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The artwork A-Memory Garden was an application for the Android platform that worked on mobile devices and tablets and was available during 2012 and 2015. It was developed and published as a PhD practical research investigation and launched in a collective exposition. While in 2015, the A-Memory Garden revealed its potential to be an emergence system, it is with the exposure of the complex characteristics of systems related to artworks that it is now possible to reinforce the essential qualities of complexity. Those qualities such as agency, agent narratives, the relationship between user's and systems, learning processes and evolution make A-Memory Garden an object of Poetics of Complexity.
According to McComarck and Bergamo (2020), observe something is not always an act of representing but also an act of deforming. Deformation can be understood as the performance of seeing something and an expression of its form. In this act, the artist uses mind, sensibility and skills. Although an artist can recognize complexity, he cannot necessarily observe it in its whole. Complexity is apprehended by human sensibility, which is capable of perceiving both individualities and patterns. It is helpful to map its formative structures to sense or comprehend complexity within systems, which also allows us to simulate them and thus expand our perception of the complex. Human beings cannot fully recreate every specific complexity perceived, but, using technology, can create other complexities, systems formed by agents, Generative Art and interactions that generate complexities.
Complexity has been extensively explored in a variety of scientific fields. In Physics, for example, it is commonly associated with thermodynamics and entropy as a measure of physical disorder. In mathematics and computer science, various “algorithmic complexity” and “information complexity” measures have been proposed to quantify the amount of accurate information content in a communication system. Algorithmic complexity can be thought of as the shortest possible program to generate a specific sequence of data.
On the other hand, complex systems are typically dynamic systems that generate more complex outcomes than their specifications. Hence, they often exhibit the properties of database amplification and emergence. They can involve the interactions of base components that give rise to complex outcomes or artifacts as a system. A classic example is the self-organizing patterns made by flocks of birds. There is no central coordination or control; instead, the flock's movement emerges through the local interactions of individual birds.
Furthermore, complexity is a discipline about description and, sometimes, predicting dynamics that exhibit changing behaviors. Several common mechanisms support these kinds of complexity. One such mechanism is function iteration, where a function (such as a transform) is recursively applied to an element to generate complex forms, often with a degree of “self-similarity”.
Notwithstanding the above, creating complexities may fall in the same dichotomy between the arts and sciences, as complex systems are not an elementary topic. Making the simulation of complex systems available to the non-scientific public opens its possibilities as an exploratory tool, as well as a poetic medium.
Complexity is not a recent topic in the field of technological-computer arts. In 1968, a group of pioneering artists presented the exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity (Reichardt, 1968). This exhibition is one of the milestones for the area and is important historically to the concept of the poetics of complexity. Cybernetics was incredibly impactful for complexity because of its statements about the relationship between entities and their environment. The mathematician Norbert Wiener, who published in 1948 his work on communication control in animals and machines, placed biological and mechanical structures at the same level regarding information exchange. Through cybernetics, it is understood that information and computing occur both in electronic circuits and in living systems.