Emergence: Speculative Ecologies & Evolution in Art

Abstract

This thesis explores emergence as a focal point within my art practice. Emergence is the phenomenon through which complex systems exhibit properties and behaviors that are not directly attributable to any of the individual components within a system. Instead, these properties emerge through the (often entangled) relationships and interactions between individual, and often heterogeneous, components of a system. By orienting my work towards emergence, I propose a necessary shift towards an ecological and systems-based understanding of the world, one in which artworks can begin to be imagined in networks of relations and interdependence, doing so as a means of probing new ways of Being in an increasingly complex and entangled world. The thesis presents two frameworks for further exploring emergence, including an understanding of the exhibition as a “speculative ecology” and the different roles that instructions, rule-based systems and contracts could take on in staging evolutionary processes. The ecological framing of the exhibition emphasizes a renegotiation of agency amongst the exhibition’s components, open-over-closed systems and a focus on the integration of life cycles into the work; the use of instructions, rule-based systems and contracts enables the translation and embedding of evolutionary processes as part of the work's conceptualization and execution, aiming to inscribe change and instability as a core element in the work. The thesis draws on references from the fields of art and computation to expand upon historical lineages of thinking, in relation to several works that I have developed during my time at MIT’s program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT).