How does life emerge from matter? How do we account for conscious awareness and empathy? What constitutes cognition, choice and purposeful behaviour with respect to machines, molecular processes, and organisms? Can art help to reposition our relationship to non-human nature and generate insights into the real by enabling us to become animal, plant or machine?

To mark the end of his Mark Tanner Sculpture Award exhibition Evolutionary Love at Standpoint Gallery, Dean Kenning will be in conversation with the artist Lindsay Seers to delve into some of these questions and the themes which have informed Kenning’s sensory, crawling automatons. They will consider how artistic approaches and methods can engage with and bring new perspectives to models of reality in neuroscience, fundamental physics and biology. With particular reference to the semiotics of C.S Peirce and the process philosophy of Henri Bergson, they will question how their amateur passions and collaborations inspire the growth of new artistic forms and envisage points of continuity across the realms of artistic and scientific research.