You are here: a system thinking approach to navigating an uncertain future

This research brings a new artistic approach that encourages system thinking as a strategy for navigating the uncertainty of humanity’s complex social and ecological challenges. Despite a mature scientific and philosophical understanding that the world is a complex system with entangled social, physical, and biological systems and emergent unpredictable behaviour, society largely continues to believe that it is a machine, separate from us, that can be controlled, and that complex contemporary challenges have linear causal solutions. The growing realisation that this worldview may be wrong contributes to a social uncertainty that elevates messages of doom, denial, and false hope in the face of ecological and social challenges while leaving the majority anxious as to what role they can play. By instilling an understanding of the complex-system nature of the world, i.e. system thinking, we will be better able to anticipate and respond to, or act to influence, the emergent behaviour of the world system. While investigating this proposition, the role of system thinking as cultural narrative is examined and a set of art practice principles developed for encouraging system thinking that account for social anxiety, are applicable across many art forms, and are centred on the need for diverse voices, neutral context-building, and the formation of innate system thinking. These have a conceptual basis in system theorist Donella Meadows’ guidance to “listen to what the system tells us.” Applying these principles using a more literal interpretation of Meadows’ advice a digital media artwork You Are Here is developed. As an interactive 3D geospatial data visualisation platform, the viewer is immersed in curated content sourced from any scientific, cultural or arts geospatial-based research. Suggesting the complex and dynamic relationship between the earth’s systems the work encourages the viewer to ‘listen’ — to become attentive and responsive — to how these systems interact and form system-based cognitive associations for navigating the inherently uncertain systems basis of the world. The initial connection of the viewer with this content is made through visualisations based on lived experience and in the initial work this is the scientifically modelled journey through the atmosphere of individual breaths, such as my father’s last breath. The conceptual development of You Are Here contributes to the fields of system thinking and digital media art on three dimensions. Firstly, epistemologically, through the use of lived experience and dynamic content in an immersive environment to stimulate a ‘speculative stumbling’ that enhances user responsiveness to the visualisations. Secondly, ontologically, through a curatorial framework for structuring and accommodating diverse ontologies and complex system relationships and encouraging the viewer to explore the work through their own self-narrative. Finally, as an open-source and open-ended platform that supports distributed staging, the integration of diverse research outcomes, and transdisciplinary research.