Current Events

Presented by the Interalia Centre, and Simeon Nelson

With Simeon Nelson, lead artist, Rob Godman, music, Nick Rothwell, software

Simeon Nelson presents two recent multi-media works, Anarchy in the Organism and Plenum, in a sculptural performance event at Rook Lane Chapel.  Anarchy looks at cancer as a complex system and Plenum looks at the balance of order and disorder in the cosmos.

Both works display a world of transience, of emergent fleeting pattern. Cancer is an unstable pattern in the body. Entropy is the irreversibility of time’s arrow, the increasing randomness or disorder in the cosmos.  Our bodies are only patterns that happen to be stable enough for our life span and of course this stability is precarious, cancer and other disruptions can cause catastrophe.

Anarchy’s computer coded organisms demonstrate growth, mutation and decay as normal aspects of being alive. Is cancer an aberration or is it an embedded aspect of being a complex organism? By situating cancer within a wider context of complex evolving systems from cities to trees to landscapes, this work attempts a reconciliation of cancer as a normative part of being in the world.

The installation at Rook Lane reconfigures both works to a cluster of four 55” screens on sculptural stands facing out from the centre of the room, within them Rob Godman, Nick Rothwell and clarinettist Kate Romano perform the work live. Around the perimeter of the room 8 speakers and subwoofer surround the audience in an immersive soundscape.