What The Hell Does That I/O\I Thing Mean?

Yes, I know it’s strange, but ‘strange’ is a point of view that is best viewed through a kaleidoscope. It’s hard to define. As is I/O\I - especially when it’s me doing the explaining! In fact, you might think that I/O\I is best viewed through a broken kaleidoscopic, microscope when you’re done reading all of this. The reason being; I/O\I has many meanings that can be interpreted in even more ways. All of these ‘meanings’ can be cloudy when thought of on their own, but when they’re pointed to a central focal point, ‘meaning’ begins to emerge. Being that I/O\I is a concept and a symbol and a word; and insofar that I can tell, is not in use anywhere else in any other fashion, I’ll attempt to explain what I/O\I means as an abstraction of a few different notions. Keep in mind that this little essay is just as beneficial to me as it is to you in comprehending all this stuff; so actual comprehension is used loosely as a diffused allegorical approach is taken to a lot of the ideas. And since visits to this site will probably be in the ‘few and far between’ category, I might as well help myself to better understand just what in the hell I’m talking about sometimes! So, understanding is not necessary, but it doesn’t hurt to try. Right? ...onward

The symbol meaning of I/O\I is simple. It represents a continuous feedback loop. I/O is the standard symbol for input/output, so I just added another input at the end of it to make it a feedback loop. The input at either end is really one in the same, because it is feeding back into itself making a complete circuit. In the same way that a Mobius Strip has one edge, I/O\I has one input because it is representative of an infinite looping cycle. A figurative conception that uses language to illustrate, more or less, a circle. I’m fascinated with feedback loops and I knew that I wanted to incorporate it into the moniker, so input/output/input made a lot of sense. Also, I/O\I is a palindrome, being that it is spelled the same way left to right and right to left, and as funny bonus, upside down as well!

The conceptual meaning is not as simple as the physical, or rather it’s just harder for me to direct meaning into an understandable confluence. At one point, I/O\I can be seen as a representation of the constant recycling of everyday lives. The endless cycles of sleep, work, leisure, to the five day work week, the 52 weekends, etc.. Accepted social institutions like; marriage, religion, education, commerce, sport. Cycles from a wide range of diverse subjects both positive and negative. Neither polarity cancels the other out, but rather evolve into an emergent co-existence that operates well in a kind of dysfunctional harmony. Passive apathy on one end; rigorous discipline on the other. I/O\I can represent these polarities on either end of the inputs. “What you put into it, is what you get out,” makes sense here. The pursuit of pleasure and satisfaction can lead to both poles of the spectrum. Definitions of happiness lie at different points; while some are confined to certain boundaries and function fine within their own limits, others are compelled to reach beyond personal limitations and push themselves into ever expanding territories. Both scenarios are mutual and in fact need each other to exist. These balancing reciprocals are alive in systems like, the rich and poor – both are in positions that are reciprocated by the other and while the proportions may be different on either side, one side cannot be independent of the other. This is what I would think of as a static loop. Rarely veering off course, and for the most part, existing in a balanced equilibrium - although unfortunate.

Dynamical loops can be seen within the larger unmoving loops. The circulatory system in the human body as an analogy to the cycle of earning and spending money within the rich/poor example. Both are part of the framework and life of a larger vessel. The blood of the economy flows to keep itself alive, but some of it will always end up on the floor, and for a few, on their hands. These financial loops are essential to the machine, but can be a damaging problem for some that can resemble an addiction. Traps that lead to debt are a hard reality that can be cyclical. “Creature of consumption,” is a term I heard Noam Chomsky say describing someone that works hard to make ends meet, but also scrounges money on useless commodities that are ruthlessly marketed to them, thereby incurring debt that perpetuates in a never ending cycle of earning and spending. While freewill can be argued here, so can manipulation. And this kind of value/necessity manipulation that’s employed to create ‘need’ and ‘stupidity’ is a familiar trap that amounts to the essence of control and suppression –another historical cycle. No force or evil dictator is needed when the people have become dulled by the pursuits of pleasure and other superfluous and superficial desires. It’s a lot easier to control a population that are busying themselves working and spending, trying to keep their head afloat in water that obscures their rationality. It’s an interesting but sad feedback loop. Earning and spending. Yet it becomes reality when passive surrender is reached, or rather, unnoticeably acquired. This point ventures into a self replicating, but slowly degrading loop. A reality that is based on an image of another reality which in turn is passed down from older generations of reality. Like the game where a message is passed down through many persons seemingly verbatim, but at the end of the line and a number of people later, the message is in a far different form from where it began. It becomes a simulacrum of its original form. This is what Jean Baudrillard would’ve called, hyperreality.

