Symmetry breaking and Emergence —— Resonance between Complex Science and Art
Original Shi 3 d jizhi club
introduction
The study of complexity has subverted the original reductionism paradigm of science, so what happens when complex science meets art? Social biologist E.O. Wilson once said: "The love of complexity, without reductionism, makes art; Together with reductionism, science has been achieved. " Science and art, as the two most creative cultures of human beings, have been expected to eliminate each other’s misunderstanding and explain hegemony, and merge into a "third culture", but until now, the dialogue between them is still distinct and independent. Therefore, complex science may be used as a way of thinking to broaden our horizons and build a bridge of communication.
In the series "Complex Science and Art", the founder ShiSanWei introduced the basic concepts of complex science, such as symmetry breaking, self-organization, fractal, chaos, emergence, etc. From the perspective of complex science. On this basis, he reviewed the development history of science and art, and further combed and summarized the interactive relationship between complexity and art, and the interaction between scientific practice and artistic creation. Finally, some new achievements in the research and practice of complexity and art in recent years are introduced, and the future of complex art based on Complexism is further prospected. This article is a summary of this seminar.
Sponsored by Jizhi Club, co-sponsored by Shi Sanwei, president of the Institute of Mind and Universe, a popular science writer, Wang Yanran, an art critic, and Long Xingru, a curator, it aims to bring together actors and thinkers in various fields, including scientists, artists, scholars and related practitioners, to discuss cross-border knowledge beyond a single discipline and explore complexity research and
Research fields: Emergence, symmetry breaking, Chaos Edge, Complex Science, Complex Art.
Thirteen dimensions | author
Deng Yixue | Editor
catalogue
1. From Prometheus to orpheus
2. Chaos and order: the birth of complex science
3. Symmetry and symmetry breaking
4. Self-organized criticality and chaotic edge
5. Multiple emergence and strong emergence
6. Cybernetics and cross-media art: from formal system breaking to cross-system interaction.
7. Turing machine and generative art: AI, evolutionary art and artificial life.
8. Complex art: biology, ecology, encryption and others.
1. From Prometheus to orpheus
At the end of 1950s, Si Nuo, an American scholar, was keenly aware that the two most important cultures of human beings, science and technology and humanities and arts, were in extreme division [1]: on the one hand, science held high the truth and used it, and constantly attacked in various fields; on the other hand, art sought deconstruction and freedom, and was unwilling to be defined any more. Scientists and artists, two respected groups, are engaged in deep ideological confrontation in mutual distrust. In the Internet era, John Brockman, the founder of the ideological and cultural website Edge, also strongly advocated the "third culture" [2], trying to build a bridge between science and art. However, both Si Nuo and Brockman ultimately put art under the microscope of scientific reduction, taking it as the highest interpretation right.
So an interesting scene appeared: when modern and contemporary art constantly broke through its own boundaries, deconstructed its own definition, and even critics such as Arthur Danto)[3] shouted the slogan of "the end of art", it was the opposite science that seriously thought and studied art. The reason why science opposes "everything is art" and insists on making reasonable norms for art is not from the confrontation between cultures, but precisely because it sees and hopes to return to the aesthetic concept that human beings regard art and nature as the original whole. At the same time, the cross-media art, artificial intelligence art, scientific art and so on, which combine the two, are constantly emerging and developing, as if responding to and rhyming with history.
Pierre Hadot, a French philosopher, reviewed the changes in the history of human nature concept in The Veil of isis, and found that science and literature and art actually belong to another "orpheus attitude", which is different from the "Prometheus attitude" of interrogating and seeking knowledge about nature-exploring its secrets by singing to nature. In ancient Greek mythology, we can also see that music, astronomy, poetry and geometry were all jointly controlled by nine ancient Greek muses. Not only was nature and man an organic whole at first, but literature and science also originated from the same root.
2. Chaos and order: the birth of complex science
Pre-history of complex scientific thought
From the beginning of ignorance, the birth process of science and later complex science embodies the changes of human civilization’s basic cognition and hypothesis about the world. This is from holism to reductionism, and then to system theory and complex system concept.
Since human beings become intelligent creatures and have consciousness, they have been separated from nature, facing a complex and changeable world. This forces people to have the ability to "eliminate uncertainty" in order to survive.
The earliest attempts in this regard were witchcraft and religion. Witchcraft and religion are very successful in eliminating the internal uncertainty of human groups. They can organize tribal members into a whole and build their own culture and even civilization through the common recognition of nature and gods. But on the other hand, it is a mixed blessing to eliminate external uncertainties: the probability of success in witchcraft guidance will not always be correct, and the "god" of faith will not always guide its people, and it is also necessary to ponder over new oracles or conclude new contracts with God.
