Dactyl Foundation for the Arts & Humanities

Nov 6th – Dec 10th 1999

‘Information Paintings,’ an exhibit by James Gilroy also featuring “Don’t Let Go”, a digital documentary with James Gilroy & Larry Clark directed by Neil Grayson
and edited by Chris Schwerin.

Art is born at “the edge of order and chaos,” to borrow Christopher Langton’s phrase, where novel patterns are related to their predecessors, emerging from while transforming convention. According to Langton, who is a central figure in the field of evolution theory, life is only possible within a special equilibrium of order and disorder. The same is easily said for the evolution of art. Science has recently done much to inform the arts. Specialists in the phenomenon of self-organization–who would include Langton as well as Margaret Boden, Murray Gell-Mann, Stuart Kaufman, and lIya Prigogine–have increased popular understanding of how, overtime, order inevitably emerges out of disorderly chance events. [continue...]