Article
Autopoietic Art Systems and Aesthetic Swarms
Evental Aesthetics
(2013)
Abstract
This paper proposes a prolegomenal model for the mechanisms through which new styles and schools of art – Cubism or conceptual art, for example – undergo the catalytic, evental transition from potential to actual. The model proposed herein, of fine art as a complex adaptive system that emerges and grows in a manner analogous to that of certain specific forms of biological organization, is predicated on a shift from the residual traces of Greenbergian disciplinary and mediumistic differentiation – grounded in an analytic autonomy – to modes of interaction and aesthetic signal exchange emergent from an autopoietic autonomy – a systemic process of autocatalysis and transformation similar to the recursively generative feedback relations seen in cell metabolism and in ecosystems. This conceptual recalibration leads to a model of artistic eventalization and change that algorithmically unfolds from the adjacent possible as an emergent phenomenon, analogous to the aggregative and spontaneous, self-organizational swarm behavior seen in the flocking of birds or the schooling of fish, applied here to schools of art.
Keywords
- adjacent possible,
- autopoiesis,
- complex adaptive systems,
- emergent phenomena,
- swarms
Disciplines
Publication Date
2013
Citation Information
Jason Hoelscher. "Autopoietic Art Systems and Aesthetic Swarms" Evental Aesthetics Vol. 2 Iss. 3 (2013) p. 15 - 39 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/jason-hoelscher/58/