SEPTEMBER 14 – NOVEMBER 24, 2002. Excerpt from exhibition essay: COMPLEXITY.
SAMUEL DORSKY MUSEUM OF ART COMPLEXITY ART AND COMPLEX SYSTEMS
by Ny Arts
Excerpt from exhibition essay: COMPLEXITY
In recent years artists have paid significant attention to a number of now familiar technologies. The World Wide Web, genetic engineering and biotechnology, virtual reality, telepresence, and robotics have all made their mark on the art world, and we have seen an explosion of shows featuring new media, biotechnology/genetics, and digital culture. These topics, while important, seem to us to be only part of the story. A deeper current, one with far reaching implications across the physical, biological, and social sciences, is only now beginning to gain recognition in the public eye and as a unifying theme addressed by increasing numbers of artists. That deep current, that unifying theme, is Complexity. At a time when the term has been weakened due to overuse, complexity as a topic and a world view is truly a new paradigm. What is complexity? Even among scientists there is some disagreement as to the necessary and sufficient conditions for a system to be deemed "complex." By "complex" scientists do not mean "complicated" or "perplexing." Generally, complex systems include large numbers of components interacting in nonlinear ways, and often leading to surprisingly self-organized behavior. In common language one is reminded of the saying that "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." For many, complexity is something available in varying quantities. For some, a measure of complexity is the effort needed to describe a system’s "effective regularities." Examples of complex systems are familiar to everyone and include weather prediction, the stock market, the brain (as studied by biologists) and the mind (as studied by psychologists), the predation and population cycles of animals in an ecosystem, the competition of genes and resulting evolution of a given species, and the rise and fall of cultures and empires. These systems exhibit "emergent behavior" which is deterministic (meaning mechanical rather than mystical), and yet dynamic and ever changing. Complex systems develop in ways that can be dramatic, fecund, catastrophic, or so unpredictable as to seem random. Thus complexity science is simply the application of the scientific method in the study of complex systems. It is important to recognize, however, that art as a distinct discipline offers its own unique approaches and epistemic standards in the consideration of complexity. Artistic approaches to complexity encompass visualization, repetition, sequences, relationships of text to image, and varied methods of transformation. Some artists (e.g., Paul Hertz, John Simon Jr.) are clearly well informed about, and directly apply, complexity science in their work. But they are also critically aware of design and material factors that mediate presentation. For others (e.g., Nancy Chunn, Janet Cohen) it is more important to form a personal, direct response to complex systems apart from the new traditions of complexity science. Jonathan Callan has invented his own artistic methodology, which relates to aspects of complexity science. While Jack Ox engages transformational systems of art, music, and mathematics in her digital prints, collaborators Remo Campopiano, Guy Marsden, and Jonathan Schull stress the emergent behavior of living organisms. Hans Haacke and Steina & Woody Vasulka began working with and focusing on complex systems many years before the phrase "complexity science" was first uttered. The premise of our exhibition, COMPLEXITY, is that a broad swath of art reflects aspects of complexity and responds to the science of complex systems either intentionally or intuitively. Our belief is that the visual and material aspects of the art works will establish threads of correspondences that the viewer can follow within each work and with other, related works. In fact, the works are largely visually self-explanatory even though the specific methodology of their creation
may not be accessible. Many works in this exhibition are time-based or reveal the action of time, including the photographs by David Goldes and the DVD works by Karl Sims and Nell Tenhaaf. Daro Montag’s photographs reveal the imprint of the real, such as that caused by the action of bacterial decay upon negatives. Although the structures the artists create are varied, they can tap into natural material processes (e.g., Brian Lytle, Daniel Reynolds) or simulate natural processes through repetitive, simple actions (e.g., Manuel Baez) and invented computer algorithms (e.g., Leo Villareal, Philip Galanter). Ellen K. Levy’s approach is to model a complex adaptive system by means of a dynamic database. In this exhibition, the nearby juxtaposition of visually related works by Frank Gillette and Mauro Annunziato highlights art styles, themselves, as complex adaptive systems. Gillette’s work resembles an illusory view of Jackson Pollock’s studio floor, and Annunziato’s work brings Art Deco to mind as readily as fractals.
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