Evolution and Counter-evolution

The Covid virus, as it appears to us in drawings like this one, has a certain prominence in the global news. Of course our main interest is in the threat it poses to us humans. Some have seen positive aesthetic qualities, too — symmetry, proportion — although these are necessarily in the drawings. Yet another remarkable feature is the speed and variation with which it evolves, presenting new configurations, dividing, recombining, etc. every few months or even weeks. By contrast, we don’t evolve at all — or don’t seem to.

But there is a view of our evolution — and it isn’t even very new or speculative — that suggests that we have evolved just about as fast as the virus. Suppose technology is the way humans have evolved, that is, instead of adapting to change through the slow reshaping of a body, as most animals and plants do, we rely on our capacities to locate and shape materials for food and protection, on extensions of our perception — especially sight and hearing — to extend our memories and project possibilities? Without significant changes in our bodies, we’ve built a tremendous, thick envelope of objects and symbols around ourselves — effectively transformed our environment beyond recognition. From that standpoint, we have speedily evolved into beings with a range of defences against the virus, and continue to develop quickly in response to specific changes it presents.

Let’s say evolution is a process of turning indeterminate into determinate, inchoate stuff into objects or bodies, possibilities into specificities. It is effectively a process of creation. At some point human beings more or less took creation into their own hands, a tremendous advantage in some respects — and a terrible responsibility.

sound waves in colour look a little like a landscape

Tuning

Thinking about indeterminacy is very difficult, at least for me.  It’s as if my brain were “tuned,” like a piano, in particular ways, probably to the grammar and syntax and even the semantics of English.  That’s my reality.  However partial and ephemeral, music seems like the best and may be the only opportunity to get out of that, into another reality — or just to the point where you can begin to see, or hear the one you’re ordinarily in. Today I’m listening to La Monte Young’s improvisation, The Well-Tuned Piano — expected to last somewhere between five and six hours. Young doesn’t consider it finished, either. The recording I’m hearing is a performance from 1987, broadcast on BBC3 years ago. Young tuned the piano in a way he didn’t want to divulge, but someone (Gann) listened and, with assistance from a synthesizer, worked it out. Young eventually confirmed it. It’s called just tuning. 

Tuning is a convention, imposed on the piano — another great structural convention that demands a fixed order.  It could be said of any musical instrument but may be especially clear with piano. Instruments physically manipulate sound, the fundamentally indeterminate physics of vibrations, to produce structures audible, pleasurable, meaningful to human beings. The conventions are strong.  Tuned in an unfamiliar way, a piano opens on to a different reality.  

Learning to Listen: Pauline Oliveros

The more I think about it, the more it seems as though listening seriously might be an especially good way to meet the universe halfway, as Barad puts it, that is, to understand oneself in intra-action with matter. The composer Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) tried very hard, all her life, to listen, and to encourage others to listen. She left music and writing about music that invite us all to listen. In fact it seems to me that she understood listening as an ongoing experiment in which we can use ourselves, our own auditory perception, to learn more — to get past assumptions and habits and think, feel, hear something new.

She summarised and shared her way of composing in an early book called Sonic Meditations, a series of exercises that suggest ways of making, sharing, imagining and remembering sounds to groups of players. In collaboration with the theoretical physicist Lester Ingber, she focussed on defining how people pay attention to sound. One phrase of hers in particular stays with me: “the universe improvises.”

The image is from https://iawm.wordpress.com.

Listening!

The difference between uncertainty and indeterminacy can seem subtle and elusive when people are talking about particle physics.  When we’re talking about music, however,  the idea of being “uncertain” seems just strange, and “indeterminate” is reasonably clear.  John Cage probably remains the best-known composers of indeterminate music, music that evolves, comes into being, in the time of being played and heard.

The image is Cage’s Fontana 03

Brownian Motion

It’s going on all the time! That would not be a revelation to everyone, certainly, but it was to me. The term “Brownian” is different from other kinds of motion in that it applies to particles, that is, it’s a feature of matter, and that means everything — your hand, your computer, your chair, etc. The most solid thing we’re looking at or touching or walking on is made up of tiny things — “things” — moving around, bumping into one another, changing direction, speed, position. I’m sure I’ve been told that before, but it seems as though there’s something about our current state of affairs, when a minute snippet of life — a virus whose sole goal in life is to reproduce — has changed everyone and everything. It lends a substance, a kind of tangibility to the adventures of subatomic particles.

Everyday Diffraction

Diffraction is a phenomenon associated with the behaviour of light, a kind a scattering, or bending when it passes through a “grating,” or narrowed area. The same term may also apply to other kinds of matter moving in a discernible direction, such as water or air. It is relatively easy to think of examples that you might set up, or build, the way you’d set up an experiment. It’s more challenging to think of examples in very ordinary situations, perhaps because we need to start thinking about things that never seemed to bear thinking about before. It seems, for example, that the lens on a camera — or the lens in one’s own eye — is designed to correct for the diffraction of light that passes through the small shutter of the camera, or the pupil of the eye.

Everyday diffraction could be a name for an awareness of matter in constant motion — of particles of varying size and speed and “spin” being focussed or scattered, bumping into things, changing direction, becoming entangled, etc.

The idea of photograph as measurement begins to make sense against this background: a record of light on the sensitive surface appears, to human senses, to “stop” the motion.