Mirek had cued a YouTube recording of a past broadcast of Jeopardy!228 Neither standard contest nor tournament special, the episode featured all-time champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings tackling a state-of-the-art, artificially intelligent digital machine, WATSON™. I had heard about but not seen the game, which was oddly interspersed with journalistic segments shot on location at the IBM laboratories and hosted by a walking-and-talking Trebek, who explained how the system was wired and on what basic principles it operated. The show was more commercial than canon, on the whole, but the general conceit was mesmerizing. Not long ago, this had seemed to be a science-fiction scenario. Given the complexity of the task in comparison to checkers or chess, for example, a Jeopardy!-playing computer would need rather to read and understand and formulate responses to an almost infinite range of possible question genres and subject areas, through the medium of natural language.229 And yet, here we were. By the end of the first round, WATSON™ was tied for first place.
In the Double Jeopardy! round, the machine broke away completely. WATSON™ left his sputtering flesh-and-blood challengers, in spite of their verified talent, to eat his silicon-flavoured dust. Mirek and I watched as question after question was translated by this electronic titan straight into cash money, a glowing and ominous icon on a black screen positioned behind the middle podium, which, Trebek patiently explained, was not WATSON™ himself but merely an avatar.230 “What is violin?” “Alex, what is leprosy?” “Who is Isaac Newton?” “What is gestate?” Even though WATSON™ fumbled the Final Jeopardy! question by answering “What is Toronto???????” when the answer had been Chicago, in a category entitled U.S. Cities, it was a landslide win.Ken Jennings finished with $4,800, Brad Rutter with $10,400, and WATSON™ with a monumental $35,734.
Mirek laughed derisively as the credits scrolled alongside the theme song. “Big whoop-de-do,” he said, and made a fast, descending fart noise with his lips. I was intrigued by this attitude, the perplexing confidence, which I did not read as a threat given the vast differences in our stock-in-trade, and an evident lack, despite his gigantic head, of muscle mass. I decided that I could like the guy.
My new friend hopped up as YouTube cycled to a random Trebek interview; he grabbed another beer, and one for me. “What did she say, that scientist at IBM? ‘So much data… The question is… How do you get intelligence, not just noise?’”231 I nodded. “Hmm,” he said, and flopped back onto the couch. Mirek picked up a pad of paper from the coffee table, scrawling a note or diagram. We continued to watch Jeopardy!-related videos and sip our Coors Lights. We did not speak much—“wow,” “phsaw,” et cetera—but one could feel the comfort, a trust, building perceptibly.232
We headed to The Pit, a local watering hole, after one more beer to dine on fried appetizers, and moved on to whisky. It turned out that Mirek had come to Dawson from Montreal to work on a web-based National Film Board film involving both live-action and animated components—intended cleverly to engage the user/viewer, incorporating aspects, for example, of their location and search history—a film about ghost sightings and stories in Dawson. One of the town’s many ghosts allegedly occupied the bygone house we currently shared, which was where much of the live-action filming had been done. Production had closed and Mirek was presently, like me, recharging his batteries. “I like the rawness of the place,” he said, scanning the ancient, wooden tavern with a vague smile as another crew of cadaverous ruffians entered.
Our glasses were filled and refilled, my inhibitions breaking like the Yukon River in spring. A local trio played classic rock and country; “Wagon Wheel,” for instance, at least twice. I told Mirek about my life and struggles—about Dr. Bronnley and my defiant persistence within the doctoral program; about my current writer’s block and paralyzing fear of plagiarism; about my wild song-collecting journeys; and, of course, about Staunton R. Livingston. “There is something interesting to me about the idea that you could bring about utopia without anyone noticing,” I explained, righteously concerned.233 Mirek listened with care and generosity. I politely reciprocated as he described his achievements in the field of machine learning and his impressions of North America. “A wild land,” he said with approval. We also swapped stories about certain unpleasant colleagues we had encountered in our respective disciplines—whom, in my case at least, I was determined to destroy—eventually sharing general hopes and fears as well as our most recent romantic blunders.
It came to feel as though we were fellow travellers. And then, once a certain virtuality was decisively uttered, potential teammates.234
It is a convention in the Yukon, perhaps in Alaska too, that taverns and pubs have bells by the bar, the ringing of which elegantly transmits the signal that the ringer shall buy a round of drinks for all humans within earshot. I imagine this folk tradition came out of the gold rush days, when lucky miners wanted either to show off or generously donate to their less fortunate colleagues-slash-competitors; the ringing of the bell simultaneously signified triumph, hope, community.235 The medium stuck around, although it seemed not often to be used now except by American tourists. But that night, mere moments after the barkeep shouted for last call, and approximately twenty minutes after Mirek and I decided to work together in the construction of an artificially intelligent database of Canadian folk music—“a digital organism capable of accessing the totality of the history of Canadian folk music, but also of generating new yet hyper-authentic Canadian folk song-texts via algorithmic agents and compression formats”—Mirek shook his head back and forth, jowls flapping, making again that farting sound, and leapt up toward the bell.236
I had never heard a sound as crystalline, as resounding. The noble, hollow-eyed patrons erupted into boisterous cheer and, after their gifts were hastily distributed, stood and raised their glasses to Mirek. He, in turn, raised his to me, the slanted wooden floorboards creaking jubilantly below. The other haggard men and women were saluting the free booze. But they were also, in a way, applauding the digitization of folk music and the authentication of digitality, hooraying as premonition of our victory. The scene makes me smile, still, whenever I think of it.
