#open systems

[rawjeev]

“The sensing body is not a programmed machine but an active and open form, continually improvising its relation to things and the world. The body's actions and engagements are never wholly determinate, since they must ceaselessly adjust themselves to a world and a terrain that is itself continually shifting.”

— David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous.

[the-ephemeral-ethereal]

There can be no truly closed systems in life.

from Children of Dune by Frank Herbert

[dustedmagazine]

Joe Morris/Damon Smith — Gusts Against Particles (Open Systems)

Gusts Against Particles by Joe Morris / Damon Smith

What makes an improvisation good? Students ask that question, and teachers fumble for answers. The world is the proverbial oyster where this superficially naïve but all-important binary construction is concerned. Listening? Form and category? Intention? Technique? Rapport, Environment or some combination? This disc’s annotator, the superb guitarist Henry Kaiser, might point to some balance of freedom and discipline, and for the moment, especially regarding this meeting of guitarist Joe Morris and bassist Damon Smith, that seems as good a path toward the golden mean as any.

An opening chord from Morris is answered by Smith, with instantaneous telepathy, by a two-note idea that makes the whole sound like some kind of James Brown funky break, but just as quickly, it’s abandoned. So much for category and form, but there’s a load of discipline behind the cultural bait and switch, whatever the trials and tribulations of intention might entail. The exchange is breathtaking in its rapid fluency, almost as mesmerizing as the moment 14 seconds into “Momentum Redoubling” where the duo comes to rest on what my European-trained ears insist on calling a third, with Smith’s arco floating as Morris’ whistle-clean guitar tone resonates and fades.

Then, there’s the answer, that indefinable series of spaces where one element leads to another with something like frank inexorability. Kaiser really does get to the heart of the matter. The musician’s language is intuitive, and the excitement comes when listening necessitates an on-the-toes approach to the point where guesswork and resolution join forces, where forms create themselves. Those are the best moments. The contrapuntal territory inhabited by much of the music does nothing to pave the way for “Equalization Staggering”’s rough and rowdy timbral intrigue. Initial articulation births low-register harmonies that don’t so much define as emerge, any implication only half-audible in the varied sonic density, but that’s only a part of the story. Like the Buddha’s raised flower, everything expands in significance, sympathetic vibrations and the artifacts of strings against bow and fingers opening doors to the patient perceiver. Every tremolo and fragmentation during the first minute and 42 seconds can be traced back to the initial tiny big bang. Is Morris bowing?

The wonder of it all resides in what it would be useless, and ultimately misleading, to call spontaneity. Total immersion might be closer, the ever-present juxtaposition of pasts in the ever-present of harmonious conflict. How’s that for a binary in search of disillusion?

Marc Medwin

[protoslacker]

The press sees only one thing when they look at tech -- companies. The biggest ones. They are not the exclusive driving force of technology. Open systems, that they always oppose, keep undermining them. You're not even getting 1/2 the story.# It's important because there's a lot of political movement when tech's grip on tech is gone, when there's a generational shift in platforms. I've seen at least four of these in my life: Unix, PCs, GUI (Mac/Windows), Web. The powerful companies were always caught flat-foote

Dave Winer at Scripting News. Tech companies aren't half the story

[nextwavefutures]

Making sense of futures

I was invited to talk about futures recently at the Royal College of Defence Studies In London. Most of the event was unattributable, but our initial remarks were recorded, so I can share a version of them here. Futures, in its modern version, is a child of the Second World War. It has two foundational strands, one in the United States, funded by the Department of Defense, and associated with…

Making sense of futures

[shrinkrants]

From the ecological perspective, all open systems — be they cells or organisms, cedars or swamps — are seen to be self-organizing. They don’t require any external or superior agency to regulate them, any more than your liver or an apple tree needs direction on how to function. In other words, order, or dynamic self-organizing, is integral to life. This contrasts with the hierarchical worldview that dominated our mainstream assumptions for millennia, where mind is set above nature and where order is assumed to be imposed from above on otherwise random stuff.

-- Joanna Macy in World as Lover, World as Self, (quoted by Kelly Hayes in a great podcast at Movement Memos.)

[proserpentina]

nodes & edges