Last sunday (13.12.09) I gave a talk about interaction and complexity in the Arts Santa Mònica in Barcelona. In this 2.5 hours talk I also presented the project Canvi i Temps as an integrated content, since it is a project about complexity in sciences.

In the talk I presented a lot of examples, from math, physics, biology, ecology, social sciences and arts fields that explores some or many of the main concepts of complexity, such as:

emergence
cellular automata
orbit
dynamic system
fix point
attractor
fractals
chaos theory
strange attractor
genetic algorithm
free scale network

I promised to the audience I will publish a list of links to some of the resources I presented, and more and less in the same order. Among them: interesting topics, free software to download, interactive applications, videos, articles, etc…

EmergenceIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
The look and say Conway´s numbers
Cellular automata
life game: definition, online app, a lot of cellular automata, and a simple one.

FractalsIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
Cantor set, created from the I-CHING transformations.
Some images
Xaos for Mandelbrot Set navigation

Chaos theory IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
Logistic map
Dynamic system

BiologyIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
Mitozoos
Other bugs, and birds
Karl Sims evolved virtual creatures

NetworksIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
Scale-free networks
Gnom

TransdisciplinaryIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
Visualcomplexity
reMap
Map of complex sciences
RNA triplets
The I-Ching and RNA triplets

Canvi & temps are two network browsing spaces built from a compilation of articles, pages, persons and links, all related with complexity in science. The research was carried out by Pau Alsina, Josep Perelló, Michele Catanzaro, Pere Monràs, Carles Tardío, Oriol Vallès, Irma Vilà and Santiago Ortiz. The project is in display at Arts Santa Mónica, in the context of a Cultures of Change exhibit.

This historical (it includes citations since 1927) and transversal (it contains more than 30 categories of fields of knowledge) research offers and ample vision of the collection of aproaches, strategies and tactics, reseach methods and interests known as complexity science. Canvi & Temps offer two different ways of experiencing the contents of the network and its interrelations. The main structure of the data base is a partition generated by contents and tags. Departing from the existing relations between contents and tags this gives rise to new relations amongst the contents. The resulting network highlights interesting relations and possible paths within the contents.

Temps
The interest in representing changes associated with complexity science through time (from 1927, which is the chronological reference in the field, up to date) rose from internal dialogue within our research group. Temps allows to see changes on the usage intensity of the tags through time.

Canvi
Canvi branches off from Bestiario’s research mainstream on network browsing interfaces known as 6pli. It is, in essence, an interface that allows browsing a network with a local vision of a node’s surroundings and it also allows moving through the network through their relation. The uniqueness of Canvi lays in the fact that it explores new node positioning techniques as well as their spatial relations. In particular Canvi combines different techniques (geometric paradigms) subtly alternating between nodes and their relation. This means that the representation of the network is in constant movement (a breathing sort of movement), this way offering a broader perception of the local network. Canvi is a proof of concept and it is an excellent example of this experimental technique at a high degree of development.