Readings 3

Complex Systems

A lot of this vocab is new in this document making it dense to read. I might be more interested in chaotic systems then Complex after reading this brief.

Cascading Failures sound very interesting too.

It’s always a great sign when they start the article by stating that what they are trying to define is not ever well defined.

Similar to heterogeneous and homogeneous patterning, like the universe.

“Variety and constraint will depend upon what is distinguished by the observer, and in realistically complex systems determining what to distinguish is a far from trivial matter.”

Emergence

In art, emergence is used to explore the origins of novelty, creativity, and authorship. Some art/literary theorists (Wheeler, 2006;[13] Alexander, 2011[14]) have proposed alternatives to postmodern understandings of "authorship" using the complexity sciences and emergence theory. They contend that artistic selfhood and meaning are emergent, relatively objective phenomena.

This is easiest to understand when given examples.

Self-organization

I like this idea that everything in nature begins to self organize.

His edict, an exclusion principle, "There are No Doppelgangers"[37] means no two concepts can be the same (all interactions occur with different perspectives making time incommensurable for actors). This means, after sufficient duration as differences assert, all concepts will attract and coalesce as pink noise and entropy increases (and see Big Crunch, self-organized criticality). The theory is applicable to all organizationally closed or homeostatic processes that produce enduring and coherent products (where spins have a fixed average phase relationship and also in the sense of Rescher Coherence Theory of Truth with the proviso that the sets and their members exert repulsive forces at their boundaries) through interactions: evolving, learning and adapting.

Complexity as practice

Such work inspired me to move away from a literal representation/interpretation of complexity, one primarily involving a sonification of behavior, to the creation of physical installations based on exploration of the underlying philosophy of complex systems. Rather than work with pre-existing emergent systems or processes, I tried to embrace approaches that really explored the underlying metaphors and philosophy of complex systems.

In a manner similar to Rinaldo’s way of working, the quirks of the system were exploited for artistic gain; the embodiment of the algorithm in a real-world scenario made its behavior much more complex and also much more interesting.

Art through misunderstanding

NEW ONTOLOGIES

Detachment is pseudo in the hand made. Seems too crafted to be detached.

Cybernetics thus showed that bringing to consciousness a decentred and temporalised ontology can make a big difference in the world, restructuring and reconfiguring great swathes of culture and practice—it was a nomad science.

The examples and variety of systems used in this paper is fantastic. It is also interesting to note this was published a year after Katrina in 2005.