I really liked the first question (compare work Connect by Andreas Muxel with the Kinetic Sculpture by Art & Com), I think the answer seems easy but at the same time allows me to think about quite deep things.
The work Connect by Andreas Muxel represents the random itself in a closed system. The artist sets only the physical environment of the installation (suspensions, balls, motors, magnets). No one can predict what happens with the installation at a particular moment; it illustrates the uncertainty created by a simple set of rules. The work of Kinetic Sculpture by Art & Com is, in essence, a traditional sculpture that, ok, simply changes over time. The position of objects at any time is strictly programmed. It intentionally expresses values and things to grasp easily: first, the visitor observes “chaos”, then some “natural” geometric shapes and their movements, and at the end it’s assumed that cars are born from this beautiful geometry, like Venus born of sea foam. Such an applied thing can be successfully sold to any company: Pokémon, bottles of Coca-Cola or the Apple logo can be born from beautiful geometry with the same success.
The work “Connect” can only be claimed as an object of abstract art or, probably, as a popular science installation. For me, this work is more inspiring, as a whole, it seems as if something less perceptible. Like some statement about the randomness of life is embedded in it. In general, it seems to me that (probably) the more layers of associations the work touches, the more it is liked.
About the second question: in my opinion, all the work in this collection is somehow related to self-organization. Generally speaking, this is one of my favorite sets in this course, because almost all of these works has something to do with me. For some reason, the idea of observing an artificially created system with an artistically limited number of input data, or, so to speak, degrees of freedom, really fascinates me. It seems to me that this is a higher and more thoughtful level of work with translating ideas into a visual or symbolic language, because in this collection authors (mostly) work with abstractions. Such type of work is reallz appealing to me.
Separately, I want to add that in general, the work in this collection just expresses what I talked about in the discussion about algorithmic art.
A couple of years ago I was engaged in the project of the Polytechnic Museum in Moscow as an architect, but sometimes we held joint discussions with scientists who worked on the exposition. The idea of the new exposition was to convey technical and scientific ideas in the most understandable language for the audience; when I quit, the office was still discussing installation projects in the spirit of a model of a solar system with the scale of a room and with interactive screens for each object. But in fact, it seems to me that it is this collection that perfectly embodies the ideas that the team of scientists in Moscow thought about.