Date: Fri, 12 Sep 1997 12:13:34 -0500 (CDT)
From: ann klefstad <klefkal-AT-cp.duluth.mn.us>
Subject: Re: nothing novel


Maximal order is maximal entropy--an absolutely evenly distributed field of
particles. Living things have teleologies, organizing agendas. When these
living things die, other organisms' teleologies take over, producing what
they perceive as organization but what the former organism would certainly
perceive as disorganization. That is, perceptions of order and disorder, or
variation and sameness, are very much derived from the purposes of the
perceiver. Also, human entrprises produce both elaboration and
simplification, both in producing states of affairs and in describing them.
These should probably not be value-laden terms.

Brad, why do you bring this up? Are you really interested in this stuff or
are you being the poorfolks' Jenny Holzer, doing didactic wedgies?

Anyway, I've been interested in these and related questions since reading
Feyerabend back in the 70s. Variation/elaboration as material fact and as a
matter of perception, and the relation of this to thinking about "Nature,"
as a construct, is something I'm working on now. I did a research trip to a
prairie landscape where I did assessments with naturalist/fieldworkers, to
try to gather information on the various ways of perceiving landscape/land,
this summer, and will be doing more of it this fall, in bogs. 

Jeffrey and I are doing an installation at Intermedia in Minneapolis called
the Red Room, that will address in some way the notion of differentiation
and dedifferentiation. 

Does anyone else use this stuff in their work? I'd be interested in hearing
about it.

Ann Klefstad

At 02:37 PM 9/10/97 -0700, BB wrote:
>
>
>All human enterprises seek to reduce the natural diversity, or 
>'abundance,' inherent in reality.
>
>/:b
>
>__
>
>On Wed, 10 Sep 1997, Ostrow/Kaneda wrote:
>
>> Truly complex things -- amoebas, bond traders and the like are
>> circumscribed and inscribed  by rigid order and randomness only simple
>> things are to be found  betwixt and between
>> 
>
>
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