Dance, Organisms, War and Melodies
| 12 mins | Bobtags: art, science-fiction, mathematics, music, journal
I have already talked about the work of Alastair Reynolds several times here1, but I just can’t stop, so here we go again. The more I dive into it, the more time I spend with it and the longer I live, the more I realise how great all of this is. Let me explain.
Dance
Recently, I have watched the piece “Superorganism” by a jugglery group called Critical Mess2. It was unexpected and I didn’t really plan to see it, so I didn’t anticipate anything. I was just there by chance. But I’m so grateful for that because it was immensely beautiful. In fact, it was so beautiful that I was standing there with shaky legs, unable to move or look away. Perhaps, only I experienced this feeling – afterwards, I heard the people around me talk about the skills of the performers, how they never dropped their juggling balls and so on. Yes, they really mastered their technical skills. It was flawless. But that wasn’t what I cared about.
Their group was seven people plus a DJ, and I’ve noticed how different their characters are, yet they worked together as if controlled by a single mind. Somebody launched up a ball at one end of the stage, others emphasised the moment by fluent directional movements, and another, unpredictable person shot out an arm in just the right instance to grab the ball mid-flight. It wasn’t obvious but they were perfectly in sync at any point in time. The performance had several layers of undulation: The overall shape formed stars, flowers, waves and suddenly sharp needles; the white balls standing out from the background moved in circles and parabolas, spreading out and coming in, suddenly vanishing behind the performers, suddenly all up in the air; and even on the smallest scale hands and fingers gestured precisely to the flow yet uniquely did their own thing. It started slowly, one action after the other, sped up and produced complexity, calmed down and grew again. It didn’t seem scripted at all. To me, it felt as if it emerged organically before my eyes. The DJ made this even more pronounced as he indeed improvised the electronic music on the fly. It matched the perfomance so well that he seemed to steer the evolving organism and command it where and how to move. I dont’t remember the music – I remember how it felt. The whole thing didn’t stop for a second in 45 minutes and it was so chaotic, organic and beautiful.
Organisms
Like chaos. It reminded me heavily of the strange chaos of mathematical attractors3. Being completely deterministic you won’t think they will be able to evolve unpredicably. But Edward Lorenz has proven otherwise. Obviously, “Superorganism” couldn’t strictly be deterministic as the performers had free will (I’m believing that we all have), but the piece itself was created so that it really felt deterministic. Every movement felt purposeful and the only logical consequence to what happened before, like a chemical reaction falling into a specific direction, like a optimisation algorithm finding a specific local minimum among many others. It was completely unpredictable. Evolution creates things unimagineable, but it wouldn’t have happened if the infinitesimally close step before hadn’t occured. What was before? The begininning is always the hardest thing to answer. This piece definitely had a beginning, but after a minute into it I couldn’t tell there was. As if it had been going forever. Endless forms most beautiful.
Most coincidentally, I was reading Alastair Reynolds’ short stories collected in “Galactic North”4 at the time. It fitted the performance so perfectly that I thought that I was looking straight into it. In the Revelation Space universe created by Reynolds, a human faction called the Conjoiners are linked in a vast intelligent network. They all share the same memories and exchange thought in real time. In “The Great Wall of Mars” their existance was elaborated in more detail, how and why, and why you can’t believe it unless you have experienced it yourself. And then you will never want to go back – the Transenlightenment. Particles of warm light flow along paths through the physical world and form information like a hologram right in your mind. You could see intelligence itself. The white juggling balls reminded me of this. Crossing from person to person they exchanged information and directed the game. They emerged from the people but were used by the people complementarily. Seperated from their flock, a lone Conjoiner would feel deeply broken, they cannot live that way. What would a lone perfomer do? The organism would be wounded and it couldn’t continue its evolution around the separated person. They must stay within reach of thought. Everybody contributes their own ideas but there will never be an odd one out. Like neurons choosing their own weight and subtly but surely changing the whole brain’s behaviour without ever disrupting its flow.
War
In another of Reynolds’ short stories, “Nightingale”, people find an intelligence that was isolated for a long time. Originally it was meant to run a hospital in space, but it has turned crazy, mad, insane. Growing body parts and harvesting tissue in a space-station-sized factory, it continued to operate a single doomed human for decades. It turned him into a work of art – a living replica of Guernica. Guernica, the almost 8 m wide oil painting by Pablo Picasso5. It is perhabs the most powerful anti-war artwork ever created, addressing the brutal and horrific bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica by Nazi Germany during the Spanish Civil War in 1937. The attack was pure evil, destroying a defenseless rural town, violently killing hundreds of innocent civilians. Picasso disturbed the art community and made one of the boldest statements against war. The Nightingale hospital intended the same after stopping to heal soldierst only to send them back into the massacre. But it did so in the most revolting way imaginable. It doesn’t make sense to fight cruelty with cruelty. Yet it doesn’t get more effective. Looking at Guernica and the depicted suffer, it strikes you with disgust, anguish and sorrow. And as the artwork is a reaction to war, you will project these feelings onto war and not the painting itself. The painting remains beautiful.
