v1.1 - Complexity, Art, Software

Wardley Maps are based on Simon Wardley’s observation that everything humans do (technology, concepts, etc) change state in ways that are broadly predictable. We can’t tell when or how it will happen, but we know what things move through a spectrum of states from Genesys > Custom > Product (or Rental) > Commodity. The change from one state to anther is a phase shift and strategy is essentially the business of acting deliberately to lead or forestall the shift from left to right along map of these states.

Assemblage Theory talks about phase shifts that happen when the internal conditions of an assemblage change in a way that shift the relationship of perameterised the concepts (DeLanda) “territorialisation” and “codification”. For example, water in certain conditions will phase shift from a liquid to a solid. How might the phase changes of a Wardley Map and the phase changes of Assemblage Theory be related?

In the Genesys phase, we might say that the assemblage has low territorialisation and low codification.

In the Custom phase, we might say that the assemblage is medium territorialisation and medium codification.

In the Pruduct/Rental phase, we might say that the assemblage is highly territorialised and more than moderately codified.

In the Commodity phase, we might say that the assemblage has a very low degreee of territorialisation and is highly codified.

BenkoBot is a commodification of business process automation built on a highly commodified version of kanban.

Today I was using the Readout tool with the CommSee SMs who are interested in doing the pilot. I decided it was worth getting it working because of the difficulties in working remotely with these folks in India. People have their video off for various reasons:

• Poor connections (like, mobile phones using 2G or 3G) in rural India
• Different communication styles - they’re quiet
• Having video on is a signal that you’re taking the lead in the meeting

It’s a big group of about 14 people and we needed to make some decisions.

I put the link in teams chat but people couldn’t access it on the bank network due to security settings. They could use their phones (lucky it works on mobile) but that meant typing in the URL manually.

NEW REQUIREMENT: Short URLs

In the end it was pretty good. We got a useful readout and decided to spend the weekly sessions focusing on the pilot.

I tried a few different labels for the poles of the dyad slider but some were not URL friendly.

NEW REQUIREMENT: Base64 encoded URL parameter values

We had a lot of trouble sharing around the URL.

NEW REQUIREMENT: Custom session IDs so we can use one generic input view and customised `/readout` views for different questions.

I realised that we need to display the question as a visual cue.

NEW REQUIREMENT: Question

If we’re going to be using the same URL as input for a session with multiple questions, we need to be able to clear the existing inputs. This is especially a problem if someone drops off mid-call. Without the ability to clear the history, their last recorded position will just stay there forever.

NEW REQUIREMENT: Clear history

UPDATE: THE NEXT DAY…

I woke up late and started tweaking it again. It wasn’t really working on iPad.

NEW REQUIREMENT: Make the Readout view open in a new tab

I also fixed a problem I noticed when opening on the iPad from the home screen shortcut. It’s feeling pretty good on the iPad and I put a test up in Gentle Agile Folk Slack to try it out.

https://readout.brokenbaysoftware.co/readin?question=SG93IGlzIHlvdXIgZGF5IGdvaW5nPw==&pole1=Tm90IHNvIGdvb2Q=&pole2=R29vZCE=&sessionId=1626313881590&readoutLink=L3JlYWRvdXQ/cXVlc3Rpb249U0c5M0lHbHpJSGx2ZFhJZ1pHRjVJR2R2YVc1blB3PT0mcG9sZTE9VG05MElITnZJR2R2YjJRPSZwb2xlMj1SMjl2WkNFPSZzZXNzaW9uSWQ9MTYyNjMxMzg4MTU5MA==

As soon as I did (which is interesting, perhaps), I realised that it needs some feedback when you move the slider. Maybe a little message that appears front and center and then fades away so you can do it many times.

NEW REQUIREMENT: Feedback after moving slider.

When I was at TAFE in the mid-90s, learning the various crafts of art-making, I made sculpture called “Piece Missing”. It was an anomally.

The classes were things like Objective Drawing, Experimental Drawing, Life Drawing, Painting, Colour Theory, Printmaking etc. For the final assessment we were expected to present almost the amount of work you would do if you were making a piece of work every class - not every course, every class. And we had multiple classes per day. That’s a lot of work.

But still, I made an extra piece of work and submitted it. It was a strange sculpture that came out of nowhere, apparently. It was and ugly geometric lump made out of plaster and painted black. It was essentially a conceptual work and the explanation was something like this:

Piece Missing
-------------

When we make an artwork we're bringing something into the world that didn't previously exist. How can this be? All we're really doing is re-arranging materials that exist in the world already. Where does this new thing come from? In what sense is it new? This work is not a new thing, it is the negative space, an absense of that new thing which hasn't yet been made. This work is the universe wrapping itself around the shape of something new which doesn't yet exist.

