Conceptual Dialogue on Semi-autonomous Complex Adaptive Systems

What does this have to do with Complexity Theory?

Schull:  The idea seems clear to me. Here is a dynamical system whose parts (the ants) collectively shape the whole (the mobile with ants) and the whole simultaneously constrains and influences the ants, changing the way they shape the whole. The whole (and the parts) is much more than the sum of the parts.

Campopiano: From my perspective, it seems to be about that point of equilibrium just before the avalanche of events. Some people call it the edge of chaos. When a level of the oasis reaches close enough in proximity to the next level, it allows the ants access to another level of exploration. Its like a paradigm shift or a discovery that establishes a whole new “ology.”

How did Guy enter the picture?

Campopiano: Months later, Guy Marsden contacted me via email. He was going to be in town for the Turning convention and suggested we meet. We are both ASCI members with a lot in common. As with Schull, the chemistry was explosive. Marsden and I took the fledgling idea in another, but symbiotic, direction. Together, we started thinking about a different activity of the ants, their instinct to dig and gnaw away their environment to make a place to be. We wanted to use the ants to effect another realm of activity, unrelated but more visible.

Campopiano: It was great to have someone of Guy’s knowledge and expertise on the project. I see his Digital Numeric Relevators of particular interest. They’re a form of electronic representation of time.

Guy Marsden: No, you got me all wrong. I am not at all interested in the representation of time!  It is randomness that is the recurrent theme in my work – as such it is conceptually more aligned with Chaos! The term “Relevator” in my Digital Numeric Relevators is a made up word that I define as “a machine capable of creating and displaying irrelevant information.”.

So where are we now?

Campopiano: At this point, Marsden brings to the table the idea of putting ping-pong balls in another cube and having them activated by tiny solenoids, a strongly visual and chaotic activity. At first we considered the movement of the mobile terrains as a stimulus, but this seemed to disconnected. Somehow, I came up with the idea to remove the mobile and coat the entire inside of the cube with oasis material and use the gnawing activity of the ants as the stimulus. Marsden quickly devised a means to electronically sample the interior of the cube for traces of light, which would indicates that the ants had gnawed through the oasis at that point. This electronic information can be used to activate the solenoids in the ping-pong cube.

So what do we have so far?

Campopiano: We now have an enigmatic green cube and a glass cube with static ping-pong balls layering its base. Staying true to the enigma, I suggest that the presence of the ants need not be revealed to anyone but the exhibition coordinators. The idea that the activity of the installation and the ants as stimulus reveals itself slowly over time excited us both..

Campopiano: Next I started playing with the idea of terrain mapping. An averaging of the four gnarred-away plains could control the dropping of the balls one at a time. The balls would be held in a vertical column with monofilament. A four level terrain would be the result. Mapping is a visual way to look for emergent properties in an apparent random activities. My brain works best when looking at three-dimensional spatial relationships.

Where is Jonathan Schull at this stage?

Campopiano: When Jonathan jumps in again all hell breaks loose for a little while. We start imagining lot of far out ideas that, although fascinating and thought provoking, would take year’s not months to complete. When brainstorming with Guy, he won’t let me get past a thought without completely understanding how it will be made. When brainstorming with Schull, it’s just the opposite. It doesn’t matter if it can be done or not, it’s more important to communicate the idea, mainly so we can get to the next idea. In the wee hours of the morning, Schull and I were envisioning the addition of 3 laptops configured into a third cube, cameras in the ceilings, tapping into the campus database and whirling sensor on top of campus towers. When we started up again the next day we began looking at the reasons behind the forms and found much simpler and more elegant solutions. Hence, the four cubes.

This looks like a big change.

Campopiano: Well, not all that big. All the elements from earlier are still retained, albeit altered a bit. The ants are the stimulus for the ping-pong balls to take flight, but instead of sensing the light from opening chewed into the oasis, a video camera will be located under the green box pointing up. The video signal will record the movement of the ants and this movement will be converted to a binary grid. This, now digital, information can be used for several effects: to activate the ping-pong balls in the popcorn cube similar to the earlier plan; to turn on and off red LEDs embedded into the ping-pong balls in the other ping-pong ball cube; and to send a video signal to a monitor underneath the mirror box in what is now a new forth cube.

OK, but what’s this fourth box?

