Entangled. An art project developed for the ISCIA Seminar Series - Horizon 2055, Nelson Mandela University, South Africa

On 22 August 2025 I gave a seminar on my art project, Entangled, for the ISCIA Seminar series, which is hosted through the Chair in Identities and Social Cohesion, Nelson Mandela University, South Africa. The ISCIA Horizon 2055 series focused on the role art can play in reimagining and reshaping our futures, with an eye to 2055. Much thanks to Andrea Hurst and Harsheila Riga and colleagues for hosting this series and providing me the opportunity to present my art work.

 

For this Blog Post, I created two video from my presentation:

PART 1 is the actual art work, Entanglement, which is a 10-minute video. 

PART 2 is a presentation of how I developed my Entanglement art work.

  

CLICK HERE to see more of my art.

CLICK HERE to see a complete list of all the tangle images used in this project.  

 

ENTANGLED

Entangled is a science fiction project that I developed, which fuses my visual art – especially the tangle sculptures and drawings, some of which are shown here – with speculative ecological storytelling. It’s grounded in my case-based complexity methods and explores how art, architecture, and adaptive technologies might help heal damaged worlds.

In the story, tangles are both sculptures and semi-sentient infrastructure – somewhere between machine and living organisms, with “living threads” that adapt to ecological, social, and psychological conditions. They modulate humidity, absorb CO₂, respond to collective trauma, and serve as localised care hubs, architectural shelters, or nodes in decayed urban landscapes.

The project is deeply visual: I’ve used LLMs and AI to create photorealistic renders, gallery installations, speculative post-industrial South African environments, floating tangle habitats, and wire-mesh architectures. I’ve also developed Rhea and other characters, scientists who help uncover the tangles’ purpose and ambiguity.

 

But Entangled isn’t just a story. It’s also an art project and a visual complexity methodology. It brings together my work in the plastic arts, environmental science, AI, and case-based methods to imagine futures that are not just sustainable, but capable of justified healing.

 

 

Case by Case, Wire by Wire: The Visual Method Behind the Atlas

 

For those who have read through the Atlas of Social Complexity, you will note our extensive usage of art across most of the chapters, including images of the tangles! That is entirely on purpose. Art is for both Lasse Gerrits and me a form of visual complexity method, a way to research the social complexity in which we live and inhabit.

Once recognised, the reader will hopefully see that my project, Entangled, is a direct continuation of the ideas I’ve developed in The Atlas of Social Complexity – but expressed through a different medium.

 

Where the methodological theme of The Atlas outlines the formal, methodological, and theoretical basis of case-based complexity, Entangled and the tangles explore those same commitments through the plastic arts, narrative, and speculative design.

 

Both are anchored in a shared worldview: that complexity is best understood not as something to model from a distance, but as something we are already living inside of, as embedded agents, entangled in systems we partially shape and are shaped by.

In the Atlas, our case-based approach is grounded in critical realism – and the same for the tangles –which rejects both naïve empiricism and abstract structuralism. Instead, it argues that, at the ontological level, social systems have real, generative mechanisms—often hidden, often messy—that produce the outcomes we observe. These mechanisms are historically contingent, emergent, and embedded in configurations of material and social life. In the Atlas, we treat each topic not as an example of a system, but as a concrete instantiation of complexity: an event, a structure, a pattern that demands attention to context, history, and power.

 

Entangled carries that same sensibility into the visual domain. Each tangle I create is a material case—a sculptural system, a visual hypothesis. They are not metaphors for complexity; they are complexity rendered through form. Their wires and threads suggest systems of interaction, feedback, adaptation, breakdown. Their placement – in landscapes, galleries, speculative architectures – stages the unequal terrain of social life. Some tangles offer protection; others expose fragility. They model differentiated complexity, just as the Atlas does.

 

But this project adds something else: it makes space for embodied cognition and emotional and existential understanding. The tangles are not diagrams. They provoke response. They ask us to feel our way through the systems we study – to sit with uncertainty, asymmetry, and emergence. This matters politically. As both Entangled and the Atlas make clear, complex systems are not neutral. They reproduce inequality, power, oppression, cruelty – but also freedom, liberty, diversity and healing. They encode histories of dispossession and structural violence, and also moments of wellbeing and happiness. And they rarely offer easy solutions.

