What strange creatures might exist in the 95% of the world we haven’t yet seen?
Step into a world of imagined species and strange new possibilities as Playing with Paper: Collage & Connection transforms Science Gallery Melbourne’s award-winning Digital Bricks into a living collage.
Created by Dr Marnee Watkins and Gina Grant, this project began with a simple fact: scientists believe only about 5% of the world is known to us. That leaves an overwhelming 95% full of unknown creatures, habitats and wonders – and ripe for speculation.
This collaborative art project connected University of Melbourne students with young artists from Ringwood Heights Primary School. Over 100 child and adult artists were paired up to explore what might exist in that mysterious 95%. Each artist created a collage in response to the brief, filling the top half of their work with their own ideas, then completing the bottom half in response to their partner’s. These playful, intergenerational exchanges were then re-imagined as a single, fluid animation using AI Deep Dream Generator – turning the Digital Bricks into a dynamic, shifting menagerie of shared imagination.
This work is part of the Child+Adult Art Response Project (C+AARP), an initiative that champions children’s artistic agency while giving undergraduate students meaningful, imaginative engagement beyond academic settings.
Video edit and compilation by Stephen Nicholls.
Science Gallery Melbourne’s Digital Bricks are over 200 LED screens embedded behind glass bricks, forming the largest combined pixel display in the Southern Hemisphere. Learn more.