Introduction

This project, initiated by students at the Santa Fe Institute's 2025 Complexity Global School at the Universidad de Los Andes, in Bogota, Colombia, aims to explore the process of cultural production and creative collaboration in a structured but open-ended collaborative art project.

Here, we showcase the citation network grown by our small artist community in intentional collaboration working from a shared commons. Over a series of co-creative cycles, artists iteratively remixed and took inspiration from works already in the commons, contributing new pieces while explicitly tracking citation relationships. Because the network grew sympoietically (made from pieces that are themselves made from readily available materials), and organically (with artists completely free to structure and create according to their own sensibilities), we refer to the network and co-creative process as a whole as a "Sympoietic Art Organism". 

Network analysis reveals how this organism evolves: how artists preferentially connect to certain works, what selection and creation strategies emerge across generative cycles, and how distributed creative decisions aggregate into collective structure. The project scaffolding, making influence relationships explicit as they form, provides direct observation of the dynamics underlying cultural production and creative collaboration an a structured but open-ended participatory process.

[Organic]: Sara Arango Franco

[Autocatalytic]: Gabriel Camacho Cabrera

[Disruptive]: Kyle Thompson

[Collective]: Nadine Abd El Razek

[Anarchist]: Sonal Raghuvanshi

[Magical]: Lina J Bulla Casas

[Quilting]: Phileas Dazeley-Gaist