Several major civilizations, including China, ancient India, and ancient Greece, all inherited this way of thinking that the world is regarded as a Holism. However, with the development of the times, the scale of population and cooperation has been expanding, and each has taken certain measures to further eliminate uncertainty. For example, the caste system in ancient India, the ritual system in China (by Wu Qili-Li Zehou) and the belief in one god in ancient Hebrew. Only ancient Greece, on this basis, opened a civilized road to development by consciously eliminating external uncertainties.
The ancient Greeks had a unique understanding of the world. Although they also believed that the world originated from Chaos [4], they also believed that there was a simple rule behind this complicated and ever-changing world-the so-called "complex world, simple rule". Pythagoras’s "everything is number" and Plato’s theory of reason are typical manifestations of this concept. This contradiction is also reflected in Heraclitus’ exposition of the relationship between Logos (λ γ ο, Logos) as the origin of the universe and active fire [5]:
The world is an eternal, living, living fire that burns and goes out according to a certain measure.
In a word, the irreducible living fire and the measurable logos are both external and internal. Therefore, although the ancient Greeks recognized the chaos and complexity of the world from the very beginning, the rationalist tradition of emphasizing order was fully burned in time and space like kindling, which spread to the world with mathematical tradition through Pythagoras, Euclid and Diophantus, and gave birth to modern science through ancient Arabia and the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.
From Galileo to the establishment of Newton’s classical mechanics, science is based on a set of such assumptions:
Determinism: there is an objective world independent of human beings, which follows some deterministic laws;
Knowledgeable theory: people can master these laws by speculating and observing the world and existence;
Reductionism: the world and all kinds of phenomena can be divided into parts by studying the proper division, and then the nature and law of the whole itself can be obtained.
This set of assumptions is so powerful that it can be said that the whole western rational civilization and even the whole modern human civilization were established on this basis. Without science, there would be no steam engine and industrial revolution, the use of electricity and power revolution, and the information revolution and intelligent revolution that are now in the ascendant.
The mechanical determinism represented by this kind of science is a typical linear thinking: whole = sum of parts, including both space and time scale. Its peak is the French mathematician Laplace, who believes that as long as we know the initial state of all objects in the universe at a certain moment, we can predict the state of the whole universe at any moment.
The science of reductionism has developed so prosperously through technology that it has even been misappropriated in various fields, including humanities and social sciences, in the form of so-called physics paradigm. Since the Romantic era, science and art have always been in a subtle and tense relationship that promotes each other and opposes each other. For example, the English poet Shelley once enthusiastically supported science, but later wrote In Defense of Poetry, believing that poetry is the source of science.
Fortunately, with the continuous development and deepening of modern science, the hypothesis of scientific mechanical determination is increasingly questioned and re-recognized: relativity and quantum mechanics make people realize that there is no external absolute space-time, and the observation and behavior of the subject will affect the world itself; In particular, reductionism has also been challenged by nonlinear science and complex science developed in 1970s. Thus, the resurrection of chaos and complexity has enabled science and art to rediscover the link.
So, what is complexity and complex system? How was complex science born?
Complexity and complex system
Complexity itself is a concept of "complexity". In complexity science, there is a saying that "if you want to understand complexity, you must first understand complexity". However, we can still understand it from the perspective of order: complexity is a state between complete order and complete disorder. As shown on the left, turbulence is a kind of phenomenon with high complexity between disordered random noise and ordered crystals. As the skeleton of complex systems, complex networks are also between regular networks generated based on equations and random networks, such as social networks and ecological networks. These networks with power-law characteristics are naturally formed in the real world and are often more meaningful to human beings.
Because it transcends and synthesizes reductionism and the older holism paradigm, the most typical feature of complex systems is that Aristotle, an ancient Greek philosopher, said, "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts". But this sentence can also describe holistic thinking. A better description of the complex system is the "many differences" put forward by condensed physicist philip anderson in "More is different: broken symmetry and the nature of the hierarchical structure of science" in 1972. Also, he creatively described complex systems at different levels from the perspective of physical symmetry breaking, and pointed out that "the ability to reduce everything to simple basic laws does not mean the ability to reconstruct the whole universe from those basic laws", which challenged reductionism profoundly.
