Punching Clouds; Or, Complexity Science Meets Public Decision Making

I just finished reading through two excellent books by Lasse Gerrits.

Gerrits is an associate professor at the Department of Public Administration at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. He studied Policy and Management of Complex Spatial Developments and was a researcher at TNO Built Environment and Geosciences.  He also has an excellent but now terminated blog on the links between urban life and complexity.  It is called Cityness.

He received his Doctor’s degree in 2008 and is a "fast-rising" scholar in the complexity of public policy and public decision making.  His two new books demonstrate why.

Before turning to those books, it is important to also note that Gerrits is likewise making a name for himself in the growing network of research in which my own work is situated, namely case-based complexity science and its more specific domains of inquiry: case-based modeling and David Byrne's complex realism.  To see Gerrits' work in these areas, click here.  Now, back to the books.

Punching Clouds: An Introduction to the Complexity of Public Decision-Making is an excellent introduction to the massive, burgeoning literature on the complexities of public policy and public decision making.  What makes it particularly useful is that it (a) bridges the gap between theory and application and (b) advances the empirical rigor and theoretical organization of the field.

To date, the formal, scientific literature in the complexity sciences has not been well integrated into such applied fields as city planning, public policy and the managerial sciences, as these 'applied' fields have tended to take a more pop-science and metaphorical approach to complexity--which can be rather problematic.  Why?  Because it is not often clear if (a) the concept of complexity are being used correctly or (b) the authors are actually saying anything new.

On this note, it is worth pointing out that Kurt Richardson of Emergent Publications and the E:CO journal published this book.  Richardson and colleagues, such as Paul Cilliers (in memoriam) are known for the high quality of their work.  And so it is with the current book by Gerrits. 

Punching Clouds cuts through the pop pretenses of much of the applied literature by taking a measured approach to complexity.  Gerrits, for example, states: Unlike some authors, I do not see the complexity sciences as presenting a revolution of thought. Rather, its main value for me lies in the fact that it provides a fairly coherent framework for integrating various ideas, including those that predate the complexity sciences, in a way that helps us gain a deeper understanding as to why public decision-making is such a complex subject. The key for this lies in how complexity deals with time and causation. As such, this book is a first but not final attempt to make sense of the complexity of public decision-making.

The payoff of this approach is massive.  For example, I have spent the past several months just meditating on the first several sentences of the book, as they are both provocative and yet intuitively correct.  Gerrits states:

Much of the work in the public sector is fairly simple, unchangeable and predictable. A minor part of the work isn’t. Although seemingly small, this complex portion requires much of peoples’ time and energy, and presents often unpredictable results. A fatalistic response to this complexity could be to give up and to go home. A different response would be to make an effort at understanding this complexity. This book presents such an attempt.

Wow!  These sentences ring true for so many public policy issues.  In my particular area of study, public and community health, I started thinking about some of the major problems we face here in the states: health poverty traps, people going bankrupt over health care costs, food deserts, unhealthy built environments, disease transmission through health networks, the failures of preventive care.  These issues remain, entrenched, despite efforts to fix them, due in large measure to a failure to understand their complexity.  It is, as the title of the book states, like punching clouds.  Anyway, I can go on but I will stop.  Get the book.  I highly recommend it!  I also recommend Gerrits' edited book, which very much functions as a companion to Punching Clouds.

COMPACT I: Public Administration in Complexity is Gerrits' second book, edited with Peter Marks.  Here is the summary as they present it:  There is an argument that says that research in Public Administration is always about social complexity. This argument is true. There is also an argument that says that Public Administration is actually very little informed by complexity. This is equally true.  The differences lie in the different takes on complexity. The latter approach understands that comprehension of complexity requires a specific theoretical framework and associated tools to look into the black box of causality.

The authors in this edited volume gathered in Rotterdam (The Netherlands, June 2011) to discuss how the complexity sciences can contribute to pertinent questions in the domains of Public Administration and Public Policy.  Their contributions are presented in this edited volume. Each contribution is an attempt to answer the Challenge of Making Public Administration and Complexity Theory work-COMPACT, as the title says. Together, they present an overview of the diverse state of the art in thinking about and research in complex systems in the public domain.

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In conclusion, as Gerrits states himself, the complexities associated with public policy and public decision making are beyond quick fixes or final solutions.  But, if we are to make some progress with them, then understanding correctly their complex nature is the first and most important new step.

 

Maurizio Galimberti and Dynamical Complexity Photography

I recently came across the work of artist and photographer, Maurizio Galimberti.  I was instantly blown away. 

To me, Galimberti's work has taken David Hockney's photo-assemblages in a very new and interesting direction, showing how the camera, used in an immediate manner (Galimberti's prefers the polaroid), can capture the evolution of time and space and the dynamics of movement, without falling into the linear form of video or the graphic novel.  It also advances Italian Futurist photography--and this is made explicit in reviews--specifically the work of the Bragaglia Brothers, whose work you also have to see.  And, of course, one cannot forget cubism.

It is wonderful, wonderful stuff and another excellent example of visual complexity.

