Artscience is an essential collaborative discipline in a world of burgeoning complexity. The old divides between disciplines are largely outdated and may even handicap the future sustainable development of culture and life. The increasing atomisation of knowledge into discrete disciplines, and the lingering influence of scientific reductionism, needs to be overcome if we are to meet the challenges of our current moment. It is no longer the case that art and science are perceived in opposition to one another, but rather, are mutually beneficial technologies of perception, opening and extending each other. Our hypothesis is that both art and science are expressions of a common instinct for playful exploration and curiosity. We believe that the intersection of play and a systems perspective is a powerful transdisciplinary crossroad for collaboration and creation.
Building on the rich tradition of transdisciplinary research at CLEA that encompasses cybernetics, self-organisation, the global brain, sustainability, quantum physics and much more, the artscience group opens and extends these research focuses by borrowing from a wide array of artistic strategies. Artscience is a hub for creative individuals and groups who wish to develop and enrich their own research and sense-making by providing them with the opportunity to interact with like-minded researchers at CLEA and beyond as they navigate the infinite possibility space between art, science, and related disciplines. We complement theoretical modes of research with practice-led and embodied methods for putting research into practice. For instance, the concept of play and self-organisation as both a research focus as well as an embodied collective activity in the form of performances and workshops. In artscience, we draw on a complex adaptive systems perspective. We believe it to be one of the most powerful frameworks for understanding the complexities of our world. It is intuitive to understand, and readily applicable to a wide variety of domains; from the dance of honey bees, to the question of how life emerged on the planet, and the entanglement of ecological and social systems.
What unifies these diverse phenomena is their complex adaptive systems ontology. Simply put, at the core of this ontology, we start with the premise that life consists of intra-acting parts or agents. This interconnection typically fosters a system characterized by emergence and self-organisation. The means that the system exhibits properties its individual agents do not have; in other words, "the whole is more than the sum of its parts." From where does this "more" originate? It emerges from the relationships and synergies between the agents; which is precisely the aspect overlooked by classical reductionist science. Moving forward, we recognise that agents are not only fundamentally in relation with other agents, but are also themselves comprised of relationships. From this foundation of relational ontology, numerous insights begin to become comprehensible and, crucially, made accessible as practical tools, frameworks, and methodologies in the conception of artscience.
Serious about Play
In the course of our investigation into systems we encountered a radical and deceptively simple idea: that play, at once a seemingly frivolous and childlike pursuit, and an ancient arcana predating human civilisation, could serve as foundation for understanding, creating and interacting with life and the world. The notion that artists and scientists can collaborate through play is straightforward and yet profound. Our mission is to expand the common conception of play as a foundation for artscience, capable of bringing many disciplines into relation, both theoretically and practically.
Play demonstrates that in the initial stages of ideation, there is no significant divide between art and science. They are both concerned with curiosity, the dynamic interplay of possibilities, differences and connections, and the blending of the imaginative with the physical and emotional. Being in a state of play is to enter an alternate world with different rules. Rather than simply seeing things the way they are, play is an openness to the way things could be. Play highlights the mutability of systems. It allows us to hold our normative world lightly and be aware of different possibilities and contingencies. Play shares a homological relationship with the systems perspective. This means play, characterised by intra-acting agents, mirrors the structure of complex adaptive systems, self-organisation, emergence, cybernetics, ecology, cognitive systems, 4E cognition, and the organisational structures found in nature. This relationship is both surprising and profound. Play and complexity are the very essence of creativity in their respective domains. Think about the creativity of slime moulds, for example. Similarly, in the face of a dynamic, volatile, complex and ambiguous world, increasingly what is rewarded is the capacity to be playful and childlike; to enter into a complex adaptive relationship with one's environment that requires us to constantly learn and remain flexible in the face of complex challenges.
