The Theory of Nevolution

Goat Milk

Fucking brilliant. So very very happy they went with goat's milk. Nothing says New & Trendy like a harmless goat staring at you from the bottle.

This is a mental public health issue

Some time back, I blogged about the 2007 Freeplay conference as part of the Next Wave conference. One of the more interesting things I took away from it was the keynote talk by Jonathan Blow, who apart from talking about his new game Braid, touched on a few ethical issues of video games. A quick side note: I haven't played is game Braid yet but we got to see a few scenes from it. I really badly want to though. Namely, it's a side scrolling platform game where you manipulate the flow of time, presented in a gorgeous painterly style, and from what I can gather a storyline that touches you not just through the narrative but through the gameplay. 

Back to my point. One of the things that stuck in mind about the more ethical and philosophical aspects points he brought up was how game designers are using evolutionary needs for rewards and goals to cheapen the game playing experience. If there were no golden coins to collect, or princesses to solve, would the game still be playable? He made a big point about comparing the simple and addictive (yet ultimately empty) rewards based system of World of Warcraft to gorging on fast food. I'd always wanted to hear him delve deeper into this, and read the odd interview where he did so but they never provided the meaty discussion I was hoping for. Thankfully, I found an audio of a lecture he gave at the 2007 Montreal International Games Conference and it was all I'd hoped. Thoughtful, detailed and insightful. Clicking on the link also gives you a powerpoint presentation of the lecture as well, so you're really getting a two-for in that package. 

The video was made by the one man team SuperBrothers who by describing his work as rustic 21st century minimalism has just received my vote for best new aesthetic title, like, ever. So, on top of his SuperBrothers outfit, he also runs The 1 Console. A quite refreshing look at the games industry - the site is drop dead gorgeous as well - and is trying to further Blow's ideas and create some sort of a dialogue regarding all of this. I highly agree with this and looking forward to see how this pans out, across the internet and eventually in the games themselves. 

There are quite a few ways that one could analyse the problems inherent in not just World of Warcraft, but in video games in general. I'll start with the closing quote of the clip; I think it allows for a more detailed response than the opening lines, only because I fear it poses an open ended question that I can't answer, quite relieving when I consider it's meant to provoke a discussion. But hopefully we'll be able to get somewhere with it.

It also says, it doesn't really matter if you're smart or adept at trying to get ahead in a system because what really matters is how much time you sink in, because of all these artificial constraints on you. It also says that you don't really need to do anything exceptional because to feel good, to be rewarded, all you need to do is run the treadmill like everyone else

An obvious starting point is to take a Marxist approach, notably that the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas and all that. Lets not start bitching and moaning about all of that because it's boring, but there does seem to be an element of control if one were to look at it through that prism. At the same time the Western dream of putting your head down, work hard and in the end it will pay off is touched upon here, but it all seems just so 20th century. At the very least there does seem to be a reflection of the dominant idea about a work ethic going on here. Perhaps though, that's not such a bad thing; a little bit of work never hurt anyone. 

I've never played World of Warcraft, but I consider myself a WoW Widower whenever Uni holidays come around. A lot of time can get put into that game, and none of it seems to amount to anything more than working in the salt mines. Or worse, standing around waiting to buy or sell runes and swords at the auction house, I'll come back to that in a bit.

But killing monsters is pretty much the name of the game. Sure, it's more than that, and there is this huge mythic narrative that covers all the different species of elves and orcs and blah blah blah. I'm being harsh here, but I get to, I've never played the game. The artificial constraints that Blow refers to is evident in most games. You start off with fairly simple weapon with simple monsters and eventually power up to a better weapon only to be faced with harder enemies; and so on. The steady progression is only steady in the problems and solutions. Most games don't force the player to increase his or her skill, but allow the game elements to force the player to progress via scheduled rewards such as power ups, gold coins or bigger weapons.

He isn't stating that WoW explicitly tries to teach you to run the treadmill, but the mind soaks up these rules as part of the environment subconsciously. People identify with their activities, they're products of the environment and if we have this many people playing Wow with the expressed result being an ever increased desire of escapism into a treadmill, then we have a problem. 