Another incredible work of art so powerful it will surely make you cry are the Hiroshima Panels by Iri & Toshi Maruki, and if you haven’t heard of them, you now have. If I ever get to visit the Maruki Gallery to see these 15(-1) utterly terrifying 1.80 m by 7.20 m paintings in their true size and detail, I know that I wouldn’t be able to stand on my feet for long. Please see and read about them on the gallery website.6
Melodies
Getting back to the brilliant music created by the musician of Critical Mess, Fabian Laute, I haven’t heard many similar things. One moment I was standing in a jungle of whispering leafs and chirping birds, the other instant looking at crashing ocean waves, and a minute later there was alien technology communicating through cryptic codes. The soundtrack created a pleasing but unfamiliar atmosphere. It was deeply integrated into the performance, like the breathing that comes with living. Living is the result of breathing and breathing the result of living. One cannot be without the complementary other. It somewhat reminded me of Neurotech’s Symphonies7 or Nigel Stanford’s Entropy8 and some pieces by Solar Fields9. Right now, I can’t really tell how “Superorganism” sounded like – as I said, I can’t remember it and just a feeling is left within me. Though, you can get a hint of it in their trailer video2 and the other performaces by Fabian Laute. I often associate songs or tracks to specific things, and if I come across the music or the thing, I instantly think of the other. The feeling from watching “Superorganism” now comes up whenever I read the Revelation Space series. The organic flow and growth, the grand scale and web of interconnections, the evolution of human nature was and still is not easy to put into words for me. Now I collected another feeling I can associate with these things.
Perhaps my favourite short story by Reynolds is called “Weather” (which is also in the book mentioned before). To cite a conversation of a shipmaster and the Conjoiner who was rescued from a hostile lightship:
“Inigo Standish, shipmaster. And you still haven’t told me your name.”
“I told you: it’s nothing you could understand. We have our own names now, terms of address that can only be communicated in the Transenlightenment. My name is a flow of experiential symbols, a string of interiorised qualia, an expression of a particular dynamic state that has only ever happened under a conjunction of rare physical conditions in the atmosphere of a particular kind of gas giant planet. I chose it myself. It’s considered very beautiful and a little melancholy, like a haiku in five dimensions.”
“Inside the atmosphere of a gas giant, right?”
She looked at me alertly. “Yes.”
“Fine, then. I’ll call you Weather.”
– Alastair Reynolds
It’s nothing we could understand. Through chaos theory, I think we might have come close to it. If we were to find the rare event of the beautiful dynamic state Weather has chosen to be her name. How long is the name? Can it be expressed with sounds? Would it have a melody? I want to understand it so badly. Maybe, I have caught a glimpse of it in the performance of Critical Mess. And now I want to see it again.
Don’t forget to appreciate the beauty of us humans and what we can create, and that it should forever stand above all evil in its greatness. Have a great day.
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Search for “Reynolds” on my search-page. ↩
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The jugglery collective Critical Mess is led by Stefan Sing who is accompanied by Kate Boschetti, Tobi Dohm, Noah Schiltknecht, Liam Wilson, Mitja Ley and Viola Dix. You can find a short trailer video of the performance “Superorganism” on youtube and a few words about it on Stefan Sing’s project page. The music is composed by Fabian Laute and you can listen to many of his improvised live performances on soundcloud. ↩ ↩2
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I’ve dedicated a whole page for the strange attractors here. ↩
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Find reviews and information about “Galactic North” on Goodreads. ↩
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Revelation Space isn’t just random science-fiction, it is an extension of human history. It feels real and as if this can surely happen to us. I love how it feels so strangely alien but still reasonable, clearly originating from the history we know. There are references to our present, like Guernica. Things that are still known to humanity two thousand years into the future, highlighting their utter importance. Today being not completely inconsequential is beautiful on its own. ↩
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I usually put links into these footnotes to not disturb your reading flow, but seeing the Hiroshima Panels for yourself is so important that I’ve linked them in the text. If you haven’t seen them yet, it’s perhaps the most important thing to do for you today. Do it now. Here is the link again, and take your time. It’s not meant to be easy.10 ↩
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You can get the “Symphonies II” album by Neurotech on Bandcamp. ↩
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Listen to “Entropy” by Nigel Stanford on various streaming services. ↩
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If that wasn’t enough for you, Toshi Maruki has written poems (sounds much more peaceful than they are) about each panel. You can find an archived website with them on the Internet Archive. ↩