We are not only interested in the commonality between play and the systems perspective, but also in their differences and tensions. As an arcana, play resists simple classification in a single discipline, language-game or modality. As a rule-based activity, play offers comparisons to games and models of complex systems. Whilst, as a lived activity, play highlights the affective quality of relations, spanning joy to frustration. Play, trickster-like, thereby bridges the objective and the subjective, demonstrating that relationality is not merely a concept but that relationships (networks, systems, etc) feel like something, underscoring play's resistance to reductionist interpretations, whilst merging the theoretical with the experiential.
Play serves as an important connecting principle, both theoretically and methodologically. We are curious to imagine that there is a playfulness woven into the universe's fabric at every scale–demonstrated in the underlying relationality of all things –from subatomic particles to galactic clusters. This universality reveals an open-ended spontaneity, exploration, and creative potential that echoes the essence of infinite play. Play in combination with a systems perspective has the potential to bring us into deeper, felt understanding and appreciation of the complexity and interdependence that define both ecological and cultural systems. It can re-enchant and reanimate the world by imbuing it with a sense of liveliness that motivates us to learn about it and act in ways that support the flourishing of ecosystems.
“The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.” — Gregory Bateson, An Ecology of Mind.
Collective, distributed, artificial, and more-than-human intelligence
Collective intelligence is a major topic in our conception of artscience which naturally follows on from a consideration of play and complex adaptive systems. And indeed, artscience, being inherently collective and transdisciplinary, strives to exemplify collective intelligence. We are interested in intelligence as a collective, distributed phenomenon, and how collective thinking and collaboration is inherently intelligent. In fact, we might say that all thinking is thinking together.
Thinking together is not limited to art and science. A non-reductionist view of intelligence challenges the traditional notion of intelligence as the property of singular individuals, be they a single person, an individual neuron, or an isolated tree. Rather, collective intelligence reveals intelligence to be an emergent property of collective agents interacting synergetically as a complex adaptive system.
The principles of 4E cognition (extended, enactive, embodied and embedded) show us that knowledge emerges through feedback networks involving minds, bodies, each other, and the world. And the kind of thinking that takes place is shaped by the form of the system or network. Therefore, novel forms of thinking can be discovered by synthesising new networks of systems. The greater the diversity of networked intelligences, the more dynamic, creative, and robust the collective intelligence. While such concepts such as play, complexity and collective intelligence are human made, the entangled lives and modes of living to which they refer predate human culture. This notion helps us recognise that more-than-human networks are also intelligent. It reveals that we humans can, and do, engage in collective thinking with nonhuman agents and networks of agents, both biological and artificial.
What skills do we need to cultivate to practice collective intelligence together?
How do we collectively attend to the same questions? How do we pass ideas to each other in order for them to be improved or reshaped by the next person? What new kinds of thinking networks, or systems, can we imagine in the creation of novel kinds of collective intelligence?
What happens if we broaden our relational networks beyond artists, scientists, and diverse human groups to encompass the more-than-human world, from individual organisms to entire ecosystems? What kinds of new insights, ideas and perspectives might emerge from transspecies collaboration? In creating networks of minds, how do we deal with challenges of equal representation, effective communication, and diverse forms of agency and voice? What skills of listening are required to attend to each other? How might we use these and other insights to find new ways to think and play together with AI? What happens, for instance, when we interweave fungal networks with neural networks? Taking this one step further, what happens when we imagine all of these different kinds of networked minds together as an emergent planetary superorganism? This idea has been explored in the notion of the Global Brain and the Noosphere as well as numerous indigenous philosophies and wisdom traditions.
Worlds
Play and collective / distributed thinking naturally come together as world-building or collective embodiment of systems. Through our collective interactions and efforts, whether they be deliberate, analytical, and synthetic reasoning, or the spontaneous emergence of worlds through play, we can become the agents of a collective system, game, or story and form a world together. World-building is not only the imaginative act of creating fictions, for example the constructed worlds of science fiction, but it is also what organically emerges through the encounters, engagements and relations of any organism. World-building is an ongoing, embodied and enacted process of generating new meanings and new narratives that allow us to make sense of the world and our place in it. This conception of world-building foregrounds play as instrumental for creating, exploring, testing and continuously reconfiguring the boundaries and possibilities of these imagined realities. This form of world-building allows for new ways to conceptualise and engage with the multiple worlds that embody our experiences and relationships. Thus, world-building in this broader sense offers us a framework of possibilities to remake ourselves and our ideologies within our continuously unfolding world-story.
