Month: July 2004

Back to the issue on Omnipresent Layered Inherent History I posted a little while back. I have started reading a book titled ‘Out of Control’ by Kevin Kelly of Wired fame. I have only just started but noticed a clear similarity with his musings on ‘swarm intelligence’ and Omnipresent Layered Inherent History. Most similar was the concept ‘invisible hand of combinatory systems’ essentially control without overall authority.

A swarm can be defined as:

“a decentralized model, based on the cooperation of autonomous units with a relatively simple and probabilistic behavior that are distributed in the environment and are provided only with local information”

A little simlar to my half arsed attempt at describing Omnipresent Layered Inherent History (“how elements, be they style, emotion, concept or form can be transported in ’spirit’ from one entity to another, mostly due to proximity”).

I feel that models such as art, style, architecture show many similarities with swarms; many practictioners, no overall controll or authority (apart from Saatchi et al).

So if the swarm model holds true, there can be no control of the arts, architecture etc as any undue pressure, will simply be swallowed up by the swarm and either reacted against or incorporated into the whole and evolved. Art can not be destroyed it can only be transofrmed from one form to another. Little similar to Quantum theory (or is that back-action principle of post-quantum theory??; “anything that affects something else must, in turn, be affected by that something else”.) .

Anyway thats my two pennies worth.

John Simpson of the BBC writes in his book ‘A Mad World, My Masters’…..”this is why, like the movies, tabloid journalism bears no relationship to life as we know it; it is too extreme, too lacking in colmplexity. There are too few categories of existence. The people the tabloids write about are either 2-dimensionally glamorous or successful, or they are victims, or they are ‘evil’…..”