I couldn't find a picture by Galimberti that was free for public use, so I chose this Polaroid picture instead; which I made of my sister-in-law, Debbie, back in 1995, when I was just starting to really develop my own approach to photo-assemblage. 

Here are some great links to Galimberti's work:

Here is a link to this own website.
Here is a link to some of his recent photographs of current celebrities, such as Johnny Depp, Lady Gaga and Benicio del Toro.
Here is another link to read a bit more about him.
Here is a great video of him photographing Chuck Close.
Here is his facebook page.

 

Keynes Was Right: Government Austerity in Times of Trouble is a Bad Idea

I am sure many of you have seen the recent study by Thomas Herndon, a 28-year-old economics grad student at UMass Amherst.  If you have not, it is titled "Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff." (At the cite you can read the article, download the data, see responses to it and so forth.)

For a very good quick overview click here.

Here is an even shorter summary:

The article is a devastating critique of the recent austerity approach advocated in the states and other countries, which cynically seeks to cut and slash federal and state government into fiscal submission, while big business continues its massive growth into highly dynamic global markets, making more money than ever before.

What makes it so devastating is that Henderson uses Reinhart and Rogoff's own data: it appears that the initial authors made a major, major, glaring database error, forgetting to properly code information correctly; the initial authors also left out three of the countries (Canada, New Zealand, and Australia) where a charitable and relaxed approach to spending resulted in significant success.

What also makes the paper interesting from a complexity sciences perspective is the issue of curving fitting and Herndon's approach to nonlinearity versus the approach taken by the initial authors.

(The Figure to the right was taken from Herndon's paper.)

Anyway, I think it is a very good paper to read; and, for those of us who teach statistics and method, it is a wicked reminder to share with our students: always, always, always, check your data; and then check your data again!!!!!!!  Out of all the things my mentor, Galen Buckwalter taught me, that is one of those things burned onto the back of my brain.







   

Complex Systems Are Not Networks; They are Cases.

Let me be clear right from the 'get go' of this post!  I am a huge fan of network science!

I regularly teach the stuff in my college courses; I do network research myself; and my colleagues and I have incorporated adjacency matrices and relational data into our development of our novel approach to case-based modeling.  In fact, in my humble opinion, network science is probably one of the most important intellectual triumphs of science in the last twenty years!  

So, there!  I think my opening point is well made: in the vernacular of the 1970s, network science rocks!

Still, it is not everything!  What?

Let me explain.  See, it really hit me the other day.  I was thinking about the case, right?

More specifically, I was thinking about David Byrne's case-based-complexity-science notion that cases are complex dynamical systems c_i (j), where j denotes the time instant t_j.

I was also thinking about case-based modeling, the version of case-based method that my colleagues and I have developed, which (pace Byrne) treats complex systems as a set of cases, each its own complex dynamical system.

So, what is key to both views?  It is this idea that cases are these complex things,  In fact, in our work, they are so complex that we treat cases as k dimensional row vectors (c_i = [x_i1,...,x_ik]) comprised of a set of measurements—which, usually, given our health science focus, constitutes some combination of clinical, compositional or contextual variables.

So, what does all this have to do with networks?

Well, actually, a lot.  See, an obvious point just sort of suddenly hit me.  But, as with many things in life, sometimes the obvious can go unnoticed.

Put simply: 

1. Cases are more than nodes in some adjacency matrix.  Said another way, there is more to a case than its position within a network or the relationships it shares with other nodes. Cases are complex, comprised of characteristics (measurements) that are beyond (cannot be reduced to) the relational.  

2. In turn, therefore, complex systems cannot be reduced to (or studied solely as) networks, as the agents of which these systems are comprised are not just nodes or positions within some network.  In other words, because network science only studies cases as nodes, it does not constitute the robust model of complex systems it is generally touted to be.  Network science maps only one particular dimension (the relational) of the complex systems it studies.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I know that just about anyone is network science would respond to my insight with the retort, "No duh!"  So, I am not trying to construct a straw-person here.

What then, exactly, am I constructing?

I am constructing a caveat to network science and, more broadly, the complex sciences, that I think worth a few moments thought.

I read an interview, recently, with the noted physicist, eco-systems theorist and complexity scientist, Fritjof Capra--click here to read interview.  

Capra is the author of one of my all-time favorite books, The Web of Life, and is a major advocate of networks as one of the key patterns of life.  In fact, the point of the interview was to discuss Capra's views on the utility of networks for understanding complexity.  In fact, the title of the article is Networks as a Unifying Pattern of Life Involving Different Processes at Different Levels. 

