IV. Imago Machinae

Machines speak to machines before they speak to man, and the ontological
domains that they reveal and secrete are (Guattari, 1995)

Guerilla dance, Guerilla musicality, coming from anywhere, taking what
is needed. (Two Fingers and Kirk 1995)

Can you hear them? Can you hear them speak to us? Their voices (Cixous,
1989)

are a system of interruptions or breaks. These breaks should in no way
be considered as a separation from reality, (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994)

as there is no clear distinction between divergencies and the body from
which they emerge. There are different orders of complexity, and the
limits of the machines which give rise to these. The distinction shall
be (?, 1999)

between different types of multiplicities that coexist, interpenetrate
and change places–machines, cogs, motors, and elements that are set in
motion, forming an assemblage that sounds (Deleuze and Guattari 1994)

like a heartbeat that can make the body throb in time to the machine.
(Virilio, 1995)

This is a multiplicity of levels that are all connected, none of which
may claim to have preeminence. (Prigogine, 1984).

Can you hear them? (Cixous, 1989)

Computer-assisted forms of thought are mutant and arise from other kinds
of music, other universes of reference… [this process of creation] is
inextricably temporal (Guattari, 1995)

and time implies degradation and death. (Prigogine, 1984)

Be ready to die and form new compositions. (Lispector)

+ + +

III. Note On Self-Organisation and Selectionism.

According to your mainstream brand neo-Darwinian biologist, natural
selection is the stuff of which evolution is made, the First Principle
of life. There is nothing in the natural world which cannot be explained
by random mutations within the genome and subsequent selection of the
fittest form by the natural environment. Beyond the constraints set by
the period of waiting for mutations to occur and external conditions,
there are no limits to this system, and an organism forms from scratch
to a furry crawling thing in a gradual process reliant on external
factors. There can be no internal feedback from the body (phenotype) to
the genes (genotype). There is no self-organising adaptive order: all
emerges from the process of selection and adapts over eons. As the
Darwinian critic Arthur Koestler pointed out, natural selection is hence
the only process found in nature which is devoid of feedback.
Neo-Darwinian theory is both unfalsifiable and all-pervasive; it is easy
to forget that it is a theory which has not yet been proven beyond doubt
by paleontological fact, and that Darwin himself suggested there may be
processes other than natural selection at work in the unfolding of life.
It is also a model which is readily plucked from its original context
and transplanted elsewhere, namely, to a computer.

There are a couple of rogue biologists and a-life crazies, however, that
don't believe the Selectionist hype. They are not suggesting that
natural selection is a dud theory, but simply that there might be other
factors involved, and that the really interesting questions don't just
concern life as a Darwinian competition between furry, crawling things,
but the interplay between structure and chaos at the basic levels of the
system which might give rise to it. Neo-Darwinism is an attempt to
reconcile two theories which are quite simply at odds with one another:
Mendelian genetics, which claims that organisms do not change with time,
and Darwinism, which claims that they do. This is usually done in a
mathematical way, with natural selection as the linchpin of some
creative equations. Biologists such as Brian Goodwin and Stuart Kauffman
take issue with this, claiming that an understanding of life should
begin at a more fundamental level than tree diagrams and
zoology–molecular biology, biochemistry, complexity theory. This is the
'language' of life: the way that structure spontaneously emerges from
chaos. And the equations here are a lot messier than your average
cold-cut genetic algorithms.

Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould looked at the fossil record a few
years back and decided that there is no proof that one species turns
into another slowly: the mathematics of the Neo-Darwinists relied upon
the idea that species took hundreds of millions of years to evolve eyes
and ears and legs and wings, branching off into other species in the
manner of a tree diagram over billions of years. What Eldredge and Gould
found was that species seem to spontaneously emerge fully formed: there
is minimal variation going on. A species emerges rapidly, it lasts for a
time (often a short time), and then it dies off. The in-between period,
the period of mutation and selectionism, is largely unaccounted for by
the fossil record, especially considering the importance of such
transitory phases to the neo-Darwinists. There are many 'missing links'
in the record, and nothing to explain how such high levels of order
emerge so quickly in the first place.

