Notes on Art & Complexity

“An enabling constraint… is what lowers energy barriers and facilitates the flow of information or ideas - or energy. “Restrictive constraints”… are processes or events that lift - or raise or add or create - impedances to energy flow.” (19:10)

Juarrero, A. 2020, Exploring the Entanglements of COVID-19, video recording, Wistia, viewed 17 May 2020, https://cognitive-edge.wistia.com/medias/tld9bso9ca

“It’s the links that matter - it’s not the nodes that matter.” (22:50)

Juarrero, A. 2020, Exploring the Entanglements of COVID-19, video recording, Wistia, viewed 17 May 2020, https://cognitive-edge.wistia.com/medias/tld9bso9ca

“Typologies are wonderful because they force you to think. Particularly if you create matrices where you’ve got to fit all the boxes because it forces you to think of things in the boxes it’s a good sense-making technique.” (28:00) ~ Snowden, D. 2020, Exploring the Entanglements of COVID-19, video recording, Wistia, viewed 17 May 2020, https://cognitive-edge.wistia.com/medias/tld9bso9ca

“The things which I’m interested in are where we can catalyse entanglement. Now, the scary thing is that’s what Trump does. Every time Trump tweets he catalyzes an attractor-well. He’s not actually arguing logically or structured, what he’s doing is increasing the entanglement of a set of tropes or belief systems with certain key phrases - and every time he’s attacked on that effectively it becomes stronger not weaker. Key phrases can catalyse tropes, strange attractors or assemblages. I think there is piece of work which has to be done to take Deleuze’s concept of “assemblages”, “strange attractors” in complexity and “tropes” in narrative theory because I actually think they’re all the same thing - but we need a … theoretical alignment on those three.

One of the issues is: how to we catalyse an energy gradient which tends towards creating something better rather than something worse? My fundamental belief - and this is the basis of SenseMaker - is that you have to map where you are and make small changes from the present - and if you don’t map where you are, and you define where you want to be, you’re going to miss the weak signals. So the mapping to me is always key. I think the other thing there is the concept of coherence which I don’t think any of us have really worked on enough in complexity theory… I think we need to think about: what are the points of coherence where entanglement is possible? If you can find a point of coherence where we can entangle, then the energy cost of that entanglement producing outcomes is actually lower.

Human beings have learned how to be deliberative and one of the ways that we entangle is through abstractions. It’s one of the roles of art. Art can allow us to combine at a level of abstraction. So it’s a low energy form of entanglement because it allows meaning and identity to flow very quickly. That’s one of the functions of abstraction, or “aesthetics” or “semiotics”. I think one of the things we’re neglecting to some extent is the role of abstraction…but we need to see abstraction as an aspect of our material world not of the spiritual world in that sense because abstraction evolved in humans to allow us to make novel or unusual connections.” (29:00) ~ Snowden, D. 2020, Exploring the Entanglements of COVID-19, video recording, Wistia, viewed 17 May 2020, https://cognitive-edge.wistia.com/medias/tld9bso9ca