Brett Stalbaum
Since the beginning
Works in La Jolla, California United States of America

PORTFOLIO (1)
BIO
Brett Stalbaum, Lecturer, LSOE
Coordinator, Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts Major (ICAM)

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO
Department of Visual Arts
9500 GILMAN DR. # 0084
La Jolla CA 92093-0084

C5 research theorist (www.c5corp.com) 1997-2007
Graduate (MFA) of the CADRE Digital Media Laboratory at San Jose State
University.
Professional affiliations:
Electronic Disturbance Theater
C5
paintersflat.net

http://www.paintersflat.net/

Latest: The Silver Island Bunker Trail, possibly the first time humans have walked like a game bot. The trail is open to the public for outdoor recreation and enjoyment.
http://silverisland.paintersflat.net
Discussions (117) Opportunities (2) Events (7) Jobs (3)
DISCUSSION

Pauline Oliveros


[A] real pioneer in developing electronic music way back when it
was something really new"

http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,58042,00.html


DISCUSSION

anti gulf war 2.0 projects


EDT is developing a list of anti gulf war 2.0 art projects with
associated urls (read: net art yes, but also performance documentation
sites, games, dance, poetry, what have you.) It is just a list - a way to
organize resources. There is no intention to be curatorial. We only want
to link to as many anti-gulf war 2.0 projects, tactical interventions,
street performances, arts news, news-news of artists, etc. etc. as we can.
Anything with a URL and an orbit within or around the arts.

Please help us compile hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands. Send me a
email if you would like a project listed. I will also try to grab
things from this list and others, such as the Banner-Strike contest that
went out today.

Thanks.

DISCUSSION

Geri Wittig, Landscape data and complex adaptive system Earth


Landscape data and complex adaptive system Earth
Holism in complexity and network science

Geri Wittig
http://www.c5corp.com

Landscape and its data can be viewed as interrelated components in the
complex adaptive system, Earth. The Earth viewed from a holistic vantage
point suggests a Gain sensibility, but I would suggest not in Lovelock's
Gain sense as an organism, but rather in Margulis's sense as an ecosystem.
An autonomous system, as proposed in Varela's interpretation of Gaia, with
operational closure, that is a fully self-referential network that
specifies its own identity and also specifies its response to emergent
factors and events. A complex coadaptive network, coevolving in
interaction with a wide range of networked systems, including information
technology networks and the data that they generate. Data from emerging
GIS developments, like all other data networks will play a role in the
ongoing evolution of the complex adaptive system, Earth.

Why Gaia
Gaia is a dicey word. A word, that in scientific discourse, seems to have
fallen a bit by the wayside. There is much up for debate concerning the
Gaia hypothesis, particularly the notion that the biota manipulates its
environment for the purpose of creating biologically favorable conditions
for itself. However the one premise that is largely accepted - the biota
has a substantial influence over certain aspects of the abiotic world -
points to the holistic orientation of the Gaia hypothesis and it is this
holistic orientation that I think is the Gaia hypothesis' major
contribution to scienctific discourse.

Dr. James Lovelock, a British chemist specializing in atmospheric
sciences, was a recognized scientist in his field in the 1960's when NASA
and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) asked him to participate in their
project teams relating to the scientific search for the evidence of life
on Mars. Lovelock predicted the absence of life on Mars based on analysis
of the Martian atmosphere and its state of being in a chemically dead
equilibrium. Noting that the Earth's atmosphere on the other hand is in a
chemical state described as being far from equilibrium, Lovelock began to
speculate about what was happening on the Earth which enabled the
maintenance of the unlikely balance of atmospheric gases that make up the
Earth's atmosphere. In explanation, Lovelock began to formulate his
hypothesis that the planet had been transfigured and transformed by a
self-evolving and self-regulating system. In 1973, with American
microbiologist Lynn Margulis, Lovelock formally proposed the idea of Gaia
as a control system.

