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Jeanyoon Choi (b.1999) is a Computational Artist researching in interconnectivity and complexity through Multi-Device Web Artworks.

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jeanyoon.ch@oi /oi % cat disentanglement-and-entanglement

Disentanglement and Entanglement

2024-09-25

Disentanglement was a guiding promise of the previous century: you do this, I will do that, and the specialisation of each part will increase the prosperity of the whole. Separate responsibilities, optimise each one, and assume that local improvement will not damage another part.

That logic extends into everyday relationships. In a service encounter, a paying customer can treat an employee solely as the provider of a defined function. A failure becomes grounds for punishment, with little room for a relationship between people. Conflicts that might be resolved through patience become contests between isolated claims, each seeking its own optimum.

The strongest version of the principle says that a corporation’s social role is to maximise profit, leaving everything else outside its responsibility.

But in a complex world, no factor is wholly separate. Changing one part affects others, directly or indirectly. The clean separation can become a psychological comfort: a story that makes the world seem simpler than it is. It may work well enough in the short term while transferring consequences elsewhere or into the future.

Our reward structures still favour that separation because isolated performance is easier to calculate. A player receives a reward now while the long-term costs remain distributed and unowned. Without skin in the game, the person benefiting from the local improvement need not carry its eventual risk.

There may also be a feedback loop. As existing separations fail, anxiety and impatience make people demand clearer boundaries and tighter local control. That additional disentanglement further weakens the system’s ability to deal with its actual interdependence.

Could I model this dynamic and build a multi-agent, multi-device artwork around it? Each device would be a system participant; their connections would carry the consequences of their attempts at individual optimisation.

The premise is simple: optimising the part no longer guarantees an optimum for the whole. The more insistently we pretend to separate the system, the more forcefully its entanglements return.

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