A project by the Sarai Media Lab:
Jeebesh Bagchi, Mrityunjay Chatterjee, Iram Ghufran, Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta

Additional Research:
Taha Mehmood

Acknowledgements:
Bhagwati Prasad, Lokesh, Researcher, Shveta Sarda, People of Pooth Khurd village, Sarai Archive

Designed and Produced at the Sarai Media Lab, Sarai-CSDS, Delhi, India (www.sarai.net)
November 2005

* You enter the work through the interface - clicking on the moving words takes you further in.
* A lot of words from the text are linked to HTML pages and these are linked to other texts/ photographs/videos.

Ectropy Index

The word "ectropy" means a general increase in organization. It appears to have been developed by Willard V. Quine, a philosopher and mathematician in the course of a series of discussions about information in 1969. It is now understood as an antonym of "entropy", If entropy is the net increase in the tendency towards chaos within a system, then ectropy being its opposite, suggests a congealing and thickening of information from a mass of things known, half known and unknown.

While imagining ectropy it helps to think of a circle, that denotes a neutral state. Any inward collapse of the circle in a cardioid fashion denotes the loss of the order. or entropy, and the outward radiation of the circle, leading to an increase in it's circumferential arc , is ectropy. An ectropic index then would be the measure of the increase of information, or of order, in a given system.

'Ectropic Index' takes these meanings to create its own tension between entropic and ectropic impulses, between forces that tend to increase and decrease the levels of order and systematization (as opposed to randomness) within a system.

Interestingly, ectropy is also a disease of the eyelid, which especially afflicts hyper-thoroughbred (or inbred) hunting dogs and people who have artificial eyes. In this disease, the eyelids do not close satisfactorily, leading especially to a slackening of the muscles of the lower eyelid, so that the orbit of the eye comes loose, and portrudes, ectropically, from its socket. Eyes that do not blink, or sleep, or never shut to occasionally 'not see' something, tend towards ectropy. The eye that wants to be all seeing, that wants everything in order, all the time, better beware of ectropy.

It is said that we live today in a social realm increasingly marked by activities that have to do with information. Identity cards and identity theft, fingerprints and forgeries, surveillance cameras and shadows , data bodies and data crashes, biometrics and body sculpting seem to define significant features of the topography of contemporaneity. Here, in this zone falls the glare of the searchlight, surrounded by the thickening fog of the unknowable. A host of everyday practices, ways of

make do and make believe provoke the anxieties of agencies deeply invested in knowing all that can be known. And all that can be known takes recourse and refuge in the unknowable. This is the ground that this work walks through. Here you can find logs of ongoing research at Sarai on information and society, and a random harvest of images and fragments of information, from the world wide web, from the street nearby, from far away shores, and from right under our noses.

Welcome, enter, and take your own measure of the ectropy index.