Retrodiction
An Interactive Audio History
of Chaos in Literature,
Science, and Art
Sponsored by
Herbert Lee Grayson
Foundation
The Rockefeller Foundation
Retrodiction is a series of audio recordings designed for an Internet experience with visual, musical, interactive, and educational components. The series will explore the concept of chaos and the fundamental question: Do things happen by chance? or does nature govern by fixed laws? The goal is to increase public understanding of science through fiction, poetry, and philosophical writings. The project is a collaborative effort among Dactyl Foundation for the Arts and Humanities, the Santa Fe Institute, and the Art and Science Laboratory.Recent interest in chaos as a scientific and literary subject has been significant, yet no attempt has been made to assemble the diverse literatures that concern themselves with this constellation of ideas. The series will tie seminal texts together in a narrative fashion using the goddess Mutability as a figure for the changing face of chaos. At various times in history she has been anarchy, randomness, indeterminacy, and entropy, but also irrationality, creativity, natural order, and emotion.
The series begins with a contemporary adaptation of Edmund Spenser's unforgettable dramatic poem, "The Mutability Cantos." In the poem, the exiled goddess, daughter of Chaos, returns and threatens to exercise her claim of control over the whole of existence. The Olympic court tries to determine whether or not the issue is resolvable. It is discovered that there are two irreconcilable views: those who claim everything in nature is ultimately determined and orderly, even if very complicated, and those who claim that there is an element of spontaneity and chance in natural processes, which will forever prevent a final and complete description of the way things are. A trial is held, and the issue is hotly debated. The Olympian gods and goddesses, represent stasis, order, and law, and try to outsmart Mutability with rhetoric and logic. But Mutability's question inspires a strong defense.
As the series continues, each program will present a new argument to be tried and examined by the Olympian court with Nature as judge. Seminal narratives and essays by historical figures will be presented in defense of a variety of views on the philosophy of chance. Aristotle (384-322 BCE.), Copernicus (1473-1543), Issac Newton (1642-1727), Denis Diderot (1713-1784), Pierre Laplace (1749-1827), R. W. Emerson (1803-1882), Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849), Charles Darwin (1809-1882), Karl Marx (1818-1883), Lord Kelvin (1824-1907), Luwig Boltzmann (1844-1906), Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), Henri Poincare (1854-1912), C.S. Peirce (1839-1914), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), John Ashbery (1927-), Richard Feynman (1918-1988), and others.
As more and more public radio stations move to the web, audio recordings must adapt to the Internet experience. Retrodiction takes advantage of this new dissemination tool by incorporating visual and interactive capabilities into the dramatic performance of texts. Retrodiction will also feature popular actors, poets, famous business leaders and politicians as readers, whose names will attract random visitors to the site through search engines. Together with the use of original music and state of the art interactive media, the website will invite a large crossover audience, including the serious student and the thrill-seeking web surfer. In a word, Retrodiction will make chaos lit hip.
THE INTERFACE BETWEEN ART & SCIENCE Science books, even the difficult ones on physics, have become quite popular, e.g. Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos (1993) by M. Mitchell Waldrop; Chaos: Making a New Science (1987) by James Gleick and Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time (1988) are bestsellers. Carl Sagan's PBS series Cosmos was the most watched series in public-television history. The audience for classic literature, in contrast, has dwindled in recent years, possibly because literature has not been adapted to new sensibilities and new media forms. Furthermore, many literary institutions, university English and Philosophy departments, critical journals, and publishing houses have promoted the "difficult" art of postmodernism, alienating general audiences. As Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont argue in Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (1998), many contemporary cultural theorists misuse science in their defense of postmodernism.
A better dialogue between the humanities and the sciences is absolutely vital and, fortunately, more possible now than ever before. Today science recognizes that over time stochastic processes can result in an order that "transcends" reductive explanations. Holistic explanations have a place beside analytical ones. We now have a positive and optimistic alternative to the postmodern philosophy of radical indeterminacy, which privileged the experience of discontinuity. Supporting neither essentialism nor extreme relativism, Retrodiction offers a way of exploring both liberal and conservative points of view.
The goal of the project, in terms of impact on the public's knowledge and interest in science, is to explore the often over-looked philosophical implications of science. This is the area in which the arts and sciences most overlap and which will attract the most diverse audiences. This is also the area that relates science to everyday life. Retrodiction will show how the scientific view of determinism changes radically over time, and how our understanding of causality, whether it is conscious or unconscious, always underpins the way we make sense of the world. Retrodiction will present narratives and personal essays that deal with this issue in dramatic ways, illustrating the subtle and dual nature of chance as it has always affected artists, lovers, adventurers, scientists, and ordinary people. Each text will explore alternative views of fundamental questions: Are we just victims of chance? or do we have control over our world? Can we predict things? Will we ever understand why things happen the way they do?