The Experimental Practice as Complex Adaptive System

The Experimental Practice as Complex Adaptive System The Generative Code If we consider our view-points, perceptions, and conceptions the results of political, economical, or cultural exposures which are themselves the results of hugely disparate human and non-human constructs; and if we consider these as being magnified by advances in communications and technologies over the last century; if we understand that this has led to an altered perception of the production of knowledge which foregrounds its fragile and temporal nature, then we can establish that knowledge production has changed from being dependent on identity and definition, to one that produces movement and possibility. Modes of being/doing have been transformed by advances in science and technology. In addition to this, our understanding of being and doing has been transformed by discoveries at the heart of science and the nature of genesis. The new ideas and concepts that proliferate as a result of technological invention has revolutionised our relationship with the world in terms of thinking and perceiving. These altered relationships regarding our integration into the world provide an altered understanding of form as being /doing. This relationship has always been explored through the experimental art practice, never more than now has this relationship carried so much in terms of an understanding of our position as percievers and concievers in rapidly moving cultural predicaments. This is because the experimental practice redraws our relationship with knowledge production as socio-cultural and politico-economic processes instigated from collective purpose/content trajectories at the same time incorporating disseminated dialogues of intervention and chance. It provides a model or a blue print for how invention - the genesis of ideas, values and things - is created, established and utilised which can aid creative intervention across disciplines and borders. The altered perception of the production of knowledge to which I refer presents to us several dichotomies, seemingly polar relationships which draw on each other for sustenance. Namely intervention and chance, identity and mutation, stasis and movement, dissemination and collective purpose, knowledge and potential. In each case we see the outside being drawn towards the inside, opposite tendencies being integrated and established as the ying and yang, the two side of the one coin that they are. (This has implications for how we consider the other and the alien – they become necessary prerequisites for progression and genesis both conceptually and materially). After Deleuze and Guattari, Delanda, Massumi et al, this paper sets out how these theories of genesis and creative production can be understood to be based on the characteristics of complex systems where the progenerative fact of such is based on the integration of a plethora of differing sometimes oppositional factors and trajectories. As a result of discovery in physics, cybernetics, and sociocultural research this new way of undersanding progenerative systems begins with a search for pattern or grammar that can adequately explain such complexity. Science has for the past three millennia relied on the serialisation or modularisation of nature. Our systems of knowledge and research have relied on this methodology for measurement. Nature has therefore been subverted into a system of tools, forced into a grid of scientific determinism, to aid human understanding. The old modular structure for understanding how the world works is in effect an idealised view, a view that is now an obstacle to understanding, especially in light of recent scientific discovery in quantum physics, socio-political theory, and economic theory all of which are understood in terms of processes and dynamics. This is not a new idea, Darwin’s theory of evolution proved that nature is in a constant state of radical change. Human activity is now seen everywhere in terms of flows and growth, urban models, algorithms, the dynamics of social structure are now understood and researched in terms of constant change. The study of systems is therefore regarded an essential tool in answering the requirement for change now presenting the world, especially in terms of the conditions necessary for morphogenesis. The relationship between code and matter, for example, not only shows what can be formed but also what can now be conceived, providing insights and answers into the codes and patterns for morphogenesis. The code therefore is a translating mechanism for movement or networks of movement in genesis, morphology and becoming which throws light on the relationship between both information and matter, and information and knowledge. Think for example of the genetic code, or the enzymatic code, indeed the computer code. These are all grammars for immanence. Digital technologies for example have changed the way knowledge is acquired and reconstituted. The relationship between knowledge and information brings into question how knowledge is generated. For example, digital technologies have caused changes in the way data, facts, objects and images are experienced in dispersed ways via collective subjectivities, ideas and identities. These systems redefine values and cultural ideals, they change perceptual processes. Numerical code and algorithm – the machinic sphere – is obviously fully integrated into the