Dayvan Cowboy
From Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Quite a decent music track by electronica duo Boards of Canada, featuring on the album The Campfire Headphase and the EP Trans Canada Highway.
Most interesting, however - at least in this context - is the video for the track. (Download it here, or see it here) Directed by Melissa Olson, it is quite effective in visualising the Deleuze/DeLanda-inspired ontology of flows and becomings. (It is also really quite beautiful.)
[edit] Video brief
Person drifts through vast empty space, eventually touching down in the turbulent, far-from-equilibrium processes of life that take place on the earth's surface.
[edit] The plot
Part I: Space
A person in a space suit stands at a platform that floats in space, just above the earth's atmosphere. The person jumps off the platform, and starts to drift towards the earth. (The footage is from Joseph Kittinger's 1960 skydive from Excelsior III – a helium balloon with open gondola – at 31.330 metres above the surface of the earth.)
Floating through empty space, the person is surrounded by lifeless equilibrium, except for the gravitational pull of the planet, as described in linear mathematics and by Newtonian physics. In the footage, you can clearly see the cloudy, turbulent atmosphere approaching quickly.
Part II: Biosphere
Opening shot of the sun shining through the atmosphere on a wind-swept ocean surface, followed by footage of our hero from space literally parashuting into the biosphere. The person thus enters a thin layer around the earth in which life-generating turbulences continuously emerge. This world is best understood as a multitude of overlocking far-from-equilibrium processes, which can only be described by non-linear mathematics and complexity theory.
In this layer of life, matter-energy from the core of the earth, this great Body without Organs of ours, is shaped into habitats and life forms, yielding ever-new life forms, through the steady flow of energy from the sun. Life emerges through morphogenetic processes in which energy is pushed through organic (as well as non-organic) structures, keeping them in a semi-stable, yet far-from-equilibrium state.
In the video, various examples of such emergent structures are shown – humans and other animals, weather systems and breaking waves, reef structures etc. So, as our parashute hero violently pierces the water surface and looks up towards the sky through the water, we can discern waves, releasing energy harnessed from far-away weather systems. The waves break onto reefs which are, in turn, generated either from flows of magma or the morphogenetic processes of coral.
A surfer (our same hero?) appears, navigating the turbulent medium. Similarly, a dolphin negotiates the turbulent flows of water, and a bird sails through the wind. Note: All of these organic life forms (humans, dolphins, birds) are assembled by the very same morphogenetic processes that manifest themselves in the turbulent media (air, water) they navigate.
[edit] Trivia
The surfer's name is Laird Hamilton.
