In any sequence of symbols, experiences or other functional input to our various sensory apertures, the entity and events which bear the most unexpected or surprising data are those which can be said to carry the most substantive information content. In a world awash in a semiotic soup of aspirational novelty and atention-seeking advertisements, billboards, […]
Why is it that ideological, political and organisational ineptitude and incompetence are endlessly reoccurring phenomena? If the longer-term evolutionary or biological history of a living system, including it’s diverse manifestations in and as cultural and political systems, is oriented towards efficient self-replication and continuity, why is it that so many poor-fitting (and indeed – positively […]
That which we love, kills us. This thread of life and passing narrative or musical improvisation that we all embody – it is a self-propagating pattern of information and energy. We find ourselves serendipitously located at a point of resonance or systemic sweet spot of scale and complexity at which sentience and intelligence has invoked […]
The form and flow of this life and logical information space we inhabit is as much a matter of what we are not as what we are; we are manifestations and expressions of that life beyond us as much as that within. There exists a particular narrow focus of abstract pattern or cognitive extension that […]
Returning to a particularly poorly-kept secret of our shared lives: no one actually knows what they are doing and everyone is improvising, making it up as they go along. We are born into a world of pre-existing stories, traditions and symbols which envelops us like a tidal wave and security blanket of meaning, identity and […]
We believe that meanings and values are stored in things, in objects, places, people but this is not true. Meanings and values are stored as and in the distributed properties of complex, adaptive and interdependent fields and relationships of reference. The value of an artwork is not in the artwork itself, it is a property […]
All ordered organisational systems are engaged in an endless competition with (and of) disorder and entropy; it is a race to weave order and patterned persistence from available resources while the other end of the tapestry continuously unravels into largely unrecoverable waste and loss. These organisational systems aspire to a relatively stable or constructively adaptive […]
Wildfires Are Destroying Bolivia’s Rock Art This represents an authentic cultural as much as an ecological catastrophe. History is characterised by the constructive, recombinatory sedimentation of complexity over time. It is a procedural thread that is also (and simultaneously) deeply infused with entropy, disorder and systemic disassembly. It is interesting to consider that while biological […]
Context: Workshop: Do living things compute? More fascinating collaboration from the Santa Fe Institute. In short and in gestalt: it all seems to invoke a form of computation that is neither particular or distributed but is both simultaneously; that is not finite or discrete in the sense of having easily-defined or simply-encapsulated boundaries; and it’s […]
We are not so much trapped in our own minds and lives as we are trapped and bound by and in those of others. Personal dissatisfaction and unhappiness is common, perhaps ubiquitous, and is at base a shared endeavour; for all its dissonance and discomfort, it must be assumed that it is a property of […]
Cultural entities, artefacts and places are simple moments, nodes in time and space. It is true that any particular node in some way encodes the whole culture in its form and the patterned flow of information and energy from, around, through and as that thing. Cultural systems protect themselves from catastrophic failure by distributing their […]
It is an interesting thought that while we all appear to possess some degree of free will and self-determination, and beyond the intractable differences of a diversity of philosopical (and, let’s face it – political) thought on the matter, much of our mental lives are shaped and patterned by the contexts that we find ourselves […]
