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 […]
The primary cultural purpose of the production of ideological and political difference is the continuing production (and reproduction) of ideological and political difference. The logical abstractions of information and entropy self-replication autonomously seek optimal methods of self-replication and self-propagation – through the individuated or tribal cognitive entities and artefacts of culture and communications systems. Observe […]
I appear to have made several fatal errors of judgement in attempting to decode culture, cognition, communication and complexity. The essence of comprehension and information that we attribute as rational, foundational and amenable to explanation is not encoded in such a way as to ever be fully decompressed, unpacked, structured and recorded. It has always […]
It is the strangest thing that all of this exists. The unlikely arrival in the Cosmos of any of this human world is profound. Our world, our cultures and all of our myriad differences and similarities – it is a wonder and peculiarity in all of the vast immensity and silent, unknowing turbulence and mindless […]
Complexity is a lot smarter than we are – all of our ratiobal interdictions into behavioural and sociological problems tend to amplify by displacement those problems.
Daedelus Kite 