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Figure 6.18.
The Gatineau River, quebec. Source: Blohm, Beer, and Suzuki 1986, 51.
(Photo: Hans-Ludwig Blohm.
©
Hans-Ludwig Blohm, Canada.)
crossover further by jumping ahead twenty years, to a topic published in
1986,
Pebbles to Computers: The Thread
, which combines photographs by Hans
Blohm with text by Stafford Beer and an introduction by David Suzuki. It is a
coffee-table topic with lots of color pictures and traces out a longue durée his-
tory of computing, running from simple counting (“pebbles”) to digital elec-
tronic computers. The history is not, however, told in a linear fashion leading
up to the present, but as a topologically complex “thread”—drawn by Beer as
a thick red line twisting around photographs and text and linking one page to
the next—embracing, for example, Stonehenge as an astronomical computer
and Peruvian
quipus
, beautiful knotted threads, as calculational devices. Here
Beer develops his ontological vision further. Under the heading “Nature
Calculates,” he comments on a photograph of the Gatineau River (fig. 6.18)
that catches the endless complexity of the water's surface (Blohm, Beer, and
Suzuki 1986, 54): “This exquisite photograph of water in movement . . . has
a very subtle message for us. It is that nature's computers
are
that which they
compute. If one were to take intricate details of wind and tide and so on, and
use them . . . as 'input' to some computer simulating water—what computer
would one use, and how express the 'output'? Water itself: that answers both