However, in his opening argument, Capra makes the following point.  He basically argues that, while studying networks as patterns of organization is necessary, is in insufficient; the nodes, as cases, need to be understood.  This is particularly true of social networks, where the nodes help us understand deeper aspects of a complex system, including such things as meaning, symbolic interaction, culture, politics, the complexity of the people the nodes represent, and so forth.  He states:

Although I can observe a network pattern, I cannot really understand it if I don't know what an enzyme is, and how it interconnects various processes as a catalyst. Similarly, in a human community the network pattern is a pattern of communications. It interconnects individual processes of communication that create ideas, information and meaning. So, we need to address the question of meaning in terms of social science, political science, anthropology, philosophy, history and so on. The social sciences and the humanities have to be drawn in to deal with the level of meaning. Only then will we really understand what's going on in a community. We can draw diagrams, and people do that. They say, person A has 4 connections in a company and person B has 6 connections; they draw little stick figures and show how they are connected to other stick figures. But to me, it does not mean much because they don't deal with the dimensions of meaning, of culture, of consciousness. So, to come back to the original issue, a unified theory is unified only through the patterns of organization [networks], but it's not a complete theory. I don't even call it a theory, I call it a unified view of life, mind and society. And it's the pattern of organization, the formal aspect, that interconnects the different domains, but the content and the nature of the processes are different in each domain. 

So, following Capra, my caveat is simple: 

remember that nodes are not just nodes; they are cases!  As such, complex systems are not networks; complex systems are sets of cases.

  

  

 

Complexity Science and the UK's new Quantitative Methods (QM) Programme

The UK is currently implementing a major, new academic initiative to address, at the undergraduate level, the underdeveloped methodological skills of students majoring in the social sciences, particularly in the areas of quantitative method and statistics.

The initiative is called, appropriately enough, the Quantitative Methods (QM) Programme.  As it states on their website, the UK's QM is supported by "the Nuffield Foundation in partnership with the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). The £15.5 million programme will promote institutional change; produce a first cohort of quantitatively skilled undergraduates; and create links between undergraduate and postgraduate training. Its ultimate purpose is to benefit academic research and meet the needs of the wider labour market."

The QM is a very impressive goal, something the states and other countries would likewise do well to think about implementing.  When one considers, for example, the methodological training the average social science major receives, particularly in comparison to students in the computational sciences, applied mathematics or various areas within the natural sciences, such as physics, it is not much.  For example, as a professor in the states, I have spent the past few years implementing advanced data and research methods courses into our undergraduate sociology program--by the way, I want to give a "shot out" to my Kent State Ashtabula students! 

Now, I must say, it has not been an easy endeavor.  But, to my surprise, I have found the students to be very receptive.  There is, however, a very specific reason why: I present to them a wider definition of quantitative method than just statistics.

If we, as social scientists, took a few minutes to look at what students on the other side of our campuses are learning, we would find that statistics is only a small part of it.  Quantitative method, today, is all about BIG DATA,  e-science, data mining, GIS analysis, machine/artificial intelligence, control theory, agent-based modeling, network science, information visualization, and so forth.  I can just keep going and going...  But, why would my social science students be interested in such things?  Because, even when lacking a background in such methods, they intuitively "get the point" of such methods.  Common now, think about it.  Our students, live, after all, in a wild new, electronic world, a virtual reality permanently integrated into their everyday reality, data streaming everywhere, 24/7, dynamic in a virtual time/space: smart cell phones telling them where their friends are at any moment, emails, texts, tweets, kicks, Google maps, endlessly streaming music, Pandora radio, electronic banking, iTunes, social media networks, LinkedIn, YouTube, online television and videos--on and on and on and on it goes.

Explain to me, what does statistics have to do with such things?  I will tell you, not much.  Now, I will say, in all fairness, students still need to learn statistics; and, as such, I make statistics a prerequisite to students taking more advances modeling strategies.  And, in my own work, I rely heavily on statistics, particularly factor analysis, multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis.

But, at the end of the day, students want (yes, I did say that word "want") to learn about  (even if they get only a sampling) the other incredible methods that computer scientists, applied mathematicians, computational scientists, e-scientists, physicists, geographers, and others are developing.  So, to such a desire to learn, I say Wow!, and a Double Wow!

And, such a desire to learn about these new methods goes to the point recently made by the UK sociologist and complexity scientist, David Byrne.  In a recent article, UK Sociology and Quantitative Methods: Are We as Weak as They Think? Or Are They Barking up the Wrong Tree?  Byrne, an expert in quantitative method, makes the case that, given the massively increased complexity of daily social life, statistics alone is just not going to "cut it," as they say.  We need to learn from the complexity sciences.  And, we need to bring the theoretical and empirical strengths of sociology and the social sciences to help with the epistemological and theoretical challenges of studying complex social systems. 

I agree wholeheartedly, and I think that students intuitively do as well.  If the social sciences seek to be on par with the methodological abilities of the natural and computational sciences and applied mathematics, they must understand that these disciplines--while facile in statistical analyses--have moved far, far beyond such methods.

In other words, we have a lot of catching up to do, and focusing on statistics, while necessary, is not sufficient.  Add to this fact the reality that, in the sciences and in the labor market our students will work in research teams comprised of groups and networks of peers from a variety of academic backgrounds, where cross-disciplinary communication will be vital to success, we have a great need to create a much larger, more methodologically sophisticated vocabulary and tool set for our students.

The BBC's Your Paintings: Networking the Art World through Digital Media

Wow!  Way to go UK information scientists, librarians, art historians and art curators.  Via a partnership between the UK's Public Catalogue Foundation and the BBC, over 212 thousand oil paintings in the UK have been digitized and released to the public--including one of my most favorite artists, Lucian Freud (a wonderful picture of his is shown below).

