On Being Nondescript

Abstract to follow.

A Prequel to Laws of Form

Abstract to follow.

Lars Clausen is a public speaker, working in management and educational consultancy. He is affiliated with the Next Society Institute, KSU.LT and UCL University College, Denmark, UCL.DK. He has published on Spencer-Brown and Laws of Form on multiple occasions, mostly from a sociological perspective.

More info: www.ucviden.dk/en/persons/lars-clausen

Writing the Mark

In a 30-minute lecture, Akiem Helmling will present a web app that provides naturally nested writing based on the Mark of Distinction. This app is developed on top of open standards like HTML and OpenType technology. The talk will also show how nested writing can offer a new perspective for computer programming, namely that of Notation Oriented Programming. And finally, how Laws of Form can help us understand how Variable Fonts can lead to a form of writing which is fundamentally different than writing by hand or typography. A form of writing based on variable symbols, and therefore called Grammatography.

Akiem Helmling (1971) is partner and co-founder of the type-collective Underware and co-founder of the contemporary art centre West Den Haag. He studied graphic design at the FH Mannheim and type design at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. He was a regular teacher at the Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague, the Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam and the Masters of Photography, at Leiden University. With Underware he was awarded numerous international prizes for their work, including TDC New York, TDC Tokyo, the Dutch Design Awards and the German Design Award.

More info: www.underware.nl

Reentry and the Laws of Narrative Form in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

I will bring Laws of Form together with Niklas Luhmann's social systems theory to develop a neocybernetic approach to distinct modes of narrative observation. The film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind exploits narrative devices of anachrony—movements back and forth in story time—and metalepsis—the transgressive looping together of narrative levels. By marking both formal reentry—the reentry of form back into the form—and systemic reentry—the reentry of the system-environment distinction back into the system—we can perform narrative observations in sufficient detail to allow a precise account of this wildly complex cinematic structure.

Bruce Clarke is Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor of Literature and Science in the Department of English at Texas Tech University, and a Baruch S. Blumberg/NASA Chair in Astrobiology at the US Library of Congress. His research focuses on systems theory, narrative theory, and Gaia theory. His latest book is Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene (Minnesota 2020); other books include Neocybernetics and Narrative (Minnesota 2014), Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems (Fordham 2008), and, co-edited with Manuela Rossini, The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman (Cambridge 2017). His edition of Writing Gaia: The Scientific Correspondence of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, co-edited with Sébastien Dutreuil, will be released by Cambridge University Press in Fall 2022.

More info: www.depts.ttu.edu/english/about/people/faculty/profiles/clarke_bruce.php

The Right to Have Rights: Spencer-Brown and the Political

In A Lion's Teeth, George Spencer-Brown (1995: 64–65) tells the story of The Garden and the Cliff, and in the paper, we will attempt to span a bridge from the rules and processes that govern the little garden community to questions of freedom and democracy, drawing largely on the works of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, and on the Antigone as a quasi-empirical example. Our aim is to push ourselves towards considering the relevance of these ideas for modern forms of organizing and in particular the role of media/mediation and how Spencer-Brown can help us think limits and possibilities of these conditions.

I am a Professor in Organization Studies at the University of Liverpool Management School. My research focuses on intersections of organization, technology and media.

More info: www.liverpool.ac.uk/management/staff/mike-zundel/

My presentation offers a perspective on cybernetic systems which puts You, Me, and Computing Machines on the same level as we all depend on the same reality of form. The main problem arising is the concept of "void" (the unmarked state/"ock"/ unwritten cross of Laws of Form), a state which cannot exist in our "one reality" by definition. To resolve this paradox which requires talking about something that cannot be talked about, we develop "duality" from "the first distinction", then "mark the unmarked state" to reintegrate the observations to a picture of TWO intersecting, though formally equal, distinctions. We then encounter trinities of marked states, which appear as oriented 4-folds (3 marked + 1 unmarked states) no longer containing (the) "void" as "nothing at all", but as "something meaningful".

Over the last 20 years, motivated first by Spencer-Brown's famous counting circuit, I developed a base-software package ('CERIOUS39') along these lines. The software is full of aspects, which allow the "void" to be rediscovered. It speaks for itself!

Applications include a deep analysis-tool for networks (especially neuronal networks). Numerical simulations of these arose almost as by-products and refinements of this developing process. The software-package now has reached some level of closure. Making it was less an implementation with a purpose than an unfolding process, allowing a (computing) language to express what it needed to in its own words. The software is intended to offer a general reliable cooperative base fpr complex IT-systems' purposes to be rebuilt. The IDEA BEHIND the software remains unlimited …

I condensed essential ideas from physics/math/Laws of Form into a software by "evolutionary" development over the past 20 years, (not really) surprisingly having come up with a full, high-performance and platform-independent C++-library for about anything a classical computer can be made capable of.

Title to follow

Abstract to follow

Bio to follow
More info: to follow

Content is number theory. Both Spencer-Brown and I, Michael Caola, use the Legendre 1808 formula as start point for analysis of the Riemann Hypothesis.

