Modeling Complex Adaptive Systems and Complexity for Interactive Art

  • Christa Sommerer

    Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis

    Abstract

    Complex System Sciences, as a field of research, has emerged in the past decade. It studies how parts of a system give rise to the collective behaviours of the system and how the system interacts with its environment. It approaches the question of how life on earth could have appeared by searching for inherent structures in living systems and trying to define common patterns within these structures. Complex Systems are also often described as systems where the whole is more complex than the mere sum of its parts, and these systems are also considered to be at the point of maximum computational ability, maximum fitness and maximum evolvability.

    Several scientific models have simulated Complex Adaptive Systems. These try to model the emergence of complexity within computer-simulated environments inhabited by artificially evolving organisms. My objective in this thesis is to study the application of Complex Systems and Complex Adaptive Systems to Interactive Art and to test how one could construct interactive systems that can create dynamic and open-ended image structures that increase in complexity as users interact with them. Ideally, these interactive artworks should become comparable to Complex Adaptive Systems or even become Complex Systems themselves by satisfying some of the key properties of such systems.
    Date of AwardJun 2002
    Original languageEnglish

    Keywords

    • Interactive art
    • Complex Adaptive Systems
    • Complexity

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