Saturday, October 3, 2009

Organic Systems

Constructed space vs. natural space.

In a completely organic environment, chaos is more readily accepted and incorporated. You can go completely berserk in a grassy field and not have much of an effect. But if you go completely berserk in an office building you can do much more "damage".

Organic systems aren't so much defined by this "working"/"not-working" dichotomy. A piece of technology is sleek, hard-edged. Binary. It either works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work, the problem is located, isolated, and deleted.

...It occurs to me that perhaps our computer systems and so forth are merely the first step towards the creation of an organic system. A forest seems like a good example of an organic system. Huge, consisting of many smaller entities (almost holographic, in that each part is a reflection of the whole, or stands for the whole: synecdoche), with multiple redundancies.

Now, that's the part that I think ties the two different worlds together. Remember that phrase I put here earlier, "graceful degeneracy"? It's the idea that if some parts fail, the system will continue. Likewise, one tree can fall, no big deal for the entire forest. It's the idea of having a system that is large enough, soft enough around the edges, that a part of it can fail or be excised, and the rest will simply adapt.

I wonder-- is the creation of artificial material part of "nature"? It must be, since even the most unusual plastics or polymers are merely rearrangements of pre-existing material. So really, downtown Manhattan is a "natural" phenomenon... perhaps more frightening is the idea of "sterility", absence of life. We are, as we know, host to legions of bacteria and various little harmless organisms. So maybe, when we contemplate the vaguely horrifying "lifeless" feel of a cubicle or a Wal-Mart, it's the millions of tiny cries of protest coming from these animalcules in our intestines.

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