- a reblog from wblut.com -
For my
FMX13
talk I’d been thinking about a particular question. Why is the
generative principle gaining importance? Sure, the tools are out
there in ever increasing abundance, but so are the tools for the more
traditional approach. And yes, it’s tying nicely with the
3D
print revolution. But again so is traditional modelling and
design. I got to a point where I have the general shape of an idea, why
it’s not just a fad, why it’s more than a fashionable, tech-savvy
hipster thing, why it can be a form of art. I didn’t really get to
making my point at the presentation, so here’s another go… a silent
undercurrent in the evolution of human society.
A silent revolution of narrative
We have long been a people of stories. Narrative told us how the world
works and perhaps more importantly, how we were supposed to behave.
There was no real reason to look further, the story was both reason
and explanation. Things are how they are because that’s how they are.
Because the stories were invented and told by us, their perspective
is uniquely human. The narrative was recognizable and believable,
often involving scaled-up exagerated personae, the Greek big-bearded
godly bastards, the West African spider überprankster Anansi, the
Christian/Muslim/Jewish let’s-not-go-there… These stories built our
society, embedded rules in daily lives, commanded unquestioning
respect, gave authority — often to the story teller.
But things happened. One by one our
POV
biased world views floundered, held up to harsh impersonal light and
found to be faulty. Useful models for daily life but empty of deeper
truth.
The flat world stretching around us turned out to bend underneath
our feet in apparent absurdity. We lost our seat at the center of the
universe. Our sun was demoted to a close star. Our glorious Milky
Way, just one of many. Cosmologists describe our universe itself as
only a bit of froth in a seething multiverse. Not content with
tearing down our surroundings, we also target ourselves. Our mind
and soul were seized from the aether and confined in soft, squishy and
above all, mortal matter. Humanity itself reclassified as a species,
endowed with exceptional potential yes, but from a biological
point-of-view in no way more evolved than the pets we master, or the
pests we exterminate.
But science, that culprit science, didn’t stop there.The sensible but cold mechanical/chemical static universe of the 19
th
century was further denied to us. Quantum mechanics ripped
determinism from the very (sub)atomic fabric of our existence.
Thankfully, our cats remain blissfully classical. But even here at
our own scale, where at least the classical, deterministic picture
still holds, we had to relinquish predictability to the gibbering
jaws of chaos theory. (Gibbering might seem too graphic, but chaos
theory is single-handedly responsible for al those garishly colored
Mandelbrotian horrors inflicted upon the unfortunate
non-colorblind.)
Where does that leave us with our stories? For ages we believed that
to understand anything we just needed to know it. To predict the
future: study the past, measure the present… Establish rules and
control the system. And we seem very resistant to letting the
stories go. So we kept the stories around. Probably we’re too scared
to cast them aside. Perhaps believing, mistakenly, that our society,
our laws, our morals are founded on the stories themselves, rather
than on the things they were originally meant to allegorize.
But surely, exotic mathematical systems might behave oddly and
philosophers delight in academic discussions of principle, but
that has no impact on the real world, has it?
A silent revolution of science
The slow change of thought is clearest in science. Let’s take
biology. Long considered a sensible science for sensible
mustachioed men, great minds cataloguing species and recording
behavior, enjoying invigorating rivalries whether skeletized
specimen A was a rather large pygmee vole or — obviously — a sickly
giant vole. Glass-eyed corpses in the stately natural history museums
around the world testify to the titanic efforts of our forefathers.
Measuring, labelling, arguing, fixating… growing and pruning the
tree of life, a hierarchy of static species.
With Darwin came a revolution of thought, suddenly the tree was
no longer a hierarchy but a tracing of common ancestry,
portraying relationships between animals. The theory
suffered/suffers from many misconceptions, but worst of all, a major
point is often overlooked: the fundamental concept of a static
species is faulty. In fact one widely held argument against evolution
was that species could not arise from other species. A child can not be
another species than its parents, the very thought. Serious
scientists tried to defend evolution by reconciling it with
discrete species: the idea of macro-mutations, rabbit and hare
springing from a common ancestor in an extremely unlikely freak
event; or the inheritance of accidental traits picked up during
life (a stretched out neck or lost tail). But those efforts missed the
point, evolution runs into problems with our preconceptions
because our preconceptions are wrong. There’s no leafy tree of
ancestry, each leaf a species, there’s only a continuüm,
evergrowing and dividing branches, each of us a point along the line,
but never a leaf. The human narrative had a clear purpose for
distinct species, a simplification, a coping mechanism for an
incomprehensible complex outside world.
So the useful story turns against us when we take it too far. But
that’s science, the world of academics, separated from us by
sensible, engineering-type men that cull the useful bits and turn it
into technology. These word-games and mathematical constructs
wouldn’t affect our daily lives, would they?
A silent revolution of society
I’m guessing that they do. A common thread in our history of
understanding is the steady decline of the static, the “state”, and
the accompanying increase of the dynamic, the “process”. Of course,
state and process are linked, but the state itself doesn’t tell you the
process, and the process doens’t always allow you to predict the next
state. There’s more to understanding than mere cataloguing and
observing. Perhaps even more important, there’s more to control than
knowing the current state and knowing the rules.
Take our sorry, global economy. An artifical construct built on
sensible rules, yet somehow it turned into an unstable beast, almost
actively resisting interference, as unpredictable as the weather.
Or our precious democracy, likewise based on sensible, rational
rules, but somehow incapable of giving us sustainable leadership —
but very good in producing people whose only talent is to get
elected. So what is turning our society into its strange current
state: seemingly unstable but at the same time resistant to change.
Where does the chaos come from? Surely time and scale are a factor in
this. But that can’t be all there is to it — that sounds too much like
another human story, ageing, the steady decline of everything —
Allow me another guess: feedback. “In olden days” events were
scrutinized after they happened. Wars, régime changes, trials,
political decisions, these have always been news. The news led to
reactions. The reactions lead to changes in future behavior. But all
in all the news itself didn’t really affect the event. But we have
closed the feedback loops all through society. The mere reporting of
events, and the reactions, and the reactions on the reactions,… are
so fast and all-pervasive that more often than not the reported event is
being changed. The ironic thing is that although the feared quantum
randomness turned out not to affect our cat, we nonetheless managed
to turn our classical reality into a quantum reality, the
observation changing the thing observed. This kind of feedback can
lead to stabilization but more often than not leads to chaotic
behavior, in a mathematical sense. We still know the rules, but we
no longer control the system.
So with this world view in mind, what better art form to
arise than the art of rules, of systems, of interactions, of
complexity and emergence…
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