Tag Archives: Complexity

Sculpture. Installation. Drawing. Text.

“Mapping, ornament and other languages of systematic representation are a focus of my practice. My sculptural language transposes between the graphical and the spatial using the tropes of cartography, ethnographic ornament and scientific illustration. The resulting work is as much a map or model of itself as of its referent.”

Simeon Nelson is a sculptor, new media and interdisciplinary artist interested in convergences between science, religion and art, complexity theory and relationships between art, architecture urban sites and the natural world.

Pattern Finding and the Thirty-Seventh Move

“People have always searched for the “song beneath the song” – a way to discover, match, and predict the patterns of a complicated world. Every job, from firefighting to lawyering, demands that practitioners learn the patterns, say, of how a fire grows or an argument is made. But how deep do patterns go? Are there patterns that underlie it all? Can our computers learn them for us?”

Pattern and Meaning

“Pattern can be discerned at all scales that exist between the infinitesimal and the infinite. We humans oddly seem to occupy nearly the mid point in this scale, which has been commented on as a new type of anthropocentrism. Humans (and to varying extents other living creatures) have an inborn and intense predisposition to perceive, represent and create pattern to make sense of a perilous and confusing world around us. We have primordial awareness of pattern to make sense of our place in the scheme of things and to make meaning and purpose out of our finite and limited existence. Pattern is both a function of our perception and an attribute of the world. The entire cosmos could be said to be an eternally unfolding sequence of patterns.”

Simeon Nelson is a sculptor and installation artist. He is currently professor of sculpture at the University of Hertfordshire

Julius Colwyn: In the Midst of Things

  Throughout my studies and research I have found myself to be a nomad, in between disciplines, walking the strange places between the bodies of knowledge, a thought ecologist. My work is concerned with how we grow an understanding, how we can incubate a meaning within a metaphor, a metaphor in a pattern, the pattern […]

Dendrites, Brains and Frontiers Reimagined

Dr Marius Kwint is Reader in Visual Culture in the School of Art and Design at the University of Portsmouth, UK. In 2012 and 2013, he was lead curator of the highly popular exhibition, Brains: the Mind as Matter, on the visual and material culture of neuroscience at Wellcome Collection, London, and at MSI Manchester. His most recent major project was co-curating, with Sundaram Tagore, the Venice Biennale official collateral event Frontiers Reimagined: Art That Connects Us, featuring 44 artists from around the world on the subject of cultural crossing-points.

An interview with Ilya Prigogine

Considered one of the founders of complexity science, Ilya Prigogine was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1977 for his work on the thermodynamics of non-equilibrium systems. His seminal book, ‘Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature’ (written with Isabelle Stengers) shows how the two great themes of classic science, order and chaos, which coexisted uneasily for centuries, are being reconciled in a new and unexpected synthesis. This interview, with Yiannis Zisis, was recorded in 2000.

Art of the Brain

Halfway through his PhD program in neuroscience at UPenn, Greg Dunn was inspired to try a new experiment: using the brain structures he was seeing in the lab as the subject matter for his minimalist Asian-inspired paintings. When he finished his Ph.D, he bought himself a sensory deprivation tank as a graduation present. The gift marked a major life transition, from the world of science to a life of meditation and art.