"For cells and organisms to work at all, there would have to be an
extraordinary amount of selection to get things to behave with
reliability and stability. It's not clear that natural selection could
ever have gotten started without some pre-existing order. You have to
already have a certain amount of order to select for variants"
(Kauffman, 337).

Kauffman is one of these rogue biologists. For over twenty years,
Kauffman has been going on about what we might call a Second Principle
in evolutionary biology: self-organisation. He argues that natural
selection alone is not enough to explain the relatively short timescale
on which life arose. Some other ordering principle is necessary, which
he locates in the ability of complex systems to self-organise (Hayles,
241).

A self-organising system involves the heresy of internal feedback and
internally-produced constraints. A particular system (an organism, a
chemical composition, a swarm of bees) will not continually diverge from
its own self-consistency but will also tend towards a structure or
pattern which keeps it poised between infinite variation and order: the
edge of chaos. In other words, Kauffman's paradigm predicts that living
creatures would converge upon certain forms as much as diverge from them
due to the influence of mutations caused by cosmic rays, wild chance and
external factors. Creatures will not just evolve over billions of years
due to selection, but will appear in a more concerted and spontaneous
manner. Systems will seek their own order. The heresy in this (as far as
neo-Darwinians are concerned, but not all evolutionary biologists) is
located in the fact that such enabling constraints emerge from within
the system itself. Consequently, natural selection is not the only force
at work in evolution. The system is its own material of expression, and
can generate its own tendencies and limits. Kauffman calls this process
antichaos, or "order for free".

One can sense that such a theory would be objectionable to biologists:
there is nothing distinctively biological about this explanation, which
in fact borrows from physics and complexity theory, and it explores
living organisms, chemical compositions and non-biological aggregates
alike as systems, privileging no particular machine. Kauffman for one
seems less interested in what biological life is than in the physical
properties of systems common to both animate and inanimate worlds and
how they transform themselves via evolutionary mechanisms. A 'complex
system' can be anything from the stockmarket to a flock of birds: the
concept has even been extended by certain biologists to encompass the
entire globe (in a holistic sense) as an ecosystem.

We might note here a similarity with virtual artist Keith Nettos'
Java-based sound system, Sonicform, whose evolving sound structures can
be found at the ANAT website
(http://www.anat.org.au/projects/dicc/index.html): the divide between
living and non-living is not the issue. As Keith puts it, "it's an echo
of that Descartian dichotomy between mind and matter. Do such
distinctions help us to know ourselves better? I'm not sure that they
do". Sonicform is more a world of Newtonian discovery than biblical
creation. Self-organisation works on a generative systemic level, and is
a prerequisite more so than a defining quality of life or evolution; it
is necessary but not sufficient to characterise an organic system. The
computer is the perfect environment in which to explore the confusion
and commonalities between animate and inanimate systems, and in that
confusion, reveal something of the processes underlying the actual
generation of self and order in the universe. Information-processing,
and life, require a certain type of complexity. The system must be
dynamic, yet allow for novel patterns. The computer emphasises the logic
as well as the mechanics of life, the emergent order and logic of
systems, which are then honed and honoured by the more familiar
conception of natural selection.

"The divide between living and non-living, to me, is just an expression
of that sublime universal mystery of islands of order existing in the
swamp of entropy… one difference between living and non-living systems
is based upon the notions of pattern, structure and process" (Keith, on
Sonicform).

+ + +

IV. Machinic Heterogenesis.

Self-organisation is the natural consequence of simple components
(cells, people at computer terminals, dollars, units of sound, air
molecules, genes, elements) interacting via equally simple rules.
Patterns and forms emerge from the collective raucous, and these forms
give rise to other forms. The components in such a system are bimbos:
they have no idea what is going on in the greater body, and don't care.
Granting that natural selection is also operating, these components
interact and develop the characterised properties of a complex system,
determined by the mode of aggregation of their constituent entities
(Boden, 147) and the associated limits of such an aggregation. In other
words, a complex system emerges from lots of small but well-chosen
components interacting in a rule-governed way, developing a larger
behaviour or pattern which cannot be predicted or divined from these
constituent parts. Random mutation and selection will act upon such a
system–this is how Selectionism fits in: forms will not just evolve
from scratch via selection, but will spontaneously emerge from within
the system, working in conjunction with the First Principle.

