17.07 autopoiesis

castello priamar, savona

palazzo del commissario



alt­ra natu­ra e arte contemporanea

auto­poie­sis (from greek αὐτo- (auto-), mea­ning „self“, and ποίησις (poie­sis), mea­ning „crea­ti­on, pro­duc­tion“) refers to a clo­sed sys­tem capa­ble of crea­ting its­elf. the term was intro­du­ced in 1972 by chi­lean bio­lo­gists hum­ber­to maturana and fran­cis­co vare­la to defi­ne to the self-main­tai­ning che­mis­try of living cells. sin­ce then the con­cept has been also appli­ed to the fields of sys­tems theo­ry and sociology.
auto­poie­sis means self pro­duc­tion, creation.
the con­cept of auto­poie­sis has long sur­pas­sed the realm of bio­lo­gy. it has been used in are­as so diver­se as socio­lo­gy, psy­cho­the­ra­py, manage­ment, anthro­po­lo­gy, orga­niza­tio­nal cul­tu­re, and many others. this cir­cum­s­tance trans­for­med it in a very important and useful instru­ment for the inves­ti­ga­ti­on of reality.
in auto­poie­sis the various com­pon­ents may be ran­dom­ly fed in and the end result may not be known until it exists.
auto­poie­sis is useful in the making of art. think, for exam­p­le, of a pain­ting as a living orga­nism in which the intro­duc­tion of parts sug­gests the intro­duc­tion of other parts. the end pro­duct, while not pre-visua­li­zed, still beco­mes a tan­gi­ble thing of its own.
auto­poie­sis is „self making“, a cha­rac­te­ristic of all living sys­tems. the inter­ac­ti­vi­ty enga­ges the viewer/participant who in turn, effects the system’s evo­lu­ti­on and emer­gence. this crea­tes a sys­tem evo­lu­ti­on as well as an over­all group sculp­tu­ral aes­the­tic. auto­poie­sis pres­ents an inter­ac­ti­ve envi­ron­ment, which is immersi­ve, detail­ed and able to evol­ve in real time by uti­li­zing feed­back and inter­ac­tion from audience/participant members.
in the theo­ry, socie­ty is defi­ned as the nexus of com­mu­ni­ca­ti­on, and
the sys­tem can repro­du­ces com­mu­ni­ca­ti­on by com­mu­ni­ca­ti­on. the mind of human is
also con­side­red as an auto­poie­tic sys­tem, which is the nexus of con­scious­ness, and
the sys­tem can repro­du­ces con­scious­ness by consciousness.
eco­lo­gy is not trea­ted as a “sys­tem” but just as phe­no­me­na on the side of “envi­ron­ment” of social sys­tem. in order to get in the harm­o­ny with eco­no­mic growth and envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion, we have to look into the rela­ti­onship bet­ween eco­sys­tem and social system.
from the aca­de­mic view­point, cur­rent pro­blem is that the methods, concepts
and theo­ries are sepa­ra­ted in each disciplines.
the­r­e­fo­re the trans-disci­pli­na­ry frame­work to under­stand the fun­da­men­tal rela­ti­onship bet­ween natu­re and socie­ty is required.