Why is complete reductionism wrong? We can elaborate from the following three angles:
Reductionism ignores the information between system parts (mechanism, linear thinking, such as the relationship between clocks or organism cells)
Reductionism ignores the information between system elements and environment (by default, an absolute and isolated time and space, and the system does not interact with the world)
Reductionism ignores different patterns and information obtained by different observation scales (by default, human beings are an absolute or unique scale observer)
In addition, the development process of complex system science can be said to be numerous and flourishing. Some major stages of development are briefly described below:
1. Pre-conceptual stage (~ 1930): some abstract system laws such as evolution theory and statistical mechanics.
2. System Science Stage (1930-1980): Old Three Theories+New Three Theories
Information theory (1948), cybernetics (1948), system theory.
Chaos theory (1963)
Complex adaptive system (1968)/ self-generated (Varela, 1972)
Dissipative structure theory (1977, Prigogine), synergetics (1974), catastrophe theory (1972)
3. Complex scientific stage (1980-1990): Santa Fe Institute, computer modeling and simulation, answering problems that are difficult to solve in the real world by means of experiments.
Emergence (emergence)
Group Behavior/Complex System Hierarchy
4. Complex network stage (2000-2010): skeleton and relational data acquisition.
Barabbá si (The Network Takeover, Albert-Lá szló Barabá si, 2012)
5. The era of big data and physics of complex systems (2010 ~): In the era of big data, data is driven rather than just computational simulation. Mathematical equations describe unified laws. Kleiber’s Law and Scale Theory of Biology (Scale, Geoffrey West, 2017)
The picture below shows a more detailed history of the development of complexity science. Among them, chaos theory in mathematics plays a key role, and chaotic system is synonymous with complex system in a sense.
In addition, symmetry breaking, self-organization and emergence are also three very core concepts of complex systems. Just like the three fallacies of reductionism mentioned above, they summarize three ways in which complex systems and complex systems are generated from space, time and scale respectively (note that real systems often have both of them, but only a more appropriate way will be chosen).
Complexity and three ways of the birth of complex systems;
Symmetry breaking-over space.
Self-organization-over time
Emergence-over scale/scale
It is precisely because of these three ways that complex science can transcend and synthesize reductionism and system theory and re-associate with art. We will talk about it separately below.
3. Symmetry and symmetry breaking
If you ask what beauty is, all the answers from ancient times to the present must be order. Differences may only lie in what kind of order. The stoic school in ancient Greece first defined beauty as symmetry, that is, the harmony between the parts of an object. Obviously, symmetry is a kind of natural beauty, which is found in animals and plants in nature. Therefore, although human art especially prefers symmetry, we can’t say that this is because people have a sense of inner ear balance or a pair of symmetrical eyes.
Philosophically speaking, symmetry is a unity of individual and whole diversity, so that the whole can be composed of the same elements regularly and repeatedly. This is what the Stoic school called "beauty lies in harmony". What is symmetry? There is a branch of mathematics that specializes in symmetry called group theory, which includes all these symmetries such as left and right, translation, rotation and crystal symmetry. The essence can be attributed to the invariance of a certain element configuration under the automorphism transformation group. Simply put, if you can’t see where it changes after operating an object, it means that the object is symmetrical to this operation. Therefore, the identity transformation-existence itself is a kind of symmetry, because no matter how irregular an object is, the fact of its existence itself will not be changed under normal observation. Since symmetry is a kind of beauty and delicacy, it can be deduced that all existence is beautiful, a kind of aesthetic view in the most universal sense.
In addition, symmetry can also be combined and transformed. For example, in particle physics, Charge, Parity and Time are not symmetrical (conserved) respectively, but the joint symmetry of CPT is a universal law without exception. In addition, China’s Taiji diagram also combines the symmetry of rotation and color.
Therefore, in classical art, symmetry is often pursued, or it is beautiful, or it is used as a means of expression, such as the Parthenon in ancient Greece and the Forbidden City in China in the former, Bach’s counterpoint in the latter, and the play with symmetrical patterns and patterns in contemporary art.
Then why do natural and ancient artists prefer symmetry? From the physical and mathematical point of view, everything in the world is so because symmetry and simplicity have the smallest "cost."
In nature, the formation of formal symmetry stems from the fact that the magnitude and direction of the applied force are always the same. For example, snowflakes, flowers or ripples in a pool in two dimensions, and spheres in three dimensions. However, this great beauty of nature is not based on beauty, but a real utility. As Newton said, "Never waste a penny". The most typical example of this is the hexagonal network of honeycomb, which is that when the plane is divided into many parts with equal areas, the total length of the boundary network is the shortest figure (the circumference is the shortest when a figure is round). It can be said that whether it is bees, grid cells in the brain, or Islamic tiles and carpets dominated by decorative arts, they are consciously or unconsciously paying tribute to nature itself by using crystal symmetry.
