Do You Think We'll Ever Run Out of New Moves?

It'd be a sad day, but do you think we'll ever exhaust poi? Or is it something that there will continue to be innovation in forever? I speak only in terms of moves, not in terms of stylistic elements.

Well, we've certainly reached far and the amount of shapes and patterns that can be done with poi, while vast, is not infinite. At the rate tech is growing I'll make a wild guess that we'll reach 'peak poi' in around a year.

If you wish to reach the 'end' you´l reach it, if not, you wont...

It might slow down, but someone will come up with something new at some point, although I am not sure whether anything in the last year or so has been brand new, rather it seems to have been a development of previous trends.

I think that wer are mostly away from a real "ending" - yeah maybe most patterns are reached - but did you try playing them isolated - whole antispin/inspin? Maybe there is a possibility of doing more complexed move like hybrids which are including 3 or more driving-styles.

And of course - do you try to play (isolated) antispins with the center not rotating in a circle? I saw "gè" doing some great staff-flowers which I think Cyrielle has covered in a .pdf-file. This patterns are really amazing and I hope just a beginning.

And if we really run out of tech patterns - we should start thinking about how to get them that we still have our flow and it looks great for an audience for example.

And of course in Evolution there is never an ending theres are only pauses!

I personally thikn that it will come to an end at some point. Definately not for an individual person, that's just too much for one person.

Someone will probably come up with something new soon.

Also, I could think that there may be more play with point isolations coming in after a while.

Well, im working on the next breakthrough currently. I will reveal it when its done. It will rock your world.

Turns out Nick has a tutorial for it

jk, I don't even know what it is yet, but that would be pretty funny in my book

damn it. thats the last time I give help to someone who is struggling. He was all like help! WoodlandApple, I need help! and I, like a sucker, showed him some moves.

But can he do it btb

Lol, not only btb, but utl, bth, and atomic in both those places. If what your're doing doesn't work like that, than he made it work just to piss you off

I curse you Nick!

now Im damned to play second fiddle. I will end up dying bitter and alone; doomed to always walk in the shadow of the one that refined my lifes work.

Too bad for you, as he has mastered your cursing abilities as well

I don't think it's actually an answerable question in its present form. In mathematical and some philosophical theories it's important to know how to individuate the objects in the domain of discourse--that is, you need to know when you're talking about one thing or two (more technically, most individuating expressions in formal theories are similar to the extensionality axiom from ZF, with the form "if Ax iff Ay, then x=y"). If moves are not distinct physical events distinguished by the region of spacetime they occupy, but are abstract objects like movement forms (which I'm pretty sure they are [if they exist at all] if you and I can actually perform the same move), then I'm not sure what individuates them (except insofar as I suspect they're a type of mathematical object [if they exist at all] and I know what individuates mathematical objects in general).

The point of this comment, besides it being a verbose form of shrugging in response to the question, is that maybe someone out there should actually find individuating criteria for moves. Me, I'm too lazy and too rusty with the applied mathematics to do it myself. There are a number of interesting properties we can name about various moves (driving style, direction/timing, even connections to other moves), but it would be interesting to know if there were some more interesting fundamental properties that these were special cases of.

Alternatively, it may be that there are no criteria for individuating them, from which I would conclude that there are no such things as poi moves at all. Actually, I find this idea amusing, so I'm going to accept this as my default until I find a good criterion; my official stance is there are no poi moves anyway, let alone a worry of running out

That's it for my super abstract tech musing (babble) for now.

Look into what drex was trying to work out a couple of months ago, classifying (specifically) hybrids according to timing and directional symmetries. I have not had the bandwidth to see how far he has gotten, but it looked promising.

Hmm... I'll drop him a line some time. It would also be interesting if hybrids existed, but other things didn't

I'm probably the only spinner pedantic enough to be seriously concerned about the ontology of poi... Yeesh. I suppose it's better than worrying about its ethics.

Here lies your answer.

Pity; I don't have a clue what it means!

Probably not the only one dealing with poi ontology. You might just look at it from a different viewpoint.

re: no moves really exist:
This might be possible, but is unhelpful. Most frameworks seem to be consistent nowadays which means that communicating those moves (real or imaginary) to others has a chance of success. If we throw that out, there will be anarchy.

Well, in the absence of "moves" there are things that I'm pretty sure do exist, like driving styles, timing and direction of poi and arms, ordered pairs of these, etc., which certainly are useful. And to say that something like a meltdow doesn't exist is not to slight the fiction, it's simply to clarify some theoretical groundwork.

My curiosity on this particular topic is a pretty purely philosophical one about ontology and, more broadly, the aesthetics of poi. Basically, this is the overlap of poi with my other hobby, analytic philosophy.