Buckminster College: Complexity Education for young people and adults
In an era where the dynamism of complex systems shapes our world—from AI and genetics to ecology and climate, and economics to social restructuring—the need for innovative approaches to education in complexity has never been more critical. We are dedicated to exploring novel methods of complexity education aimed at fostering the development of young people on physical, artistic, and psychosocial levels. The CLEA ArtScience group is collaborating with Buckminster College, a part-time school for young people (10-18 years). Buckminster College specializes in nurturing cognitive development along accelerating, asynchronous, and divergent learning trajectories by bringing young people directly into connection with artists and scientists. Through this collaboration, we are developing a comprehensive approach to education for complexity that is rooted in play by fostering a shared ecosystem of research and learning that engages both adult researchers and young learners as active participants.
For more info on background, work and philosophy: download the CLEA ArtScience Brochure
Members:
- Orion Maxted (theatre, computer science): Theatre: Collective intelligence and complex adaptive systems made of people
- Damien Rudd (artistic research, environmental humanities, systems and cybernetics, biosemiotics, altered states of consciousness)
- Prof. Dr. Francis Heylighen (cybernetics, complex systems, photography): Sense-making, conceptual metaphors and metaphorms as a common basis for art and science
- Katarina Petrović (painting, music, ArtScience): Cosmograms and cosmogony in art. Creative processes as systemic foundation of arts, sciences and humanities
- Olivier Auber (computer art, engineering): The Poietic Generator: self-organization and disorganization in a collective drawing system
- Jonito Arguelles (photography, quantum theory): Entanglement of Images, Afterimages
- Stan Bundervoet (composition, sociology): Music and ritual theory: interaction between symbolic, sub symbolic and intersubjective cognitive processes
- Dr. Nicole Note (philosophy, cultural anthropology): On the importance of being touched in meaning-making
- Dr. Tomas Veloz (physics, mathematics, music): Parallels between the evolution of music and of science
- Dr. Shima Beigi (environmental engineering, installations): Mindfulness engineering for sustainability and resilience
- Prof. Dr. Em. Diederik Aerts (physics, cognitive science, composition): Entanglement of concepts
- Prof. Dr. Pieter Meurs (cultural studies, educational sciences): Worldviews and globalization
Selected publications
Aerts, D., Mathijs, E., & Mosselman, B. (Eds.). (1999). Science and Art: The Red Book of `Einstein Meets Magritte’. Springer Netherlands.
Arguëlles, J. A. (2018). The Heart of an Image: Quantum Superposition and Entanglement in Visual Perception. Foundations of Science, , 23(4), 757-778. doi: 10.1007/s10699-018-9547-1
Heylighen, F., & Petrović, K. (2020). Foundations of ArtScience: Formulating the Problem. Foundations of Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-020-09660-6
Heylighen, F. (2019). Transcending the Rational Symbol System: how information technology integrates science, art, philosophy and spirituality into a global brain, in N. Gontier (ed.), Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution. Oxford University Press. Retrieved from http://pcp.vub.ac.be/Papers/TranscendingRSS.pdf
Maxted, O. (2017). Cybernetica vs. Descartes. De geest van het non-cartesiaanse theater. Etcetera, 151, 38–43. http://pcp.vub.ac.be/ECCO/ECCO-papers/Maxted-NonCartesianTheatre.pdf
Petrovic, K. (2018). On Cosmogony (ECCO Working Papers No. 2018-02). Retrieved from http://katarinapetrovic.net/on-cosmogony.pdf
Saillenfest, A., Dessalles, J.-L., & Auber, O. (2016). Role of Simplicity in Creative Behaviour: The Case of the Poietic Generator. Proc. 7th Int. Conf. on Computational Creativity (ICCC-2016), https://csl.sony.fr/wp-content/themes/sony/uploads/pdf/pachet-16c.pdf