The Affordance is the Message: Creative Media as Complex Systems

Abstract

The affordances of a creative medium strongly condition the creative artefacts the medium will produce. In this work, we present a formalisation of computational creativity (CC) media using the conceptual toolbox of complex systems (CS). We introduce the notions of emergence, collective intelligence and self-organisation, non-linear dynamics, criticality, multi-scale hierarchy, phase transitions, diversity of attractors, path dependence, and open-endedness, and connect them to the existing CC literature. Together these nine properties form a vocabulary with which creative media can be described and compared at the system level, while medium affordances are the design-level mechanisms that determine each medium's complex system properties. The formalisation emphasises the influence of each medium's affordances in determining what the medium can produce in creative processes. To demonstrate the proposed theoretical approach, we characterise a diverse set of media (r/place, Minecraft, cellular automata, Twitter, Boids, ...) using this vocabulary. The proposed formalisation under the CS concepts serves a dual purpose: it establishes a link between the affordances and realised practices of the medium, and it offers a shared lens for characterising existing creative media.

17th International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC 2026), Coimbra, Portugal