Anthropocene. Data-mining, the diffusion of knowledge, production, objectivity, authority, and authorship, presents both a promising and potentially dangerous new order, that is, it is seen as dangerous because it is less stringently subject to state control and more subject to collective subjectivities. The realm of subjectivity is expanded, as a plurality of perspectives and trajectories integrate and subvert identity structures. Questions are raised regarding the blurring of boundaries between reality and the virtual. Capra (2014) defines these paradigm shifts in cybernetics and in physics as essentially a ‘crisis’ of perception. The idea of a perception of identity as separate and static, a phenomenologically centralized view of identity, stands at odds with the probabilistic world of these complex systems and unstable equilibriums where small differences create indeterminable results. However, the possibilities inherent in this new paradigm could inspire an intrepid hope. As ideologies disintegrate, the hierarchical structures that support society have been found to have limited use value, economic and information systems morph into nonlinear systems. The new emerging paradigms recognise the fundamental interdependence of all phenomena. In view of this, the question being asked by the theorists cited in this chapter, Massumi, Capra, De Landa, Latour for instance, and now engaging artists and academics is how do we negotiate control with freedom, and choice with integration in the light of a disseminated subjectivity. Systems theory provides a common language for navigating this new terrain and presents a framework for examining the pathways which represent a shift from identity and structures of modularisation to patterns of mutability within webs of relationships. In this new paradigm it is understood that the properties of the parts can only be understood in the context of the dynamics of the whole: "ultimately there are no parts at all what we call a part is merely a pattern in an inseparable web of relationships….in the old paradigms there are fundamental structures and there are forces and mechanisms through which these interact thus giving rise to processes. In the new Paradigm every structure is seen as the manifestation of an underlying process… thus entailing a definite shift from structure to process. Matter becomes energy, science therefore shifts from objective to epistemic knowledge systems…. the understanding of the process of knowledge has to be included explicitly in the description of phenomena so that what we observe either object or pattern we do so by isolating it from its workings within the networks in which it acts. As Heisenberg puts, it what we observe is not nature but nature exposed to our method of questioning" (Capra,2015: 23). This idea questions our ability to understand anything in its essence since in order to explain one we need to explain the whole. By virtue of this, knowledge becomes a paradigm of approximations. This is what Heisenberg points out - every idea or concept has only a limited range of applicability. And I would add every concept , clear as it may seem has implications beyond its limitations. Duchamp’s work, for example, is an elaboration of these ideas. His work constantly questions our understanding of the production of knowledge and the limitations of our perceptions. His work is a dialogue on disseminated subjectivity and perception as models for the creative process. Duchamp’s ‘impossible objects’ were images and works which explore how visual perception is less a direct translation of reality than a complex interaction between memory, cognition and vision. These predate by 40 years the Penrose study which examines a foible in the human perception of dimensionality, detailing how conflicting visual clues in two-dimensional representations are altered by the mind to read dimensionally correctly whereby intuition signals the mind to unconsciously rectify erroneous representations. Duchamp altered his ‘ready-mades’ to this effect, as famously shown in ‘Apollinaire enamelled’ created in 1916 to 1917. Duchamp had an interest in perceptual ambiguity and optical illusion and constructed a number of devices and machines to this effect. (Shearer 1996). According to Jonathon Williams (2000), in his article ‘Pata or Quantum: Duchamp and the End of Deterministic Physics’, Duchamp directed his questioning of a rational empiracle, predictable world towards new discovery in quantum physics and its questioning of deterministic systems through an investigation into non-Euclidean geometries. This aspect of Duchamp’s work was, according to Shearer, inspired by his knowledge of the work of Poincaré. Shearer demonstrates quite convincingly that this is illustrated in The Stoppages in which Duchamp “casts doubt on the concept of the straight line” (Williams) as a natural phenomenon in causal physics; and also in ‘The Large Glass’ which describes profoundly irrational space “This relationship is evident in the placement of a network of stoppages in the large glass, a pata-physical device that carries the spray of the bachelor machine to the sieves and parasols. He places the new metric directly into the system, using his measuring devise to transport the erotic energy of the bachelors. The inference is characteristic – pursuing an established model for articulating the male/ female, or logical/intuitive and making a case for the ascendancy of the latter