Sunday, November 16, 2008
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Driessens & Verstappen
These two have several really interesting projects. I would highly recommend spending some time exploring their site...
Driessens & Verstappen
Driessens & Verstappen
Tauba Auerbach
Tauba Auerbach
This is what I think the letters would have looked like in the disturbing short story by Franz Kafka titled:
In the Penal Colony
Monday, November 3, 2008
Frederick Turner
Excerpt from: "Abundance and the Human Imagination"
"But a different story has now begun. Artists rejected the fecundity and abundance of nature partly because, so it seemed, science had shown it to be a fraud and a cause of delusive hope. If the universe is on the whole a spring that is relaxing, an engine that is running down, a fire that is burning itself out, then the richness of living creativity is merely an eddy in the general current, a chance and temporary reversal in the fated descent into decay and mortality. But suppose the universe were not, in fact, running down?
The new sciences that have been emerging in the last few decades seem to confirm the validity of this question. Nonlinear dynamical systems can and do create new forms of order and organization. Entropy has been entirely reconceived by information science. It now appears not to be a measure of decay and death, but rather a natural explorativeness of possible information-states that is happily used by living and non-living systems as a free computational device. Evolution uses entropy to explore possible new life-forms, just as markets use it to construct a pricing system and explore the viability of new technologies. Information—the stuff of our lives and experiences—does not die when it rushes away from us in the form of dead skin DNA, sound waves, gravitational vibrations and light; it is still there, fleeing outwards from the planet, to be collected perhaps by some black hole and preserved at the surface of its event-horizon until Brahman blinks, Gabriel blows his horn, the black hole evaporates and it all begins again.
What, then, if the wild profusion of new natural forms generated by evolution were not the exception but the rule? What if the universe were not one of scarcity and loss but abundance and recuperation? When evolution was discovered in the nineteenth century, its interpreters made the characteristically modern mistake of seeing it in subtractive, reductive terms: as a struggle for existence in which the weaker go to the wall, or as the overwhelming of available resources by overpopulation. What they missed was the miracle—the astonishing exponential power of reproduction, the even more amazing conserving power of heredity, that keeps almost intact over billions of years the most sophisticated biochemical structures, and the yet more astonishing result of the combined operations of variation, selection and reproduction, that is, the production of a torrent of new species and ecosystems. For nature, species are not precious irreplaceable inheritances whose loss is a disaster, but temporary and expendable guises for its protean and intelligent vitality. Life is cheap. Extinct species outnumber currently existing ones by billions to one. Nature is unimaginably more wasteful than we are, and it can afford to be.
"But a different story has now begun. Artists rejected the fecundity and abundance of nature partly because, so it seemed, science had shown it to be a fraud and a cause of delusive hope. If the universe is on the whole a spring that is relaxing, an engine that is running down, a fire that is burning itself out, then the richness of living creativity is merely an eddy in the general current, a chance and temporary reversal in the fated descent into decay and mortality. But suppose the universe were not, in fact, running down?
The new sciences that have been emerging in the last few decades seem to confirm the validity of this question. Nonlinear dynamical systems can and do create new forms of order and organization. Entropy has been entirely reconceived by information science. It now appears not to be a measure of decay and death, but rather a natural explorativeness of possible information-states that is happily used by living and non-living systems as a free computational device. Evolution uses entropy to explore possible new life-forms, just as markets use it to construct a pricing system and explore the viability of new technologies. Information—the stuff of our lives and experiences—does not die when it rushes away from us in the form of dead skin DNA, sound waves, gravitational vibrations and light; it is still there, fleeing outwards from the planet, to be collected perhaps by some black hole and preserved at the surface of its event-horizon until Brahman blinks, Gabriel blows his horn, the black hole evaporates and it all begins again.
What, then, if the wild profusion of new natural forms generated by evolution were not the exception but the rule? What if the universe were not one of scarcity and loss but abundance and recuperation? When evolution was discovered in the nineteenth century, its interpreters made the characteristically modern mistake of seeing it in subtractive, reductive terms: as a struggle for existence in which the weaker go to the wall, or as the overwhelming of available resources by overpopulation. What they missed was the miracle—the astonishing exponential power of reproduction, the even more amazing conserving power of heredity, that keeps almost intact over billions of years the most sophisticated biochemical structures, and the yet more astonishing result of the combined operations of variation, selection and reproduction, that is, the production of a torrent of new species and ecosystems. For nature, species are not precious irreplaceable inheritances whose loss is a disaster, but temporary and expendable guises for its protean and intelligent vitality. Life is cheap. Extinct species outnumber currently existing ones by billions to one. Nature is unimaginably more wasteful than we are, and it can afford to be.
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