Humanity is made up of an irregular tapestry of relations involving six thousand million individuals who are co-evolving within an ecosystem of limited resources. The complexity of contemporary experience, the diversity of sensibilities and outlooks that intermingle within this tapestry, together with the vertiginous process of transformation in which we are immersed on a global scale, have generated countless tensions and uncertainties. "In order to understand this we must overcome mono-sectoral, linear technical schemas. We have to place ourselves in a totally different hermeneutics if we wish to grasp this new reality." (José Vidal Beneyto).

For instance, if we place ourselves on a geological, evolutionary timeline—bearing in mind that life on Earth appeared some 4,000 million years ago and Homo Sapiens only some 40,000—it is clear that we are the latecomers to the biosphere: one could almost say a "work-in-progress" that has barely begun. We find ourselves in an "evolutionary dawn", believing that we dwell in a reality that is, in fact, merely the representation of a dialogue that reflects our own thought process and conditions our outlook. It is a relational process that flows between the individual and the collective, between our internal reality and external reality, the consequence of whose encounter is perception. It is a flow from which the diversity of cultures that constitutes the phylogenetic memory, the memory of the human species, has emerged.

If we follow the trail of this dialogue, we could go back in time as far as the initial exchanges of information effected by the first micro-organisms that inhabited the planet. Thanks to those primitive bacterial interactions, we enjoy the atmosphere that surrounds us today. It is not in vain that "technologies such as genetic engineering and the globalisation of communications, that we consider the most advanced achievements of our modern civilisation, have been utilised by the planetary network of bacteria for thousands of millions of years as a means of regulating the planet." (Fritjof Capra).

However, the communication flow that articulates human relations currently manifests signs of serious interference, and there is a growing discontinuity and loss of harmony with the environment of which we form a part. According to the physicist David Bohm, "the true crisis does not consist of the facts that confront us, but of the thought that has engendered them. (...) One of the difficulties of thought is its tendency to fragmentation. All the frontiers and divisions that we make originate in thought."

What happens is that we often ignore the fragmentary nature of our mental constructions and place them in the category of "real". We go on to use them as the foundation for the majority of our opinions, beliefs and behaviours. Thus, fragmentation spreads like a shock wave, impregnating the contemporary human condition, from one's own individual conscience to the currents and structures of collective thought. Nevertheless, events engulf and crack our thought reality, making plain the extent of our alienation. What is appearing today "is a mediating description located between two alienating representations: that of a deterministic world and that of an arbitrary world subject to pure chance. (...) In the process of steering a narrow course between blind laws and arbitrary events, we distinguish new horizons, new questions and new risks." (Ilya Prigogine).

In counterpoint to this fragmentary outlook, systems theory, the dynamics of fluids and the emergent sciences of complexity propose a new dialogical, multidimensional, interdependent vision of interconnected processes. "Under the broad umbrella of complexity, we find a fascinating world of interlaced concepts, terms and instruments bubbling away, opening up new perspectives in almost all fields of knowledge. Dynamics, non-linearity, irregularity, order, chaos are just some of them, behaving as parts of an indivisible whole." (Andrés Fernández Díaz).

This renewed vision demands a rereading of history through countless fluctuations and bifurcations. As Antonio Escohotado points out, "the protocalculus of Democritus and Archimedes admits only to turbulent trajectories, not schematic ones, whereas its modern version—introduced by Newton and Leibniz—does the opposite, representing phenomena as simple, regular, periodic lines." Where the scientific renaissance wished to formalise a mechanics of solids, Epicureanism took fluid dynamics for granted. Where the West discovers dualities in linear time, oriental philosophy focuses on polarities, or extreme states of the same thing, in cyclical time.

This fluctuating course of attitudes and thoughts illustrates a resonant, non-linear cartography that, with few differences, connects the "everything flows" of Heraclitus and the whirlwinds of Leonardo with the I Ching book of mutations; and Baudelaire's ideas of correspondences with the fuzzy logic of Lofti Zadeh or the "everything is flow" of David Bohm. Memories and knowledge that regenerate and intermingle in a common present, both changing and perpetual, simultaneous and ambiguous.

An ambiguity that is described by the physicist Guiseppe Caglioti as "an intrinsic, interwoven aspect of the very process of perception. Each act of perception culminates in a dynamic instability of the interiorized image, where an incoherent quantity of sensorial stimuli coincides with coherent visual thought. If perception is a basic ingredient of life, we should look on this ambiguity not so much as a troublesome aspect of the perceptive catastrophe, but as a trajectory orientated towards the emotions, and it can therefore be considered as a permanent cultural value."

For centuries, Western science has been very reticent about the turbulence and unpredictability of flows, "given that there is no way of subjecting these realities to precise measurement, or of rendering their behaviour as a determinist equation." (A. Escohotado). However, when engineering acquired efficient techniques for calculating currents, when they remained constant—a sum of knowledge that goes back to the nineteenth century, when understanding of the movements of liquids and gases was at the forefront of physics—enormous amounts of money were invested in the design of aeroplanes, turbines, propellers, submarine hulls and other forms that move through fluids. Researchers were concerned with circulation through blood vessels and heart valves; with the evolution of explosions; with vortexes and whirlwinds, flames and shock waves. What is more, according to James Gleick, in his publication on "Chaos" (2), the problem of the atomic bomb, which was theoretically a question of nuclear physics, had largely been solved before the project commenced, and what bedevilled the scientists assembled at Los Alamos was in fact a question of fluid dynamics.

