Category Archives: Art

The Exquisite Corpse of Science

April 16, 2009 Tim Jones 9 Comments

How do different people and groups of people view science? What do they know about it? What do they think is important?

To help answer those questions – here’s a fun ‘Sci-Art’ idea with a serious side.

You see, proof that Big Science is alive and well at Imperial College, my colleagues Arko Olesk, Graham Paterson and I went crazy last month and invested in an A3 sketch pad and a felt-tip pen.

So armed, we’ve been accosting members of the public, scientists, and science communicators, and, looking over their shoulders in the nicest possible way, asking them to DRAW what they think is important about science.

We’ve made audio recordings of what was said whilst drawing and, in a bid to capture all this diversity in an intriguing and memorable way, stitched the pictures together in the manner of the surrealists’ Exquisite Corpse. A little photoshopping nicely finished this testimony to all our efforts.

A 14 yr old's view of science — A 14 yr old’s view of science

Pretty, but what’s been achieved here?

Our thinking was that long questionnaires and government surveys have their place, but they don’t catch those instinctive, spur of the moment thoughts and reactions that show where someone’s really coming from. We wanted to capture the ideas that get lost in a more calculated response. OK – we gave our subjects some warning, but we saw real spontaniety too.

On to our subjects and something of the learning…… We are indebted to Imperial’s Head of Physics – Professor Joanna Haigh, Programmes Developer at the London Science Museum’s Dana Centre – Dr Maya Losa Mendiratta, and our ‘public’ – Emma Sears and Gareth (14 yrs), for being temporary artists and great sports in equal measure.

To give you a flavour of what we learned from our statistically unrepresentative ‘spot sample’, take the youngest of our ‘public’ – Gareth. Given his relatively young age, I was struck by his breadth of knowledge: we have AIDs in Africa, perils of passive smoking, space clutter, hearing damage, nuclear weapons, carbon footprint, materials shortages, and nothing less than the “de-evolution” of the human race. A follow-up study might probe for depth, but he came over as a walking endorsement of the contextual focus of UK science teaching (although for me the jury’s still out).

Scientist Joanna Haigh chose to illustrate the scientific method, to which end she referenced her specialisation in atmospheric physics, especially topical given the field’s impact on the global warming debate (which all our subjects referenced).

Some of our subjects were quite complimentary about science journalism – others less so. And we saw a ‘blurring of the lines’ between what a group or public really is. Some of our scientists also dealt with the media, making them part communicator. When it comes to keeping up with the sciences distant from her field, Haigh reads the popular press, like New Scientist, rather than specialist journals.

Haigh was also strong on interdisciplinary working, a theme that resonated with science communicator Maya’s comments about scientists needing to avoid stereotyping in one field. Yet that idea can conflict with another view we got that it is the focused scientist who traditionally ‘gets on’. Behind all this I sensed a yearning for some enabling change in the scientific establishment.

Climate was perhaps THE common scientific theme, with Emma talking about water conservation and desalination. She also discussed affordable medicine, which resonated with Gareth’s comments on AIDS. The possibility of extra-terrestrial life (not so much UFOs – despite Gareth’s alien sketch) was another recurring theme.

Anyhow, my intent here is to share the idea, not this particular analysis. And I’ve also avoided academic discussion of communication models: deficit, PUS/PEST, hierarchical etc. – which this sort of exercise can inform.

Update 12th July 2009

You can watch the movie of this project here.

Art, Biography, Books, History, sciart

Royal Institution Speaker Calls for an End To Culture Wars

January 21, 2009 Tim Jones Leave a comment

Yesterday evening at the Royal Institution, I watched the respected biographer and academic Richard Holmes make an empassioned plea for an end to the ‘two cultures’ rift between science and the arts – a reference to the term coined by CP Snow in his Rede Lecture of 1959.

Coleridge with his biographer, Richard Holmes, at the RI last night. Photo Sven Klinge — Coleridge with his biographer, Richard Holmes, at the RI last night. (Photo Sven Klinge)

In a packed auditorium, familiar as the venue for the annual Christmas Lectures, Holmes challenged his hosts to do their bit by including humanities speakers as a fixture in the RI lecture programme. He certainly held the historical high ground, sharing a daiz occupied in another age by Sir Humphrey Davey, Michael Faraday and significantly the poet Samuel Coleridge.

