e-mail: fogliano@pucsp.br

This century witnessed the biggest history transformation ever happened in human society. Such radical changes in all fields of activities is due, mainly, to tremendous improvements in science and technology. These two activities, in mutual influence, seem to be evolving in a spiral path of growing complexity. In this way of evolution arts, philosophy and all others kinds of human activities evolve cyclically with periods of instability and stability. Technological and scientific discoveries and inventions act like a shock wave unbalancing the cultural systems and provoking crisis. When the human systems are unbalanced, the system itself search, by the behaviour of its components or the people that compose it, for a new level of stability by means of construction of new structure and organisation.

Calvino (Calvino 1990:20), with great sensibility points multiplicity as a important value to be cultivated by literature in the next millennium. In reality the major evidence we already can see not only in literature but in all the human activities, in these days, is the interrelation. The plurality of possibilities of interconnection can be seen in almost all kinds of languages and techniques of different expression systems like movie, video, photography, music, etc. Science, as Calvino says in his book (Calvino 1990), could be the place where we could go to find new ways to explore the world around us. If we follow Calvino and let science to be our guide in the winding roads of multiplicity, maybe we could dive in the deep waters of complexity that rules the frenetic and turbulent human activities and the life itself.

Contemporary science in opposition to a static world submitted to immutable and deterministic laws presents us a dynamic and unstable universe where uncertainty, random, multiplicity and chaos reign. Through this new scientific point of view, emphasis is not on phenomenon itself, but to the processes and structure from where it emerges. Therefore is important to have an appropriate tool to deal with these realities. Determinism is no longer adequate to describe our world. As an example of this situation, let us recall the history of the physics of this century, specially the Quantum Physics. New approach in analysis of complex problems can be found on modern thermodynamics. Scientists discovered that entropic phenomena, in opposition to the classic ideas, can create order instead disorder or equiprobability. Classic thermodynamics associates balance to order and disorder to unbalance; today scientists know that turbulent phenomena are highly ordered. When a system is under entropic conditions its components reach a new state, the coherent state (Prigogine 1988: 39-42). In this condition the constitutive particles of the system interact in distance. This fact refute the classical approach, the unbalance is the situation where matter reorganise itself producing multiplicity of solutions.

If we establish a relationship between thermodynamic systems and contemporary phenomena, we would be doing what Bertalanffy called Science Isomorphism (Bertalanffy 1993: 80-86). In accordance with his General Theory of Systems, complex systems of different nature can share the same structural and behavioural properties. Therefore is possible to transfer principles from one field to another, avoiding duplicate, or even triplicate, the discover of the same principles in different fieldbs of knowledge.

If we face the human society like an immense and complex system, composed of a infinity of concrete subsystems (like social systems), or conceptual subsystems (like fields of science), and if we assume that these systems behave isomorphycaly, then we can affirm that the laws that rule the physic universe are the same that rule the society as a system; therefore we could state that the chaos, uncertainty and probability governs the universe around us and our lifes as well.

There is a classical phenomenon that can help us to understand better the problem of complexity: the Instabilities of Bernard. Let us imagine a layer of water inside a kettle over a flame. There will be a temperature difference between the upper and the lower surfaces of the liquid. For a certain value of the temperature difference the process that predominates in heat transfer is conduction. As the temperature rises we can see appear convective columns which means that the system had to change the way to conduct the heat, so convection begins to predominate as a process of heat transfer. These columns are distributed in the liquid forming regular cells.

The graphic above shows the result of a computer simulation of a system composed of particles. The particles are represented by there velocity vector. The graphic on the left shows the random movement of the particles when the system is in balance. The right graphic shows the representation of the particles’ movement when the system is far from equilibrium. Note the emergence of coherent movement of the particles.

It is the emergence of columns of convection that deserve our special attention. Inside the columns particles move up while others move down. Despite what the appearance could indicate, the situation is not chaotic, in fact the situation is the very opposite. Inside the streams in the fluid the particles can interact in distances several times larger than there own sizes. A macroscopic structure appears inside the system. This fact points toward a very important property of complex systems: self-organisation and emergent behaviour. In the case of the water inside the kettle, the molecules that constitute the liquid system had to assume a more organised configuration to allow a better heat transfer.

An integration of expression systems, in analogy with thermodynamic systems, can be seen as a coherent state of the subsystems or elements that constitute it. Far from equilibrium these elements interact in order to allow the expression of more and more complex representations we make of the world. If we think about modern photography we will see it interacting with a lot of other forms of communication and expression systems like music, text, video, etc. This is a good example of how new forms of expression, like the technology and language of multimedia, for example, can (or must) emerge in order to make possible to us to describe the things of the universe around and even express our inner feelings, our imaginary and our passions.