So there you go. In my first year of learning how to make art since I left school, I was handing in a sculpture that was claiming to be the whole universe. Really, I was asking the question “How is it possible to create something new?” and this is still the question I’m asking.

McMahon’s Kantian aesthetic theory (“critical realism”) is fine but it’s only half the story. Deleuze (and Guattari) give us the other half.

McMahon is concerned with the normalising process of art. She describes the way we create community by ascribing properties to aesthetic objects which illustrate the abstract concepts that make us human.

Given that perception involves “form plus concept” when we experience … form for which there is no concept, the system responds automatically by finding a concept for which there is no form. The result is that we apprehend a form which … evokes a deeply affecting experience related to a state which we desire, even unconsciously. (McMahon 2007, p. 14)

This normative process is only half the story. The other half explains the ability of art and artists to go against the norms of a community - to create change. This is where Deleuze’s “abstract machine” comes in.

For Deleuze, everthing is an assemblage. That is to say: every “thing” - everything that we think of as a “thing” - is an assemblage of other “things”. The properties of a thing are emergent properties arising from the particular combination of its particles (also “signs” and “particles” in Deleuze’s writings). A tree, for example, has properties but a tree is a combination of many parts - leaves, wood, bark etc - so the properties the tree has are more than the sum of it’s parts, they are “emergent”. Of course, every part of a tree is also an assemblage - a leaf, for example, is made up of many parts and the properties of a leaf, its qualities as we expereince them, are also emergent.

If this is the case for things that are separate from us - part of the material world, like a tree is - then how much more so is it for “things” with which we are more closely entangled? Answer: a lot more so. For example, complex adaptive systems that are human social constructs, like communities or organisations, are clearly “things” in ways that emerge from the interraction of their parts, which includes us. They are also “things” in very contingent ways - in complexity-speak, they have “permeable boundaries” and are influenced by their environments.

Whereas for McMahon aesthetic experience is a shared, normalising process that creates community, for Deleuze art is a “deterritorialisation machine” that creates newness through provoking a catastrophic breakdown of existing assemblages and re-assembling something new - “…artistic creativity lies in being able to destratify an assemblage and through this process express its immanent material flows in particles-signs” (Deleuze in Zepke, p178)

Both processes are inherent and natural in art as they are in humans but we experience their effects as both positive and negative. We are social creatures who tell stories about the world and ourselves (positive) but too much of this “territorialisation” (Deleuze’s term) is oppressive and so we resist it in order to change and adapt. The processes of territorialisation and de-territorialisastion are in a dynamic opposition that will never be resolved. Art approaches the “problem” of territorialisation (or de-territorialisation, depending on your perspective) from both directions at once, “on the one hand enabling its reproduction but on the other creating deviations from its normative axiomatic” (Zepke, p128).

Ontology, aesthetics and ethics are tightly bound and deeply interconnected. Art is, in Deleuze’s words, an “abstract machine” that allows us to dissassemble and re-assemble the “things” (assemblages) that make up our reality, and we deploy this machine according to an ethical framework of some kind. An ethics based on an idea of morality that is pre-existing and external will dictate an art-making process that reinforces existing territorialisations (or “strata” for Deleuze). So will a materialist ethics derrived from consideration of the adaptive processes of evolution, as McMahon’s “critical aesthetic realism” demonstrates. An ethical framework that puts value on resisting oppression, or revolution, will privilege an art-making that de-territorialises and challenges exesting structures.

The question of how art practice that supports an ethics based on the necessity of being adequately “critcal” and having a net-positive social impact should operate is a nuanced one. Locative-art as a movement was criticised for being inneffective and failing to address important questions about technology and society. When we start to address these legitimate concerns and to think about how art should utilise emerging technologies, it becomes necessary to think about particular situations and not just generalities.

The project that underlies Cynefin is the deliberate application of complexity thinking in order to create positive change. Positive change, according to this ethical framework, is change that leads to better (more productive, more resilient, happier, etc) social systems that include humans and our technologies (actor network theory goes here). Art that can be applied in the service of these ends needs a very fine-grained control. On the one hand it needs to break existing strata and on the other it needs to be very deliberately creating new structures with different “affordances”. Ethically, this context has a low tolerance for rupture and breakdown unless it leads quickly to the creation of new, more useful, structures.

Having read and understood slightly more since Aesthetics and Material Beauty, my view of McMahon’s theory has shifted. While I still find it generally coherent, I now see it as almost exactly half the story.

