Invisible Cities, A Metaphorical Complex Adaptive System

by Chloé E. Atreya
Festina Lente Press, Ann Arbor, 2004
172 pp., 50 illus. b/w. Paper, $25.00
ISBN: 0-9754347-0-5.

Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium

stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be

It takes some courage and maybe even presumption to name a book squarely after Italo Calvino's masterpiece 'Invisible Cities', so it was with some reluctance and suspicion that I started browsing through Chloé Atreya's latest publication. What I found is a daunting and entertaining mixture of a respectful remake and an analysis of the original, an introduction in the field of complex adaptive systems, an at times poetic and at times scientific reverie and, finally, a blueprint of the workings of an associative mind. As the author says in the accompanying letter to the editor of Leonardo Digital Review: "Invisible Cities: A Metaphorical Complex Adaptive System is distinctive for its narrative structure and because it gives equal weight to Invisible Cities and complex adaptive systems: arts and sciences. The goal of the book is to provide a novel and accessible means of contextualizing existing knowledge within an interdisciplinary framework and to demonstrate how art and science inform each other."

Chloé Atreya has a PhD in pharmacology and earned a certificate in visual arts from Princeton. She is a visual artist as well as a scientist. The inspiration for this book came from her interest in the work of John H. Holland, the founder of the domain of genetic algorithms, on complex adaptive systems (cas).

In this book, she uses the many-layered formal structure of Calvino's book as a template and a metaphor to explain and illustrate the main elements of a theory of cas: non-linearity, building blocks, tags, rules, slack, flows, homeostasis, novelty and evolution. With a chapter devoted to each element, and ordered in precisely the same way as the original, she guides the lay reader through the complexity of the theory, inviting her to follow an intuitive and associative interdisciplinary path with many loops and leaps, crossings, sidesteps and picturesque cul-de-sacs. Most of the examples she is taking from, fields as widely different as molecular biology, games and folk art, are appropriately chosen even though at times the connection between the theme and the illustration is hard to discern. Here she is taking us through her own understanding of philosophy, the history of art, and the meaning of the world rather than through a well-ordered system of proofs and proven or provable connections. To a certain degree, Atreya's enthusiasm for cas turns into a belief, an all-encompassing worldview containing a mixture of scientific 'truths', moral and political imperatives and forced kinship. Of course she has the full right to do so, as an artist and even as a scientist, since she doesn't pretend to be doing science. It is for the reader to decide how far she will follow Atreya's iterations through this delightful proof of how science and art can become inseparably intertwined. Maybe we should read this book in a cas way: non-linear, with some slack, following the flow, tagging the nicest pages and illustrations and savouring its novelty.