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stable configurations, “in tune” with nature and natural surroundings. Ecological
processes provide a certain cachet, appeal and authority that conveniently lend both
a design and moral credibility to a project. Such views have been rightly criticised
(Kaplinsky 2006 ). Evolution needs only to offer adequate solutions—ones that are
sufficient for growth, survival and reproduction—not necessarily the best or globally
optimal ones. “Optimality” for evolution is dependent on environment (obviously
polar bears don't do well in deserts). But it is not that nature has nothing useful
to teach us. Moving beyond mimicry, a better understanding of the function and
behaviour of real biological ecosystems offers new and rewarding possibilities for
design, along with a greater awareness of how our activities ripple out through the
environment and affect other species.
Music and Performance. Waters ( 2007 ) uses the concept of a “performance
ecosystem”—one that encompasses composition, performance, performers, instru-
ments and environment. Here music and music making are seen as part of a multi-
layered, complex dynamical system, operating from the acoustic to the social. Em-
phasis is placed on the dynamical interactions and, importantly, feedback processes
between components of the ecosystem. For example, the feedback between a per-
former and their instrument encompasses the body, tactility, vibrating materials,
physical and acoustic properties of the room in which the instrument is played, along
with the “psychological adaptations and adjustments” in the body of the performer,
who is deeply connected to, and part of these interacting elements.
Such connections evoke the cybernetic: instruments can be considered part of
a continuum that originates from the body, extending through instrument and en-
vironment. Italian composer, Agostino Di Scipio ( 2003 ) seeks a reformulation of
what is meant by “interaction” in a technological performance context and invokes
the cybernetic concept of ecosystems and feedback dependencies as a sonic inter-
action paradigm. This is indicative of a more general sense of failure, in creative
contexts, of standard technical approaches to human-computer interaction. These
traditional approaches emphasise the functional over the explorative and connected.
An alternate view, advocated by Di Scipio and many others, sees interaction as “a
by-product of lower level interdependencies among system components” (Di Sci-
pio 2003 ). Components are adaptive to their surrounding external conditions and
able to manipulate them. In the case of sound, this involves a sound ecosystem of
sound-generating, sound-listening and sound-modifying components, connected in
feedback loops with their acoustic environment. In this configuration sound itself is
the medium in which the ecosystem exists. The coupling of components with their
environment allows them to change and reconfigure in response to environmental
variation: an environment that the components themselves may be modifying.
Visual and Installation Art. My own interactive installation, Eden (McCormack
2001 ), is a complex artificial ecosystem running in real-time on a two-dimensional
lattice of cells, projected into a three-dimensional environment (Fig. 2.2 ). The sim-
ulation includes seasonal variation, planetary albedo modified by biomass compo-
sition (Lenton and Lovelock 2001 ), and a simulation of sound propagation and at-
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