in the science of his time. Duchamp is here making a statement about illogical causality in 4th dimensional or non-Euclidean space and “places new science in the context of irrational desire and exploration…. By inserting the irrational desires of the Freudian id into the newly forming non-deterministic physical models he disarms and unloads classical positivist social physical and psychological ideas” (Williams). Duchamp literally in The Large Glass creates a ‘non-deterministic physical model whose causality does not follow a linear trajectory. Duchamp makes repeated reference to Poincaré in the notes that accompany the Large Glass – The Green Box. Poincaré had previously developed a geometric technique, using a double pendulum, where two-dimensional shadows were used to express three-dimensional shapes. These factors lead Shearer to surmise that Poincaré, as the founding father of chaos theory and fractual geometry was instrumental in the development of this work where Duchamp specifically singles out issues regarding conceptual transformation of space and form in relation to the concurrent appearance of new geometries, and in which Duchamp shares many of Poincare’s concerns regarding perception and its tendentious nature. The moves, patterns and schematics that he discerned in both chess and art revealed unconscious processes removed from the senses. The art object becomes a map or plan of these four dimensional ideas, the movement between map and idea then become indicative of the movement of perspectival plurality. It’s a very clever, engaging tactical analogy which directs thought without controlling it. Engendering the captive freedom of the thought process as one which relies on the identity of the object and yet moves perpetually around it. At the same time acting as an intermediary between the invisible and the visible a means of bringing forth a discovery in the viewer as well as memorialising the discovery in a form for others to see. Duchamp often repeated that it is necessary to read the notes to understand the large glass - the conjunction of the two things removes the retinal aspect. The art object then becomes an abstract engineering diagram depicting the nature of the process of perception – an abstract model much like Deleuze’s Fold. In this way the viewer becomes integrated into the work of art, in Deleuziam/Guattarian terms the viewer becomes the enunciatory mechanism which pushes that thought diagram on to have a future life. In Duchamp’s impossible objects the mechanism of thought brought about by impossible visual information becomes the exercise of participation. In this they become, as Duchamp insisted, completely grey matter. His impossible objects become processes removed from the senses, and therefore fourth dimensional. The three-dimensional objects are patterns or schematic maps that catalyse a forth dimensional idea. They are diagrams that indicate the mechanism of the visible or the virtual in the field of perception, or diagrams that describe the quantum uncertainty and quantum indeterminism. Poincaré was first to use the term ‘ready-made’ or ‘tout-fait’ as one stage of a larger process of creativity. The term as used by Poincaré, and subsequently by Duchamp means a series of shadows which provide clues as to the true or real nature of perception. Likewise, the Large Glass is a series of clues and exercises indicative of the real nature of perception and meaning generation. The visual clues in Duchamp’s impossible objects, how willingly you go along with the erroneous perspective, correcting them in the mind’s eye, is precisely because that is what our minds are used to doing. We perceive in movement, perspective is constantly in flux, our brains are well versed in rectifying rambling perceptual clues. According to Poincaré all systems operate in this way, that is in terms of probabilistic systems of chance, modern chaos theory being a case in point. This points to developments in modern science which reveal a probabilistic world of unstable equilibriums where small differences create indeterminate results (providing a digression from the Newtonian view of direct cause and effect). Poincaré indicates that individual creativity operates in a similar way involving facts of nature or experience which randomly combine to form new combinations creating new ideas which drop into consciousness like ‘ready-made’ anomalies from which new paths can proliferate. Both Duchamp's and Poincaré’s thinking demonstrates the notion of how the unconscious formulates a perspective according to the aggregate of muscular sensations: Our perspectives are chosen by our senses and integrated by the unconscious mind. According to Massumi in Parables for the Virtual our senses are immediately effective on the body in the form of intensity, “an autonomic reaction directly manifested at the surface of the body and its interface with things”. (Massumi). That is intensities occur before they have been semiotically ordered or reasoned by thought, they are measured by functions such as heartbeat and breathing; they exist before being associated with any narrative or meaning. Massumi points out that intensity is associated with pre-linguistic expression and non-linear processes and that a delay of linguistic expression can produce amplified intensity; intensity is akin to intuition, it is emotion before conditions and interpretations. Massumi defines intensity as the event where nothing is