II


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 * Text** **I - __Emergence__ - Steven Johnson - 2001**

Issues emergent within Mark C. Taylor’s //From Grid to Network// are again addressed in Steven Johnson’s __Emergence__. Taylor mentions how in Capitalist America of the Henry Ford generation, “the all-encompassing logic of industrialism, work, leisure, and the rest are designed to promote efficiency and thus increase profitable production…Mechanical engineering, in other words, cannot work without an equally calculated social engineering. Toward this end, social engineers develop strategies to separate work and home in a way that secures different domains for different activities.” The SOLUTION, as an engineered answer is considered by both Taylor and Johnson to be an outmoded approach. Johnson gives the example of how “traffic jams themselves are a particularly crude form of emergent behavior, and for years we’ve been battling them with engineering solutions. Selfridge wants to take the master planners out of the equation. Make the traffic lights smart-by connecting them and feeding them information about backups or accidents-and you have a solution that can actually manage the immense and constantly changing problem of urban movement.” And herein lays the basis of Johnson’s argument, and the relationships drawn to a variety of citations. It is the ability of single-cellular life, or of seemingly simple social insects, or even of complicated urban environments (when reduced to the scale of individual neighborhoods), to be self organizing based on a bottom-up system in which no component takes a dominant //planning// (or pacemaker) role, but where each unit obtains localized data based on its immediate environment, and information received from other individuals within the general vicinity. The resultant patterns of behavior, or structure in a varied sense, have been termed to be Emergent Behavior, where an apparent macro-principal of organization takes form, but which is believed to be indeterminate and not organized by a central pacemaker cell. This, through the fairly lengthy descriptions of case studies, is the point. But it must not be forgotten that often times, new ideas appear, and attempt to supplant existing concepts, only to be discovered in the end as possessing many of the qualities existent within the previous system. IT is not necessarily unique or singular.


 * Text II - “Soft Systems” - Sanford Kwinter - 1993**

A //Soft System// is not all that unlike a system exhibiting emergent behavior. The primary difference being that of the examples cited to illustrate the point, and the eventual direction the text takes. This is through the technological infusion of matter at a multiplicity of scales, including technologies from the macroscopic “digital infrastructural systems,” to the microscopic “integration of the human nervous system with machines” through the mediation of that-which-is-in-between, the act of transmission of information and the inherent interactions, the data-in-itself. In order to reach that conclusion of the text, through the linear progression of linguistic methods of dissemination of information (the word-as-written being the primary way in which one is capable of communication of abstracted concepts through indirect means), it is posited that nonlinear systems “cannot be explained simply through an understanding of their parts, because their primary behaviors-their qualities-represent properties of interactions between parts…the properties of nonlinear systems are therefore emergent…and are expressed principally through their organization and form, not their structure.” The difference between form and structure referring to the two scales of individual form, and the general encompassing structure composed of the quantities of individual forms. Furthermore, notions implicit within current theories on genetic behaviors are suggested to act according to nonlinear models, evidenced in this instance by “a forced mutation, such as the surgical elimination of the gene for eyes in the drosophila fly, [which] produced eyeless flies only for a couple of generations before the eyes were mysteriously restored-but not the genetic material-by hidden repair mechanisms buried inside the system.” Therefore, it is believed by Kwinter, in a fashion much akin to that of Johnson, that there exists an Epigenetic Landscape, in which there are a range of three implicitly linked scales extant. The Genes/Individually programmed elements which each follow a fixed set of rules are at the smallest scale. When they are combined, however, they produce an infinite possibility of arrangements in which interactions are both varied and complex. These interactions primarily exist within the middle range of the landscape, pertaining to the correlations of chemical interactions produced by the series of simple behavioral rules which, once combined, produce staggeringly complex, and hence nonlinear results. The final and largest scale of the landscape is the general surface///Epigenetic Landscape//, the product of all the microscopic machinations that have/are occurring. At this level, the structure will not necessarily be compromised by “too radical a sensitivity to perturbations and mutations [it will]…absorb and diffuse the effects of a few localized catastrophes [however]…if entire regions are blown out, the landscape will undergo deformation, but even this will not prevent the system’s inbuilt //flexible strategies// from finding a smooth and harmonious, even if a little monstrous, pathway through it…[They] evolve by internal regulating mechanisms, yet always in collaboration with forces and effects (information) arriving from an outside source.” It has been asserted that this can apply both to the scale of an individual multi-cellular organism, or to that of a society at large; and as is discussed at both the beginning and the end of the paper, that of a technologically integrating society, where human technologies become implicitly linked with the acts of living and perception, reality and interaction, linearity and nonlinear systems.


