S-Curves are a maths thing. Their application in business strategy comes from Charles Handy
Dave Snowden linked them with Moore’s Crossing The Chasm and, gradually] found his way to apex preditor theory
Simon Wardley also references s-curves, which is particularly interesting in terms of his ideas on the natural evolution of things from genesis, through custom and product, to commodity.
“During a period of stability any eco-system has an apex predator around which the eco-system organises… but when instability hits matters get problematic. The old ideas have reached maturity and the ecosystem is changing faster than can be understood or comprehended… At this point a low energy cost, adaptive entity can stabilise a new ecosystem, create a new way of thinking.” ~ http://cognitive-edge.com/blog/it-never-troubles-the-wolf-how-many-the-sheep-may-be/
As we move into the early majority stage of the life cycle of a product or an idea then there is a lot of diversity in the system, with interdependency. As the system matures that diversity starts to be reduced and as the idea reaches maturity diversity is minimal. That lack of diversity allows for new ideas to emerge in the fringe of the system (the early adopters). Initially dismissed and often contradictory one will emerge as the most flexible, adaptive to context and stables the next eco-system. So as the new apex predator establishes itself the variety is reduced and the distribution shifts from Pareto to Gaussian, things become more predicable. But as the system becomes increasingly homogenised the maverick ideas start to emerge left field. We then get a catalytic event which creates mass heterogeneity. Before and immediately after this we pay attention to the tails of distributions and we hit negative patterns early and fast – there is no predictability. ~ http://cognitive-edge.com/blog/integration-and-an-alarmist-implication/
Yesterday I went to “Teamlab Borderless”, a digital art extravaganza located in the “entertainment” quarter of Tokyo. Inside a 6 storey parking-lot/shopping-mall type of building, nestled beneath the “Giant Sky Wheel in Palette Town” and next to the Megaweb Toyota City Showcase. I lined up for 40 minutes even though I had bought tickets online.
It’s two floors and there are different spaces and rooms. The “borderless” part is the way that the artworks move around the spaces. Some rooms are pretty much set because they’re custom made with harware or architectural features, like an uneven floor, trampolines and slides. In most places you and interact with the projections that don’t feel like projections. You don’t get projections on your body when you stand in front of the wall, and you don’t cast a shadow onto any surface. I couldn’t work out how they do that - probably a combination of oblique angles and projections of the same thing from different angles. The effect is much like AR but, of course, there’s no head-gear.
Today I put three thoughts together for the first time:
Augmented space is what we get when we mix digital technology and the physical world. An assemblage is a combination of things that is more than the sum of it’s parts. A complex system is a network of things, loosely coupled, that exhibits emergent behaviours. Augmented space is an assemblage with which we can work if we follow the principles of complexity theory.
Practice-based research (in the UTS sense), explores questions about the creative act itself (https://youtu.be/b1xQ0eMxZJU?t=230). Practice-led research uses practice to inform research. I’m mixing both things.
There are three interlocking research questions
Complexity <---> Art: Can complexity theory be operationalised to support or inform the practice of artmaking?
Art <---> Software: How might artists work most effectively with technology. Can we avoid or address the criticisms levelled at earlier practices such as net art or locative art?
Software <---> Complexity: Exploring the relationship between software and complexity:
The first is Neuromancer written by William Gibson in 1984. This book spawned a SciFi genre called “cyberpunk”. In it, Gibson used the term “cyberspace” (coined a few years earlier in a short story) and described a networked data-space called the “matrix” that was basically a VR interface for the internet. Pretty amazing considering the internet had barely existed for about a year before the book came out.
The second is another William Gibson book written 23 years later called Spook Country. In contrast to the far future setting of Neuromancer, this story is an alternative history of the near (like, 12 months) past. Locative art (where virtual scultptures are situated in real locations) is part of the plot.
I think these works are important to the project because they’re both by GIbson and show a change in his understanding over time. This is from an interview with Gibson in 2007:
When I started, I thought that the “locative art” stuff would work the way immersion technology did in my earlier fiction. Then I started liking that it wasn’t going to do that…cyberspace is inverting, turning inside out. I have a feeling that being aware of being connected will be an anachronism, because we’ll be connected all the time. I have this inkling that the whole idea of cyberspace is going to seem fabulously quaint in 20 or 30 years. ~ http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/35536/
“Cyberspace”: A term first used in speculative fiction by William Gibson in reference to shared spatial visualisation of a world-wide computer network - “a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.” (1984, p69). In he following decades, the term use has been also metaphorical and it became synonymous with the World Wide Web, describing the imaginary, shared space of communication and representation online.
