Simple and Complex Amsterdam

The team working with the simple and complex in art and microbes travel to Amsterdam August 27-30, 2024. They will develop their work by visiting Micropia which is a museum dedicated to the microbes that surround humans virtually everywhere and also reflect on the simple and complex in art.

Microbes offer an interesting way into complexity. Their small size and the fact that they are everywhere connects them to other complex systems and their influence cannot be understated. Without microbes there would be no life on this planet, and small changes can have profound consequences for other interconnected complex systems.

The world is full of unknown unknowns and to help us sort all of this out and extend our knowledge increasingly complex computer programs are being used.  But there is a problem with this. As computer models or simulations become increasingly complex they also become harder to understand. This is referred to as Bonini’s paradox.

French poet Paul Valéry wrote: “If it’s simple, it’s always false. If it’s not, it’s unusable.” It is important to be able to simplify ideas without losing the complexities underpinning them, but how do we do that?