WORKING WITH COMPLEXITY
Truth being said, I’m not a scientist nor an artist. I’m a designer, researcher, creative technologist and educator passionate about science and a belief that artwork can be part of my practice to create a simplistic tangible way of dealing with complexity. How have others approached complexity? There are so many different levels of complexity, that I didn’t know where to start. Here some angles relevant to my exploration of complexity.
Ramon Lull
Figure 19 Diagram featured in a 16th-century edition of Ramon Llull’s Ars Magna (1517).
Approaching complexity is not a new quest, it’s a concern that has occupied the body of work of lots of researches since centuries ago. For instance, Ramon Llull’s contribution engendered the foundation for what later on was considered a generative system, not just a representation19 . Hence, Llull is considered a predecessor to modern computing although his mechanical calculators were quite rigid formally as the resources and techniques during the XVI century were also limited.
Llull, introduced an innovative perspective in the realm of logic. Using a machine made of paper that allowed him to combine elements of thinking and language was a breakthrough. Dr Jonathan Grey, who has researched early visions of computation and the “combinatorial art” states that Llull held that this art could be used to “banish all erroneous opinions” and to arrive at “true intellectual certitude removed from any doubt”. He drew in turn on the medieval Arabic zairja, an algorithmic process of “letter magic” for calculating truth on the basis of a finite number of elements 20. All this new logic was based on creating trees of knowledge, which are graphical forms whose structure is static and fixed, but whose spatial relations carry meaning21. Lull mastered to represent different trees containing different kinds of knowledge but incorporating a lot of religious connotations due to his devotion both to research and god. The evidence that Llull’s work represented a starting point to a new era of knowledge and information visualization has been the standpoint of resource that I value as part of my research, “Graphesis, Visual Forms of Knowledge Production” by Johanna Drucker 22.
Figure 20 Ramon Lull, tree structure from mss. Of Arbor naturalis et logicalis, Ars Generalis Ultima (1305).
Edward Tufte
Figure 21 Edward Tufte, Beautiful Evidence.
Along with Lull, another famous landmark in this newer era of information is Edward Tufte. Edward Tufte had had an enormous role in the visual representation in the production of scientific reality during the XXI century. “The Visual Display Of Quantitative Information23”, “Envisioning Explanations24” and “Visual Explanations” represented for me a journey of discovery of how historically different visualizations25 challenges were overcome and understanding the logic behind them thanks to Tufte’s case studies explanations.
Manuel Lima
Figure 22 Manuel Lima, The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge.
Manuel Lima’s works for me is a natural evolution of the line of thought that Ramon Llull started, and Edward Tufte mastered towards visualizing science and knowledge. Lima adds a new dimension to data by mapping information interactively. He still stays in a merge between art, design and science in every piece that he creates. His book Visual Complexity shows his personal research though analyzing different systems and networks. His effort to spread his knowledge made him follow a career as a public figure and professor which makes his work an interactive, dynamic and evolving tool for scholars26.
Moreover, in his TED talk called “A visual history of human knowledge27” he shows beautiful and intriguing works created by other artists that I found intriguing .
Figure 23 Galaxies Forming along Filaments, like Droplets along the Strands of a Spider’s Web, Tomás Saraceno.
Figure 24 Emma McNally, Abstract Drawing, Wire Sculture. 2014.
John Maeda
One my main referents both as a researcher and aesthetically are John Maeda. Maeda has devoted his life to find answers to overly complicated questions. For him, simplicity becomes a first step to understand complexity. One great example is The Laws of Simplicity a brilliant book that shows the path to simplify technology regarding product design. This design philosophy became a paradigm for me a couple of years ago, and I still believe the effectiveness of his principles.
One my main referents both as a researcher and aesthetically are John Maeda. Maeda has devoted his life to find answers to overly complicated questions. For him, simplicity becomes a first step to understand complexity. One great example is The Laws of Simplicity a brilliant book that shows the path to simplify technology regarding product design. This design philosophy became a paradigm for me a couple of years ago, and I still believe the effectiveness of his principles.
