Curator’s Introduction

David Familian

Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty is an exhibition of contemporary artists whose work explores complex systems at the nexus of art and science. The word complex, derived from the Latin plectere “to weave,” describes how interconnected, complex parts in each system are woven together, but also interact with other systems. One cannot think of them in isolation because they are constantly interacting with each other through feedback, generating chaos, emergent behavior, and self-organization, all which create uncertainty. For instance, climate change, pandemics, social unrest, and geo-political turmoil are all generated within complex interactions between elements that lead to unpredictable, dynamic outcomes. Another element in complex systems is that we can never have complete knowledge of every interaction of a given system. All systems become less predictable over time, producing tension and uncertainty, which explains the exhibition’s title.

Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty includes interdisciplinary works of art that represent, demonstrate, and embody the fundamental nature of complex systems. The emerging and established artists selected for this exhibition focused on different aspects of complexity, using both traditional media and new technologies such as computer modeling, robotics, and dynamic AI generated data visualizations. The works explored complex systems at various scales from that of microscopic organisms to the totalizing implications of global warming on a planetary scale. The exhibition endeavored to help audiences understand how complexity functions within the individual works but also engaged them to actively experience the overarching aesthetics and effect of each system, which is reflected in the exhibition’s installation.

A Walk Through Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty

The exhibition is arranged thematically in three distinct galleries, each with a different ambience aimed to produce a disparate effect. The first gallery focuses on one characteristic of complex systems: chaos, where works demonstrate various chaotic elements or systems out of control. For instance, Clare Rojas’s Circle of Infinite Chaos (2022), a representational painting of a woman (possibly the artist) lying peacefully in a hollow below grade with objects buzzing above her reflecting chaos in her inner mind. The tension between both chaos and order is visible in several works: Julie Mehretu’s Landscape Allegories (2004), etchings of turbulence landscapes; Fernando Palma Rodriguez’s Huitzlampa (2023), kinetic sculptures programmed to respond to live weather in Los Angeles; and Ralf Baecker’s Interface I (2016), a kinetic sculpture of thin bands driven by signals from the ambient radiation of the earth, some that form smooth sine waves, others that move with frenetic energy. Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas’s Measuring the Immeasurable (2022), a hanging installation of surveying tools and drawings of indigenous rock paintings, references how the Public Land Survey System (PLSS) created displacement and environmental chaos for native peoples and their land.

The second gallery features three video projections in a dark, interstitial, liminal space where viewers could have a respite from the previous chaos. Laura Splan’s Baroque Bodies (Sway) (2022), an interactive video projection on a wall, zoomed in and out in response to the movement of participants moving in the space as they explored the impact of the environment on gene expression. Theresa Schubert’s Glacier Trilogy — Part 3: Simulating glacial water systems (2022), included two large flat-screen monitors stacked vertically screening a real-time simulation of melting glacial ice that varied according to the amount of carbon dioxide in the room. David Rojas and Carolina Caycedo’s video, Teaching of the Hands (2020), a companion piece to Measuring the Immeasurable, oscillates between a documentary about the history of colonization with its ravaging extraction policies and a poetic meditation on indigenous knowledge and caretaking of their land.

The third gallery focuses on the complex and unknowable in both past histories and speculative futures. Gail Wight’s Ostracod Rising (2024), a timeline drawn like a 19^th century naturalist illustration, explores both previous and anticipated future extinctions of organisms on our planet. Chico MacMurtrie’s Dual Pneuma (2024) is a large installation of futuristic, soft robots whose movement is powered by air from pneumatic tubes. They are installed alongside ceramic “doubles” cast from the robots, which play sounds using the same water whistle technology as ancient Meso-American flutes. Pilar Yoldas’s Alphabet of Life (2024) are glass orbs etched with the molecular structures of twenty amino acids, the building blocks of life. Hege Tapio’s Ephemeral (2024) consists of a promotional video, didactic materials, and a prototype to imagine a fictitious corporation where venture capitalists embrace a brand new technology: hormonal implants to alter our emotions. Cesar and Lois’s Being hyphaenated (Ser hifanizado) (2024), a living sculpture/experiment with sensors, measures the complex communication between mycelium and other plants with the data visualized on a computer.

The final part of this exhibition in the fourth gallery features two artists who provide cautionary tales for the future: Lynn Hershman Leeson, one of the first media artists, and Newton Harrison, an innovator of environmental art. Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Logic Paralyzes the Heart (2022), a photo and video installation about AI-generated life forms, includes a character that reveals the historical secrets of past surveillance technology and potentially dystopic future technologies. Newton Harrison’s Epitaph (2022), his final work, is a drawing of an imagined tombstone for himself and his long-time collaborator, the late Helen Mayer Harrison. Referencing their dialogical artistic process, the text on the tablet-like tombstone is a conversation between Harrison and what he calls the “life web.” The penultimate line on the tombstone reads, “Human, Human to survive, learn from your companion species how to rejoin me,” which reflects Newton Harrison’s frequent admonition for humans to coexist with nature to prevent human extinction.

