Conditions is a network of installations with multiple channels of interconnection. The work oscillates between constructed and emergent, object and process, animate and inanimate, and natural and artificial. The machines see and communicate with each other, and their behaviour is both controlled and unpredictable. The apparatus interface with some of the core processual dynamics of complexity science, which is the study of how individual components interact to form complex, often unpredictable, systems. These processes include self-organisation and emergence and chaos: the same processes that underpin life.
LiDAR sensors measure audience proximity to the installations where, at a certain distance, audience members can stimulate specific conditions for the machines to operate far-from-equilibrium, a term which describes the constantly changing dynamics of natural phenomena in complex systems.
The work explores the complicated relationship between humans and nature, and favours systems thinking in which humans are integrated within the natural world. Through integrating dualisms and presenting tensions between untamed and contained numerosity, the work aims to expose the structures and biases that have separated humans from nature. The vessels enclosing natural processes suggest frictions between control and chaos, and the human endeavour to represent, encapsulate and isolate natural phenomena. Every experiment, action and observation has an effect – even admiration can yield unintended consequences – therefore, by adopting a bottom-up, systems approach Conditions ask audiences to attune to underlying processes and interact with the world through fluid perception and responsible mediation.
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