I suppose it is true that you do have that framework. So then a move is just a shorter way of referring to something built in that framework?

If I'm staying to my "no moves" line, I would say that talk of moves is an articulate form of grunting and pointing to a nebulous event that instantiates all, but not only, some subset of the individuatable components. I think, theoretically, "meltdown-ish" or "weave-ish" would end up having to count as primitive predicates that couldn't be stated in terms of whatever other predicates it turns out we can individuate the extensions of. So not an abbreviation, more of a rhetorical gesture, if that makes sense.

I mean, there'd be a lot more moves I'd be confident we could individuate if we could talk about bodily movements and positions, but I don't think anyone would like the results if we had to do that by appeal to metric properties; the cardinality of our set of moves would be crazy, and would fail to individuate just the things we're trying to explain. There's more hope for a non-mathematical or quasi-mathematical framework in this respect, but I'm not sure what the non-mathematical stuff would be.

Not that I'm married to the Moveless Thesis at all; I just find it entertaining.

My english is very poor, but this topic is so interesting that i'm attempting...
I agree with sister eleven,and also i think that this the golden age of poi, or probably the beginning of that. This is a time of creation, when creation will stop, will start the time of tradition and conservation, and finally the end of spinning, i hope in a far far future. Now poi are simply a new toy, and we can discovery it, at the moment there are no limits, just practice=natural selection can give to spinning its ultimate form. And a lot of moves are coming, i'm sure, when guy that are starting now will have been seven or ten years spinning spinning wil explode completly! (i'm sure i mistaked a lot of verbs here ehehe)

Finally one more thing, mathematial spinning can be seen also like a fractal, each concept is deeply linked with all the other, and can be studied and emproved almost anlimitedly. At the same time, during our practice, we can amprove all the complessive structure of the fractal, enlarging our point of view. In this ipotetical system is allowed also a matematical description of single trick, without losting the total view, but is so much hard to explaine something like this that would be a wast of time.. lol

I hope that my english was good enough for this deep and probably boring post :-P

We will think we've learned all the poi moves one could imagine
Then shall come the A-poi-calypse to wash away the sins of all the spinners.
All we have gained will be lost and the few survivors will covet any scraps of knowledge we once possessed.
In time humanity will learn to rebuild. We will rediscover socks and ball chains with swivels, LED lights in plastic balls and the sacred, holy Kev-Lar that brings the gift of the Gods to the new humanity.

But then your basis must be something. Position? Centre of Spin? Direction?

Right, those sorts of things are fine; my point was that I don't think you can derive just the things we would be tempted to distinguish as "moves" on that basis. If "moves" did exist, no reductive analysis of them is available in terms of the most general things that do exist (angular momentum, driving style, symmetry, or what have you). They would be non-eliminable. This is in contrast with something like topology where you could ultimately say everything you could say in topological terms, in terms of set theory (with some sacrifice of brevity). Basically I wanted to be careful with the idea of abbreviation, since in the sense that topological notations are abbreviations of set theoretic notations, moves are not abbreviations of anything (if the No Moves Thesis is true).

I am too lazy to read the whole page and a half of oppinions.

I don't think poi will, it's evolving and changing, years ago people (AFAIK) were not doing contact poi, or metior/poi combo, or throws and whips etc etc, so as new doors open, new patterns and paths become possible. Then mix concepts with individual "move groups", more concepts become available. I have seen someone combine club spinning "moves" with poi, stuff I havn't seen anyone else do (not saying people havnt done it, but this particular stuff, was the first I have seen).

I will never know every pattern and be able to do every "move" or every combination, so wether there is eventually a limit or not, i really don't care, I doubt any 1 person will ever hit that absolute defining point where there is nothing left to learn.

People whoes spinning I admire (not going to float egos) generally tend to have their "path" they have taken, one may focus on tech, another on contact, another on flow, and they may be incredible at their chosen paths, but I would imagine, say to a flow spinner "do that contact poi", then they would be lost, and vise versa.

There will only be a limit when people stop being creative.... my 2p

But why not? How do you define a "move" then? I follow what you are saying, but I think that I would have to say you are wrong, probably because I am missing that.

Well that's really the question, innit? I don't define "move" because I don't think I can define it in any vocabulary I've seen. The point of my adopting the slightly absurd position I have is to shift the burden of proof onto those who think that they can individuate something like a 4x4 fountain from absolutely everything else in such a way as to defuse counterexamples. So tell me, how should I define "move"?

Hmmm.... Point taken. Will have to sit and think on that one.

Nulleamai understood my post.

Fractals innit.