The project is called YOUR PAINTINGS


What is interesting about this project, from a complex network perspective, is that Your Paintings is asking the general public, in a sort of Wikipedia fashion, to tag pictures.  As they explain on the website: 

Your Paintings Tagger is part of a project run by the Public Catalogue Foundation and the BBC to put all 200,000 publicly owned oil paintings online on the Your Paintings website. Currently we have only basic information about each painting such as title, artist, and execution date. We have no information about the type of painting, the subjects portrayed in the paintings and the styles and movements represented. Tagging each painting will provide this information enabling Your Paintings to be searched by users in a more sophisticated and helpful manner. Without this extra information it will be very difficult to search Your Paintings effectively

Anyway, it is all very interesting in terms of what all of this means (good and bad) for the future of art and art venues.   Check it out...

Art as Research, Expanding the Ideas of Visual Complexity

I received an email this week announcing that a video archive for the following symposium was available:

Remaking Research - Emerging Research
Practices in Art and Design

Remaking Research was hosted by the Emily Carr University of Art + Design and the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design (AICAD) and took place in Vancouver, Canada, in November 2012.


What I find fascinating is that, given the profound visual nature of much of research today, combined with the challenges of information management and overload, artists are becoming more and more viable as partners in the research process.


Here is what their announcement said:
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Remaking Research was an AICAD 'working symposium' centered on the pragmatics and possibilities of creative practice as research, both within art and design institutions and in the context of interdisciplinary, inter-institutional and partnered relations. This gathering was organized with the intent of sharing existing knowledge, showcasing new projects and contemporary methodologies, and addressing practical and ethical concerns involved in building successful research partnerships. Presentations, featured projects, and dialogue addressed three themes:

• The Production of Knowledge in Art and Design 
• The Political Economies of Art and Design Research
• Networked and Partnered Research

The outcomes of this gathering, which brought together practitioners from over 40 institutions, include the publication of an exhibition catalogue on research methodologies developed and employed by artists featured in the exhibition that accompanied the symposium.  

A complete video archive of the symposium's content is now available online, including the keynote and plenary addresses, given by Graeme Sullivan, Director of the School of Visual Arts, Pennsylvania State University and Carol Strohecker, Director, the Center for Design Innovation, University of North Carolina. 

Panel discussions and presentations on current research practices include contributions from Joanna Berzowska, Associate Professor and Chair, Design and Computation Arts, Concordia University, member, Hexagram Research Institute; Anne Burdick, Chair, Media Design Graduate Program, Art Center College of Design; Sara Diamond, President, OCAD University; Lisa Grocott, Associate Dean, Parsons, New School; Pamela Jennings, Director, Brenda and Earl Shapiro Centers for Research and Collaboration, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Debera Johnson, Academic Director of Sustainability, Pratt Institute; Sanjit Sethi, Director, Centre for Art and Public Life, California College of Art; Rosanne Somerson, Provost, Rhode Island School of Design; Ezri Tarazi, Head of Industrial Design, Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem; and Laurene Vaughan, Nierenberg Chair, Distinguished Professor of Design, Carnegie Mellon University.

Evolutionary Psychology, I Don't Think We Can Date

I was reading an article in today's New York Times Sunday Review, titled Darwin Was Wrong About Dating--the picture to the right, copied from the Times, is by Chloé Poizat.   The article reminded me of a similar critical review of evolutionary psychology in a recent New Yorker article, titled It Ain't Necessarily So; as well as books like Fodor's critique of Pinker, The Mind Doesn't Work that Way.

All of these writings make the same critique, which a lot of evolutionary psychologists of late, particularly the more vocal ones, seems to keep right on ignoring.  The point of these critics is simple enough: it just isn't that simple.  And still, many evolutionary psychologists plod on.  I think it might be something in their genes?

Now, mind you, to be fair, there are a lot of level-minded evolutionary psychologists out there.  Problem is, they don't seem to be writing top-ten, pop-science or undergraduate psychology books.  Common folks!
   
Case in point.  About month or so ago I was at a dinner party and happened to find myself, during the course of the evening, in the middle of a conversation with a small group of professors and doctoral students, who were discussing, amongst other things, the difficulty of ABD's (all but dissertation) sitting down to write.  "We all go through it," I interjected, awkwardly.  "For most, the dissertation is that first piece of real solo work."

Anyway, no sooner did I start saying this when I realized--as the grad students stood there looking at me with glazed eyes--that I sounded just like my dad telling me, when I was a kid, to go finish my homework. Suddenly I felt really old, as if they were all looking at my grey hair and hoping, right at that moment, it would all fall out.

One of the profs (the alpha male of this paleolithic small group), tired of me, returned to talking about his work.  After a few minutes of trying to hear things above the din, I leaned in and quickly interjected, "So, what is your area?"  He looked at me with confident eyes.  "Evolutionary psychology," he said.  "I am studying the mating preferences of college students."

