And finally, for this post at least, yesterday afternoon I attended a fascinating class offered by Mine Ozkar and Sotirios Kotsopoulos called “Visual Thinking Via Shape Grammars”. This was my first formal exposure to the idea of shape grammars, though I have heard the term before. The theory was initially presented by Stiny and Gips in 1972 and includes the idea of shape computation following rules defined in a grammar of shape. The theory has both fascinating explanatory power and useful generative power, depending on the purposes for which it is applied. Kotsopoulos gave many examples from architecture employing the theory both as an explanatory analysis and as a generative tool. I have to say, this class was right up my philosophical alley. Similar enterprises have a long-standing history in philosophy, culminating in Anglo-American analytic philosophies of the middle of the last century, but having expression in the work of Spinoza, Leibniz, and Alfred North Whitehead to name just a few.

For the most part, the focus is on new tools and structures that combine data from multiple and sometimes disparate sources in novel ways. Often the product is a visually interesting website or Internet-based tool. But, in its broadest sense, almost any cultural artifact can be seen as a mashup. In a real sense, everything that is a cultural product takes the current cultural landscape as a given upon which it can then build, borrowing more or less from previous cultural artifacts. The movement of mashing up and remixing is transforming how we experience culture and its products. And because educational institutions are situated in culture, it is unsurprising that this movement is being embraced by educators. The topic is fascinating from a technological as well as philosophical point of view.

So far, one of my favorite presentations has been “Confessions of a Mashup Un-Artist” by Brian Lamb of the University of British Columbia. Brian’s presentation was itself a masterful mashup, more a live performance employing images, video, music and text than a traditional presentation. In addition, the NMC folks did something really excellent by having Brian perform in Second Life and then streaming the performance out to the web using Adobe Connect. That setup allowed the performance to be recorded, which is how I was able to experience it because I had a class during the actual time the performance was given. Take a peek at what it looked like:

It was absolutely fantastic. Some of the symposium participants really had no idea what to make of it. And many others really got into and started dancing in the amphitheater. Really great stuff.

The article linked above refers to the statistical analysis the Global Consciousness Project has carried out with respect to momentous events that have had massive impacts on many people. The EGG researchers have seen perturbations in the randomness of the EGGs (the random number generators I mentioned above) that correspond to important global events like the recent tsunami in Asia and the September 11th terrorist attacks in New York, D.C., and Pennsylvania. The perturbations in the randomness of the numbers, according to Dr. Roger Nelson, the primary researcher based at Princeton, represent about a million to one odds that they are mere coincidence. In fact the project has recorded several statistically significant departures from random in the system of EGGs over the past several years, including the funeral of Princess Diana (watched by an estimated 1 billion people world-wide and the passing of the new year in 2000 at major metropolitan areas such as New York and London.

Some readers of this post may have read my musings from last summer on the nature of infinity and light, and I think the EGG project is related in several ways. In the end, the idea of a global consciousness seems very Hegelian to me, especially as Josiah Royce developed Hegel’s metaphysics through Charles Peirce’s Logic and Semiotics in The Problem of Christianity. I’ve been interested in these ideas since they were introduced to me at Loyola in my several philosophy classes on epistemology and American Philosophy with Rev. John Stacer, S.J.–a wonderful teacher.

Dr. Nelson at the Global Consciousness project also refers to the work of Teilhard de Chardin on evolutionary theology, who I was also introduced to by Fr. Stacer at Loyola. For a great speculative treatment of some of the ideas of Teilhard, I’ve always really enjoyed reading and re-reading Julian May’s Galactic Milieu novels–very fun stuff. Put all this together with my readings recently on string theory, relativity, and transfinite mathematics and you get the bubbling pot that is my mind right now.