Cambridge LASER Talks: Arts in residency

Description

This talk is part of Cambridge LASER Talks

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Co-Chairs

• Satinder P Gill
• Chrysi Nanou

This Cambridge LASER highlights and reflects on artist in residence programmes within scientific institutions and academic departments, including Cambridge, bringing together different processes of translation and collaboration.

In the early days of artists residing in science institutions and academic departments, their purpose and artwork tended to be seen as an adjunct or parallel process to science rather than part of the process of doing and shaping science. Meanwhile, across the globe, there have been groups of artists and scientists creating within the ‘entanglements’ or ‘synergies’ of doing art and science, discovering new forms of art and making scientific discoveries. Such collaborations, interpretations, translations and transformations of imagination and knowledge are still a challenge to achieve in our scientific and academic institutions. We invite artists and scientists who have been involved in residencies, including the University of Cambridge, to discuss their experiences and aspirations and the transfer and translation processes of data between arts and sciences.

Speakers

• Natasha Freedman (Creative Producer of Cavendish Art Science Programme)

Natasha is a freelance producer and director working across the arts with experience of developing imaginative programmes that use artistic practice to explore the human condition and support human health, social justice and environmental wellbeing. She founded the pioneering performing arts programme at Chelsea & Westminster Hospital, reimagined the learning programmes for English National Opera and Complicite theatre company, and co-led the culture climate organisation Cape Farewell. She is also Creative Director at studio2009.

• David Blandy (Artist)

David was artist in residence with the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, where he created the interactive game, Lost Eons. This creates an alternative future world for Cambridgeshire, thinking about the way the environment could have changed after recovery from our climate crisis and the societies that might emerge if evolution was accelerated. His residency took place online, during Covid.

Miriam Akkerman, Mary Simoni (Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at RPI) and Charles Nichols have produced commissioned music based on Covid data, which you will be able to hear in a listening room (link coming soon).

• Miriam Akkerman (Junior Professor in Empirical Musicology at the TU Dresden)

Miriam performs the Transverse flute/live electronics, creates sound art, in a musicologist, who also does sound engineering. Her recent works include The Aesthetics of Biodiversity, CD 2022, curated by Sergey Kostyrko for the Global Young Academy, and The Tartini, CD released on Creative Source. Miriam edits Array, the journal of the International Computer Music Association ICMA.

• Charles Nichols (Associate Professor of Composition and Creative Technologies at Virginia Tech, USA)

Charles is a Composer, violinist, and computer music researcher who explores the expressive potential of instrumental ensembles, computer music systems, and combinations of the two, for the concert stage, and collaborations with dance, video, and installation art. His research includes spatial audio, data sonification, motion capture for musical performance, telematic performance, and haptic musical instrument design.

• Stefanie Reichelt (Scientist, researcher, artist and photographer)

She is the HCA UK/EU Science Strategy Manager for the Human Cell Atlas (HCA) initiative. From 2005 until 2021, Stefanie was head of the light microscopy laboratory at the CRUK Cambridge Institute. Her research included the development of new imaging techniques to enable the visualisation of molecules in cells for cancer diagnostics.
She desribes herself as a scientist and a photographer, which combine both her capacity to observe and to imagine. Her aim is to investigate the particular role of the image in the context of today’s epistemic function of laboratory-based imaging technologies. In science and technology images depict ideas. What is an image? Why is an image so powerful? She has curated, and developed Art and Science workshops and exhibitions in the UK and during residencies in India, Japan, and USA. Stefanie is was founder and curator of ArtCell Gallery, which has provided an exciting exhibition space on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus to local artists and the science community.

• Joanna Page (Professor of Latin and American Studies, Director of CRASSH)

Joanna’s research focuses on the relationship between science and culture in Latin America, and she has worked on a range of different media, including literature, film, graphic fiction and visual arts, particularly from Argentina, Chile, and Brazil. She is author of Creativity and Science in Contemporary Argentine Literature: Between Romanticism and Formalism (University of Calgary Press, 2014), Science Fiction in Argentina: Technologies of the text in a material multiverse (University of Michigan Press 2016), and Decolonising Science in Latin American Art (UCL Press, 2021).