 

That’s why Entangled is not utopian. The tangles don’t fix the world. But they do propose a different mode of engagement – one that’s grounded in the complexity of lived experience, one that recognises that any healing worth pursuing must begin with the realities of entangled life: patterned, uneven, partially knowable, and still, somehow, open to transformation.

 

CLICK HERE to see more of my art.

CLICK HERE to see a complete list of all the tangle images used in this project. 

 

 

 

The Atlas of Social Complexity. Chapter 32: The Unfinished Space

QUICK OVERVIEW AND LINKS TO THE OTHER THEMES AND CHAPTERS IN THE BOOK

 

We come, finally, to the last chapter of the Atlas, and with it, the initial series of blog posts covering the entire book.

 

Here is a summary of those posts and our core themes: 

 

The first major content theme in The Atlas of Social Complexity is Cognition, Emotion and Consciousness. This first theme includes six chapters, which I have so far blogged on. Chapter 6 addresses autopoiesis. Chapter 7 turns to the role of bacteria in human consciousness. Chapter 8 explores how the immune system, just like bacteria and cells, is cognitive – and the implications this has for our wider brain-based consciousness. Chapter 9 explores a complexity framing of brain-based cognition, emotion and consciousness. Chapter 10 explores the complex multilevel dynamics of the Self. Chapter 11 is about human-machine intelligence.

 

The second major content theme in The Atlas of Social Complexity is The Dynamics of Human Psychology. So far for this theme, I’ve given a basic overview, found here. I then moved on to the first theme, Human psychology as dynamical system (Chapter 13). From there I reviewed Chapter 14: Psychopathology of mental disorders ; Chapter 15: Healing and the therapeutic process; and Chapter 16: Mindfulness, imagination, and creativity. 

 

The third major theme is living in social systems (Chapter 17). The first chapter in this section is Complex social psychology (Chapter 18). From there we move on to Collective behaviour, social movements and mass psychology (Chapter 19). Next is Configurational Social Science (Chapter 20). From there we move to the Complexities of Place (Chapter 21); followed by Socio-technical Life (Chapter 22). Chapter 23 turned to the theme of Governance, Politics and Technocracy. Chapter 24 focused on The Challenges of Applying Complexity. Chapter 25 focused on Economics in an unstable world. And, finally, Chapter 26 focused on resilience and all that jazz. 

 

Chapter 27 introduces the final theme of the book, Methods and complex causality. It begins with Chapter 28, Make Love, Not Models and then moves on to Chapter 29, Revisiting Complex Causality. Chapter 30 maps the new methodological terrain. Chapter31 takes on the issue of philosophical complexity and outlining our approach, complex realism.

 

 

The Sixrth and final theme, The Unfinished Space (Chapter 32) ends by not ending.

 

 

THE UNFINISHED SPACE

The final chapter of The Atlas of Social Complexity is our unfinished ending: an open space rather than a final word. We chose not to close the circle but to celebrate its non-closure. The study of social complexity, as we’ve learned from the interviews we conducted for this book, the literature we reviewed, and our own ongoing experimentation across disciplines, thrives when it resists premature conclusions.

We take seriously the generative power of incompleteness, not as a flaw, but as a vital condition for creativity, emergence, and new insight. This chapter is both reflection and invitation: to embrace porousness, to foster discomfort, to wander ‘rhizomatically’ through social systems as through a city without a centre.

 

Rather than resolving complexity, we call for its re-imagination. We draw from the arts, jazz, speculative cartography, and moments of collaborative improvisation. We highlight the danger of retreating into silos, of reducing complexity to normative procedures or narrow metrics. Across conversations and terrains (from symptom networks to actor-networks, urban flows to policy knots) we witness a common thread: the need to stay open, to keep the system leaky.

 

This is not easy. Becoming transdisciplinary means being willing to feel lost. It means resisting the institutional push for closure, while also cultivating the craft, care, and curiosity needed to stay in the work. Education, too, must be rethought, not as instruction in tools but as apprenticeship in thinking, failing, and sensing the edge of the known.

 

We leave this Atlas unfinished on purpose. The chapters do not converge on a grand theory. Instead, they open onto a space of adjacent possibles. Like the megalopolis with its tangled corridors and surprise exits, this final chapter is less a map than a membrane, inviting you, the reader-traveller, to walk, improvise, and reassemble the terrain for yourself.

