Experimental Errors: navigating accidents in practice-based research
Description
Across art, science and engineering, experimentation, iteration and prototyping share a capacity to generate discoveries through failure. While their languages and institutional cultures differ, artists, scientists and engineers often employ similar creative methods. Experiments do more than test ideas: they create conditions for the unexpected to emerge, producing what Hans Rheinberger calls “epistemic things” – phenomena whose significance is not yet understood. Through making, the research question itself evolves. In this context, failure becomes a productive form of inquiry.
This lecture will explore how resistance, accidents and unexpected behaviours can reveal new possibilities, generating new questions, insights and directions for further research.
Details:
Date: Friday 29 October, 5pm to 6pm
Venue: Newton Room (201), Level 2, Electrical & Electronic Engineering Building (193), Parkville, The University of Melbourne
Format: In-person
Cost: Free
This event is part of a Culture of Experimentation series, held over a few separate dates.
The series explores the fascinating history, challenges, and methodologies of interdisciplinary collaboration across art, science, and engineering, and reveals how encounters between these fields have become a blueprint for new forms of knowledge synthesis and a driving force behind contemporary creative culture.
Follow the link below for information on the other sessions:
Culture of Experimentation: Converging Art, Science & Engineering
About the speaker

Dr Chris Henschke
Dr Chris Henschke is a media artist, designer and transdisciplinary researcher, working at the intersection of art and experimental science. He specialises in reworking the technologies and techniques scientists use to express fundamental qualities of nature. Dr Henschke has undertaken various collaborations including the National Gallery of Australia, 2004; the Australian Synchrotron, 2007-2010; the CSIRO nanomaterials laboratory, 2018-2019; and CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN,) 2014-2018 and the Australian Network for Art & Technology Synapse Fellowship at CERN, 2024.
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