I had a sudden wave of panic.  I thought, "Oh no, I have got to get out of here fast."  But, I couldn't get away, at least without being rude, as my back was to the wall--which is a bad place to be at an academic party; unless, of course, your drink is full, and mine wasn't.

Bottom line: he had me cornered, like an antelope.  So, I decided to just listen, node, and find a way to leap and escape.

But then it happened.  This guy, without ever asking me my background or what I study, suddenly decided, without warning, to lecture me and the rest of my new paleolithic friends, on the grand insights of evolutionary psychology and mating preferences, stringing together a litany of impressive, polysyllabic words and theories that spun around us with such sudden density and intensity that I immediately became disoriented.  And, for the record, it is necessary to stat that my "dizziness" was not entirely a function of too much vodka.  Okay, maybe it was.  But, still, he didn't need to be so rude!

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Now, mind you--and as a point of caveat--my own work, as a complexity scientist/medical sociologist/clinical psychologist is heavily grounded in sociobiology.  For example, the current book I am writing, Human Complexity, From Cells to Society, essentially reviews what complexity scientists (circa 2013) have to say about the interconnections between biology and cognition and sociability, from bacteria to globalization.  So, I have no problems, whatsoever, linking biology with psychology or society.  We are, after all, social animals.   

The problem I have is that a lot of evolutionary psychologists seem to ignore the fact that society is an evolutionary force and that social relations, even at the level of bacteria, play a key role in the evolutionary success of many species.  As an easy example, look at the work by Eshel Ben-Jacob on the social behavior or swarm intelligence of bacteria or the more recent controversy over multi-level selection theory (aka group selection) between Richard Dawkins and E. O. Wilson--click here, as an example.
  
Now, even if you do not "buy into" group selection theory, you at least have to acknowledge it as an important caveat, sufficient for you to say, "Wow, life really is complex and maybe, just maybe--given that we don't even know why humans are hairless--it is a bit of a leap to explain, so easily, the mating preferences of iPhone carrying college students.

And, it is the failure to acknowledge such complexities that makes someone like me, an otherwise enjoyable party guest, so grumpy.  In my own defense, I actually enjoy listening to ideas that differ from mine; in fact, in a Foucault-like manner, I seek them out, as they help me think in new and different ways.  But, when advocates of a position ignore their critics and are sloppy with their ideas, as we saw with postmodernism and the famous Sokal Affair--or, as we see, with all the overzealous pop-science books in my field, complexity science--I just cannot understand it.  I find myself getting a headache.
 

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Again, case in point, my conversation.  As this guy went on and on, I kept thinking, he is aware of his critics, isn't he?  So finally, I just decide, quite innocently, to ask.

"Have you have read Pinker's How the Mind Works?" 
"Why, yes; of course!  I am an advocate of his massive modularity theory"
"Then, you must have also read Fodor's The Mind Doesn't Work that Way?  

He just looked at me, with that "deer-in-the-lights" stare; which reminded me of two things my mentor, Lee Spray, always said.  First, never assume to know the background of your audience, because you will most likely be wrong; and, never say you know something you do not.

I continued, "Fodor wrote it because he was frustrated with Pinker's misuse of Fodor's computational theory of mind, as Pinker over-asserts that high-order mental processes, like the socio-biological complexities of attraction and mating preferences, are massively modular; when, in fact, Fodor's theory does not support such claims?"

As he stood there, in that split-second pause, I felt bad.  But, then I thought, "C'mon, if you are going to go around asserting such claims, how can you not know your critics and the important things they have to say, especially when you are using their ideas. Or, not to assume that other, educated people, even if not in your field, might know such things?"

Anyway, the split-second was so fast (as a split-second generally is--ha!) and the room was so loud that nobody heard what I said.  Come to think of it, I am not even sure he did; as, no sooner did the split-second end when he moved on to a different topic, turning away from me and indicating, with his non-verbal, paleolithic gestures, that the group no longer, if ever, found my presence appealing.

"Phew," I thought.  I had the opening I was looking for; and so leaped away to the bar; where, finally, I got into this really cool conversation with a neuro-musicologist.  His work was on people's neuro-cognitive responses to bands like the Ramones and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.  Now, I thought, this is good evolutionary psych.  one big mob, oh yeah oh yeah...

My Sabbatical Blog; Or, My pilgrimage to Michel Foucault's Square in Paris

Since September of 2012 I have been on sabbatical in Europe; stationed, primarily, at Durham University in the UK, where I have been working with David Byrne and several other colleagues, developing our mutual interest in a case-based approach to modeling complex systems.

During my stay, I was overwhelmed by my attempt to keep my family, friends and students apprised of my adventures, so I decided to start a
Sabbatical Blog.

My favorite travel writers/commentators are Bill Bryson and Anthony Bourdain, so the blog is a goofy combination of my off-the-cuff, sociological observations about the weird things Europeans do (like putting the toilet and the shower in two different rooms) compared with the even more bizarre things Americans do (like consuming over half the world's resources).  Stuff like that.  Plus, you get a front-row seat to all the self-deprecating, ridiculous situations I tend to get into, such as trying to purchase rubbing (isopropyl) alcohol in the UK, for my swimmer's ear, only to be asked, out loud, by the clerk, and without any whiff of irony or sarcasm, and in front of several dozen people, why I wouldn't want to drink my alcohol instead of rubbing it on myself.  Let's just say I ran out of the store.  Anyway, you get the point.