 * Text & Film III - ”Nonorganic Life” Manuel DeLanda - 1992 - & -** **//Alphaville -// Jean Luc Godard - 1965**

Where to begin? It is a dense text. Not incomprehensively dense, but dense in the quantity of concepts either introduced or re-coded/re-defined through the course of the paper. I am left without knowing what would be an appropriate starting point. For amusingly enough, a linear method of description was employed in order to convey complicated notions of a nonlinear nature, in fact nonlinear concepts themselves as illustrated through the use of many examples. From phase space to colloids, states of flow as catalyzed, stratified, entrained, and bifurcated, who is to say where it is to end? Nothing is so, and even “society cannot be understood as climbing a ladder of //progress//, as though hunter-gatherers, agriculturalists and //civilized// communities were stages on a path toward ever-increasing perfection. Rather understanding these transformations as phase transitions would imply that State apparatus is not essentially better than a //primitive// society.” So, if nothing is progressive, how is it that an argument can be made in such a fashion? How is it that such linear modes have come about when everything apparently functions according to nonlinear principles? Each paper pertaining to the class to date has presented something of a similar problem. The utilization of linear methods in the dissemination of information may possibly be inappropriate in order to convey such //higher-order// thinking. How is it then that such theoretical constructs, all pertaining to the same subject, yet approaching from varied angles, and offering alternate and increased perspectives, should be communicated? Visual communication, as is known, is limited, in that with such highly complicated notions, a description, a dialogue, a written essay must accompany. A strictly mandated interface between visual transmission, and verbal/written information. This even is insufficient, in that the concepts would still be required to be set within a context, to be placed within a causal chain of reason/explanation/justification of each point with prior pertinent facts arranged linearly in some form or another. Herein lays the true dilemma, not the thing-in-itself, but the communication of the idea in a mode appropriate to a supposedly new concept. It does not exist. Fragmentation does exist in film, but however one wishes it avoided through manipulation, film is a linear medium. Alphaville makes use of this technique in order to convey a notion that α60 attempts to transmit at the opening scene of the film: “Sometimes, reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world.” It/He has reduced the entire concept of the film to an abstracted verbalized construct. It is assailable, yet vague, and requires the remainder of the film to visually communicate. But unfortunately, even this two sentenced synopsis of the film was utterly necessary, otherwise it would not have been articulated by Godard in such a fashion. Through all the visual fragmentation, and correlative cut-scenes, the spoken word is still of the utmost importance to lend a legitimacy to the entire endeavor. The linear construct remains to be the only mode of transmission of information to date that mankind may employ for exacting concepts of a highly complicated nature.


 * Film I -** //**Videodrome -**// **David Cronenberg - 1982 - [See also: Atom Egoyan’s,** **[|Family Viewing] (1987)]**

“Videodrome is a bio-electronic addiction. Videodrome is the ultimate addiction. Videodrome will shatter your reality. Television can change your mind. Videodrome will change your body. Experience Videodrome.” What more could be said? The Theatrical Trailer manages to sum up the entire film more efficiently and succinctly than that of the movie-in-itself. This appears to be the theme for the week. The summation of a concept within the confines of an explicit and refined statement which is then laboriously and at length expressed in a linear progression of informational conveyance. From films to texts which all make use of this method. It is an admirable attempt, and one which approaches much closer to the self professed goals of a deeper understanding, and shifting of experience to that of a phase shift in society, current. There exists a flaw in the statement. Television does alter the mind. It also alters the body, in a less fundamental way than is expressed through Videodrome’s manipulation of body, although not necessarily. For Videodrome is a self professed hallucinatory inductor. The reality that a viewer experiences is altered more profoundly and totally than that of the humble television observer; for television is not truly interactive, as much as it is implied as such to an addict. The American tendency to initiate any social interaction through the over familiarization with a person just met could be viewed as one such symptom of television’s invasive coercion to alter behavioral patterns of a society at large. With Videodrome, the definitions of boundaries are even less distinct, and more disastrous. It follows that one becomes a programmable component of the system. The microscopic “integration of the human nervous system with machines” [Sanford Kwinter, //Soft Systems//] is just such a result. Consciousness becomes implicitly linked to artificially produced externalizing constructs, generating a spiraling feedback-loop of information between: I. Physical Experience II. Abstracted Perception/Mental Activity III. Thought Codified Symbols of Communication and Assignment/Assessment of meaning A. Abstract visual symbology/direct iconic representational conveyance (beginning with cave paintings). B. Development of language from repetition of oral/sound references to iconic ideals expressed. C. A written language of Ideograms (Hieroglyphs) possessing a one-for-one relationship to concepts, yet further complicating iconic form through the introduction of simple grammatical rules. D. A written language of abstract characters not literal in its representation of an external object (Hieroglyphs) but possessing of an indirect alphabetic abstraction/communication divorced of representational meaning (Greek, Latin, etc…). These initial feed-back loops mounted their ascent long ago, allowing for ever more complicated means of self-analysis/comprehension of external realities to manifest throughout regions of the collective human consciousness. The infusion of: E. Radio Transmission F. Television Broadcast G. Computer Interface and H. Internet Linkage primarily as mediated via a visual screen (exempting that of Radio-being an audio screen of sorts) into the processes of self realization and constant evolution of the human consciousness, merely add to the complication of means of self-reference to external realities and events and cyclical interactions and collaborative processes allowed for by the interplay of conscious understanding to enact external manipulation back and forth to effect results that further develop with more means of expression and new means of input. I am as unsure as I am confident.