New forms of expressions does not mean the death of preceding ones. Photography is now on a new level of complexity and the classical technologies based on photo-chemical processes are in a new context where digital technology plays an important role. Because of gain in possibilities of uses, production and the increase of interaction with others kinds and forms of communication and expression, photography enables us to express more complex representations of our environment and imaginary. Thermodynamics, therefore, can constitute the paradigm we need to understand and deal with contemporary phenomena. About this matter Prigogine comments: "Maybe these ideas can guide us in places where thermodynamics cannot guide us anymore, places where the important is the relationship between man and nature. Is the intensification of social relations that urban life allows at the same time the source of wastefulness, pollution and inventions, artistic and intellectual practices?" (Prigogine, 1992: 55)

Until this point we did not take in account the agent, or agents, that can take the system out of balance. When we studied the emergence of columns of convection inside the kettle, we understood that the cause was the heat of the flame. The system of water molecules had to change its system’s structure in order to allow a more efficiently heat transfer. But, when we think about cultural problems, what could be the agent that cause changes? This question certainly do not have a simple answer. But there is at least one thing that make cultural systems to show emergent properties on what consensus exists: technology.

The Belgian physicist David Ruelle (Ruelle 1993: 113-119) speculates about the possibility of making an analysis of an economic system comparing it to a liquid heated by a flame at lower side. In his interesting comparison Ruelle considers technology as the agent that can provoke systems instability. Economic systems evolves as the "economic heat" or technology imposes an entropic entailment onto it.

If we face photography from Ruelles’s point of view it would be possible to think that, like an economical system, photography also evolves due to technological pressure. But technology is also a result of scientific discoveries. So, thinking about photographic evolution requires the consideration of technological, scientific and artistic constrains. We can see each one of these fields of human activities as subsystems of a major one: the cultural system. In a spiral of evolution these fields provoke in each other, from times to times, the necessity for their own reconfiguration (crisis). As a consequence of this evolution the reorganisation of the entire cultural system occurs as well. Technology therefore is a very important activity in cultural processes because its products constitute the media to all kinds of human communication and representations. So, like Ruelle did, it would be worth if we also consider technology as the "cultural heat"; the agent that plays an important rule in the evolution of human cultures.

Impelled to keep and increase its niche in nature, human race has to know and represent better the universe around. Changeux defines the behaviour of man in nature by his activities in the environment. By moving lips, eyes, hands, the human being is able to communicate with others beings of his species and interact with nature. The brain is seen by Changeux as a "cybernetic machine-brain" that can only execute a definite number of tasks. To perform any task, it must have its representation in the brain. Otherwise no task is possible. Synthetically we can state that the apprehension of the world and the consequent behaviour depend upon how this "machine"is internally organised (Changeux 1991: 105-106). As a consequence of this statement we could say that all activities of mankind, including the scientific and artistic ones are originated from the impulse of self-preservation; to learn and represent the environment in order to get the best fit to it.

Photography and human experience are involved in a dense relation. Photography can offer to our eyes phenomena that allow us to learn about certain aspects of reality or even of ourselves’ interior, feeding our imaginary. Through photography we can, therefore, change our behaviour and relationship with the environment. The changes begin from the perceptive process which, by its turn, is an important element of a major process: cognition. It is important therefore to recognise the deep influence of photography as an element that can trigger cognitive processes in artistic, scientific and cultural production.

David Marr stated that our visual system is not a general instrument for analysis of distribution of colour and luminosity. It is basically a system designed by means of evolution to perceive objects in three dimensional space and bounded by edges. Our visual system can recognise these elements in the environment and put them to other mental systems in order to produce information interpretation. Everything we see is the result of interpretations that begin with information processing by a system that natural evolving, constrained by the physical exterior reality, produced. In universe there is no place for universalistic abstractions. Even the quantum mechanics deals with universal objects like electrons, atoms and photons can only explain the emergence of individuality. Physical evolution spread in all universe particular objects like the Earth and all the forms of life that evolved here (Gell-Mann 1994: 3-10). "Life is singular organisation between two kinds of existing physic-chemical organisations. And, beyond of that, the Hubble’s discovery about galaxies dispersion and the cosmic background brought the emergence of a particular cosmos with a particular history in which would emerge our own particular history." (Morin, 1996: 178).