prefigured; the collapse of distinction which pre-empts genesis, "it should be noted that in particular during the mysterious half second, what we think of as free higher functions such as volition are apparently being performed by autonomic bodily reactions occurring in the brain but outside consciousness and between brain and finger, but prior to action and expression. The formation of a coalition is necessarily accompanied and aided by the cognitive.” (Massumi 2002 p30): cognition occurs in the body rather than in the mind. Massumi describes intensity as a pre-reflective bodily experience, one that happens in the split second before it is interiorised, and therefore considered virtual. A bodily reaction before identity has been assigned and therefore composed of potential: Massumi equates intensity with Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘affect’, saying that the problem is that there is no cultural theoretical vocabulary specific to affect our vocabulary is allied to structure and categorisation – Guattari's schizoanalysis and collective subjectivities aims to address this. Massumi concurs, much could be gained by integrating the dimension of intensity into cultural theory, admitting that in this way we may improve our understanding of what happens in the process of genesis. That is “the spontaneous production of a level of reality having its own rules of formation and order of connection” (Massumi 2002 p32). Massumi asserts: “affect is unqualified and is not ownable, recognizable, irreducibly bodily and autonomic. It is the activity in the brain before consciousness because before consciousness the brain is overfull. Will and consciousness are subtractive they are limited; their function is to reduce complexity” (Massumi 2002 P30). An understanding of the nature of bodily perception, which Massumi talks of in terms of intensity and an understanding of how this produces affect, is vital to understanding how the experimental practice operates. Where the bodily or tacit experience of the experiment is wrapped up in the conceptual process of the experiment. Massumi explains that binary oppositions such as expectation and suspense, past and future, action and reaction, happiness and sadness, quiescence and arousal, passivity and activity, become resonating, rather than oppositional, levels of affect at the point of emergence, they can subsequently be seen as productive partners rather than as antagonistic rivals. This is the process that Deleuze strives to conceptualise as a becoming, most pointedly in Difference and Repetition. It is this difference – or this simultaneous propagation of oppositional elements that creates a sense of the transcendental, in the sense that it is not directly accessible to experience. Deleuze also asserts that this mechanism is not transcendental in that it is not outside experience either, it is immanent to it. These resonating differences that interact are the pre-requisites for genesis within the experimental practice and in the complex adaptive system. The pathways that these differences forge within the experimental practice are complex. It is the non-equilibrium at the core of these processes that predispose systems to differentiation. This destabilisation is the founding principle of genesis both in the complex adaptive system and in experimental practice. the most striking feature of an experimental practice is its predisposition to change, it becomes distinct from its environment through its own dynamics. Each time there resounds a unity, by implication there is a distinction from the group that makes it possible. We are in effect dealing here with a contradiction: The progenerative factor in the complex system, and the experimental practice is the combining of oppositional forces. The Experimental Practice as Complex Adaptive System Resonating differences that interact are the pre-requisites for genesis within the experimental practice and operate in terms of the ideas that underpin complex adaptive systems including: The small directed action which invokes non-linear pathways of change; dynamics which move between hierarchies (or fan outs) and chaos; and feedback loops which enable complex adaptive systems to act in terms of immanence, or behave in anticipation to change. Complex adaptive systems are composed of elements called agents that learn or adapt in response to interactions. Such systems are rarely in equilibrium, there are often huge fluctuations bubbles and crashes. They display an extensive diversity that results from this adaptation, for example species in a rain forest or proteins in a biological cell. These diverse agents are mutually dependent. The behaviour of the whole complex adaptive system is more than the sum of the behaviours of the component agents purely due to the adaptive nature of systems incorporated within them. This adaptive mechanism allows the system to both engineer change and survive it. The system within system structure of the complex adaptive system is non-linear. Whilst this non-linearity poses particular difficulties in translating these systems mathematically it is also responsible for their identifying characteristic: They are characterised by small directed actions causing large changes in aggregate behaviour, as for instance when a vaccine produces long-term changes in the immune systems of whole communities. (Holland) A small change to an environment generates new capabilities of