Resonance Spaces: Why We Must No Longer Control Systems, but Learn to Read Them
Abstract The prevailing understanding of systems is shaped by a paradigm that places control, steering, and clearly defined interfaces at its center. This perspective proves increasingly insufficient once systems cross a certain threshold of complexity. In its place, another interpretation emerges: systems no longer appear as machines with defined inputs and outputs, but as dynamic spaces of conditions in which meaning, behavior, and structure arise only through enactment. This essay develops an alternative description of such systems. It shifts the focus from control to resonance, from modules to layers, from storage to fields. Its point of departure is the insight that interaction can no longer be understood primarily as an exchange between separate units, but as the coupling of states that mutually modulate one another. In this sense, the classical interface is replaced by resonance—a principle in which systems are not connected, but attune themselves to one another. A...