“One of the most highly developed skills in contemporary Western civilization is dissection: the split-up of problems into their smallest possible components. We are good at it. So good, we often forget to put the pieces back together again.”

— Alvin Toffler in the Foreword of Order Out Of Chaos
by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers

The kinetic installation Putting The Pieces Back Together Again is a complex system with self-organizing and emergent behavior. At the same time, it is an artistic inquiry and a meditation on contemporary scientific methodology. The installation investigates non-hierarchical communication and collective behavior by physically implementing such a system via many electro-mechanical actors.

The installation consists of 1250 stepper motors arranged in a two-dimensional grid measuring two-by-two meters. Each motor is equipped with a pointer made from white acrylic glass. The radiuses of the pointers are chosen to intersect with the pointers of their neighbors. All motors are stimulated with the same alternating current that initially allows them to move in a random direction. Simultaneously, each actor senses its environment. In the event of a collision, the pointers reverse direction. This is achieved through a custom motor control circuit. Through the interplay of many entities, a complex behavior emerges on the surface of the installation. By manipulating the signals during run time, the system will form a spontaneous pattern on its surface. It appears as if each actor is negotiating its position with nearby actors. In this process, the system displays self-organizing behavior. The installation drifts through various activation levels during its runtime by constantly evolving new formations and constellations (crystallization).

The setup acts as an epistemological instrument to examine the dynamics that emerge from non-hierarchical and collective organizations/systems, which can be found in many areas and on different scales, such as social systems, economics, climate system, and biology.