On a more positive note, I spent the last week of my trip in Paris, with my family, for Christmas.  Without a doubt, other than New York City or Rome, I think Paris is the other greatest city in the world. 

Most important, I got to visit a little known memorial near the College of France for the most influential thinker in my life, Michel Foucault.  It is called the Le Square Michel-Foucault.  Here are a few pictures of me at the square.  I was sort of amazed that, given Foucault's impact on French thinking and scholarship worldwide, that this was the extent of his recognition.  Oh well.  Anyway, it was wonderful for me to see it.

  
    

And, again, if you like travel journals that aim for the weird and the sociological, check out the Blog.


 


   

Complexity and Architecture

BIAD_UFo: phoenix international media center


It is funny because, for anyone who has read much about postmodernism, you know that its start was, interestingly enough, just as much grounded in architecture as it was in literature or science. 

Apropos of this point, I stumbled, today, across the Complexitys.com website, which is devoted to the topic of architecture and complexity science.  The ideas running through my head as I clicked through its catalogue of photos was crushing.  Of course, thinking of humans as complex, dynamic, self-organizing systems and of communities as complex networks, and on and so forth is deserving of an architectural response.  But, this point didn't really hit me until just now.  Wow!  I mean, I have been blogging on Tomas Saracano's work and green architecture and so forth.  But, for some reason it really hit me today.  How should buildings and pathways and highways and trains and public transportation and gardens and lawns and parks and stores and recreation and so on fit into all of our emerging notions of complexity? 

In my field of study, health and health care, we talk about the built environment all the time.  And, it is not like this is a new idea in architecture or urban planning.  But, suddenly, looking at these photos the whole thing just overwhelmed me in its measure.

Case Based Modeling and Sociology and the Complexity Sciences

As you can see from the picture below, we have updated the face of our Sociology and Complexity Science Website.

The new version of the website has been condensed to focus specifically on case-based modeling and its application to the study of various topics in health and health care. 

Case-based modeling is an entirely new approach to modeling complex systems, grounded in two key insights by the British sociologist and complexity scientist, David Byrne: (1) complex systems are cases and cases are complex systems; (2) complex realism serves as a viable epistemological frame for social scientific inquiry.



The SACS Toolkit is our new case-based method for modeling complex systems.  It uses a long list of the latest methods in computational modeling (e.g., network analysis, cluster analysis, agent-based modeling, neural nets, synergetics, cellular automata, etc) in connection with conventional social scientific methods (e.g., factory analysis, logistic regression, grounded theory method and historical inquiry) to model complex systems as sets of cases.  

On the website, you will see:

1. A quick overview of case-based modeling.
2. Papers on the SACS Toolkit, including a mathematical outline of our method.
3. Papers applying the SACS Toolkit to various topics.
4. Papers on mixed methods and data mining.

New Version of Complexity Map

 Hello everyone!

As you can see above,  I have updated my map of the complexity sciences.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE INTERNET VERSION OF MY MAP

My current edits are based on my autumn sabbatical at Durham University, in the UK.  I have spent a lot of time working with and talking to complexity scientists from as far ranging fields as quantum mechanics and neuroscience to business administration and health care to philosophy and the arts--all of which has led to my new version.

First, I have included the field of visual complexity.  As those who follow this blog know, I have spent considerable time discussing the influence of complexity science on the arts and how visual design is advancing how we organize and understand the massive globalized world of data in which we now live.  This is an important new area of emerging investigation.

Second, I have highlighted Hermann Haken and his work in the field of synergetics.  It appears that, within the past couple years, a movement has re-emerged within dynamical systems theory where complexity researchers are thinking, once again, about the macroscopic as a way to dampen or manage the high levels of complexity in a system, primarily by rethinking micro-level interactions and their rules at the macro level.  One example is the recent paper that my colleague, Rajeev Rajaram and I published in Complexity--click here.

Third, I added the field of case-based modeling, based largely on the internationally renowned work of Charles Ragin in case-based reasoning and David Byrne in case-based complexity and complex realism.  This is a major, major movement in the social sciences and in applied areas like health, business, education and political science.  It is also a significant advance in complexity method, adding an entirely new way of thinking about complex systems as cases.

Fourth, I added the field of multi-level complex systems.  This is where I think a huge segment of complexity science is headed.  We need to find ways to model systems at multiple levels, taking into account agency and structure.  And, we need to move to the usage of multiple methods.  A good example of this advance in thinking and its financial support is the European Union's initiative on multi-level complex systems--Click here.

Finally, I added a few more long-deserved names to the list, including Eshel Ben-Jacob and Nicholas Christakis and Bruno Latour (on whom I have been blogging lately).

As always, no map is perfect and I am sure people will let me know.  But, I am always working on it.






