Sorting Demon
Sean Peoples

In 1920, American child prodigy William Sidis attempted to outline the nature of animate and inanimate matter in the context of thermodynamics. He did so by using a thought experiment developed by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell in which a 'Sorting Demon' could hypothetically violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Simply put, the experiment described a very small and nimble demon (sorting fast- and slow-moving particles) who could theoretically defy the Second Law, which states that disorder increases over time. Sidis used this as a groundwork to argue how living things are a reversal of the Second Law. In Sorting Demon, Peoples looked at animating the inanimate while exploring the transgression between entities and their environments through a scrapbook of sculptures using a combination of assemblage and 3D printing.

Sean Peoples graduated from the Victorian College of Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Art in 2006. Selected solo and group shows include Primavera 2014, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2014; and Supreme Universal Order: Alpha of Alpha, Omega, and Channel G, West Space, 2014 and 2013 respectively. Sean is one half of The Telepathy Project, a collaboration formed in 2005 with artist Veronica Kent. Together they have undertaken an Australian Council for the Arts Barcelona residency, Last Ship residency in Mumbai, and a Bundanon Trust residency. Recent Telepathy Project exhibitions and performances have been held for MONA’s Dark Mofo festival, Hobart, Tasmania, 2015, Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2013–14, and Whisper in my mask, TarraWarra Biennial, the TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria, 2014.