The overarching goal of Future Tense: Art, Complexity and Uncertainty, was for audiences to understand how complexity functions in our everyday life through works of art. Audiences could see and experience (perhaps even feel) the dynamic interplay of chaos and order, uncertainty and unpredictability in extreme weather events and climate change, robotics and AI, and in biological systems in plants and within our own bodies, just to reiterate a few. Ultimately, the artists in Future Tense: Art, Complexity and Uncertainty propose ideas about this paradigm of complex systems that helps us understand that while we cannot solve all these vexing global issues, we must learn to manage them, or our survival will continue to be at risk.

Historical and Curatorial Precedents

For the last twenty years as a curator, I have had a long-standing interest in the concepts of chance and probability that control randomness and can generate uncertainty in art and science. At critical junctures, paradigmatic shifts occurred in art, philosophy and science that embraced randomness, indeterminacy, and unpredictability. In the visual arts, the modernist avant-garde redefined the very meaning, function, and materiality of art, by welcoming chance in the production and reception of art.

A few voices in the late 19^th century began to question the determinism of science and its goal of certainty. For instance, scientists including physicist/mathematician James Clerk Maxwell and physicist/philosopher Ludwig Boltzmann, could only understands the kinetic behavior of the molecule through probability using statistical mechanics. In trying to solve the “Three-body problem” (why do three celestial objects i.e. planets, stars, or suns with similar mass exert force on each other when they are in proximity?) physicist/mathematician Henri Poincaré realized even a minute miscalculation in the starting position of each body would give an inaccurate result, as the systems are so chaotic and unpredictable.

This skepticism about certainty continues into the 20^th century. In his Creative Evolution (1907) philosopher Henri Bergson, argued that Darwinian mutation cannot be predictable, but must involve chance and uncertainty. As scientists looked further into the structure of atoms, they found bizarre behavior which led to the theory of quantum mechanics. In 1927 when Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr presented their “Uncertainty Principle” positing that you cannot know both the speed and the position of a particle at the same time, they confronted much opposition because it depended on probability. Albert Einstein, who did not believe that nature is unpredictable, reacted to their principle famously stating that:“god does not play with dice.”

Artist Marcel Duchamp became interested in the concept of uncertainty and read the writings of Henri Poincaré, including Science and Hypothesis (1903) and Esprit Jouffret’s book on the fourth dimension, a popularization of Poincaré’s book that read by many artists at that time. When most art historians think of Duchamp it is in relation to his impact on the development of conceptual art, but equally important is how he dealt with uncertainty, indeterminacy, and chance. One may see this in his Three Standard Stoppages (1913-14) where three one-meter threads held horizontally were each dropped from a height of one meter onto a piece of canvas and fixed in position by means of varnish. His composition Erratum Musical (1913) a score for three voices composed by Duchamp and his two sisters, Yvonne and Magdeleine, both musicians, was created by randomly picking up a range of twenty-five notes from a hat.

Artists responded to the rupture of World War I also using chance along with found objects and nonsensical language in raucous performances at Hugo Ball’s Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. This is where Richard Huelsenbeck reportedly slid a paper knife into a dictionary and randomly selected the word “Dada”—hobbyhorse in French––as the name for the group of artists. In the 1920s surrealists embraced the unconscious and the irrational to reflect the extreme level of destruction, death, and trauma of war. Like the scientists and philosophers, Dada and surrealist artists also continued question certainty, predictability and rationality, which became the zeitgeist of the post-World War I era.

In the 1950s, John Cage developed “chance operations” indeterminate procedures to make visual scores for compositions, often open-ended and including audience participation. Beginning with has famous Untitled Theater Piece #1 (1952) at Black Mountain College, he developed this early intermedia performances combining painting, poetry, dance, music, everyday sounds and found objects. Influenced by Cage, Fluxus artists wrote their own “event scores “for brief, multi-sensory intermedia performances. For instance, La Monte Young’s “Composition 1960 #10,” also known as Draw A Straight Line and Follow It, was interpreted by Nam June Paik in his Zen for Head (1961) where he draws a straight line by dipping his head (or sometimes his tie) in ink and drags it along the paper, making what looks like a Zen ink brush scroll.

Complexity, Wicked Problems and Systems Thinking

When I first heard about Getty’s PST Art and Science Collide theme, I knew that it presented an opportunity to expand further upon the concepts of probability and uncertainty that I engaged with in previous Beall exhibitions. What I did not know was this would result in four years of research into adaptive complex systems, its histories and methodologies. This started out with a deep dive into the literature of complexity theory that led me to cybernetics, Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of the organics, and eventually, to ubiquitous, adaptive complex systems all around us that effect our lives in very profound ways we cannot ignore.

