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(foam_earth contribution to the Alchorisma Reader → https://fo.am/events/alchorisma/ )

Here is the Stillness, which is not still even on a good day. Now it ripples, reverberates, in cataclysm. Now there is a line, roughly east-west and too straight, almost neat in its manifest unnaturalness, spanning the girth of the land's equator. (…) The line is deep and raw, a cut to the quick of the planet. Magma wells in its wake, fresh and glowing red. The earth is good at healing itself. This wound will scab over quickly in geologic terms, and then the cleansing ocean will follow its lie to bisect stillness into two lands. Until this happens, however, the wound will fester with not only heat but gas and gritty, dark ash - enough to choke off the sky across most of the Stillness's face within a few weeks. Plants everywhere will die, and the animals that depend on them will starve, and the animals that eat those will starve. Winter will come early, and hard, and it will last a long, long time. It will end, of course, like every winter does, and then the world will return to its old self. Eventually. Eventually. (…) Eventually meaning in this case in a few thousand years. —NK Jemisin

Human beings have from prehistoric times recognized the potentialities within the lithic to send communication across vast spans of time. Hence our fascination with structures like Stonehenge, designed to persist across atemporal duration no human culture can surmount. As information endurance devices, such rocks communicate long after their successive human co-dwellers have been obliterated. (…) Human immediately becomes posthuman as a consequence of the enlarged temporal frame that geology demands. Such a stone-etched counter-vision invites reflection on what it means to inhabit a world that is potentially indifferent to humanity and yet is intimately continuous with us. (…) Rocks possess much of what is supposed to set humans apart.They are neither inert nor mute, but like all life are forever flowing, forever filled with stories. —Jeffrey Cohen

The Anthropocene marks the fall of humanity from cosmic Big History into terrestrial Deep Time. The Big History narrative is an evolutionary epic, a bio-centric teleological tale of emergence and ascending complexity that culminates in a cosmic anthropic vision of human beings as the universe becoming conscious of itself. By contrast, Deep Time is a rocky ride, a disaster movie, a lithic-centric cyclic story of explosions and extinctions, periods of equilibrium punctuated by catastrophes, which in turn open niches in new fitness landscapes for opportunists to fill. The geologic record, the rock cycle, the movements of tectonic plates, stratigraphy: these all remind us that the earth is not a ground but a process of ungrounding and regrounding, a layered history of layers punctured by unconformities, gaps and skips in the record. —Paul A. Harris, Richard Turner, A.J. Nocek

A post-digital re-reading of his stones might invoke entirely new kinds of narratives. By reinterpreting Caillois's stones in relation to the aesthetics of digital simulation, algorithmic visualization can be used as decryption device to decode and unravel new fictions. The crystal deposits in stones might now chronicle the arching trajectories of boids as they trace pathways defined by chaotic parabolas of a Lorenz Attractor. In other rocks, mineral accretions may delineate facsimiles of reaction diffusion patterns—the scattered pointillist aftermaths of activator-inhibitor liaisons. Other patterns tell tales of cellular automata self-assembling themselves into unpredictable, but scrutable patterns—Conway's Game of Life frozen inside a crystalline snapshot. So, the stones become a collective unconscious for dynamical systems, an oblique strategy for algopoetic revelry, and a divination system for generative pattern recognition. (…) their values are intrinsic and without external reference,“ might he be imagining a kind of geological Turing Completeness?—a universal lithic calculating machine whose solution is its own morphology (Turing). This possibility echoes the inklings of tantric cybernetician Stafford Beer in Pebbles to Computers who saw that “Nature's computers are that which they compute” and who maintained that “We cannot read off numbers” from these calculations “because nature does not put labels on its solutions—it becomes them”. The sealed language of stones… —Paul Prudence

In its exile from the Earth's simmering interiority, crustal rock provides a platform and venue for biological life. Living things can approach, engage, even ingest this minority of minerals. Indeed, here rock and life transform each other, generating composite formations—rocks assembled out of once-living bodies, biological bodies composed in part of minerals. But we should not forget that this florid organic-inorganic interface is but a 'gloss on the surface' of our astronomical body, and that the stone that invites life's embrace is a chilled and pallid shadow of its seething progenitors. —Nigel Clark

Rock is passionless. “Stone hearted” and “cold as stone” are as much a part of our lithic vocabulary as various expressions for stony silence. Without a human hand to impress meaning upon it, stone would be blank, impassive, aloof. Immobile and sterile, stones do not do much. Or perhaps our lexicon for stone is impoverished. When observed within their particular and nonhuman duration, stones are forever on the move. —Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Deleuze and Guattari introduce the concept of a “machinic phylum,” which they define as “materiality, natural or artificial, and both simultaneously; it is matter in movement, in flux, in variation, matter as a conveyor of singularities and traits of expression”. Because of its constant flow and variation, the machinic phylum is very hard to measure indeed. Therefore, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the “matter-flow can only be followed” —Patricia Pisters

Stones in Chinese gardens or natural settings that are so distinct as to seem out of place are sometimes referred to as Stones That Flew Here. This designation references an obscure Buddhist myth about stones that were magically transported from India to China, landing in unlikely locations where they were incompatible with the local geology. The myth is most likely a way of explaining stones that have been moved by glaciers great distances from their places of origin. We extract millions of tons of minerals from the earth annually for the manufacture of computers, mobile phones, television sets and other electronics. When these products become obsolete, they are returned to the earth in the form of e-waste, which often pollutes the earth and can be a significant health hazard for workers involved in processing the e-waste. —Richard Turner

假作真时真亦假,无为有处有还无。(Truth becomes fiction when the fiction's true; Real becomes not-real when the unreal's real.) —Cao Xueqin