When I said, in the previous post, “we use art-making to reinforce existing communal patterning and we can use it to catalyse the system around new states”, I was on the right track. However, McMahon’s theory only adequately (perhaps I should say beautifully because it is elegant) explains the first part - how we create community through sharing aesthetic perceptions. McMahon calls this process “the normative force of aesthetic judgement”. McMahon’s “critical aesthetic realism” doesn’t really offer an explanation of the role aesthetic experience has in a process of change - of making a ‘new normal’, one might say.

The “new materialist” school of thought, which traces a lineage back through Deleuze (and Kant) to Spinoza rather than leaning directly on Kant, embodies a much more dynamic, process-oriented and gritty idea of what art does than McMahon’s rather refined theory. I think this all stems from what Deleuze and his acolytes might describe as the main problem with Kant’s aesthetic theory - that it presupposes a whole pre-existence. If art is a “normative force” and the aesthetic experience is only about the system responding automatically by “finding a concept for which there is no form” and then backflipping into an experience of finding that concept _in_ the form… where did the “concept for which there is no form” come from? Whatever the process is by which they appeared, presumably art had nothing to do with it. I think for McMahon (and possibly Kant, though I still haven’t read Critique of Judgement), these concepts are somehow baked into us at an earlier stage of evolution. They come from before we were fully modern humans and started to make art.

For Deleuze [and the DeleuzeGuattari simbiot] art is something animal - in fact pre-animal. It is about the ceaseless processes of life - in fact, the ceaseless processes of becoming and unbecoming of which life is just a part. Deleuze calls this process “inorganic life”. Complex systems are “assemblages”, territorialising out of chaos in an endless process of becoming and becoming something else. Some assemblages become temporarily “solidified” and predictable - Deleuze might say “stratified”.

You can detect that I’ve started to use Cynefin here, to make sense of Deleuze. I think there’s a very clear way in which we can combine Deleuze’s ontological, aesthetic and philosophical approach with Cynefin for the benefit of both frameworks. Dave Snowden has made it clear that DeLanda’s re-interpretation of assemblage theory has influenced his thinking profoundly. Other key Deleuzian concepts like chaos, stratification and lines of flight (think exaptation) map very nicely to Cynefin and associated concepts. If we were to look into these aspects of Deleuze’s onto-philosophy we might find useful connections that will deepen the application of Cynefin.

For my part, I’m interested in the operational relationship between us, our art and the rest of the world, including our technology and all the non-human inhabitants of the world. On a practical level, I’m interested in how we might use art in the work we do with organisations and communities. Deleuze’s idea of art as ”abstract machinic assemblage” is a powerful idea. The kind of radical but natural deterritorialization and reterritorialisation art embodies is a profound process of change. I’m looking forward to unlocking some of the potentials it has in combination with Cynefin.

Jennifer A. McMahon’s “materialist” aesthetics would seem to have very interesting practical applications for anyone considering the role of art in human systems and how it might be deployed strategically to affect positive change for communities and organisations. I am particularly interested in the possibilities that might exist for using art more effectively when applying complex-adaptive systems theory as practiced by Dave Snowden and the community centered around his Cynefin framework. Interestingly, “Aesthetics & Semiotics” is the theme for a Cynefin Virtual Retreat later this month.

This book is an update to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment published in 1790. In it, McMahon addresses what she takes to be the least convincing aspects of Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment and establishes a framework she calls “critical aesthetic realism” that reconciles two standard aesthetic theories, which McMahon calls “cognitivism” and “formalism”. McMahon makes her argument coherently, and methodically, so that even a reader without knowledge of Kant’s work can follow her reasoning to some extent.

The starting point for McMahon’s theory is an acceptance that our minds are in some way continuous with the world because our consciousness in some way arises out of our physical being. We have minds and bodies which exist to some extent together in a physical world. This might not seem like a stretch but there are other ontological positions and this materialist approach grounds her theory of aesthetics in our shared human context (the world, community, etc) and makes it practically applicable to the complex-adaptive systems we’re all interested in around here.

She then makes the logical assumption that the way we perceive must have an evolutionary aspect. Basically, we have the ability/addiction to perceive qualities in the world that make it an ok place in which to live. We are capable of experiencing nature as a coherent synthesis with a high degree of harmony - as “beautiful”, in other words. Put bluntly, we experience nature as embodying concepts that are imaginary but very, very important when you’re a pattern-matching ape.

Source: https://bigseventravel.com/2019/06/beautiful-new-zealand/

Art-making comes from this ability we have to perceive beauty. It is basically a hack on our evolutionary predisposition to imbue external objects with positive properties that don’t have any actual perceptual counterparts in the natural world. Drawing on contemporary work in computational cognition (machine learning), McMahon explains the perceptual process we go through when we relate to an object aesthetically.