 

Tomás Saraceno, HangarBicocca and The Center for Art, Science and Technology at MIT

Okay, so you know I am a big fan of the work of Tomás Saraceno.

Well, he has a new exhibition at HangarBicocca, a new Italian art gallery in Milan--the picture on the left was taken from their set of gallery images.

The title of Saraceno's exhibit is On Space Time Foam--click here to see more images and a brief interview video. 

As stated on their website: On Space Time Foam is a floating structure composed of three levels of clear film that can be accessed by the public, inspired by the cubical configuration of the exhibition space. The work, whose development took months of planning and experimentation with a multidisciplinary team of architects and engineers, will then continue as an important project during a residency of the artist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT in Cambridge (MA).


Speaking of MIT, through their Arts at MIT program, they have a really interesting new Center for Art, Science and Technology (CAST).  Such a center offers a lot of possibilities to complexity artists working at the intersection of complexity science, art, visual complexity and computational modeling and technologies.

Here is what they say on their website: The Center for Art, Science & Technology (MIT CAST) facilitates and creates opportunities for exchange and collaboration among artists, engineers, and scientists.  A joint initiative of the Office of the Provost, the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) and School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), the Center is committed to fostering a culture where the arts, science and technology thrive as interrelated, mutually informing modes of exploration, knowledge and discovery.

For more on CAST Director Evan Ziporyn and other key faculty, click here.

For an overview of what Saracano will be doing at CAST, click here.

Complexity Art, Latour, Global Compositions and the Agency of Unrealized Projects

For those who follow this blog, you know that it is devoted to the development of complexity science and art at about a 50/50 split.  While blogs are great mediums for immediate expression, comprehension can get lost, as the argument being made, over time, gets lost in the archive.  I thought, therefore, it might be worthwhile to pause and summarize what I have been doing in my own complexity art, highlighting my current project.  Anyway, here is a brief review.

CLICK here for updated versions of my artistic and scientific vitae.

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             CLICK THIS PICTURE OR ANY PICTURE BELOW FOR A LARGER VIEW

For the past five years I have been working rather extensively on a set of assemblages, the purpose of which is to visually portray (in various combinations of photo, paint and video) my key thoughts about human complexity.  The title of my project is Virtual Sistine Chapel Global Composition.

(The above three images are from my Virtual Sistine Chapel Global Composition)

 

A. 1992-1997: Painting My Way from Postmodernism to Complexity

Most people who know my work would probably think that the complexity science came first, but it didn't.  Fact is, the opposite happened: the art came years before the science.  To explain, I go back to my work in graduate school, circa 1994 to 1997 and my first show (in 1994) at Kent State University (Kent, Ohio, USA), titled, appropriately enough, Postmodernism and Beyond.

Here are two assemblages from the time period.  While I was (and remain) strongly influenced by the analytic cubism of Picasso and Hockney, my agenda, even back then, was not to deconstruct time and space.  Instead, I was trying to build it up.  More specifically, I was layering and intersecting people, looking for their connections, relationships and networks of similarity, and then assembling all of these interdependent 'pieces-parts' into a complex system where the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

 My first picture, for example, is a combination of my wife and niece.  The gestalt is someone beyond the individual images--note the similarities in facial structure.  The second is my wife and brother--note how each head, depending upon how the images are combined, results in one person standing out more than the other. 

Furthermore, I realized that these assemblages (and those I have created for the past twenty years), while highly representational, are primarily symbolic.  They are iconic representations of a complex system--by icon I mean a visual (semiotic) sign that stands in place of or acts as a simulacra of something else.  In short, my art is a visualization of a type of complexity science.  In fact, my art works are built using the same SACS Toolkit assemblage algorithm used in my science.

Twenty years later, here is an assemblage I completed this year, showing how my work has evolved--well, I hope it looks like things evolved.  phew!

B. Systems Art, Assemblage, and other such Influences

In actuality, while indebted to analytic cubism, my work for the past twenty years is more influenced by assemblage and systems art, which I think are more in line with complexity science.

For example, while my art bears no resemblance to Rauschenberg, I am nonetheless influenced by his advancement of artistic assemblage, which goes back to, amongst others, Dubuffet and Duchamp and, even earlier, to Picasso and Braque.  For example, my work combines photography, paint, paper, video, etc--which mimics the multidisciplinary nature of complexity science.

Likewise, while my work bears no resemblance to Pollock or Stella, I am also influenced by systems art--which, all the way back in the 1960s and 1970s was exploring the implications of the two historical precursors to complexity science, namely systems science and cybernetics.

All of these approaches are unique in that they are bottom-up in their design, starting with a simple set of rules or procedures, which, when iterated, produce, at the macroscopic level, very complex paintings.  Even Chuck Close's work fits this tradition.

My assemblages follow a similar process: it involves, at the micro-level, taking photos and paintings and videos and repeatedly cutting them apart into smaller squares and then copying and pasting these sections together to create macroscopic systems. This bottom-up process, for example, has also manifested itself in a cartoon version of my work, as the two above images show.  Both follow a basic algorithm: draw a character, link the next character in reaction to it, repeat the process until the system emerges.

