Artists announced for the WSFB 2024 Art/Science Program

Honouring the ‘thinkers and dreamers’ that have shaped our world in a captivating exploration of artistic and scientific achievements, WSFB returns with an exciting Art/Science Program in 2024.

An evolution of the popular Curiocity Brisbane, which offered a trail of artworks for audiences to discover across Brisbane, the 2024 Art/Science Program continues to extend the creativity around art and science in a program that features interactive artworks on a larger, engaging scale. With links into visual arts, STEM, First Nations culture, science and digital technologies, the Art/Science Program will encourage audiences to discover the connection between culture and science.

The artworks featured in the 2024 program include:

• ADA, Karina Smigla-Bobinski (Germany) – Australian Premiere
• Tectonic Resonance, Snooks + Harper with Philip Samartzis (Victoria)
• Simulated Selves, Svenja Kratz and Bill Hart (Tasmania)
• Drawing on Complexity: Experiment 9, Briony Barr (Queensland)
• Plus more artists to be announced soon.

As well as four collaborative artwork from Queensland schools and Queensland artists:

• Oakleigh State School with Rebecca Lewis
• Dutton Park State School with Lucy Reid
• Boonah State High School with Elizabeth Willing
• Chinchilla State School with Kim Walmsley

WSFB 2024 Art/Science Program is proudly supported by Tourism and Events Queensland

SPOTLIGHT ON 2024 ARTISTS:

Karina Smigla-Bobinski

Headlining the Art/Science Program is world renowned German-Polish artist Karina Smigla-Bobinski’s captivating artwork ADA, which will make its Australian debut at World Science festival Brisbane. ADA is a giant interactive analogue installation, featuring a helium sphere about three meters in diameter and studded with 300 charcoal spikes. Users are encouraged to engage with the kinetic sculpture by pushing and spinning the membrane-like globe to create impressions on the walls. The work is named after Ada Lovelace, a 19th-century mathematician who collaborated with Charles Babbage on his prototype computer, the “analytical engine”. Lovelace is credited as being the earliest computer programmer and she mused about the artistic potential of a machine that could create art. ADA will feature alongside new interactive artworks from Australian artists based in Cairns, Melbourne and Hobart promising a mesmerizing fusion of creativity and innovation across the ten days of the festival.

Snooks+Harper with Phillip Samartzis

In Tectonic Resonance, architecture duo Snooks+Harper team up with sound artist Philip Samartzis to create an immersive installation embedded with sound. The work utilises innovative sand 3D printing to explore the intersections between this technology and geological formation. This unique form is accompanied by rumbling geophone recordings from the ancient, yet highly mined, Pilbara region, provoking questions of our use of geological resources.

Svenja Kratz and Bill Hart

Simulated Selves is an installation by art-science practitioners Svenja Kratz and Bill Hartz that playfully experiments with artificial intelligence. Set in a room of AI content, the work features two AI-generated human forms augmented with digital avatar screens portraying the artists. Viewers are invited to converse with the avatars, but are they chatting to the artists themselves or human forms of intelligence. The artwork teasingly invites viewers to consider philosophical questions regarding what fundamentally constitutes the human self and the implications of an autonomous digital doppelgänger.

Briony Barr

Drawing on Complexity: Experiment 9 is an immersive, art-science installation inspired by complex adaptive systems. The artwork will evolve over an eight-day period using colourful paper tape, with no prior drawing experience required. This interactive installation is a real-life, real-time ‘agent-based model’ – typically a computer simulation used to study and understand the behaviour of a system made of lots of interacting parts (e.g. people, things, places, time). As more and more people (agents) interact and add their tape lines, patterns will form in the artwork. This process embodies a key feature of complex or ‘bottom up’ systems called ‘emergence’ – when all the smaller, simple interactions and feedback between the parts of a system contribute to the development of bigger, complex patterns. Experiment 9 is designed by visual artist Briony Barr and physicist Andrew Melatos who have worked together on different Drawing on Complexity experiments for over ten years.

The full Art/Science Program will be announce on 31 January with the full program announcement.