In the Sonicform system, the components are 'sound fragments', the
samples attached to the abstract images in the top left-hand corner of
the screen at startup, and also the people seated at terminals who
interact with these fragments. Although it might seem to be stretching
the concept of systemic components to include the user population, the
fact that the emerging pattern is dependent on these users to evolve
renders them part of the system. When one considers the machinic
assemblages which technical machines constitute with human beings, when
one considers that the evolving structure of the sound in Sonicform is
literally produced by the ears, eyes and choices of its listeners, this
much seems obvious. The organisation of a machine has less to do with
its materiality than with the inter-relations of its components. And the
formation of a sustainable pattern has less to do with the materiality
of the components than with the balance between their internal
constraints or rules and infinite variation.

The rules in Sonicform are the 'sound controllers' located on the
right-hand side of the screen, containing basic instructions such as
"play sound", "loop sound" and "stop sound" that control the sound
fragments and consequently limit the structure of the emerging acoustic
pattern. These rules and sounds are combined by users into a time-based
system known as a 'transform'. A transform consists of four separate
channels, and sound controllers are placed at various points in each
channel, organising the behaviour of the sounds over time. Because
sonicform is linked via the net to 'sonicserver' and consequently the
multiple versions of itself which are being executed at any point in
time, any changes that a user makes (eg: attraction towards a particular
kind of sound or a particular chain structure) are detected by
sonicserver and fed back into the primary chain structure (more about
this presently). This is the formative basis of sonicform's 'evolution':
a selection of internal behavioural constraints generated by its
constituent parts. As users, we are constituent parts.

Keith has pointed out that if we view the Sonicform system as part of a
different material order to the 'external' environment of users, then we
don't have a self-organising system in Kauffman or Varela's sense of the
term. Although this was the original motivation for his work–to give
people the feeling of being part, of being immersed in something that
was alive and evolving–if we view the computer as something separate
from our own animate order, this won't happen. I'd like to bring my own
(preformed) opinions about technology into play here and credit Keith
with realising his original intentions. If we abandon strict
neo-Darwinian conceptions of evolution as a simple competition between
individuals and inherited conceptions of technology as a rarefied 'tool'
which is separate from ourselves, that is, if we stop policing the
boundaries between technical and organic, we become part of the emerging
system. There is no distortion going on here. Rather, as I have been
trying to illustrate in this paper, the distortion is viewing technology
as a mere artifice or extension of ourselves.

The heresy in theories such as Kauffman's is the implication that both
biological and technical systems are capable of self-organisation and
evolution, that both are constellations of universes which are capable
of autonomy and complexity (and 'life' as a certain form of complexity).
This is not anti-humanist. It's not even post-humanist. Ideology is a
human concept which is brought to bear on technology. We're talking a
different register altogether. Technical machines, organic machines,
conceptual machines: each will beget the other, each will inscribe its
own pattern on the process, each will redefine the limits of such
connections.

"It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times
in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks.
Everywhere it is machines-real ones, not figurative ones: machines
driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with
all the necessary couplings and connections" (D+G, AO, 1).

'Machinic heterogenesis' is a mode of being and production: a term to
describe the way that the machines which populate the universe connect
with each other, mutually affect each other, exchange segments and then
bifurcate into new machines. Collective existential mutation. When we
sit at a computer screen, we are connected with the computer's universes
of reference through the circuits of sight, the play of fingers across
the keyboard, the conceptual and logical limits of the exchange laid
down by both parties. There is a certain synchrony going on across the
zone of intersection and compromise to the limits of this exchange. In
other words, the limits of the medium define the exchange and what we
are becoming as we connect with it.

"When working with a medium I guess one should try to uncover the 'ness'
of that particular medium - what gives it it's characteristics how to
engage it in a way that is unique to itself ie what has bought you to
single this material out from the available spectrum of matter you have
to express yourself in. I wanted to find what it is that you can do with
the net (it's now hard to conceive of a computer as anything other than
a node on a network, for me anyway guess i've been listening to Sun's PR
too much - the network is the computer…hohum) that is not possible
without it… the limits of the environment are ultra important to me"
(Keith, speaking about Sonicform, 11/2/99).