 

Here, then, are the terrains we reflect on in this final chapter, mapped loosely, nonlinearly, in the same spirit with which we travelled:

 

·      The art of staying unfinished: why incompleteness is not failure but method

·      Unease and comfort: how structure soothes but also constrains the complexity imagination

·      The rhythm of contradiction: our paradoxical urge to both expand and contain the field

·      Rhizomes: the city as metaphor, the map as open architecture

·      Porosity and permeability: how we design membranes, not walls, for transdisciplinary practice

·      The lure of the un-grasped: why complexity attracts those drawn to edge terrains

·      Productive struggle: how our interviewees created generative friction across boundaries

·      Organising for emergence: improvisation, jazz, and institutional design for collective creativity

·      Listening as method: how conversation and rhythm shape collaborative intelligence

·      Becoming transdisciplinary: why this is a journey, not a state

·      Becoming educated: complexity as an apprenticeship in curiosity, not a credential

·      Cartographies of refusal and invitation: the ethics of leaving space unfinished

 

Let this chapter, then, remain porous. A threshold rather than a gate. An atlas, yes! But one with missing pages, unfinished sketches and maps, and journeys waiting for others to take.

 

 

 

The Atlas of Social Complexity. Chapter 31: Getting Philosophically Real . . . a case for complex realism.

QUICK OVERVIEW AND LINKS TO THE OTHER THEMES AND CHAPTERS IN THE BOOK

 The first major content theme in The Atlas of Social Complexity is Cognition, Emotion and Consciousness. This first theme includes six chapters, which I have so far blogged on. Chapter 6 addresses autopoiesis. Chapter 7 turns to the role of bacteria in human consciousness. Chapter 8 explores how the immune system, just like bacteria and cells, is cognitive – and the implications this has for our wider brain-based consciousness. Chapter 9 explores a complexity framing of brain-based cognition, emotion and consciousness. Chapter 10 explores the complex multilevel dynamics of the Self. Chapter 11 is about human-machine intelligence.

The second major content theme in The Atlas of Social Complexity is The Dynamics of Human Psychology. So far for this theme, I’ve given a basic overview, found here. I then moved on to the first theme, Human psychology as dynamical system (Chapter 13). From there I reviewed Chapter 14: Psychopathology of mental disorders ; Chapter 15: Healing and the therapeutic process; and Chapter 16: Mindfulness, imagination, and creativity. 

The third major theme is living in social systems (Chapter 17). The first chapter in this section is Complex social psychology (Chapter 18). From there we move on to Collective behaviour, social movements and mass psychology (Chapter 19). Next is Configurational Social Science (Chapter 20). From there we move to the Complexities of Place (Chapter 21); followed by Socio-technical Life (Chapter 22). Chapter 23 turned to the theme of Governance, Politics and Technocracy. Chapter 24 focused on The Challenges of Applying Complexity. Chapter 25 focused on Economics in an unstable world. And, finally, Chapter 26 focused on resilience and all that jazz. Chapter 27 introduces the final theme of the book, Methods and complex causality. It begins with Chapter 28, Make Love, Not Models and then moves on to Chapter 29, Revisiting Complex Causality. Chapter 30 maps the new methodological terrain.

The focus of the current blog post is (Chapter 31) is addressing the issue of philosophical complexity and outlining our approach, complex realism.

Getting Philosophically Real

When Lasse and I set out to map the complexity turn in social science, we knew the tour couldn’t end without turning to philosophy. Not the capital-P, armchair sort that polishes metaphysical trinkets. We mean philosophy as groundwork, as excavation, as a toolkit for getting real about complexity. Hence, the final chapter of The Atlas of Social Complexity is our invitation to “get philosophically real.”

It all began with a provocation: I (Brian) was in South Africa, running a workshop on our complexity-friendly methods at Nelson Mandela University. We hit the first condition—“There is no philosophy of complexity”—and the room, filled with philosophers, went still. Then came the hands. “What about Cilliers?” “What about Varela?” “What about Prigogine and Stengers?” The conversation erupted. It was brilliant. And telling.

What we realized in that moment, and what this chapter tries to spell out, is that the philosophy of complexity exists—but only in fragments. Spread across systems theory, postmodern critiques, cybernetics, epistemologies of embodiment, and methodological pluralism, it lacks a clear terrain. It’s like the early days of the social science turn in complexity: present, provocative, but disjointed. Hence our call for a philosophy of complexity—not just a complexity of philosophy. A grounded, ongoing engagement between philosophers and complexity scientists. A framing. A field.

