In 2026/2027, SPACE invites Dawson students across the Arts and Sciences to explore this year's annual theme: EMERGENCE. As always in SPACE, we also encourage participants to share their explorations with the Dawson community—through the SPACE writing competition, website, events, popups and magazine, among other venues, allowing a richer, more varied and illuminating understanding of the theme to emerge.
But first, what exactly do we mean by EMERGENCE?
DEFINITIONS
“Emergent properties are novel characteristics of behaviors that in appear in a complex system when its individual components interact, but these properties are not present in the components themselves.”
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
“…the appearance of novel entities that in one sense or another could not have been predicted from what came before…[the] formation of new “ways of seeing”, new interpretive paradigms… whether they explore an existing space of possibilities or whether they enlarge such spaces.”
- Peter Cariani, Emergence and Creativity
Literature on emergence describes something ‘new’ as occurring during emergence. For example, the “creation of new properties”. Also, "an emergent form [is one which] displays characteristics not present in its source."…
For example, the perception of the whole musical melody and how it is inconceivable from exposure to separate tones, as well as being heterogeneously new and not deducible from those musical notes.
- Jennifer Seevinck, Emergence and Artistic Visualization
“The whole is more than the sum of its parts”
- attributed to Aristotle
Emergence marks the moment when we need to a new description for a phenomenon—the language and concept of “a melody” rather than just of separate notes. The moment when our previous language, concepts, rules no longer suffice because we seem to be talking about something new that is more than the sum of its parts.
COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS (CAS)
One place to find examples of emergence is in complex adaptive systems (CAS).
A CAS consists of a large number of interacting units or individuals that adapt or learn as they interact.
Examples include traders that lead to the emergence of markets; companies that leads to the emergence of economies; organisms that lead to the emergence of ecosystems; antibodies that lead to the emergence of an immune system; proteins that lead to the emergence of biological cells, atmospheric temperature and pressures shifts that lead to the emergence of weather; neurons that lead to the emergence of consciousness, and so on.
TWO CATEGORIES OF EMERGENCE
Sometimes a phenomenon is emergent because of the limits of our human knowledge—i.e. it escapes our ability to understand, explain, predict or reduce it to its individual components.
This kind of emergence is often found in cases of:
- Predictions—i.e. the weather (notoriously difficult to predict, because it is a complex system with too many variables for us to take into account)
- Patterns—i.e. in a river, there can be vortexes that swirl and interact with other vortexes according to their own rules, ones can’t be reduced to the laws that govern the movement of water
Philosophers generally call this kind of emergence weak (epistemological) emergence.
There may be another kind of emergence, though—although it is a debated topic—that is not just about predictions or patterns beyond our comprehension but that is really about something new being created that is more than just a byproduct or what philosophers call an “epiphenomenon”.
One of the most famous examples of this kind of emergence is, of course, human consciousness. We experience our own consciousness to be a very real thing, one that not only emerges from our brains (bottom-up) but that can also act on our brains (top-down), a phenomenon also known as “downward causation.” Simple examples of this would be the ability of our consciousness to do meditation to calm our own mind or therapy to understand and shift our own mind. In other words, something not only emerges in a complex system but can also have an impact on that system.
Philosophers generally call this kind of emergence strong (ontological) emergence.
EMERGENCE ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES
SCIENCES
Science is in many ways the study of emergence. The hierarchy of the sciences from physics, chemistry, biology, ecology, etc. is a ladder of emergent levels. Chemistry is built from atoms, but you cannot derive the periodic table by solving quantum mechanics.
The same is true of the interactions of molecules. For instance, similar to the example of melody earlier, the properties of water (transparency, refraction, etc.) are not properties of individual molecules in H2O. They are properties of the aggregate, and they depend upon the interactions of the molecules.
A cell is also built from molecules, none of which are alive in some definition. But the cell lives.
It might be said that there is a kind of central puzzle in emergence which is that each level depends on the one below it but cannot be reduced to it.
Years ago, SPACE explored the theme of entropy—the second law of thermodynamics that says everything tends toward disorder. But within systems that have energy flowing into them, order can also emerge. A simple example: if you heat a thin layer of oil from below, at a certain temperature the random motion of molecules suddenly organizes into a regular pattern of hexagonal cells.
In 1952, the mathematician Alan Turing published a paper called "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis."(Original paper here.) He showed mathematically that two chemicals reacting and diffusing at different rates can produce spatial patterns like spots, stripes, and spirals. These Turing patterns have been found in leopard coats, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the ridges on a fingerprint, all sorts of places. These forms emerge from chemical conversations between cells.
The English mathematician John Conway arrived at similar results from a different direction, looking at emergence in cellular automata best exemplified in his Game of Life.
In Conway’s Game of Life, there are simple rules that govern the interactions of a grid of cells that are each alive or dead. From this you get stable structures, oscillating patterns, things that move, things that build other things. The rules of Conway's Game of Life fit on a cue card and yet the complexity that emerges is unbounded.
