1 The Hybrid: This and/or That

2 Abstract: This text is a meditation on the concept of hybridity and hybridization as a construct of our techno-social system that attempts to safely frame (chaotic change).

3 Keywords: bifurcation, schizophrenia, catalysis, difference, gradient, reaction, culture, change, innovation, control, systems

4 Introduction:


4.1 What happens when two things come together? What happens when two energies come together? In certain situations there can be a catalytic response which allows the two disparate systems or impulses to encounter and change each other with gusto. In other situations the two systems retain their essential character and apparently do not mix, merely coming into separate relation with one another. Why do humans bring things together? Why is life combinatory and synergistic?

Recognizing the expanse of territory posed by these questions, as well as the main thematic question proposed at the Hybrid Space workshop "How does art create, visualize and network hybrid spaces," this essay will not attempt to provide answers, but rather will plot a simple course through some ideas and reflections on what may be the foundations that the questions rest upon.

5 CHANGE


5.1 Change is the base expression of life in the cosmos. Life, as a process established in the concentration and rarefaction of energies literally embodies change.


5.2 Change is a base condition of the variation of locally available energy gradients -- changes in the total radiative or potential energy present which are essentially conditions of excess concentration or rarefaction.


5.3 Change is the condition that forces evolutionary adaptation of a living system.


5.4 Change is evidenced by the existence and determination of difference.


5.5 Change is the ground condition for the first awareness of hybridity.


5.6 Change is formulated by the observer as difference.


5.7 Exposed to the unknown, the observer desires control over difference and change.


5.8 The space of flows may be framed reductively as a space of constant multifarious hybridity.


5.9 Hybridity, as the combining of apparently discrete elements is controlled and what is turbulently and chaotically uncontrolled is indeterminate.


5.10 Hybrid hints at the unknown obliquely through the limited acknowledgment that there is more to our universe than what we can comfortably apprehend.


5.11 Hybridity is a hand-made silhouette of evolution.


5.12 Hybrid is a flat-bed scan of taijitu, the dynamic yin-yang equilibrium condition. As such, it is mere straw-dog representation of the condition of change.


5.13 Hybridity appears as a discrete binary when there are, in fact, unlimited variations and variables involved.


5.14 Limiting the infinite possibilities of combinatory control to just two is an exercise in itself, and is largely an illusion to the extent that control itself is an illusion. It is all one can bear to engage with two conditions when all the world is in change. It represents safety.


5.15 Hybridity is reductionist methodology of control.


5.16 Hybrid is a determinate combination of two related elements or constellations. What about the indeterminate combination of dissimilar elements or constellations?


5.17 Because essences of the primary elements are used in hybrid pairings, the original two sources are spent in the process.

6 CONTROL


6.1 Hybridity appears to allow one to take what one can grasp in the left hand, and what one can grasp in the right hand, and bring the two together, mixing and moulding, to create a third condition.


6.2 One outcome of hybrid confluence is sterility or the lack of creative potential. While hybrid outcomes may be novel, they likely represent an evolutionary dead-end.


6.3 Hybridity is not embracing change, it is rejecting all possible outcomes in the stead of the determinate: most especially rejecting the surprising ones.


6.4 The hybrid is transitory and impermanent. It comes from a space of flows and exists in a space of flows.


6.5 A primary feedback from hybrid biologic systems is the death of the hybrid.


6.6 Hybridity is about naming and numbering the world-that-is so that it might be divided and controlled.


6.7 Hybridity appears to solve problems. But this capacity is merely a result when trying something different: something always happens, problems are possibly solved. This suggests the close relation between control, method, and processes which are stimulating hybridity.


6.8 Hybridity is the limited application of controlled change in experimentally limited circumstances.


6.9 Hybridity is about deflecting flows. Flows have an infinite source and infinite destinations, the hybrid is a small selective sampling of these infinite flows.


6.10 Hybridity is an expression of artifice and duplicity.


6.11 Standards are applied for optimization of control. Control is applied to eliminate the possibility of surprising variations within human systems.


6.12 Control is illusion.

7 SYSTEMS


7.1 Hybrid is an expression of agency and self-determination which is typically limited by social systems and collective imaginings.


7.2 For hybrid processes to be defined, there has to be an applied social metric -- as expressed through, for example, the scientific method -- combined with a limited and ultimately limiting concept of difference.


7.3 Optimization is the core expression of engineering.


7.4 Why? (experimental) Optimization. Optimization of what? of elements in the environment that affect survival. moulting


7.5 Systems apply extractive forces and abstractive frameworks to ensure hybridisation is controlled.


7.6 System constructs are limited in their scope and do not anticipate all possible outcomes.


7.7 Hybridity leads me back to face a wall that separates me from the world-that-is. Hybridity, or at least the foundations of the philosophy upon which hybridity stands, in fact constructs that wall.


7.8 Hybridized difference is conditional and relative and depends explicitly on an existing social metric or a standard in order to come into being.


7.9 Hybridity requires standards and protocols through which difference is constructed.


7.10 Hybridity arises within social systems, it is human-orchestrated expression.


7.11 Hybridity brings the disparate into union in the need of optimization.


7.12 Hybridity arises and appears under the control of the same forces which construct our wider social system. Hybridity is a construction of that techno-social system.


7.13 Hybridization is ultimately a tool of science and technology and of the broader techno-social system.

8 Conclusion


8.1 "The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed". -- Carl Jung


8.2 Hybrid ideas may confront, may coalesce, may cancel each other out.


8.3 Sourcing hybridity in the encounter that is human relation is necessary.


8.4 Dialogue is hybrid creation.


8.5 This encounter, between two unitary human beings, is the core source for (r)evolution in that both are altered in the hybridization process and there is an energized outcome from the process. That outcome is (possibly) the (r)evolutionary impulse.


8.6 The natural encounter and the subsequent exchange of energy between two living systems is the primary tool of evolutionary hybridization.


8.7 In the creative impulse, it is necessary to transcend the hybrid and directly face the unknown: if there are parallel universes, there are many of them.


8.8 But what we think of as space is a bare-bones reductive concept which is about abstracting some sensual experience of the cosmos into a limited and constricted *thing* which is no thing at all. If all is change need we consider hybridity at all?


8.9 It is no coincidence that one proposed savior of the hydrocarbon-driven techno-social system collapse that we are experiencing in the moment is the hybrid (car). Change will indeed solve the problem, but the change that is occurring is far beyond the control of those posing as progenitors of hybrid control.


8.10 In the capacity of invited facilitator of the conference, festival, and coming-together that spun off this book, it was important for me to introduce a complicating factor into the mix. A factor that de-stabilized the named and static concept of hybrid as it was framed in a variety of assumptions leading up to the event... Exerting control... Creating a system, a counter system. What works against conceptual hybridization? What provides a fertile ground for:


8.11 Final Words

Let us find eclectic mutation and permutation, syncretic molting, and idiosyncratic transmogrification to establish our dreams. Let us seek out what chaotic natural systems provide us with more directly than that which emerges from our synthetic imaginings. It will happen anyways that our species, always the mongrel, the efficiency-hunting mongrel kings of the animal world, will be changed by flows far greater than any we could ever hope to control. What form this change will take on is not known to us, nor is the final destiny of our species.

At the culmination of techno-social systems, hybridity is a dead end, it is a pretension, it is simply another expression of the hubris and arrogance which traces a heavy line throughout human endeavor in this world. The fertile field of creation cannot be sourced, approached, nor circumscribed through this concept.