System+Complexity

2015

Participatory activity, school project

As a part of group projects at Iceland Academy of the Arts, each group was supposed to randomly pick two words under the theme of Modernism. Our group of four people got 'system' and 'complexity' and wanted to demonstrate that a simple system generated complexity through human intervention. We had a first experiment where a person drew anything she wanted and then repeated the same drawing by adding up one person in front of the first person at a time. The second experiment was what we had during our presentation. The two experiments gave us the a bit different yet similar results. The former showed three drawings losing the accurate form but still maintaining a certain pattern, while the latter resulted in three similar chaos regardless of the inputs. The experiments visualized well how human dissolves system, and how system controls human at the same time.