The Arts Catalyst is a science-art agency that aims to extend the relationship between the arts and science. It organises and promotes exchange and collaborations between artists and scientists, and research in multidisciplinary laboratory situations. Events including exhibitions, education and critical debate, which are presented in a range of arts, science and public venues. Our funding contributes to core costs and artistic programming.
June's KOSMICA - the Microgravity Sessions will feature exclusively speakers who have floated in the air in zero gravity. We can guarantee that all participants have undergone at least 10 parabolas in a diving aircraft! Previously a resource solely available to trainee astronauts and scientists, pioneers Kitsou Dubois and Dragan Zivadinov opened the way in the 90s to artists flying in microgravity, and following a flight by The Arts Catalyst's curator Rob La Frenais with Zivadinov in 1999, over 50 artists and scientists flew in The Arts Catalyst's microgravity campaigns in Star City, Russia.
Kevin Fong medical doctor, researcher in Space Medicine and Extreme Environments and presenter of the BBC's To Boldly Go
'Novel Forms & New Materialities' explores the radical transformations to our material world provoked by contemporary science and technology. It asks how engagement with new forms and modes of material performance promises to conjure into existence unseen materialities, narratives and possibilities. An evening of presentations, film extracts and discussion follows an afternoon creative writing workshop. You are invited to book for one or both.
As molecular biology and nanotechnology converge, promising a proliferation of new, designed biological entities and smart materials, how is our physical environment and visual culture affected? What is at stake in these manipulations of material at this this scale? How might this reshaped matter in turn shape our visual, tactile world, as well as our dreams?
Science writer Philip Ball sets the context and considers what cultural, sociological and scientific factors have enabled these technological advancements, and our changing relationship with materials in this new "invisible era".
Oron Catts discusses his project Crude Matter. 'Crude' is the direct translation of the Hebrew word Golem, a creature created by magic, often with the sole purpose of serving its creator. In one popular account, the Golem grew stronger and stronger, but instead of heroic and helpful deeds, Golem became increasingly uncontrollable and even destructive.
A group of artists who make extraordinary and poetic machines: homemade satellites, rainbow and tornado generators, handmade particle accelerators, and weapons of mass amiability will talk about their projects and ideas. Together, their work provides a quirky and compelling critique of the allure and production of technology.
A group of artists who make extraordinary and poetic machines: homemade satellites, rainbow and tornado generators, handmade particle accelerators, and weapons of mass amiability will talk about their projects and ideas. Together, their work provides a quirky and compelling critique of the allure and production of technology.
A group of artists who make extraordinary and poetic machines: homemade satellites, rainbow and tornado generators, handmade particle accelerators, and weapons of mass amiability will talk about their projects and ideas. Together, their work provides a quirky and compelling critique of the allure and production of technology.
A group of artists who make extraordinary and poetic machines: homemade satellites, rainbow and tornado generators, handmade particle accelerators, and weapons of mass amiability will talk about their projects and ideas. Together, their work provides a quirky and compelling critique of the allure and production of technology.
A 15 minute documentary about the making of Rachel Mayeri's Primate Cinema: Apes as Family 2011 dual screen installation - a drama/documentary for and about chimps filmed at Edinburgh Zoo.
Rachel Mayeri's Primate Cinema: Apes as Family was commissioned by The Arts Catalyst and premièred at AND Festival 2011, Liverpool; was shown at The Arts Catalyst, London Oct 2011, screened at Nottingham Contemporary Dec 2011 and then at Edinburgh Art College for Edinburgh Art Festival throughout August 2012.
A details and free eBook downloads are available at www.artscatalyst.org/chimps
The project was supported by The Wellcome Trust and Arts Council England.