Symmetry summary, every step of physical development, often will find a new symmetry.
symmetry breaking
But symmetry can only be said to be the most basic harmony. That is, in addition to the complete unity and maximum symmetry between the whole and the parts, there will be a large number of non-isomorphic and proportional parts division for forms involving time and growth. The most famous of these is the golden ratio. Therefore, the concept of "beauty lies in harmony" can be further deepened into "beauty lies in proportion": beauty is the harmony of the proportion of all parts of an object.
Pythagoras school has long recognized the relationship between beauty and proportion. They regard everything in the universe, including nature and art, as mathematics, and have found harmonious proportion from celestial bodies and music. Whether it is the Parthenon, the brokeback Venus and the works of Leonardo da Vinci, many plastic arts of human beings conform to the golden section. Why can the golden section make people feel harmonious beauty? If we continue to do golden section on a rectangle, we will find that the remaining edges are still a small golden section rectangle, and they are self-similar, and if we replace the edges of each cut square with circular arcs, we will get a spiral-equiangular spiral. Because every time this spiral rotates at the same angle, the arc obtained is proportional, so it represents that the space is uniformly enlarged during the growth of organisms.
Nautilus shells, tornadoes and even the cantilever of the Milky Way all conform to the equiangular spiral, and its numerical embodiment is Fibonacci series-that is, almost all flower petals love to follow its number growth.
What is the relationship between the golden section and symmetry? In fact, from the perspective of condensed matter physics and complex systems, they are actually a kind of symmetry breaking.
If we regard perfect symmetry as a sphere (which can be very high-dimensional) that remains unchanged under all operations-that means it is eternal in any time and space, then the first symmetry breaking is symmetry with respect to time. Simple to two-dimensional case, from the lower left corner, a circle has infinite kinds of symmetry (taking axis symmetry as an example). When this symmetry breaking occurs, many kinds of polygons will be formed. Among them, the most symmetry is regular quadrangle, followed by regular triangle and then rectangle. With the increasing degree of symmetry breaking, more and more diverse and complex quadrangles are produced.
The straw hat in the middle is the spontaneous symmetry breaking of particles. Spheres (particles) that were originally in the dome of a wide-brimmed straw hat and kept symmetry-this means that the particles with high-energy excited state come from the real physical environment and will be constantly kicked by noise to the low-energy excited state with a longitudinal degree of freedom at the bottom, thus breaking the original overall symmetry. At this time, the particles can’t move in all possible directions. Symmetry breaking’s result is to reduce the freedom of things: we can also use a standing stick to illustrate that if the stick is a cylinder, it may fall in all directions, but if the cross section is broken into a cube, it is only possible in four directions.
Nevertheless, symmetry breaking has created great richness and complexity of things, and even such a complicated world in a sense is the result of symmetry breaking. Therefore, if symmetry represents a kind of classical and eternal beauty, then symmetry breaking itself also represents a kind of beauty that breaks away from convention, diversity and heterogeneity. Just as some people think that Venus with a broken arm is more beautiful, or the relatively solemn ancient Greek sculptures appreciate the beauty of messy conflict dynamics like laocoon.
4. Self-organized criticality and chaotic edge
When there is diversity because of symmetry breaking, there may be local interaction between these elements or subjects, thus making the system produce some form of overall order, which is the Spontaneous order, also known as spontaneous order in social sciences.
When enough energy is available, the process can be spontaneous and does not need any external agent to control. It is usually triggered by seemingly random fluctuations and amplified by positive feedback. The final self-organization is completely dispersed and distributed in all components of the system. Therefore, self-organization is usually robust and can survive or self-repair serious interference.
As shown in the following figure, in various fields such as physics, chemistry, biology and nerves, all kinds of patterns and cluster behaviors are products of self-organization.
Self-organization produces complexity or complex system, which is mainly caused by dynamic system behavior in time. It is often based on some simple rules, and after enough evolution, it reaches a critical point as an Attractor, thus showing some different orders from the past. This process is also called Self-organized criticality.
At the critical phase transition point of self-organization, there are not only local and direct interactions, but also hidden and indirect interactions between relatively distant particles, which is called "long-range correlation". For example, taking birds as an example, a flock of birds only needs three simple rules to realize complex and changeable behavior:
Get close. Within the radius of vision, the bird will try to get as close to its neighbors as possible so that the birds will not fly away;
Alignment. All birds in the visual field radius have to fly in one direction, otherwise the tethered birds always need to adjust their direction;
Avoid collisions. Birds in the visual field radius, birds getting too close to each other or obstacles, need to change direction, otherwise they will hit and stop the system.
