Manifesto: Growing a Sympoietic Art Organism

[O.A.D.C.A.M.Q.H.L.E]  (exquisite corpse) 

Organic (Sara)

 
This creature evokes the unfoldings of life’s tapestry: trajectories made materially manifest are path-dependent and have a fortuitous component. The will of creation, which is the will of life, acquires with this exercise a better metaphor than studio art: visual units become analogues for individual entity, highlighting the banality of entertaining visual units without having a systemic view of their peers. No living being came to be on its own. No creation ever does. The role of the artist is that of a translator, and a good translator adapts form for it to be fertile in its context. 
It highlights creation as an iterative yet. Nothing comes from nowhere. Intentional design is replaced by intuitive, ever-evolving mutual interactions. Perhaps creations come to be by means of the workers. Chaos arises: . 
 
Path-dependency
Chaotic nature
Dependence on geography and notions of proximity (thinking of evolution)
Challenging the notion of identity
What does a unit of information mean in our case? Our associations and inspirations were clearly not merely visual.
What is a visual informational unit? – seems like an important question in the time of generative AI
Self-referentiality is a likely outcome in organic (non-algorithmic) conditions, if a comparison with life aiming to self-perpetuate is valid
 
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Challenge authorship, identity and death

Autocatalytic (Gabriel)

We said, “Let there be light”, and there was the first spark of autocatalytic ignition
In the beginning was the world, and the world was with us, and the world was us (Spinoza 1:1). Listen, this is how an artistic lab culture catalyzes itself, how one becomes two becomes four becomes a network blooming across the adjacency matrix of our panpsyche. It starts with a substrate—raw material, analog debris, digital fragments— you just need (at least) one seed, one B to meet your A, and suddenly you're not cultivating isolated Petris anymore, you're feeding a re-action that re-plicates, by do(cite). This is the sigmoid curve of co-creation: that slow induction period where nothing seems to happen, the patterns are small and the rate equations whisper low instead of shouting, but wait—wait until the exponential or power-law-like phase ignite, watch how one citation spawns two spawns four, or n-1, how the Jacobian matrix of our co-creative system suddenly has eigenvalues with positive real parts, unstable in the best possible way, growing, exploding outward through the strongly connected components of our holobiont until every node can (almostly) reach every other node, where the Laplacian hums with the flow of influence and the Fiedler value tells us “Yes, we are connected”, we therefore become one distributed reaction-diffusion system painting Turing patterns across the canvas of this community’s co-creativity.
 
Then, we saw the light, and unfolded the spark into conservation and transformation
And afterall, here's the theorem that matters: nothing is lost, everything transforms. Remember the first law? If thermodynamics is working on our behalf, nobody can really do anything against us (Clausius 8:31). The stoichiometric matrix keeps the score—whatever enters must exit, changed, reconfigured, remixed into new morphologies, or end into the sinkhole of creativitylessness, period. This is conservation through collaboration, where your work becomes a substrate for mine and hence becomes a catalyst for theirs, transfer entropy between creators maps the hidden pathways, and Granger causality proves “Yes, you influenced me”, if your past can predict my future movements, our time series must be intertwined in the master equation of cultural evolution. We co-exist at multiple equilibria, simultaneously, bistable between states, phase-transitioning over basins of attraction, and that, that’s not chaos, perhaps catastrophe—or simply a richness, fulfilment through non-optimizing diversity that disentangles our mutuality, co-evolution. The spectral gap then determines how fast we synchronize, how quickly local fluctuations propagate through our coupling matrix, but we never fully sync because there’s let’s say, noise, a Langevin term, stochastic kicks from the Gillespie algorithm of individual choice keep us exploring this sympoietic phase space, until the cycle is finished the tension keep us dancing on the edge between order and disorder, between a settled fixed point and potentially strange attractors, contemplating what was and what could be, all of us holoentic critters in this sympocatalytic graph. There was the vine, we made the branches (Haraway 15:5).

Disruptive (Kyle)

As artists, we call for change to be loving. We believe that disruption comes when the bosom of expression meets innovation. 
Disruption is a dialectic; an engagement with artistic change that is based on a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis of ideas, modes, and expressions. 
Disruption is sometimes necessary politically, personally, or communally. History moves us, our day to day lives move us, and as a community of artists we are moved by each other to disrupt, dream, and desire. 

Collective (Nadine)

The organism cannot evolve without the dynamic interactions that animate its collective body. This project explores what it means to respond to, shape, and be shaped by an assemblage of others’ artistic expressions. Each contribution emerges from a shared space of exchange, where individual works intertwine, influence, and transform one another. The collective is not merely a gathering of pieces or artists—it is the generative force through which each piece comes into being.

Anarchist (Sonal)

We often say that to change anything, start everywhere. This sympoietic art organism is a collective reflection of relationships built on trust within the team and each contributing artist answering to themselves (and not needlessly heaping up tragedy in service of agendas), seeking power to create something from the commons (without authority). Each individual artefact persisted in an anarchic harmony and in reconciliation through constant change in the whole organism.

Magical (Lina)

Magic is not mystery or trickery, it is the shimmer that appears when we are together, even across distance. In the sympoietic organism, every connection is a spell of attention, a way of feeling in common without touch.
To create is to conjure, to transform shared time into something alive that binds and transforms with us. Magic lives in that invisible presence holding the collective, in the possibility of dreaming together while far apart.

Quilting (Phileas)

Patching ideas together
Open ended
Telling stories together
Collective imagination and shared dreaming
Free-associating
Automatic writing
Collective transe
Sowing/Sewing
Threading

Hybrid (Louison)

Hybridization is a special power that requires tending and practice. As artists, hybridization is knowledge that what we make is always a combination of many fragments that do not always bear our names. It is something to look forward to, to work for, not a goal to achieve. In order to be hybrid, we must refuse fusion - because fusion means eradication of the self.
Accept hybridization as a way to :
share what cannot be formulated // decenter yourself of the narrative // open the flesh to the new and uncanny // create wormholes in the common ground.
Change is a monstrous figure to praise, chaos is a romantic way to embrace otherness.
MUTATE WITHOUT PROMISE (from ïan Larue’s analysis of Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto)

Liberation (elly)

Release self-imposed constraints
Open your mind to joyful engagement 
Nothing is in isolation

Expression (Emerson)

Thoughts and feelings
Desires
Thinking outside the box
Unabashed
Community based and supported 
Freeing