About this site
This is the companion site for a paper at the 17th International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC'26) that argues creative media (or substrates) can be usefully read as complex systems and placed in a 9-dimensional basis of complex-systems properties. The paper presents the framework; this site collects ratings from readers and the community.
Two sources
- Crowdsourced
- Live aggregate of community ratings. Modal level per cell, updated as people rate.
- Expert baseline
- The paper authors' own ratings, frozen as published. The source toggle on the analysis page switches between the two so you can see where the crowd agrees or diverges from the authors.
The 9 properties
- Emergence
- Macro-level outputs unpredictable from the microscopic rules.
- Collective intelligence
- Distributed knowledge production and problem-solving across many agents.
- Non-linear dynamics
- Small parameter or input changes produce disproportionate output shifts.
- Criticality
- The system operates at a boundary between order and disorder (edge of chaos).
- Multi-scale hierarchy
- Distinct scales of organisation visible (micro → macro levels).
- Phase transitions
- Qualitative regime shifts at thresholds in a control parameter.
- Attractors
- Stable configurations in state space that the system converges towards.
- Path dependence
- History and prior states condition future possibilities.
- Open-endedness
- Unbounded generation of novelty over time.
Methodology notes
- Ratings are independent: existing ratings are not shown until after submission, to avoid anchoring bias.
- Raters are identified by a random token stored in browser localStorage. Same browser = same identity (and can update its own ratings). Cleared cookies = a new identity.
- The site collects no personal data; the only stored fields are the (medium, property, level) ratings plus an anonymous token.
- The dataset is exportable as CSV at any time; a frozen snapshot will be archived on Zenodo at paper-submission time.