Trompe-l’oeil is a term used in art to describe a technique that creates an optical illusion. The viewer sees a 3-dimentional place, but in reality, ‘the place’ is just the flat 1-dimentional medium that the artist has used to create the effect. The effect can have dream-like qualities when applied to other disciplines that when experienced, can have a range of reactions from panic to euphoria. If the acoustic qualities of an environment in which high fidelity audio is listened to are correct, the boundaries of real and unreal can be juxtaposed to the point of not knowing the difference between the two states. For example; the sound of a bee flying by a listener’s head produced by the recorded audio verses a real bee flying by, but still inside the confines of the listening environment. The effect could be unsettling or just plain impressive depending on the person, and the attributes of the listening environment, which could be anything from a dark room to a complete sensory deprived chamber that is submerged underwater and in total darkness. Underwater bees? I know, but just bear with me here because I’m talking in a figurative sense. Taking this thought experiment one step further, imagine a bee that, instead of flying by one’s head, flys through the head! This clearly couldn’t happen in a normal reality for obvious reasons, but on another level it can happen. Think of the sense deprivation chamber and imagine the listener underwater in total darkness experiencing the sound of a bee flying through his or her head. What would this listener think? Their brain would certainly appeal to their rational sense in asking; “Did a bee just fly through my head? That couldn’t have happened, but it really felt like it did!” Remember that in this sense deprivation chamber the subject is deprived of normal senses like, sight, sound, and touch. So, the listener would have all the same sensations and reactions in this environment as if it did happen, except for the physical proof of a bee flying through their head. In a sense it happened in much the same way dreams happen and are part of normal reality. The proof of the dream is the dream itself, whereas the proof of the bee flying through the listener’s head is in the experience itself.

The sensationally real experience of a bee flying through someone’s head is an example of the hyper-real culture that envelopes most of the present day civilized world. This hyperreality is part of a theory formulated in the early 1980s by the French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard. In his, ‘Orders of Simulacra,’ Baudrillard put forth that in the world’s modern societies, the reality we experience on all levels everyday, is a counterfeit reality that has been copied though the rise of communicative technologies from a previous reality. He used many examples to illustrate this and wrote a few books on the subject, so I’ll just bring up some brief scenarios that he frequently employed. In the first he borrowed a fable that was written by, Jorge Luis Borges, in which an empire sets out to make a very detailed map of its territory. This was to be the most detailed, exact, complete map the cartographers would ever create. After many years of toiling away at this map, it had grown to proportions and detail that exceeded the territory! The map became the new territory because it was more accurate than the original. This map was the simulacra of the original form, and all future maps will be based on this simulacra, or the image of the original territory. Another more generalized example is; the emergence of the ‘image’ as a representation of something else. Statues, paintings, photographs, movies, etc… Baudrillard points to the proliferation of images in the modern era as becoming so important, trusted, and common, that they have become invisible because reality has become an image. It is the reliance on the image as a representation of reality that has replaced the picture inside the image – the simulacra is made by us, and therefore becomes us. Modern societies reflect everything that is put into the simulacra becoming a doppelganger, or copy of ourselves. Through repetition and ubiquitous absorption, the image and the viewer become one in the same. Except for the actual physical properties, the emotions, thoughts, and behavior of the image and viewer are one simulacrum. Baudrillard has used the example that, an infant raised to adulthood by wolves is bound to become wolf-like, just as a child growing up in a society of objects and images will become object-like and image-like. The advent of television as a marketing and entertainment tool has proven to be one of the best examples of hyperreality. For many, it’s hard to imagine what people did on weeknights before TV. With TV, the modern person becomes more isolated in the sense that they’re less likely to participate in community affairs; or rather, a family watches television together, but instead of interacting, they remain isolated from one another because attentions are diverted. If millions of people participate in the same medium night after night, day after day, through multiple generations that add up to roughly 50 years; isn’t something bound to change? According to Baudrillard this postmodern ‘hyperreality’ is now the reality.