Given that perception involves “form plus concept” when we experience … form for which there is no concept, the system responds automatically by finding a concept for which there is no form. The result is that we apprehend a form which … evokes a deeply affecting experience related to a state which we desire, even unconsciously. (McMahon 2007, p. 14)

The process of making art and the process of perceiving it are complementary because they’re based on the same hard-wired perceptual process.

McMahon says we experience an art object’s “aesthetic properties” as being objectively real. We can feel passionately that an object actually embodies certain qualities and we expect people around us to share our perception of these qualities, or at least be capable of experiencing these qualities. We might explain our perception of an art object to another person in order to convince them a quality exists. We might feel the need to provide context, such as what we know about the artist’s intentions or the social context of the work.

Context is everything for art. Art objects may lose their aesthetic qualities when their context shifts. For example, when we look at art produced in an earlier time, we need to recontextualise it if we are to relate to it as an aesthetic object rather than a historical artifact. This kind of recontextualisation might be observed as the highlighting of different aspects to those that were originally considered significant when the work was produced. Conversely, new artworks may initially (or forever) be unavailable as aesthetic objects for people who don’t share enough social context with the artists who are producing them. Impressionism, for example, was famously problematic for many people when artists first started painting in the new style. But things change and that is the point.

Olympia by Édouard Manet, 1863 (Source: http://www.theartwolf.com/articles/50-impressionist-paintings.htm)

The shared process of making art and accepting art as beautiful is an intrinsic part of building community. We use art-making to reinforce existing communal patterning and we can use it to catalyse the system around new states. Practitioners working with anthro-complexity could be making much more effective use of this innate tendency we have to create and perceive beauty. I think this is what Dave Snowden was talking about when he said recently:

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. (Snowden 2020, 20:29)

This “abstraction” is not necessarily stylistic abstraction, although it can be of course. I think Dave is referring to the way we can perceive, in fact the way we must perceive, important shared cultural concepts as being present in external objects. We can see organisations trying to do this by creating artifacts like vision statements and strategy decks but these are lame artifacts in every sense. What is an organisation except a community of people with a shared context? How effective could it be to really engage at the level of art with the core aspirations and practical realities of an organisation?

This sort of work cuts across some big silos. It will take extremely mindful practitioners who are skilled in complexity work and art making - or a collaboration between specialists in both fields. I think deep work like this is necessary if we’re going to make positive change in the conditions that exist in our communities and organisations.

References

McMahon, J., 2007, Aesthetics and material beauty : aesthetics naturalized, Routledge studies in contemporary philosophy ; 9, Routledge, New York.

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

The current architecture of a webAR app and the underlying software technologies.

.

WebAR is built on WebGL, and the library for working with WebGL is three.js, invented by mrdoob. Before learning webAR, I thought I should do a couple of experiments with three.js so that I understood some of the basic concepts. Also, I wanted to test out my boilerplate.

Lines1 is a line generated from a 100 random points. Not random exactly but random within a range around the last point that was generated.

Lines2 is the same thing but 100… or a 1000, i can’t remember… lines are generated at once and rendered to the scene.

The key learnings were:

• How to use three.js with a useEffect() hook in a Preact component - kind of cheating but a nice way to just do vanilla JS with Preact/React
• Working out how to re-render
• Getting the thing to go full screen on tap

Doing three.js inside useEffect() is basically just a mess of side effects. Not very functional at all. The approach I’ve use so far is very procedural - set up all the properties for the scene things and then render, then do this onTapEnd, etc. It’s very oldschool. One idea might be to use RX.js but I’m wondering if it’s worth it. A-Frame is an HTML-like, declarative wrapper around three.js. It might be better to just use that and hide away all the funny business.

Looking ahead at the AR.js docs, all the examples use AR.js. There is a version of AR.js that uses three.js directly without A-Frame but there aren’t any actual examples in the docs showing how to use it, just some repos on GitHub. So, the next step is probably to try out Goodthing with AR.js.

“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

I needed to learn how to code again and I couldn’t bare the thought of ploughing into create-react-app again. Somehow I got onto Snowpack and Preact etc. It seems like there’s an updated to Snowpack I need to look into.

So, I made a boilerplate for new projects that don’t need to be compiled during development:

https://github.com/k7n4n5t3w4rt/goodthing

I also wrote a test framework called “Testy” that’s part of the repo. There are better test frameworks out there but Testy is lightweight and runs as javascript, not as a binary, so I can just run it in VSCode debug mode.