What is Emergent Form?
Emergent Form is an interdisciplinary multi-part event featuring discussions, performative lectures, performances and guerrilla exhibitions in Toronto (Apr. 10-11-12) and Ottawa (Apr. 14).
With this event, ArtSci Salon was awarded an Outreach grant by the Fields Institute which was matched by a grant from the Italian Embassy in Ottawa (Ottawa Scienza). This much needed assistance gave us the ability to invite artists from Germany, Italy and California. The event was also possible thanks to a partnership with the Centre for Drama at the University of Toronto and the Digital Dramaturgy Lab led by Antje Budde
This event also marks the beginning of a 3 years long research-creation exploring the meanders of emergent life titled: Emergent: how to cope with complex phenomena
A Description
Nature teems with self-organized forms that seem to spring spontaneously from the smooth background of things, by mechanisms that are not always apparent. Think of rippled sand on a beach or regular stripes in the clouds. Plants, insects and animals exhibit spirals and spots and stripes in an exuberant riot of colours. Fluid flows in amazingly regular swirls and eddies. The emergence of form is ubiquitous, and presents a challenge and an inspiration to both artists and scientists. In mathematics, patterns appear as solutions of the nonlinear partial differential equations in the continuum limit of classical physics, chemistry and biology. In the arts and humanities, “emergent form” addresses the entangled ways in which humans, plants animals, microorganisms inevitably co-exist in the universe; the way that human intervention and natural transformation can generate new landscapes and new forms of life.
With Emergent Form, we want to question the idea of a fixed world.
For us, Emergent Form is not just a series of natural and human phenomena too complicated to understand, measure or predict, but also a concept to help us identify ways in which we can come to term with, and embrace their complexity as a source of inspiration.