performance and designates a new behavioural repertoire. The small directed actions or agents act in effect as signal processing triggers which activate other parts of the system instigating change. This would not be the case but for the nonlinear nature of the system. Particular combinations of agents or grammars at one level become the agents or grammars of the next level up: For example chromosomes generate proteins, proteins combine to form organelles, organelles combine to form cells and so on. Another example is provided by the rules for combining atoms based on the periodic table of elements, thus the hierarchy of the complex adaptive system is determined by a succession of enclosing boundaries that pass some signals and not others implying that there are different kinds of agents at different levels processing different rules or conditional actions. A grammar of this kind can be used to generate a body of rules that produce programmable interactions of signals - otherwise known as a fan-out. Our central nervous system has a fan-out of a thousand or more. Holland (2014). According to Holland we have yet to build a machine with a larger fan-out than about 10 and there is therefore little basis for speculating about the capabilities of machines to have a consciousness, let alone anything as complex as a human consciousness. It is the general consensus that the capacity to understand and create machines with larger fan outs will enable further technological innovation and progress. I would add, it will be our capacity to decipher and understand vastly more complex systems which operate in terms of nonlinear fan outs that will be a requirement of real progress in terms of intelligent, problem solving machines. An experimental practice provides an opportunity to examine these complex grammars within what is essentially an integrated human/non-human system. Such a system provides information on how a human consciousness has limited agency on non-human systems and vice versa. Within this examination it becomes apparent that both a human consciousness and a non-human system will work in terms of a wave-form pattern, being generated by many possibilities. Within complex networks large numbers of these grammars form loops which recirculate signals and operate through positive and negative feedback as per Prigogine’s thermostatic loops. Loops make possible subroutines that are partially autonomous in the sense that their activities are only modulated by some surrounding activity rather than being completely controlled. This allows the system to go beyond their current stimulus their complexity increases with autonomy and vice versa, more complex loops allow the system to learn from the processes it is already engaged in and to ‘look ahead’ and learn strategies – to act in terms of immanence. This learning produces an ontogeny: an unfolding of events involved in a system as it develops in complexity through adaptation. The view that organisms are bundles of relationships that maintain themselves by adjusting their own behaviour in anticipation to changes in the patterns of activity all around them is now the accepted schema. (Holland) It is both anticipation and response that constitute this process of genesis - a complex series of communications between the organism, cells, atoms etc. and their environment: Forms are bundles of morphogenic tendencies. Norbert Weiner’s (1894-1964) theory of cybernetics was the first systematic theory of responsive behaviour in machines and animals which examines the mathematics of responsive behaviour and which describes how machines, organisms and phenomena adapt to changes or information via feedback. Further work in thermodynamics by Prigogine (1917-2003) in the experimental study and theoretical analysis of biological and non-biological systems furthered the field. By outlining the flow of energy through a system as a flow which is subject to many small variations which integrate back into the system as feedback- Prigogine argued that small variations have a tendency to accumulate to a point where the system itself migrates from a tentative equilibrium into chaos, from which a new order emerges. This new order integrates the amplification of change into itself by way of increasing complexity. And the increasing complexity renders the system more able to cope with amplification or change and therefore instigate periods of collapse or chaos. This makes the system more supple and so facilitates morphogenesis towards evolving tendencies. The consequential increase in complexity and the accompanying increased flows of energy produce a system which is more susceptible to fluctuation and collapse. The tendency of these systems to ever-increasing complexity together with their tendency to extend beyond their internal energy relations (autopoeisis) are absolutely distinctive of evolutionary development and morphogenesis. (Holland) This progression from pattern to chaos formalises the mathematical structure of the systems from which complexity emerges. The process of increasing variety is called differentiation and the process of increasing number or strength of connections is called integration. Evolution, emergence and genesis as described produces differentiation and integration on many scales from the microscopic to the macroscopic. This integrated behaviour of semi-autonomous systems is exhibited in the social group dynamics of many natural species for example flocks