Holon Loosely [About the Cover]

For two weeks in August of 2023, the waterfront docks in Melbourne, Australia, welcomed 130 cybernetic solar-powered "creatures" equipped with microphones, speakers, lights, photovoltaic cells, and on-board computers.During the day, the sun filled the creatures with energy.At nighttime, they communicated with each other via sound and light (see cover and Figure 1).Any biological species in the vicinitybirds, insects, or even humans-were transformed into observer/participants.Melbourne's Now or Never Festival commissioned Jon McCormack, a computer science professor at Monash University, to build the cybernetic creatures with his team at SensiLab, an interdisciplinary academic research compound he founded and still directs at Monash (see Figures 2 and3).McCormack discusses various other AI-based projects from his decades-long career in this issue's Art on Graphics article, but for the waterfront project, titled "Holon," he took inspiration from organizational principles detailed in the 1967 Arthur Koestler book, The Ghost in the Machine.A Holon is something simultaneously a whole in of itself, but also part of a collective networked whole.