Have you noticed? Zebra and ocelot markings are everywhere, from haut couture to discount slippers. We need to crack Code Zebra. After all, zebra is the penultimate reaction/diffusion pattern, a proof of nature's capability to develop complexity, display and camouflage. Zebras are animals that appear docile but are known for their fighting qualities, especially when mating. Code Zebra is a site where art, science, philosophy, economy, game play and popular culture can miscegenate. Oscillate towards our chat cult and enter our event stream.

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P A G E  C O N T E N T S

CODEX ZEBRA
EVOLUTION
WHY ZEBRA?

S I T E  C O N T E N T S

CRACKING CODE ZEBRA (SOFTWARE)
ANIMAL KINGDOM
ZOOKEEPERS
THE ARTIST AND THE SCIENTIST
R and D ARCHIVE
Z COMMERCE COAT ZEBRA/WEAR WOLF
SAFARIS
OCAMM'S RAZOR

		

Welcome to Code Zebra, a web of wills, in which faux science flies in the face of faux fur. Code Zebra is a reality drama and web laboratory where art and science muse in mutual fascination. Triggered by plyotropic genes, reaction/diffusion (r and d) generation was the key to Turing's code cracking methods. R and D lies deep below the surface at the level of the cell, ovulating as ocelot and zebra patterns, voluptuous Voronoi clonal mosaics, colluding cellular automota.

The artist and the scientist desire each other. They start with participant observation. They sit apart, high up in the rhyzomes of a mangrove swamp.

The artist turns to the scientist, "Do you dream about animals?" The scientist responds, "Recently. I dreamt of the genetic coding of a tiger stripe and its parallels in field analysis. I was up in front of a peer review committee. They asked, which door, and I accidentally choose the lady over the tiger, what a nightmare." The artist, preparing to pounce, "Why not take the tiger by the tail? Are you sure that animals are not humans? After all, humans are animals. Ever been licked by a large cat? Does that scan? Do you like to climb trees? Play shaman? Are you just a gene pool narcissist with data mining anxieties?" The artist thinks, "I'm going to chew on that rational left ear."

The artist does not want to proceed as an Artist. Oh no. It is far too dangerous. Artists assume the identities of various other endangered species in order to enact their will upon scientists. Perhaps the gap that separates the artist and the scientist will dissolve with these imaginings; perhaps they will find a space in between. Will there be progeny or parthenogenesis? The artist is tempted to get physical. The scientist weighs the situation from the bough, kicking a foot, wanting to get it on, but nervous about the encounter. The scientist, examining the artist, thinks about root systems, artificial life algorithms, the comfort of abstraction, as does the artist. The engineer who dwells inside both the scientist and the artist would prefer to reduce the problem of seduction to something solvable, manageable, to a design issue. The scientist begins to calculate the distance between one tree and the other, between the logos and the loci. The scientist sits erect, excited by the possibilities of research amongst the animals. Actually, thinking of becoming an artist. The artist growls, protective of its territory.

While the scientist and the artist take to their boughs and look at the common but distanced ground several overlapping committees are forming. One examines ethical practices, concerned about the artist's accelerating loss of identity and the scientist's research on human subjects. They are debating the artists lycanthropy, wondering whether it is psychosis or participant observation, hence whether to reward it with censure or tenure. The second circle is comprised of elders. They feel that research upon human subjects requires a protocol. The elders understand the artist's lycanthropic role-playing and feel it may be the only means to burst the oblique dialogue bubble. They are concerned about the artist's and the scientist's appropriation of their cultures' genomes and logic structures. Both committees share a mutual interest in the case study. Like Quake players, they encourage the two human creatures to trade skins and wear the results.

Why are sciences and art such strange and powerful attractors? Why are we so threatened and yet hopeful about their relationship? Can we get them out of their trees and into the Zebra Cage fake fur bedroom or the embossed ocelot air stream motor home to merge their patterns? Can we get under their skin? Will social engineering work, or will the patterns become murky, ambivalent?

Maybe the artist and scientist will solve world hunger, build the next utopian architecture, end global warming and save each other and ourselves from the boredom of the familiar.

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The Evolution of Code Zebra

Future folly: Follow the ongoing seductive play of Art and Science, Code Zebra and Clawed Fluffy in weekly episodes. Go to the Artist/Scientist on this site now.

Log onto Code Zebras pattern producing and physically mobile chat and sign up. Rant a reaction, deliver a diffusion, string your ideas into debates. The chat patterns shape change by issue, dwell time and topic. Impose a visual reaction/diffusion pattern from the archive or web site onto the chat, use this to jump start new conversations. Vote on the reaction/diffusion pattern that you think best describes the discussion; build your very own r and d profile. Listen to the sounds your pattern produces. Clothe the artist and scientist, grow their patterns or shake them out of their branches.

You can zcommerce shop at Coat Zebra/Wear Wolf. A commercialization committee runs its stats, grabs popular or unique data patterns, copyrighting these for you, their producer, and prints test tube martini glasses, fun fur lingerie, decorator wireless 1-800 phone sets. You can trademark your very own R and D pattern.

You can visit the database of past safaris and sci.art.lit, data set theories, famous zebras, r and d sites, lycanthropists, failed r and d funding requests.

You can attend an r and d love-in at locations around the world, or listen to these streamed over the net.

You can plunge into a Code Zebra Safari.

You can imprint a reaction diffusion pattern under your skin.

Why Zebra?

In the old tradition that dominated biological thought for over two thousand years, a given population of animals was conceived as being the more or less perfect incarnation of an ideal essence in the case of zebras, there would exist an ideal zebra, embodying all of the attributes which together make for zebrahood (being striped, having hooves and so on). The existence of this essence would be obscured by the fact that in any given population of zebras, the ideal type would be subject to a multiplicity of accidents in this view, only the ideal essence is real, with the variations being mere shadows. When the ideas of Darwin on natural selection and Mendel on the dynamics of genetic inheritance were brought together six decades ago, the domination of the Aristotelian paradigm came to an end. It became clear that there was no such thing as a preexistent collection of traits defining zebrahood. Each of the particular adaptive traits that we observe in real zebras developed along different ancestral lineages, accumulated in the population under the action of different selection pressures, in a process that was completely dependent on specific (and contingent) historical details. In other worked, just as these traits (camouflage, running speed, hooves) happened to come together in zebras, they might not have, had the actual history of these populations been different.

Moreover, the engine driving this process is the genetic variability of zebra populations. Only if a zebra genes replicate with enough variability can selection pressures have raw materials to work with. Only if enough variant traits arise spontaneously can the sorting process of natural selection bring together those features, which today narrow define what a zebra is. For population thinkers, only the variation is real, and the ideal type (the average zebra) is a mere shadow. Thus we have a complete inversion of the classical paradigm.

(Manuel de Landa, Emergence of Synthetic Reason, pg. 264-265, Flame Wars, The Discourse of Cyberculture, Mark Dery, editor, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1994.)