of birds and schools of fish, its systemic structure operates in the same way that micro quantum particles display tendencies and communications. Insects such as bees and termites produce complex built environments and display functional specialisations without central planning. What appears to be an overall coherent form without any lead or central directing intelligence operates in terms of complex adaptive systems in both microscopic and macroscopic fields. Experimental practices are in effect semi-autonomous systems – being partially directed by the artist, partially autonomously directed by chance encounters of disparate variables. The structure of the environment not only triggers structural change, this change is composed of a shared history, a communication takes place engineering a behavioural coordination in that what is communicated becomes an integral part of what is formed and vice versa, this gives the system the ability to ‘sense’ future change. However, the information contained in a picture, object, the printed word, or even a social system presupposes a unity that is not a given, where people operate autonomously - there is always ambiguity. ( The immersive experience is an attempt to minimize this). The progenerative dynamic of the experimental practice is to produce freedom rather than to limit it. To increase variation and therefore complexity – to produce choice rather than produce stasis. If as artists, we are interested in the freedoms and values of other people then the question is how do we create meaning from variation rather than how do we minimise variation. As we saw with Duchamp and Poincaré the combination of perspectives or loci with the formation of a concept or idea allows the mind to move around the idea without imposing any limit that stasis or identity may imply. In the same way the experimental practice requires this abundance of loci which combine to produce innovation. Complex Adaptive Systems Continued: Open System Versus Closed System or The Trouble with the Information Processing Structure In the same way and according to Michael Weinstock, in order to model these systems in mathematical or computational environments we must understand these organisational interactions as they give rise to emergence. Systems involving the creation of forms that evolve in space over time as a result of both linear and non-linear networks, such as those described above, can provide a model for this examination and can be utilised by artificially constructed systems. This includes the systems that operate within an experimental art practice. Jack Burnham’s exhibition “Software” circa 1970 and concurrent theories regarding systems aesthetics were an attempt to understand information processing systems within an artistic and philosophical context. Burnham’s motivation was to put all communication – not just aesthetic communication into a questioning frame of reference. His subsequent systems aesthetics were an endeavour to understand art in terms of its dematerialised systemic nature which highlighted its ontological instability or morphogenic nature. His premise for systems aesthetics, that there has been a transition from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture; that art does not reside in material entities; that art is not autonomous; and that art is conceptual focus, have been widely reinforced. Burnhams weakness was in limiting his ontological reading of systems theory exclusively to cybernetics, “The humanistic concern of general systems theory as I understand it makes it different to mechanistically oriented system theorists speaking solely in terms of mathematics, feedback and technology and so giving rise to the fear that system theory is indeed the ultimate step towards mechanisation and devaluation of man and towards technocratic society”. (Skrebonski). System theory encompasses all systems both living and non-living and can add to our understanding of both. Systems theory, as apposed to the cybernetic bias of systems science, is a broader view which surpasses technology and cybernetics. It can at the very least provide a methodological vehicle for understanding art practice in terms of its experimental nature and it can assist a search for the production of new forms, materials and meanings through the art practice. Halsall (2015) maintains that just as the systems view incorporates the collective, the cybernetic analogy of the art system inaugurated a re-examination of histories and movements within the art world. In light of this, Burnham’s systems aesthetics represents another narrative in support of those on dematerialization, the expanded field, and relational aesthetics. Burnham’s new way of examining art discourse and events involves the analysis of new codes and data in making, it is directed by programs which consist of instructions, descriptions, movements, stylistic trends, promotion and marketing, archival structures, and the economics of the art world. They are overseen by self-meritocratic programmes which ‘feedback’ according their own version of success and failure. The art impulse thus establishes strategies in terms of these impulses rather than in terms of ethical needs or in terms of new or over looked pathways which exist outside established trends. Instead, aesthetic values emanate from the art system as self-maintaining. Just as cybernetic systems are limited in that they effectuate progress engendered from within