Video by Steev Morgan 2011
Audio mix by Steev Morgan from samples by suonho and Flick3r from http://www.freesound.org

The Fort was approached by a back alley and was up on the second floor. There was a small deck at the top of the fire escape. There was a formidable pile of bikes and parts almost reaching up to the deck.

Inside the barricaded door was kitchen and beyond that was a warren of lofts and cages where people slept. Everything was covered with graffiti.

Crazy Steve lived there, also Kirkie (Maddog) and Filthy Sean. Lots of people crashed there: travelers, touring bands and some who just couldn’t make it home or had nowhere better to go.

I hung out there a lot; it was a pretty reliable place to get a beer after hours, and all manner of artists, musicians, and Kensington Market characters could be counted on dropping by.

In March of 1988 the Goofs were moving out to a new Fort, on Oxford I think. It was the end of an Era and all the regulars were notified. They planned to remove some of the wood to build spaces in the new place, so there was going to be a little Demolition Party.

At the time I worked as a technician in the OCA film department so I procured a 16mm camera to record the proceedings. Andrew O1 was my production assistant.

The walls were painted black to prevent the graffiti squad from making any connections. Steve, Kirkie and Sean did most of the destruction.

Eventually I cut this footage to a couple of songs from Fringe products release “Carnival of Carnage and Chaos” posted them on http://youtube.com/teeveesteevee.

Music in this video is Bunchofuckingoofs recorded live at the Rivoli in Toronto January 4 1991 by Steev (TeeVeeSteevee) Morgan with a Sony Walkman Pro hooked up to the board. Some video of those original performances is also be available at http://youtube.com/teeveesteevee.

Film rescanned and cut together in 2011.

By Steev Morgan 2011. Macro Time lapse of a wilting strawberry flower that I shot with my Veho Micro Camera and iStopmotion on the Mac. Sound mash-up by me from an obvious archival source.

Enjoy it as a loop.

Music and Video by Steev Morgan 2010

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Starring:
Tom Leonhardt
Ursula Pflug
Tim Wynne-Jones
Rowan McCulloch
Morgan McCulloch
Rowan Orfald Morgan
and narrated by Hugh McCulloch

Completed in Jun 2, 2009 for the IMAGES festival in Toronto during an Artist’s Residence at Charles Street Video.

The corn has not been great, but I went looking for ripe ears the other day and discovered the dampness had fostered a real nasty growth on one big cob. Distended gray-blue kernels like ghostly babies’ fingers tangled in the silky hairs. When I touched it, a digit dropped off revealing the blackness within. Scary!

It was a fungus called “corn smut” (Ustilago maydis), probably the bane of many corn farmers in weather like this. After I regained my composure, and while I was trying to gross out the kids with the mutant cob, my lovely wife reminded me that this was probably the very same fungus we had enjoyed in fine restaurants in Mexico. There it is treasured as a delicacy known by its ancient Aztec name “Huitlacoche”(it sounds a bit like “wit la coach, eh”). You can buy it in cans at Mexican specialty shops.
A quick google of the Web confirmed this and gave the additional fact that the Aztec name translates as “raven’s excrement”. Too much information perhaps, but all of a sudden “corn smut” didn’t seem like such a bad name after all and it almost sounds like fun compared to the French “goitre du mais”.

Of course I had resolved to eat it! Now, if you are grossed out at this point you probably haven’t put a lot of thought into what your regular mushrooms grow on.

Online recipes suggested sauté-ing with onions, garlic and chilies to fill tortillas or tamales (corn dumplings). These “Mexican truffles” have a rich subtle mushroom-y flavour and this was my first chance to taste them fresh, I thought more than a taco was in order!

I was inspired by the optimism of the rampant squashes that are making the best of a bad situation and escaping from our composter. The result was the tasty appetizer below. It was a bit labour intensive but I felt like I was turning lead into gold.
Oro del Filosofo
(Stuffed Squash Flower Fritters with Huitalcoche and Goat Cheese)

(serves 4)

-1/2 red. Onion, chopped fine
-3 cloves of garlic, chopped fine
-Several sprigs of fresh oregano
-1 small fresh hot pepper
(If your pepper is not hot enough supplement with whatever you’ve got, I used a dried, smoked pepper, soaked overnight in vinegar and oil, and then chopped)
-Approx. 1.5-2 c. huitlacoche (gently cut from cob and separated gently from silk and corn)
-1 egg
-(2 Tbsp.) of soft goat cheese (or cream cheese or other soft cheese)
-1/2 c. cornstarch
-1 t. baking powder
-1/2 c. flour (non-wheat if desired)
-3 t. milk (non-dairy, if desired)
-Salt, to taste
-4 large fresh squash blossoms stems attached (picked the morning of serving, when open. Store loosely in a large covered bowl in the fridge until needed)
Sufficient oil to float the stuffed blossomss

Chop onions and garlic and sauté until translucent.