Campopiano: That’s going to take a little explanation. Jonathan has for a long time been interested in an artwork of mine, well it’s more like an element of an artwork, which I call the mirror box. It’s a phenomenon that occurs when you place four mirrors facing each other and allow them to taper down to some visual element. The most dynamic use of the mirror box is when it is placed against a video screen or a computer monitor. The mirror box creates the illusion of a giant sphere–it’s an impressive illusion. Although I’ve been aware of this phenomena for over 20 years, I only first used it as the catalyst for my “Rupture in Cyberspace” installation in 1999.

Jonathan, what about the mirror box interests you and what does it say about complexity?

Schull: Funny you should ask.  To me, the piece in general is about visualization of the most fascinating kind of complex adaptive system. The “kind” of system that fascinates me is an adaptive semi-autonomous system composed of many adaptive semi-autonomous systems (which may themselves be composed of semi-autonomous systems). This is the architecture of the biological world, and it is increasingly the architecture of the cyber-world. But there is also something new here. Some of these systems are beginning to try to understand their own nature, and to ponder the nature of understanding. That’s what I’m trying to get into this piece. Let me try to explain. The ant colony is a classic and obvious example of an adaptive semi-autonomous system composed of many adaptive semi-autonomous systems (which may themselves be composed of semi-autonomous systems).

Schull: Less obviously, every person is an example of such a system: I am a nervous system, a circulatory system, a digestive system, etc. They are cells; the cells contain mitochondria. And so on. Many of these sub-systems can function on their own (for a while at least) and many of them are intelligent information processors in their own right (especially the brain and its neural subsystems).

Campopiano: And going in the other direction, we are part of something bigger.

Schull: Yes, each of us is a semi-autonomous component of larger systems (our social groups, our society, our species, the biosphere etc.). And those larger systems are themselves semi-autonomous and adaptive. (We talk about the “will of the people”, for example.)

Campopiano: This is great Jon, but before we get too deep into this, let’s define a few terms. By “adaptive” system, do you mean a system that alters itself to a changing environment? For instants, when we take 500 ants out of the Utah desert and placed them in a new environment, a 13″ glass cube layered with oasis, they adapt to the sandless environment by burrowing into the oasis material. Or is there a deeper meaning to adaptive systems?

Schull:  There are deeper issues lurking, but you’re exactly right.

Campopiano:  Am I right in assuming that a “semi-autonomous” system is one that can exist on it’s own but only in relationship to something else, like a parasite?

Schull:  A parasite (or a partner, or an environment, etc.) able to maintain its character and pursue its goals, even in the face of environmental challenges and changes, but not of course independent of its context.

Campopiano: “No man is an island…”

Schull: Yes, No man is an island, yet each man is partially (but only partially) independent of others.

Campopiano: Does this mean that the “context” is an important element of a semi-autonomous system, as the desert is the ant colony’s context, and further down the hierarchy, the colony is context to the ant?

Schull:  It does.  In fact according to systems theorists Gregory Bateson  and H.Ross Ashby (don’t get me started) the “system” is actually the organism-interacting-with-its-environment.  Those parts of the environment with which the organism interacts are the “context.”

Campopiano: I’ve often associated the ants in my artwork with the human neural system. The “Rat-Buddha” is an excellent example.

Schull: Well, you’re in good company. Bateson, Ashby, Hofstadter, E.O. Wilson and others have shared that insight. Perhaps its the role of the artist to move such insights from the realm of abstraction into the world of the senses and of the spirit.

Campopiano: So in your mind, this piece explores the similarity of ants and humans, ant colonies and human social systems?

Schull: Somewhat, but that’s secondary to a more interesting point, to illuminate and reflect, literally and figuratively, the differences and interactions between random systems, mechanical systems, biological systems, and self-reflective systems.

Campopiano: Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. Let’s talk more about “self-reflective” systems. I can see how this sets up a paradoxical situation. What happens to a system, or for that matter the other systems, when one is self-reflective?

Schull:  I think the best way to answer that question is to say, “look in the mirror.” Or for that matter, look at this installation.  Something strange happens… And something strangely similar happens when scientists (or philosophers) try to answer that question.  “What happens” is something we don’t quite know how to talk about, which is why we’re trying to illustrate it.

Campopiano: I believe that is why I gravitate to this issue. Things that defy verbal explanation make great subjects for art.

Schull: But of course, we can’t resist trying to talk about it. Whether we are talking about classical sciences, the new science of complexity, or even about what we naively call “simple perception,” we naturally tend to take the stance of an objective observer looking “in” at our object of study from the “outside.”

