Experimental Art

kahneman_large.jpg
This weekend, the much talked about 24-Hour Serpentine Gallery Experiment Marathon will be taking place in the gallery's Olafur Eliasson- and Kjetil Thorsen-designed pavilion in London's Hyde Park. The brainchild of Eliasson and Serpentine curator (or Co-Director, Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects to be exact) Hans Ulrich Obrist, the Marathon aims to bring together artists, architects, and scientists to explore issues of time, space, and reality (all themes that run throughout Eliasson's own practice) and experiment with them in a public forum. An extension of Obrist's '24-Hour Interview Marathon' of last year, the event also harkens back to E.A.T's (Experiments in Art and Technology) infamous and highly influential '9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering' which took place in New York, in 1966, and featured a collaboration between artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Yvonne Rainer, and over 30 engineers from Bell Labs. Of the many projects underway this weekend, one that succinctly demonstrates the conflation of disciplines and cultures at work is a joint venture between Obrist and John Brockman (of the loosely-organized 'think tank' Edge), for which a broad range of artists and scientist were asked the question, "What is your formula? Your equation? Your algorithm?" Using a simple sheet of A4 paper, respondents ranging from Richard Dawkins to Brian Eno rendered their own scientific method, as art.