One of the more important states that games allow us is to enter into a state of flow; that of complete immersion at the task at hand. One of the easiest ways to create this, especially from a game designers perspective is through fine tuning the balance between challenge and ability level. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the positive psychologist has done a lot of work around this, most of it fascinating but I'll let you do your research on your own time. There are a few other methods of gaining flow: clear objective, concentration, distorted sense of time and a loss of the feeling of self-conscious. I've listed almost half, but these seem most appropriate to gaming and game design in general. Playing Halo for hours (months) on end was probably the clearest personal example I've experienced, but Halo 3 was probably the most overly designed game I've ever heard of. Testing rooms rigged with cameras analysing the players facial tics, button pushing, game playing and crunching vast data sets of players movements. It seems that the game was crafted with a sense of flow in mind, by way of constant and scheduled rewards. That's fine, and Halo works beautifully on that level and the narrative sequence never seems to detract from the game. But the skill set required never seems to increase because of it's negative effect on flow.

But flow aside, does the tweaking of artificial rewards have any real benefits? The addiction of games can be something to brag about, but I'm interested in how games achieve this state. TED recently put up a video of Dan Dennett talking about evolution's strange inversion of reasoning. The talk, titled 'Cute, sexy, sweet and funny' looks at these four examples as to how we have it wrong. But the sweet aspect gives us something to lead to. 

"Honey is sweet because we like it; not we like it because honey is sweet. There's nothing intrinsically sweet about honey. If you looked at glucose molecules until you were blind you wouldn't see why they tasted sweet. You have to look inside our brains to understand why they're sweet."

I'm hoping that this gives a clearer example of the addictive qualities of games. It's runaway signalling. I was lucky to see Geoffrey Miller's talk on conspicuous consumption as part of Darwin's birthday and he delved into this a bit deeper. In a recent post I highlighted how he saw a 21st century understanding of consumerism move forward and away from the left/right argument and I knew it would come in handy sometime. And we're not here to talk about consumerism, but rather an evolutionary take on it. 

Conspicuous consumption arises from human instincts for showing off our intelligence, personality traits, and moral virtues to family, friends, and mates. Consumerism is not a matter of 'materialism', but of runaway signalling, status display, and socially validated narcissism.

This abuse of runaway signalling is exactly Blow's argument. Without these scheduled rewards, is there any worthwhile gameplay left? Without a power up, gold coins, a bigger gun or more narrative, does the game fall below a threshold of playability, of interest? It's these empty rewards that keep most players hooked, the mistaken impression of a fitness indicator. Back to the selling of swords in WoW. Although he skipped over it, Miller quickly discussed a study about weapon purchases in WoW. Specifically the lengths that people will go to buying purple weapons, which while they add nothing in terms weapon damage they indicate high status. Translated into the treadmill of WoW, although that means is how much time someone has spent in the game. It has no actual indication of skill, merely time spent. 

But free time or wealth indication aside Blow questions if game designers have been designing games to exploit the need for fitness indicators and affordances. Rewards can be like food (naturally beneficial) or like drugs (artificial stimuli and the illusion of fitness indicators), games over use the drugs because they don't understand how to make a food. There's nothing wrong with drugs every now and again, or perhaps eating non-nutritious food is a better description. It's when you're eating fast food all the time that problems begin to appear. There's a slide in his presentation with two really really fat kids at McDonalds. It's quite amusing, but also scary, and even scarier when he proposes that these false rewards are doing the same thing to our mental health. And he's not kidding when he makes that comparison, and it's a fair analogy. 

The rules of the game, the kind of interactions that the game puts you into, is the meaning of life for that game. And the meaning of life in WoW is you're some shmo who doesn't have anything better to do than to sit around and kill monsters

