Let’s dive deeper into the topic of emergent properties, which are the unique characteristics that result from connecting some underlying components. The high school student creates emergent properties by mixing vinegar and baking soda to simulate the frothing lava of a volcano science project, for instance. The frothy properties do not exist in either of the underlying components. Rather, they emerge from the interaction of the components.
Consider the Pointillist painting style developed by artists Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. The technique involves painting thousands of tiny dots to create an image. If you stand close to a painting such as Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,
you don’t actually see an image because you are too close. All you see on the canvas is a swarm of little painted splotches. As you step back from La Grande Jatte, however, your eyes begin to recognize certain images such as a woman with a parasol and a quirky 19th-century French skirt, various dogs, and sunbathers laying lazily on the lawn. Each little paint dot on its own is trivial, but it is the clustering of dots that creates the emergent properties of a Pointillist image.
The same is true for Roy Litchenstein’s pop art pieces like Whaam! From far away they look like large comic book images, but up close they are just clusters of colored Ben-Day dots.
Same with the giant photorealistic portraits of Chuck Close. Far away you’d swear they were photographs. Close up, however, they look like multicolored cell clusters. You step back a couple of steps, and then step back once more to locate the exact point where you see the face beginning to form in the soup of cell clusters. And then you step forward again to see the transformation again from face to cell clusters. Walk backward far enough and the property that emerges from Close’s cell clusters is the property of a lifelike human portrait.
The same holds true for murals made of tiny ceramic shards. The analog in music is percussive rhythms comprised of the clackety-clack of drum beats. A single clack is not music. Rather, music is created by assembling multiple clacks to form a rhythm.
The analog on a computer monitor is the retro video game comprised of blocky pixels (think, Pong, Space Invaders or Asteroids). Zooming in on one section of the mural or one phrase of the percussions or one corner of the video-game monitor, you encounter the basic building blocks of the work. Zooming out to a larger portion of the work, your senses will start to infer patterns, and you recognize the artist’s inherent order.
These examples show that sometimes the success of singular links is less about what elements are combined, and more about how they are combined.
In each of these examples, the individual components are basic, simplistic, elementary. But it’s the method of combining those components that creates emergent properties.
Chuck Close’s portraits, when seen from afar, are jarringly lifelike. They reflect a shimmering luminosity, especially in the eyes, making the subjects appear animated, just like breathing, living giants peering at you from outside a window. You can see the Subject’s human character in his portraits. But as you go closer, the illusion of aliveness disintegrates, revealing itself as an optical illusion on a flat canvas, delivering a subtle, lucid reminder of the fleeting impermanence of a person’s life. That’s an amazing lesson from a cluster of paint splotches!
Think about Seurat’s painted dots. His fine aesthetic only works because the dots are tiny and uniform in shape and size. If the painted dots were larger and more irregular, the image would inevitably appear cruder and more pixilated. If Seurat had been forced to work with ever-larger paint brushes, eventually he wouldn’t be able to create a discernible picture on a canvas of fixed size.
This observation branches out to several realizations.
First, the size of the paint brush is related to the size of the image. I guess that’s just another way of saying, If you want to cram more information onto your canvas — or onto any fixed piece of real estate — you need to shrink the size of your information. The more dots crammed into a fixed-size image, the smaller the dots need to be.
Second, the size of the paint brush is related to the quality of the image. When I say quality, I’m not talking about whether it is inherently good or bad. I’m talking about how refined or crude the image is. The larger the paint brush for a given image size, the cruder the image will be. The smaller the paint brush, the more refined the image can be.
Third, abundance and randomness are related. Sometimes two elements randomly come together and just work as a singular link. In other words, when they join together randomly they create emergent properties. For example, I don’t know… For example, your cat bumps against two drinking glasses on the kitchen counter, and one makes a sound whose pitch is a major third above the other, forming a pleasing spontaneous harmony. That’s a kind of random interaction that has emergent properties. The moment is so interesting that it strikes you and you forget to shush the cat for being on the kitchen counter.
That’s a fascinating idea, that two random elements can work together. Can more than two random elements spontaneously combine to form emergent properties? Sure, it’s possible. This dynamic is captured in lots of adventure movies involving chase scenes, and as the characters scurry through their environment, they capitalize on the random intersection of people, vehicles, objects, and luck to excite and delight the viewers. However, in the world that plays out beyond the movie screen, the more elements you’re hoping to link, the less likely they can be chosen randomly and still work successfully together.
A good example is the use of words. A single word is a tiny packet of information. A useful word like the word “help” is a concise packet of information that conveys meaning. If you yell, “Help!” on a busy city street, you may cause some people to turn their heads to see what’s going on. However, they will still need more information to understand the problem. That additional information may be communicated visually, such as if they see your coat is on fire or there is a thief running away with your purse. But absent additional information, the single word “help” is a salient but incomplete message.
You can complete the message by using more words, such as, “Help, he stole my purse!” or, “Help, my coat is on fire!”
It takes an abundance of words to write a paragraph, even a reasonably short paragraph. You’re unlikely to be able to pull a handful of words from a bag containing the entire English dictionary and find that your random handful of words forms a cohesive paragraph. The longer the paragraph, the less likely it could be created randomly.
If you give a typewriter to a monkey, it will not spontaneously type The Lord’s Prayer. That is, unless there’s some kind of divine intervention involved, in which case you not only have proof that God exists but also that God has a great sense of humor. “What are you gonna type next, Bonzo, the Book of Deuteronomy?”
The point is, the larger the number of units you’re combining, the less you can rely on randomness to successfully choose which units will work together. Abundance and randomness are related.
Fourth, abundance and skill are related. When you are deciding how to combine components such as paint dots, the more dots you need, the more skill you need. This may not be immediately evident, but think about it. There’s only so many ways you can arrange three giant dots on a canvas. If you shrink the dots and add more of them, you now have more ways to arrange them on a canvas. Creating salient images with more dots takes more skill. As you continue to shrink your dots and add more and more of them, the success of your painting to evoke a response in your viewer will depend increasingly on your dot-arranging skill.
Taken to an extreme, there are few people in the world that have the skill to pull off an original painting in the style of Chuck Close or Georges Seurat. Very few people have Chuck Close Skill (let’s call it, “CCS”) or George Seurat Skill (aka, “GSS”). These skills require mastery of their technique to create thousands of paint splotches in union demonstrating incredible judgement to decide how thousands of splotches can interact successfully. Abundance and skill are related.
Fifth, skill and scalability are related. When you have succeeded in developing the level of skill of a Georges Seurat, when you have GSS, you can apply your skill to most any subject and be able to create fascinating art with emergent properties. Your skill is scalable. Think about it. Georges Seurat happened to choose a beach as his subject for La Grande Jatte, but he could have applied the same technique to any subject. “Hey Georges, you want to do another beach scene? Go for it! Wanna do a mountain scene? Sure, Georges, go ahead and do it! Wanna do 10 more mountain scenes? You’re Georges fricking Seurat! You got this! You can do any type of scene you want because you’ve got that Georges Seurat Skill, that GSS. You have serious GSS! You have more GSS than anyone else! You invented GSS! You can go ahead and apply and repapply your same Georges Seurat Skill over and over and over again, and people would love it, Georges!”
Skill gives you scalability. Skill creates scale.