The Source of Novelty: Exploring semiotic and poetic mechanisms in biological systems

Abstract After describing how her interests in literary theory led her to complex systems research, V. N. Alexander explains how she found that poetics and the science of intentionality overlap. Drawing from the field of Biosemiotics, Alexander makes an argument for artistic and human agency, mostly by focusing on creative biological processes in and between cells. Providing numerous references to experimental work, she shows that biological systems do seem to use poetic sign processes to invent and to remember.