Here I think is one of the more profound statements I've heard about gaming, and once I realised it I realised that narrative should play less of a focus in games than it does. Or at least, less than what all the huge multi-million dollar games are aiming for. Games will never be able to compete with movies as a narration devices, and nor should they. It's not what they're supposed to do. As a game play device, narrative can help push things along, but too often games get stuck in creating a choose your own adventure by way of a few superfluous cut scenes. But what he's really trying to get to, which is a bit more abstract, is the dynamics of a game and the way they can convey something. And here's where it gets tricky, only through lack of choice. He gives a few examples that achieve or at least attempt this, most notably The Marriage by Rod Humble. I'd love to play it, but it's a windows only program. The abstractness of it seems to work for it, allowing the user (player?) to interpret different actions in regard to the fragility of marriage. All this through simple interactions between coloured squares. The problem with using this game as an example is that it wanders a bit too far into the artistic realm, or as a side research project. But it does seem to be an indication of nutritious content. It would be fantastic to see a major games company attempt this level of profundity with a best seller game. At the moment it doesn't seem to scale well, or at least it hasn't yet.

Even more intriguing about this is it seems to do so without presenting a narrative to inform the meaning of life for the game. It does so by using the gameplay. Back over at Superbrothers, in trying to describe the motivations behind starting a discussion on this topic and the video, Craig brings up a very interesting point about what Jonathan Blow is trying to convey:

The real meaning of a videogame is expressed by the rules. He explains that these expressions may not be perceived by the intellect, they can be perceived in an abstract, holistic way by the player. 

This is where it gets a bit tricky in sketching out solutions to the problem. But it has to happen. For games to be given serious merit, they have to be able to affect people the same way that a poem, a song, a book or a movie has done so. Yet, with each of these examples, they have the power to affect people through different methods, each of which by suiting the medium. But they've had a longer time than videogames to achieve maturity. And I think to figure out how to achieve this, one of the best places to start would be through defining the space that games exist in. By looking at Wittgenstein's language games, the definition of 'game' can vary enormously, becoming harder and harder to pin down. Blow quickly looks at the definition of games and defines them as follows: 

Games are where you are trying to achieve a goal and there are some rules governing the actions you can perform and their affects on the game world and also what the game world can do back to you

By defining games this way, surely levels of emotion and maturity can seep through? It doesn't have to be steeped in narrative to try and affect the player emotionally; once again, it never should, this isn't their strong point. Back to The 1 Console, Craig closes his piece stating

the rules of a videogame have meaning, intended or not, that is where their expressive power comes from, and that these meanings are absorbed by the people who play them

There's more to be said about this, but not here. I've had a few ideas for some posts in my head, but not sure where to take them. Now I do. Expect to see more about this in the future. I really hope that something important comes about through all of this, and hope that it somehow spawns, or at least furthers the movement to make games what they could and should be.

Update: Thanks for the link Craig. If you've came here from the 1 Console, put your feet up and have a leisurely browse.

Tiles, I likes 'em

I just like 'em. Painter girl got me into them. She has lots. I don't. I still like them. I see more of them now that I like them. You should too.

The Elements

This came across my eyeballs last week. It's pretty neat if anything as a beginners guide to typefaces. There are a few things I'd change about it, namely a few questionable fonts that don't deserve to be in there, but most of the classics have been included. I'd like to complain about Helvetica being number 1 but I fear are few people might take that one personally. Grouped by families and classes, the structure and order seem to make sense at least in comparison to the original table of elements. One of the problems something like this is always going to bring up is the clash it presents between personal choice and the higher realm of scientific truth. Then again, the elements in this table have had only 500 years to develop, whereas the elements have had 13,000,000,000 years to forge in the centre of exploding stars. Perhaps a more appropriate variation would take Phoenician script as the first element, and plot the rest as variations from that original lineage. 

Thanks Nik and Mik, let's not argue over who got there first.

Rosalie Gascoigne: The Entropic Environment

A bit late with this one considering the Rosalie Gascoigne exhibition at the NGV ended a few days ago. I even went to the trouble of borrowing a book from the city library to brush up on her history; turns out I forgot to do that reading until I got a late reminder from the library. I was planning on holding a few photos to make you all go and see it; the guilt of a late review has forced me to put up everything I have. I'd never heard of her before, but as soon as I saw the above sculpture I knew I was in comfortable territory. 

