Nodes in Recursion is a two-page paper brought to you by Kirsten Hurley. At its core, it’s about adaptive systems. She set out to write something that describes mechanisms and functions without leaning on morality or psychology. Her aim was to create a piece that is self-evident, and free of opinion- something that unites and abstracts truths that scale across disciplines. By abstracting across fields, the paper makes it easier to see patterns that connect biology, technology, and human behavior.

The paper is relevant to humans, neurons, elephants, butterflies, cats, computer systems, bunnies rabbits.... It doesn’t tell you what you should or shouldn’t do. It just highlights how systems function. It identifies leverage points- places where change can be introduced into a system with real effect. 

Alongside the paper, Nodes in Recursion is also being introduced through film. Hurley is using the emerging tools of artificial intelligence to create short videos and an accompanying film that bring the framework into culture. These works are not ideology and not prescriptions- they are explorations, using humor, narrative, and visual play to make the terms accessible and to show, rather than tell, how systems function. At a moment when synthetic media is entering public awareness, the videos also mirror the question at the heart of the paper: how perception shapes what we take to be knowable. Together, the paper and the film operate in tandem- one distilled to academic clarity, the other alive in cultural expression- both pointing to the same framework for understanding adaptive systems.

Stay Tuned for the release.