Office for Applied Complexity

Office for Applied Complexity (OfAC) recognizes that many of the most pressing problems of our time may only be comprehended by approaches across traditional disciplinary boundaries. We propose that new solutions are not to be had by overcoming or reducing the complexification of societal conditions, but rather by adjusting or even increasing social and institutional complexification to provide both greater freedoms and greater welfare simultaneously. Our immediate task is to comprehend the organisational frameworks and affordances which affect the dynamic tendencies of existing structures.

OfAC is an international collective founded in 2016.corrected_diagram

 

Mission Statement

OfAC recognizes that societies are now irreversibly complex.

Contemporary social formations and technical infrastructures exhibit dynamics that are developing with increasing complexity. The difficulty of devising adequate responses to multiple historical tendencies —from environmental deprivation and global inequality to colonialism, patriarchy, and reactionary perspectives—necessitates the coordination of an ensemble of knowledges and collective actions.

Plotting complexity is a necessary condition for positive societal change.

Progressing beyond existing obstacles requires organizational strategies and tactics adequate to confronting–and not merely opposing–the dynamic tendencies that continue to support conditions of immiseration. The capacity of complexity science to grasp evolving relations between system and environment in precise and measured terms provides new frontiers for knowledge and new dimensions of application.

OfAC intervenes to advance sociocultural complexification.

We see the need for modes of creative investigation, which gain their efficacy through the generalization and transformation of conceptual material across boundaries. We are interested in generating nuanced and scalable cross-disciplinary practices through the exploration and synthesis of conceptual and experimental horizons.

Understanding, translating and mobilizing complexity is our mission.

Organizers

Diann Bauer | Victoria Ivanova | Joshua Johnson | Suhail Malik | Patricia Reed | Keith Tilford | Natalia Zuluaga

Locations

Berlin | London | Miami | New York