To that end, this chapter sketches a philosophical programme that we and others have come to call complex realism. Rooted in Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism and branching through thinkers like Archer, Sayer, Byrne, Elder-Vass, Harvey, and Williams, complex realism is not yet a fixed canon—it’s a post-disciplinary scaffolding. It’s a start. A field in motion.

In contrast to the narrow empiricism of much computational complexity science, complex realism foregrounds the ontological status of the social: its depth, its historicity, its emergent and stratified nature. It affirms that social systems are real—but not in the deterministic sense of physics. They are open, contingent, probabilistic. In other words, they are complex.

Importantly, complex realism is as much epistemology as it is ontology. It invites us to study social systems using a pluralist, adaptive, model-rich approach. Every model is a window, not a mirror. Causality is plural. Methods must be mixed. And emergence is not just a pattern to be visualised but an ontological feature to be reckoned with.

We are not philosophers, Lasse and I. We are social scientists. But we know that our tour cannot end in methodological pragmatism alone. We need to get clear—ontologically and epistemologically—about what we are doing. And so, we offer the following tenets of complex realism as both provocation and provisional map. Use them. Expand them. Critique them. But most of all, let’s get philosophically real—together.

Complex Realism: Basic Tenets

Ontology

• The question Bhaskar sought to answer was fundamentally ontological. He wanted to know what the social world must be like for social science to take place.
• Complex realism begins with the premise that there is a real world out there beyond what we can observe.
• The social world is just as real as the physical and natural worlds.
• Although the social world is real, it is different from the natural and physical worlds. To begin, it lacks the type of natural necessity one finds in physical and natural systems, which tend to be more deterministic. In social systems, there is also a greater degree of variance and contingency. This stems from human agency and its ability to respond differently in similar situations. It makes social reality probabilistic, with the possibilities of equifinality and multifinality, and limitations to prediction.
• Williams summarises the ontology of social complexity as follows: “social reality at any given time is the produce of the historical realisation of a matrix of contingent outcomes that have the properties of relative invariance, emergence and dynamic change”.
• Byrne and Callaghan add to this, arguing that, in terms of what social reality looks like, the social world is ontologically complex and systemic.
• Defining the bounded nature of any particular social system is a theoretical and empirical act. The systemic nature of the social world, ontologically speaking, is better seen as a complex web that is network-like in its structure and organisation.
• The networked aspects interact and it is through this interaction that environmental influences become internalized. The process by which this happens is emergence: structure is formed through the interaction of the aspects.
• As a result, social complexity is emergent, constituting its own form of reality. Emergence is an ontological necessity of social reality.
• Social existence takes place at different levels of emergent order. ‘Levels’ refers to Archer’s distinction between interactional and local to systemic, not to the conventional distinction between the micro and macro in the sense of small to large.
• Emergence is not a discrete entity or phenomenon that can be investigated as if it is an object out there. Instead, it serves as an ontological vehicle for thinking about the nature of causation.
• As an emergent reality, social complexity is ontologically defined as real, actual and empirical. The experience of social complexity is the empirical; the outcomes across instances are the actual; and the underlying mechanisms of social complexity are the real.
• Given its emergent nature, social complexity is developmentally open, which limits the possibility of prediction.

 

Epistemology

• Given its ontological position, complex realism in the hands of social scientists is focused on the empirical study of the actualized real. The question is under what conditions the real becomes actualized.
• This is the search for (conditional) empirical mechanisms – which is why critical realism and configurational thinking, in our estimate, fit together so well.
• When complex realists use the term ‘social complexity theory’ they mean a framework for understanding social life as emergent from the real to the actual.
• As a framework, social complexity theory can be both conceptual and offer a causal theory.
• Social complexity theory also provides a theory of production: an explanation of e.g., how power is produced, or how social deprivation comes into being.
• Given the complex nature of social reality, epistemologically speaking, we can never fully know social complexity to its full actualized extent. It means that any given empirical model is not entirely correct. They are windows unto the social complexity being studied.
• Still, while bounded, we can know things about social systems and their complex causality.
• Because all models will be under-determined (or, perhaps more appropriate to complexity, over-determined) by the evidence, we need multiple complementary empirical models.
• Given the need to develop multiple models, be it from different angles and theoretical framings, methodologies and methods likewise need to be pluralistic and transdisciplinary.

Next stop? A phase shift. The future of complexity science needs its philosophy—not as ornament but as infrastructure.