Lovelock's tendency toward the poetic seems to have contributed to the
cooptation of the Gaia hypothesis by many far outside the scientific
realm, who are attracted to its holistic orientation. Margulis who is in
disagreement with Lovelock in his premise that the Earth is an organism,
states: "Lovelock's position is to let the people believe that Earth is an
organism, because if they think it is just a pile of rocks they kick it,
ignore it, and mistreat it. If they think Earth is an organism, they'll
tend to treat it with respect."(1) Lovelock's positioning for political
aims might be considered unfortunate, because it's this holism, often
misinterpreted in animistic terms, that is the paradigmatic contribution
of Gaia. The premise of an interrelation between the biota and environment
moves away from the one directional Darwinist notion of life adapting to
environment, toward a holism that is also a primary factor in the fields
of complexity and network science that were beginning to emerge during
this same timeframe.

At the edge of chaos - the rise of complexity theory in evolutionary
biology
William Thompson, the Director of the Lindisfarme Association, an
interdisciplinary networking think tank, organized an international
conference held in Perugia, Italy in 1988 called Gaia 2: Emergence, the
New Science of Becoming. This conference brought together not only
Lovelock and Margulis, but scientists like Varela, who brought to the
conference an expansion of the discourse into the realms of the emerging
fields of complexity and networks. As Thompson noted, "we are moving from
lines of descent to patterns of reflexive self-reference or emergent
patterns of circularity in the metadynamics of the system."(2) Someone who
was not at the conference, but who could have contributed much to that
discourse is Stuart Kauffman, a biologist who became deeply involved in
the debates about complexity that were taking place at, what was during
this same time period of the late 1980's, the recently founded Santa Fe
Institute. The domain of complexity lies between order and disorder, or,
as was coined by complexity scientist Chris Langton, "at the edge of
chaos." Kauffman persuaded by the premise that life takes shape between
too much and too little order endeavored into an examination of the
precise dynamics of emergence.

As biologists such as Kauffman, who interprets the evolutionary process in
terms of self-organizing systems, began to use complexity theory, there
was a reaction from the neo-Darwinians such as Dawkins, who extends the
theory of evolution to the level of genes. Dawkins maintains "A body is
the genes' way of preserving genes unaltered."(3) For Dawkins what matters
is the survival of the part rather than the whole. For neo-Darwinians the
focus is on the elements that make up the whole: the whole is the sum of
its parts and the whole can be reduced to its essential elements without
substantial loss. In response to the reductive excesses of neo-Darwinism,
Kauffman argues for a combining of neo-Darwinism with an increasingly
refined theory of complex self-organized adaptive systems: "the revolution
in complex systems dynamics is now making it possible to hope that
complex, self-organized systems, including those investigated by
evolutionary biology, can be more closely linked to physics and chemistry
without reductionism or vitalism."(4)

The underlying premise of Kauffman's view is that the emergence of order
is spontaneous, but not random. In the early 1960's biologists Jacques
Monod and Francois Jacob had discovered feedback mechanisms that function
in a binary mode similar to computers are what regulate genes. Kauffman
who saw this insight as pointing to a new research approach, was focused
at the time on the problem of determining how the immense numbers of genes
in the genome (approximately 100,000) could produce the comparatively
speaking, very small number of different cell types necessary for life
(250). With the potential activity states of the genes comprising the
genome being 1030,000, Kauffman thought the chances of natural selection
producing this small number of specifically required genes to be extremely
improbable, if not impossible. Thinking of Monod's and Jacob's discovery
of the feedback mechanisms by which genes switch on and off, he thought it
possible to model genetic activity with Boolean networks. Kauffman
speculated that the parallel distributed processes of Boolean networks
could approximate genetic activity. In his research he found that Boolean
networks, made up of a multiplicity of interconnected nodes, display the
characteristics of emergent self-organizing systems. Kauffman found that
when random inputs are applied to these networks, they tend to settle into
regular patterns known as "state cycles" which serve as attractors in the
system. Within certain parameters, Boolean networks produce emerging webs
of self-sustaining patterns. Kauffman describes these webs within networks
as "order for free."