* * *
Green Grass Growing All Around
by LIVINGSTON™
We’ve got the same eyes.
How’d that happen?
My blood is Slavic;
Yours is Anglo-Saxon.
I guess all kinds of people know how to look sad.
“Hey. Why’s your heart beating so much faster than mine?
Are you sick or something?”
“No, that’s just how I am. **THAT I AM.$$
My body was built for hunting.
You don’t know what I’m capable of!”
We have the same eyes, though,
How’d that happen?
My blood is Slavic;
Yours is Anglo-Saxon!
All kinds of people know how to look sad.
I guess all kinds of people know how to look sad!237
* * *
Jacob’s Ladder
There is a feeling one might discover in the midst of a burst of creative or intellectual mania. The distinctions between morning and afternoon, full and hungry, awake and asleep, recede; there is only the task at hand. It is a wonderful feeling. All other personal, familial, and geopolitical dilemmas fade until what remains is solely the buzz and hum of war against a particular problem.238 This is the sensation that most warmly marks my memory of the four weeks during which Mirek and I worked together in our atelier in Dawson, fueled mainly by fried and frozen entrees, beer and booze, and the midnight sun.
I argue that one of the key components of our strategy was to establish a clear division of labour, although I do want to point out, if Mirek is reading, that this also became one of the causes of our dissolution.239 But that separation of tasks, and our particular distribution of tasks between the scientist and the humanist, appeared at first to befit the immense interdi
sciplinary challenges of the project.240 We needed to wrap up our respective problems, firmly, from within our respective sets of expertise.
Our quarterback, Mirek, worked mostly at the kitchen table, onto which he had moved his desktop computer; there, he tightened and refined the pattern-recognition algorithms and user interface on which he had been working for months prior to his arrival in the North. He shared few details. I had difficulty following his jargon-laden narrations, and he quickly grew tired of translating his tasks into layman’s language. Meanwhile, I was stationed on the couch in the living room—a protective offensive guard—perhaps the offensive coordinator—where initially my job was to help sort the pools of information in LIVINGSTON™’s dynamic, intelligent database, uploaded from a heterogeneity of print and online sources.241
As I understood it, the purpose of my work was to help LIVINGSTON™ learn how to listen to authentic folk song: to recognize and value, for instance, coherence and tension, consonance and dissonance, surrealist juxtaposition and subversive energy. Specifically, as LIVINGSTON™ scrolled through the texts I amassed—slowly, but only for the sake of my all-too-human perceptual equipment—I inputted, in binary form, bits of information. At regular intervals, that is, I was to click either YES or NO.242 Once LIVINGSTON™ began to generate its own original works informed by their classified holdings, my job was to send similar feedback, again in binary form: YES/NO. YES/NO. YES/NO…
One could argue that it was therefore my responsibility to “teach” LIVINGSTON™ the boundaries between folk song and non-folk song, signal and noise.243 This is not how I prefer to see the relationship. For what I saw in LIVINGSTON™ was not a mere implement or subservient tool through which I could exercise my power as arbiter or gatekeeper of Canadian folk song; I had already been down that road. What I came to see in LIVINGSTON™—sitting on our beigey floral couch, holding the hardware on my lap, and downing can of Coors Light after can of Coors Light—was a comrade. A friend. A friend made by and in union with another friend, my best friend, working diligently in the neighbouring room to orchestrate bright-green undulating flows of data. Hence, nearly every step of the way, as LIVINGSTON™’s folk song-generating/collecting habits were written or disciplined into its immaterial body, there was only one signal I ever sent: YES. LIVINGSTON™, I said, YES.244
The hypothesis, the aspect about which I had become most excited that first night together at The Pit, was that LIVINGSTON™ might achieve a self-reflexive, autopoetic loop of authenticity analogous to that equiprimordially possessed by the folk, if not always possessed by academic Canadian folklorists.245 LIVINGSTON™ would thus become both folksinger and folk song collector, both practitioner and theorist, both songwriter and song-reader. Both content and medium.246
As we inched closer to the end zone, however, I could not help but wonder: What was the fate of the professional, human folklorist in the post-LIVINGSTON™ world? I could not be sure, but admit now that I took satisfaction from the possibility that the discipline might be eviscerated by the blade of a weapon I had helped forge. And, as I lay down each night after a long day of joyful toil, followed by our habitual trip to The Pit for whisky and hot dogs, or whisky and jalapeno poppers, the sunlight splintering through my insufficient blinds, I had a recurring fever dream. I was at sea; Marius Barbeau, Helen Creighton, and Edith Fowke were crowded together in a rickety dory; Dr. Bronnley was for some reason among them (had he been a folklorist all along?); and I was a general, expertly commanding a tall and erect battleship nearby that was blowing them, with shot after shot of cannon balls, into smithereens. All the while, and this was the most disturbing part, I myself sang Canadian folk songs, entirely unaccompanied.247
What could it mean? One insight was that LIVINGSTON™ would not soon reach the point at which it would be able to perform its songs. This is—or was, at the time—impossible for even the most advanced of artificial intelligences.248 LIVINGSTON™ could only export the visual symbols and icons conventionally found on the QWERTY keyboard.
