The  team of artists and researchers who work on “Microbes in The Desert of The Real – The Simple and The Complex” will meet in Brussels and Ghent June 19 and 20, 2024 to talk about the relations between the simple and complex.

Here are some words to guide them:

The world is full of unknown unknowns and to help us sort all of this out and extend our knowledge increasingly complex computer programs are being used.  But there is a problem with this. As computer models or simulations become increasingly complex they also become harder to understand. This is referred to as Bonini’s paradox.

French poet Paul Valéry wrote: “If it’s simple, it’s always false. If it’s not, it’s unusable.” It is important to be able to simplify ideas without losing the complexities underpinning them, but how do we do that?

The group organises workshops and public events around Europe since 2023 and participate in other Vision Forum projects like Perplexity: Meetings in Art and Science. The public presentation include both artistic performances that takes its inspiration from microbes and their complexity and scientific talks that relate to the subject matter.