Unusually rare events / Distribution of Noovantgarde

Extremely Rare Events / Distribution of the Noo-Avantgarde is an experimental artistic-scientific project, a result of intense interaction between art and science. The exhibition crowns one of the stages of a unique dialogue, continuing for over a year now, between artists and scientists devoted to the phenomenon of Extremely Rare Events and generally between complexity science and art. This dialogue has become a catalyst for a generational statement by a group of young artists, curators and architects, whose practices can be termed, in keeping with the exhibition's manifesto, as Noo-Avantgarde.

An interdisciplinary Noo-Avantgarde Institute will take temporary residence in the CCA's exhibition rooms, with artists and architects inspired by the contemporary science of complexity and scientists researching complexity and inspired by art studying the possibilities of collaboration between their disciplines and testing the concept of Extremely Rare Events. This concepts develops between art and science as one of the effects of the reflection made as part of complexity sciences, pursued by scientists as renowned as Prof Andrzej Nowak or Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan), and holds that crucial changes in complex systems (social, economic, ecological, and so on) occur through sudden and unexpected Extremely Rare Events that, by definition, cannot be repeated. For this reason, the conception postulates moving away from science's currently dominant emphasis on the study of central measures, mean values, status quos, and challenges the sense of lab-room experiments that reject all kinds of unique and seemingly insignificant noises, outliers, errors, extremely rare events, and so on. According to Nowak and the participating artists, with whom he ran an independent, grassroots seminar, science, seen from the perspective of Extremely Rare Events and the complexity paradigm, approximates art.

The exhibition is comprised of three equally important and overlapping modules: scientific, artistic, and architectural, all three tackling the problematique of complexity and Extremely Rare Events. It presents works chiefly by artists born in the 1970s. The works of artist Janek Simon visualise disaster theory using experimental means. Catastrophe theory describes systems in which a small change in a certain parameter can cause the whole system to change radically.

Trucks drive onto a bridge, for some time nothing happens, then the bridge collapses. The protagonist of Falling Down, played by Michael Douglas, suddenly loses it. We look at Necker's cube and at some point it starts flipping back and forth between its two possible visual interpretations. It turns out that we can try to pinpoint formal similarities connecting all these situations on the most general level of mathematical abstraction.

Simon's work consists of several elements and visualises the theory in several ways - through sound, the colour of the architectural elements, or geometric transformations. The artist also presents his classic Ceiling Fan causing a pair of shoes suspended on it to move chaotically. The installation is an example of what physics calls a double pendulum system, one of the classic examples of chaotic motion.

Agnieszka Kurant's works produce 'extremely rare events' in a manner completely different than Simon's generative projects. In the magnetic levitation-based pieces presented in the exhibition, The End of Certainty and The World Is Still. For I. Prigogine, Kurant radically challenges our common perception of reality. When the logic of a fragment of reality is warped before our very eyes, we start to suspect that the whole world is a suspicious, fictional construction. In the perspective of these two works, it becomes clear that,art is a laboratory of extremely rare events, a laboratory located within our reality but able to produce outliers - ideas and percepts challenging it, affecting it in a non-linear, dynamic manner.

In her earlier work, Language Is a Virus from Outer Space, Kurant relates to the extremely rare event known as the 'wow signal' - the only 'message from space' ever recorded - by the Big Ear telescope in Ohio in 1977 (although the signal may have as well been a reflected signal once broadcast from the earth).

Ola Wasilkowska creates architecture based on non-linear processes that occur in complex systems such as the city, society, or art. The exhibition structure she has designed materialises the idea of the system's destabilisation through select-location artists' actions. An algorithm has been created of distortions of space (in association with Michał Piasecki). The artists' works and academic documentations act as attractors, introducing local interferences into the space of the exhibition, generating a new, complex order. Wasilkowska's project alludes to the concepts of self-organisation and emergence, which started to spread to architecture in the 1950s with figures such as Yona Friedman (co-founder of Groupe d'Etude d'Architecture Mobile, GEAM) or, presently, Francois Roche, an author of generative architecture that merges science with art.

The exhibition presents two theoretical studies of utopian cities by Friedman and Roche. Friedman's La Ville spatiale, begun in the 1950s, is a planning study based on the rejection of the notion of a static city. Friedman developed a framework for a mobile infrastructure drifting between order and chaos, perceived as symbiotic states of urban organisation, and proposed a porous, open meta-structure whose users would be able to create their own, changeable spatial configurations. Friedman's intention was to help the residents become the organisers of their own space and thus make architects more sensitive to user needs. Participation and extremely rare events, or rather mistakes, resulting from uncontrolled interactions, determine, according to Friedman, the generation of a living urban tissue.

