Spectacular creations will be popping up all around town as the new event Curiosity Brisbane combines art and science into a trail of discovery.
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A series of 15 installations featuring immersive, interactive and multi-sensory elements will stretch across Brisbane from South Bank to New Farm from March 15 to April 3.
Brisbane Powerhouse artistic director Kris Stewart, the inaugural guest director of Curiocity, said the event is designed to spark conversation, as well as a little “civic pride”.
“There’s a lot of opportunities with the river and the weather, the canvas you can place and event like this one, which frankly you don’t get with other cities,” he said.
“Brisbane is a city of participants, they want to get in and do things, they don’t sit back in their turtlenecks and judge.”
The installations have been sourced from a range of local, national and international artists and scientists, with the unifying thread being the work of Tori-Jay Mordey.
The Brisbane-based Indigenous artist has created art pieces to help explain and identify all the works, and says she was given a “very broad brief” to come up with ideas.
“It was very hard to do because there were a number of sculptures which were still in the works that I had to reference from a stick-figure sketch of what it was going to look like,” Mordey said.
“So it was a very lengthy process but I think it turned out well.”
Mordey was on Thursday still painting the mural on one of the installations based at the State Library of Queensland called Shadowgram which takes pictures of participant’s shadows while posing philosophical questions and collating their answers.
Another installation, Da Vinci’s Dream in Captain Burke Park under the Story Bridge, sees full-scale replicas of “helicopters” drawn by inventor and artist Leonardo Da Vinci which curious bystanders can “fly”.
Lecturers from Griffith University have also devised an installation called Scatter, which sees solar-powered loudspeakers that hang from four-metre-high rotors ‘scatter’ sound in all directions.
Mr Stewart said he hoped all the installations highlighted how science and art could interact to inform and inspire.
“The central part of science is imagining something that doesn’t exist,” he said.
“We always say instead of just STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Maths) it should be STEAM with the 'A' standing for Art, because that’s where so many scientific ideas come from.”
This is the first year of the overall Curiocity event, which officially takes in both the World Science Festival and the new QODE technology and innovation conference in April.
Organisers hope by 2022 the combined event could attract a total of 500,000 visitors to Brisbane.
