Inside Outside

As David Rokeby observed in his crucial essay, ‘Transforming Mirrors’, artists often make interactive, immersive installations in order to create relationships rather than finished artworks.  Such artists set up systems that ‘reflect the consequences of our actions back to us’1.  When you encounter such artworks you get a feeling for the endless flux and paradoxically patterned unpredictability that are always coursing through the world. The Mirror States exhibition is comprised of works like this, works that encourage an understanding of how you and the world are in and of each other, how you and the world are constituent of the other and mutually obliged.  The artworks in Mirror States can help you know the complexity that plays out when individuals, their environments and their communities insinuate each other.

Complexity –  it’s so much more slippery than intricacy or complication.  In a lucid book on the subject, the philosopher Paul Cilliers explains how ‘complexity is diverse but organised’ and ‘descriptions of it cannot be reduced to simple, coherent and universally valid discourses’.  Complexity emerges and evolves systematically. To know a system, it’s best to describe it, and ‘to describe a system,’ Cilliers observes, ‘you have … to repeat the system’ and watch how it differs with each repetition.2 You cannot reduce a complex circumstance to a static, schematic model, because complexity is definitively dynamic, relationally intricate and always adjusting.  You need to experience a complex circumstance, to be with its changes through time, to feel its shifts whilst also being attuned to the historically determined tendencies and the feedback patterns of stimuli and responses that are organising it at any particular moment. As Cilliers explains, ‘complex systems have to grapple with a changing environment.  … To cope with these demands the system must have two capabilities: it must be able to store information concerning the environment for future use; and it must be able to adapt … when necessary.”3

With traditional artforms, artists often conjure an impression of complexity either by manipulating absences or inserting deliberate contradictions which goad the perceiver’s imagination. William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity is the classic study of this aesthetic and semantic plenitude in literature.4 More recently, Andrew Benjamin’s investigation of the phenomenon of ‘incompletion’ in painting has added to our understanding of the importance of an organised kind of indeterminacy in an artwork.5  In traditional artforms like literature and painting, the adaptability and complexity occur in a ’space’ between the perceiver’s self and the artwork, in the strummed intellect, memory and senses of the person engaging with the work at a particular instant.

In more recent times, digital-computational systems have emerged that enable an artwork itself  — not just the relationship between the work and the perceiver — to transmogrify in response to stimuli and at the behest of active and activating codes written into it. The artists in Mirror States all find their particular ways to reflect this ‘quickness’ back to the viewer. Rokeby’s jittery systems, for example, take their nervous energy from the viewer’s incursive presence. George Khut’s or John Tonkin’s uncanny feedback reflectors, offer the viewers compelling yet disturbing ways to investigate one’s own distinctive self, ways to be inside and outside oneself, to be both in charge of oneself and at the behest of an inquisitor who knows one all to well. In such artworks the adaptability and the complexity are to be found in the work as well as in an imaginative ’space’ between the perceiver and the work. Rather than being implicit and always somewhat opaque inside the ruminations of each perceiver, the complex of relationships and repercussions  activated by a participant’s engagement with an interactive-immersive environment can now also be made explicit in the work itself.

The drive to understand the dynamics of what Cilliers calls ‘constrained diversity’6 appears to be strengthening in contemporary culture. Doubtless this reflects how everyday experience is becoming more complex. Which brings us to the nub of Cilliers’ and Rokeby’s theses about the most effective way to know such experience.  Instead of producing a schematised blueprint or a snapshot of complexity, a viewer or participant of a dynamic-complex artwork needs to generate an interrelated set of narratives that encourage speculations about the endless dynamics of the system. In this way the viewer is emboldened to become not only a participant but also an investigator, someone who proposes ‘what if’ scenarios, who pursues several ways to sense the probabilities in the situation. Delving inside the system whilst also maintaining a critical distance on it, one cross-references these tendency-governed probabilities against one’s own history and desires. And one observes and describes what’s going on while the system reflects the consequences of our actions back to us. In other words, one waits and gets a feeling for the way the system is tending. As fuzzy as it sounds, this heuristic, intuitive attitude is true to the workings of complexity.

‘Complex systems are open systems’ writes Cilliers.  Their constituent parts (including yourself, if you are amidst them) and their dominant actions all change from moment to moment, which means often ‘the very distinction between “inside” and “outside” the system becomes problematic’.7 Complexity is not especially tractable to analysis, therefore, because the ‘object’ under analysis is altering from moment to moment. In Cilliers’ words, ‘a complex system is not constituted merely by the sum of its components, but also by the intricate relationships between those components.’8 If we try to map those relationships as an active network, ‘any given narrative will form a path, or trajectory, through the network. … [and] as we trace various narrative paths through it, it changes.9   If we were to ‘cut up’ a complex system, we would find that our ‘analytical method destroys what it seeks to understand’.10 Thus we need to treat all discernible patterns as momentary, contingent sets of principles; then we have to take those principles into the meretricious environment, knowing that the pre-set principles will eventually fail or need adjustment. Once we sense those failures and adjustments registering in our analytical faculties, we are set apart again, organizing another batch of contingent principles which we then take back into the system.

Inside  –  but also outside –  but also inside  –  but  also outside  –  but also inside.  This rhythm is restless.   And it’s necessary.  Because the world of lived experience is restless like this, not simple, static or stable.

Being thus immersed and extracted, involved yet also critically distanced, when you investigate and participate in Mirror States you stand a chance of knowing both the world and yourself more comprehensively, not only more intuitively but also more analytically. It’s the paradoxical capability that we need for finding our way through the complex world. It’s the lived, designed and dynamic paradox that this exhibition, Mirror States, lets us know from inside and out.

Text by Ross Gibson

[1] David Rokeby, Transforming Mirrors: Subjectivity and Control in Interactive Media, 1995

2 Paul Cilliers, Complexity and Postmodernism, 1998, p. 130 and 10 respectively.

3 Cilliers, p. 10.

4 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1947 (first published, 1930)

5 Andrew Benjamin, Disclosing spaces : on painting, 2004.
6 Cilliers, p. 127.

7 Cilliers, p. 99.

8 Cilliers, p.2.

9 Cilliers, p. 130.

10 Cilliers, p. 2.

Ross Gibson Biography

Ross Gibson makes books, films and art installations.  Recent works include the book Seven Versions of an Australian Badland, the video installation ‘Street X-Rays’ and the interactive audiovisual environment BYSTANDER (a collaboration with Kate Richards).  He is the Professor of New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Technology, Sydney.