“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 meditation on contemporary scientific methodology. The installation investigates non-hierarchical communication and collective behavior by implementing such a system physically through many electro-mechanical actors.

The Installation consists of 1250 stepper motors arranged in a two-dimensional grid of two by two meters. Each motor is equipped with a pointer made from white acrylic glass. The radii of the pointers are chosen to intersect with the pointers of their neighbors. All motors are excited with the same alternating current that let them move initially in a random direction. Each actor is at the same time sensing its environment. In the event of a collision the pointers reverse their turning 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 runtime the system will form a spontaneous pattern on its surface. It seems like they are negotiating its position with nearby actors. By this, the system is showing self-organizing behavior. The installation drifts through various activation levels during its run time by this it constantly evolves new formations and constellations (crystallization).

PTPBTA acts as an epistemological instrument to look at dynamics that emerge from non-hierarchical and collective organizations/systems which can be found in many areas and on different scales like social systems, economics, climate system, and biology.