Different species evolve and fit to environment in particular ways. Uexkül (Uexkül 1992) states that reality appears differently to different species. We could imagine each living being inside an invisible bubble, or umwelt. The umwelt delimitates the perception of each different species in a particular way. From this point of view we could conceive artistic and scientific activities as a part of the strategy that our species employ to get the dilation of our umwelt and thus increase the possibilities of permanence in our ecological niche. Images play a special role in visual memory; recording surrounding events or the inner complexity of human soul they constitute a very important agent in the process of expansion of our sensitivity to a cosmic reality.

Bibliography

BANCHOFF, Thomas F. Beyond the Third Dimension. Geometry, Computer Graphics, and Higher Dimensions. New York: Scientific American Library, 1990.

BERTALANFFY, L. von. General System Theory. New York: George Braziller, 1993.

BUNGE, Mário. "A World of Systems", da coleção "Basic Treatise on Philosophy ", vol. 4. Elsevier Publ. Co., 1975.

CALVINO, Italo. Seis Propostas Para O Próximo Milênio. Tradução de Ivo Barroso. São Paulo: Cia. das Letras, 1990.

CHANGEUX, Jean-Pierre. O Homen Neuronal. Lisboa: Publicações Dom Quixote, 1991.

COSTA, Luciano da Fontoura. "On the Most Advanced Signal Processing System: The Visual Cortex, its Modeling, and Implicatoins for Computer Vision", in Workshop sobre Computação de Alto Desempenho para Processamento de Sinais", 1993.

DEBRUN, Michel, M Eunice Q. Gonzales, Osvaldo Pessoa Jr. Auto-Organização: estudos interdisciplinares em filosofia, ciências naturais e humanas, e artes. Campinas: UNICAMP, Centro de Lógica, Epistemologia e História da Ciência, 1996.

ECO, Umberto. Obra Aberta. São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 1988.

EYSENCK, Michael, Mark T. Keane. Cognitive Psychology: a student handbook. East Sussex, UK: Erlbaum (UK) Taylor & Francis (3rd edition), 1995.

FOGLIANO, Fernando. Fotografia Eletrônica: A Nova Era da Imagem. Dissertação de Mestrado, Pós-Graduação em Comunicação e Semiótica. São Paulo: Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo.

GELL-MANN, Murray. The Quark and the Jaguar: adventures in the simple and the complex. London: Little, Brown and Company, 1994.

HALFHILL, Tom R. "Imagens Panorâmicas", in Byte Brasil, jun. 1995, pp.72-78.

KUHN, Thomas S. A Estrutura das Revoluções Científicas. Coleção Debates. São Paulo: Editora. Perspectiva, 3a. edição, 1994.

MACHADO, Arlindo. Máquina e Imaginário: O Desafio das Poéticas Tecnológicas. São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1993.

MORIN Edgar. Ciência com Consciência. Tradução: Maria D. Alexandre e Maria Alice S. Dória. - Ed. revista e modificada pelo autor - Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand Brasil, 1996.

OLIVEIRA, Paulo M. C. "Sistemas Complexos", in Ciência Hoje, vol.16, no.92, jul. 1993, pp.15-22.

PRIGOGINE, Ilia e Isabele Stengers. Entre o Tempo e a Eternidade. Tradução de Roberto Leal Ferreira. São Paulo: Companhia das letras, 1992.

PRIGOGINE, Ilia. O Nascimento do Tempo. Tradução de João Gama. Rio de Janeiro: Edições 70, 1988.

PRIGOGINE, Ilya e Isabelle Stengers. Order Out of Chaos. New York: Bantam Books, 1984.

RITCHIN, Fred. In Our Own Image. The Coming Revolution in Photography. Aperture Foundation, Inc., 1990

ROVALETTI, María Lucrecia.. "Teoria Geral de los Sistemas", in Signo y Pensamiento no. 15, vol. 8, 1989, pp. 45-52.

RUELLE, David. Acaso e Caos. Tradução de Roberto Leal Ferreira. São Paulo: Editora da Universidade Estadual Paulista, 1993.

SANTAELLA, Lúcia. A Percepção: uma teoria semiótica. São Paulo: Experimento, 1993

STEWART, Ian. Does God Play Dice: The New mathematics of Chaos. London: Penguin Books, 1990.

UEXKÜLL, Jakob von. "A Stroll trough the worlds of animals and Men", in Semiotica, Vol.89-4, 1992.

VARELA, Francisco J., Evan Thompson e Eleanor Rosch. De Cuerpo Presente: las ciencias cognitivas y la experiencia humana. Madrid: Gedisa Editorial.

VIEIRA, Jorge Albuquerque. Semiótica, Sistemas e Sinais. PHD thesis at Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, 1994.