Title: Phase transitions in Balinese time, music and irrigation management (jointly with Vibeke Sørensen)
Abstract: The Balinese use three calendars, one of which tracks weeks in ten dimensions and is unconnected to astronomical time. Instead it creates a sound track for the musicality of daily life. This talk deconstructs the musicality of the Balinese uku calendar using analytical models and simulations. Claude DeBussy’s recognition of the polyphonic structure of gamelan music in 1889 launched musical explorations which continue to inspire contemporary minimalist music (Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Philip Glass). In Bali, the uku calendar is also used to compose interlocking irrigation cycles, enabling phase transitions that reduce emissions of methane, a dangerous greenhouse gas, from traditional rice paddies. Using these examples, we probe the dynamics of Bali’s ten dimensional concept of time from a computational perspective.
Bio: J.Stephen Lansing is an external professor at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna and the Santa Fe Institute, and emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona. From 2015 to 2019 he was Founding Director of the Complexity Institute and Professor in the Asian School of Environment at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. His research on Balinese water temples was the basis for Bali’s UNESCO World Heritage Cultural Landscape in 2012. His 2007 book Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali was the focus of an exhibition by a team of architects, artists and researchers from ETH Zurich at the Sharjah Architecture Triennial in 2019, now updated for the Venice Architecture Bienalle in May 2025. His most recent book is Islands of Order: A Guide to Complexity Modeling for the Social Sciences (Princeton University Press 2019). Presently he is working with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Nature Conservancy to assist nomadic hunter-gatherers in Borneo, and with Balinese colleagues to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from rice paddies.