“Internet of Things”: “interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, animals or people … with unique identifiers (UIDs) and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction” (Wikipedia Contributors 2019)
“Locative Art”: Art that is digital and also concerned directly with the physical space of the world. In the early days (before phones) people used protable GPS devices and the work tended to be very perfomative and interactive. When AR became possible, the focus shifted to that. The 2002 book “Spook Country” by William Gibson suggested an art practice like this before it really existed.
“Mirror Worlds”: A term coined by David Gelernter in his 1991 book “Mirror worlds, or, The day software puts the universe in a shoebox : how it will happen and what it will mean.” (Gelernter 1991) Mirror worlds are virtual representations of data space. They may utilise world-space but they may also represent data in other ways that better allow for navigation and interpretation.
“Web of Things”: In the same way the Web is a layer of shared protocols (an “application layer”) for the Internet (the “network layer”), “Web of Things” describes the proposed standards for an application layer that simplifies the creation of applications for the “Internet of Things”. Competing approaches include a framework from Mozilla (Mozilla IoT 2019) and a draft specification from the W3C (Web of Things (WoT) Architecture 2017)
“World space”: A term from spatial computing (c.1997) meaning the shared 3D space of a scene, as opposed to the relative 3D space of a single object in a scene. Frequently found in technical documentation of 3D programming frameworks, eg: “Returns a vector representing the position of the object in world space.”
“XR (X Reality): “the union between ubiquitous sensor/actuator networks and shared online virtual worlds” (Landay & Paradiso 2009)
Why complete the study? Why is it necessary?
Complex adaptive systems theory is becoming a kind of general theory of everything. It’s probably no coincidence that this is happening when we’re meeting incredible challenges as a species. Philosophically, Deleuze has become increasingly influential in the decade or so since his work was translated into English. Assemblage theory has become accessible for many disciplines through the work of Manuel DeLanda. New materialim and the “post-human turn” in the humanities has become a hugely influential perwpective that is profoundly influencing thought and practice at the boundary of art and technology.
This area is still young and connections are still being made particularly when it comes to the ‘implementation details’. What is the relationship between Cynefin, a sense-making framework with roots in knowledge managemet, and assemblage theory. How might art parctice be used in oprganisational change. How should artists engage with technologies that are shaping our identity as a species, more rapidly than we can comprehend.
Make a list of any evidence that exists to support your belief that your proposed research is worthwhile and necessary
When we were only several hundred-thousand years old, we built stone circles, water clocks. Later, someone forged an iron spring, set clockwork running, imagined grid-lines on a globe. Cathedrals are like machines defining the soul; bells of clock towers stitch the sleeper’s dreams together. You see? So we’ve always been on our way to this new place ― that is no place, really ― but is real. It’s our nature to represent: we’re the animal that represents, the sole and only maker of maps. And if our weakness has been to confuse the bright and bloody colors of our calendars with the true weather of days, and the parchment’s territory of our maps with the lands spread out before us ― never mind. We’ve always been on our way to this new place ― that is no place, really ― but is real (Gibson 2000).
My starting point was the imminent shift from an internet on the screen to an internet that is here with us in the world. It seems like we are about to embark on a huge experiment that will change us in such a fundamental way that we will be different as a species. Then I realised that this has already happened many times before - television, the internet, mobile phones etc. We keep inventing technologies that change our world profoundly and irrevocably - but now things are getting serious. Fossil fuels change the cimate and infect our ecosystem with plastic, social media disrupts politics, and increasingly powerful algorithms are accelerating and amplifying the effects of every change.
It seems like, just when we need to evolve our knowledge and awareness exponentially if we’re to find ways to survive and create, we are learning how to formalise and scale our natural human capabiulity to work with complexity. Conceptual tools like Cynefin and Assemblage Theory equip us with the ability to respond appropriately and with them, survival starts to look like a choice.
Although art is a central interest for Delueze, our mental model of art hasn’t been successfully updated. We might ask for an art that is radically connected but old ideas of what it is to be an artist hang around, obscuring the potential that art has to offer as a process and a strategy for the kind of radical reterritorialisations we desperately need to make as spcies. Why isn’t art central to the practice of change in our organisations and communities. Why do we still think art needs to be kept separate from the messy reality of commerce, politics and daily life? New materialism creates anoher possibility for an art that is engaged in and with the world, not side-stepping into transcendent disconnection or abdicating it’s power to transmute reality and settling for whatever is left.
No Maps For These Territories. (2000). [YouTube, viewed 28 September 2019, https://youtu.be/VVqW2pMGw6c] Directed by M. Neale. Canada: Mark Neale Productions.