Furthermore, in the 1930s, organicist biologists, Gestalt psychologists and ecologists formulated the key criteria of systemic thought, whose essential properties are the properties of the whole that belong to none of the parts separately—they emerge from the organisational relations between them. The part is merely a pattern within an inseparable network of relations. Systemic thought is therefore contextual thought. The material universe is seen as a dynamic network of interrelated events. Within this development of systemic thought, the processual aspect was emphasised for the first time by Austrian biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy at the end of the thirties and later explored in cybernetics in the forties.

During the Second World War, what is known as systemic analysis arose out of military operations research. During the fifties and sixties, systemic thought had a great influence on engineering and business management to provide solutions to the practical problems of organisation and administration in large companies.

However, systems theory suffered its first failures and its limitations were made evident in the field of biology, due to the lack of mathematical techniques for dealing with the complexity of live systems. Only the discovery of the new mathematics of complexity, and the emergence of the concept of self-organisation succeeded in giving new momentum to the application of systems theory that, together with the development of microelectronics, were to have such a profound effect on transforming the most diverse branches of the social and natural sciences.

We can find certain resonances and coincidences between these concepts and some of the most innovative artistic manifestations of the past century. Scientific discoveries of the time were the subject of discussion in artistic and intellectual circles, elevating "the identification art/life to one of the most important theses of the twentieth century, by way of dadaism-futurism-surrealism or constructivism, up to the present day." (Simón Marchán). The vital experiences of the avant-garde were profoundly affected by the unrest and uncertainty in the social, economic and cultural, as well as political, spheres. The art of those times presents a vivid portrait of rebellion against hegemonic canons and established values. The central perspective breaks down, and eyes are turned to the multiplicity of simultaneous, apparently unconnected, irrational and random processes. The beginnings of a new aesthetic of non-equilibrium and complexity is formulated. The reaction against mechanistic and deterministic ideas is perceptible in the outpouring of new non-linear, ambiguous and processual forms of action and representation. This aesthetic, formal and conceptual approach to a conception of life beyond equilibrium corresponds to the new concepts and models mentioned above, that emerge from the different branches of science.

Marcel Duchamp himself, one of the most emblematic figures in twentieth century art, was profoundly influenced by the ideas of Henri Poincaré. This French mathematician and physicist is considered to be one of the precursors of the theory of dynamic systems and the mathematics of complexity that would be developed some decades later. In his time, Poincaré anticipated a kind of unpredictability, almost as marked as that which the meteorologist Eduard Lorenz was to describe in the 1960s as the "butterfly effect" (James Gleick). Poincaré's conclusions that "science cannot grasp things in themselves, but only the relationships between things," and that "outside those relationships, no knowable reality exists," (Janis Mink) could be considered as one of the keys to understanding not only emergent scientific research but also the new concepts that underlie the art of a whole era.

Both in science and in art, chaos has been considered as more than just an idea or a theory. It has been seen as a working method, an approximation to the model of life and source of creative processes. In fact, chance and randomness became constituent elements in the artistic practice of both abstract art and action art. As the artist Antonio Saura states in his notes on space and gestures, "in abstract expressionism, whether figurative or otherwise, the forms or preliminary structural schemas are destroyed in order to be organised anew in a rhythmic complex, obeying an unconscious, organic geometry that attempts the unification of the whole torrent of the picture (in its ebb and flow) in a single biological pulsation." (Simón Marchán). Saura explains his pictures from the standpoint of a new "mathematical-biological structuration, flowing like a continuous, organic river" ruled by the turbulence, vortexes and whirlpools of the fluid, dynamic structures of the image.

The attitude of rupture, the innovation of concepts, and experimentation with new materials and technologies that characterise the artistic avant-garde of the early twentieth century continue to evolve during the second half. Nevertheless, there is a significant distinction between the first period and the second. The avant-garde centres its plastic and visual investigation on redefining space: political, social and cultural space as much as physical space. "Openings and limits, perforations and movable surfaces carry the periphery to the centre and displace the centre outwards. A constant fluctuation sideways and upwards, radiating, multilateral, announces that man has taken possession—insofar as his human ability and conceptions allow—of the insubstantial, invisible but nevertheless omnipresent space." (László Moholy-Nagy).

In contrast, the great challenge for art in the second half of the century is not only to assimilate the new perceptions of space but rather to address the emergent appraisals of time, understood as the raw material of plastic and visual construction and expression. Time begins to occupy a crucial place in all attempts to build a bridge between fields of experience and the physical dimensions of the material world. Systems theory, relativity, quantum mechanics and cybernetics underlie the transition from the art of the object to the art of the process.

On the other hand, a relationship between messenger (body/material) and message (sign/information) characterises the emergent audiovisual culture of electronic art from the 1960s onwards. "When you make a film, you dye the chemicals with nature through the lens. But in television, there is no direct relationship between reality and picture, just code systems. So we got into time," explains Nam June Paik (Edith Decker) in relation to the electronic image. It is true that the video camera codifies the recorded image in abstract values that are then decodified at the moment of projection. During this process of abstraction, the videographic image becomes independent of the original input and changes into an image structured in time. "While light is the basis of material life, time is the indispensable, immaterial substance within which all existence flows. (...) But the element time is also a material that we can load, modulate and program in its flow," affirmed the mathematician and pioneer of infographic creation, Michael Noll, in 1967 (Simón Marchán).

This modulation of time, understood as programming, becomes the structural basis of the new artistic manifestations of recent decades. The artist's interest no longer centres only on the construction of forms, volumes and objects but on the processes intrinsic to their creation, on the architectures of the living and on the codes of formation and growth of living systems. The referent ceases to be the surface of the natural and material world, and becomes the structural and functional basis of its evolution. This occurs in the works by Yoichiro Kawaguchi and Karl Sims: two of the artists who were pioneers in the simulation of particles and in the application of algorithms of artificial evolution and self-organising processes to infographic creation in the 1970s and 1980s.

Yoichiro Kawaguchi