Prototype testing of HeHe's M-Blem: the train project. Commissioned in collaboration with AND Festival 2012 for participatory installation at Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester 29 August - 1 September 2012
Brandon Ballengée's Malamp UK project curated by The Arts Catalyst and including field work at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, shown as part of 'The Case of the Deviant Toad' exhibition at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in March 2010.
www.artscatalyst.org
Ansuman Biswas was born in Calcutta and trained in the UK. He has an international practice encompassing music, film, live art, installation, writing and theatre. He is interested in hybridity and interdisciplinarity -- often working between science, art and industry, for instance, or between music, dance and visual art. His central concern lies between science, work and religion. For the last decade he has been working on Zero Genie projects in collaboration with Jem Finer, who appeared in June's KOSMICA . He is a Trustee of The Arts Catalyst. Zero Genie was conceived as a response to the structure and history of the space program over the last 50 years. For millennia people have been travelling to the most remote regions of the cosmos using shamanistic technologies. Can we deride their experiences as being any less valid, any less real, than those of modern astronauts and cosmonauts? Who is to arbitrate on claims of yogic levitation, or persistent conspiracy theories suggesting that the American moon landings were actually a hoax constructed in a film studio? Judgements of fantasy and reality are conditioned by relationships of power. The vast expanse of space is a political territory, colonised so far by the industrialized, affluent powers. Its exploration is a First World, high investment pursuit, beyond the orbit of all but the whitest, richest individuals.
Carey Young discussed her recent artistic works which critique and satirise the 'management' and legal control of outer space. Using recent discoveries in astrophysics and space imaging, as well as creating new propositions in copyright law, her works use cameraless photography, installation, text and sculpture to investigate links between outer space law and ideas of landscape, colonialism and the 'real'. Young has exhibited widely including recent solo shows at The Power Plant, Toronto (2009), Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2009), Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (2010) and the touring solo show Memento Park. She is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Her touring solo show Memento Park is at mima, Middlesbrough.
We Colonised the Moon (Hagen Betzwieser and Sue Corke) explores an idiosyncratic world view based on popular science, flexible wikipedia knowledge, graphical illustrations and various display formates. Hagen Betzwieser will talk about his experience in The Institute of General Theory and Sue Corke will describe their projects Moon Scratch and Sniff and Lost in Space.
Agnes Meyer-Brandis whose lecture performance deals with art, science and weightlessness. Her starting point is an artistic project conducted under weightless conditions, entitled Cloud-Core-Scanner, involving a microgravity-generating flying manoeuvre carried out in collaboration with the DLR (German Aerospace Centre) in which she explores the boundaries separating fact and fiction, fantasy and technology.
Lewis Dartnell: Astrobiology - the hunt for alien life
'Astrobiology' is a brand new field of science, encompassing research into the origins and limits of life on our own planet, and where life might exist beyond the Earth. But what actually is 'life' and how did it emerge on our own world? What are the most extreme conditions terrestrial life can tolerate? And where in the cosmos might we reasonably expect to find ET? Join Dr. Lewis Dartnell on a tour of the other planets and moons in our solar system which may harbour life, and even further afield to alien worlds we've discovered orbiting distant stars, to explore one of the greatest questions ever asked: are we alone...?
Dr. Lewis Dartnell is a researcher based at University College London, studying how life, and signs of its existence, might survive the intense cosmic radiation on the surface of Mars. Alongside his research he writes regular science articles in newspapers and magazines, and has published a popular science book introducing astrobiology, "Life in the Universe: A Beginner's Guide".
www.lewisdartnell.com http://tinyurl.com/LifeInTheUniverse
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Dr Kevin Fong, KOSMICA June 2012
Novel Forms & New Materialities - Philip Ball
Naked Matter introduction to evening of talks
Radical DIY - Patrick Stevenson-Keating
Radical DIY - Alistair McClymont
The Making of Primate Cinema Aug 2012
B Ballengée Malamp UK (2010 final).mp4
Kosmica- 13/07/2011-Ansuman Biswas.m4v
Kosmica- 13/07/2011- Carey Young
