Gregory Minissale
A work of art can generate a network of relationships that range from artistic elaboration to reception. This network of relationships is not simple but complex, so its study cannot be reduced to subject-object relations; instead, it must consider the interweaving of sensibility, art, and culture. In fact, the word “complex” originates etymologically from the Latin ‘plectere,’ meaning to fold or intertwine. It refers to the quality of something that has been folded repeatedly. It suggests that all components of an aesthetic experience are dynamically interconnected in complex patterns, taking into account other previous aesthetic experiences but not reducible to them. Emergence is what happens when this complexity produces something unexpected or even ‘unprethinkable’.
In Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway suggests that individuals can be described as knots in a complex system, connected through ‘intra-active’ relationships. This of the network of relationships woven between sensibility, art, and culture implies a co-creation. The call for papers invited contributions exploring emergence, a concept that, as this issue demonstrates, resists a singular definition. In neuroscience, Marc Lewis describes emergence through dynamic systems theory, which posits the spontaneous appearance of order from nonlinear interactions among components. In art history, James Herbert finds emergence in the brushstroke, where neural activity and hand movements coalesce into a recognizable style. For many, emergence names the ongoing, pluriversal unfolding of relationships between human and more-than-human worlds. This issue can be understood as setting in motion a particular kind of emergence from its parts, sometimes in productive tension, allowing each contribution to illuminate a different facet of how novelty, meaning, and form arise from complex entanglements with one another and with the world in which they are immersed.
In Monserrate Sobral Dorado’s essay, instead of focusing on the viewer’s response to the artwork, the Diamond Theory provides a framework for understanding how the relationships among different aesthetic experiences intra-act to produce a particular aesthetic experience, resulting in the emergence of the work of art. The objective of this theoretical framework is to trace the expression of a fractal through the Diamond Theory, which describes the complexity of aesthetic behavior over time. The diamond logic could be used as a conceptual tool for thinking about our aesthetic experiences as iterative relational patterns, without any claim to interpretative closure or deterministic formalization. Developed by Rudolf Kaehr in his 2017 publication The Book of Diamonds, this model utilizes fractal and nonlinear logic to depict relational structures. When applied to the reflection of complexity in our aesthetic experiences, this theoretical framework helps us understand the constitutive interdependence between aesthetic relationships and their context.
Yet the Diamond Theory, for all its sophistication, represents only one of many possible frameworks for understanding emergence in aesthetic experience. The contributions gathered here demonstrate the necessity of theoretical plurality. Where Diamond Theory emphasizes fractal iteration across historical time, as exemplified in the analysis of the Homeric Odyssey, other contributors model emergence through improvisational performance, material assemblage, digital infrastructure, linguistic evolution, or geological deep time. Each offers a distinct temporal logic, a different scale of analysis, and alternative vocabularies for describing how wholes arise from parts in ways that exceed mechanistic causation.
To describe the relationships that link production, reception, and the work of art, this framework applies the categories used by Jordi Claramonte in the second volume of his Modal Aesthetics: Poiesis, Apate, Mimesis, and Catharsis. Following Aristotle, Claramonte considers poiesis as the aesthetic activity of taking known elements and creating something new. Jury Tosh’s exploration of Cecil Taylor’s Unit Structures methodology offers a vivid model of emergence through musical improvisation. Here, poiesis operates at the level of real-time performance: simple musical units (cells comprising just a few notes) become the raw material for complex, unpredictable structures. Each musician processes these units differently, based on their emotional state that day, what they observe others doing, and the audience’s reaction, such that form emerges from the intra-action of these various ways of processing a unit. Taylor’s dictum, ‘I don’t really concern myself with form. And the reason I don’t is because I know it’s there,’ articulates a profound trust in emergence itself, a confidence that structure will appear through the spontaneous organization of interacting parts. The translation of this methodology into Tosh’s practice illustrates how poetic procedures can be transferred across media, generating new forms while retaining their underlying logic.
Lena Pozdnyakova’s digital exhibitions, born from the COVID-19 pandemic’s forced closure of physical spaces, demonstrate how technological constraints can trigger profound formal innovation. When the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery launched its first web-based exhibition and when Studio106LA transformed into a virtual platform, these represented the emergence of what Pozdnyakova calls speculative architecture, where screens became sites of spatial imagination. This is a form of apate in its most contemporary iteration: the screen creates a convincing illusion of space, architecture, and encounter that operates according to logics distinct from, yet resonant with, physical exhibition-making. Koktem Shaqyrady, a virtual exhibition centered on the former NKVD building in Almaty, Kazakhstan, transforms an inaccessible site of historical trauma into a permeable environment of encounter and reflection.