Having trained in the Japanese art of flower arranging - Ikebana - most of her early work is straight up sculptural arrangements. While the formal structure of Ikebana allowed her to improve and expand upon her flower arrangements; which she was already a well known practitioner of in Canberra. Thankfully, she decided that the natural environment and found objects were more important to explore than Japanese objects, while still maintaining the art of arrangement. I didn't take any photos of her floral arrangements (because, well, they're flowers) but in hindsight I wish I had. As one would expect, this type of approach quickly garnered her praise, and in no time at all she was on her way to the Venice Biennale (not bad work for 8 years). Her work began to move away from floral arrangements as well as the inherent form that Ikebana taught her.

One of the more exciting aspects of the exhibition was the curation and design that went into it. All of these objects were presented quite cleanly on extruding stands and plinths - say what you will about the white wall approach to galleries, it worked perfectly and in the artists favour here. I spent quite some time looking at these objects before moving on to the rest of the exhibition which contained a smorgasbord of ephemeral type.

As you can imagine, I was in heaven here. Well thought out layout through a variety of found soft drink crates. At a distance the composition was well considered, but up close I really got to have some fun. It's rare to find such good examples of australian history, at least in quantities like this. Most of it ends up destroyed or thrown out or more annoyingly in expensive second hand shops. Thankfully she found large amounts of this stuff lying around discarded in the country side and put it to good use in emulating her environment. Not 'the red centre' but the more typical bushland where my family comes from. Old houses, weathered beyond belief, with this lovely muted luminousity that speaks straight from the country. The dimensions of these works clearly reference the australian horizon, with it's endless landscapes and slow moving vistas. 

Repetition plays a large part in her work, amounting to not just lovely patterns but, and on a more exciting note, lots of examples of type to compare. It gave me the chance to vaguely confirm my suspicions of an early typographic style that seemed to be washed out when the International Style came along and swept up any Australian vernacular and relegated them to the history books. Tarax and Loys soft drinks now come in plastic crates (if kids are drinking them at all these days) so it was really nice to see the original crates they came in, not to mention the historical typography found on them.

Eye Magazine had an article on her awhile back dwelling mostly on her personal history and journey as an artist. It ends asking why her use of found letterforms as an expressive medium has been ignored as part of the discussion regarding her work. I think it's a very valid point to make and not just for obvious personal reasons. While the materials she uses in all of her assemblages are straight from the manufactured australian landscape (corrugated iron, crates, beer cans, road signs etc) and therefore are indicative of an australian history. Very little mention is given to her choice of letterforms, is this due to her unwillingness to discuss it or because the wider public has no interest (don't answer that, it's a rhetorical question)? 

I wasn't to keen on the road sign stuff: the colours are too garish and the typography ventures too far into the realm of concrete poetry. I quite enjoyed the rhythmic motion of this one was easily the highlight, mostly as a point of difference. Her later assemblages were quite lovely, moving closer to the abstract experience of australian nature. 

This would be the part where I tell everyone to go and see it, but having missed that deadline the best I can offer is to go and buy the catalogue of the exhibition or wait until I return my book to the city library.

Spatial Evolution of Selective Organisation

Did someone say Spatial Evolution of Selective Organisation? On a monday morning? Meh. Maybe the joke's getting old. Via Kottke.

Oven of the month

What rat bastard would leave an oven in the streets and deprive it of it's dials? Especially one as charming as this? Poor guy.

Selective Evolution of Spatial Organisation

Did someone just say Selective Output of Spatial Organisation? And did I also hear collective memory? And at 9 pm on a saturday night? With ants using their pheromones to map out the most effective trail? I think I did!

On the nature of cosmopolitanism

When you see words printed or burnt onto food you have to buy it. You don't have a say in the matter. Arguments of free will go right out the window as your hand reaches onto the shelf and picks it up. An ironic smirk as it falls into the shopping trolley. Where disbelief should be, it is instead replaced by a grim acceptance of the world. And then it is forgotten as you get distracted by how much milk you should buy. To be left in the fridge as you realise how much of a sucker purchase it was. 

But you have time you tell yourself. This is a highly processed food, it's built to last. It will probably outlast western civilisation and still be there when nuclear fallout and cockroaches are the only other things still left standing. A few days past, and you see it in the fridge again reminding yourself, promising yourself, not to get drawn in by trial yet whimsical purchases. Looking at the packet, you wonder which marketing branch decided that this would be a good idea, tempered by weeks and weeks of ambiguous market research. Which market segment would think this to be a nice idea. Polite multiculturalism gone wrong. A 21st century Betty Draper keen to show off how worldly her dinner party is. And then you notice the use by date. Three days ago. Confusion as you realise that this is a premium product, that doesn't belong in the frozen foods section. 

