Stuart Kauffman has been probing the “deep structure” of life for decades. He is one of the founding members of the Santa Fe Institute, the leading center for the emerging sciences of complexity. His work therein started in complex Boolean networks in which he found “order for free” in a void seeming to consist of nothing but chaos. This lead him to highly dynamical yet self-structuring autocatalytic sets (now known as “Kauffman sets”) which eventually lead him to search for a general biology from which all of life could extrapolate. …

I have often been asked how I came to be interested in science and media after so many years as a BMX/skateboard/indie-rock/zine kid. It’s kind of a long story that I will do my damnedest to shorten here.

In her recent book Utopian Entrepreneur, Brenda Laurel describes a dialectic between the high art of the academy and the lowly wares of pop culture, writing, “Philosophical, political, and spiritual matters are seen to be central to the discourses of the arts and humanities, not the material of popular culture. Too many artists circumscribe their audiences by restricting themselves to a kind of peer-to-peer philosophical dialogue, conducted exclusively in the academy and the gallery.” Blurring the lines, she bucks the term “artist” and instead calls it “culture work,” adding, “It’s …