Arts & Business/Kosmos & Chaos

Mikael Strandänger is CE of Arts & Business Sweden. The firm’s very name sums up its vision and mission in its pursuit of reconciling two apparently antithetical worlds.

How, it may be asked, can two realities, one of which, according to common lore, is the epitome of order as much as the other is of disorder, possibly co-exist without clashing? Arts & Business aims indeed high, nothing less than at contributing to the setting up of an economic and social system as an alternative to the prevailing one by effectively combining the prophecy of art and the method of business.
To do this entails discontinuing a repetitive, standardised way of production, the wearisome offspring of piecemeal, incremental innovations, and turning to an alternative artistic approach based on the audacious, disorderly disruption of the reality confronting us and its recomposition in a new and unexpected order, the expression of positive aesthetic ideals and uncompromising affirmative action.
It first and foremost means believing that there can be an alternative to the status quo, to an existence we are prone to deem as being unique and unchangeable, until someone bold and brazen enough comes along and proves otherwise. For all of this to be at all a viable prospect, it is essential that there be the courage to approach reality, whether from the artistic or entrepreneurial point of view, in terms of its complexity. It is essential, in other words, that the prevailing attitude and practice of neatly processing and packaging reality into so many watertight compartments be overcome.
Thinking complexity is not the preserve of a single trade or profession. It is open territory where unfettered and free-ranging discussion and proposition can and must be made to thrive.
Mikael Strandänger underscores the importance of “kosmos” and “chaos” as root concepts of human thought and a challenge to human action.
As such, he concludes, they are jointly the wellspring of human enterprise and an inexhaustible driving force prodding us ever forward.

There are human concepts that are extremely old. I think “chaos” and “kosmos” are two of them.
Perhaps the first generations of Homo sapiens discussed and meditated over chaos and kosmos in the woods of eastern Africa some 160,000 years ago.

The words “chaos” and “kosmos” derive from Greek. “Chaos” means “throat”, “mouth” or “abyss”, while “kosmos” means “order of the world”. Ancient Greeks believed that the universe was created out of chaos. Kosmos had been drawn from chaos, with man at the apex of creation.
Today we think we know better. The whole process would appear to have come about in quite the opposite way, or at least that’s what it seems like at the moment.
Scientists are in fact currently of the opinion that the universe was created from an extremely ordered state. A point-like state, that was indefinitely dense and extremely hot. Around 14 billion years ago for some unknown reason this pointlike structure suddenly exploded and rapidly expanded, an event termed the Big Bang. Not only were energy and matter created, but also space and time, that’s to say the four dimensional space-time continuum we think we live in. It is of course nonsense to talk about “suddenly” or even “when” here since there was no time before the Big Bang, or at least not time as we know it.
As time passed, the universe expanded as indeed it still does, a circumstance that makes for ever increasing disorder. This is what the second law of thermodynamics is all about. It is a fundamental law of physics that was formulated in the 19th century by the physicists Lord Kelvin and Rudolph Clausius, and as yet has not been falsified by any experiment. When a tea cup falls off a table it shatters. We would be quite surprised to see the shards of the tea cup reassemble and jump back up on the table again.
Disorder increases with time. And this arrow of time follows the expansion of the universe. The world becomes more and more disordered and hence chaotic as it expands and gets older. There might be a remedy. Quite a few scientists believe that the expansion of the universe will slow down and eventually come to a halt, and then the universe will start contracting. And the arrow of time will change direction as well.
Disorder will revert back to order again! The price will be high though; it’s the Big Crunch at dooms day, when the whole universe with planets, stars, galaxies and all will get squashed and mashed together and end up as a point again.

But chaos also shows up in our kosmos in another way. In 1960 the American meteorologist Edward Lorenz found that it was impossible to make long term forecasts. “Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?” of December 1972. Lorenz concluded by contending that the flapping of a butterfly’s wing creates turbulence that as local as it may be gets amplified in the chaotic motion of the atmosphere, so much so as to change wind patterns on a large scale, hence making it quite impossible to predict long term effects or make forecasts.
Edward Lorenz findings opened up a completely new area of research, chaology, the study of chaos theory.

Chaology has proven that even simple systems under certain conditions can exhibit chaotic behaviour. Small disturbances can give rise to big, and in the long run, unpredictable effects. The least lack of knowledge of initial conditions makes long term predictions impossible even when the system obeys simple deterministic laws.

Weather, water turbulence, disease expansion, and animal population growth are all systems that can be chaotic. So, chaos is almost a general phenomenon of all natural systems, in living organisms but also on a cosmic scale. Not even the positions of the planets of our solar system can be predicted over a long period of time.
Predicting or exactly pinpointing where the planets will be a hundred million years hence, for instance, is a task doomed to failure. On their journey through the kosmos the planets’ orbits end up being completely chaotic.