M.A. Cantab 1958, PhD (Grenoble), Pilkington (photochromic glass), STC (semiconductor lasers), BAE Sysyems (pattern recognition, radiative transfer)

The Form in the Metaverse : The technoetic poetics of "FORMAFORMS III"

Technoetics is a convergent field of practice that seeks to explore consciousness and connectivity through digital, telematic, chemical or spiritual means, embracing both interactive and psychoactive technologies, and the creative use of moistmedia. The term was coined by artist and theorist Roy Ascott who introduced in his art and education practice and extended substrate of second order cybernetics. This definition of the concept of Technoetics provides a context for an art-research loop related to the process of distinction in virtual spaces. This article a theoretical analysis of a digital art project called "FORMAFORMS III" that allows concepts, sounds and images to generate an art cocoon and immerse the observer into a poetic spatiality of the Laws of Form narrative. This text , followed by a VR exhibition of the project and an artist statement/presentation explores the logic the formalisms and the interpretation of George Spencer Brown's book narrated a-textual art experience. The forms that emerge through the digital spaces, the concepts of the narrative, the technicity of the installation and the co-authors/observers are interpreted as elements of a large dynamic cybernetic system. This system is being analyzed via diagrams, Mark notation and the process of the observers entering and exiting the virtual space and the nested virtual subspaces is treated as sequential crossings. Within the text and the art installation the question of forms emerging from behavior is related to an experienced hybrid system that combines mathematical poetics and self-referential aesthetics.

Bio to follow

I will try to establish connections between Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form and Husserl's scheme for finding clarity with respect to the central traits of reality, that is to say, his theories about the structure of the austere world of pure logic, which he explored in his quest to limn the true and ultimate structure of reality in the way he believed was needed to complement his theories about phenomenology and to keep knowledge of reality from collapsing into a formless blob of facts.

Claire Ortiz Hill is an independent scholar, religious hermit and author of books and articles on the Austro-German roots of twentieth century philosophy, specializing in the works of Edmund Husserl, the foundations of analytic philosophy, the philosophy of logic, and the philosophy of mathematics. She earned a bachelor's degree in Philosophy and a master's degree in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Riverside and a second master's degree and a doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Paris-Sorbonne.

More info: rancho.pancho.pagesperso-orange.fr/Writings.htm

The Theory of Form in Husserl's Science of the Logos and in Spencer-Brown's Calculus

This presentation explores George Spencer-Brown's powerfully simple paradigm alongside Edmund Husserl's "science of the logos". In Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form, a delicate crystalline structure is built on the firm ground of a simple intuition, in the realm of formal objectivity. The powerful analytic and ontological beauty of this entity has captivated the imagination of numerous disciples of multiple disciplines, notably those in mathematics, cybernetics, and systems science. First philosophy encompasses these activities, but differs from them in degree, a degree of difference necessary to contextualize, through crystallization, the expression of the first indication of the first distinction and the indicational space that it opens up.

Phenomenology, a method and model of rigorous scientific thinking, offers a unique means for universal reflection and speculation on the primordiality of the first distinction, outlined in Laws of Form, and the Calculus of its Indication, which arises from framing nothing. Nothing (the unmarked state) maintains its virginal reproductive integrity in the face of the marked state, a paradox indicated in Spencer-Brown's definition of distinction as perfect continence. In this synthesis of Husserl and Spencer-Brown, we anticipate novel positive developments in first philosophy and mathesis universalis as well as regressions to a deeper expression of the true genesis of form.

This project is a sequel to "First Philosophy and the First Distinction: Ontology and Phenomenology of Laws of Form," in Laws of Form: A Fiftieth Anniversary, Volume 72 of the Series on Knots and Everything (World Scientific; June 2022).


Randolph Dible is a lecturer in philosophy at St. Joseph's University, New York, and a philosophy doctoral student at The New School for Social Research. He has recently published the chapter "First Philosophy and the First Distinction: Ontology and Phenomenology of Laws of Form," in Laws of Form—A Fiftieth Anniversary (2022), and he has forthcoming publications in Analecta Husserliana, including "Ontopoiesis, Autopoiesis, and a Calculus Intended for Self-Reference." Recent publications can also be found in Natur und Kosmos (2020) and The Further Shores of Knowing (2021). He has published on mysticism in the Journal of Consciousness Exploration and Research (2010), and his Masters thesis is entitled Phenomenology of the Spheres: from the Ancient Spherics to Philosophical Cosmology (2018). Randolph Dible's current research focuses on the historical hypothesis of an infinite sphere and its relevance to the interpretation of formation in the cosmologies of George Spencer-Brown and Hedwig Conrad-Martius. Associated with this thesis is a general theory of extension and dimensionality. Randolph Dible is the Secretary and the Director of the Webinar for the Society for the Phenomenology of Religious Experience (SOPHERE), the Communications Director for the North American Society for Early Phenomenology (NASEP), and Assistant to the Editor for the journal Phenomenological Investigations.

More info: nssr.academia.edu/RandolphDible

Abstract to follow


Professor Barry Smith, director of the National Center for Ontological Research (NCOR), in the State University of New York at Buffalo, is one of the most widely cited contemporary philosophers. His applied ontology extends across many fields, including the biomedical sciences, geospatial informatics, military and intelligence analysis, and industrial engineering. His work draws on Edmund Husserl and his early realist followers, especially Adolf Reinach and Roman Ingarden. Professor Smith is Julian Park Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Affiliate Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Computer Science, Engineering, and Neurology at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and Visiting Professor at the University of Italian Switzerland.

The Pen Factory