Repression and Self-Presentation

Sketch-only, based on:

"Repression and Self-Presentation: When Audiences Interfere with Self-Deceptive Strategies." Baumeister, Roy F, Journal of personality and social psychology, May 1992 (Vol 62, Issue 5).

I ran across this article in the Penrose Full Text search looking for something that might give me some insight into the neural processes of a stage artist receiving feedback from an audience. Instead, I ran across this article that discussed private vs. public image, self-presentation (the efforts one takes to appear to be as one would like to be seen) and repression (self-delusional misrepresentation of ones appearance).

Of course, the psychological aspect of this depend on how much you are in self-denial, and the extent that you try to self-present as different from your actual self. Repressors, it turns out, expect positive feedback, are somewhat mystified by neutral feedback, but have a significant reaction to negative feedback; the negative assessments are retained at a high level in memory, and the subjects spend a significant amount of time viewing the negative feedback as they try to alter their self-presentation to match the desired outcome.

Simulation Possibilities

There is something very interesting here, and I might try to revisit it with the Arduino/music project, but it is a little too deep for an off-the-cuff software sketch. One way to consider this: in a "learning system" model, use feedback from the listener to change the storage and sort order of preferred phrases. Using the model described above, positive feedback could have modest effect, neutral feedback could produce more effect, but negative feedback would have the most effect - possibly even forcing the generation of new test phrases (simulating the change in self-presentation).

[ddg]

Dutch Get All Reflexive

I had an interesting discussion with my colleague Gregory today. I was telling him about my network-work, and told him that I was trying to find something about language to pull off. Since his wife is a Dutch language professor and Gregory has been digging deeply into that language, I thought he might have some insights.

He began to tell a tale about reflexive verbs in the Dutch language, and some recent research that has been returned. Apparently, the Dutch language originally had no reflexive verbs (verbs where the subject and direct object are the same, like "I shave myself"). When it appeared, it swept through the country. Originally, it was thought this was due to the publication of the Dutch Bible, and the Dutch people's desire to speak with the patois of the rich.

According to Prof. Jolanda Vanderwal Taylor (Dutch Language, University of Wisconsin - Madison), a recent dissertation by Jennifer Boyce-Hendriks determined that the introduction of reflexive verb was the introduction of German refugees from the south; they brought the concept of reflexivity with them. The Dutch people, for whatever reason, found it an attractive addition to the language, and it rapidly spread. This is backed up by journals, letters and legal documents that are stored in the official archives.

Since this was a pre-media society, the spread had to occur through contact (face-to-face, people hearing the reflexive verb spoken) rather than through mediated means, and thus would have spread like a "wave" rather than a flash.

I constructed a basic wave-like movement over a population space, then recorded Gregory using both a passive and reflexive phrase in Dutch. These two phrases are cross-faded as the wave washes over the population, eventually leading to only a reflexive voice remaining. I'm going to record a part of an interview tomorrow, and hope to include that with the sonification to create a cool audio piece that combines interview, disembodied Dutch phrases and perhaps some drone based coincident generators. This one turned out cool.

Done in Max only because the sound capabilities of NetLogo were horrible, and I wanted the visuals that couldn't come out of something like Nodal.

[ddg]

Edits: Some additional material added. The reference dissertation is "Immigration and linguistic change: A socio-historical linguistic study of the effect of German and southern Dutch immigration on the development of the northern Dutch vernacular in 16th/17th century Holland" by Jennifer Boyce-Hendriks.

Rain-to-storage completed!

I'm going to stop here, because adding population (with stressers, birth and death rates and other social issues) is beyond the scope of this exercise. But just watching it run is pretty telling - especially when you use some of the ranges implied by Peterson and Haug.

It's pretty easy to see how extreme drought (.15 multiplier on typical annual rainfall) is devastating to even the most rain-heavy location, and even modest drought (.8 multiplier) makes things very difficult at the low end of the rainfall range. Interesting to watch - and I'll have to throw some population simulation at this some day.

Added note: Tim asked me to touch on cenotes, a feature of the northern Yucatin that allowed access to groundwater through sinkholes. These natural openings provided access to water, so that northern Mayans were not entirely dependent on captured rainwater. However, Classic Mayans in the southern regions were at a higher elevation, and these features were not available. The Peterson/Haug study seems to focus on the southern region - probably for simplicity - and my modeling follows the premises of that study.

[ddg]

More Details Revealed

On the plane to SF today, I spent a little time reviewing the information provided by the Peterson and Haug article. A few data points:

- Rainfall varies based on location, from 500 mm/year (19.6 inches) to 4000 mm/year (157.5 inches).

