DELPOZO, WESTWORLD, AND FUTURISTIC NOSTALGIA

Delpozo's recent SS17 collection bordered on transcendent: organic yet architectural, somehow simultaneously channeling both sci-fi futurism and Victorian nostalgia. They are the kinds of clothes one might imagine wearing to a formal ball hosted by Luke Skywalker or a rave with Anna Karenina. As Vogue nicely put it, "The resulting lineup was a bit Old World, yet undeniably modern; even the designer's most otherworldly proportions felt featherweight."

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Delpozo SS17 - What to wear to a formal ball hosted by Luke Skywalker, or a rave with Anna Karenina.

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Depozo SS17 - Equally appropriate for futuristic human technocrat and wild-western cyborg.

I thought a lot about Josep Font's creations this week as I watched the first three episodes of HBO's new series "Westworld"--and not just because many of his designs would seem equally appropriate on its human women and robot "hosts." If the end goal of technical innovation is immortality, a key implied requirement is the ability to inorganically mimic the organic. Forget blinking buttons and spacesuits--the height of technical innovation is rather its own obfuscation, an unnatural return to nature not so much for the purpose of passing a Turing test as rendering one obsolete in the inextricable blending of the two. 

Based on Michael Crichton's 1973 theme-park-gone-wrong precursor to Jurassic Park but more like an extended sequel to 2015's Ex Machina, the new "Westworld" depicts an application of naturalistic technology aimed precisely at manufacturing pre-digital nostalgia into a highly-marketable recursive loop. It's a clever premise, appealing simultaneously to our fetishization of future and past, the glamour of immortality-seeking innovation and the glamour of the bloody Wild West in a way that, as Rolling Stone points out, feels very now. Perhaps that's because, according to Emily Nussbaum, what "Westworld" is really about is HBO today:

"Like HBO showrunners, Westworld’s designers “pitch” plot arcs. They “massage” story lines. They plant backstories to deepen characterizations. When glitches appear, they panic over the need to halt production, much as 'Westworld' itself did, when it shut down during shooting for a rewrite. They are uneasy, at times, about the ethics of their labor. In real life, 'Westworld' can’t just be good—it needs to be a hit, too. It’s HBO’s bid for a franchise to succeed 'Game of Thrones,' following two pricey flops, 'Vinyl' and 'True Detective.' For both the show and the show inside the show, the key is to reproduce the alchemy that HBO perfected when it slid the Bada Bing into 'The Sopranos'..."

Even from the opening credits to "Westworld"--a macro-lens tour through an über-stylized Vitruvian workshop of technical materials and human organs, eerily serenaded by a skeleton pianist who gives way to a player-piano--it's clear this show is HBO out-HBOing itself. 

When I picture the showrunners, they too are wearing Delpozo SS17. 

RECURSION: THE REMIX TO COGNITION

The power of recursion, almost by definition, boggles the mind. Its reach transcends academic disciplines, unites art and nature, and may be the fundamental linguistic and even cognitive function that differentiates human from animal existence. Its propensity toward complexity and infinity quickly defies comprehension, with the highest-IQ humans able to process only 6-7 embedded layers. A single infinite loop can crash the most powerful supercomputers, and there's certainly no escape from infinite self-referential nerd jokes.

Broadly, I define recursion as "self-similar embedded repetition." I'm not going to try to rewrite Wikipedia on recursion's many discipline-specific applications and examples, but this list includes:

The Sierpinski Triangle, a fractal

• The Droste Effect and Matryoshka dolls in art
• Mis en abyme in art and literature
• Frame stories and stories within stories in literature
• Fractals in natural phenomenal and mathematics
• Fibonacci numbers, factorials, and the golden ratio in mathematics
• Infinite loops and circular references in computer science

The first chapter of Michael Corballis's book The Recursive Mind provides an excellent extended introduction to recursion, including several choice humorous examples. Building on Chomskyan universal grammar, Corballis holds recursion as not only the distinguishing attribute of human language, but of human thought, the foundational function of not just linguistics, but philosophy.* (He also nicely distinguishes recursion from its cousin simple repetition, and sister iteration.)

It's worth noting that frame stories and stories within stories pervade Classical mythology; Ovid's Metamorphoses, the gold standard, is woven together almost entirely in this way, with multiple layers of embedding. The story of Echo, for example, is embedded within the tale of Narcissus, which is in turn embedded in the that of Tiresias. This example is particularly rich, as the stories each individually contain recursive elements--Narcissus, for example, falls in love with his own self-similar reflection, embedded in a pool. So, here we have 1) textual recursion, 2) metatextual recursion (stories within stories), and 3. recursion of recursion--between levels 1) and 2). 

John William Waterhouse, Echo and Narcissus, 1903

Recursion is all over the business world, even though the word itself isn't part of our vocabulary. We do financial analysis on financial analysis, make a plan for the plan, and innovate on innovation. Especially as operations standardize and scale, recursion often pops up in organizational hierarchies and operational algorithms as well.

And then there's the underlying function of human existence, which I'm very surprised is not mentioned more in connection with the word recursion: mammalian reproductive biology. What is gestation but embedded self-similar repetition? 

Is the cultural ubiquity of recursion--in art, literature, business, technology--a subliminal cognitive response to our physical and biological nature? Is our underlying obsession with recursion, like sex, a natural instinct in the quest for survival? 

I think so. But the more I think about it, the more I think about it.

*There have been some interesting recent challenges to Chomsky, universal grammar, and recursion as a fundamental law of language.