Workshop - Drawing On Complexity — Experimenta

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Workshop - Drawing On Complexity

Fri 9 Aug 2019, 1:42PM – 2:42PM

Join artist Briony Barr in an experiment which combines collaborative, expanded drawing with an exploration of complex adaptive systems.

Over a one-day session, a group of participants (called ‘agents’) will draw on the floor with colourful PVC tape following simple rules determining placement of the tape and how to collaborate with others. As the lines build up over time, so will the emergent patterns – a hallmark of the complex adaptive systems that have inspired the project. This process is also inspired by ‘agent-based modelling’, a digital method used to model systems with many interacting parts.

From a bustling crowd of people, a fluctuating stock market to the behaviour of a weather system or grains of sand in a desert, complex systems can be found everywhere around us. They are studied by an extremely diverse range of scientific disciplines, from sociology to physics to mathematics. Like a ‘grass-roots’ movement, complex systems evolve from the ‘bottom up’, meaning larger patterns and behaviour (like a stock market crash or a hurricane) evolve from interactions and feedback between the parts. This unpredictable process is often described as ‘the whole being more than the sum of the parts’.

Part of a larger investigation into pattern formation, this experiment is part of body of work that will compare what patterns (social or aesthetic) will emerge when different groups of people make a drawing together within a similar set of parameters. Exhibiting as part of Experimenta Make Sense: International Triennial of Media Art, video documentation of each drawing will be presented over a three-year period, across regional Australia. In parallel with this one day experiment, members of the public are also invited to contribute to a separate drawing, based on the same rules. This will evolve on a drop-in basis over the course of the main exhibition.

Drawing on Complexity (The Experimenta Series) is based on a concept created by Australian artist Briony Barr in collaboration with physicist Andrew Melatos – The University of Melbourne. Previous drawing experiments have taken place at both science and art institutions including at The National Art School in Sydney, Museum Victoria (Scienceworks), The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Korea and the Santa Fe Institute in USA.