Watch the documentary:

The Center Leo Apostel for Transdisciplinary Studies (CLEA) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) hosted its first international artscience conference: 'Systems At Play: A Self-Organising Symposium on Self-Organisation', which took place in Brussels from February 15th until 18th, 2023.

The 'Systems at Play' symposium emerged from the understanding that art and science are mutually beneficial means of perception and insight creation. It provided a transdisciplinary contact zone for artists and scientists to meet, exchange, think, share, take time, and, ultimately, play together.

What did we talk and play about? Well, it was up to all participants where it ended up, but our starting points were the ideas of 'emergence', 'self-organisation', and 'goal-directedness'.

As far as goals went, the symposium invited participants to tackle creative challenges collectively. During the symposium, participating artists and scientists together created 'embodied models of emergence' in the form of live games, scores, presentations, conversations and small algorithmic performances. We offered inputs to this process in the form of presentations, talks and workshops during the day; as well as an evening programme of immersive and interactive performances and film screenings.

A Self-Organising Symposium on Self-Organisation

To be true to the self-organisation and emergence of goal-directedness as thematised in the symposium, we recognised that we could not fully predict all the processes or the end goal of the conference itself. And nor did we want to. Rather than organise a symposium simply about self-organisation, we attempted to organise a self-organising symposium, one that determined its own final goals through all our interactions together. To facilitate this, we provided an open space with some supportive structure, knowing very well that we couldn't force it, and that we had to let go of any preconceptions of what constituted success or failure. We allowed uncertainty to enter, and let the goal of the conference find itself. Otherwise, we would have repeated that which we already knew, only to end up where we had already been. The self-organising symposium thus became a shared research object, a unique immersive environment and experiment, as well as a strange loop in which topic and method merged and multiplied.

To feed the symposium, we tapped into the enormous resources of experience which we collectively possessed, drawing upon scientific expertise, mathematical modelling, algorithmic theatre, musical composition, choreography, collective thinking, the global brain and noosphere research, collective mindfulness practices, play, ritual and mythological research, and much more besides.

Play - physically, intellectually, creatively - served as the guiding principle: participants were free to play and propose ideas while nobody was obliged to collaborate or participate. There was plenty of space to wander off, take a coffee break, and perhaps come up with alternative suggestions for activities that felt appropriate to the moment. Together we created a self-organising ecosystem of actions adaptive to our interests, abilities and expectations throughout our time together. We were excited and curious to discover how people and ideas came together during the symposium.

About Self-Organisation, Goal-Directed Systems and Emergence

The concepts surrounding emergence, complexity, cybernetics, self-organisation, and goal-directedness offered us tools that helped us to understand the systems at play in the world. This fascinating branch of science addresses the question of how an assemblage of things, be they people, animals, cells, or almost any other aspect of the universe, comes to have the quality of being more than the sum of its parts. When making and/or understanding art, science, and the world, the relationships and processes that connect things deserved as much, if not more, attention than the things themselves. These connections helped us to explain how a system consisting of interacting parts, such as a swarm of birds, a forest, a market, a game, or a theatre performance based on simple rules, comes to have 'a life of its own', an emergent intelligence, a collective mind or spirit, in a way.

Such a dynamical system typically has one or more 'attractors', which function as emergent goals that direct the system's behaviour. While science investigates emergence and self-organisation by means of mathematical models and computer simulations, complementary artistic methods offered embodied, imaginative and experiential insights.

Thus, art drew our attention to the sensual and emotional quality of relationships: how they felt, their asymmetries, the provocative, absurd and tangential connections, concurrent spontaneity, and the joy of playing with others. Such sensuous relationships brought us to what it felt like to be a part of a collective mind, to experience self-organisation from within the system itself, and to be part of a pattern emerging out of chaos. Jumping together into shared systems of play that allowed emergence dissolved the artificial divide between objectivity and subjectivity, by reminding us that we take part in the world and its network of interactions, and thus in an ongoing process of self-organisation.

In this context, goal-directedness, as discussed by cybernetics, could be interpreted in different ways. It could be viewed conservatively, in terms of self-maintenance, control, and the homeostasis of a system steering itself back to the status quo after a perturbation. But who was to claim that the salmon returning upstream to its spawning place was not wagging its tail in ecstasy at performing its journey?

To paraphrase the composer La Monte Young, if you have a constant, then you can go as far out as you want in relation to that constant. Goal-directedness could in this context be interpreted as the motif around which the musician freely improvises. The goal could be read as the place the hero in the hero's journey steers herself back to, creating therefore both the drama and its resolution. Or as a faraway point on the horizon that directs a continuing advance.

Goal-directedness could then be viewed as framing the question of how we might steer ourselves towards those states of flow, curiosity, novelty, and towards the kinds of future in which we want to live, and ultimately, how the cosmos steers itself towards purpose and meaning.

Sponsors

The Symposium was funded by the John Templeton Foundation as part of CLEA's Origins of Goal Directedness project, and by the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB).