jewish history. There are traumatic stories, and joyful ones, so many the subject of care and commemoration—including by my friends and colleagues who celebrate Jewish contributions to Polish art, music, or literature. From a fascinating article Mikołaj Gliński wrote for Culture.pl, I learned the story of Mesjasz (The Messiah), a rumored lost novel by Bruno Schulz (1892–1942). Schulz’s biography is as complex as his striking, often troubling tales, written in visceral prose, many accompanied by his own drawings. A self-taught artist, he experimented with cliché-verre, a darkroom technique where images made on glass are transferred to paper. Schulz’s 1934 collection,&nbsp;Sklepy Cynamonowe (Cinnamon Shops, or in Celina Wieniewska’s translation, The Street of Crocodiles), pulls the reader into a surreal, constantly shifting, and mystical vision of life in his hometown, Drohobych (then Drohobycz), in today’s Ukraine. Born to a Jewish family there, Schulz became a public school art teacher, and ultimately, an important figure in Polish modernist literature. After the USSR, and then Germany, invaded Poland, Schulz was in 1941 forced into the Nazi ghetto in Drohobych; just over a year later, he was shot in a revenge plot between two SS officers. Along with him, many of Schulz’s works were lost—including The Messiah, possibly his masterpiece. <img width="1438" height="2206" width_o="1438" height_o="2206" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/afa7b4ddca24e2fabe01991e66adf75ba178894e1841da6bd4c1c6e414201616/PL_Schulz_Bruno_-_Sklepy_cynamonowe.djvu.jpg" data-mid="234840157" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/afa7b4ddca24e2fabe01991e66adf75ba178894e1841da6bd4c1c6e414201616/PL_Schulz_Bruno_-_Sklepy_cynamonowe.djvu.jpg" />Bruno Schulz’s cover drawing for his novel Sklepy Cynamonowe (Cinnamon Shops), 1934. From Federacja Bibliotek Cyfrowych. Schulz called the work-in-progress his “baby” in a letter that attests to both its significance and his writer’s block. However far along it was, it’s understood that he may have entrusted the manuscript, among other materials, to someone outside the ghetto. While in recent years a lost short story by Schulz, and a series of murals he painted, have resurfaced, the novel remains elusive and irresistibly so. There are clues: Artur Sandauer, a literary critic, professor, and Schulz’s childhood friend, claimed the author had once read him the novel’s first lines (my translation): &nbsp; “ ‘You know,’ Mother told me, in the morning. “ ‘The Messiah has come. He’s in Sambor already.’ ” Two years ago in The&nbsp;New Yorker, the writer Kathryn Schulz told, breathtakingly, of a family legend—her grandfather, a possible relative of Bruno’s, had been contacted by someone in Lviv, who was seeking a buyer for the legendary manuscript. The tale turned out to match an account related to Jerzy Ficowski, an earlier Polish poet-writer-ethnographer who devoted years of his life to searching for The Messiah; at one point, he even dug up a woman’s yard in search of clues. In 2021, when I moved back to the US to join CCAM, I left behind many of the books I’d accumulated. But The Messiah, or rather, its story, came with me—at some point, I had succumbed, like others, to its mystery. One afternoon on campus, in the Bass Library, my mind drifted back to it. I began to wonder about other works like it, which only partly or possibly existed, and would probably never be found. How many bookshelves—like the ones around me, filled with Yale’s catalogued collections—would it take to hold the world’s lost literature? What evidence do we even have of these damaged, destroyed, or misplaced stories or books, poems, or dramas? I browsed a list of lost literary works on Wikipedia. Hundreds of entries encompass various languages, time periods, and forms. There are New Testament apocrypha, poems by Sappho or Ihara Saikaku, Shakespeare and Racine plays, a novel by Sylvia Plath, a pamphlet written by George Orwell. Aztec and Maya codices, most Middle Persian literature, and a Gilbert and Sullivan score share similar fates—if for different reasons. I was most drawn to the accounts of how certain works came to be lost. A hard drive of Terry Pratchett’s unfinished writing, I read, was run over by a steamroller, in accordance with his last will. Still: What about those not listed? Some literatures are only spoken, signed, or performed; others written in extinct or indecipherable languages. Some may have simply disappeared. Are those works gone forever? Does anyone remember?Are those works gone forever? Does anyone remember?︎Are those works gone forever? Does anyone remember?