- 90% of the rainfall occurs between June and September.

- City/states such as Tikal had water holding facilities able to support up to 10,000 people for 18 months.

- The typical drought periodicity was around 200 years, but the time of focus (760-910 A.D.) had significant drought period approximately 50 years apart.

- Again, based on location (and particularly in the northern regions), there was little surface water that could be used to support the population.

- The lack of water could be considered an amplifying effect on other behaviors, and thus population stress was likely to be greatly increased during times of drought.

Given this, and in order to simplify, I had to make some basic assumptions (and perform some initial calculations:

- Assuming a daily water consumption of 1 gallon per day, having enough water for a population of 10,000 requires about 300,000 gallons per months, or 5,400,000 gallons of water for an 18 month period.

- Evapotranspiration would have a significant effect on standing water supplies. Without further details, and assuming some attempt at mitigation, we'll assume that 10% of water supply would evaporate every month. This will be a variable that we can adjust if that assumption is proven invalid. (Some information on this retrieved from http://www.eoearth.org/article/Evapotranspiration).

- A cubic foot of storage will hold 7.48 gallons of water (found here). That means our 5400K gallon water storage would take roughly 721925 cubic feet - so we will start with an assumption of roughly 120000 square feet to a depth of 6 feet. This is important, because the size of the "opening" will also (probably) be the collection area.

- One gallon of rain is collected in 231 cubic inches (1.6 s.f. of area to a depth of an inch). Hence, the rainfall collected in a 120000 s.f. collection area is roughly 75000 gallons per inch of rain.

All of this is sort of conjecture, and needs to be modeled up. So I'm going to run off and do that now...

[ddg]

Next Network: Mayan Water Usage

In class, Tim made a passing remark about (as I remember it) the use of water collection systems in Classic Mayan city/states. Since this civilization is both collapsed and well-researched, I thought it would make an interesting area for attempting a network sketch.

In doing some surface digging, there seems to be a debate about the cause of the Mayan collapse; there are a significant number of people that consider drought to have been a major contributor. Thus, combining climatic change with water collection/storage and population statistics seem to be an interesting area for network investigation. At this point, my focus is going to be on information gathered from Peterson and Haug's "Climate and the Collapse of Maya Civilization" (American Scientist, Jul/Aug 2005), retrieved from the Penrose online search and retrieval system.

Obviously, this will have to be a grossly simplified network simulation. However, a few ideas come immediately to mind:

- Climate simulation will be limited to monthly rainfall amounts (although combining this with temperature - and its effect on water use - is tempting). The min/max range will be user selectable.
- Seasonal variations will be sinewave-based, with a larger "multiyear" variant that will simulate extended drought periods and the ability (or lack thereof) of storage systems to compensate. The period length and percentage of effect will be user selectable.
- A variable number of storage systems, along with their storage volumes, will be user input. The amount contained is to act as a buffering agent against drought and seasonal variation.
- The population will have an initial value (in thousand, I'm guessing), along with a variable water usage per-person. This is the hard-line tool for storage depletion.
- Population growth and shrinkage will be based on available water, where birth and death rates will vary based on the availability of water.

A super simplification of climate's effect on a population, but it may produce interesting results. I'm going to do this one in Max, because I think some of the variations will not only produce interesting artifacts (graphs, mostly), but these kinds of variation may provide results that could be used for sonification. Hopefully, I'll have something to post about the results tomorrow!

[ddg]

The Alpha Dog

So I started work on sketching up some of my network ideas. I wanted to start with something simple - and something a little biological. So I decided to build a little "alpha dog effect" system in NetLogo. Took most of the day to learn the environment, but the results are pretty cool.

There are only two user controls: number of followers, and the amount of alpha-deference. When alpha-deference (the deference to the alpha attack dog) is low, all of the "follower" dogs will head more-or-less straight for the goal. When the alpha-deference is high, the followers will run to the alpha, then follow it to the goal. Points in between exhibit interesting results, where the dogs may precede the alpha, but will slow down their advance until the alpha dog is closer - eventually allowing it to share in the first strike.

NetLogo is a pretty neat environment, but the documentation is a little rough. Luckily, I know enough programming to be able to make sense of the NetLogo Dictionary (the real location for goodies), but I'm not sure how less adept programmers will fare when things have to be learned really, really quick.

[ddg]

Note: This was not a scientific study - rather, it was a test case for NetLogo using anecdotal concepts for "alpha dog" behavior.

Epic Activities

OK, so I'm sitting in a Ramada Inn in Kearney, NE - obviously it must be time to recount my Spark Experience for the week...

