People tend to think and talk about the internet as if it suddenly emerged out of nowhere, as that is how it felt for many of us in the early 90s. However, the work leading to its explosion was going on for most of the last century, notably in the field of Cybernetics.

“Cybernetics is a transdisciplinary approach for exploring regulatory systems—their structures, constraints, and possibilities. Norbert Wiener defined cybernetics in 1948 as “the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine”

Alan Turing’s paper on the way patterns form, for example, on the back of cows and zebras, decoded natural phenomena. It is now considered a valid starting point for describing how all the various shapes and patterns we see in life emerge, from fingers to toes and beyond. Turing coded nature and therefore influenced the way humans have since learned to emulate, store and re-create reality using symbols.

The Internet and digital culture today could be described as collective human consciousness decoded, and recoded, produced and exteriorised in tangible form. It is language outside of us on a grand scale and we don’t appear to be coping very well. It has emerged from us, although we are under the illusion is a separate system, but it is not. It is us and but exists outside our inner worlds, and also feeds back and amplifies aspects of our being. It makes visible the networked nature of collective human consciousness, and seems to speed up social contagion .

There are plenty of doomsday predictions about how the Internet will bring about the end of society, civilisation, modern-life, a return to the dark ages. But perhaps those predicting have not looked back in time sufficiently to see just how grotesque humans are capable of being. And even the actual period known nowadays as the Dark Ages is being re-examined (Pruitt, 2016), and understood to be less dark than we previously thought. The apparent loss of the liberal project, or rather the threat it seems to be under right now, might be understood as yet another wave of instability in our history as we move from one stable state to another. The problem for us is that these unstable states may be necessary for complex life to exist at all.

Turing’s paper explains how organisms form patterns, and there are key themes within the paper which I identified (see list below). Complex life cannot form without these variations, the moves away from equilibrium , the deviations. They may seem inherently violent and difficult for the organism (in this case, society) to manage but they are fundamental for growth and continued existence.

The three films examine the transitions from the end of one state to the start of a different one. Contained within the film, and influenced in the making, are the key elements I identified in Turing’s paper, as well as a focus on what is usually considered to be detritus, the raggedy bits on the edges, the hidden and the discarded.

ATTRIBUTION

  1. Dialogue With Life by MPO Productions, Publication date 1950s late – early 1960s circa, Usage Public Domain Mark 1.0

  2. The World at War 22 — Japan, publication date 1941 (sic )

  3. The Miracle of Life, by Time-Life Video, Publication date 1983

  4. Human birth by University of Missouri–Columbia. School of Nursing. Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology; J.B. Lippincott Company, publication date 1973

  5. Hidden Treasures, by Moody Institute of Science, publication date 1951.

  6. Girls and Women: How the World Sees Women by Sharon Lowen, publication date 1971

  7. The Voice of the Nightingale stop motion animation 1923 by Ladislas Starevich