These categories prove remarkably generative when applied across the diverse practices documented in this volume. Denis O’Connor’s Lucken’s Alphabet embodies poiesis through the transformation of found objects, Welsh slates salvaged from buildings, into a heraldic alphabet of personal and cultural significance. The exhibition practices a poetics of recovery and reassembly, elevating what O’Connor calls things that don’t get acknowledged into nodes within a force-field of associations. The viewer’s encounter involves recognition of familiar forms even as they resist stable meaning. The puzzle-like quality of O’Connor’s work creates a productive space that invites us into the game of interpretation. What emerges is not reducible to any single element but arises from their interaction, from what O’Connor describes as connections that are linked by something more suggestive or mysterious than direct definition or causality.
The contributions here document perturbations at every scale. At the molecular level, in Noel Meek’s work, we encounter Coal, a being whose biography spans hundreds of millions of years, formed from ancient forests compressed and transformed through geological processes that dwarf human temporality. The piece Three Scores with Coal attempts what the author calls nonhuman witnessing, a practice of attending to timescales and forms of agency that exclude and elude the human entirely. Working with fifteen-kilogram fragments of raw coking coal, the artist engages in multisensory liaisons, entanglements of atmospheres and microbiomes, and haptic relationships that form knots of shared sonic territory. This intimacy with Coal stands in stark contrast to industrial extraction, modeling an alternative relation grounded in what the piece calls transbiotic alliances: solidarities that cross the boundary between biotic and abiotic, human and more-than-human.
If Coal operates at geological timescales, JG Mair’s Keyboard 2.0 tracks emergence at the velocity of digital communication. Mair documents the rapid evolution of what might be called a digital dialect, a mode of communication built from abbreviations, emojis, and an ever-deepening layering of memetic expression. This language is adaptive, symbiotic, and shaped by the feedback loops of our increasingly networked lives, building meaning not in isolation, but through interplay, weaving together image, gesture, and text. By transforming each key into a hidden cyku (cyber-haiku) that reveals itself only through typing, Mair creates what he calls an unexpected convergence that both disrupts and contributes to the dialogue of messaging. The vintage typewriter that anchors the installation serves as a temporal portal, collapsing the distance between mechanical inscription and digital flow.
Between these extremes lie the historical and cultural timescales explored through the Homeric Odyssey. As an artifact of oral transmission, later written down and continuously retranslated, reinterpreted, and adapted across nearly three millennia, the Odyssey exemplifies what this framework calls fractal behavior in cultural systems. The myth has no specific author; what is agreed upon is that the story it tells has been shaped through transmission and memory. Each generation’s encounter with Odysseus generates new meanings while preserving recognizable structures, creating what Nicolai Hartmann calls the spirit of the object: content that persists and transforms across epochs, carrying forward what each age inscribes in it while remaining open to future elaboration.
If the Odyssey models emerge through iterative historical transmission, other contributions reveal alternative temporal logics. Tosh’s musical improvisation unfolds in real time, with form emerging moment by moment through the interplay of musicians. This is an emergence as an event, as the unrepeatable crystallization of a specific configuration of energies, affects, and responses. Unlike the fractal iteration that allows cultural works to persist across centuries, improvisational emergence is radically singular, ephemeral, existing only in its moment of actualization. Pozdnyakova’s account of the digital turn during COVID-19 reveals yet another temporal mode: emergence through enforced rupture and adaptation. The pandemic functioned as a massive perturbation, suddenly closing physical exhibition spaces and forcing rapid experimentation with virtual platforms. This is emergence through crisis response, where new inventions emerge from established patterns that suddenly become impossible to maintain.
Paul Wiersbinski’s ‘Buildings are Spaceships that Surround our Flesh Bodies’ explores emergence through the logic of games and virtual worlds. Beginning with childhood experiences of playing Monopoly alone, representing all six different parties, winning and losing against himself simultaneously, Wiersbinski traces how gaming creates split subjectivities, spaces where self-division becomes productive. Chess evolved from a war simulation to a cultural practice and an AI training ground, each transformation representing an emergent shift in meaning and function while retaining its core formal structure. Contemporary massively multiplayer games generate emergent economies, emergent social norms, and emergent psychological profiles. What emerges in gameplay is not the conscious self-presentation but something more fundamental, behavioral patterns that reveal unconscious structures.
Itsnatani Humaira Anaqami’s reflection on the exhibition Differences in Kind and Rhythm focuses on accumulated repetition. Observing how a single line drawn multiple times can evolve into a captivating composition, Anaqami extends this insight beyond the gallery: even the smallest thing in life, like habits, whether good or bad, when repeated consistently, has the power to shape and transform us, perhaps into an entirely new version of ourselves. This is catharsis as transformative recognition, the realization that emergence operates not only in aesthetic objects but in the very construction of subjectivity through iterative practice.
