Making Unmaking: Part Three

There’s pattern-making that catches in at the same time as the pattern evolves and equally comes undone. That is not an intentional linking in to a social network- not an affiliation to a membership that has any inherent or long-term existence. It is generated by something far more removed, and yet far more common- a gradual filling in of pauses and emptying out of intensity- a continual re-positioning that is mobile, immediate because each component only has in its dealings those small shifts necessary to tweak local encounters. And yet there is this sense of wholeness- the pulsating filiations of this spreading and cohering that lets the very atmosphere become a kind of distributed lung.

Contact/no-contact is a bit of a misplaced priority for concern- and this should be understood too in all socialization programs aimed at including the seemingly socially removed priorities of autistic compulsion, anti-social attention seeking noise fanatics, oddly clothed teenagers or infants more interested in spinning than in playing age appropriate games of cowboys and Indians, mothers and fathers.

What I mean by this is that there are an accumulation or backdrop of tiny motionings- all the turns and re-turns, the trials and errors that never make it to any well toned meaning or even to a coordinated whole, let alone a personalized intent or historically relevant passage of time in which a certain action can be said to take place.

Out of this multitude, festering and boiling and cooling in which we insert and remove minute involvements that are contingent upon other involvements the beginnings of gestures collide, meet and separate, forming themselves. Only out of these impacts do brief occurrences stay for long enough to create the beginning of ideas. These ideas are multi-facetted lean-tos worked out between bodies or body parts, or chemical interactions and border exchanges and therefore can not get started out of one direction alone. They summon up you and me in relation to one another. Language arrives out of that pacing- that to and fro questioning that plays with tempo, with abbreviation, with sudden extension and growth spurts seemingly coming out of the blue.

Last night I watched a program about the work of Professor Lovelock, a maverick thinker who came up with the Gaia theory whereby earth’s atmosphere as an optimum environment for the diversity of life is linked in by continuous feedback into the cycles of intake and waste through which populations prosper to a certain optimum level, thereby altering the balance of climatic and chemical conditions that led to that explosion and so sending themselves into a natural decline in order to be replaced by a species more suited to these new conditions. Until again the same optimum threshold is reached in this species and so on, in a pendulum balance where different species are intimately entwined and modulated through natural selection. That is always linked into environmental plateaus that their own behavior instills and eventually over-runs in order to push into likelihood a different set of conditions. Intake and emissions at microscopic levels are amplified in planetary systems to create conditions conducive or un-conducive to various life-forms in entangled phases.

Can this same logic be applied in a speeded up form to a dance, an educational program for autistic children, a creative episode of output, exhaustion and renewal? Can aesthetics- the productivity of a period of making be considered in the sense of pixels or sound waves or motioning intertwined with physical actions, metabolisms, co-ordinate thresholds of physical possibilities connected with denser enfolding periods of separation, pause, decline, dissociation? Here then instead of talking about the ebb and flow of species as they tip the atmosphere this way and that way, one could talk of an ebbing and flowing of states of movement and rest, of conscious discrimination and the indiscernible progress of pattern-making that rus onwards.

James lovelock made a simple computer program called Daisy World in which he showed the ebb and flow of black daisies and white daisies according to the periodic affects that each species had on the earth’s temperature. At first the temperature is cold. Gradually the black daisies take hold because they absorb the maximum amount of heat and so in minuscule degrees the earth’s temperature begins to rise. At a certain threshold it becomes warm enough for the white daisies to germinate and they prosper as the temperature rises because they deflect the heat of the sun off form the earth’s surface. The heat on the surface of the earth gradually diminishes until they go into decline and so again the black daisies are able to get a foot-hold and to become the predominant species.

There is another computer program which shows how a simple model of a clumsy top-heavy walking avatar gradually optimizes the capacity to walk in countless generations where only the models who learn, often by chance, from their falls to bounce back up, or roll or soften so as not to break limbs are able to reproduce. What emerges through this program in several hundred generations up the line are figures that can run and fall and roll and re-stand and playfully intertwine and come apart with one another. In other words they interact and “learn” a full repertoire of coordinated human movements based on interlocking patterns of stabilization and de-stabilization. A pendulum of falling and rising that becomes self-fulfilling as a manifestation of human physical, mental and emotional integration.