jonathan kemp

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Decrystallization 27-28 May 2011, London

Suppose a system consists of two containers holding a total of 10 blue molecules and 10 red molecules. There is only one way in which the molecules can be arranged so that all 10 blue ones are in one container, and all 10 red ones are in the other. On the other hand, there are a very large number of ways we can arrange to have 5 of each color in each container.

“Entropic View of Computation” in Mead, C., Conway, L., Introduction to VSLI Systems, (Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1980), p. 366

Decrystallization was a two day workshop and a salon performance event that took place in late spring 2011 in London. Jonathan Kemp (http://xxn.org.uk) and Ryan Jordan (http://ryanjordan.org), conceived the event around the two premises:

1) that while life itself starts from aperiodic crystals that encode infinite futures within a small number of atoms, the digital crystallization of the flesh by Capital limits these futures to the point of exhaustion

2) if computers and the minerals from which they are made are considered equally crystalline, then their decrystallization, that is, an increase in their disorder, is possible through positive feedback that disrupts and escalates entropy throughout their structures and forward into their present pathology, Capital.

In Day One of the workshop participants destroyed laptop boards/components and recovered some component minerals including copper/gold/silver by executing various volatile chemical processes. Although activities like these are often scaled to consolidate Capital through the negentropic use of stolen energies (cycles of exploited labour as in the 'real' price of gold), on Day Two the workshop participants playfully re-purposed recovered minerals in novel arrays for the final nights salon event of gold/silver drinks and lo-no amp performances.

Operating in an economy of transduction, that is, of the transduction of materials to value, consumption and energy, feedback appears as a regulatory mechanism in Capital's seemingly irrepressible need for growth. Feedback is the result of any circular causal relationship that takes place within a system, and negative feedback is where an action and its effects are fed back into the system in order to better adjust the systems performance. The game of 'animal, mineral, vegetable' (or 'Twenty Questions') is a regulated system where errors are interrogated to improve performance, and that the information required to identify some thought-of object is at most twenty bits (of information).

This game, along with Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics and Claude Shannon's Theory of Information were all in place by the end of the 1940's, presaging the installation everywhere of Capital's mis en scenes with its growth centre stage.

Cybernetics declared aim is to understand intelligent behaviour in systems by focussing on their “communication, control, and statistical mechanics, whether in the machine or in living tissue” and extended to encompass brains, “computing machines and the nervous system”, all characterized as self regulating systems made up of scaled nodal networks. Quickly identifying that such regulation is most effected in the passing of information through the system, its fundamental notions were founded on those of information, feedback, entropy and environment.

Future behaviours were to be adjusted by performance feedback through a maximum adaptability for self-regulation and self-reproduction. Materials are decoupled from anything other than being mechanistically nodal in the modelling and governance of spaceship earth (food dating/labelling as an example) and recycling is subsumed as a mantra crucial for sustaining the web of this life.

In the light of newer ecology, where systems are now seen to be less holistic and more dynamic, ever changing through a series of unpredictable events with nodal relations never balanced in a steady state, modelling now incorporates such dynamic positive feedback mechanisms as a crucial part driving circuits of self organisation (diy, p2p etc.) adroitly recombined by Capital in the accelerated transduction of that-which-is-decoupled to value. This transcendental malaise, the transcendental domination of the material by Capital, with efficient agency and growth as its biggest fictions, accelerates the renewal of profits by recycling through the abuse of resources and drives the extension of non-production towards the final crystallization of culture and capital together, like the exhausted subjects succumbing to the crystalline forests of JG Ballard's The Crystal World.

Where Politics lags behind, still set in declensions of the universal, and all planes of inconsistency are registered by Capital in its mutating controls and connective assemblages, and where hackers are eminently coupled as they evoke a sense of 'doing of things before they make sense' – so that their short range bursts can helpfully propagate an antidelirial Capital, anxious to harvest such free inputs for the circulation of its Power.

Decrystallization began without explanation, that is, a first and natural idea, prompted in part by personal diffidence. But its non-explanation and non-translation could also be viewed as the refusal of the control functions that are otherwise located in those feedback loops preferred by Capital. Instead that which had just gone and that which had just come were both unknown, with no closure, looping or otherwise, and autonomously supplementary to their ontogenesis in unfolding an ecological phantasm through the rubbing together of the various distributed material bodies. And it was this grubbing around in 'dark materials' that gave Decrystallization the visceral dimension to the mangling isomerisation of those crystal invariants it attempted to escalate against Capital's exhaustion of our futures.

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