A striking commonality across these contributions is their embrace of indeterminacy, their insistence that emergence requires openness to what cannot be fully grasped or controlled. O’Connor’s Lucken’s Alphabet exemplifies this through its deliberate resistance to closure. The work creates what O’Connor calls a force-field of associations that invites multiple interpretive pathways without resolving into a singular meaning. Identity itself becomes concealed within the exhibition like a series of clues without a solution. Taylor’s Unit Structures methodology similarly refuses predetermination. Form is always there, Taylor insists, precisely because it is not imposed from outside but emerges from the process of improvisation itself. The musician must trust the structure to appear rather than constructing it in advance.
Steve Lovett’s photographic series unendingbeginning enacts emergence through the materiality of sustained attention itself. Working within what Lovett describes as ‘the rhythm of days,’ the practice generates knowledge not through the accumulation of information but through iterative looking, remembering, and discovering anew. Each photograph captures surfaces marked by time and use: asphalt scattered with debris, shattered glass radiating fracture patterns across corrugated metal, architectural surfaces bearing traces of prior encounters. These images resist singular interpretation, instead operating as what Lovett calls ‘critical silences’ that demand the viewer’s own processes of sense-making. The practice embodies productive ambiguity, meaning that meaning emerges not from authorial control, but from the spaces between intention and reception, between what is shown and what remains unspoken. Lovett’s methodology of walking, capturing images with digital cameras, and examining the tangible nature of mixed spaces generates what might be understood as visual palimpsests, surfaces where multiple temporalities, materialities, and meanings coexist without resolution. Like O’Connor’s force field of associations, Lovett’s work practices emerge through patient, repeated engagement with environments and images that reveal complexity only with sustained attention. The interstitial aspect of these images, their refusal of easy categorization, even of depth and surface, positions them precisely within the liminal spaces Pozdnyakova identifies as generative, where established orders break down. New organizational principles crystallize from an attentive encounter with what already exists and what we make of it, through mind-wandering gestalts, haecceities, and the epiphany of a presence in the emptiness and unforgiving hardness of the surfaces.
Noah Matteucci’s ‘The Sum of Things’ exemplifies emergence through the deliberate mobilization of chance operations across digital and analog domains. Using computer-generated random walks, algorithmic processes that move squares across grids according to random number generation, Matteucci creates patterns that are then laser-engraved onto woodblocks and hand-printed, merging what he calls two forms of chance: the geometric random walk and the natural patterns of the wood grain. The work operates at the intersection of code and craft, revealing how digital algorithms and traditional printmaking both function through iterative procedures, what Matteucci describes as nested loops, arranging the already-made into the already-made again. His invocation of Lucretius’s atomism, the materialist philosophy that proposes indivisible atoms in ceaseless movement and collision create everything in the world, provides theoretical grounding for understanding how simple units (pixels, lines, algorithmic instructions) generate complex, emergent structures. Matteucci’s observation that chaos and order are two sides of the same coin resonates with Marc Lewis’s concept of metastability, which is the dynamic equilibrium between settled and chaotic states. The work’s connection to Conway’s Game of Life, where simple rules governing pixel survival create hypnotizing patterns resembling natural formations, demonstrates emergence at its most fundamental: small, simple things following simple rules to make big, complex things. Like Taylor’s insistence that form is always there or Anaqami’s recognition that repetition transforms, Matteucci’s practice affirms that nothing that repeats is the same, that iteration itself generates novelty. His woodcuts perform the fractal logic the editorial theorizes, each print simultaneously unique (shaped by the contingencies of inking, pressure, grain) and repetitive (following the same algorithmic pattern), each viewing position revealing different aspects (zoom out to see construction, zoom in to see abstraction). Matteucci sets parameters and trusts chance to produce results he cannot fully predict, affirming through this methodology what he calls the material world, the only one that matters.