Dipping into his new book The Age of Wonder, Holmes used the lives and achievements of explorers like Sir Joseph Banks and the romantic polymath Erasmus Darwin (grandfather to Charles) to illustrate an age when science and art moved together to their mutual benefit. He continued through the lives of the Herschels: from William and Catherine and the discovery of Uranus, to Catherine’s formative influence on the young John Herschel. Then on to Humphrey Davy and Michael Faraday, finishing with Charles Darwin in the mid-nineteenth century. Readers who enjoyed hearing about Joseph Banks’s culturally sensitive integration activities in this earlier post on the Otaheite Dog, will find more revelations in the same vein in Age of Wonder.

Holmes bemoaned the lack of general access to source texts, including Banks’s Endeavour Journal and Darwin’s Botanic Garden – another sign of the literary/science imbalance of two cultures thinking. Both of these works are wonderful pieces of literature as well as scientific documents. The Botanic garden is a compendium of virtually all 18th century science expressed as poetry, in a format where the footnotes are as inspiring as the main text. The good news is that both are available online.

Richard Holmes (Photo courtesy Sven Klinge)

Holmes believes that if there there was one event more than any other that influenced Snow’s proclamation on the two cultures, it was the horrific association of science with the atomic bomb. An audience member blamed the divide in the UK on the arts/science choices students were forced to make at A-Level. Whatever the reason, Holmes’s comments are a timely introduction to a week in which the two cultures theme figures large, with as part of the London Consortium’s Art and Science Now Programme, a mix of all-day conference sessions and receptions scheduled at the Wellcome Institute on Thursday, the Science Museums’s Dana Centre on Friday, and the Tate Modern Art Gallery on Saturday. More on those later.

UPDATE: My report on the Art and Science Now ‘Two Cultures’ event is HERE

Art, Film, Physics, Politics

Dr Atomic – A Poignant Blast

November 10, 2008 Tim Jones 1 Comment

Yesterday evening I spent three hours in one of the 850 theatres in 28 countries that were screening John Adams’s opera Dr Atomic , live from the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

I thoroughly enjoyed this modern opera. Set around the first U.S. atomic bomb tests in 1945, Dr Atomic explores the tensions, dilemmas, and decisions that occupied the minds of J.Robert Oppenheimer, his wife, and his project Trinity associates in the weeks, hours, and seconds leading up to the world’s first nuclear detonation.

Lines taken directly from declassified documents lent authenticity. As did a suitably sinister Atom Bomb, it’s crude complexity resembling a lash-up from a PhD lab, but radiating a pawl of edgy doom as it hung center stage.

Memorable moments along the way included the team’s sweepstake on expected explosive yield; Oppenheimer’s conservative estimate of 3kT (TNT equivalent) perhaps betraying a wishful regret that would later turn into his consuming guilt. And the other scientists, reluctant to put their money where their calculations had taken them – so massive, other, and beyond intuition were the predictions.

We also saw the quintessential moral dilemma that faces most if not all scientists at some point. When to speak up, protest, do-the-right-thing; take and act on the responsibility that knowledge has both blessed and damned you with.

Predictably, the finale was charged with tension and poignancy. The begoggled cast stared into the audience/horizon for what seemed an eternity – as the minutes, then seconds, counted down to the detonation itself. In the final seconds, a translucent curtain descended between audience and stage with the typewritten words “give me some water” and we heard the stuttering voice of a Japanese child.

Art, Chemistry, History, Medicine, religion

Fireworks (and the Very Useful Application of Bishops)

November 2, 2008 Tim Jones 2 Comments

As we approach the 5th November, many people in the UK will be considering which firework party to attend. But on the night, they probably won’t be thinking too hard about why they’re standing out in the cold, gripping a baked potato, and “oohing” and “aahing” to the explosive delights. Because the British public have been doing this for a while – 403 years to be exact, since that fateful day when a bunch of disgruntled catholics tried unsuccessfully to vapourise King James I and the English parliament. There you have it: gunpowder, treason and plot.

Thankfully, science as a social construct goes beyond applying the physical consequences of rapid combustion under containment to the government of the day. Centuries before Guido Fawkes got his catholic knickers in a twist, enterprising chemists were delighting expectant crowds at fireworks displays.

A popular 18th and 19th century venue for fireworks was the Vauxhall Gardens pleasure park in London. While the elaborate promenades, bandstands, and the ‘firework temple’ have all disappeared, youngsters can still be found unwittingly (and illegally) maintaining the firework tradition on the patch of public park that remains, as this picture from 2003 shows.

fwork2small1 — Fireworks - Vauxhall Gardens 2003. Photo: Tim Jones

The manufacture of fireworks has always been a risky business. Factories typically comprise many small and separated work units, such that if one goes up in smoke the remainder are isolated from the blast. This aerial photograph well illustrates the layout at the now defunct Standard Fireworks plant.

