A Context for Complexism: Between Neoliberal Social Thought and Algorithmic Art

Among the many genres of visual art to emerge in the wake of computerisation, the subset of generative or algorithmic art known as complexism seems uniquely keyed to the social and technological mainsprings of everyday life in the twenty-first century. Complexism typically deploys computer algorithms to demonstrate how complex phenomena can emerge through the reiterative enactment of simple rulesets. The light and sound installations and the videos that complexist artists produce, alongside the discourses surrounding the works, stand out as singularly contemporary, not necessarily for their exploitation of now-ubiquitous telematic tools and techniques, but for their deep commitment to the trailblazing problems, methods, and hypotheses set out by the new science of complexity. Practitioners of and commentators on complexism (the work and writings of Philip Galanter feature most prominently here) persistently invoke this booming interdisciplinary field of complexity research. Against this trend, I argue that for all the leverage the tools and terms of complexity science supply to complexist art, the concept of complexity itself remains surprisingly vague and shorn of any historical sensibility. One preliminary aim of this essay is to bring more theoretical rigour to the artists’ use of this concept by beginning to fill in the missing backstory. From there, I move to complicate this genealogy by introducing a somewhat controversial figure-the social theorist, political economist, and legal philosopher Friedrich Hayek, who had posited similar problems concerning the emergence and maintenance of complex, self-organized systems as early as the 1930s, and whose theoretical solutions to these problems were instrumental to what historians and sociologists have subsequently described as capitalism’s late “neoliberal turn.”