Briony Barr. Juried Artist
Dreaming of the Sea. VENTSpace.
Artist Statement
Drawing on Complexity is an ongoing series of art-science experiments in which groups of participants follow simple rules to make a large-scale, collaborative drawing using lines of tape and become part of a complex adaptive system in real-time.
Ongoing since 2011, experiments have been run with fixed groups of people (3-30 people) or on a drop-in basis with the general public (up to 8000 people) for periods ranging from two hours to two weeks.
A real-time ‘agent-based model’, the evolving artwork visualises and tracks how decisions and interactions between agents give rise to larger, emergent patterns.
The rules for each experiment are designed by artist Briony Barr and physicist Andrew Melatos. Experiments have taken place in schools, festivals, galleries, and science institutions around Australia and internationally, including at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.
The ISEA 2024 drawing will be created using a set of rules designed for a recent 8-day experiment enacted with the general public as part of the World Science Festival Brisbane. Through the workshop, we will compare and contrast emergent outcomes.
About the artists
Briony Barr is a visual-conceptual artist who uses process-based drawing to explore ideas around structure, emergence, and the role of different boundaries and generative limits. Interdisciplinary research and collaboration are fundamental to her practice, and she regularly works with scientists, writers, musicians, dancers, educators and fellow artists, as well as groups of people to create art, books, workshops, and performances.
She is part of two long-term art-science investigations. Ongoing since 2012, Briony has worked with physicist Andrew Melatos on ‘Drawing on Complexity’ a project which uses collaborative drawing to explore and model complex adaptive systems. Since 2008, Briony has collaborated with microbial ecologist Gregory Crocetti as ‘Scale Free Network’. Together they have created a diverse range of projects which explore and visualise ‘invisible’ micro-worlds, including five storybooks and two graphic novels about microbial symbiosis.
Briony’s work has been presented in schools, libraries, festivals, conferences, galleries, museums, and science institutions around Australia and internationally. She is an Honorary Fellow in the School of Physics at the University of Melbourne.
Credits: Briony Barr and Andrew Melatos