The biggest bang: when science and art come together at World Science Festival Brisbane 2024, The Guardian, 15 February 2024
What happens when you cross creativity in science with innovation in art? Immerse yourself in this festival and find out
You couldn’t dream up a festival in which Annabel Crabb and Leigh Sales unravel the mysteries of the universe one day and you journey to the darkest parts of the ocean with a panel of marine biologists the next. Or where you can learn how Indigenous knowledge might direct the future of food, and where even toddlers can experiment with physics. But brace yourself, because this is World Science Festival Brisbane, and it takes place from 15-24 March.
From its inception in New York in 2008, World Science Festival has held fast to its mission statement that is at once visionary and pragmatic, aiming to “cultivate a general public informed by science, inspired by its wonder, convinced of its value, and prepared to engage with its implications for the future”.
The Queensland Museum has presented the festival since 2016, bringing the big questions of science into Brisbane’s streets, museums, parks, galleries and arts venues. Over 10 days visitors can take in shows, panel discussions and performances. From the playful Robowars to frontier discussions about artificial intelligence, expect not just cutting-edge technology, but visions of our future world.
The festival tackles some pressing issues, such as how humans and machines might coexist, how First Nations cultural burning practices might save us from future fire catastrophes, and how we can look fabulous in waste couture. As well as conversation panels, the program is packed with hands-on explorations, practical career development opportunities for STEM professionals and students, and solutions for the climate emergency.
By harnessing science’s real superpowers – knowledge and hope – events promise to educate and engage visitors, and perhaps even transform them. It’s little wonder that the New York Times called the festival format a “new cultural institution”.
The festival offers a program within a program by inviting esteemed and emerging artists working with science and technology to create a trail of artworks across the cultural precinct at South Bank. The Art/Science Program celebrates what is inherently creative about science and inherently innovative about art, rejecting the limitations that have set art and science in opposition.
From the Schools Challenge, in which Queensland schools will be paired with Queensland artists to create physical or digital artworks that connect with STEM principals, to headline talent including the open-media artist Karina Smigla-Bobinski, the architectural duo Snooks+Harper, the sound artist Philip Samartzis, and the First Nations artists behind the ghost nets of Pormpuraaw, the program challenges thinkers and dreamers to experiment together.
Smigla-Bobinski’s ADA exemplifies this spirit of collaboration. Making its Australian debut, ADA is a three-metre-wide helium-filled sphere, covered with hundreds of charcoal points, its kinetic possibilities only realised with other moving bodies, co-creating a drawing in time and space. Like so many of the events in the Art/Science Program, ADA rethinks the partnership between art and technology.
Queensland-based artist Briony Barr loves the interdisciplinary approach because “different knowledge systems and points of view come together to create something no one would be able to do on their own”. Her featured installation, Drawing on Complexity: Experiment 9, is a collaborative project with physicist Andrew Melatos that does the extraordinary work of materialising complex adaptive systems.
Over 10 days participants will create an agent-based model, usually simulated by computers, to reveal the unpredictable patterns that emerge when individual agents (you and me) interact. It’s riveting science that might seem daunting to understand but is made gorgeously comprehensible with Barr’s guiding rules and much colourful paper tape.
Such unpredictability is at the amused heart of Simulated Selves, by Tasmanian artists Svenja Kratz and Bill Hart. Playing with the anxiety surrounding AI while asking philosophical questions about selfhood, this installation features two AI-generated forms that may or may not be the artists themselves. Viewers are encouraged to chat with these avatars and ponder the implications of digital doppelgangers.
This is an artwork that arrives just as public discourse is consumed with the dawn of a new era of machines, and as Kratz and Hart have observed, now is the time to “engage and learn about it so that we can be more informed about the risks and benefits and help contribute to the discussion regarding application, access and governance”.
Simulated Selves allows festivalgoers to have a meaningful interactions with AI that might dispel fears, but more importantly allows viewers to formulate opinions through the cultivation of knowledge and experience, an outcome very close to the festival’s mission statement.
The only World Science Festival held outside New York, World Science Festival Brisbane has attracted audiences of more than 1.5 million since its inception. This year the collaborative methodology of the Art/Science Program reminds us that knowledge is an act of creation and that enquiring minds are creative minds. The festival is a chance for all of us to enter the laboratory of ideas, and delight in the questions while we search together for the answers.