I've Heard About. by Francois Roche and his R&Sie(n) firm is an experiment in urban planning, begun in 2004, showing the hypothetical development of an ideal city. A biostructure generated in real time by robots (the contour crafting method) arises as a result of the negotiation and distribution of gossip among the residents. The robots' open growth code is a consequence of a fluctuation of the collective (sub)conscious and an induction of social behaviour. Ruche's urban strategy rejects the paradigm of central planning and strict control on behalf of a self-organising community, open growth code, and fuzzy control. In the course of an indeterminate negotiation process, a meta-stable city develops, always, however, with the prospect of entropy and catastrophe looming over it.

An important feature of the exhibition is the Noo-Avantgarde and New Autonomy Manifesto, created together by young artists and complexity scientists (the term 'noo-avantgarde' having been inspired by Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere, a concept denoting a sphere of symbolic human exchange, communication of ideas, and diffusion of knowledge).

Works by the abovementioned artists are accompanied by works by artists from other generations, in various ways complementing or inspiring their practices (Francois Roche, Yona Friedman, Luc Steels, Andrzej Nowak, Edwin Bendyk). One of the main 'works' created specially for the exhibition will be Prof Andrzej Nowak's Archive of Extremely Rare Events, a growing collection of his video interviews with outstanding representatives of the various sections of complexity sciences about the role of Extremely Rare Events in their respective fields of research. Prof Nowak prepared this material with the intention of presenting it in an artistic context, yet, doing so, he simultaneously introduced to the world of science new methods of the distribution, circulation and production of knowledge. He offered each person he interviewed sending them a DVD with the interview plus two other interviews from the Archive, thus creating an alternative circuit of knowledge, intensifying and accelerating the research of the various scientists taking part in the project. Art influenced science. Moreover, as part of the Archive of Extremely Rare Events, a collection will be presented of digital simulations and visualisations of knowledge, presenting Extremely Rare Event-related phenomena from the field of complexity sciences.

An important dimension of this presentation is an emphasis on interdisciplinarity, its use of the category of an 'art act' (as a special kind of an extremely rare event) that may appear in every field of human creativity (be it scientific or cultural). The exhibition becomes a reflection on the nature of creativity as such, on the autonomy of art and science in an age of an increasingly complex reality governed by 'rare events', in an age of cognitive (creative) capitalism feeding on the, fundamental for every genuine scientific or cultural creativity, autonomy of the art act, in an age of complexity sciences. The artists contained their own definition of the 'art act', informed by the above context, in the exhibition's manifesto.

The exhibition is accompanied by a seminar series called Anthropocene, Noosphere, Noo-Avantgarde. Art in an Age of Cognitive Capitalism and Complexity Sciences, programmed by Edwin Bendyk from the Collegium Civitas Centre for Futurological Research. The purpose of the seminars will be to share reflections on the key concepts and categories of the contemporary, complex world, whose condition is a cumulated result of many transformations and breakthroughs.

An epistemological breakthrough, that is, the development of complexity sciences (including the concept of Extremely Rare Events), which has paved the way for a new, free from the limitations of the reductionist paradigm, description of the physical, social, economic and cultural reality.

A civilisational breakthrough, that is, the onset of the Anthropocene era (according to the concepts of Paul Crutzen, the Nobel prize winner in chemistry, who explained the ozone hole phenomenon), in which man has gained the ability to directly shape geological and climatic phenomena and the ecosystem as a whole.

A technological breakthrough, that is, the development of information technology, computers and telecommunications networks, resulting in the rise of the Noosphere, a new dimension of the Anthroposphere, vibrant with communication activity, symbolic exchange and the work of the collective intelligence.

An economic breakthrough, that is, the transformation of industrial capitalism into cognitive capitalism (knowledge-based economy), where the main source of value is intellectual work.

A cultural breakthrough, that is, the collapse of the traditional humanist paradigm which, as a result of the abovementioned breakthroughs, is being irrevocably supplanted by a new, post-humanist one. The new reality requires new definitions and new answers to old questions: grammaticisation, cognitive capitalism, semantic capitalism, value theory, action theory, autonomy, freedom, future - these are just some of the issues requiring urgent analysis.

Łukasz Ronduda

Artists: Janek Simon, Agnieszka Kurant, Oskar Dawicki Scientists: Prof. Andrzej Nowak and the Archive of Unusually Rare Events, Luc Steels Architects: Aleksandra Wasilkowska (cooperation: Michał Piasecki), Yona Friedman, François Roche Curator: Łukasz Ronduda and: Cultural Theoretician: Edwin Bendyk; Graphic artists: Kasia Korczak / Boy Verecken

Unusually rare events / Distribution of Noovantgarde
art - science - architecture
Kuratoren: Lukasz Ronduda, Cultural Theoretician  (Edwin Bendyk), Kasia Korczak / Boy Verecken

mit Janek Simon, Agnieszka Kurant, Oskar Dawicki, Andrzej Nowak & Archive of Unusually Rare Events, Luc Steels, Aleksandra Wasilkowska / Michal Piasecki, Yona Friedman, Francois Roche