Cynically, you realise that this product, this object d'art must be documented. It must be recorded and presented to the wider world. People have to know. Taking it out of the box, the uncooked food looks even more delightful and implausible than it does on the packaging. Humouring yourself, you decide to try and mimic the mise-en-scene as close as you can. A tinge of embarrassment as you realise to your horror that you don't have any sweet and sour sauce and wonder how this happened. For how long has this been missing from the cupboard? You press on, and are reminded once again that you still don't own any chopsticks despite your cosmopolitan world view and eating habits. After a few attempts at this still life, you wonder what the cooked result will be, while reminding yourself that it's past the use by date and is for display purposes only.

Twenty minutes past and you take it out of the oven. It looks worse than your wildest dreams. A few decisions as to how to best photograph it, you set up the shot. Curiously, you smell them, and wonder why it doesn't smell so bad. So you take a bite. And another. All the while checking for evidence that it has gone bad. You take another bite and realise that you've just eaten one. Reminding yourself to get back to the job at hand and take a few photos. And then you eat another one. So far, only one of them seems to taste a bit wrong, but it's all vegetarian, so, it can't be that bad. You tell yourself that the fact that the filling is black has nothing to do with the use by date, and push it to the back of your mind. A few more compositions, a few more photographs, a few more bites. You decide that you've taken enough photos and eat two more. Rational enlightened self-interest washes over you and you realise that you've eaten more than a token amount and vow to put them all in the bin, not before having another nibble.

Walking to the bin, you read over the ingredients and realise that one of them had prawns in it. Confusion turns to horror turns to shame as you realise that was the reason the filling was black. Slight panic as you wonder when it will hit. Later on in the day; perhaps tomorrow when you've all but forgotten about your shameful secret. Perhaps tonight, as you're sleeping the horrible truth will make itself known. You cover up all evidence in the bin so your girlfriend won't know that you've eaten some, and vow not to tell her how many if she does ask. And then you forget about it.

As you sit on the train the next day you begin to feel a bit strange. Moments pass and sharp stabbing pain grips your inside. It all comes flooding back. Panic washes over your body and you try to talk to your digestive track and tell it that it can handle it. We've been through worse things before. We can do it. More stabbing pains and a slight wave of nausea ripples throughout your body. The air suddenly becomes thick and you hope to hell it doesn't all come undone on a busy train. Not here, not now, and not like this. 

And then it's gone. You did it. You overcame adversity. You congratulate yourself on a job well done and vow never to do something this stupid again. Deep down you doubt you've really learnt anything by the experience. Except perhaps that you can't wait to see some sanskrit on a samosa. That would be totally cool.

The shape of science

After trawling through more than a billion user interactions the Los Alamos National Laboratory has come up with this map of science. I'm not really sure why or how it works, or why it ended up looking at like it did, but seems to indicate the connections and relationships between scientific fields. It's not based on citations as that doesn't allow for recent articles as well as areas of science that are well read but not cited. Its based on usage, but how that works or how it could be collated  beats me.

Meanwhile, the more amoeba looking map of scientific paradigms seems to have a bit more visual logic to it. By treating links between fields as rubber bands it forces similar paradigms to be closer. It's also ridiculously detailed and massive. I can't figure out why some of the text is upside down, nor their visual logic, but one of the designers is talking about using the importance of something or other as a terrain; my eyes keep on glazing over the important bits.

While I Slept

Happened upon Gorker Gallery on the weekend while walking the back streets of Fitzroy. It's a nice little gallery that seems to specialise in trendy up and coming artists. Moving along, Ghost Patrol and Cat Rabbit just finished up their collaborative exhibition of illustration and plush toys While You Slept (I wasn't kidding when I said they focused on the trendy side of things). I was feeling a bit out of place when I noticed this heart warming scene of He Man and Skeletor holding hands. Joy. The Darwin is pretty cute too, but can't really compete with He Man and Skeletor. In fact, nothing can.

