Typically one thinks of collaboration as being between human beings. But I believe that in a slightly different sense you also collaborate with your materials, onto which you do not simply impose your vision, but rather discover it there. To take a stock example, Michelangelo felt he found his forms in his stone, then set them free in his sculptures. (Kaiser, 2002b)

...And Kaiser (ibid.) discovered in 'Loops' (a multi-media piece he created) an emergent structure that was never the same from one run to the next. But what exactly is emergence? Lucas (2005a) defines emergence as:

System properties that are not evident from those of the parts. A higher level phenomena, that cannot be reduced to that of the simpler constituents and needs new concepts to be introduced. This property is neither simply an aggregate one, nor epiphenomenal, but often exhibits 'downward causation'. Modelling emergent dynamical hierarchies is central to future complexity research.

So emergence is the appearance of new properties in a complex system, which has evolved from recombination and mutation of elements and other complex systems already in existence. That is, what already exists evolves into the ‘adjacent possible’, and may, by doing so, give rise to new phenomena.

3.0 QUOTE 8, QUOTE 13,
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