Canvi i Temps

Cultures of change

Cultures of change. Social Atoms and Electronic Lives examines the social and cultural dynamics from a highly multidisciplinary perspective, from the hand of the complexity sciences and digital technologies.

Information and communication technologies have made possible to quantify and monitor, process and display aspects of our society and our culture unthinkable until recently. The so-called complex systems theory seeks to explain this phenomenology based on the hardest sciences through models that assume nonlinear properties, selforganization, emergence, feedback, heterogeneity and uncertainty. These theoretical abstractions contributions describe the social and cultural interactions maintaining the unique and the co-evolution with the environment as an essential element.

Both the whole and the singularities are particularly important, and robotics, artificial intelligence, electronic circuitry and new technological devices are getting closer to our human peculiarities. The exhibition seeks to experience in person all these ideas and artistic practices through experimental projects, and providing access to scholarly information on the subject in a friendly environment.

Canvi i temps

Canvi (change) and Temps (time) are two navigation spaces within a network composed of articles, web pages, people and links related to the field of complexity science. This research, which is both historic (papers as far back as 1927 are reviewed) and crosscutting (containing more than 30 categories from different fields and disciplines), offers a broad overview of the foci, strategies, tactics, research methodologies and topics of interest that make up the field of complexity science. Canvi and temps offers two distinct ways to explore the content and their relationships in this field.

Canvi (change) is a branch of a main axis of research into navigation interfaces in networks that Bestiario developed called 6pli. It is an interface which allows one to navigate through a network maintaining a constant local perspective around a node while moving about through means of the relationships. Canvi combines a number of different techniques (geometric paradigms), smoothly alternating between them. In other words, the representation is constantly changing (breathing), and in this way offers a broader perspective of the structure of the local network.

Temps (Time) tracks changes over time in the topics of interest within complexity science (from 1927, the first time this term was used, through the present) and it makes possible to visualize the changes in the intensity of the use of tags over years.

The primary structure of the database is a bipartition made up of content and tags. Existing relationships between contents and tags suggest new relationships. The networks emerging point towards interesting relationships and possible new connections among the contents.