It can be seen that based on some simple local rules, birds can have a long-range association, which makes the macro-behavior of birds show some characteristics that are invariant in space or time scale. From the perspective of symmetry, the self-organization generated by birds is equivalent to a new symmetry based on the dynamic evolution of time after all birds are in symmetry breaking (from completely uniform to each different bird).
More generally, what birds produce at the critical transition point of self-organization is a kind of attractor of typical chaotic behavior. Because chaos can be generated from mathematics, it can be said that it spans all natural and human fields.
Chaos refers to some systems, and if the measurement of their initial position and momentum is extremely small and inaccurate, it will also lead to huge errors in their long-term prediction. It is often called "sensitive dependence on initial conditions". Like the quantum uncertainty principle, it directly denies Laplacian determinism.
The first clear example of chaotic system was Henri Poincaié, a French mathematician, who tried to solve the so-called three-body problem at the end of 19th century: Newton’s law was used to predict the motion law of three celestial bodies whose mass, initial position and initial velocity are arbitrary and can be regarded as particles under the action of universal gravitation. The two-body problem is very simple, but the three-body problem is much more complicated. Poincare found that the general three-body problem has no solution, that is, there is no analytical solution. Only the solutions in special cases are used as attractors.
Chaos has been observed in many systems, such as heart disorder, turbulence, circuits, water droplets, and many other seemingly unrelated phenomena. Of course, the most famous phenomenon is the so-called "butterfly effect": an Amazon butterfly flapping its wings may cause a hurricane in Texas, USA.
For mathematics, the most famous example is a simple model called logistic map, such as the upper right corner. Take different values of r, and the result of x will become very interesting.
When R=2.9, x will reach the fixed point attractor x = 0.655;
When R=3-0, x will reach the bi-periodic attractor. This is the first bifurcation point in the graph, and the fixed point attractor is replaced by a bi-periodic attractor;
R is between 3.4 and 3.5, and it bifurcates into a 4-period attractor, and then it multiplies periodically;
Until R reaches around 3.569946, the onset of chaos begins to appear.
We can see that only a small change in the control value r will result in a world of difference.
Another example is cellular automata. The initial state and interaction rules of these cells have been set, and a λ parameter has been defined, and then this parameter is adjusted. It will be found that the final state of cellular automata is predictive, but different λ values determine the final mode.
When λ=0.001, all cells are attracted to a fixed state, which is equivalent to the first kind of cellular automata described in the last section;
Near λ=0.2, the system periodically circulates between some fixed states, which is equivalent to the second kind of cellular automata, and its cellular automata has a more complex structure than its original one.
When λ is between about 0.3 and 0.6, quite complex structures will appear. These structures are neither fixed period or fixed value, nor completely random, so these cellular automata belong to the fourth category, namely "complex type". Moreover, with the growth of, the maintenance time of complex structures will become longer and longer;
When λ≥0.6, the complex structure disappears and the system will be attracted to a completely random chaotic state.
Above, the transformation process between four kinds of cellular automata can be obtained by λ change, namely: fixed point-> period-> complexity-> chaos, in which the third kind of cellular automata in complex state is just on the edge of chaos and order, and the system is both stable and dynamic in this state.
We will see later that many interesting cross-media and interactive artworks are often in this state.
5. Multiple emergence and strong emergence
From symmetry breaking’s diverse elements or subjects to self-organization between elements or subjects, self-organization criticality and chaotic edge are produced. If the whole system is a multi-level system, it is possible to produce brand-new system attributes or system levels beyond the original observation scale. This phenomenon is called emergence.
Typical emergence is multiple emergence or strong emergence, so only in these two kinds of emergence can we observe brand-new phenomena from a new scale and the causal effect of interactive feedback at different levels. For example, the birth of mind will not be reduced to countless large-scale interactions between particles or cells. Emergence classification is shown in the figure below. It can be seen that symmetry breaking and self-organization can also be included in these kinds of emergence.
In addition, from the perspective of complexity, just like symmetry, each new type of complex system will also correspond to a new kind of complexity, that is to say, the collection of the word "complexity" will always be in an unfinished state. For the discovered natural or artificial systems, we can seek new complexity to describe them. On the contrary, we can use the known symmetry and complexity to create and generate new systems, including various types of art. The following table summarizes some common complexities:
6. Cybernetics and cross-media art:
From formal system breaking to cross-system interaction
The famous art historian and theorist Gombrich (E.H. Gombrich) said in The Sense of Order:
Whether it is poetry, music, dance, architecture, calligraphy or any kind of craft, it proves that human beings like rhythm, order and complexity of things.
