Professor’s new novel highlights ecological pressures
UCLA Department of Design Media Arts professor Johanna Drucker has a joint appointment with the UCLA Department of Information Studies and is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art and digital humanities. Recently, Drucker published a new novel, “Downdrift.” Her new book describes the impact of ecological pressures on animals that adopt increasingly human behaviors.
"Johanna Drucker, Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the department of information studies, is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art and digital humanities.
Recently, Drucker published a new novel, “Downdrift.” Her new book describes the impact of ecological pressures on animals that adopt increasingly human behaviors.
What was your motivation for writing "Downdrift"? Is there something in particular you wanted to highlight?
“Downdrift” is a story about species changing under ecological pressures. We tend to think of animals as relatively stable — pigs are pigs and hawks behave like hawks have always done. But in fact, animals are evolving rapidly, particularly in certain populations. This is documented by animal behaviorists and biologists. I was interested in writing about this from an imaginative point of view. The concept of “downdrift” refers to the “seepage” of human traits into animal behaviors. The story is narrated by an archaeon — the oldest living species on Earth, which dates back about 3.8 billion years. They were only discovered in the 1970s, and they helped restructure the tree of life because of their unique characteristics. But the action in the story is driven by communication between a cat and a lion — as the cat realizes her familiar world is altering and the lion, bewildered by the changes in his habitat and the animals around him, tries to understand the alterations of the natural world. The book is very melancholy, as the ecological pressures are rapid and seem irreversible. The archaeon has a distributed consciousness — like a fungus — and so can witness events in multiple places simultaneously. The contrast of individual sentience and distributed intelligence is another subtheme in the book.
Distributed consciousness is a condition of shared awareness across a population of living entities. The single-celled organisms that make up fungi, for instance, can act in unison when necessary for the survival of the organism. They will retreat from danger in a coordinated motion, as if they were a single living thing. The consciousness of a bird swarm, flying in careful patterns, has a distributed awareness — each member of the group is both individually aware and also part of a larger pattern of thought. In a networked environment for automated sensing, awareness — the ability to process signals and respond — is frequently distributed, rather than central. This makes the network more robust, and less vulnerable, since the system can compensate for loss or error in a single node. Though we might not characterize a computer network as having “sentience” or the capacity for self-reflexive thought, it has awareness in its feedback mechanisms and processing capacities. If we define consciousness as simple awareness, then these automated systems possess a distributed consciousness. But in my work, I am interested in systems of living beings — humans, animals, plants, and microorganisms — and the tension between awareness located in one entity or individual and a consciousness that emerges from the aggregate of all participants in the system."— Joy McCreary, Mar. 14, 2018
This post is an excerpt, read the full insterview on the UCLA Newsroom website.
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