This title is the result of a one-week workshop sponsored by the Swedish research agency, FRN, on the interface between complexity and art. Among others, it includes discussions on whether "good" art is "complex" art, how artists see the term "complex", and what poets try to convey in word about complex behavior in nature.
excerpt from Preface.

The concept of "complexity" is a lot like other informal—but very useful—everyday notions like "truth," "beauty," "love," and "justice," residing as much in the eye of the beholder as in some objective, platonic realm beyond space and time. But there is an emerging science of complex systems, which is often termed the "science of complexity," suggesting a formalization of what we mean by "complexity" in objective, mathematical, and computational terms. So it's of more than passing interest to investigate whether a formal notion of complexity accords with what practitioners of the more humane arts, such as literature, painting, poetry, and music mean by a work of art being complex.

With this exploration of the interface between complexity and art as the leitmotif, the Swedish research agency, FRN, sponsored a one-week workshop to bring together complexity scientists interested in art and artists interested in complexity to exchange views of the issue of how complexity and art fit together. This meeting was held in May 1998 at the scientific station of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Abisko, Sweden, a small village in Lapland, nearly 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The pristine beauty and stark surroundings of this remote location, as well as the warm collegiality engendered by a small group living together on a 24-hours-per-day basis for a week, contributed to many stimulating conversations and contemplations on the relationship between art and complexity. This book is a pale attempt to capture the gist of these deliberations.

Download File Size:9.89 MB

---