René Descartes described the old scientific method of problem-solving succinctly: “Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it.” In short, everything is like a clock: in that manner of thinking one knows what every part does and can predict with certainty how it will operate. In contrast, Bruno Latour explains in a discussion about global warming: “The disorientation people feel regarding the planet, and the fact that they can’t react quickly to a situation that everyone knows is catastrophic, is largely because they continue to be in the world in the past, one where there are objects that have no agency and can be controlled by calculation and science.” Today, like Latour, we assume climate change consists of a set of complex, dynamic, interrelated systems that produce unpredictable outcomes that, unlike the “clockwork” paradigm, cannot be resolved by calculations or science.

Adaptive complex systems theory attempts to explain how large numbers of relatively simple entities organize themselves into a collective whole that creates a pattern, such as a group of flocking birds. While adaptive complex systems y more accurately reflect our current conditions, their complexities make them difficult to comprehend. In 1973, urban planners Horst W.J. Rittel and Milton M. Webber coined the phrase “wicked problems”:

A wicked problem has innumerable causes, is tough to describe, and doesn’t have a right answer… Environmental degradation, terrorism, and poverty—these are classic examples of wicked problems. They’re the opposite of hard, but ordinary problems, which people can solve in a finite time by applying standard techniques. Not only do conventional processes fail to tackle wicked problems, but they may exacerbate situations by generating undesirable consequences.

Twenty years later, Barry Richmond developed the idea of “systems thinking,” proposing a possible way to solve “wicked problems.” Richmond emphasizes how systems thinking observes complex systems bi-focally and that “one must see both the forest and the trees.” Systems thinkers strive to see both the generic and the specific, as well shifting patterns in an event. Finally, Richmond noted if one does not employ systems thinking and tries to change just one element of a complex problem, the chance of unintended consequences will increase over time. To summarize, we cannot fix these problems easily and must consider they are within a matrix of many intersecting nodes of a complex system.

Helen and Newton Harrison were aware of the concepts of wicked problems and systems thinking, which they integrated into their practice from the beginning. They employed systems thinking in conversations with one another, and with collaborators in architecture, urban planning, marine biology, and environmental science across the globe. As Newton Harrison stated: “we have to live with nature, not try to control it.”

Today, this kind of global systems thinking resonates with Yuk Hui, a philosopher of technology, who recently wrote, “To think planetary…means formulating a language of co-existence that will allow diverse people and species to live on the same planet.” The essential aspect of complex systems—feedback—combined with collaborative, interdisciplinary systems thinking, could possibly help to begin to a co-existence where we can tackle our current wicked problems and the cataclysmic events that will continue into the future.

Notes

This “Three body” conundrum was not solved until discovery of chaos theory in the 1970s.
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, translated by Arthur Mitchell. (New York: Henry Holt and Company), 1911.
Presented at the Solvay Conference in Denmark, this became known as the “Copenhagen Interpretation.”
Herbert Molderings, Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance: Art as Experiment. (New York: Columbia University Press), 2006, pp references Jouffret’s Traité Élémentaire De Géométrie À Quatre Dimensions. (Elementary Treatise of Geometry in Four Dimensions. (Paris: Gauthier-Villars), 1903.
Ibid, 6. Many years after Duchamp made this work, he would state that it was his most important work of art.
Ya-Ling Chen, Tout-Fait Marcel Duchamp, issue 1, vol. 1, December 1999, accessed at https://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_1/Music/erratum.html
Ibid. Jean Arp, Johannes Baader, Hugo Ball, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, Emmy Hennings, Hannah Höch, Richard Huelsenbeck, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Hans Richter, Kurt Schwitters, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Tristan Tzara, and Beatrice Wood, among others.
These previous exhibitions include: Drawn from a Score (2017), which featured artists whose work emanates from a written, visual or code-based score https://beallcenter.uci.edu/exhibitions/drawn-score Vera Molnar: Variations (2022), a solo show of a pioneer of computational works https://beallcenter.uci.edu/exhibitions/vera-molnar-variations and Computational Poetics (2023), curated with art historian Hannah Higgins, that surveyed human/computer collaborations in poetry, with historic work from the 1960s and contemporary experimentation. https://beallcenter.uci.edu/exhibitions/computational-poetics
René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, 4^th edition. (New York: Hackett, 1998), 11.
Interview with Bruno LaTour, Part I, date to be added, video, length, ARTE.tv, accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYfwkTgEpmE.com.
UC Berkeley Planning professors coined the phrase “wicked problems” in 1973. See Horst W.J. Rittel and Milton M. Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4, no. 2 (1973): 155-69.
Barry Richmond, “Systems Thinking: Critical Thinking Skills for the 1990s and Beyond.” Systems Dynamics Review 9, no. 2 (1993).
Barry Richmond, “System Dynamics/Systems Thinking: Let’s Just Get On With It,” transcript from a lecture at the International Systems Dynamics Conference in Sterling, Scotland, System Dynamics Review vol 10, issue 2-3, (summer-fall 1994): 135-157, accessed at https://doi.org/10.1002/sdr.4260100204
Ibid.
Newton Harrison, multiple verbal conversation with the author, 2019 onwards.
Yuk Hui, Machine and Sovereignty: For a Planetary Thinking (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2024): 1.