"It is out of the random that organisms collect new mutations, and it is there that stochastic learning gathers its solutions." - Gregory Bateson -
Read to the end of this page before using links, there will be a butterfly landing at the bottom - in time.
When I talked to the Native Media Artist Mike MacDonald about the odd flight of the butterfly he told me it was the creature that he found most difficult to film in flight - he had no problem with birds, other animals or insects - but butterflies were so capricious.
As we seek to articulate solutions to the manifold problems of our times the delicate and frenetic flight of a butterfly comes to mind.
The web of our new capacities, the work of a new fluid way of writing, of bounding our inscriptions into the water of ideas and images, dissolving our certainty into the living poesis of association, analogy and an incompleteness that fulfils our need for movement, for the next note, for the next link.
"Every worker dabbling in artificial evolution has been struck by the ease with which evolution produces the improbable. 'Evolution doesn't care about what makes sense; it cares about what works." - From Kevin Kelly's Out of Control -The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, 1994 - The eccentric flight of the butterfly is a parallel of its frailty as a creature. Its unpredictable movement demonstrable of a survival strategy of the fantastic.
"The look forward becomes even more powerful the brighter it becomes aware of itself. The dream in this look becomes quite clear, and the presentiment, being the right one, will be obvious. Only when reason starts to speak, then hope, which has nothing false to it, will begin to blossom again. The not yet conscious itself has to become conscious of its own doings; it must come to know its contents as restraint and revelation."
- Art and Utopia, Ernst Bloch, 1959 -The butterfly's very existence projects an understanding and incorporation in the world of a rhythm beyond the rational and into the real of transformation and pure variability. The butterfly is nature at a serendipity of extravagant flourish.
Mr. MacDonald's video installation "Touched By The Tears of a Butterfly", from which we have recomposed for the web as "Butterfly Gardening on The Net" is one that surprises, in its simplicity, understatement, yet intense realization. I have been and remain against the general idea of unadulterated realism, and especially opposed to the filming or photographing of nature.
Mechanical means to capture an image from nature, as an art, seems absurd to me. But the work of MacDonald speaks through the images, the myth of the butterfly, and the reality of the butterfly, it speaks an unencompassed silence with an eye that is patiently waiting.
The images unfold without haste, without noise, but full of drama, beauty, colour, pathos. The formal gestures, the placements of the work within the context of a gallery and now on the net reconstitutes a meaning, a relationship of complexity demanding of silent attention.
Its discarded past as a slow and earthbound creature, the chrysalis of transformation and its rebirth as thoroughly transformed is another aspect of its metaphoric value. Here we acknowledge metaphor as essential. Metaphor as the gene pool of meaning - as a liquid plan, as an impact of an unreasonable process and whose speculated out come is unpredictable, is as the awakening to new being.
"...he that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils: for time is the greatest innovator; and if time of course alter things to the worst, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them for the better, what shall be the end?"
- Francis Bacon, -Of Innovations -, 1625.