"For some years now the activity of the artist in our society has been trending more toward the function of the ecologist: one who deals with environmental relationships. Ecology is defined as the totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment. Thus the act of creation for the new artist is not so much the invention of new objects as the revelation of previously unrecognized relation- ships between existing phenomena, both physical and metaphysical. So we find that ecology is art in the most fundamental and pragmatic sense, expanding our apprehension of reality." (Gene Youngblood, "Expanded Cinema", 1970)
"Cybernetics is simultaneously the most important science of the age and the least recognized and understood. It is neither robotics nor freezing dead people. It is not limited to computer applications and it has as much to say about human interactions as it does about machine intelligence. Today’s cybernetics is at the root of major revolutions in biology, artificial intelligence, neural modeling, psychology, education, and mathematics. At last there is a unifying framework that suspends long-held differences between science and art, and between external reality and internal belief." (Paul Pangaro, "New Order From Old: The Rise of Second-Order Cybernetics and Its Implications for Machine Intelligence", 1988)
"Model building is the art of selecting those aspects of a process that are relevant to the question being asked. As with any art, this selection is guided by taste, elegance, and metaphor; it is a matter of induction, rather than deduction. High science depends on this art." (John H Holland, "Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity", 1995)
"Thus my advice to model builders in the social sciences is to think in terms of social processes that might require algebraic structures that could yield catastrophe potential. Build models from an intimate knowledge of these processes while remaining aware of the algebraic requirements for catastrophes. The art of nonlinear model building is a delicate dance with two partners, algebraic forms that produce known effects and a substantive understanding of the complexities of social phenomena. Coordinating the two by mixing structure to match complexity is the job of the theorist, and it is the single greatest creative challenge of any researcher." (Courtney Brown, "Chaos and Catastrophe Theories", 1995)
"The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science." (Edward O. Wilson, "Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge", 1998)
"Much of the art of system dynamics modeling is discovering and representing the feedback processes, which, along with stock and flow structures, time delays, and nonlinearities, determine the dynamics of a system. […] the most complex behaviors usually arise from the interactions (feedbacks) among the components of the system, not from the complexity of the components themselves." (John D Sterman, "Business Dynamics: Systems thinking and modeling for a complex world", 2000)
"Models need to be judged by what they eliminate as much as by what they include - like stone carving, the art is in removing what you do not need." (John H Miller & Scott E Page, "Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life", 2007)
"[...] cybernetics is the art of creating equilibrium in a world of possibilities and constraints. This is not just a romantic description, it portrays the new way of thinking quite accurately. Cybernetics differs from the traditional scientific procedure, because it does not try to explain phenomena by searching for their causes, but rather by specifying the constraints that determine the direction of their development." (Ernst von Glasersfeld, "Partial Memories: Sketches from an Improbable Life", 2010)
"Holism [is] the art - in contrast with reductionism - of seeing a complex system as a whole. Holism knows the limits to its understanding; it acknowledges that the system has its wildness, its privacy, its own reasons, its defenses against invasive explanation." (David Fleming, "Lean Logic", 2016)
"The art of simplicity is a puzzle of complexity." (Douglas Horton)
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