Future (Tense)
Claire L. Evans parses interdisciplinary experimentation
at the Beall Center for Art + Technology
Claire L. Evans is a Los Angeles-based writer and musician exploring ecology, technology, and culture. She is the author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet (2018) and the singer of the Grammy-nominated pop group YACHT. A prolific essayist, her writing has recently appeared in outlets including GROW, MIT Technology Review, and The Verge.
In a cellar in Buenos Aires, there is a point at which the universe collapses in on itself. If you visit, and wait for your eyes to settle in the darkness, you’ll see it: the Aleph, a brilliant sphere no more than an inch wide, where, in the imagination of the late Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, all of space exists, “actual and undiminished.”
The Aleph contains nothing less than the universe, “whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon.” It’s not a complicated sight, but is a complex one, from the Latin complector: to enfold, entwine. The unimaginable universe is an entwining of parts. Alone, these parts—be they ants, neurons, or nodes—are relatively simple. But braided together, they self-organize, process information, adapt, and evolve. They cease to be predictable. We’re surrounded by such systems; Alephs within Alephs. They’re in our bodies, our cities, our societies, our minds.
Despite this omnipresence, complexity is difficult to define and even harder to measure. The physicist Seth Lloyd, in a paper aptly named Measures of Complexity: A Non-Exhaustive List, proposes no less than forty different ways to quantify a complex system. But this doesn’t mean that complexity is a confused science, or a confusing one: merely that it is young, fruitful, and generative. A lack of commonly-defined terms can sometimes be a sign of an active scholarly debate, and a convivial, or at least engaged, community of heterogeneous thinkers. Indeed, that is the case here.
The science of complex systems is interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, as relevant to evolutionary biology as it is to finance, computer science, medicine, and, yes, why not? Art. In the absence of a single, or simple, definition of complexity, it may be the artists who make its reality felt—particularly those artists who, as in this exhibition, draw their inspiration from the wigglier edges of scientific inquiry, and model phenomena as all-encompassing as ecosystems, evolutionary processes, genetics, and the internet.
From August 24th to December 14th, 2024, the galleries of the Beall Center for Art + Technology will be hung with models in motion, in microbes, in microcosms. These will draw from the complex systems we both contain and inhabit. “Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty,” a research project, exhibition, and symposium spearheaded by Beall Artistic Director David Familian, emerges from three years of interdisciplinary dialogue between artists and scientists at UC Irvine—collaborations that pushed both parties out of their comfort zones to yield new forms of artistic research. “Future Tense” will strive to give its viewers a visceral sense of complexity, not as an abstraction—“a world hidden in plain sight,” as the evolutionary biologist David Krakauer likes to say—but as something ordinary, lived.
Of course, model-making is a delicate art, an intentional process of detangling signal from noise. In the nesting hierarchies of complexity, what is signal at one scale can be noise at another, and vice versa. This is the allure of complex systems, which can appear to operate in unpredictable ways, until their deeper patterns emerge from the chaos. We can study those patterns in mathematics, in computer simulation, and through art. But it is in the nature of complex systems to elude our closest measurements.
The living world resists simulation. To make a faithful model, for example, of a microbial community, a colony of ants, or an ecosystem would require enormous computational resources, and in the end, the result would be as difficult to interpret as the thing itself. This is as true for mathematics as art; take Borges’ Aleph, the point in space that contains all other points in the universe. It can be glimpsed, but expressing it is another matter. The best Borges can offer are samples spanning geography and time:
“I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on Earth and none of them reflected me…”
And so on, spanning horses, roses, and cancers, love, bones, and bowels. We could call Borges’ catalog a model too—beautiful, but as inadequate to represent the heart-stopping complexity of the world as any computer simulation. As Borges himself wrote, reflecting on The Aleph, the task of “setting down..a limited catalog of endless things” is impossible, since “such chaotic enumeration can only be simulated.” But perhaps the very inadequacy of its simulation, the space of inexpressibility it opens between representation and reality, is what makes Aleph worth glimpsing into in the first place.
Anyway, there’s no map more detailed than the territory (Borges certainly knew this too). But we can still sample it, describing slices of what we see in the Aleph. As the biologist Richard Levins wrote in his highly influential 1966 paper “The Strategy of Model Building in Population Biology,” when it comes to forming any kind of theory based on mathematical models, “truth is the intersection of independent lies.” That is to say, if we make enough models, sampling different levels, aspects, and behaviours of complexity, perhaps, in their overlaps, we’ll find something momentarily true. And whatever hazy gap exists between the universe and our models of it—well, this is the emptiness that will always draw us forward, in curiosity, in hubris, in devotion.
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