Insect Theatre

I was looking at a few spreads of the upcoming BLDGBLOG book (which, by the way, is going to be truly awesome and might be the first serious architecture book I get) and came across the works of Jo Whaley. Pairing staged backgrounds that mimic the natural colouring and camouflage of insects, the images create a nice interplay between the natural and the man-made. I'd shudder to think about how difficult it would be to stage these if the insects were alive. Her site has an extensive collection of these works, and although the first few pages wander off into the ethereal realm a bit too much, the rest are quite good. Those that strictly rely on the colour scale to indicate the nature of mimicry don't seem to work as well as the few that wander off into more conceptual pairings between insect and printed matter.

The Relational Ontology

I'm going to be going out on a limb here, not just because I'm going to be wading through some unfamiliar territory but also because it has ramifications about the nature of this blog in ways that I can't really quantify as yet. I've stumbled across this thing called a relational ontolgy, and I agree with it in many ways, despite the difficulties I have with grasping it, as well as looking at and understanding things in this new way. 

Whether to conceive of the world as consisting primarily in substances or in process, in static "things" or in dynamic, unfolding relations. It's thesis argues that the relations between entities are fundamentally more important than the entities themselves.

The origins of this post came from a TED video by the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin titled How science is like democracy, which I've been sitting on for quite awhile. Mostly because it's a deep topic, but also because I found it hard to grasp, both visually and as a mode of thought. The further I went into it the more stuff I picked up along the way that forced me to wade through philosophical, sociological and linguistic tracts while trying to understand it all. The secondary source I looked at, the Manifesto for a Relational Sociology by Mustafa Emibrayer, expands upon what Smolin is talking about, but obviously more from a slightly different perspective. I've had trouble trying to reconcile the difference to see if an agreement can be made between them. 

While the title is mildly deceiving, he looks at three different stages of how we have thought about space and time and how they correlate to the society of the time.

Smolin starts off by looking at Aristotelian cosmology. It's clearly hierarchical, with these series of spheres with the earth in the centre followed by the sun, the moon and the celestial spheres where sit the stars. It illustrates rather nicely the way that medieval christian society worked; everyone having their natural place in society. Everything is defined by these spheres, where outside lived god in an eternal perfect realm.

Meanwhile, Emibrayer looks at Knowing and the Known, a book written by John Dewey and Arthur Bentley that cover the same three historic levels of organisation that Smolin discusses in the chapter Interaction and Transaction (whether these are by coincidence or choice on Smolin's behalf I don't know). While they discuss the same historical periods and link them to ideas about time and space, they focus on the action associated when taking a substanstialist viewpoint as a means of looking into logic and and the inefficiency of words and concepts. The first action type that they look at is Self-Action: Where things are viewed as acting under their own powers. 

"Aristotle's physics was a great achievement in its time, but it was built around 'substances'. Down to Galileo men of learning almost universally held, following aristotle, that there exist things which completely, inherently, and hence necessarily, possess Being; that these continue eternally in action (movement) under their own power – continue, indeed, in some particular action essential to them in which they are engaged. The fixed stars, under this view, with their eternal circular movements, were instances"

While this doesn't talk directly about the feudal structure of medieval Europe, we can clearly see the correlation through the image above; the planisphere of Ptolemy, or the mechanism (or movements) of the heavenly orbits following the hypothesis of Ptolemy laid out in planar view.

This Aristotelian view ended when the Newtonian universe came into play. Smolin starts to discuss this Newtonian framework, which is best illustrated by the use of a Cartesian grid, allowing for a fixed framework of reference when explaining where something is. I vaguely remember reading that Descartes came up with the idea of his grid while lying in bed watching a fly buzz around his room. I couldn't find any sexy woodcuts or engravings of this scene, so I instead need to refer to the Holodeck in Star Trek as a visual aid (and yes, I can hear you sniggering in the corner).

"There is no centre, there are particles, and they move around in a fixed absolute framework of space and time. It's meaningful to say where something is in space because that's defined by not where other things are, but to an absolute notion of space. In liberal political theory, there are individuals (particles) which have fixed rights (or properties) absolute and universal aspects of rights and justice. Which are independent of what is going on in history."

