Fri, 15 Sep 2006 12:00am

MA | The Emergence of Emergence

Before I start writing about what I imagine the artwork will look like, I should also introduce some other concepts that are important to my work. These are 'complexity', 'self-organisation' and 'emergence'.

Complexity refers to systems or environments that have a lot going on in them and are therefore difficult to make predictions about. The weather is 'complex', human brains are complex, societies are complex. However, they are not random. One feature of complexity and complex systems is that it's hard to make sense of the whole by studying the individual bits.

Self-organisation is the process in which these systems are able to structure themselves without a centralised guiding force.

Emergence is the process by which brand new structures and properties appear in a complex system. These new properties can seem completely unrelated to the constituent parts of the system, have no guiding force, be unpredicable and spectacular.

I probably need to explain these concepts further at some point.

Author: Sean Clark