Toss in peppers and oregano, as well as coarsely chopped huitlacoche (some other fungus like oyster mushroom would also work).

Let mixture cool.

In morning, pick squash blossoms.

Stir goat cheese in with huitlacoche mixture.

Carefully spoon mixture into squash blossoms.

Fold tips of blossoms over into a pear shaped package.

Scramble egg with milk.

Mix cornstarch, baking powder, salt and flour in shaking bag.

Gently roll stuffed squash blossoms in egg mixture, and then fluff them gently in flour mixture. Set on drying rack (like a cookie rack).
Let sit for 10 minutes, then repeat;
Keep cool until ready to serve, gently turning. Dust with flour again if egg soaks through.

Just before serving make sure oil is good and hot
Deep-fry one at a time until golden-brown, turning regularly.

Dry on rack or paper towel for 5-7 minutes, serve hot.

A brief look at history reveals a deep underlying relationship between the inspirations and aspirations of mathematicians, scientists, and artists. For one thing, we are all trying to explain the world around us.

Click for Animation

The Greeks thought the true nature of the universe was to be found in ratios of numbers. Pythagoras¹ saw all things as relationships defined by the void between them ², in the same way that the spaces between beats in a piece of music determine its rhythm and tempo. This is where we get our concept of “rationality”.³

The “Golden Ratio” was particularly cherished by the Greeks and can be defined as a rectangle that is constructed such that the removal of a square equal to its height from one end will leave a smaller rectangle of the same proportions.

Click for animation.

Architectural historians have identified the use of this ratio in the design of the Acropolis, and so mathematicians refer to this proportion by the first letter of the name Phidias (Gr. Phi, or ), as he is the architect of the Athenian Temple complex.

Further popularized in Luca Pacioli’s 1509 book Divina Proportione (which was illustrated by Da Vinci and includes the famous picture of the Vitruvian Man, see animation). This “Golden Ratio” was rediscovered during the Renaissance by artists as a guide to producing works with pleasing proportions. It has been seen as emblematic of the ideals of rationality. Ironically, is also an irrational number.

Studies of perspective in the early 1400′s by Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) produced a  geometrical formula for two dimensional representation of the three dimensional world that became the standard model for the realistic depiction of space from the Renaissance onward.

The development of calculus by Isaac Newton gave the finishing touches to the Copernican heliocentric paradigm and bequeathed a powerful set of tools to astronomy and physics. This emboldened society to believe that, if these laws could be mastered, the universe could be controlled.

With the earth removed from the center of the universe, the church lost its monopoly on science and art. Armed with a new mechanistic world-view and with a set of mathematical tools that seemed to have unlimited predictive powers, the western world entered what was called the “Age of Enlightenment”. This was an echo of the Renaissance and of the Golden Age of Pericles, during which Phidias had worked. The “Enlightenment Thinkers” believed in the perfection of mankind through accumulation of knowledge.

So we see that, for each of these time periods, the cultural understanding of mathematics had both a direct and an indirect influence on the culture’s self-expression, providing practical tools, useful paradigms, and areas for further endeavor.

What is the mathematical metaphor that dominates us in the post-modern age? How will the math of today affect our cultural future?

I propose that the Science of Complexity, also known as Chaos Theory, provides many concepts which help to give insight into the context and direction of contemporary culture, as well as providing new technologies, methodologies, and metaphors for the production of valid work and theory.

What tools can it provide us, both practically and intellectually? Perhaps we should first ask what it is that we look would look for in such a paradigm.

A useful paradigm for artistic discourse should fulfill a few basic requirements:

It should contextualize our work in history: It should provide a historical and geographical overview of cultural phenomena which is inclusive of the diversity of human experience. It should provide tools for understanding society; past and present, and it should contextualize current trends and indicate future developments. It should help make some sense of apparent paradoxes, contradictions and disparities.

