Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty

Image credit: Laura Splan, Baroque Bodies (Ambient Portals #1), 2022. Digital animation created with 3D nucleosome model and AI-generated image. 01:23 minutes. This work was made possible by the Simons Foundation. Created in collaboration with Adam Lamson, Science Collaborator and theoretical biophysicist at Flatiron Institute, a division of the Simons Foundation. ©2022 Laura Splan.

Opening Reception: October 5, 2024, 2-6pm

Exhibition Site

Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty, part of Getty’s 2024 PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative, offers artistic frameworks for comprehending complex systems in the 21st century. The exhibition presents emerging and established contemporary artists who engage with complexity in myriad systems, including robotics, evolutionary biology, data surveillance, global warming, and bacterial intelligence.

Cesar & Lois, Chico MacMurtrie, Laura Splan, Hege Tapio, and Gail Wight are premiering newly commissioned, transdisciplinary works under the Beall Center’s Black Box Projects, a residency program that facilitates collaborations between visiting artists and UC Irvine faculty researchers. Ralf Baecker, Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas, The Harrison Studio, Forrest and Lula Kirkland, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Julie Mehretu, Fernando Palma Rodríguez, Clare Rojas, Theresa Schubert, and Pinar Yoldas are exhibiting existing paintings, sculptures, and installations that explore complexity.

Today, many scientists and scholars across disciplines agree that an understanding of complex systems is vital for studying a world where conditions, events, and phenomena are too entangled to be observed individually.

Distinct from scientific models which produce predictable outcomes, complex systems have feedback loops that can have emergent behavior that organizes into new patterns. It is this constant dynamism between order and chaos that produces the complexity and uncertainty that is visible in the art in this exhibition.

This exhibition is organized by David Familian, artistic director and curator at the Beall Center for Art + Technology, with Gabriel Tolson, curatorial assistant. Special thanks to the Beall Center’s staff Jesse Colin Jackson, executive director, and Fatima Manalili, associate director, and to the staff of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts who supported this program.

Support for Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty comes from The Beall Family Foundation and from Getty.