ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses William Gibson’s use of metaphors taken from chaos theory in the Bridge trilogy: Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996), and All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999). Chaos theory was popularised in the 1980s, and appeared in popular culture primarily through computerised visual representations like the Mandelbrot sets, named for their creator, Benoit Mandelbrot. Chaos provides a connection between an abstract, or scientific understanding of the world and visual culture by allowing space to be portrayed as increasingly complex, particularly through images of fractals, strange attractors, and infinite regress. Images from chaos theory appear throughout the trilogy: the visual images of chaos theory represent both real space and cyberspace as constructed from information, revealed as increasingly complex through increasing levels of granularity. While using images from chaos theory to define his aesthetic in this trilogy, Gibson uses vision as a means of distinguishing between human and artificial intelligence (AI). AIs in the trilogy are not capable of the pattern recognition that allows humans to extrapolate from chaotic data. This human exceptionalism shows that Gibson’s work is not committed to a posthuman perspective and it is the relational, networked, gestalt perspective of human individuals that provides the distinction.
