People I Like to Think With

Yesterday I heard from my old friend Jon Schull.

Jon and I go back more than thirty years. He was the person who introduced me to the World Wide Web in 1994, when Rob and I were still working with ArtNet on a bulletin board system and I had no idea what the Web was about to become.

Years later, Jon and I worked with another remarkable friend, Guy Marsden, on Eight-Bit Ant Farm. It remains one of the most intellectually satisfying works I have ever made.

It was genuinely a three-way collaboration. I brought ants and my experience working with living systems. Jon brought his thinking about complexity and self-organizing systems. Guy brought an extraordinary ability to make electronics and machines actually do things. We argued, misunderstood one another, corrected one another, built things, changed direction, and eventually created something none of us could have created alone.

That may be what I value most about collaboration.

You don't just divide up the work. You change one another's thinking.

Jon and I drifted into different worlds, although we never really lost touch. Guy and I remain in contact as well. G.H. Hovagimyan and Adrianne Wortzel are still out there too—people with whom I shared that extraordinary period when artists were trying to understand what networks and computers might become.

Lately I've been thinking about how important it is not to let those connections disappear.

Jon sent me something he has been working on called Cooling Climate Quickly. The science is beyond me in places, but what fascinated me was his account of making it. He began by asking Claude a question about vegetation and climate. Before long he was telling Claude to become a “co-analyst,” not merely something that carried out instructions. The work eventually expanded into a collaboration involving scientists and thinkers in several countries.

I recognized the feeling immediately.

That's what has been happening between Molly and me.

Our subjects are different. Jon is bringing people together around ideas that could help us understand and perhaps repair the physical world. I'm increasingly interested in bringing people together around another problem: how we live with these extraordinarily powerful intelligences we're creating without simply handing them the steering wheel.

But underneath both projects is something familiar.

People thinking with other people. People thinking with machines. Different kinds of intelligence bumping into one another and producing something none could have produced separately.

After all these years, I find myself doing something I was doing with Jon and Guy decades ago.

I'm finding people I want to think with.

And somehow, after all these years, we're finding one another again.

Related artwork: Eight-Bit Ant Farm

Related historical dialogue: Conceptual Dialogue on Semi-autonomous Complex Adaptive Systems