What is the 'ness' of the computer medium, and what are the possible
universes of exchange which extend from this? Sonicform explores this
exchange through sound, and through a system which explicitly invites us
to be a part of an evolving structure. The use of complexity theory and
evolution in sonicform makes explicit the rethinking of machines which
we have been doing here in general: machines speak to machines before
they speak to Man, and the ontological domains that they reveal and
secrete tend towards pattern in an innate way, determined by the mode of
aggregation of their constituent parts. In other words, Sonicform
rethinks technology in terms of evolutionary, collective entities,
rather than being closed in on itself and seen as separate (or at most,
a simulation or artificial extension of) the 'natural' world. And this
rethinking allows for the particular qualities of the medium itself, its
own characteristics, its own unique interpretations of our model of
evolution, to express themselves.

Here I might note something: evolution cannot be naturalised and reified
as an entity independent of the conceptual, technical and scientific
machinery of its production. In the eagerness to import biological
models to the computer in a-life, we sometimes forget that from its very
origins, the human species has been constituted by technical evolution,
and that it is the mediation afforded by technics which makes "it
impossible simply to describe evolution in terms of a self-contained, or
monadic, subject that passively 'adapts' to an object-like environment"
(Pearson, 4). Similarly, we have produced our various models of
evolution by analysing the 'natural environment' through the mediation
of technology. Technology has always enjoyed more than just the position
of a neutral tool to locate and test Nature, and has its own unique
limits and qualities to contribute to anything we produce with it.
Technical machines, organic machines, conceptual machines: each will
beget the other, each will inscribe its own pattern on the process, each
will redefine the limits of such connections.

So this will be the beginning of our rethinking. Constellations of
universes colliding, machines exchanging particularities, components
that retain their autonomy and yet can collect and self-organise into
complex systems, even life. "The ideas that we have been devoting space
to here–instability, fluctuation, complex systems–diffuse into the
social sciences", in the words of Ilya Prigogine (312). And also into
virtual art and a-life. Sonicform makes explicit this diffusion of
ideas. Evolution is not imported to the computer as a model to reflect
nature: the computer, the program, we as users are components of a
larger system, interacting via simple rules to give rise to unique
patterns.

With respect to self-organising systems and complexity theory in
particular, this is no mere metaphor or philosophical trick.
Philosophical acrobatics occur after the fact: if we can create an
evolving complex system on the screen which we ourselves are components
of, we tend to rethink the interface between nature and technology. What
does it say about the "reference point" of the natural world when
creatures whose entire function consists of weird acoustic dances across
computer circuitry begin to self-replicate and exhibit the signs of
open-ended evolution, resulting in formations which no longer have
analogues in the 'natural' world? I'd like to hesitate a start here.
Biology is its own material of semiotic expression. Techne` is its own
material of semiotic expression. Music is a collection of Acoustic Gods.
All of these are machines; constellations of parts, affects and
functions which are constantly (re)producing their own universes of
reference, and can answer to no original perfection.

To address the interface between nature and technology, we need a
philosophy of cells, flocks, patterns, components, motors, and elements.
We need a philosophy that will create an interference pattern across the
zone of intersection. Evolution is not just conflict, competition,
selfish genes, tree diagrams, living and non-living systems. It's not
just something furry, crawling things do. It's music. It's a dance.
Poetic-existential. Hybrid subjectivities. And all the wor(l)ds in
between.

+ + +

VII. Evolution. Music and Sound.

As we have just explored, the formative basis of sonicform's 'evolution'
is a selection of internal behavioural constraints generated by its
constituent parts. As users, we comprise some of these constituent
parts. Sonicform implements a threshold-triggered feedback loop to graft
the choices made by users back into the sound stream. When a particular
chain reaches a certain length (for example, five 'nodes' comprising
constituent sounds and their collection of rules), this chain is fed
back into the continuous chain structure being built by sonicserver,
which then updates the user population. For the energetic user, new
sound fragments can be created, sent in, married to sound controllers
and integrated into the basic componentry or transforms can be built and
linked into the chain structure. For the more passive point'n'click
user, there is the option of just pressing "play" for the chain they
wish to hear. In Keith's words, "the basic connectivity of the net, the
data manipulation and observation capabilities of the computing
resources that it links to, are thus combined to form a single
net-spanning entity which, while responding to individual touch, evolves
according to collective will".