Art and Expression: From Formal System to Informal System
Whether it is rhythm, rhythm, symmetry or proportion, it all comes from the mathematical and physical characteristics of the real world. A system that can be described by a formal language and composed or generated based on various rules is called a Formal system. For example, Euclid geometry.
* including character strings, symbols or images, unlike natural languages, formal languages only study the grammar of a language and are not committed to its semantics.
Corresponding to it, Informal Systems include natural systems, mental systems, etc. Most art is also an informal system. We can see that complex systems are between formal and informal systems.
Escher: From formal system to informal system, the gradual part is chaos, full of recursion and interaction.
Any art needs to be expressed in a certain form. Different expression media are different physical forms, and their expressive ability has its own characteristics and limitations. In addition to media forms, it also includes different abstract forms under the same media. For example, movies with lens language as the medium are different from novels with written media, but this does not prevent both of them from narrating with nonlinear structure and telling the same story; Or in the same media, such as poetry and novels in words, the structure of realism and post-modern literature is very different. The same story or content often presents completely different artistic effects under different media, narrative methods and structures.
Here, there are two problems about the expressive ability of media forms:
How to express more content in limited media forms?
How to express information outside a certain media form?
Hou Shida, a cognitive scientist, pointed out in his book Godel, escher and Bach: A Masterpiece of Different Things, a "strange circle" phenomenon that spans all fields of mathematics, painting, music and even human beings: Self-reference and Recursion in a broader sense.
In natural language and formal language, if a sentence directly or indirectly mentions itself, it is self-referential. And if it points directly or indirectly to itself or its class, it is recursive.
In his generative grammar theory, the linguist Noam Chomsky regards recursion as the core attribute of language, that is, "limited means and unlimited use". Because the sentences between existential objects have a hierarchical sequence (for example, inorganic matter, organic matter, animals, people, etc.), the use of recursion gives human language the ability to generate various syntax with different meanings, more complex structures and rich forms, thus expressing the most complex and subtle thoughts that human mind can exist.
We can see that the reason why human natural language has such powerful expressive power that "the boundary of language is the boundary of my world" is because of the existence of recursion and self-reference mechanism. This also enables the language itself to be compatible with multiple modes of expression. For example, poetry can express the feelings of another sense in the form of synaesthesia.
In addition to poetry and more abstract music, before modern art, other single media, especially classical art and plastic arts, often resorted to the content and information that expressed their own media form characteristics. But similarly, just like escher, if we use self-reference and recursion, we can achieve the effect of other media systems outside the performance media system or try to refer to other media systems outside the system.
However, in order to actually accomplish it, rather than observing the subject’s feelings or imagination, we need another unified language to describe nature and the corresponding "grammar"-this is the birth of information theory and cybernetics.
Cybernetics and cross-media art
In cybernetics, no matter human, animal or machine, it is only a part of information theory. Therefore, when I give an order to a machine, it is not essentially different from when I give an order to a person. -Wiener’s Cybernetics in History
Through information theory and cybernetics, we can find that information itself can be combined with a unified and abstract language that spans many systems, that is, whether it is system state storage or causal transmission, it can be completed through information processing. This provides the underlying foundation for cross-media art.
The above figure is a schematic diagram of a general cybernetic system. It can be seen that the control system controls and adjusts the input and output of the system and the environment through the controller, so as to realize the recursive call and cyclic feedback of information between multiple systems, including symbolic and semantic levels. That is, the control system itself is an example of recursion in the physical world. Because the environment of the physical world is open, there may be a "out of control" state beyond the original system in cross-media installation art. From the foregoing, we can see that this is not different from the nature of spontaneous symmetry breaking of high-energy particles under random noise disturbance.
Michel Paysant: Intangible calligraphy: bouquets, most installation art, and the results are out of control through the information control system.
7. Turing machine and generative art: AI, evolutionary art and artificial life.
Turing machine and artificial intelligence
Since information can be used as a unified language for all systems to operate and describe the system, there is no difference between abstracting information and natural system information process. In this way, for all material processes, the Turing machine invented by alan turing can constitute a kind of universal simulator for any information and calculation process (of course, this is inevitably accompanied by information loss, such as the physical effect when the Turing machine reads paper tape information).
