nettime:HAPPY DOOMSDAY by Calin Dan

[diana@dial.isys.hu (Diana McCarty)]

HAPPY DOOMSDAY!

I Warn you. The following lines are indebted to the revitalization of an
ecumenical trend which periodically brings together the artistic and
scientific discourses, in an attempt to prove that creativity and the
capacity to analysis are objectively unified in the processes of the brain.

"Periodically" means that the phenomenon is not new. It can be tracked back
as far as the 15 century (Renaissance), with revivals in the 18, in the
modernist avant-garde and in the sixties (op art, art and technology,
etc.). Its most recent expression is converging with the development of
computer technology on a mass scale, reaching a relative climax in the 90,
with the advent of the World Wide Web.
"Trend" implies that this approach is not necessarily a positive one. My
criticism does not address the cultural equation as a whole, but only its
"art" factor, in the way it uses research methods and in the way it aims at
conclusions. My critical reaction unfolds on 3 levels: 1. the presentation
of "Happy Doomsday!" (HD!), a project for the WWW and other
computer-assisted
environments; 2. the positioning of the project in the art + science
equation; 3. the criticism of the WWW as a representative tool in art +
technology behavior.

Level 1. The parameter of war. The way maps are dealt with speaks about the
ability of ideological agendas to hide the non-linearity of history. Flat
projections of fulfilled (or frustrated) desires, maps freeze into patterns
of dominance a reality based on approximation and change. Territoriality,
although a multi-dimensional concept, has its ultimate expression in the
abstraction of mapping, a symbolic act of imprisonment.
The questioning of maps is considered an attack on the survival of the
human species - advertised both as a settled configuration of power groups
and as a dominant intelligence able to control the environment by
quantified information. Maps are beyond doubt, as is the knowledge of the
scientists who draw them and the goodwill of the political class that
controls the instrument of borders. Monuments to the utopia of stability,
maps should never be presented in series, unless for illustrating a
Darwinist vector underneath historical processes, since progress is
cherished as the supreme logic of change. Thinking otherwise means aiming
at disorder, and finally at war. War is, on the other hand, the constant
factor underneath the strategies of
modern behavior; how to avoid or how to use war in a profitable way are the
basic issue of almost all initiatives aiming beyond practical and/or ideal
border, and therefore needing maps.

A hidden map. HD! is a computer-assisted art work, using the information
provided by border shifts on the political map of Europe in order to build
an interactive environment. The environment can be visited as a web site or
as a screen-based multi-media installation. The support is a map of greater
Europe, with the surfaces of countries/ provinces differentiated by color,
and presenting the shifting of borders as an animation.
Chronologically, HD! starts before the first documented political
boundaries, using both the information provided by retrospective research
(archaelogy mainly) and by the maps inherited from Greek-Roman Antiquity. (1)
Since HD! is meant to apply Chaos Theory to the political geography of
Europe, in order to establish the attractors determining the "border
behavior", the project will have a prognosis value going beyond the second
millennium.
The user can zoom into a specific region, freeze the animation at a chosen
moment of the continental history, go fast-forward or fast backward. A
series of parameters will feed the equation generating oscillations between
limit maximum and minimum border values, as experienced through history.
New parameter values can be introduced by the user, generating a
"retrospective prognosis" who forces the stream of historical processes
through bifurcations towards events that never occured, actually.
Political geography becomes in HD! a metaphor of survival in an
increasingly complex environment. This statement is made obvious with the
help of the "map of vanishing silence" which parallels the developments of
the visual map. This is a reconstruction of the noise waves which
progressively obscured the silence of the continent, and is actually the
only "evolutionist" phase of HD!
It starts with the natural sounds of pre-history; goes through the roaring
of the first migrations; the rumor of the developing urban and rural
activities; of navigation; of wars; of population displacements during the
second wave of migrations, during famine and epidemics; then the new sounds
imported via geographic discoveries; those provided by the industrial
revolution; by modern wars, etc. All alternating with samples of cultural
sounds (music, religious services, readings of literature fragments).
Decreasing intervals of silence are spacing the map, as the European
history paces further into an increasingly crowded environment. The climax
is reached with the contemporary noise level, when traffic and media are
speeding the mix into final chaos.

Level 2. The flip book. The use of political maps on a statistical scale
implies the acceptance of two risk factors: a) the randomness of the
information available; b) the approximate accuracy of the mapping tools.
a) Concepts such as border and state are relatively new in the historical
processes. Data concerning the political shifts in the history of Europe
were, for a long period, more connected to landscape design than to
scientific analysis. The maps referring to pre-modern Europe are actually
reconstructing a feeling about how things looked, more than providing
information about what they were.
b) Although borders became a basic component of the way modern society
understands political equilibrium at the continental scale - it is
precisely scale that is ignored in map drawing. Exception made, perhaps, by
the strategic satellite photographs, addressing limited groups of decision,
the dynamic perception of political geography seem to be undermined by
approximations which keep the general understanding of the historic
processes at a symbolic, almost emotional level.
The borders should be perceived as indicators of variations in a number of
parameters: agriculture, energy resources, economy, scientific development,
ecology, geographic limitations, epidemiology, climate, demography, etc.
Each of those parameters have been researched in their historical aspects,
separately or in the framework of more general overviews of the European
life. Some have been mapped also, and shown to have a fractal dynamic. The
fractal dynamic of the European borders themselves becomes clear by just
flipping the pages of a geographic atlas, if its maps are ordered
chronologically.
The difficulty starts when you want to link those parameters in equations
resulting in border changes, and therefore go beyond the cartoon-like
representation of Europe into virtual geography.

