Jokes In Systems / Cliff Hammett

A response to incongruity, the sudden realisation of personal superiority, a cognitive mechanism for debugging thought – many explanations have been offered for how humour operates and how jokes do their work. But could they – do they – serve other purposes? Could the structures inherent in jokes might help us to understand patterns of disruption and emergence in ostensibly formal systems?

Jokes In Systems presented a number of experiments to AND Fair-goers: jokes written in computer code, card games with holes in their logic, a crazed ungovernable clock (pictured) that breaks the heuristic of control through simple stubborn automatism. Each shows how the logic of jokes might be embedded in an algorithmic or mechanical system, and points to what we might learn – about jokes and about complex systems – through the process.