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/-k36JrGYzA3GEJTIpmsQtQ
Taking the Turing machine as a conceptual prototype, John von Neumann designed and manufactured an electronic computer, in which he can process all kinds of natural world information, including information based on different senses and physical modes, such as vision, audio and semantics. At the same time, according to computability theory, the computing power of human brain is equivalent to a Turing machine. This means that human beings can get an intelligent system, which can unify all media information into pure digital media for processing.
Turing machine: the embodiment of mechanical decision process can be used as a general information processing device.
Cross-media art is only based on information transmission instructions, which makes many media and main systems cooperate. As a complex system, the next step is for artists to use or create a system and use the system itself for artistic creation. Among them, digital media is the core, and in a sense, numbers play the role of so-called metamedia (atoms → bits). However, not all digital arts are cross-media or cross-system. For example, video recording or videotaping, which only records the information of the physical world, still uses digital media as a mapping tool, rather than a creative tool based on itself.
Generative Art, Evolutionary Art and Artificial Life
The most typical art based on digital media is Generative art The most typical definition of generative art comes from Philip Galanter, a professor at new york University:
Generative art refers to any art practice where the artist uses a system, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other procedural invention, which is set into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art.—— Philip Galanter”
It can be seen that, unlike using physical media or natural language to create art, generative art uses code language and automatic algorithm to create works, so the code and algorithm and the final process and result itself span two media or systems. Because generative art often starts from a series of algorithms, computer programs, natural language rules and even the initial mathematical equations, typical generative art can be attributed to the process of formal systems generating informal systems, such as chaos/fractal /L system/generative grammar/rule system/cellular automata/life game/reaction-diffusion system and so on. Of course, if the restriction of automatically running codes and algorithms is removed, the art based on rules can be regarded as generative art, such as the use of visual or other symmetry, pattern texture and repetition in classical art, or the use of mathematics and geometry to arrange chords, etc.
In the generalized generative art, there is a large class of art based on simulating human brain and using neural network algorithm to create, which can be called artificial intelligence art. For example, RNN/LTSM/Gan/Diffusion based on neural network, or the art of generating and creating a Text-to-image/ multimodal ….
In addition, when generative art and artificial intelligence art draw inspiration from mathematical algorithms and brain neural networks respectively and shine as creative methods, another kind of Evolutionary Art inspired by natural algorithms is also developing quietly. Under the background of complexity which combines science and humanities, evolutionary art has become a new type of dynamic portraiture. By adjusting parameters, selecting fitness function, studying genotype-phenotype mapping, and making extensive use of methods such as cluster system, ant colony algorithm, genetic algorithm, genetic programming, self-organization and emergence, various arts with high effective entropy complexity comparable to natural systems have been created through a creative system.
Therefore, it can be said that generative art in a narrow sense or AI art based on neural network are two generalized generative arts that specialize algorithms in regular and irregular systems, while evolutionary art is between regular and irregular. As mentioned above, this is the system with the highest complexity, so it is possible to produce autonomous agents or cluster agents with high intelligence, and to create by subjects other than artists. This is artificial life art or robot art. A typical evolutionary art process is as follows:
Evolutionary art: by adjusting the initial parameters and fitness function, the final phenotypic effect is shaped.
Evolutionary Art: Miguel Chevalier: Extra-Natural 2021
Artificial life: Karolina Sobecka and Jim George Sniff, 2009.
Digital ecosystem: Joan Soler-Adillon, Digital Babylon, 2005.
Here, we can summarize several kinds of arts with complex systems as clues:
Generative art: using code language or automatic algorithm to create works.
AI Art: The creator creates an autonomous intelligent agent by using various media and algorithms.
Evolutionary Art &AL& Robot Art: Creator creates an intelligent subject who can create art.
8. Complex art: biology, ecology, encryption and others.
It can be seen that based on Turing machine and artificial intelligence system, generative art has profoundly changed the concept and method of artistic creation:
1. Creative subject: it is no longer limited to people, but may be algorithms and machines (creator symmetry breaking).
2. Process controllability: the creative process is no longer artificially controllable, but introduces the characteristics of real-time, interaction, autonomy and evolution;
3. Predictability of results: Due to the introduction of randomness and the above interactivity, the results are almost completely unpredictable and emerge.
Furthermore, from the perspective of evolutionary art, autonomous agents and human-computer collaborative creation will also make people re-examine art and the creative process itself.
