O nature, nature, life will not perish! . . . [I]t will start out naked and tiny; it will take root in the wilderness, and to it all we did and built will mean nothing—our towns and factories, our art, our ideas will all mean nothing, and yet life will not perish! Only we have perished. Our houses and machines will be in ruins, our systems will collapse, and the names of our great will fall away like autumn leaves.
—Karel Čapek, R.U.R.
Back in January, I wrote a post about Floris Kaayk’s “Metalosis Maligna,” a short film that I had seen years ago but thought lost to the internet void. There are two more of his videos that I want to share. Embedded above is “The Order Electrus” (2005), which I saw at the same time as “Metalosis Maligna,” in those heady days as I was groping around for my doctoral thesis project. Check out the video after the jump.
Nature adapts, even to human actions that seem to destroy everything. The amazing power of evolution has given birth to a new species of insect. Their ideal habitats are old industrial locations. Some call them electrical insects, others simply speak of a miraculous phenomenon, or even better, a self-supporting order; the Order Electrus.
The tiny silicon life forms in “The Order Electrus” remind me so much of Rodney Brooks’s early design methodologies for behaviour-based robots, the results of which he has likened explicitly to insect intelligence. For my money, if something we might call genuine life or intelligence were ever to occur in electromechanical beings, it would largely be an evolutionary process of variation, adaptation, and descent from the tiniest, “simplest” forms onward.
Kaayk’s use of the phrase “self-supporting order” points to the idea of emergence, which is a pretty fundamental concept in cybernetics and systems theory, as well as certain traditions of robotics and artificial intelligence research. Emergence basically refers to the idea that a dynamic system, a system whose complexity allows it to change and grow, is more than the sum of its parts. You can’t account for something like life—not to mention an intelligence—as a single, unified whole. Seen as an emergent phenomenon, the life of, say, a rabbit, is not a thing in and of itself; rather, life emerges from countless interactive relationships and communications that take place among the rabbit’s organs, tissues, cells, and so on. Emergence also involves an open relationship with the surrounding environment. In our rabbit’s case, it makes little sense to speak about its life apart from the conditions of living: the availability of food and water, the population of predators, climate conditions. For me, emergence is a profoundly ecological concept that invites us to think about how the interconnections between beings, their ability to touch and be in touch with one another, drives change and creates a future.
In the case of “The Order Electrus,” Kaayk plays with assumptions about what kind of life forms might emerge from man-made objects. The order electrus is not the product of an advanced technological society and the direct efforts of its best scientists, engineers, and industrialists to create artificial life. Rather, these insectile creatures are the “naked and tiny” life that crawls from the ruins of a human world in a process that may not exactly be natural, but is certainly not artificial.
[See Kaayk’s site, and the page on “The Order Electrus”]
Filed under: Artificial Life, Arts, Film, Robots, Speculative Fiction Tagged: artificial intelligence, artificial life, computer animation, cybernetics, emergence, floris kaayk, robots, the order electrus