Kauffman concludes that the principle of order for free provides an
approach toward the explanation for the origin life as well as its
development, arguing that life emerges in "autocatalytic sets".
Autocatalytic sets possess the property whereby each member's formation is
catalyzed by one or more members, so that its own high concentration is
maintained. The set is collectively autocatalytic by virtue of reflexive
catalysis among its members. In explaining the loops of autocatalytic
sets, Kauffman points to Kant's understanding of the organism in relation
to the concept of inner teleology:

"Immanual Kant, writing more than two centuries ago, saw organisms as
wholes. The whole existed by means of the parts; the part existed because
of and in order to sustain the whole. This holism has been stripped of a
natural role in biology, replaced by the image of the genome as the
central directing agency that commands the molecular dance. Yet an
autocatalytic set of molecules is perhaps the simplest image we can have
of Kant's holism. Catalytic closure ensures that the whole exists by means
of the parts, and they are present both of and in order to sustain the
whole. Autocatalytic sets exhibit the emergent property of holism."(5)

Coevolution and fitness landscapes
The genome, Kauffman contends, is a complex adaptive system composed of
"networks of genes and their products interacting with one another in
enormous webs of regulatory circuitry."(6) Complex systems being adaptive,
their evolution tends to be coevolution. When systems and networks adapt
to systems and networks that are adapting to them, change is reciprocally
related.

Developments, at both the individual and species level, take place in webs
within networks that are transforming by adapting to each other. This
process of coadaptation creates a dynamic of coordination between the
parts and the whole within a system, establishing the type of niches
similar to those found in an ecological system that form fitness
landscapes, which Kauffman postulates are non-random. This non-randomness
Kauffman argues is "critical to the evolutionary assembly of co"mplex
organisms. We will find reasons to believe that it is not natural
selection alone that shapes the biosphere. Evolution requires landscapes
that are not random. The deepest source of such landscapes may be the kind
of principles of self-organization that we seek. Here is one part of the
marriage of self-organization and selection."(7)

Kauffman's argument that fitness landscapes are non-random comes out of
his work on Boolean networks. Fitness landscapes of an individual or
network develop in parallel with other fitness landscapes. These
landscapes can be thought of as nodes in a web of landscapes that
determine the parameters for each other: enabling the network to establish
the conditions for development. The ecology of the whole network is
transformed by a change in one niche or landscape. Kauffman argues that
coadapting networks evolve to the verge of a self-organized threshold
where minor changes in one landscape trigger a rush of changes that move
out through the entire network. Because of the complexity of the web of
landscapes, possibilities are limited within a given network. Networks of
fitness landscapes are inclined to settle into rhythms with cyclic
patterns, functioning like attractors in dynamical systems. Functioning
along a perimeter of divergence that is in constant flux, networks
self-organize in somewhat stable patterns until another phase transition
occurs. A bifurcation occurs resulting in the emergence of a new
morphological type that remains relatively stable for a time, and then
suddenly mutates or vanishes. Because this process is unpredictable by
nature, it doesn't necessarily mean it is directionless. Instead of
thinking of this process as teleological, self-organizing systems can be
understood as following a teleonomic progression; a line of development
that moves toward increasing complexity.

Landscape and its data
What of the other landscapes - the material ones made of such things as
dirt, rocks, and dust? Here we come full circle to the premise of the Gaia
hypothesis that is widely agreed upon - the biota has a substantial
influence over certain aspects of the abiotic world - and as argued in
Kauffman's coadapting networks, vice versa. I would speculate further that
both the data networks generated in relation to both the biotic and
abiotic realms are also implicated in these coadapting networks.

