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.