20 October 2026
The INCOSE Michigan Chapter is pleased to host visual artist Xavi Bou for a remote presentation, jointly sponsored with the INCOSE Norway, Midwest Gateway, Blues, Colorado Front Range, and Enchantment Chapters. Because the five chapters are underwriting the event together, attendance is free and open to all INCOSE members.
Since 2012, Xavi Bou has been photographing what the eye cannot hold. Using a contemporary form of chronophotography developed in his own practice, he captures sequences of birds in flight and assembles them into single images, revealing trajectories, flight patterns, and natural choreographies that ordinary sight cannot resolve. The resulting photographs do not freeze a moment; they condense an expanded stretch of time into one readable frame. His projects Ornithographies, Entomographies, and Fluctus have been exhibited in contemporary art centers, international photography festivals, and natural science museums, and his work is currently on view at the Dennos Museum Center in Traverse City, Michigan.
For this audience, Mr. Bou will give particular attention to collective behavior — the starling murmurations in which thousands of individuals produce a coherent global form with no leader and no central plan, and in which that form reorganizes in seconds around an approaching predator. He will also discuss the development of the capture system itself: the requirements that drove it, the camera and software work needed to realize it, and the approaches that did not survive contact with the problem.
The themes run close to the center of systems engineering practice:
● Emergence — properties that exist only in the interaction of parts within a wider whole, which is both his subject and the opening definition of our discipline.
● Distributed control — global structure arising from local rules without a central controller, the governing question in multi-agent systems and autonomous fleets.
● System and environment — behavior that cannot be characterized apart from the context acting on it.
● Representation — rendering time-extended behavior in a single legible image, a problem our modeling tools handle poorly. This is not a systems engineering lecture, and it has deliberately not been reframed as one. Its value lies in seeing our central abstraction through entirely different eyes.
Check out Xavi Bou’s website