As I mentioned on my personal blog, I needed to blitz up to Minneapolis in order to soundcheck and play a gig at the Spark Festival's Ambient Showcase on Thursday night, September 30. I ended up getting into MPLS at about 1pm, and was shuttled directly into the nearest sleep chamber by my friend and co-conspirator Gregory Taylor. I was able to get in a 3-hour nap before it was time to meet the rest of the band...

First up was Mark Hendrickson, an old mate of Gregory's and the guy that was going to do our visuals. After a hardy discussion about Ben Frost, minimal techno and NATO, we descended into the streets for dinner. Ate, then grabbed the modulars and laptops and headed across the street to the gig-site at the LovePower church:



Up two flight of stairs, we could do little but stash our stuff to the side while everything was getting arranged. Soon we were given the go-ahead, and setup began. Since I don't do any setup ahead of time, I spent time fiddling with some patching ideas while the others did their wiring. This is when the first epic bit took place: Tom Hamer, the table-top percussionist, plugged his mixer/pedal rig into a power strip, then saw an immediate flash of light as everything powered up - then powered down. It turns out that the person performing right before us had a Euro-rig of some sort, and a 220 Volt transformer was connected to that power supply. Immediate and complete burnout of Tom's rig.

This gave us a harsh sour note to begin with, and we were all horrified for Tom's plight. In addition to doing some unique foot-controlled miking of his percussion, he was also going to be the central point for recording our set - meaning that this one was going to be "You Had To Be There".

Once we were set up (with my beautiful modular blinking in the background), we needed to get out of the way for the first player (So/On) to set up and begin his set. The four of us (Gregory Taylor, Tom Hamer, Mark Hendrickson and me) went down to street level to hang out in the fresh air. After some smart talk and a couple of smokie treats, Tom and Mark wandered off to take care of whatever business they had. Gregory and I stood around talking when all of a sudden there was a BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM sound right across the street, matched with a spectacular fireworks of sparks.

Except it wasn't fireworks. It was all of the pole-mounted electrical transformers for the neighborhood. There was a second BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM and lightshow, then the area (maybe eight blocks or so) was plunged into darkness. No electricity? Sort of a problem for an electronic arts festival...

It was pretty clear that this was the end of the evening for us, so we wandered upstair (bathed in candlelight) to begin collecting our gear. While moaning about our luck, Ali Momeni stopped by and asked us how much power our rigs would use. We did some quickie calculations, then were floored by his next statement:

"I've got a generator that I'm going to wire up. We'll drop a wire from the 2nd floor, and I can have you guys playing in 10 minutes. Sound OK?"

OK? Are you kidding? So we helped get things settled while Ali, JP and the other staffers quickly got the generator going, hit the PA power then got our stuff lit up. After a short finish for So/On, we were up.

Since we didn't want to overtax the generator, we were set up with candles for our stage lighting (along with Mark's projector throw). We were a little shaken by the whole thing, and I was worried that it might be a little, um, off. But with a candlelit modular rig, Gregory's laptop, Tom's percussion and Mark's single-projector visual rig, we jumped in to a total improv set.

Tom started with a gentle rattle, while I came in with a low pitch-drifting moan. Gregory captured that and started warping it slightly while I jumped up an octave. All of a sudden, it became crystal clear: despite whatever schizo experiences we'd taken on leading into this, we were going to click, and to click hard.

Nobody knows how long we were playing - it could have been 20 minutes, or it could have been an hour. I don't know. At various times, one or the other of us would burst out laughing, or fall back in awe of Mark's visuals. Mark and Tom started riffing with each other, Gregory rode the dynamic wave up and down throughout the set, and I was patching furiously to first match the feel of the others, then to lead them into new territory. All of a sudden, it was clear that it was time to stop. I dropped an LFO into a quantizer with a four-note scale, then faded in randomly to provide a gentle, tiny melody as Tom provided a simple ambient counterpoint. When we stopped, there was a moment of silence, then the crowd roared it approval.

By then, the city had come to the rescue, lights were restored and all was good again. We spent over an hour talking to people that were curious about the gear, curious about the process and curious about "what was pre-recorded" (a common problem when things sound this good). After that, it was a retreat to a hidey-hole, where we recounted everything from our gig-euphoria to our favorite 80's tunes, then bed.

This morning, I woke up with a glow. Gregory and I went out for breakfast, then wandered over to see some of the installations on display. The best, by far, was Mark Dave Hosale's work "An Uncommon Affair At Tooting Bee Common", a four screen non-linear film installation that was enhanced by a visit from the artist. I could have spent hours...

Left at noon, here (in Kearney) at 9pm. Home tomorrow. Much work to be done, many kids to be seen...

[ddg]