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[1] Soon after I arrived in Portland, one of the things I was thinking about was “What do I want to do?”  which a lot of people are thinking about.  I really like mathematics and I really like helping the world, so then I discovered the sciences of complexity and also its very creative here, so I mashed them together.

[2] Complexity is all about thinking of agents in a system and how they interact and when I think about creativity I think about finding solutions to different problems or being really imaginative.  If I were to connect them, how could we figure out ways in which things interact, be it be us, to design a better world.

[3] So a lot of people are doing research on this, there’s the Santa Fe Institute down in New Mexico, and one place I will be in a month will be the New England Complex Systems Institute in Boston.  I’m going to be doing some math research stuff.

[4] First I’m going to talk about some of the ideas of complexity, so you have an idea of what it is.  And then some of the projects that I’ve worked on, then things I’d really like to kind of collaborate on.

[5-6] So complexity, OK. What kind of name is this? So its all about systems that have agents that exhibit adaptation, interaction, and emergence.  Interaction- they’re communicating in some way, information is traveling between them.

[7-8]Emergence is a really interesting idea.  Its something that forms when the whole is not the sum of its parts, its more than the sum of its parts.  So here we have a single agent, then we put more agents in the system, then they’re interacting, and all of a sudden woah something happens there. One way to think of it, an example I like to use, is ants. You take a single and and its going to die. You put a hundred together, nothings going to happen.  You put a hundred thousand together and oh my god, there’s a collective intelligence that emerges. Its exciting to think of that sort of application to things like the internet, you know Google search algorithms and things like that.

[9-11] and when we apply those ideas to ourselves, one of the things- there’s this architect Christopher Alexander who I really love, and he talks about how we are beings of pattern.  So on a day to day basis 80 percent of the things we do is pretty much the same.  The words that you use, where you go, and just your general cycles. And once you realize that, you realize how a space a created can affect your interactions with other people in the space and also your feelings, your emotions, and your meaning.

[12] So how can we design interaction to have beneficial emergence. And thats something I explored in the different projects I did. One of the things about complex adaptive systems, just like the system of ants, is that there is no central hierarchy. Self-organization emerges from it.

[13] If we look at nature as a designer, how does it work? When you look at the process of evolution: its bottom-up, its very abundant, and explorative. There’s lots of different creatures that come out and don’t survive, but some of them are very successful.

[14] So here are some of the projects I worked on.

[15] The first one was PDX I Love You. An idea to cover the city with hearts.

[16] Me and a friend of mine were going to do it, and it was like, well we could go and put the hearts ourselves, but

[17] what would be more fun is telling people about it, and getting people excited. And being like, hey cool, do you like Portland too? Yea, OK.  They’d tell other people, and we’d cover much more ground and spatially it would be a lot more exciting.

[18-19] That one is more performance-based, and a social practice piece, this one is more of a music collaboration. This is something I worked on with Gary Wiseman, we just had six people playing the guitar, and we did was we made up different scripts which were sort of rules on what you would play. Are we all going to play the same note? Are we going to play the same string in different ways? And from us playing together at various times we’d see what would happen if we all did these different scripts, and I thought of that as the emergent property.  So in composing the final piece we just looked at the different scripts.  This is a fun process also could be used for generative experimental music as well.  You can have lots of random processes and curate certain things to be absolutely certain.

[20] So, now the fun part, things that we can do together.  First of all, last year was PDX I Love You’s first year happening, there was definitely some support.  If anyone wants to take it over and do it again- we had a booth at the Love Show and they really dug it too.

[21] One thing I’m really excited about is this framework of complex systems, of modeling, looking at the world in a certain way. So I’d love to share ideas and projects.  If there’s something you’re really pumped about- kinda like oh I think it applies here- I’d love to talk about it. Thinking of this aspect of a gardener and growing things, when I mentioned Christopher Alexander earlier, he talked about building architecture as, almost as if nature creates something.  Putting these patterns together and from that a living space will emerge.  And social projects on the internet, because I’ll be in Boston, I’d love to send ideas back and forth.

[22] What I can offer– I can do agent modeling– music, and math skills.  So thanks, thanks for hearing me out.