It should give direction to movements and to individuals: It should provide motivation and direction to groups, individuals and specific works, just as ideals rooted in mathematics have, throughout the ages, inspired people to believe in the power of Art to elevate and enlighten.

It should provide tools and technology: It should enhance or provide new avenues of expression and distribution. Just as the mathematics of optics provided optical devices that allowed painters to analyze what they saw and lead to the eventual development of the cameras and the scanners we use today.

It should provide metaphors and tools for critique and analysis: It should provide a language for understanding new concepts and relationships , just as the science of optics has given us the concepts of “focusing our attention” and “getting things in perspective”. It should also have the capability of self-analysis ⁴ .

It should open significant areas of endeavor: It should provide areas for artists and critics to direct their investigations and their works, in the same way that modernism opened the door to the study of contemporary life and ultimately art itself.

Chaos theory is the study of simple iterative formulae that produce complex, unpredictable results. In common usage the word “chaos” implies disorder or randomness but this sense it means an underlying, unpredictable order from which patterns emerge over time.

Those patterns are called fractals and they have a number of special attributes which make them different from Euclidean geometrical shapes.

One unique aspect is that their borders are infinitely convoluted, so that it is impossible to predict if points in the vicinity are inside or outside of the shape. This complexity means that fractals occupy fractional dimensions (they can occupy a dimensionality between 2 and 3D for example) (Burger/Starbird 507).

Fractals also demonstrate self-similarity at different scales. Patterns may be contiguous or have many elements that are not connected. Their patterns display infinite with infinite differentiation.

The equations that create fractals do not generate patterns in a linear fashion, as in Euclidean geometry where adjacent points are determined successively. Patterns emerge chaotically, so that it is impossible to predetermine if subsequent iterations will generate points which will fall within the shape or not. The final outcome of many iterations is radically affected by tiny changes in the initial conditions.

Chaos theory doesn’t espouse a deterministic, Newtonian idea of linear causality, but one of emergence. As such, “things” can be regarded, on one level, as structures and on another level as processes (Young 5).

Complexity theory also denies the concept of the objectivity, or separation of the observer from the observed (Young 11).

How can an understanding of Chaos be helpful in a cultural analysis? Culture is a non-linear dynamical system. The development and propagation of ideas is an iterative process. The repetition of concepts, both verbally and concretely, forms the evolution and the canon of our culture. This process has accelerated since the development of reproduction technologies like the printing press, and it is now increasing exponentially through digital information technologies. It is reasonable to expect a massively iterative system such as this to produce complex, non-linear results. How best to understand this complexity? I believe Chaos theory meets the criteria set forth earlier:

It contextualizes our work in history: The contemporary practice of referencing the distant and recent past in the forms of irony, parody, homage, reruns, remakes, takeoffs, mash-ups, outtakes, rip-offs, revivals, samples, loops, cover versions, re-mixes and reissues etc. is one of the defining features of Post-modernism. We have inherited this practice directly from the Modernist mandate for self-analysis, which has been multiplied by the subsequent proliferation of industrial technologies for image making, replication and distribution. Fractal models help us understand the post-Internet de-centeralization of expertise, authority, and distribution in all realms of expression.

It gives direction to groups and to individuals: The open source movement, wikis, and distributed computing, are new forms of massively collaborative endeavor that are best understood as non-linear dynamical systems. Democratized distribution like YouTube and peer-to-peer file sharing circumvent the traditional top-down distribution models, and allow the appearance of “viral memes” and other emergent phenomenon. Complex systems like these are subject to the Butterfly Effect”, i.e. final outcomes are critically dependent on tiny changes in the initial conditions. This means that all of society can be affected by the actions of individuals and small groups.

It provides tools and technology: The tools of chaos are those that allow us to produce, reproduce, alter, sample, loop, feedback and distribute information. Computers, whose sole function is to cycle thousands of times per second and store millions of iterations of ones and zeros are ideal, but so are cell phones, wireless devices, smart appliances, and samplers to name a few others. Chaos algorithms are used to create realistic textures to 3D animations, encrypt sensitive data, and cut down noise in transmissions.

It provides metaphors and tools for critique: Unlike the Newtonian Paradigm, Chaos theory and cybernetics ⁶ integrates the concept of circular causality. Simple loops where A causes B, and B causes A are found throughout the art world. For example, the relationship between artist, critic, and audience, between inspiration and work, as well as perfomative and improvised scenarios all have thes “chicken/egg” relationships.