Figure 25 John Maeda. The Laws of Simplicity Book, Chapters.
Maeda started his career surrounded by the embedded entanglements of a science degree at MIT. However, later in his career, he found the intersection between art, math, and technology 28.
Figure 26 John Maeda, Robotic Drawing MIT
“I began to think about the computer as a spiritual place of thinking. I was influenced by performance art,” says Maeda, before sharing one of his earliest works — a computer enacted by people. “When people say, ‘I don’t get art. I don’t get it all,’ that means art is working. Art is supposed to be enigmatic … Art is about asking questions — questions that might not be answerable 29.”
Figure 27 AI Infinity, John Maeda
Maeda has become an unquestionable icon that keeps bringing some light to lots of designers and other practitioners’ journeys, myself included.
Muriel Cooper
Figure 28 Computer-generated stacked and distorted type produced at the Visible Language Workshop during 1980s
David Reinfurt and Robert Wiesenberger co-authors of the book Cooper considered her to be “A humanist among scientists”. They state that “Cooper embraced dynamism, simultaneity, transparency, and expressiveness across all the media she worked in. More than two decades after her career came to a premature end, Muriel Cooper’s legacy is still unfolding 30.“ No one can deny that Muriel Cooper was not only an incredible designer but also a pioneer educator who was able to stablish a paradigm shift through the exploration of new forms, methods and techniques that influenced a wide range designers and media artist during more than 50 years. Cooper has become an inspiration to search a more fluid and process-drive practice to achieve a seamless communication in the space of contemporary design practice 31.
Figure 29 Pentagram, Compilation of iconic designs from Muriel Cooper’s four-decade career at MIT.
One great example is Zach Lieberman, who still believes in Cooper’s principles and teaches at the School for Poetic Computation as part of their typographic experimentation curriculum32. After almost 10 years of the discovery of Muriel Cooper’s work I can still find my own work influenced by her and her desire to unravel a new way of communication to provide new designer with tools to make our daily lives easier.
Figure 30 Sfpc, Zach demostration on text manipulations.
Anish Kapoor
Figure 31 Anish Kapoor, Descension
Anish Kapoor reminds us of the contingency of appearances: our senses inevitably deceive us,’ public art fund director Nicholas Baume says. ‘with descension, he creates an active object that resonates with changes in our understanding and experience of the world. in this way, Kapoor is interested in what we don’t know rather than in what we do, understanding that the limit of perception is also the threshold of human imagination.’ Moreover, Kapoor is interested on achieving the unachievable which lead him to work with scientist to create the blackest black, Vantablack which he possesses the exclusive rights of use. Vantablack is a material developed by Surrey NanoSystems in the United Kingdom and is the darkest substance known, absorbing up to 99.965% of radiation in the visible spectrum 33.
Even though I admire the persistence that Anish Kapoor to achieve his artist goals, I don’t share some of the values and principles that he states as an artist such as holding exclusive rights to a material that some other practitioners might benefit in their practice too.
Figure 32 Vantablack’s demonstration
Figure 33 Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate” (2006), Recoating in Vantablack 2016.
Casey Reas
Figure 34 Casey Reas, KNBC, 2015
Casey Reas is a precedural artist well-known for creating Processing programming language next to Ben Fry. My admiration comes from not only from his astonishing body of work but also for the effort that Reas has been doing in order to simplify the complexity that represents understanding form related to a programming language. Form+ code, Casey Reas’ book, helped me to understand the structure, the method that I’m creating when I code even better. As a scientific experiment, code needs to be repeated, transformed, parameterized, visualized, simulated. So, the relationship formed between code and physics can be entirely natural.
Figure 35 Subjectbeschleuniger, Eno Henze, 2008. Screenshot from Form+ Code by Casey Reas.
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