Sha Xin Wei to Jon-Helgi Schweizer February 25, 2010: Ouija

Dear Helgi,

It is generous to imagine that I meant the same thing by naming our dance experiments regarding collective and "intentional" movement after Ouija :)  Our "experiments" in the form of dance improvisations were not at all precise enough to merit being called experiments like your Ouija experiment.  However I wish I could show you some of our work in video someday.  We have them mostly only on tape, and many hours would need to be condensed.

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I certainly very much in sympathy with your populations of coupled oscillators.   There is for example, some work with Ginzburg-Landau "spin glass" "lattices"  that may be of use.  Ginzburg-Landau is a well-known model for quantum mechanical matter, so you may have already considered it.   The classical analogue would be magnetic domains of little magnetic needles.  At high heat the needles are in random directions, but as the magnetic material cools, the needles tend to line up in regions of uniform direction.   This "anneals" into regions of uniform magnetic direction.   Spin glass models can generalize this.

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I've always admired one of your experiments that Helga described, having to do with having n people placing a finger (?) on a puck on a pivoting rod (?) and letting their collective pressure move the puck around.  When one asked them to guess how many people (agencies) were pushing the puck around, they tended to answer n+1, where n was the number of people.   After more than 10 years since Helga told me about some experiment, I am sure that I have caricatured the actual procedure.   So I should ask you what it was and the implication.   But it seems like an elegant and suggestive result.

Back to Memory+Place, may I post your recent thoughts to the group's (private) blog for our project?  They are rich thoughts, and certainly the philosophers and experimentalists would learn a lot by being closer to your experience.   I am writing very late at night, so please forgive me for these very casual, and not very thoughtful remarks.  But I did want to respond right away to thank you for this note.

Warm Regards,
Xin Wei