The fractional dimensionality of emergent phenomena and the uncertainty of their border regions suggest what socio-cyberneticist TR Young called “fractal facticity”; meaning that more than one thing can be true simultaneosly depending on one’s point of view in time and space. This approach helps us to understand, in a holistic fashion, the postmodernist de-centeralization of cultural discourse from the various perspectives of post-colonialist / post-structuralist / Marxist / feminist /queer / etc. theory.

A complex analysis of works would be done done with an eye for self-similarity at different scales, rather than looking for linear connections and Euclidean constructions with their connotations (“right” angle, “golden” rule, getting “straight to the point” etc.). For example, Pollock’s paintings have been been interpreted in terms of their fractal properties (Peterson). Emily Zants has used complexity theory to study French literature’s evolution in relation to cinema (Zants)⁷.

A phenomenon like the replication, distribution and display on the Web of the self-similar frames in a QuickTime video over millions of hard drives and screens can be viewed as a vast fractal distribution intersecting both cyberspace and real space/time.

It opens significant areas of endeavor: Aside from the use of fractals for their 2D and 3D graphical properties there are many applications where iterative systems can be applied. Artists who produce work that demonstrates emergent behavior, like David Rokeby and Norman White, exploring complexity and chaos creatively.

Artificial intelligence, massively collaborative on-line virtual spaces, ubiquitous computing and image recording with democratized distribution; these are all chaotic systems.

The convoluted fractal boundaries between doing and being; between the real and the imagined; between the idea and the art; between the artist and the viewer; between the public and the private; these are areas of infinite richness to be explored, and what better tools than the Aesthetics of Chaos to navigate them?

Bibliography

Burger, Edward B. and Starbird, Michael The Heart of Mathematics: An invitation to effective thinking
Key College;2 edition (August 18, 2004)

Peterson, Ivars Jackson Pollock’s Fractals 1999
http://www.maa.org/mathland/mathtrek_9_20_99.html

Rokeby, David Installation Artist
http://homepage.mac.com/davidrokeby/home.html

White, Norman The Normill
http://www.normill.ca/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoreanism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippasus

Young TR CHAOS THEORY AND HUMAN AGENCY
http://www.critcrim.org/redfeather/chaos/chaosindex.html

Zants, Emily Chaos Theory, Complexity, Cinema and the Evolution of the French Novel
1998 Edwin Mellen Press ISBN13: 978-0-7734-8789-5

1 – Pythagoras (c. 580-500 BCE), the Greek philosopher/mathematician who is known for the theorem explaining the relationship between the lengths of the side of a right triangle, also originated some profound ideas about the nature of space and time which influenced thinkers from Plato on for many centuries.

2 – Aristotle (384-322 BCE) (wiki/Pythagoreanism) explains the Pythagorean concept of how Form emerges from Void by creating relationships in space and time.

The void distinguishes the natures of things, since it is the thing that separates and distinguishes the successive terms in a series. This happens in the first case of numbers; for the void distinguishes their nature.

3 – So much did the Greeks cherish their rationalism that legend has it that when Hippasus discovered that the square root of 2 could not be represented as a ratio of two natural numbers, and was therefore irrational, he was drowned at sea and the information was kept secret by the Pythagoreans.

4 – Clement Greenberg wrote in the 1970s that Modernism was the culmination of a social project of self analysis. He said it started with the empiricism of Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant and manifested as a science-like self-analytical approach in the arts that culminated in Post Painterly Expressionists, like Morris Louis, who avoided the intervention of the brush by simply pouring paint on the canvas. But by then postmodernism was already underway.

5 – This effect discovered by Edward Lorenz in the 1960s. When he re-ran a computer weather simulation, after rounding the initial parameters off to 2 decimal places from 3 or 4, he got radically different results, leading him to say it was as if the flapping of a butterfly’s wing in the forest had caused a hurricane on the other side of the world.(Burger/Starbird 490)

6 Cybernetics is the study of communication and control systems in machines and nature and important area of research is into positive and negative feedback where complex and unpredictable results are produced by self-limiting iterative systems.

7 – In the introduction of her book Zants states:
“…novels developed techniques and structures such as fragmentation, doublings, flashbacks, or metaphorical representations that are cinematic because they engender a sense of spatial and temporal simultaneity, whereas the traditional novel is condemned to the linearity of words.(Zants)”

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? When 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.

More on this subject…