 * Film II -** **//Playtime -// Jacques Tati - 1967**

The modernist ideal as reduced to an iconic repetition. The glass box as object revered. The temples of rationality as purportedly expressed in everyday, mundane life, the rational being the unspectacular, anti-phenomenal. For every activity, an environment for which is as undifferentiated from the next. //Objective,// rectilinear, lines and metals, glasses and grays, suits and hats. The city as experienced as a singularity, yet possessing no singular aspects aside from perhaps the language spoken and the food eaten. To “thro. out greek style” (throw out, greek style), the luxury implied, and the temples of money associated. New modes of production called for new modes of living. “Man governs his feelings by reason; he keeps his feelings and his instincts in check, subordinating them to the aim he has in view…as feelings and emotions are controlled, order is wrought from disorder.” [Mark Taylor quoting Charles Edouard Jeaneret, //From Grid to Network//] However, disorder is exactly what makes a life worth living. The embodiment of which is through Monsieur Heulot and (to a lesser degree) the American tourist Barbara. They become the personification of the disorder that was intended to be eradicated to allow for the culmination in the goal of a rational existence. The temples to currency were no longer inhabited by a God personified, even in their symbolic appropriation of the Greco-Roman. The symbol became devoid of true meaning, and in that process, took on a new connotation, that of a superficial style of Neo-Classicism alongside that of the Gothic revival and the Orientalist aesthetic. They meant nothing, but were commodities in themselves, styles to be purchased at great expense, and signifiers of status, not of an inherent culture. The God of Currency became merely the Coin Revered, Idol worship at its worst, as warned against in the Judeo-Christian text of the Old Testament. This allowed for one meaningless style, one hollow indication of wealth and luxury to be supplanted by new magnificent environments, refashioned, yet equally void in content and intended livable experience. The reduction of the lived-in environment to rigidly calculated components within a totalizing, mechanistic world. “The all-encompassing logic of industrialism, work, leisure, and the rest are designed to promote efficiency and thus increase profitable production…Mechanical engineering, in other words, cannot work without an equally calculated social engineering. Toward this end, social engineers develop strategies to separate work and home in a way that secures different domains for different activities.” [Mark Taylor, //From Grid to Network//] The appearance of the different domains is in fact undifferentiated. The Airport is the Hospital, which looks like the Lobby, of the Office, next to the Exposition Centre, which sells everything that is in the identical Apartment Building. There is no actual specialization. Even in the Travel Agency, which looks the same as all the other environments, the posters display cities of the world with iconic monuments recognizable with their respective cities yet concealed by huge glass cubes. Now this is parody, as the whole movie is…but is it really? Is any city truly unique? Yes. But all cities still attempt to objectify specific landmarks or features. They in effect are recognized by such, for how else would one know which city it is that they see. The reflection in the glass doors at opportune moments manipulated through the exact angle at which the camera is looking to discreetly reveal a distant aging monument, pre-rationalist modernism, is also a commentary on the city itself – sans the modernist quarter. It is objectifying the monument, and stating that the city is not in fact the city without it. This in and of itself produces a problem. Which is better, the //objective// modernity, or the //subjective// irrational past? What is to be done next? In the context of this class, it would be to distill from the movie the protocol of a mechanized society reducing each individual to a component, with rigidly programmed behaviors both pertaining to work and leisure. It is Monsieur Heulot that does not appear to conform to this highly structured succession of repetitive and unmemorable environs (unmemorable in their repetition and lack of true distinction). It was well put when Monsieur Heulot was caught unawares by a group at the exhibition and absorbed into their number for a tour or lecture of some sort. “You do not belong here.” is simultaneously realized and spoken to him by an organizer of the group. And it is true. He does not belong in that world of efficient and homogenized spaces and procedures. In fact, it is only through chance operation at the restaurant-night club, that the environment and its occupants are repeatedly damaged and re-appropriated for un-engineered purposes. Activities that were not accounted for in the planning of the space become both prevalent and entertaining. It is in the unplanned, the disastrous where the people begin to live and are able to interact through the ruins of a hyper-engineered rationalist machine; and it is here that Monsieur Heulot truly belongs.


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