Fireworks manufacturies do not make for good neighbours, as this 1858 newspaper report of a terrible accident in central London illustrates (interestingly the year before Vauxhall Gardens’ final closure). While regrettable, the event deliciously opportuned some wry social commentary towards the religious establishment and aristocracy of the day.

Also of interest:

Coke and Borg’s Biography of Vauxhall Gardens (Guardian review by PD Smith here)

Archaeology, Art, Books, Chemistry

Mummy

September 29, 2008 Tim Jones 6 Comments

When it comes to buying books, I’m either very keen and go straight for the new hardback edition, or I’ll trawl the bargain basements for unwanted and long forgotten editions selling at three for a fiver. I’ve just finished one of the latter, and can belatedly vouch that Heather Pringle’s Mummy Congress is the most interesting, original, and frankly amusing treatises on preserved corpses you’ll find.

Maybe it’s old news (Mummy Congress was published in 2001), but it’s ghoulishly intriguing to learn that mummies have until quite recently been used to make paint for artists. Human flesh and bone, combined with the resinous embalming materials of the time, make all the difference in achieving the silky texture only Mummy can deliver. Available into the early years of the twentieth century, the paint left the market when the supply of mummies dried up.

Silky Texture — Paint made from mummies had a silky texture

Further research convinces me that despite the horrified reaction of artists such as Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Edward Burne-Jones, on discovering the true nature of what they had happily been throwing at the canvas for years (Burne-Jones even gave his tube of Mummy a decent burial in the back garden), our national galleries must be displaying a fair selection of canvases and boards that are essentially smeared with dead people.

According to Pringle’s sources, Martin Drolling’s L’interieur d’une cuisine, now in the Louvre, is a prime candidate, although in this case the mummies were of more recent French origin. But what about Burne-Jones? His pictures do have that atmospheric brownish aura about them.

Burne-Jones’s The Beguiling of Merlin (1874). Nice browns.

Science, in the form of mass spectroscopy, can help identify ‘mummy’ paintings. The molecules associated with bitumen, asphalt, and human remains all have their tell-tale signature. Yet the technique hasn’t been widely used, probably due to the disincentive of an invasive procedure, the results of which can only turn people off.

If anyone knows more about this fascinating topic please get in touch.

Art, events, Film, Reviews, Television

Thin Film of Technology at the BFI

September 26, 2008 Tim Jones Leave a comment

Yesterday evening I joined the British Film Institute’s ‘BFI 75 – A Story in Pictures’ on London’s South Bank, celebrating 75 years of film and TV culture through a mix of archive clips and interviews.

The evening was hugely enjoyable. What a delight to see Leslie Phillips, beloved of the Doctor and Carry-On films, take up the microphone with his trade mark saucy “Hello” . And to be transported back to 1901 with big screen footage from the Mitchell and Kenyon archive, beautifully restored, complete with live piano accompaniment.

Science and technology was represented by films about the railways and telephony. From John Grierson’s GPO Film Unit, that produced industry and transport films in the 1930s, was a sequence from ‘The Fairy of the Phone’, a fantasy involving female telephonists singing and standing atop telegraph poles.

Ironically, given the light coverage of science in the main program, later discussions and guest commentaries addressed the role of technology for enabling positive change in the industry, like the accessibility of professional quality, low cost, equipment. More exotically, Frank Skinner looked forward to a cinema world of wrap-around 3D, while another pundit held out for the holy grail of odorama (a low tech scratch ‘n’ sniff version has been done).

For further Reading on science in documentary film and T.V. See Timothy Boon’s Films of Fact: A History of Science Documentary on Film and Television

Art, events, News, Physics

Dr Atomic

September 21, 2008 Tim Jones Leave a comment

“Science and art belong to the whole world, and before them vanish the barriers of nationality“

Johann Wolfgang Goethe

That sentiment will be endorsed when, on 8th November, John Adams’s opera Dr Atomic is broadcast live from the Metropolitan Opera in New York City to cinema venues across the world.

Taking as its theme the first U.S. atomic bomb tests in 1945, Doctor Atomic draws on declassified documents to inform a production that explores the tensions, dilemmas, and decisions that occupied the minds of J.Robert Oppenheimer and his project associates in the weeks leading up to detonation.

In London, the 3hr 21m performance starts at 18.00 GMT, relayed to the BFI IMAX, Barbican, Curzon Mayfair, and Greenwich Picturehouse cinemas, amongst others.

Thanks to C and J for the tip-off.

Communicate Science