Gulammohammed Sheikh’s retrospective, as documented by Arooshi Bagri Maheshwari, demonstrates the emergence of a unique perspective through what the artist himself calls living simultaneously in several cultures and times, where the past exists as a living entity alongside the present, each illuminating and sustaining the other. Sheikh’s kaavads, three-dimensional wooden shrines inspired by Rajasthani storytelling traditions, exemplify this temporal multiplicity through their architectural invitation to viewers. Unlike static canvases, these syncretic structures open in all four directions, allowing viewers to navigate at their own pace, in any direction, and even determine the frontality as they approach each door. The massive canvas Kaarawaan operates as a visual palimpsest, layering quotations from Mughal and Kishangarh miniatures, Nainsukh’s 18th-century Pahari painting, Amrita Sher-Gil’s modernism, and contemporary imagery of pandemic migrants and Gaza devastation. What emerges is neither synthesis nor chronology, but rather what Sheikh describes as a multi-perspectival view through shifting vantage points. The artwork generates meaning through interaction rather than transmission. The artist’s practice is a fractal iteration where each painting, kaavad panel, or accordion book becomes a site where historical memory, mythological reference, political consciousness, and lived experience interact to produce configurations irreducible to any single source or interpretive frame.
The very idea of emergence, that wholes possess properties their parts do not, that interactions generate phenomena exceeding their components, requires acknowledging that complex systems produce results not entirely predictable or controllable from any single position within them. Emergence names precisely this excess, this gap between intention and outcome, input and result, a gap that is not deficiency but productive space. Yet, emergence as a concept is morally neutral; complex adaptive systems produce inequality and precarity as readily as they create beauty and insight. Elli Leventaki’s contribution on labor precarity in the art world reminds us that emergence operates in domains of power and economy as forcefully as in aesthetic experience. Leventaki documents how contemporary art world structures have emerged to systematically exclude artists from lower social classes through unpaid or underpaid labor, high barriers to entry, and institutional cultures that assume independent wealth, or they censor and exclude political protest, particularly against the genocide in Gaza. These conditions emerged gradually through the interaction of gallery economics, funding structures, educational credentialism, and social reproduction, and now direct government intervention has been whipped into a frenzy by the right-wing press. Responding to this emergence of structural exclusion requires what Leventaki calls collective work and a mentality of unity, comradeship, and solidarity, the intentional cultivation of counter-emergences through organized resistance.
The Coal piece grapples with a different form of complex emergence: the violent extraction and consumption that has generated both industrial modernity and catastrophic climate transformation. The attempt to stand in solidarity with Coal represents an effort to imagine a relationship outside the logic of extraction, allowing for what Timothy Morton, in Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People, calls the pleasant confusion of feeling-with and being-with that constitutes genuine solidarity. Yet this remains, as the author acknowledges, unresolved, perhaps necessarily so. Complex systems generate both ethical complications and aesthetic insights, and any honest engagement with emergence must attend to both.
The framework of art as mediator proves generative when extended across the diverse practices documented here. If a work of art mediates between production and reception, between individual and culture, between material and meaning, then translation between media, disciplines, and ontologies represents sites of particularly intense emergence. Tosh’s movement from music to drawing to poetry, all organized through the Unit Structures methodology, demonstrates how aesthetic procedures can translate across seemingly distinct domains while generating new possibilities in each. What emerges in this translation is not perfect correspondence, but rather something akin to family resemblance, recognizable kinship despite substantive differences.
Pozdnyakova’s ‘Where the Sound Object Meets the Architectural Object’ takes translation as an explicit theme, arguing that sound and architecture, despite operating through different sensory modalities, share structural properties that can be analyzed through common frameworks. Drawing on Formalist literary theory, she suggests that the shift from practical to poetic language creates abstract objects. These units become available for formal analysis precisely through their detachment from immediate utility. What bridges these domains is not content, but structure; not what they mean, but how they organize perception and generate significance.
This suggests that the most productive translations, the ones that generate genuine emergence rather than mere transposition, occur at moments of necessity, when established forms prove inadequate to changed circumstances. O’Connor’s transformation of heritage building materials into heraldic alphabet emerged from his long engagement with diasporic identity. The Welsh slates made the same migratory passage that O’Connor’s father did, literalizing in material form the transmission of culture across oceans and generations. What emerges in O’Connor’s slates is not a representation of diaspora but its performance; the work itself enacts the drawing-together (Lucken) of dispersed elements.
Meek’s Coal piece’s invocation of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the founding document of Aotearoa, New Zealand, that, in its te reo Māori version, describes a pluriversal Aotearoa where the sovereignty of all beings is recognized, and worlds may coexist without domination of one by another, points toward what might be called pluriversal emergence. This framework, developed by scholars like Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, challenges the assumption that emergence must be understood through Western scientific paradigms or Western aesthetic categories. Indigenous ontologies operate through fundamentally different assumptions about agency, relationality, and temporality. The Coal piece’s attempt at nonhuman witnessing draws on these alternative frameworks, imagining solidarities that cross the biotic and abiotic boundary. The piece describes this as a messy, mixed-up, and unresolved translation process, full of misunderstandings and new beginnings. What emerges in this messiness is not confusion but a space where multiple worlds might coexist without one subsuming the others.