It's interesting to note that in the field of physical geography, which is
self-admittedly probably one of the most empirically oriented of the
sciences, there is some discussion emerging concerning the use of
complexity science in physical geography research approaches. The fields
of biogeography and landscape ecology are the areas most oriented toward
the applicability of complexity theory in research methodology. In his
article, "Considering Complexity", biogeographer George Malanson suggests
the science of complexity as a possible approach to the conflict that has
emerged in physical geography between reductionism and holism, especially
since the introduction of General Systems Theory, the scientific effort to
identify structural, behavioral and developmental features common to
particular classes of living organisms.

Malanson describes the "strong trend toward reductionism in physical
geography over the past three decades..." which has lead to researchers
tendency to "... simplify our research questions to conform to
mathematically tractable domains..."(8) A primary argument of the paper is
that most of the research in physical geography is related to place.
Because "...the location of a place can be characterized by its spatial
properties..." and "space can produce complexity in simple
processes..."(9) there are nonlinearities created in geography associated
with scale. Malanson views this as a prime area for applicability of
methodologies of complexity theory. He describes a key area for
applications of complexity in biogeography as the analysis of ecotones
(vegetation boundaries where plants are presumed to be near the edge of
their physiological tolerance) related to the edge of a phase change,
through the use of computer-simulation modeling developed out of GIS or
remote-sensing technologies.

With the increasing use of GIS technologies in a wide variety of fields,
including art, the data networks generated will disseminate into the
expanding networks of information technology. I speculate these GIS
generated data networks have the potential to act as bifurcations and
coadaptive systems in relation to the landscape and the overall complex
adaptive system earth.

C5 Landscape Projects Field Mediation
UTM 10 589631E 4145735N (in the vicinity of Alviso, CA)
January 12, 2003

Notes

1. John Brockman, The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution
(Simon & Schuster, 1995).

2. William Irwin Thompson, Gaia 2: Emergence: The New Science of Becoming
(Lindisfarne Press, 1991), 234.

3. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1989), 23.

4. David Deprew and Bruce Weber, Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and
the Genealogy of Natural Selection (MIT Press, 1995), 399.

5. Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of
Self-Organization and Complexity (Oxford University Press, 1995), 69.

6. Ibid., 99.

7. Ibid., 166.

8. George Malanson, Considering Complexity - Annals of the Association of
American Geographers, vol. 89, no. 4 (Blackwell Publishers Inc, 1999),
747.

9. Ibid., 748.

Bibliography

Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo. Linked: The New Science of Networks. Cambridge,
MA: Perseus Publishing, 2002.
Brockman, John. The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution. New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press,
1989.

Deprew, David, and Weber, Bruce. Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and
the Genealogy of Natural Selection. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.

Kauffman, Stuart. At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of
Self-Organization and Complexity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Malanson, George. Considering Complexity - Annals of the Association of
American Geographers, vol. 89, no. 4 . Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers
Inc, 1999.

Taylor, Mark C.. The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Thompson, William Irwin. Gaia 2: Emergence: The New Science of Becoming.
Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1991.

DISCUSSION

Talk to Verio


Please forward. Please review the Press Release below for context.

Then please do the following.

1) Load the following URL in your browser, (only once;-). Or go to
www.verio.com and figure out how to contact a salesperson.

2) Go shopping. Find some NTT/Verio services that you might otherwise be
currently interested in.

3) Using your real identity, make an inquiry. A sales person will contact
you.

4) When they do, please remind them of NTT/Verio's legacy, speculate about
how they will be remembered historically, and explain why you could or
could not enter into a business relationship with them. Use the press
release below for context. Help remind them who they are and what kind of
goodwill they have created for themselves; one that they now must sell
into.