C. 2012, Twenty Years Later

So, how do all of these ideas come together?  For the past twenty years my work has been a methodical attempt to develop a complexity art based on the ideas of cubism, systems art, assemblage and, as time has evolved, the explicit theories, concepts and methods of complexity science.  All of this work has come together, at last, for my first comprehensive project: Virtual Sistine Chapel Global Composition.  The self-portrait included here gives a clear impression of the effect that all this work has had on me.



As a prelude to finding somewhere to show this composition, I submitted a part of it to the Serpentine Gallery's Agency of Unrealized Projects--which I briefly review now.

D. The Agency of Unrealized Projects

 

The Agency of Unrealized Projects (AUP), run through the Serpentine Gallery in London, is the brain-child of Hans Ulrich Obrist and colleagues Julia Peyton-Jones, Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle.  Its purpose is to generate an ongoing catalog of projects by artists of any and all background who find, for one reason or another--intended or not--that the projects on which they worked is unrealizable--even if only for now.

In addition to Serpentine Gallery, the AUP is supported by e-flux and by daadgallerie, where it has, from September 9th to October 20th 2012, taken up temporary residence.  The goal of this round of the AUP is to present its evolving archive to the public.  Artists are invited to submit their own unrealized projects up to the 20th of October to AUP’s growing archive, which is what I did--CLICK HERE.

E. A Virtual Sistine Chapel Global Composition

 So, here is the project and the brief description of it that I submitted to the AUP:

In addition to its pure genius, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel is remarkable because it represents, in art history, the rare opportunity for an artist to present to the world a rather complete visual cosmology—something even Michelangelo, due to politics, economics, and ultimately the constraints of time and place found frustratingly difficult to achieve in other areas, such as the Tomb of Julius II.

  

Standing under Michelangelo’s colossal ceiling at the beginning of the 21^st century, however, one has to seriously wonder, given the complex world in which we live, can such a project be realized today?  It is five hundred years later.  We live, now, in a highly complex, global network society with its supporting cyber-infrastructure; its swarm of clashing individual and collective identities; its inadequate grand narratives; its numerous global social problems; and its conflicting religions, ultures, myths, artistic traditions, political systems, economies and historical narratives—so much difference.  What cosmology could handle all of this complexity?  As the last hundred years of history, theory, and art have shown us, the obvious answer is none; it is an unrealizable project. 

There is, however, a necessary and important and more modest alternative, held by a growing network of globalization scholars, artists, eco-feminists, cyber-theorists, continental philosophers and complexity scientists—and expressed well by the French theorist, Bruno Latour in his e-flux article (Issue 23), Some Experiments in Art and Politics (See also his article An Attempt at a Compositionist Manifesto, New Literary History, 2010, Issue 41). 

For Latour, success in handling globalization comes from replacing cosmologies with compositions.  Unlike cosmologies, compositions are assemblages of negotiation, difference and heterogeneity; they are compromising, decomposing, compost piles; they are post-human, non-hierarchical, self-organizing, networked, evolving, adaptive complex systems; they are global and yet local, universal and yet relativistic; serious and yet ironically playful.  And, given their nature, they are ultimately useful: they can be taken apart, added to, or reassembled to meet different global needs. 

Following Latour and others, my goal for the current project—which I have been working on for the past five years—is to take apart, add to, and reassemble the major themes of Michelangelo’s visual cosmology to create my own global composition.  This composition will include a variety of artistic and scientific assemblages—painting, photo, video, sculpture, networks, computational models, etc.

The thematic purpose of my composition is to create an inclusive, secular, scientific and more positive view of the human condition in today’s highly complex global network society.  My composition draws extensively on the latest advances in globalization studies, complexity science, global mythology, the natural and social sciences and, equally important, my local culture as an Italian-American living in Cleveland Ohio (USA), including in my assemblages family and friends as many of the heroic characters--including in my pictures the people in my life is an explicit turn to Jame Joyce's Ulysses and the idea of exploring the heroic through the lives of everyday people such as myself, family and friends.

As way of an introduction, Figure 1 (located above) provides a quick overview of my six themes and the ten images I have so far completed, as overlaid on a schematic of the Sistine Chapel.  (My ultimate architectural form, however, would be some type of network structure.)  

 Figure 2 provides a more detailed close-up of four of my completed images.  All images start as photo-assemblages created on the computer with Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.  Some images, as shown in Figure 2, are then painted on canvas.

 

Finally, below is an even more detailed overview of one of the four pictures in Figure 2, called Cathy's Dinner Party.  It combines extensive photo-assemblage work done in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop; the assemblage was then fully painted in oil on a five foot by three foot canvas; which was then photographed and integrated with the initial photo-montage.  The painting is symbolically charged, referencing a variety of symbols found in Da Vinci's Last Supper, including the famous chalice (V) formation.  The painting was also worn down and corroded with various materials to explore how so many of the images from the Renaissance have worn away, been restored to varying degrees and, in their ware, become iconic images.  What, however, does 'wear and tear' mean in a digital, globalized age?)  Anyway, there is a lot more that can be said, but that is enough to make the basic point.