Embracing Chaos: A strategy for the next millennium.

Absract of a talk given at ISEA98 on Sept 6, 1999 in Manchester.

We are approaching the end of the age of reason. Science has matured as a philosophy to the point where it recognizes the existence of the unknowable. No longer labouring under the naive Newtonian assumption that all the universe can be measured or predicted Science turns to the study of Chaos in an attempt to gain insight into the inner workings of the world.

Communications technologies allow culture to instantaneously encircle the world and feedback on itself. Sampling and looping its way into the next millennium, the iterative nature of post-modern humanity makes it impossible to predict. Artists can embrace Chaos as a tool for deciphering and forging the new world disorder.

Emergent robotic behavior, genetic algorithms, and fractal mathematics are just a few of the approaches being taken. After more than 2000 years of living under Euclidean rule our head space is changing. The shortest distance between two points is no longer a straight line but a point of view.

Just as Euclid planted the seeds for an age ruled by logic, we are inoculating a culture of intuition. Try to imagine the world after one or two millennia of Chaos. What happens when feedback is produced as DNA starts to sample and manipulate itself? an idea is as easily spread to the whole race as it is to conceive? When personal experience is not tied to the body?

Revolution becomes evolution and thought becomes reality. We become Meta-human and culture moves into the Noosphere.