Stockholm: The Desert of the Real?

The  team of artists and researchers who work on “Microbes in The Desert of The Real – The Simple and The Complex” will in Stockholm December 2-4 to develop work for their public presentation at Hallwylska museet. The interdisciplinary events at the historical museum in central Stockholm will be held in November 2025. For their research they have formulated the following:

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 presentations in Sweden and Belgium both include artistic performances that takes its inspiration from microbes and scientific research talks that relate to the subject matter.