A human mind does more than reason; it exists in time, and reckons with life and death, and builds a world around itself. It gathers meaning, as if by gravity. That’s according to Joshua Rothman in “Metamorphosis,” a profile of Geoffrey Hinton in the New Yorker, 20 November 2023. 

Mr. Rothman was referring to the development of generative artificial intelligence — the kind that can pass the Turing test, a technology that may save us from ourselves or hasten our ineluctable end. I resonate with the quote about Hinton because it also says a lot about Moore.

By Moore I don’t mean a cardboard cutout fabricated by scholars. I mean a man who was present in his moment, made a living from intricate worldbuilding, created estimable meaning, and bravely, sensitively, often humorously reckoned with life and death.

His almost final reckoning took place on 21 January 1933 — almost because, thanks to scientists like Geoffrey Hinton and builders like yours truly, his reanimation is being scheduled. George Moore is coming back to continue having conversations in Ebury Street.

One dimension of reanimation — the most basic and yet complex — is the corporeal. It’s one thing to interact with an intelligent chatbot, where each participant writes one part in a conversation and reads another. It’s quite a different thing to encounter a reanimated George right before your eyes, to watch his facial expressions and body language, to hear the timbre and inflections in his voice, to notice what he’s wearing and the kind of place he lives in.

All of that would be taken for granted in a real conversation; in a virtual one, it cannot be taken for granted, but must be created.

I’ve taken a baby step towards such creation by moving a lot of pictures of George Moore online; as many as I could find pending further research and a little help from my friends.

This part of the People section of George’s Iconography presents the images of 56 makers (artists and photographers) who viewed the living man in his natural element 170 times; plus two makers who imagined what that would have been like. The number of makers is actually a bit larger than 58 because one named Anonymous is 12 different people; I just don’t know who they are. Yet.

Though the ultimate purpose of these pictures is to ballast digital reanimation, I am publishing them in a way that humans can browse.

The pictures are grouped by maker, and the makers are in alphabetical order. Within each group, the pictures are in chronological order; some pictures are precisely dated, others approximately.

George’s age is appended to each date so visitors don’t have to figure that out. The pictures that have no sort of date are in alphabetical order following the dated ones.

Each page includes a link to a maker’s biography. I think it’s important to know whose eyes we’re looking through when we view a subject.

Other information includes picture title, which in most cases I invented; the dimensions in inches and centimeters; and the medium. When the owner of a picture has a webpage about it, I include a link to that page and also a link to the owner’s organization. Likewise if an auctioneer has a webpage touting a picture.

In addition, I have included my description of each picture. You might think this is unnecessary since the picture itself is right there on the page, but I think a description helps visitors notice details that might otherwise be ignored.

I have appended provenance, exhibition and publication history either by linking to an owner’s page or writing what I know (very little, in most cases). 

The images are thumbnails suitable for reference. If visitors want high-resolution or rights to reproduce, they can contact owners to request them. If an owner isn’t known, that means rights and image quality aren’t negotiable.

Hard as I tried to get the pictures right, I have zero doubt that I made mistakes of commission and omission. For that reason, as always in George Moore Interactive, visitors who know more or better than I can use Leave a Reply at the bottom of any page, or the Contact page itself, to improve my awareness, accuracy and understanding. I promise to update the pages and acknowledge each individual’s help.

Next up for the People section of Iconography are pictures of family members, friends and associates. In these sections, I may include less metadata with the pictures, but enough to guide the further inquiries of those who are interested.

The overall goal for pictures of people is to show what George Moore looked like throughout his life, and show how others looked who were important to him when he knew them. To visualize and humanize his legacy.

Returning to the subject of ultimate purpose, I’ll mention that my main client for assembling and dating and describing all of these pictures is not people like you, or any other people for that matter.

My main client is a neural network born of the cloud that will take all of the corporeal details of Moore and his world into account and construct a high-fidelity model of the man — how he looks, how he acts, how he talks. That model, endowed with a voice that sounds an awful lot like George did in life, will be the one who hosts your own conversations in Ebury Street. Building a world around itself, gathering meaning, engaging you as if by gravity. 

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Worldbuilding

In a sidetrack while curating pictures, I transposed the first chapter of the first edition of A Mummer’s Wife, Moore’s second novel, into Google Docs. It comes to 5,719 words including front matter.

This exercise was a proof of concept to estimate the time and effort needed to transpose all of Moore’s worldbuilding into Google Docs.

The bad news is that transposing a book is fairly laborious; the good news is that it’s enjoyable and entirely feasible. By the time we meet again, the whole of A Mummer’s Wife should be online and ready for ingestion into a model.

Thanks to a gracious volunteer in Dublin, next up will be Martin Luther, a title that has never been digitized to my knowledge. Obscure and precious as it has always been, Martin Luther is now in the pipeline.

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