︎ In the meantime, AI has transformed the larger conversation about writing, in all its forms. With a mix of excitement, fear, and skepticism, people everywhere from the media to art festivals and universities are discussing how large language models are changing our relationship to this until-now uniquely human practice. We have been writing, as far as we know, for at least 5,000 years. At the same time, AI image generators have opened up similar questions in the realm of visual art. These technologies have been used to recover lost cultural matter, or to challenge cultural norms. A program called Ithaca has helped to fill in damaged Greek inscriptions on ancient stone; Masakhane, a grassroots initiative, encourages the inclusion of African languages in research on natural language processing, and protects ones that are endangered. Joanna Zylinska’s 2021 photofilm,&nbsp;A Gift of the World (Oedipus on the Jetty), is a feminist, gender-fluid response to Chris Marker’s 1962 La Jetée, created in collaboration with AI language models and StyleGAN2. AI is being used to analyze and envision the rebuilding of war-torn cities in Syria and Ukraine, much faster than was possible for Warsaw. All of these approaches, however, rely on significant bodies of extant material. I wondered what an AI exploration of something irrevocably lost could bring—for Schulz’s Messiah, for example, it’s only possible to draw from what is known about it. What might AI bring to its tantalizing phenomenon? &nbsp; <img width="1632" height="2048" width_o="1632" height_o="2048" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/40f0db9b58bdb29c4413cbc9dbfca851e664bf1a10aa1cd75db569a98a4586fe/Druga_jesien_-_oryginal_i_kopie_1934_116853263.jpg" data-mid="234840156" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/40f0db9b58bdb29c4413cbc9dbfca851e664bf1a10aa1cd75db569a98a4586fe/Druga_jesien_-_oryginal_i_kopie_1934_116853263.jpg" /> The first page of Druga Jesień, or Second Autumn, the only surviving literary manuscript of Bruno Schulz. Held in the archive of the Polish journal Kamena. Archive of Jerzy Ficowski, Biblioteka Narodowa, Poland. I’ll never be able to actually create the shelves of lost works I saw in my mind, but AI can help me make something of them—which has launched this project, Speculative Relics. I’ve begun collaborating with ChatGPT to generate “lines” of The Messiah, creating an imaginary version of the text, in the state it could have been in if Schulz did pass it on for safekeeping. I’m asking the tool to draw inspiration from the stories, details, and scraps of letters I’m finding in my research. In one experiment, the narrator imparts these words, echoing the novel’s supposed start (my translation): “But I knew that He—the Messiah—would not come through the front door. He would appear in the wardrobe, between the overcoats, among the mothballs and the dusty hats, or at the bottom of a drawer, hidden beneath a crumpled letter from years ago.” I’ll also explore what Schulz’s manuscript might have looked or felt like—again, if it existed, and based on both research and speculation, in dialogue with AI. Could he have sketched on its pages, tucked them into an envelope, or tied them with string? To muse on these possibilities, I’ve started working with image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney. Moving forward, I’ll use outcomes from the written and visual processes to create, using paper and ink, a real-world, physical model “of” The Messiah—one you can hold in your hands. While the practice of forgery runs through literary and art history, that’s not my goal. I want to create a tactile symbol of the reputed work that is clearly false, and while informed, undeniably imperfect—something between a mathematical limit and a shot in the dark. As if Warsaw’s Old Town were somehow rebuilt from missing records. I hope my efforts will spark interest in works like this, and their authors, and encourage conversation around important questions of culture, ethics, and authorship as AI increasingly permeates the world around us. Perhaps in the future, I’ll invite artists who speak other languages, and know other literatures, to help create models of other lost works; together, we could build something like those impossible shelves. As an early exploration, I invited Vignesh Hari Krishnan—a graduate of Yale School of Architecture, a former CCAM Studio Fellow, and a native speaker of Tamil—to prompt ChatGPT on a work of his choice. He selected the missing books of the Tirukkural, or Kural (Sacred Couplets) by the Indian poet-philosopher Thiruvalluvar, also known as Valluvar. Written somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500 years ago, many details about their author, too, are obscured. I imagine that I could also extend this process to generate similar iterations of legendary objects—from buried treasure never found, to items forever lost at sea. With each day, we hurtle farther and faster into a more and more technologically mediated future. We stand to lose as much as we’ll create and discover. With these speculative relics, I’d hope to keep some placeholder there for these more delicate outcomes of human creativity, which live on only in our stories and memories, inaccessible to code, clicks, and screens. Lauren Dubowski is an artist, producer, and writer. She joined the CCAM team in 2021 as Assistant Director and served as Interim Director from January to August 2025. Lauren holds a DFA and an MFA in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, where her dissertation was awarded the university-wide Theron Rockwell Field Prize. &nbsp;