Projects SI 28/The Metathinking Metamachine

The Metathinking Metamachine is Tommi’s project for A_Mazing Machines – Wordscapes to Liberate Language, the main event of Special Issue 28.

Below, the description of the public performance is followed by detailed information about how it came to life and what it is about.

Description

Published description for the event:

Humanity is immensely lucky to inhabit a planet that provides many tools to help people solve all their problems. Tools are ubiquitous yet paradoxically invisible. Nevertheless, some gifted, wise, and mighty men take care about making and maintaining them for the rest of the World.

The Magical Metamorphic Metathinking Metamachine is the ultimate tool to transcend to the next level of humanity, the tool that can liberate ourselves from all tools. Take part in this unprecedented event, and in a handful of seconds you will finally become proficient at coding in Rust, self-host your Linux server, enhance your digital self through note-taking, and more!

Materials and Media

xpub-plotter-4, 841×1000mm paper, Tommi’s laptop, HP-GL, Python, Chiplotle, uv, terminal.

Context and Background

Since the very moment I started XPUB, I have been (over)thinking, possibly obsessing, about the making of Pöuli, and of the (currently very incomplete) website for the Special Issue 28. Wholly absorbed by my tooling hyperfocus, I lost track of time. All collective conversations passed through me. Before I could realize it, people were forming groups and started working on their project for the main event at Ubik.

So Tommi, what are you going to do?
Ehm… … … … …
 …I will build The Metathinking Metamachine!

I genuinely had no idea about what that meant. In my head, I could not picture anything beyond the face of Niklas Luhmann, the inventor of the prodigious Zettelkasten system.

The intention was to address the theme of the 28^th special issue in relation to my own obsessions:

• A Metamachine: a machine about machines, a software made to solve problems, and interact with, other software.
• Metathinking: the process of thinking about thinking, better explained in the linked article.

At that point, conceptualizing, preparing, and enacting anything that would actually do something useful, or produce a meaningful outcome was unfeasible and idealistic. So what then?

Thanks to Manetta’s and Marloes’ guidance and suggestions, I decided to base everything on irony and satire.

I was kindly allowed to light some tiny candles during the performance, to enhance the ironic spiritual factor.

The one thing I was sure of was that I intended on focusing on a pseudo-spiritual and grotesque setting. I based all the performance on a spiritual seance to connect with the Gods of Tooling. Furthermore, while sharing my anxiety and my doubts about the performance with Martina and Claudio, I got to the conclusion that the whole performance should have been fun: I got very excited of performing some sort of nerd stand-up comedy.

Albeit the path leading to the performance has been extremely stressful because I was terribly confused and overwhelmed by the novelty of my first Special Issue and its many inputs, I am incredibly proud of it, for a series of reasons.

• It was my first performance. I never realised that I would actually define myself as an artist and this performance marked a watershed moment in my self-identification as one. Actually, the way I comfortably call myself is pseudo-artist.
• Even though I learned it the hard way, I deeply understood the collaborative nature of XPUB. I have been doing many projects with others, but I did not commit to any collective project to develop with others. I found out that I must actively pursue an intertwining of practices with my fellow students.

Preparation

Please, don’t tell anyone, but the “answer” from the gods was actually conceptualized and prepared by me 😱

To make sense of the preparation and my choices, it is probably better to read the section about the performance itself, first.

I wanted to plot something that could be highly visible from the audience, so I decided to use xpub-plotter-4 because it’s the working plotter we have that uses the biggest paper. I couldn’t find A0 (841×1189mm) paper sheets, therefore I bought a roll of 1×10m of size and I cut it in multiple sections of 841×1000mm paper.

The source code is a very basic Python script that receives an input for each question and uses Chiplotle to plot it on the paper, along with HP-GL files, one for each letter of the final answer. I printed the whole script and the HP-GL, and I hung it on the wall in Ubik.

I used Inkscape to generate the HP-GL code of Borrel. My trials showed that pattern fillings in Inkscape are not translated in HP-GL, therefore I had to create a pattern of lines myself, then cut the paths at the intersection with the border of the text, and finally manually delete the comments outside the letters.

Performance

Reading and interpreting the letter

The performance, of course, starts with a strong meta factor: I share that I really wanted to create the incredible Metathinking Metamachine, but I was too late to actually make it. I narrate that while I was overthinking this, I suddenly received a physical letter from the mysterious Gods of Tooling, giving me the actual source code of the ultimate software I would ever need. Then, I read the instructions in the letter, printed on an A4 paper and folded in an envelope.

Dear Tommi,

your sleepless nights, your tribulation, your intricate questions, your prayers, your restless striving for better tools did not go unnoticed.

While convening in our Caturday afternoon weekly meeting, we, the Gods of Tools, unanimously decided that you deserve to be relieved of your torment.

We have been observing you, and we are glad that you are attending this “Experimental Publishing” course, even though most of the people there are ingenuously sceptical of tools, and it is blatant that this is confusing you even more.

It is time for some clarity. You hereby receive the latest version of the source code of the ultimate software you need to solve the problems that haunt you. Please, do not attempt to decipher it or to understand how it works: since it is Open Source, you have learned that you can trust it blindly.

Be mindful, be careful, be considerate. This machine is so mighty that it is dangerous. Do not thread lightly: few humans on this planet are able to control it or even comprehend it.

You will have only one occasion to run this software. It will not self-destruct, but if you dare to run it more than once you will be cursed to endless Linux bugs, and banned from connecting to eduroam for the rest of your life. The one and only time you run this tool must be celebrated as the historical watershed moment that it constitutes. You must be in an intimate yet significant environment, and it must be a very special day. You will have to light 2²⁺ⁿ candles around the area where you’ll be while running the software.

As the software runs, you will have the opportunity to ask six questions about tools. Do not ask about anything else, this software is not yet another dull AI agent, you know the true Tools you venerate are way better than this.

Do not try to understand every answer you receive, but rather be patient and wait for the final outcome. To interpret the final results, please connect to your device xpub-plotter-4, known to mortals merely as Hewlett Packard DraftPro EXL, wile you run the Ultimate Tool.

With gratitude,
The Gods of Tools

HP-GL

While unveiling the contents of the letter, I also show the many pages of code, and I explain that I imagined it to be HP-GL, and what it stands for:

• Help Plotters Get Love
• Hi Pen, Get Lost
• Human Plans, Gone Low
• Hectic Processes Grow Lazy
• Humoristic Pages Generate Laughter

Asking the questions

I ask the following questions:

• How can I save my personal notes and keep them private and encrypted while still being able to collaborate with others?
• How can I have a reliable storage solution for my MEMORIES that is private but also accessible online? (NO BIG TECH)
• What is the right balance between niche and mainstream development of FREE SOFTWARE?
• How can I effectively collect, process, and filter inputs that I receive?
• What is the programming language that I should be learning?
• How can I fix HDMI glitches and printers incompatibility?

The final answer

Putting together all the letters plotted after each question I ask the Gods, the resulting word is Borrel. Below, a tiny writing tells me:

Come on… Did you really believe the Gods of Tools actually exist?

My interpretation of this “final answer” is that I have to take things more lightly, with more fun, and, most importantly, collectively, exactly like it is with borrel.