their own remit, they are self-fulfilling, the art system requires an ability to reach outside of itself to incorporate alternative systemic inputs and other perspectives. These limiting aesthetic values are simply the result of long term information processing structures. According to Halsall, this is the business of museums, press and galleries who have long considered controlling and creating art information vital to the proliferation of their market and culture. For instance, according to Halsall, the survival strategy of all social organisations including the art system is that of transforming preferred information into values. Every artist produces data not only by making but by instigating the work of art critics, magazines, galleries, museums, collectors, and historians who exist to produce information and therefore data. These systems exist to minimise uncertainty. However, where Burnham praised these systems as components of the artwork, and although the accepted status quo is that without the support system the object ceases to have definition, it is these closed systems which, according to the dynamics of systems theory, are engendering a kind of checkmate on the system’s morphogenic capability. By limiting the feedback to that endorsed by the system in order to disallow collapse, the very collapse that would according to theories of complex adaptive systems catalysise evolutionary divergence and emergence. Burnham’s premise was that the art experience attaches itself less and less to recognised forms, adopting all experiential, phenomenological, empirical or epistemological forms. Becoming according to John McHale, “temporal immersion in a continuous contextual flow of communicated experiences” (Burnham 2015 p117). Such a premise necessarily extends itself to experimental pathways inherent in a practice. According to Burnham, information within the art system has an entropy reducing potential or a negentropy: “Negentropy is the ability of information to increase the structure and potential energy within a system.” (Burnham 2015 p117). This can only happen if the art system consistently reaches outside of itself for new data to support the conditions for emergence. How can such a system maintain its relevance in the age of information as alternative fully adaptive information systems proliferate? In these alternative adaptive systems Burnham’s negentropy is replaced by a process I will call pro-entropy whereby potential energy increases but structure decreases, where systems increase in complexity as they reform from chaos. At this point (called bifurcation point) information increases uncertainty and reduces stasis, therefore it can be argued innovation will be at its peak where bifurcation point is maintained. Such networks already exist in the form of large-scale digital computer control systems, online banking systems, the stock market. These systems gather data from their environments in time to influence future events within those environments. I can’t help but wonder whether Burnham envisaged a kind of replica of these information processing systems for the art world and what would have been the effect of such a system. Nevertheless, I would suggest, as Burnham does, that artists are obligated to understand them both technically and philosophically. Artists have the choice between remaining implicit in a traditional market economy or engaging real-time information processing networks. Artists increasingly have the capacity to effectively question, even subvert, an elitist market economy where the structural powers-that-be control outcomes. The experimental practice provides an alternative to practices whose premise is in real terms the production of information produced for the specific purpose of up-holding the system itself. The experimental premise is to innovate, its premise is to subvert a system which imposes itself from the inside. The role of the artist is to act outside bureaucracies to subvert the capitalist market censorship of generally accepted norms and values, to analyse and criticise the dominant regime of cultural production. Burnham’s premise was that the artist can only be a slave or co-conspirator to the system as it stands, with limited iterations. The capacity for the market structure was, according to Halsall, interpreted by some theoreticians as a sign of the death of autonomous artistic subjectivity. The fact that certain artists used their analysis of the system to develop their own systems of meaning production and communication in order to produce alternative utopian messages, (Halsall refers to Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, India Cough and Lydia Clarke), is justification enough for Halsall. Experimental practice subverts the hegemony that a market may have over artistic production by redirecting that hegemony to the productive process itself. A process instigated from the premise of the new, and absorbed in its own autonomous modes and systems of production in order to provide a place for what might otherwise be marginalised is an alternative modus operandi. Therefore, experimental art practices provide an alternative methodology to those reliant on retrospective, introspective or hierarchical systems. BIBLIOGRAPHY / READING LIST CAPRA. F (1982) The Tao of Physics. London: Flamingo CAPRA, F. (2014) The Systems View of Life. New York. Cambridge University Press. 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