Life of Matter - FREE FUN - art and science workshops for kids 9+yo

Life of Matter - FREE FUN

Join us at The Pyramid at Anderston for a day of creativity and learning at our art and science workshops designed for kids 9+ years old. Let your child's imagination run wild as they explore the wonders of the world around them through hands-on activities and experiments. Our experienced instructors will guide them through exciting projects that will spark their curiosity and inspire a love for both art and science.

The APEX award, ‘Does cognition predate life?’, investigates the possibility of there being elementary mind-like properties in complex but non-living chemical systems. We call these mind-like capacities proto-cognition. Using methods from AI, chemistry and philosophy, we want to understand how cognition could have emerged from basic chemical principles. Our research stems from the emerging fields of basal cognition in biology (the study of cognition in basic life forms such as bacteria) and active matter in chemistry (the study of self-organising, nonliving systems). In our public engagement project, we will convey the concepts of proto-cognition, active matter, and self-organisation through specially commissioned video and sound art. Research on active matter and selforganisation produces a range of aesthetically striking and enigmatic phenomena that can be captured in video.

This will form the starting point of artworks to convey various impressions of agency (animacy). In workshops led by the artists, accompanying the exhibition, members of the public will be invited to create their own art exploring these phenomena. Our public engagement proposal draws on research on the perception of animacy given by very minimal stimuli. Such perceptions are normally interpreted as illusions or projections of agency onto an inert substance. Our APEX project raises the more challenging question of whether some complex nonliving systems are not completely inert and inanimate, and by introducing this idea to the general public we wish to start a conversation about our relationship with everyday material objects that we do normally treat as passive and discardable.

Project Partners: Glasgow Caledonian University, The University of Edinburgh

Host or Publisher Beetroots Collective CIC