Part 3: Complications, complexity and clarity

August Piccard's metal gondola, 1931. StratoCat, "Stratolab, an Evolutionary Stratospheric Balloon Project," Gregory Kennedy.

Now that you have considered emergent systems and written your own Oulipio-inspired work, this week we will focus on the distinction in behaviors between complex and complicated systems. As you read in week 1, just because a system is complicated doesn't mean it is complex: the space enclosure example showed that unexpected behavior of a complicated system was observed not because of interaction of constituents governed by simple rules in a complex system, but because not all necessary variables had been accounted for when designing the complicated system. 

The exhibition Closed Worlds by architect and scholar Lydia Kallipoliti presented a series of architectural experiments designed to be closed systems with a predictable set of variables did not behave as expected. The exhibition questioned whether these misbehaviors should be categorized as failures: "The moments of failure portrayed when closed worlds escape the designed loop cycles raise a series of questions about the ontology of autonomous enclosures." 

For this week, review the exhibition website: https://www.closed-worlds.com/ Links to an external site.. Select one project and closely examine its description, list of failures, and visual representation.

Create a new diagram for this project that captures the unaccounted-for variables that led to the unexpected outcome. 

Create a drawing that removes this additional variable to imagine what a truly emergent instance of this system could have looked like. Briefly write a description about what would be the cost of removing this variable.

Consider the politics and feasibility of applying the concept of emergence to systems that involve a human subject. Is it possible to make the case for an emergent behavior in systems that arguably cannot be fully closed? Otherwise, if the data set remains necessarily incomplete, does the subjectivity involved in interpreting it itself behave as an emergent phenomenon?