Contemporary art itself has become a process of multi-body cooperative interaction and symbiotic evolution. For example, from the creative subject, in addition to people and autonomous machines, it also includes other existing subjects of biology, nature and earth ecology (such as Myxomycetes); In terms of collaboration space, scale and mode, it also includes greater interaction and collaboration between human beings as creators, such as encryption art based on contract system, game art connecting virtual and physical space, and performance art created by various designs.
Biological art: creating with other natural living creatures as media and materials.
Ecological art: creating with natural ecosystem as the medium.
Encryption art: based on the blockchain contract system, many users and digital objects are called to create.
Game art: based on rules, a new order emerges in a certain space-time range with the cooperation of many subjects including people.
Here are some typical examples of this kind of art:
R smithson, Broken Round/Spiral Mountain (1971, located in Emmen, Netherlands), Environmental Art/Ecological Art/Earth Art, Multiple Systems and Emergence.
Laurent Mignonneau and Krista Sommerer, "Insect Man" 2019, interactive device, using the life system itself as the material to create a larger mutual system.
PaK：The Merge, the art of encryption, is a multi-agent behavior art that mobilizes different agents to buy through smart contracts, and finally unexpected definite results emerge.
Epilogue: The Future of Complex Art
We can see that looking at contemporary art from a complex perspective is not only an emergence of art, but also the aesthetic experience of art is completed by the emergence of consciousness and art together. Art from classical contemplation, imitating modern expression and interaction is often accompanied by the process of symmetry breaking, self-organization and emergence of complex systems. The combination of complex science and art makes art get rid of the influence of reductionism to a certain extent and can embrace more chaos and uncertainty.
In the book "Art in the Age of Emergence" published in 2017, it is believed that the formal characteristics of complex systems described by emergence and the consideration of the relationship between emergence and consciousness are not only based on scientific research, but also provide space for spirituality, which can be particularly suitable for understanding the process of artistic creation, thus filling the gap in the understanding of art in the post-modern era.
In "The Art of Artificial Evolution: A Handbook on Evolutionary Art and Music" in 2008, it is also proposed that Complexism can be used as a new practical program of evolutionary art..
Although we don’t know whether the attempt to combine ideas and practice based on complex science and art can promote the brand-new and development of art, at least we have seen this possibility and these new directions that are happening and exploring. In many artistic fields, these changes and explorations that are taking place are worthy of our attention and exploration. Finally, let’s take the words of social biologist Edward Wilson as the end of this article:
The love of complexity with reductionism makes science;
The love of complexity without reductionism makes art.
—— E.O. Wilson
reference data
[1] The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,Charles Percy Snow,1959
[2] The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution,John Brockman,1995
[3] The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art,Arthur Danto,1985
[4] Theogony, Hesiod (8th–7th century BC)
[5] Ancient Greek Philosophy, edited by Miao Litian, Renmin University of China Press, 1989, P37-38.
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Complex Science × Art Series Seminar Phase II-Saturday Live Preview
The seminar "Complex Science and Art", sponsored by Jizhi Club, co-sponsored by Shi Sanwei, president of the Institute of Mind and Universe, a popular science writer, Wang Yanran, an art critic, and Long Xingru, a curator, aims to bring together actors and thinkers in various fields, including scientists, artists, scholars and related practitioners, to discuss cross-border knowledge beyond a single discipline and explore the potential overlapping areas between complexity research and humanities and arts. This seminar will be held once a month from July 2022, with a total of 12 issues.
On Saturday, August 13th, the second session of a series of seminars will be held. In this issue, curator Long Xingru and scholar Teng Xiangbin are specially invited to discuss the embodiment of "calculation" in creativity and aesthetic dimensions from the perspectives of computational aesthetics and neuroaesthetics, so as to provide a new way to conceptualize artistic creation and aesthetic experience and try to break through the paradigms of technological determinism and biological reductionism and open up a new discussion space. Interested friends are welcome to sign up, join the community and get video playback.
Seminar time and process:
Time: 20:00-22:00 on Saturday, August 13th, 2022.
20:00-20:40 Long Xingru: Before Complexity: Computer Art
20:40-21:20 Teng Xiangbin: From art to aesthetic feeling in the brain: complex art needs complex systems to appreciate the beauty.
Dialogue session from 21: 20 to 22: 00, guests: Shi Sanwei and Zhou Yizhang.
Details of the second phase:
Neuroaesthetics, Computational Aesthetics and Visual Arts | Saturday Live Complex Science × Art Series Seminar
Details and framework of the seminar:
Chaos & Muses: Complex Science × Art Series Seminar
Original title: "symmetry breaking and Emergence-Resonance between Complex Science and Art"
Read the original text