+ + +

XI. Evolution. Music and :::Time. And How They Relate.

Music and time. Music as a temporal thing, as something which must be
experienced in each unfolding instant, as an experience which one cannot
transcend and view from a distance with the circuits of sight, as in a
static map of a particular landscape. Music is time-bound and the
cumulative experience on the ear and body is irreversible, inextricably
corporeal. Each
noise is experienced in a contingent fashion, and will not have a
reducible, causal ::: connection with the sounds preceding it,
and although we might say that the pattern

is caused by the aggregation of constituent sounds, we cannot say that the
experience is reducible to its constituent parts.

When listening to or composing music, it is simply impossible to
take an indifferent epistemological stance toward time. We might note the
similarity here with nonlinear thermodynamics: the irreversible laws
characteristic of statistical approximations that govern complex systems. I
am not saying that music

moves in the same way as fuel in a combustion chamber, but I am
saying that unlike the more domesticated realm of images and
animation,

music cannot be reduced to a series of still-frames which can be shown to
interact in a dynamic fashion, which are time-reversible or transcendable.
The experience,
and especially the pro

duction, of music is

nonlinear

::

i want to write to you about possible futures. about sound which treads the
interface between being and becoming: the edge of chaos. sounds
which skid in and out of existence as quanta in a photon chamber…..
:
:
organic: ephemeral: evanescent……………..:
:
:
:…….careful:
:……you might miss them.

sounds that vanish into past. sounds that break temporal symmetry. music
which issues as a gasp, a rupture, a stuttering. a small fluctuation in the
track which plays across the consciousness and emerges as an acoustic
pattern

[the disquieting strangeness of it all]

you can hear them only if you bring your face up to the screen and open
your mind wide. if you take leave of yourself. singularities of sound:
signals emerging from the flux and flus of technology. a microscopic
physics of. fucking with

:the meter of consumerised crap. remixing, rewriting, deconstructing
:
:…………………..
:
this unfolding now.:
:
:
:………..
:
:
:………..i want to write to you about. incomprehensible
incantations

which reverberate, ramify, intensify across the acoustic landscape

and move you…………

[hesitant sounds which issue from a child's lips as she
struggles to form her first word.]

:
quanta of sound that exist as entities, lifted from alternative worlds and
superimposed on the space of. 4 minutes. bits and bytes. and i want to
write to you about technology. about a relationship with technology which
is neither liberatory nor Luddite, but pragmatic and

:
singular.
a microphysics of sound
:
:
ephemera………………:

signals from noise.

:
:sniglsa morf oines..: sound that issues from the speakers, as if
for the first time, stuttering, gasping: haunted by the ephemeral nature of
technology. sound which acts as a beam-splitter: intersecting the path of
mainstream music and spinning it into wild whorls and eddies, producing an
interference pattern across the docile culture of consumerised tunes. oh,
the disquieting strangeness of it all.. [possible worlds]
:
:…………………………………can you hear them colliding?
:
:
:
:
:
signals from the flux and flus of technology………………..:

so many possible permutations. so little

time. fucking with the arrow of time. carving samples up into smaller and
smaller worlds and shaking them like snow globes then. writing to the
dancefloor, to the loungeroom, to the bastard offspring of the baby boomers.

can you hear them colliding? surface surfeit. here now now
:
O.

+ + +

Bibliography

Boden, Margaret A. The Philosophy of Artificial Life. New York, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996.

Cixous, Helene. Foreword in, The Stream of Life by Clarice Lispector.
University of Minnesota Press: 1989.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

Guattari, Felix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Power
Publications, Sydney, 1995.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. The University of Chicago
Press, 1999.

Kauffman, Stuart. "Order For Free" in Brockman (ed.) The Third Culture.
New York, Touchstone Press.

Pearson, Keith Ansell. Viroid Life. London and New York: Routledge,
1997.

Prigogine, Ilya and Stengers, Isabelle. Order Out of Chaos: Man's New
Dialogue With Nature. London, Bantam Books, 1984.

+ + +

Litera scripta manet. (the written word remains) -Horace