The fractal iteration of the Diamond Theory, the dynamic systems of neuroscience, and the poiesis of modal aesthetics are powerful analytical tools that illuminate specific dimensions of aesthetic experience. What would it mean to hold multiple frameworks for emergence simultaneously? To allow the geological timescales of Coal to sit beside the improvisational immediacy of Unit Structures, the fractal transmission of the Odyssey to exist alongside the viral spread of digital dialects, the modal aesthetics of Western philosophy to resonate with Indigenous conceptions of sovereignty and relation? This volume attempts not to synthesize (which would flatten differences into a false unity) but to create a ‘constellation,’ a gathering of distinct approaches that illuminate each other through contrast and resonance, while maintaining their specificity.
Our relationship with the arts can be seen as an adaptive dynamic system. Those involved in the production and reception of beauty are not controlled by a central power that determines what beauty is throughout history. Furthermore, the members of an aesthetic experience do not necessarily interact simultaneously, and their different political and socio-cultural contexts may vary in a nonlinear manner. The aesthetic values of a work of art are evident in the aesthetic experience. They can influence the set of cultural values within the system, causing emergences, that is, changes in its overall behavior. Describing and predicting these types of systems is done by the theory of dynamical systems. Among other things, it uses mathematical models or formulas to describe the behaviour that characterises a particular system. The attractor is the characteristic final behaviour. It represents the values to which the system eventually returns.
Fractals are a special type of attractor characterized by self-similarity at different scales. This fractal behavior helps illustrate how aesthetic relationships repeat and evolve, supporting Sobrado’s analysis of the Odyssey, as well as Jackson Pollock’s tendencies to repeat gestures across different scales and with other colors rhythmically. Fractal geometry is an extension of classical geometry. It can be used to create accurate models of physical structures, from ferns to galaxies. The term “fractal” comes from the Latin “fractus,” meaning broken. It was coined by the mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot in the late 1970s to refer to objects with a fractional dimension, lying between the dimensions described by natural numbers in classical science. Rudolf Kaehr’s Book of Diamonds provides a nonlinear logic that exhibits fractal behaviour, allowing the specificity of each aesthetic experience to be discerned. The mathematical diamond is composed of entities linked to each other by relations of order. These are organized through a possible temporal sequence, in the form of a coherent proposition. The diamond presents a structure that can be iterated, meaning it can be repeated multiple times. This means that each entity can, in turn, become a diamond, generating a fractal pattern of relationships.
Given these categories from which to think about the relationships within our aesthetic experience, this issue demonstrates that aesthetic emergence cannot be reduced to a single model or mechanism. The contributions gathered here practice emergence across wildly different scales, temporalities, and ontologies. Each offers distinct insights; each has its limits; each illuminates dimensions that others leave in shadow. What emerges is the volume itself as a complex system. Just as O’Connor’s found objects generate meaning through a force field of associations, just as Tosh’s musical cells crystallize into structure through improvisation, this collection of contributions generates emergent significance through their interaction. Readers will discover connections that the editor did not intend, find resonances between pieces that never directly reference each other, and construct interpretive pathways that cross-cut the thematic organization.
This reflects the fundamental insight of emergence theory: that complex systems produce outcomes exceeding the control or understanding of any single position within them. The Diamond Theory’s framework of poiesis, apate, mimesis, and catharsis offers one approach to this material. Lewis’s neuroscientific account of emotional metastability provides another. Indigenous pluriversalism offers yet another. Readers bring their own frameworks, shaped by their disciplines, experiences, and commitments. What emerges in the encounter between these multiple perspectives cannot be predicted or fully controlled, which is precisely what makes it emergent. The perturbation that initiated this issue, the Call for Papers on emergence, has triggered responses that collectively constitute a phase transition in understanding.
The works, writings, and practices in this issue do not converge on a single theory of emergence. Instead, they demonstrate emergence through their differences, through the productive friction between geological and digital temporalities, between improvisational performance and fractal iteration, between material assemblage and virtual architecture. This volume offers clues without solution, not because it fails to theorize emergence but because it takes emergence seriously enough to let it remain partially indeterminate and open to futures we cannot yet imagine.
The poem that follows this editorial captures the restlessness inherent in fractal patterns and various perturbations (a blackbird assaulting numb borders) that interrupt settled states. Like love, what emerges in the encounter between brick and mortar, propositions, and lyrical flight cannot be predicted. We invite readers into the space of emergence to discover connections not foreseen. Like Taylor’s Unit Structures, the form is there, we know it’s there, precisely because we do not yet know what it will become.