Chaotic web site. The work hypothesis underlying HD! is the potential
applicability of chaos theories to the movement of political borders during
European history. The conclusion towards which I am aiming accords with the
Second Law of Thermodynamics, and has a short name - entropy.
The calculation processes behind HD! should be able to establish the
attractor (or set of attractors) determining the border shifts. One
possibility is to adopt the procedures of fractal basin boundaries research
in order to see the borderlines stretching between two (at the limit three)
basins of attractors, expressed as countries' surfaces.
Another possibility is to look at the countries as at chaotic systems
generating random processes that find their limit in borders (Michael
Barnsley). The difference between the two methods comes from the way of
perceiving the borders: in the first case they are a fact/in the second a
result of chaotic behaviour. This might lead to different entropic models,
roughly speaking limited versus generalized entropy. It is also possible
that both methods converge towards a unique solution of entropy - be it
limited generalized.
The third possibility is to go into the refined details of border systems
and try to fit their oscillations in the attractor of HŽnon (a folding
attractor generates random points that organize themselves in couples of
lines; the increasing number of couples on the same limited surface as the
process unfolds might be a model for the borders behavior in physic space).
If this method of calculation is confirmed by the real data, we get the
most comforting model of limited entropy that can be expected, which
reduces the chaotic behaviour to less damaging effects than the previous
ones.
In any of those cases, borders behaviour has to fit into the universality
theory of Mitchell Feigenbaum, which states that there is a law of
convergence applying to natural systems at the point of transition from
order to turbulence. Borders might be such systems, or at least they are
the most visible expression of their activity in the developments of Power.

Skip this!  The first step in the demonstration is the scaling of the
European map according to a standard allowing the proper integration of any
new data. From there on, the demonstration can take two paths:
1. The linear path, using just a refinement of the information provided by
the historical maps. Some practical questions might ssuggest themselves
here, in relation to the degree of refinement itself. Let us have two
converging axis of coordinates; the vertical one is defining the parameter
"time", the horizontal one the parameter "space". We consider data
refinement on the "time" axis as linear. But the behavior on the "space"
axis can be again twofolded:
a) If we calculate a segment of border, the "space" axis becomes
bi-dimensional - a horizontal plane containing the respective segment. At
every time point we will obtain a new plane, parallel to the previous ones,
and containing another behavior of the border segment. The accumulation of
border segments will in the end define a vertical plane intersecting all
the horizontal ones at the incidence with the respective segments. It is
predictable that the plane will have a fractal 3d shape.
b) If we calculate the same segment point by point, the two axes keep their
initial linearity, defining the oscillation of each selected point in a
vertical plane. But in order to get the definition of the border segment
itself, the series of planes have to be put together. That brings another
series of parallel planes, vertical this time, and crossed by another
fractal horizontal plane generated by the incidence lines of the
oscillations.
What this obscure description aims at is to emphasize the hidden complexity
in the system of the borders behavior, since even an equation with two
parameters is forced into a tri-dimensional result.
2. The non-linear path uses time-space as a coupled parameter moving under
the incidence of variables from the group mentioned in Chaotic web site.
Those new parameters, themselves the products of non-linear equations, will
determine at each time-space point as many phase spaces as required by our
curiosity. The result consists in a complex series of graphics,
representing the border response in the time-space couple chosen initially.

If we choose, say, one value for energy, one for climate, one for
epidemics, the point in question will have three possibilities of change
some convergent, but mostly not. Since we are talking here about streams of
data, not points, a border segment can be divided into an infinity of
time-space points, each of them moving according to infinite variations of
the oscillating parameters we like to consider.
If we split this couple and relate a point on the "space" axis with a time
interval of our choice, things become even more complex. As infinity
operates on a continuum from the micro to the macro levels, a finite
interval on the time axis can also be divided internally in a reasonably
big number of points, each connected to the shifting parameters, and
therefore modeling the behavior of the border point(s) we want to question.

Models of chaotic behavior can be deduced both from linear and non-linear
processes, as far as the input of real data is supposedly leading in the
direction of chaos. The essential difference between the two paths consists
in the prognosis character which makes 2. stronger than 1.

The cynicism of computation. Putting the political map of Europe under the
incidence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics might be a speculation. In
any case, the reality seems strangely to fit into the model this law is
governing. According to it, all systems aim towards entropy, actually
oscillating between total entropy and the opposite extreme - negentropy,
frozen stability.
What data we can already use concerning our subject shows that Europe is a
surface alternating intense entropic processes and short negentropic
breaks, on every scales between large and small, in accordance with the
fractal structures of any chaotic phenomenon. Even by considering the time
segment starting with the Mediterranean settlement of civilization, the
amplitude of those oscillations prove to be unpleasantly vast for the
limited capacity individuals have in enduring history. What we discuss
here, though, is not a human dimension (be it morality, patriotism, life
quality, survival of the species, etc.) but the way information defines
that very reality we try to understand. And which, moreover, unfortunately
proves to be convertible into numbers, and therefore computable.
The fact that the entropic oscillations have been drastically reduced in
the last 5o years is just an exception. (The Cold War was a good period
speaking in terms of negentropy, as proved by its name also.) But starting
with 1989, a new raise of entropic moves can be noticed. The reunited