Edges was the most recent edition of Unpsychology Magazine. it is full of collaborative work from a wide range of artists, practitioners and writers. You can get hold of a free copy of magazine from HERE and purchase a print copy from HERE
This week’s short post is a video and written response to the Edges magazine issue by Tamsin Haggis – a collaboration with it, if you like. Tamsin has had her work in previous magazines and so her video and written response is a very welcome contribution…
As I was reading Edges, I was taken back to a past life, over 15 years ago now, when I was an Educational researcher using complexity theory to critique social science models of people as so called ‘learners’.
I was fascinated by the idea that a self-organising system in nature could be open to its environment, continually exchanging matter and energy, while at the same time somehow still maintaining a sense of itself as an organism, with edges of some kind, but without having any kind of central director.
I spent years trying to articulate an argument for thinking of the human being as an open system, embedded in the flows of multiple larger systems, and containing multiple smaller systems, but also somehow uniquely idiosyncratic and distinct; consciously able to function in consensual reality, and physiologically maintaining biological integrity. Developmental psychology and some social science theorising were already talking about this, but in adult education and higher education, there were very few people interested in this perspective.
After 10 years of talking complexity to the void, I gave all that up and returned to my original training as a visual artist. Complexity and emergence became my lens for thinking about creative process, as I set out to try to make space for something to emerge from the confusion of 20 years of no art practice at all. Fast forward to the present day, reading the latest Unpsychology magazine, I got curious to look back and see if any of the work I had made in the last 15 years might in some way reflect those ideas that had fascinated me for so long; overlapping systems embedded in multiple flows, a continual process of energies within and beyond, untrackable emergence, but at the same time, edges – coherent forms, system integrity, boundaries, containment.
A response to Edges