Brett Stalbaum
EDT

On Tue, 4 Mar 2003, Rachel Greene wrote:

>
> ------ Forwarded Message
> From: brian@thing.net
> Reply-To: brian@thing.net
> Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 21:36:04 +0100
> To: nettime-l@bbs.thing.net
> Subject: <nettime> Thing.net press release re Verio/NTT
>
> February 28, 2003
>
> FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
> THING.NET REMAINS ONLINE WITH NEW PROVIDER;
> SEEKS GREATER INDEPENDENCE
>
> Contact: thing-group@rtmark.com
> Contribute to Thing.net's independence drive at
> https://secure.thing.net/backbone/
>
> As has been widely reported in the press, NTT/Verio, Thing.net's upstream
> service provider, recently informed Thing.net that it would unilaterally
> terminate its service contract. While the original date given for the cutoff
> was February 28, it is now timed for March 14, 2003. In the meantime
> Thing.net
> has signed with other providers to assure continued connectivity and will
> remain safely online.
>
> Socially and politically critical groups and artists with similar concerns
> continue to feel the chilling effects of unfounded legal threats from large
> corporations, who currently believe they can intimidate an ISP simply by
> complaining to the upstream provider. As C. Carr reported in the Village
> Voice,
> "technically, what's happened to Thing.net is not censorship. It's worse.
> 'What
> we have here is something that doesn't even go to court,' says Svetlana
> Mintcheva, coordinator of the Arts Advocacy Project at the National
> Coalition
> Against Censorship. "'They were just preemptively closed. It sets a kind of
> precedent where corporations can take away free speech, no matter what kind
> of
> First Amendment protections we have, and there isn't much to be done
> legally.'
> Verio reps declined to comment."
>
> Thing.net plans to fight such actions by working to achieve more
> independence
> from censorious upstream providers. Thing.net is in dialog with European
> ISPs
> about relocating some of its "mission-critical" elements there. "The
> advantage
> of this approach is that the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) doesn't
> apply there and the European Union just failed to get a majority for a
> similarly flawed law," says Wolfgang Staehle, Thing.net Director. "This will
> provide greater security with no compromise in service."
>
> Since an article in the New York Times on December 23, 2002, Thing.net has
> received many donations from individual and institutional supporters around
> the
> world, in addition to international press coverage. Among organizations that
> have contributed or promised to do se are The Nathan Cummings Foundation,
> the
> Open Society Institute, the Warhol Foundation, and the Creative Capital
> Foundation.
>
> http://www.thing.net
> https://secure.thing.net/backbone/
> http://bbs.thing.net
> http://thing.net/switch
>
> Background:
>
> In addition to terminating their contract with Thing.net, NTT/Verio took the
> dramatic measure, in response to legal complaints about a parody web site,
> of
> shutting down the entire Thing.net network for fifteen hours on December 3-4
> virtually without warning. This affected web sites for such organizations as
> Artforum and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (and many more), seriously
> compromising Thing.net's service to its clients.
>
> The shutdown stemmed from a complaint by Dow Chemical Corporation over a web
> site created by artists' collective RTMark that parodied Dow and was hosted
> by
> Thing.net (http://rtmark.com/thingpr.html). Dow invoked the intellectual
> property and cybersquatting provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright
> Act
> (DMCA) - a law that is regularly used by corporations to prevent free speech
> -
> in demanding that the site be taken offline.
>
> NTT/Verio, in turn, claimed to be obliged both to shut down Thing.net and to
> terminate their service under the DMCA. When NTT/Verio was unable to contact
> a
> representative of Thing.net during the evening hours, they shut down the
> entire
> network - rather than just the parody Web site - and subsequently threatened
> to
> terminate their service to thing.net.
>
> "Thing.net is a commercial ISP with years of solid service," says Wolfgang
> Staehle, Thing.net Executive Director. "Verio's arbitrary and punitive
> interruption of our services has made us look unstable and inflicted serious
> damage to our reputation."
>
> "What Verio has done," asserts Ray Thomas of RTMark, the group responsible
> for
> the Dow parody site, "is like a phone company cutting off a whole
> neighborhood
> for one prank phone call."
>
> To receive donations for the expenses associated with the switchover and for
> building a more secure network, Thing.net has set up a donation page at
> http://secure.thing.net/backbone/.
>
>
> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
> # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
> # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
>
> ------ End of Forwarded Message
>
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