The Dynamo and the Spime, part three

Metaphors grafted to science develop their own sort of force, an auxiliary ability to convey a message, albeit to an audience expecting the relative ease of journalistic minimalism.

This entry will be short; it's devoted to a metaphor that I want to address obliquely because it deals with something that's indirect: chaos.

Adams writes that he'd become convinced that the sequence of human thought is chaos. Sequence implies continuity, at least some connection between the first and last elements and a channel to navigate the way between. Final conditions in some way, whether the way is obvious or obscure, arise from initial conditions. The channel is all process, all participation: turning points, decisions, may seem arbitrary, their effects transient. Superfluity defines the experience.

According to Sterling, the Gizmo, the predecessor of the Spime, is "...delicately poised between commodity and chaos." Here an older definition of chaos is probably more useful than what we currently associate with the word: instead of disorder, chaos is empty space, a chasm. According to the dictionary I use, this latter definition is obselete. It's still accessible, though, and I think it applies.

There's another definition I'm underqualified to speak of in any way other than obliquely...in math, chaos describes a property of some systems sensitive to initial conditions. Whether we can find how a final condition is described by an initial one depends on the precision of our tools. To place Henry again between the dynamo and chaos: looking for a cause and finding only effect, he could easily invoke the "occult mechanism." As precision in cataloging and defining causes might be aided by Spimes and their ilk, the human thought process may remain occult.

As definers of experiences, Blobjects, Gizmos and Spimes aren't so unlike the Venus, Virgin and dynamo. Via intention, each renders something of the transience of its creation, making flux static. As metaphors for whatever happens in the channel, they're direct, accessible, and sometimes forceful. This, from Mork's comment at the end of the last entry, nicely concludes this topic by broadening it.

The dynamo and the Spime, part two

When Francis Bacon said that science is "the development or economy of forces," machines were just beginning to economize and amplify force. Perspective as a graphic tool was still a relatively new way to realize space, and crafty building techniques like the cupola were the height of techne.



Cupola at St.Peter's Basilica, Rome

The "occult mechanism" was concomitant with popular modes of representation. Adams' statement that no machine could've generated the force that built the cathedral at Amiens bluntly makes my point for me: even up to and including Adams' lifetime, modes of discovering the unknown were mediated by analogy. Religious iconography and art were the primary modes, but science as a distinct discipline and system was also being leveraged to explore the occult. (What's now called the Romantic movement is popularly synonymous with "anti-science": a literary attempt to keep the mechanism occult. In retrospect it's interesting to see how deeply into the occult some preeminent scientists of the time were. Newton lived about twenty years after Bacon; he spent the latter part of his life in esoteric bible studies. Also: there's a blog that treats the subject of communication between science and literature.)



The Last Supper, Leonardo Da Vinci, 1498


The dynamo is from the era when the machine was the best representation of Bacon's statement. The Spime (see "When Blobjects Rule the Earth," bookmarked in the sidebar) is from a future era when the "development or economy of forces" is the responsibility of anyone who interacts with objects. It's an interesting way of thinking about the evolution of science. And of omniscience.

The Spime doesn't yet exist--Bruce Sterling (who came up with the idea) calls it a "historical thesis." I'm treating it as a literary device--a plot mechanism--but because of the medium (genre?) we're communicating through, even a literary device can be applied beyond text. For one thing, it can augment repututation. It can help out in first-person narrations. (This lets me do some "wrangling" for Sterling, about which I'm a little ambivalent as I only know Sterling the narrator. That he does some wrangling for me by commenting here, well, doesn't make me glib.)

Spimes are objects that narrate themselves. They exist in space and time, accumulating a past that determines their future. A Spime would likely not want you to attribute its workings to an "occult mechanism." If you do, it hasn't done what it's designed to do: to negate all that time (and mystery) between its existence as potential--some designer's idea--and its realization as your object, by telling you everything about itself. Ostensibly, a Spime can give you all the information the Spime's creator has, thereby making itself transparent. With transparency, you get omniscience: information about where the object came from, how it works, and where it needs to go when you're done with it is part of the object from the beginning. The process becomes the product...but all of this is in Sterling's speech.

Sterling talks about the Spime to an audience of SIGGRAPHers: a cohort of animators, computer game designers, motion picture makers...people who design virtual worlds. They work in two dimensions to simulate three; they've got algorithms to apply principles of perspective Da Vinci would've had to spend many, many hours on his back fast with a church ceiling to realize. Sterling suggests that these designers, or their future counterparts, will be creating not only useable objects via computer simulations (which they're already doing), but also a process by which we can find out nearly everything about our objects. They're embedding the process by which the object was created in the object, so it can communicate its history to its user. Representation no longer decorates the occult but the process by which the occult reveals itself. We participate in this process by using the object.





This process is one that is akin to what Adams experienced when he tried to understand, via analogy, how the dynamo could so affect his imagination. It's also akin to the process that makes pet rocks pets. In fact, the process is one that's so familiar and obvious, it doesn't even need an analogy. Or: the analogy is designed into the process so as to be transparent. It has been wholly digitized. And it ostensibly obviates the analogy the Romantics tried to write between human and machine. As a literary device, the Spime lets us think about what first-person omniscient narration might be like.

Next: Part three, if there is one, will address whatever remains to be said about this topic.