Disaster Responses Are Space-Time

KlugesGus Koehler,

Time Structures, Inc., and USC

Sacramento Center, Calif.

A disaster does not exist within linear time; A disaster’s existence, its Performance, is time.

– Cities are unique nested space-time fractal performances

– Earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods are unique, nested space-time fractals and are performances too

– The character of a disaster’s performance is the experience of its disruption of a city’s performance leading to unpredictable, emergent structures propagating disruptive event streams

– A disaster response involves the design of local kluges or patches to

change the character of emergent local outcomes by changing the propagating direction of event streams

– Response kluges as fractal space time performances produce their own intended and unintended short and long-term consequences and are in turn changed via feedback.

TIME STRUCTURES

A Kluge is like Origami: Both Involve Self-Emergent Properties as the Result of Actions Changing an Event Stream

Source: Allen, Cities and Regions as Self-Organizing Systems, 1997.

A Disaster-Kluge Performance Exhibits a Continuously changing Character

• How to intervene appropriately to minimize undesirable effects of a disaster-city fractal crash?

• Such a crash involves proximity and envelopment of the disaster’s elements and the city’s expressing the time-space dimension as a local fractal space-time collapse

• Crash performance and the emergent resulting structures is evolutionary rather than causal and calculable; it is an unknowable performance producing an unpredictable character

• Disaster response involves engaging the performance of the damaged time ecology with a kluge or patch to ameliorate its undesirable character

• Kluges are historical structures: literally creations of history. They represent not a perfect product of engineering, but a patchwork of odd sets of things pieced together when and where opportunities arose. A kluge itself is a new space-time fractal generating its own event stream.

• A Kluge is a local theatrical movement involving “orientability”, “continuity”, “connectivity”,

“envelopment”, and novelty that changes or reinforces the disaster performance event streams.

• Knowledge necessary to design an effective kluge comes from observing the disaster’s performance and changing character

• Thus the key is the practice of designing, observing, and evolving kluges in response to changing character of the performance

Kluge Tactics

Kluge design complexity is related to the degree of difficulty associated with the discovery, and simultaneous application of fractal space-time rules as they apply to multiple disaster fractals and their event streams producing the disaster’s performance.

Kluge Patchs Broken Fractal Space-Time Performance Networks

• Fractal Time: A nesting cascade of multiple passing nows occurring simultaneously on differing uni-dimenionsal event-streams within shifting contexts. (Vrobel, 2011)

• Understanding a disaster involves understanding the morphodynamic rules of the fractal space-time nesting of this destructive process, BUT:– Responders see what they know, not new rules – Order of new rule learning is inadequate to the task– Apply kludges to “driver nodes” of emerging networks

but where are such nodes?

Cognitive Factors Shaping Kluges

• Clumsy apparatus of self-control (upper hand to reflexes)

• Confirmation bias of being always right• Motivated reasoning to protect our beliefs• Contextually driven nature of memory or

what happened in the past applies here (fractal time)

• Point: hot systems dominate reasoningGary Marcus, Kluge, p. 154