Cuckoo

Abstract

Drawing from the imag(in)ing of passing time as a cuckoo’s repetitive passing through a threshold, this article emphasises the active role of repetition in modulating spatio-temporalities and fostering variations. It argues that the systematic organisation and classification of the milieu emerge from the human capacity to perceive and assign differences within the spatio-temporal continuum. This process is enabled by iterative interactions with environmental stimuli, whether immediate or mediated through technological means, serving as an active process of evaluation and unfolding of environmental affordances. In this context, repetition simultaneously serves two seemingly opposing functions: it creates patterns of return to previous encounters while also opening potential lines of flight away from established norms. Intelligence transduces repetition into change, as it evolves through feedback loops, that is, non-linear operations that integrate information across various time scales and through diverse physical mediations, both embodied and exosomatic. As such, intelligence is re-conceptualised not as a state but as a symbiotic, responsive, and anticipatory process that unfolds through failing and adapting to environmental stimuli.