66 On Complexity

JORGE WAGENSBERG

COMPLEXITY VERSUS UNCERTAINTY: THE DILEMMA OF INERT MATTER, LIVING MATTER AND CULTURED MATTER

Contrary to what one might think, knowledge is not gained as one gleans the answers, but rather as one searches for the questions. In any proper construction of scientifi c knowledge, the answer precedes the question. A thinker, indeed, is someone who thinks up questions. The reality of this world takes care of the answers. And so perhaps the greatest of all questions is this:

If nature is the answer, what is the question?

What disturbs us about the world are the answers with which it confuses and astonishes us in our everyday life. Questions serve to address these concerns, reduce them, classify them and communicate them. To come to the realisation that two answers belong to a single question, is the equivalent of winning a point of scientific intelligibility. Understanding is always related to the task of compressing a raft of answers into a common essence —which is precisely the question to which they provide the answer. The greater the mass of answers to a question, the more important the question is and the more knowledge it provides.

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WAGESBERG_EN.pdf — PDF document, 112Kb

DIEGO RASSKIN-GUTMAN, THEORETICAL BIOLOGY GROUP ICBIBE, UNIVERSIDAD DE VALENCIA

BIOLOGICAL FORM AND COMPLEXITY: REFLECTIONS ON THE ART OF TAI CHI

Vassily Kandinsky, father of the abstract movement, Bauhaus professor and one of the great fi gures of contemporary art, believed in the existence of an «inner necessity» that drove the artist inescapably to create. Naturally, one hundred years after the publication of «Concerning the Spiritual in Art», both the defi nition of and the necessity for creation are still the subject of much debate, with the very concept of art itself being called into question. However, it may be interesting to consider an impetus that is similar for the scientist, whose inner necessity is more obvious, an impulse that one might call «inner curiosity», a need to know and furnish the natural phenomena with a reasonably objective explanatory basis that satisfi es our intellect. The search for complexity in nature responds directly to this inner curiosity and is grounded in different conceptual bases. On the one hand, this quest contains a component that has been inherited from monotheistic Western religions, whereby human individuals are viewed as the centre of creation and their brain as the most complex structure in the universe.

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RASSKIN_EN.pdf — PDF document, 167Kb

DAVID JOU, DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS UNIVERSITAT AUTÒNOMA DE BARCELONA

SCIENCE AND POETRY: BETWEEN THE COMPLEXITY OF THE LEAFY AND THE TRANSPARENT

Images of complexity tend to be of one of two types: the leafy or ramified and the transparent. In the former group are the forest and the brain; in the latter group, air and light. Leafi ness, clearly, bears a direct suggestion of structural complexity: the dense, the multicoloured, the different, the interwoven, the inextricable. But transparency also has its complexity, more dynamic than structural: the turbulence of the wind, the quantum and cosmic fl uctuations of light in the eye and in the background radiation of the universe. Between the structural and the dynamic there stretches a broad domain of complexity that combines time and space, geometry and movement.

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JOU_EN.pdf — PDF document, 222Kb

PAU ALSINA, UNIVERSITAT OBERTA DE CATALUNYA ARTNODES.ORG

OMNES ET SINGULATIM: ART, COMPLEXITY AND EMERGENCE

The concept of emergence dates back a long way and throughout its history it has taken on different meanings in the different spheres of knowledge in which it has become relevant. If today, several theoreticians are presenting complexity as the paradigm of the new millennium, emergence seems to be becoming the explanation as to how complexity has evolved. Complexity is said to be an emerging phenomenon, and emergence is said to be what self-organised systems produce, the explanation for phenomena such as hurricanes, life itself, ecosystems and complex organisms such as humans, to name but a few examples.

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ALSINA_EN.pdf — PDF document, 168Kb

ABELARDO GIL-FOURNIER

THREE MILESTONES IN THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ART AND COMPLEXITY: INDISTINGUISHABILITY, STATISTICS AND CONFRONTATION

INDISTINGUISHABILITY THE AGENCY OF THE CROWD

The mere presence of an individual as the product of an exercise of combinations immediately places it in a singular relationship with all other possible combinations. An example of this can be seen in the exercise of imaginary recombination and ramifi cation to be seen in Dutch artists Driessens & Verstappen’s work MORPHOcarrots1 (1997), where an ordinary carrot is lined up beside a series of carrots based on combinations of possible deformations (Fig. 1). Nothing can prevent us from seeing the common tuber on display in this context from looking like some specimen that might at any moment spontaneously mutate into one of its quasi-monstrous neighbours; by its mere presence alongside its mutations, the observer discovers in the common carrot such a latent capacity that the specific features of its outward appearance are relegated to second place.

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GILFOURNIER_EN.pdf — PDF document, 375Kb

JOSÉ PÉREZ DE LAMA

Art as Machine (ecosophic) Guattari in the WikiPlaza

CONCERNING ARTISTIC PRACTICES

Félix Guattari has propounded an ethical aesthetic paradigm as a metamodel of the production of subjectivity and, by extension, of political practice. Our hypothesis in this text proposes the opposite road, i.e. to take the Guattarian concepts of machine and ecosophy to define contemporary artistic practice.

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PEREZDELAMA_EN.pdf — PDF document, 181Kb

MARÍA PTQK

This is Not a Bioart Exhibition

«The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it».

Mark Weiser

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PTQK_EN.pdf — PDF document, 169Kb

VALERIA GRAZIANO, FUTURE ARCHIVE

INSTITUTING THE FUTURE

Future Archive is a project initiated by Manuela Zechner in 2005. I started to contribute to its development at the beginning of 2008 when she joined the Micropolitics Research Group of which I am also part.

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GRAZIANO_EN.pdf — PDF document, 141Kb

PIERRE BONGIOVANNI

right brain and left brain

My aim is to try to communicate with both sides of the brain of anyone reading this article, left and right.

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BONGIOVANNI_EN.pdf — PDF document, 144Kb