Recently, in AI systems, we are also seeing unexplained behaviors and capabilities emerging from the rules that govern extremely complex computer algorithms.
These examples show that local rules and interactions can lead to unspecified global structures.
As mentioned, these structures can include life. Living cells form tissues and organs and eventually living, breathing organisms that in turn interact with each other to form yet further emergent patterns.
Consider, for instance, the giants swirls of starlings in the skies of Rome that occur only during the fall and winter months. The starling murmuration is quite a mesmerizing experience. The birds rapidly switch directions and roll in the sky like waves, creating complex kinetic patterns. And the noise! A crescendo of warbling, chattering and whistling accompanies the visual display.
Other examples of collective animal behavior abound: a school of fish, a colony of ants. Or even a college program like Dawson!
These structures are not a random accidents but the result of certain conditions. An interesting question might be: what conditions are needed for this emergence to take place? What energies need to flow through the college system, say, for the students at Dawson to emerge as whole persons and responsible citizens, individually and collectively? How can college foster the creativity and critical thinking of students and help them harness that energy toward the emergence of a better world for all?
To answer such a question, we may also need to look at the conditions that lead to the opposite—dark kinds of emergence, such as addictions, whether to substances, technologies or harmful activities, or the hardening of political divides, or physical diseases that emerge from the way our society operates.
In thinking about how we might foster thriving among students, other people, other creatures and nature in general, how might we also mitigate the various threats that have emerged to that thriving?
ARTS
Emergence is integrally related to human creativity and critical thinking, which are all about sparking something new that is more than just the sum of what came before— bringing together ideas, words, images, objects, people, communities in emergent new ways; allowing for the surfacing of new perspectives, paradigms and ways of seeing. As visual design professor Jenniver Seevinck writes, "Emergence is fundamental to creative thought in the sense that we find it hard to qualify an idea as creative if it is clearly implied by the preceding conditions"
Emergence is also naturally part of the creative and critical thinking processes. In the process of creating and reflecting, unexpected discoveries are made and possibilities emerge that are often a surprise even to the creator or thinker themselves and yet that can lead to a coherent new whole. Original creators and thinkers are familiar with the experience their process carrying them somewhere they never imagined they would go. In the words of playwright E.L. Doctorow, “Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
Below are a few examples from the art world of artists who have directly engaged with the theme of emergence.
Sculpture
Artist: Dustin Yellin
Work: Emergence
https://www.dustinyellin.com/projects/emergence
“… stainless steel sculpture that braids together three threads – the origin of the universe, the story of the birth of life, and the creation of computing – into a 10 foot tall human-like being. Building off the artist’s well known Psychogeographies series, in which hundreds of smaller images combine to make a singular bodily form, Emergence introduces a figure modeled from the World Tree, a mythological archetype found across multiple cultures that connects the Earth to the stars, denoting the central axis on which the cosmos turns.”
Artist: Haegue Yang
Work: Haegue Yang: Emergence
https://ago.ca/agoinsider/emerging-meanings
“Emergence” for this artist involves surprise, novelty—a phenomenon in which a system or entity develops new qualities that are distinct from its individual parts.
Yang combines disparate items to create anthropomorphic and alien forms that challenge the viewers expectation for classical art historical representations of the human form. Yang’s interest in material exploration and transformation, which arise from elemental forms, materializes the relationships between people and things to generate surprise and new considerations.
Interactive Art
Professor Jen Seevinck, mentioned earlier, is known for her research in evaluating interactive art systems that facilitate emergent participant experiences. She created an interactive art system for creative participant experiences called ‘Of me with me’ which consists of a drawing tablet and stylus interface, with a monitor, personal computer, internet connection and weblog for publishing. Participants draw with the stylus and the positional, angle and speed of gestural movement data is collected to feed the visualization running on the screen, in real time.
https://www.smartnoise.net/of-me-with-me
AI art
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5535
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9wr2hx1PY0&t=16s
“What would a machine dream about after seeing the collection of The Museum of Modern Art? For Unsupervised, artist Refik Anadol (b. 1985) uses artificial intelligence to interpret and transform more than 200 years of art at MoMA. Known for his groundbreaking media works and public installations, Anadol has created digital artworks that unfold in real time, continuously generating new and otherworldly forms that envelop viewers in a large-scale installation.
Unsupervised is a meditation on technology, creativity, and modern art. Anadol trained a sophisticated machine-learning model to interpret the publicly available data of MoMA’s collection. As the model “walks” through its conception of this vast range of works, it reimagines the history of modern art and dreams about what might have been—and what might be to come. In turn, Anadol incorporates site-specific input from the environment of the Museum’s Gund Lobby—changes in light, movement, acoustics, and the weather outside—to affect the continuously shifting imagery and sound.
If this year's theme sparks ideas for you, whether creative, academic, research, experimental or otherwise, we invite you to get in touch with us. We are here to help guide your explorations and can't wait to see what emerges from them!
