A TOOLBOX FOR COMPREHENDING — AND CHANGING — THE WORLD
Systems Ultra explores how we experience complex systems: the mesh of things, people, and ideas interacting to produce their own patterns and behaviours.
What does it mean when a car which runs on code drives dangerously? What does massmarket graphics software tell us about the workplace politics of architects? And, in these human-made systems, which phenomena are designed, and which are emergent? In a world of networked technologies, global supply chains, and supranational regulations, there are growing calls for a new kind of literacy around systems and their ramifications. At the same time, we are often told these systems are impossible to fully comprehend and are far beyond our control.
Drawing on field research and artistic practice around the industrial settings of ports, air traffic control, architectural software, payment platforms in adult entertainment, and car crash testing, Georgina Voss argues that complex systems can be approached as sites of revelation around scale, time, materiality, deviance, and breakages. With humour and guile, she tells the story of what ‘systems’ have come to mean, how they have been sold to us, and the real-world consequences of the power that flows through them.
Systems Ultra goes beyond narratives of technological exceptionalism to explore how we experience the complex systems which influence our lives, how to understand them more clearly, and, perhaps, how to change them.

motw/Systems Ultra_ Making Sense of Technology - Georgina Voss.epub

SYSTEMS ULTRA : how to live in a complex world

Georgina Voss

United Kingdom and Ireland, United Kingdom

PS, 2024

Memory of the World Librarian: agía ákira

A toolbox for comprehending and changing our networked world by writer, artist, and scholar Georgina Voss
The world today is so complex that it diminishes our understanding of it. It can be difficult to comprehend the flows of power which run through the networked technologies, global supply chains, and supranational regulations that exist all around us and influence our everyday lives.
These are systemssets of things interconnected in such a way that they produce their own patterns and behaviours over time. Systems Ultra explores how we experience these phenomena, how to understand them more clearly, and, perhaps, how to change them.
In a series of scenarios, Georgina Voss shows us how to parse our complex world, looking at it through five themesscale, legacy, matter, deviance, and breakagevia contemporary industrial settings of ports, air traffic control, architecture and construction, payment systems in adult entertainment, and car crash testing.
In these human-made systems, what is designed and what emerges? What does it mean for a software-dependent car to break? What does the use of design software tell us about the workplace culture of architects, and therefore the limitations of architecture? What happens to port cities and workers if container ships keep getting bigger? Systems Ultra offers a toolbox for comprehending, and changing, the world.

2025-10-27