Creative media as complex systems

Complex systems are ubiquitous in natural and artificial worlds, spanning processes as diverse as climate physics, biological organisms, economic markets, social structures, and collective dynamics in social media. They are characterised by interactions among numerous components that give rise to emergent behaviours not reducible to any single component in isolation.

Computational creativity media can be seen as complex systems. McCormack argues in his work on creative ecosystems that the environments in which creative activity unfolds are themselves complex, with outputs emerging from interactions among agents, substrates and shared rules rather than any single component (see also Galanter's 2003 art-theory precedent on a single effective-complexity axis). Agents engage with the medium through its action affordances: combinations of the medium's substance and surfaces, perceivable and meaningful relative to a particular agent. These affordances combine, in use, to produce the system-level properties that characterise the medium as a complex system.

An illustrative example is the r/place experiment, started on Reddit on April Fools' Day 2017. Users acted within a small affordance set: a 1000×1000 pixel canvas, a 16-colour palette, a single-pixel brush, the ability to override any existing pixel, and a 5-minute cooldown between placements. The combination meant that any lasting mark on the canvas would have to be negotiated between participants, leading to the emergence of a multitude of collective creative behaviours. If this simple 5-minute constriction had been reduced to 1 second, the platform would have collapsed into single-user monopolies, and died out. While a lot can be said for the claim that creativity lies in the artist, this simple example tells us that we cannot disregard the importance of the medium's affordances in conditioning what creative artifacts are explored and produced.

Though some attention has been given to the relation between media substrates and creativity over the years, we still lack a vocabulary in which media themselves can be compared on principled, complexity-theoretic grounds. Within computational creativity, the structured space the agent operates in has been formalised as Boden's conceptual spaces and Wiggins' Creative Systems Framework, both of which characterise the agent's reachable space within a medium left largely implicit. The creative-ecosystems strand introduced above (McCormack) comes closest, taking the substrate seriously and importing systems-theoretic vocabulary such as niche construction, but stops short of treating the medium itself as a complex system with measurable system-level properties.

In light of this gap, we propose to analyse the creative medium itself as a complex system, characterising media along a basis of nine macroscopic complexity properties — emergence, collective intelligence and self-organisation, non-linear dynamics, criticality, multi-scale hierarchy, phase transitions, diversity of attractors, path dependence, and open-endedness — and treating action affordances as the design-level mechanism through which media acquire these properties. We chose complexity dimensions that provide a disentangled characterisation. Further, we map several creative media of differing adoption by the research and the CC research community along these property dimensions, hinting at shared characteristics of high quality versus low quality media. This mapping also allows us to identify sparsely explored regions of the “media substrate-space”, and describe the properties of yet-to-exist creative computational substrates that would occupy these regions.