“Yes, but what does this have to do with I/O\I?” I know, I veered into a strange landscape, but it was necessary so I could come back full circle. Anyway, the aforementioned recycling of our day to day lives has fascinated me for long time. The things that we all seem to think are so important can be, when stripped and broken down into the lowest form, vapid and meaningless. Some of the fundamental roots of society like, the pursuit of power, success, happiness; are driven by the seemingly innate quest for meaning in one’s life. For example; the desire for happiness would seem to me, almost a universal quality. For some, happiness is staying alive, or living to see their next meal, or simply dreaming at night. For others, happiness is succeeding in life in terms of monetary wealth with possessions to match. Some will run their entire life trying to achieve this goal. When is it known that it’s achieved? And if it’s realized, then what? In this particular situation, I think the goal is rarely achieved because, the pursuit becomes the cycle which is an end point in itself. Always in pursuit, always hungry for more. The circumstances surely differ for everyone but, in the end, what is gained? Meaning and purpose seem far away. Whether it’s money or a warm bed for the night, ‘meaning’ is nowhere. And, I/O\I can be a representation of this spiral into nowhere. At birth we start with nothing, and in death we have nothing. Without being too much of a nihilist, I’d like to say that I don’t necessarily see all this as negative. I try to see all this in an objective light, and I strive to be as rational and scientific thinking as possible when thinking about these subjects – it can be hard, but the ‘big picture’ is an intriguing topic to me - positive or negative. When any ideology or theory is questioned and tested rigorously, it will either stand stronger or crumble to pieces making the way for a new possible truth. It is a self-correcting cycle, and I/O\I can be thought of as a piece of this process of thought – but most would call it the scientific method. The input/output/input model is a spiral that works to learn from the old and build for the future. As the saying goes, “it’s as old as the hills.” And it is this processional cycle that balances and propels the all encompassing ‘world.’

These encompassing cycles can be taken farther when applied to the known universe. The Gaia Hypothesis is biological theory that states that the entire plant Earth is one organism. Through constant repetition and modification (and a little help from the cosmos), the Earth has sustained itself for 4.5 billion years. Looking at the Earth as a single entity, one can imagine the Earth juxtaposed against the dark backdrop of the space it occupies. Thinking or actually viewing the planet in this way – as in satellite images or some of the Apollo mission photos of the Earth – one can see the similarity to other living entities that we know and love. The flowing of the oceans, patterns of weather, the rotation, the active geologic interior manifesting itself in a constant remodeling of the surface in terms of plate tectonics, and the millions of species the Earth harbors and supports. If Gaia-like thought is taken even further, beyond the Earth, one can think of the entire known universe as a single living being - like a spiraling, circular chain that supports each constituent part. Just as the Earth rotates and supports the moon; the solar system revolves around the Sun, which in turn, the Sun and its orbiters sit in one of the arms of the Milky Way galaxy revolving around the center. The Milky Way is part of a group of 40 or so nearby galaxies called, The Local Group, which has a central gravitational center that rotates just like a planet. The Local Group is in turn a small satellite of the Virgo Cluster, which is a grouping of roughly 1,500 galaxies that also spin on a gravitational axis. Even larger, the Virgo Cluster is part of the Virgo Supercluster, which contains about 100 galaxy clusters that – you probably guessed by now – also rotates around a central focal point. Superclusters attract one another with their gravity and end up convening in large scale structures known as filaments, which form walls and connecting points that are made up of relatively high density areas of Superclusters. These filament structures can be thought of in 3 dimensions when comparing them to bubbles. A grouping of bubbles are attracted to each other the same way large scale structures in the universe are. Bubbles attach themselves together on all sides with the inside of the bubbles having nothing inside them. Likewise, Superclusters form the walls and connecting ‘filaments’ from bubble to bubble with immense voids of space in between the walls and filaments. These are the largest known structures in the presently understood universe. It is this structure that can be seen as an all encompassing Gaia Hypothesis that argues the point of a single organism. Also, let me say that, all this is still science, because it is based on observation and analysis. When thinking of topics like these, it’s easy to think from different angles like, “why is all this here, and who made it?” This would venture into philosophical, religious approaches. There’s nothing wrong with these approaches, but they don’t constitute science because, they are not testable theories. Religions are infallible ideologies based on strong absolutions that explain everything, but end up explaining nothing because, they cannot deviate from their doctrines to allow new or outside theories. Religious thought is not self-correcting, thereby making theological based thinking unscientific and irrational.

