As a part of “Acoustic Garden ” program, The Maelstrom reflects today’s huge overwhelming forces of data, offering pattern recognition tools of the past, as a means of survival to embrace the inevitable interdependence of a nonlinear future. By recognizing data may serve as a collective memory, actions dictated by the user may take indeterminate inputs of activity and impose patterns through habit. This process of morphic resonance, where systems inherit memory from previous similar systems across space and time, provides the bridge between technology and nature where memory is not a static storage rather an ever-evolving elastic multi-sensory tuning system.

Edgar Allan Poe’s story “A Descent into the Maelstrom” had tremendous influence on the nineteenth-century poets and symbolists like Baudelaire, Flaubert, and others. In this story, Poe imagines the situation in which a sailor, who has gone out on a fishing expedition, finds himself caught in a huge maelstrom or whirlpool. He sees that his boat will be sucked down into this thing. He begins to study the action of the strom, and observes that some things disappear and some things reappear. By studying those things that reappear and attaching himself to one of them, he saves himself. Pattern recognition in the midst of a huge, overwhelming, destructive force is the way out of the maelstrom.

The huge vortices of energy created by our media present us with similar possibilities of evasion of [their] consequences, of [our] destruction [by them]. By studying the pattern of the effects of this huge vortex of energy in which we’re involved, it may be possible to program a strategy of evasion and survival.