In all of history the crystal is perhaps the most overloaded symbol; used by writers, prophets, medicine-man and orators of all times to express in one clear psychogeonamic object otherworldliness. Novalis, poet and student of mining, held the crystal to be a dark, soul-eating parasite transforming the human heart into the dead cold of a stone; some believe it to be an early apocalyptic warning against the cyborg. The sentiment is easily understood; is it, after all, not true that it is with more than just amazement we listen to the stories about that Indian sect that refuses to eat anything organic and, consequently, rather suck on amethyst for the rest of their life than touch organic matter, even when it is as profane as centipede-excrement. Mineral cults evoke in us absolute horror and disgust, suggesting crystal-phobia lurking at the deep of our instincts. Crystalpunks are challenging the basic conditions of their humanity. But at least one standard metaphorical use of the crystal, that of the crystal as object of utopian perfection, as pure geometrical-molecular-ethnicity, in most cases turns out to be a chemical fiction. One of the most interesting qualities of crystals is their ability to encapsulate alien particles. Crystals too produce noise, as one flaw entered during packing distorts tessellation for ever after.” —The Crystalpunk Manifesto

symmetry breaking (algorithmic technique) To differentiate parts of a structure, such as a graph, which locally look the same to all vertices. Usually implemented with randomization. https://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/symmetrybrek.html

antichain (definition) A subset of mutually incomparable elements in a poset. https://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/antichain.html

Bloom filter (data structure) A data structure with a probabilistic algorithm to quickly test membership in a large set using multiple hash functions into a single array of bits. https://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/bloomFilter.html

Simulated annealing (SA) is a probabilistic technique for approximating the global optimum of a given function. Specifically, it is a metaheuristic to approximate global optimization in a large search space for an optimization problem. It is often used when the search space is discrete (e.g., all tours that visit a given set of cities). For problems where finding an approximate global optimum is more important than finding a precise local optimum in a fixed amount of time, simulated annealing may be preferable to alternatives such as gradient descent. The name and inspiration come from annealing in metallurgy, a technique involving heating and controlled cooling of a material to increase the size of its crystals and reduce their defects. Both are attributes of the material that depend on its thermodynamic free energy. Heating and cooling the material affects both the temperature and the thermodynamic free energy. The simulation of annealing can be used to find an approximation of a global minimum for a function with a large number of variables“ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing

Hydrological Cycle Algorithm (HCA) simulates nature’s hydrological water cycle. More specically, it involves a collection of water drops passing through different phases such as flow (runoff), evaporation, condensation, and precipitation to generate a solution. It can be considered as a swarm intelligence optimization algorithm for some parts of the cycle when a collection of water drops moves through the search space. But it can also be considered an evolutionary algorithm for other parts of the cycle when information is exchanged and shared. By using the full hydrological water cycle as a conceptual framework, we show that previous water-based algorithms have predominantly only used swarm-like aspects inspired by precipitation and flow. HCA, however, uses all four stages that will form a complete water-based approach to solving optimization problems effciently. In particular, we show that for certain problems HCA leads to improved performance and solution quality. https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/3828420

The field of meta-heuristic search algorithms has a long history of finding inspiration in natural systems. Starting from classics such as Genetic Algorithms and Ant Colony Optimization, the last two decades have witnessed a fireworks-style explosion (pun intended) of natural (and sometimes supernatural) heuristics - from Birds and Bees to Zombies and Reincarnation. https://github.com/fcampelo/EC-Bestiary

So, image for a moment an object, a material, which can literally do anything. It can move across categorical boundaries with no difficulty whatsoever. So what do I mean? I mean that if you possess the philosopher's stone and you were hungry, you could eat it. If you needed to go somewhere you could spread it out and sit on it and it would take you there. If you needed a piece of information, it would become the equivalent of a computer screen and it would tell you things. If you needed a companion, it would talk to you. If you needed to take a shower you could hold it over your head and water would pour out. Now, you see, this is an impossibility. That's right, it's a coincidencia apositorum. It is something that behaves like imagination and matter without ever doing damage to the ontological status of one or the other. This sounds like pure pathology in the context of modern thinking because we expect things to stay still and be what they are and undergo the growth and degradation that is inimical to them, but no, the redemption of spirit and matter means the exteriorization of the human soul and the interiorization of the human body so that it is an image freely commanded in the imagination. —Terence McKenna, Lectures on Alchemy

When you cook bread from a recipe, you’re following an algorithm. When you knit a sweater from a pattern, you’re following an algorithm. When you put a sharp edge on a piece of flint by executing a precise sequence of strikes with the end of an antler—a key step in making fine stone tools—you’re following an algorithm. Algorithms have been a part of human technology ever since the Stone Age. —Christian & Griffiths


References

  • Amato, J. A. Dust: a history of the small and the invisible
  • Blohm, H., Beer, S. Suzuki, D. Pebbles to Computers: The Thread
  • Caillois, R. The Writing of Stones
  • Cohen, J. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman
  • Cohen, J. Stories of Stone
  • Calvino, I. & McLaughlin, M. L. Collection of sand: essays
  • Harris, P.A. Turner, R., Nocek, A.J. Rock Records, SubStance Volume 47, Number 2, 2018 (Issue 146)
  • Jemisin, N.K. The Broken Earth Trilogy
  • Ogden, J. G. The Kingdom of Dust
  • Thacker, E. In the dust of this planet
  • NIST. Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures. https://www.nist.gov/dads/
  • Sonic Acts. Living Earth
  • Sonic Acts. The Geologic Imagination
  • Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions,
  • alchorisma_reader.1542028281.txt.gz
  • Last modified: 2018-11-12 13:11
  • by nik