He continues on to mention that there is no space for god inside this grid, but as an outside external observer. This viewpoint of an external observer is something that has become my default photographic style here, so to move away from this is something I'm quite nervous about. But for the sake of the discussion we'll talk about it later.

Dewey and Bentley refer to the second mode of thinking as Inter-Action: Where thing is balanced against thing in causal interconnection; action takes place amongst entities  (not by generating their own action as they did in Self-Action). We're dealing here with Newton's laws of physics or Hume's billiard balls – simple cause and effect type stuff.

"For many generations, beginning with Galileo after his break with Aristotelian tradition,  and continuing until past the days of Comte, the stress on physical inquiry lay upon locating units or elements  of action, and determining their interactions. Newton firmly established the system under which particles could be chosen and arrayed for inquiry with respect to motion, and so brought under definite report... the inter-actional presentation had now been perfected."

In other words, the entities remain fixed, while the action takes place between them. 

Beginning with general relativity and continuing with quantum theory, old Newtonian ideas of absolute time and space became superseded by a network of relationships. There is no meaning by saying that something has a fixed point in space as was with the Newtonian/Cartesian framework, only that everything is relative to where something else is. There is nothing fixed anymore, only an ever expanding and evolving network constructing the universe. This is what he terms the Relational universe. Nothing can be outside of this relational universe, which means that there is no absolute or eternal maker to impose order over the universe. Nor can there be eternal laws governing this universe as everything is in a constant state of flux and constantly evolving. This idea of a ever-changing relationships is a nice extension of the Darwinian idea of constant change. So if there can be no external order dictated to this universe, the only way to create order and complexity is through processes and mechanisms of self-organisation. In the universe, this mechanism is gravity. The image above, taken from George Smoot's video titled The Design of the Universe shows how obscenely large the universe is: each dot is a galaxy. But before you vomit in your mouth over that scale, look at how fascinatingly similar it is to a network. Thus, the only way to exist inside this universe is to be embedded inside this network of relations, and the only viewpoint one can have is that of an incomplete and internal observer with partial viewpoints. He continues by saying that this ties into ideas of a pluralistic democracy, where we try and recognise our continually evolving networks of relationships. The image below is the known universe; our partial view. Once again, each dot is a galaxy.

Trans-Action: Where systems of description and naming are employed to deal with aspects and phases of action, without final attribution to "elements" or other presumptively detachable or independent "entities," "essences," or realities," and without isolation of presumptively detachable "relations" from such detachable "elements."

Emirbrayer thankfully makes sense of this sentence; the  very terms or units involved in a transaction derive their meaning, significance, and identity from the (changing) functional roles they play within the transaction. The latter, seen as a dynamic, unfolding process, becomes the primary unit of analysis rather than the constituent elements themselves. 

Got it? Good. 

One of the difficulties with comprehending this ontology is the shortcomings in western languages in expressing processes that are in a constant state of motion. It is impossible to hold the verb and the noun together in the mind at once, whereas we are used to the idea of the noun, thing, essence first, isolated of any event or movement. We don't ask "look at the perpetual flowing of the water", we state "look how fast the water is flowing". It is these linguistic shortcomings that make this hard to comprehend as a day to day way of thinking.

Enlightenment humanism begins with entities rather than relations, and the construction of power as property only makes sense within a logic that privileges entities. According to Enlightenment humanism, human beings, in their capacity as asocial, self interested, stable entities, seek power-over before power-with.

I can't remember where I got that quote from, but it illustrates rather nicely the differences between the two different modes of thought, especially when dealing with power relations. But where does this leave us when trying to visual these new power relations? I think that will have to work for another post, but I'll be getting into that sooner rather than later. The Aristotelian and Newtonian imagery is easy to consider, considering the amount of time that has been spent on it, as well as their fixed nature. I won't really be looking into the medieval system, but more the differences between the objective/absolute viewpoint and the relational way of seeing the world and it's effects on aesthetics and design. Looking back this post was more to help me understand it enough to regurgitate it back out, and we'll pull our sleeves up in a little while and get to the design stuff later.