In the structural patterns that stem from natural and man made creations, the processional system of emergence can take control. Emergence being a system that brings together seemingly unrelated elements and coalesces them into a finite entity. Music for instance, is something that I consider to have emergent qualities. A composer of any kind of music might come about from attributes like; exposure and admiration for existing music, desire, personal education, creative impulse, discipline, and purpose. In nature, weather is emergent. A water molecule by itself is just that, but seen with billions of other water molecules, a combination of mixed pressure systems, temperature differences, and unbalanced electrical fields, a thunderstorm has emerged. Emergence is seen as a whole when many apparently unrelated parts work together in unison to produce something else entirely. You and I, and all of our interests are examples of an emergence. For the last 3.8 billion years on Earth, evolution has been taking place to give us DNA based life. Which in turn, has produced humans that can speculate on the nature and qualities of evolution and emergence. I see Emergence and The Gaia Hypothesis as theories that are incredibly useful in studying the past, present, and future of evolution – plus they’re just so damn interesting too! Contemporary thinkers like, Marshall McLuhan and Ray Kurzweil have utilized these processes into their own fascinating theories. In the 1960’s, McLuhan predicted a ‘Global Village’ would take shape from technological advancements in communications, that could potentially have the power to unite people of diverse backgrounds and distant geographic locations. Today we see examples of this in the internet, and cellular and wireless technologies. He also speculated that it could be used as a tool and medium of centers of power to further advance economic globalization, and possibly enhance totalitarian-like control. Ray Kurzweil has predicted that the nature of being human will change in the next 100 years with the rise of nanotechnology. Kurzweil has talked about a ‘singularity’ that he thinks will take place sometime in the middle of the 21st century, when human created technology will become more intelligent than its creators. He sees a ‘paradigm shift’ in the evolution of life itself. It will continue, but for the first time, evolution will not be governed and propelled by random, chance mutations, but by the technology arising out of human invention (an emergence). Kurzweil has talked of nanotechnology in the form of molecular sized machines and quantum computing, replacing essential human biological functions and processes, thereby bringing an end to humanity and the emergence of a new species in its place. The loop will break and be superceded by its progeny.

It is the patterns of these emergences that function as self-contained feedback cycles. As a whole, emergences can be seen to be living entities, like the Gaia Hypothesis, but individual parts that propel the machine through circular feedback are the unknowing navigators. People go to work and function as components in an economic machine. Animals and insects fly, walk, and swim in swarms, flocks, and schools. Stars rotate and support satellites, just as they are satellites orbiting a galactic center. Reproduction is key in a system that feeds back. Life and culture reproduce themselves, but only one is considered to be alive. Yet, one of the arguments against Gaia is that it doesn’t reproduce. So is it alive? Is the Earth and the universe alive? I don’t know. And no one else does either, because the definition of life is flimsy and unsubstantial at best. Some say that the hallmark of life is consciousness, but stars reproduce themselves by means of blowing themselves up, and in the process seed the cosmos with all the natural occurring elements that accrete into new stars and planets – just as decaying, dead trees provide nutrients to new generations of forest. These are life cycles that don’t necessarily need to be ‘alive’ in humanity’s reflection, but exist amongst us in a multitude of forms.

It is these unknowing navigators, the individual parts of the emergence machine, that gradually move culture, philosophy, science, art, and technology, to places that can be thought of as abstractions of our mind’s eye. It is our imagination that perpetuates the continuation of the ideas of life.

And, while life is not easily definable, it sure is fun to think about! As is all this stuff about loops and cycles and feedback and circles. And as you’ve seen, all of this really is hard to define in a concrete way, hence the extremely loose structure of this little essay. From Noam Chomsky, Jean Baudrillard, Marshall McLuhan, and Ray Kurzweil to, Edward Van Halen, John Zorn, Bob Dylan, Evan Parker, and Bjork, to Don Delillo, Carl Sagan, Charles Olsen, David Grinspoon, Andy Warhol, and Jenny Holzer: All have influenced me in ways that have propelled me into thinking about music, art, literature, science, and poetry in diverse and exciting ways. I/O\I is me. And my output is an emergence of all my interests and influences, but sent through the kaleidoscope of a input/output/input feedback loop to make it unique. It’s like a Mobius Strip that is perplexing and fascinating and weird at the same time – one edge, but looks to have two; one surface, but looks to have two. Just like a continuous feedback loop, I make music, art, and writing for myself. The music I do, is the music I want to hear. And this is the closest definition of what I/O\I means.