THREE MILESTONES IN THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ART AND COMPLEXITY: INDISTINGUISHABILITY, STATISTICS AND CONFRONTATION

INDISTINGUISHABILITY THE AGENCY OF THE CROWD

The mere presence of an individual as the product of an exercise of combinations immediately places it in a singular relationship with all other possible combinations. An example of this can be seen in the exercise of imaginary recombination and ramifi cation to be seen in Dutch artists Driessens & Verstappen’s work MORPHOcarrots1 (1997), where an ordinary carrot is lined up beside a series of carrots based on combinations of possible deformations (Fig. 1). Nothing can prevent us from seeing the common tuber on display in this context from looking like some specimen that might at any moment spontaneously mutate into one of its quasi-monstrous neighbours; by its mere presence alongside its mutations, the observer discovers in the common carrot such a latent capacity that the specific features of its outward appearance are relegated to second place.