I’m in a club, and my girlfriend asks the DJ to play music from another DJ. He refuses; he knows the other guy and thinks he’s an asshole. There is a strange recursion here. On the one hand, there is a peer relation: the DJs know each other. On the other hand, there is a hierarchical relation: they could play each other. This means there is a feedback loop and a potential chaotic attractor. From a population of various musics, different sampling and mixing artists can create derivative work, which can itself be the basis of further derivative work… if this process continues, a set of strange music emerges, distributed along a chaotic attractor. The music no longer represents the songs it was derived from, but is the process of derivation itself. Different mixing rules can create uninteresting attractors, like a Larsen effect or white noise, but they can also create fantastically interesting effects. A similar example: life is best understood as reflecting the process of evolution.