Context: Liquid sheep – drone footage.
The patterns of sheep transit are as of slime mould moving, or of liquid flow – perhaps quicksilver. Note that the resemblance is not merely superficial or in any sense trivial. Complex systems dynamics quite naturally gravitate towards functional eloquence over a diminished or abbreviated dynamical vocabulary; more or less equivalent to information undergoing algorithmic/programmatic compression.
This is a consequence of the ways in which information systems autonomously seek optimal self-organisational encoding. We can certainly wax long and lyrical on the composite, compound mathematical beauty or entropy of turbulent flow but the most interesting thing in both organic and inorganic dynamical systems is that not only do these systems obtain an average approximation to optimal paths, but they do so in ways that bias a probability of the continuing presence of those optimal paths.
Information-processing systems are endemically-oriented towards their own optimal replication in, through and as self-abstraction. Success is measured not purely in reproductive terms but by the extent to which the recursive propagation of encoded, patterned dynamical symmetry is itself – and as a scale-independent and context-agnostic information meta-state – recursively reproduced.
Daedelus Kite 