I was reading the scripts for Angela Chang’s webcode poem “No Knead” of Taper #9 using Chat-GPT to help understand some basic Javascript string/array functions and how the Word operator words. As someone with no prior Javascript knowledge, this was quite helpful, and I was impressed by how even if I shared a fragment of the code, it would deduce other aspects of the full code and help me trace connections for myself. Optimistic about learning new things, I started researching the nature of “exceptions” while reading Allison Parrish’s “Throes” (Taper #5) particularly in regard to exceptional objects in mathematics, of which the Schwarz triangle in Euclidean space (as opposed to hyperbolic space in which there are no exceptions of Schwarz triangles) was listed as an example; Schwarz triangles are spherical triangles that overlap and tile a sphere via its reflections along an edge (Here’s a visualization of Möbius triangles which is interesting to consider in relation to 3D modeling software), with three exceptions called Möbius triangles with whole number vertexes that correspond to the 3 exceptional Platonic solid groups (tetrahedron, cube and icoshedron) and a one-parameter family . I wanted to better understand what the one-parameter family meant and why Möbius triangles were only named as exceptions so I started to ask Chat-GPT.
Disguised in a veneer of growing more in-depth in meaning (“I see..”) the program actually is at a site of not knowing, and generates a fabricated concept, the “Hirshhorn-Maclachlan tiling” based on its semantic similarity to mathematical research.
The Schwarz triangle concept was published in 1873. To be fair, the more I pushed Chat-GPT to create a fictional pseudo-mathematical concept of “Hirshhorn-Maclachlan tiling” and a visualization of it, it would refuse, express its limitations, and offer resources to mathematical visualization tools. When dialoguing with an assistive AI tool, just as might be the case within in a seminar classroom or on Stack Overflow, constructing the question is just as much of the task as the evaluating the given response. This layering of meaning-making is crucial, and feelings of shock or surprise, as was my case here, speak more to my own expectations and lack of familiarity with the personality of the program. Oddly enough, what these kinds of moments remind me of is early stages of high school when you’d start disagreeing with literary analysis on SparkNotes, or being a freshman in college and relating to Departments (of Psychology, International Relations, etc.) no longer by my immediate semantic relation to the word, as surface, but by the reality of its ideological leanings, its depth. To that effect, it’s exciting to experience an expansion of critical modality via new curiosities to discover ideas for myself in different fields or facets of life that go back to an eighth-grade summer geometry class taken online. I often return to memories of the past because it’s at this juncture that I can address and explore my own learning blocks while considering what better pedagogical methods across developmental stages might look like.
Image Generated with AI ∙ December 6, 2023 at 9:43 PM (Dall-E 3) : prompt: an image of tessellations of triangles on a sphere in the style of takashi murakami’s jellyfish eyes
新泳 is newswimming 