Emergence

In philosophy and science, emergence is a way of understanding how interactions between complex processes can produce unexpected and innovative outcomes. This approach has been very useful in reconceptualizing creativity and artistic practices as interactive behaviors involved with complex social and material entanglements. ‘Emergence’ suggests that artworks can arise, like hope, spontaneously from complex interwoven events in the world. Yet, somehow, these artworks are not reducible or precisely traceable to these events. How is this emergence to be understood?

ABOUT THIS ISSUE

Editorial Essay
Emergent Polyphony – Gregory Minissale

IN THIS ISSUE

Essays
Aesthetics as an Adaptive Dynamic System: A Fractal Reading of the Odyssey – Montserrat Sobral Dorado

Where the Sound Object Meets the Architectural Object – Lena Pozdnyakova

Free Time – An Experiment in the Age of Precarity – Elli Leventaki

Thought Experiments
Coal Scores: Being-With the More-than-Human through Speculative Performance Scores – Noel Meek

Buildings Are Spaceships That Surround Our Flesh Bodies – Paul Wiersbinski

Interstitial Practice in the Digital Turn – Lena Pozdnyakova

Art Projects
Keyboard 2.0 – JG Mair

The Sum of Things – Noah Mattucci

unendingbeginning – Steve Lovett

Reviews
A Dialogue with Artistic Choices in the Works of Gulammohammed Sheik – Arooshi Bagri Maheshwari

Thoughts on Giorgio Griffa and Peter Robinson’s Dialogue Exhibition – Itsnatani Humaira Anaqami

Review of Lucken’s Alphabet by Denis O’Connor – Jack Kramer

Creative Writing
Struck Strick – Jury Tosh Kobayashi-Mackay

You – Gregory Minissale

This issue was edited by Itsnatani Humaira Anaqami, Jack Kramer, and led by Gregory Minissale

Special thanks to Simone Huynh for her expertise and patience providing technical support on this issue

Emergence – Vol. 20: 1 (Jan. 2026)