wiffle waffle

so there's a little under 8 months to go in my phd and i have to really start bringing everything together. so here's a quick little rundown of where i'm at and where i think i'm heading:

exhibition:
the idea is to create an indoor garden of terrariums and pot plants, all hooked up to a variety of sensors. at the end of each day, the information collected from the sensors will be processed, and the results will trigger automated software to buy/sell shares in selected commodities on the australian stock exchange (probably industrial stocks for companies that mine rare earth minerals).

i need to consult experts in sensors and experts in trading software, which i'm in the very early stages of doing.

thesis:
revisiting systems theory, and its application to both art making processes and art criticism/analysis.

systems theory was of interest to artists around the late 1960s and early 1970s during the growth and development of conceptual art practices. it fell out of favour about as quickly as it was first taken up but i think there's still untapped potential in some of its approaches. the main theorist who brought systems thinking to art was jack burnham, who began to write less and less interestingly on the topic before abandoning it completely and disappearing into esotericism. much of what he echoed about systems thinking was translated across from natural sciences and has been consistently evolving in that area - into complexity, emergence, chaos theory and network theory - whilst still being pretty much left along by the fine arts.

much of the ambivalence in the art context to systems theory, stems from its associations with militarism and corporatism and its apparent implication of logical processes - all things anathema to any considerations of the creative avant garde. however, the internet has its foundation in the military and yet has gone on to be considered the most democratising development since the printing press, so abandoning or ignoring systems theory on these grounds is limiting. additionally, i think the variety of names applied to this way of thinking - systems, networks, analysis etc - raises concerns about its application in the fine arts, where freedom of intuition, randomness, non-heirarchical concerns are the touchstones of practice.

ironically, aspects of systems thinking goes straight to the core of these very 'art-centric' issues.

in some ways i am looking to work backward from the most recent developments of actor network theory (ANT), and most recently 'compositionism' as developed by the founder of ANT - Bruno Latour, to the origins of systems theory and touching on the art-focused ideas raised by Jack Burnham. this takes a path through mostly scientific-style theories, with foundations in anthropology, sociology, metaphysics and economics, and their potential application to the practice and analysis of art making.