The Taxonomies Project

This paper presents Taxonomies, a STEAM project that can be placed on the intersection between art, science, and technology. In Taxonomies, art is taking the lead role, providing a goal for action, while sciences and computation provide a shared agenda and means for artistic creation. The project is a collaboration between the University of Southern Denmark, the Biotech Lab at Spinderihallerne and Rosborg Gymnasium, a Danish secondary school. During the past year a series of 3 workshops was designed, implemented, and run at Rosborg. Here we focus on the challenges, design solutions, and findings related to the third workshop, which aimed at introducing forms of creative, aesthetic coding suitable for art students with no prior experience and allowing them to explore algorithmic botany. Results include a general method to convert L-Systems to tangibles, an intuitive software simulator to create simple algorithmic plants; moreover, materials and methods developed worked well within the strict constraints of the project. A new edition of Taxonomies is being run in these months, and we are working on generalizing the workshop format to a reusable and shareable kit for other schools.