The artwork creates a social environment in which people come together to participate in a shared activity. Bourriaud claims “the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever scale chosen by the artist.”[15]
In Relational art, the audience is envisaged as a community. Rather than the artwork being an encounter between a viewer and an object, relational art produces intersubjective encounters. Through these encounters, meaning is elaborated collectively, rather than in the space of individual consumption.[16]
I find ideas in relational art relate a lot with complex systems thinking. Some of the connections I describe in the Complexity and Creativity talk for Research Club. Basically, the study of complex systems focuses on the relationships between parts, how such interdependence can affect the dynamics of the whole and how properties of the whole system can give rise to complex interactions.
An artist who works in relational aesthetics considers similar systemic properties in designing a piece of art. In thinking of the audience as a community (producing meaning collectively), an artist explores how the audience may interact with one another, and how the environment can cultivate particular interactions. Instead of designing an individual experience, the artist designs that collective experience. Such a design can both empower the audience members by giving them some creative control, and also produce unique and personal experiences for each member.
In Portland I used relational aesthetics to inform a couple projects. pdx i love you was a collaborative public performance piece, a platform to encourage individual creativity as well as collaboration. hexagon followed a structure of composition to encourage the process of discovery in the composition, exploring how simple rules could produce complex behavior. The performance sought to decentralize a musical experience, by surrounding the audience.
Currently the relational aesthetics approach informs soup night and whirl. People’s interpersonal interactions can be used as a medium of art, and as a way for an artist to produce meaning.
How Networks Shape Human Behavior
Alex Pentland‘s research focuses on how interactions between people can reveal information about the individual and group. His innovations have included novel methods to measure and analyze the interactions of groups empirically and correlate the interactions with group performance. Such innovations have led to many spin-off entrepreneurial ventures.
I love this sort of work because it focuses on design for group interactions and builds connections between academic research and social business opportunities.
An unfortunate byproduct of rapid technological growth and cheaper tech is a culture aloof to rapid product consumption and replacement. You can buy a laptop, knowing that in a few years you will replace it. I admire pursuits to include elements of longevity and sustainability in design, like modular submarines. They are constructed with the idea that certain technologies will remain necessary and functional in 100 years, so you begin by including those in the design. With the remaining space, you allow for different modules to be placed in- allowing for flexibility.
Stuart Kauffman spoke remotely at the NECSI 2011 Winter School. He has made significant contributions to the field of complexity – in particular with his work on self-organization and Boolean networks. I found the talk most interesting because it took issues commonly discussed, of determinism and evolution, and approached them at a different angle. How did determinism affect our culture? How did it affect the way in which we view nature (hinting to the crisis we are in at present)? The talk itself presents nature as a powerful ‘problem’ solver, from something we tried to harness, to something that will survive whether or not we do.
Both cities and corporations are apt targets for complex systems research, as they are both composed of entities interacting over various scales. Its undeniable that both are significant- in the best cases cities for providing a wealth of opportunities, and corporations for improving the quality of living.
Understanding their behavior is essential- everyday decisions are made for the future of cities, and future of companies. To have the tools to understand their growth and behavior leads to better models for prediction. City planning and organizational design can be well informed by findings within complexity research.
As an artist and designer, I find meaning an essential concept to understand- you must understand the implications of what you make and how they measure up to your actual intentions.
I had the pleasure of giving the Patterns and Meaning lecture at the 2011 NECSI winter school. It was my favorite lecture when I took the course, so preparing a talk on the subject was an exciting opportunity. I’ll begin with the contents of the lecture, in particular how they unify many important ideas regarding meaning, and then describe how these ideas can be applied to designing experiences for groups and individuals. I will follow that with a summary of my own explorations on meaning. The lecture was originally developed as an exploration of complex systems as applied to art.
We’ll be looking at the phenomena of fracture formation, and modeling it using the finite element method based on this thesis by P. Federl. The general idea is that we have a material which consists of a surface with two layers that are connected. The bottom layer grows, causing the top layer to deform. When the amount of deformation passes a threshold, a fracture is formed. You can assume most if not all of the material presented is from the thesis, while any mistakes are my own.
One of the most intriguing phenomena within complexity science is that of emergence. It is a salient feature of complex systems, so much so that definitions of complex systems include the quality of exhibiting emergence. Many exciting solutions to the world’s bigger problems can be understood through collective dynamics and emergence.
Google’s search algorithm, to a heavy extent, depends on the nature of linking between websites. On the scale of the website and what links to it, Google is able to provide an answer the global problem of findability on the internet.
Muhammad Yunus developed a micro loan system that re-frames loans to take into account collective dynamics of a group. Through challenging the assumption of who one can give a successful loan to, and by tapping into group trust, he has created an effective method of alleviating poverty.
Social systems are becoming more complex from technological advancements and increased connectivity. Individuals are further empowered with the capability to augment their memory and communication through computers, the internet, and cell phones. Every society has structures which influence collective behavior, and with all of the possible configurations of people in a population, the question emerges for designers of how to implement a method to use the collective information and create a successful design solution [1].
Cities have been shown to have fractal geometry. In this paper we show how the fractal shape can emerge from a generative process that takes information on the scale of individuals or groups, and uses it to design a permanent infrastructure on the scale of a city. In this sense, we grow cities consisting of individuals and roads, starting from just individuals. [from introduction of paper, see PDF for rest]
A talk I gave at the December 2009 Research Club brunch at Tribute Gallery on applying ideas of complexity to creative projects. Applications of complex systems ideas in the projects HEXAGON and PDX I Love You are described in the presentation. The talks were limited to five minutes each, and a transcript is included below.
