Reaction to Systems Theory text

What I took Systems Theory to mean, based on the text:

Systems theory is the idea that any system can be transferred to any group/medium. For example, key ideas or laws from physics systems can be applied to the workings of computers, and in the case of this text, this idea is being used to create systems aesthetics, a system thats allows us to judge a piece of work that is fair to it's context and media, but can be applied to all art/media. The writer suggests this can be done in three ways:

1- Looking first at the way a piece of work relates to the audience it is aimed at. (sociological context)
2- Looking at the piece of work in relation to other works of a diverse, post-modern nature. (i.e, not just looking at paintings when your judging a poster, but looking also at new medias such as digital imaging)
3- Using a flexible definition of New Media to judge it by (because new media is so diverse and constantly evolving that it is unfair to poinpoint certain aspects of it to define)

Inspirations derived from the text

I did not find the text very engaging or inspirational, however I did take an idea from the writers remarks about radical new technologies/media/objects becoming quite old quite quickly and the retrospective way people look at them. The idea is to take an old(it can be an old 'new media') media, and examine the way it was perceived at the time, the way is is perceived now, and look at ways to update it, and make it new again, applying interactive features if it has none, or updating them if it does already.

I also made note of the word 'hermeneutics' which was used not in the text, but in the class discussion of the text, quite frequently. I looked up this term, and discovered that-

'hermeneutics involves cultivating the ability to understand things from somebody else's point of view, and to appreciate the cultural and social forces that may have influenced their outlook. Hermeneutics is the process of applying this understanding to interpreting the meaning of written texts and symbolic artifacts (such as art or sculpture or architecture), which may be either historic or contemporary' [from http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermenutics"]

This is an idea that ties in quite well with one of my own ideas of exploring relationships between people and teamwork in interactive installations. Using interactive installations to get people to understand one another could be a way forward with the project.........