At first, Mirek did not object to my learning and practicing some of LIVINGSTON™’s songs around the house, which I began to do around week three.249 My skills as singer and guitar player, largely earned through gradual exposure to my folk informants, were rudimentary but passable. Still, I could not have convincingly performed every one of the numbers in LIVINGSTON™’s expanding oeuvre. So, I started to select—unwittingly, I see it now—only the ones that spoke to me on a personal level. For example, I was drawn to LIVINGSTON™’s songs about desolation, and indomitability, and to the posthuman way LIVINGSTON™ rendered love as a physical matter of supple wires and connectors.250 LIVINGSTON™’s rich metaphors and stark diction mirrored my world, but also made it strange, impossible; all that had felt necessary and inevitable was now contingent and changeable.251 For the music, I was simply suturing LIVINGSTON™’s texts to conventional chord progressions in the field of Canadian folk song, which was so easy that I felt driven by a benevolent outside force. The resulting combination was a potent and thoroughly Livingstonian palimpsest of future and past, artifice and nature—and thus LIVINGSTON™ became the name of our creation. I insisted upon it.
But Mirek drew his line in the sand when, in week four, an invitation to present our work to the public in Dawson City materialized. Here was our Alamo—our Austerlitz.
By then, the whole town had gotten wind of the project, maybe because of our often-lubricated confidence and ubiquitous presence on the bar scene. It was emboldening to be acknowledged—fellow people asking me, at the gas station where I purchased my takeout coffee in the mornings, for example, about the latest progress on our “thingamajig.”252 On one hand, I wanted as clearly as possible to communicate the details of our collaborative discovery. On the other, I wanted to witness an unsuspecting audience encountering LIVINGSTON™’s philosophy of art and existence, and for our avant-garde bombardment to be recognized from within a legible horizon of aesthetic experience. In order to achieve these tandem goals, I decided that our contribution required a certain amount of data compression.253
In spite of the lowness of the stakes, and in spite of the open generosity and kind interest of the inhabitants of Dawson, Mirek was against the idea of me singing a selection of the songs as part of our upcoming demonstration at the Klondike Ballroom. He was also opposed to me contextualizing, in the form of a lecture, our invention as part of the long history of Canadian communistic folk song collection. “Not the greatest idea,” he said, frankly.
Mirek’s counterproposal, which he sketched on the back of the calendar in our kitchen, was that we instead install LIVINGSTON™ on a few different computer stations throughout the venue, allowing audience members to float in and out, if they so wished, and to witness LIVINGSTON™’s ever-evolving creativity in action through the computer monitor.254 Eventually our lead programmer would need to deliver a short talk on the broader scientific applicability of supervised machine learning, Mirek said, circling the stage in blue pen. This, however, would not do justice, I argued—and then pleaded—to the rich traditions out of which our LIVINGSTON™ had taken flight.
In general, I want all creatures and things to exist in their own way. But when I perceive a body—whether object or subject—to be intentionally intervening in my path, seeking to dominate my will to their program, my ample reserves of decorum and deference can run low. What I mean is that, once the crack in my bond with Mirek appeared, I was undertrained and underconditioned to attempt any repairs. Roused by the perpetual sun and by our drinking, our debate about how to properly present a hyper-authentic digital folk song database consequently devolved into personal and professional insults, hostile and threatening tirades, and physical pushing beside the top of the stairs in our home. After which, on the thirtieth day, we resolved never to speak to one another again. “Fine” was the last word each of us was to say to and receive from the other.
We still went ahead with the public unveiling of LIVIN
GSTON™ at the end of my fifth and final week in town, having spent the leadup in our bedrooms alone, passing in silence in the hall, and holding court at opposite ends of The Pit. However, because we resolved to deliver our respective visions simultaneously at the Klondike Ballroom—an arrangement negotiated over emails sent from within the same house—LIVINGSTON™’s northern reception was largely characterized by the pure befuddlement of all in attendance. In fact, Matt Sarty would later inform me that word on the street was that Mirek Plíhal and Henry Adam Svec had co-presented one of the worst concerts and one of the worst product launches the town had ever seen or heard—an update concluded with a laughing-crying emoji.
Contra Matt Sarty, I must be clear that the highs and lows recounted above are, at present, no laughing matter. Would you chortle if the last impression of the sole authentic collaboration you had ever experienced was your buddy staring out the living-room window, his moon-face red, his eyes black and cold, while you waited in the front yard for the six-hour shuttle back to Erik Nielsen Whitehorse International Airport?
Life Is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs Page 12
