Today, two deaths:
On October 2 1968, Marcel Duchamp, optician, voyeur, and chess player, passed away, aged 81.
On October 2 2002, Heinz von Foerster, one of the architects of cybernetics and Wittgenstein’s nephew, died at the age of 90.
The only traceable connection between the two might have been their mutual friendship with John Cage. For the last three years of Duchamp’s life, he and Cage met once a week to play chess. During the same time at the end of the 1960s, Cage visited von Foerster for play dates at von Foerster’s Biological Computer Laboratory in Illinois. Von Foerster recognised his own “order from noise principle” in Cage’s composition techniques and the two hit if off connecting pianos to electric guitars, creating listening computers and making systems nervous.
In 1913, the year Cage was born and von Foerster celebrated his second birthday, Duchamp composed a music piece using chance operations, “Erratum Musical”.
In 1960, von Foerster published an article proposing a formula to predict future population growth. The formula predicted that population growth would become infinite by Friday, November 13 2026, von Foerster’s 115th birthday anniversary. 2026 will be the year that the organ note in Cage’s piece “Organ2/ASLSP” played as slow as possible over the course of 639 years at Halberstadt will change from d’ to a’. The next change of notes will be in three days, on October 5.
At the moment of writing this text, 19786338051 seconds remain until the end of the piece in 2640. There are no Google hits for the number 19786338051.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJ5Cl30_KvE