Here's a major major throwback: Craig Reynolds' Boids
I believe that this project is one of the earliest examples of effective complexity in digital and generative art - where simple rules create a generative behaviour that ends up becoming a good mixture between order and disorder. In the spectrum between total order and total randomness, I believe that this sits somewhere in the middle, which is what makes it so effective. Though this slide can be adjusted depending on the number of boids in the system, and the complexity of the rules being followed.
The Problem of Postmodernity
This problem hits closest to home for me, as someone who is an acute observer/believer in the postmodern phenomenon. The shift away from modernist top-down approaches (where the whole must resemble the parts, or the theory of composition) to the postmodern beliefs of bottom-up generation, complex systems and chaos theory hold more truth in the contemporary world, especially one where technology plays such a decisive role. The world unfortunately just is not that coherent anymore.