Kate Joyce

Santa Fe Institute complexity science, turned into images you can hang on a wall.

Quiet, contemplative, systems-minded. An artist at home among scientists.

Kate Joyce is a photographer based in her hometown of Santa Fe and a resident artist at the Santa Fe Institute, where she has worked among complexity scientists for years. Her subjects are time, change and ambiguity — things caught in the process of becoming something else. Her book Analogies, a five-year wordless exchange of images with software engineer Gordon Cameron, asks how human minds make connections.

Melanie Mitchell wrote its foreword, and put the stakes in plain English: in an age of increasingly intelligent machines, what aspects of humanness can we hold on to? Her answer was that our fluid, shared, entirely human capacity to draw meaning from a page of colors remains beyond even the smartest machines.

She'll be talking about all of this — attention as a human act, analogy without language, and what a camera knows that a model does not. Weather permitting, she'll take a walk with anyone who wants to come.

You'll take away: recalibrated attention. A morning with Kate is the closest thing on the program to a reset for how you look at things — which turns out to be the underrated skill when everything else is accelerating.

ONE VIEW — Analogies (kate-joyce.com). Melanie Mitchell's foreword frames it; the images do the rest. Buy this, it’s gorgeous.