The Earth hums and spins
by rebecca ~ July 4th, 2005. Filed under: New Media Musings, Space is the Place.Hi all, sorry for the silence!
My absence from this blog can readily be explained: In two weeks I have given a public lecture, survived an interview, traveled to Hakodate and Tokyo, attended an intercultural studies conference, tended to my son who had a high fever all last week, had our car die from as yet unexplained circumstances, and all the while I’ve been reading, researching, and creating the second media production for my graduate class, New Media and Cultural Studies, at The University of British Columbia, Vancouver.
Check out Media 2: “Spiraling autopoiesis” here.
Autopoiesis is a theory by Francesco Varela (1991) that at the smallest unit of life (the bacterial cell) there is a self-sustaining, self-regulatory, ever-changing unit of competing behaviors, and this could be said about all life forms, too.
Of course, he acknowledges that that unit also exists as it does due to the outside environment’s constant invading or interrupting the cell’s systems. He claims there is no center to this cell’s ‘self’: it is only a ‘dialogic’ process that works or doesn’t (which is death, I suppose?). I am not sure about that last point though.
In Media 2, I was trying to ‘spin’ the common ideas and motifs (the spiral and concepts of life) found in various cultures, philosophies that have been re-appearing in ‘scientific’ discoveries or theories. Sort of built it from the ashes of last week’s entry, “Musings on immortality.”
There were so many possible similarities and parallels (and equally possible complexities within those similarities), that I couldn’t do much within the time constraints, but hope I captured the sense that science is not so separate from what we tend to call ‘mystic.’ We seem to be spiraling back to an origin. It was fascinating to try to get this point across, anyway….ciao for now!