Campopiano: The way we stand outside the ant colony looking in?

Schull: Exactly. This stance is natural and convenient, but it is an illusion. In this artwork we bring attention to this illusion in several ways. For example, our view and our stance when we look down at the gallery are apparently rather similar to our view and our stance when we gaze at the ant colony. “Apparently similar,” but deeply different.

Campopiano: Of course, because when we look at the webcam image, we see ourselves.

Schull: Indeed, we see ourselves seeing ourselves. And this act of self-reflection changes the nature of what we are observing in many ways. For example, when you suspected you were seeing yourself, you probably waved your hand in order to see your doppelganger move in the image. For a deeper example, consider that when you first saw yourself in the webcam image you were looking at someone who didn’t know s/he was on camera. Later, you were looking at someone who did know. What we see is a reflection of what we see. What we are is a reflection of what we see. And what we see is a reflection of what we are.

Campopiano:  Jon, most people can follow your reasoning until these last three sentences. Do you want it that way or do they need some explanation?

Schull: I like the three sentences because each one seems to have several true and interesting meanings. What we see is a reflection of what we see. What we are able to see is determined by what we have learned to see.  Right?  And how do we learn to see?  By looking, and learning.  So, what we see really is a reflection of what we have seen. Now here’s a sense in which “What we are is a reflection of what we see.”

Learning is (quite literally) the process in which what we see changes us.  Every experience changes us in some way, forever. And so it is also true that “what we see is a reflection of what we are.”

If these last paragraphs have done their job, you have been changed in some way, however small, by these words and this piece of art.  Look at it again.  If you see it differently this time, it’s in part because you are a different person.

Campopiano: As a 10-year-old child, I remember an important moment in my life. It was when I realized I was me. I wasn’t just a son of parents, an animal running around on two legs. I would look down at my hands and say this is me. I am different than any other person looking down at their hands and saying this is me. It was an empowering feeling on one hand and scary as hell on the other.

Schull: What I’m saying is, science is “a way of looking at the world.” And so, what we have been saying about “seeing” is equally true of science. The world that science shows us is a reflection of the way science looks at things. While the scientific stance usually supposes that the world we see is objectively real, that too is a conveniently oversimplification.

Campopiano: Can we go as far as to say it too is an illusion?

Schull:   Sounds like Buddhism, doesn’t it?  I guess I’d say that perceptions (and illusions) are as “real” as anything we ever experience.  There may be (must be?) something really real “out there”…but all we get to experience is a view of it, as reflected (and refracted) by our nervous systems (and our theories).

Campopiano: I hate to keep throwing my past work into the dialogue, but as an artist, my work often speak more eloquently than my words. I did a piece back in the mid eighties called “Plato’s Cave.” It also used ants and their seemingly mindless activity to bring attention to the fact that organized religion was attempting to undermine one of humanities truly progressive evolutionary documents, the US Constitution or more specifically the Bill of Rights. It was Plato’s view that we are only seeing “shadows of shadows” (if I have the quote right) and if we are to see reality, we need to be outside of our perceived reality to really see. Of course, with this line of thinking, it appears we are moving away from science and toward philosophy. Are you saying complexity theory has a foot in philosophy, not to say science and philosophy is mutually exclusive?

Schull: All science has a foot in philosophy. And all philosophy has a foot in science. And historically each has had an impact on the other, each has had to adapt to the other…

Campopiano: …uh does that mean…

Schull: …Right.  Science and Philosophy are themselves semi-autonomous complex adaptive systems. As our scientific theories change, our worldview changes too. Classical science (and physiological psychology) saw ants (and people) as mechanical objects reacting to complex but deterministic forces.

Campopiano: Rather like ping-pong balls reacting to mechanical impacts.

Schull: Right. But then early-20th century science introduced the idea of randomness, indeterminacy, and uncertainty. And we started seeing ants (and people) differently. Late-20th century science brings us complexity, chaos and emergence. Millennial science (I think) will come to grips with self-reflection, the nature of systems that can know themselves, and the nature of a universe in which self-knowledge and consciousness is possible. But the millennium is still young. For now, we invite you to look down into the mirror box. Gaze at the “objective” images on the computer screen, and note that to see those images you must peer through your own image. The inter-reflection of these images (some “real,” some created by you, some created by and of you), viewed by you and from your unique perspective, creates a universe, which is in some mysterious way a reflection of the universe.