“Science, Art and Technology together form human culture. All are ways of discovering and exploring the world around us.”
Internationally recognised as an expert in the field of public engagement and creative science communications. Known for working with the latest ideas of cutting edge science and devising different kinds of programmes which target particular audiences.
Below are some examples.
Entangle exhibition in Bildmuseet, Sweden
What do you do when the visual art gallery you are exhibiting in doesn't allow text on the walls? And your exhibition is showcasing artists who are inspired by physics? How will the public realise this and know the physics which is behind every piece?
This was the constraint to be overcome for Entangle: Physics and the Artistic Imagination at Bildmuseet, Umea, Sweden November 2018-April 2019.
Every constraint brings a freedom. And so an audio cloud was produced in which the observations of physicists and artists about the same phenomena were laid side by side on audio - for the public to listen to going around the exhibition on headsets, their mobiles or at home online.
Five of artists in the exhibition reflect on Light, Gravity, Matter, Time, and Spaceside by side with physicists from CERN and Harvard University on the same phenomena.
It's in the gaps as well as the connections between their individual reflections and different ways of knowing reality that the imagination grows and the creative process happens.
The audio cloud was produced by Whistledown Productions.
The producers were Nathan Gower and Ariane Koek
Listen out below.
Interventions at CERN
A feature of the early days of the Arts at Cern programme, were interventions in the laboratories by the Collide artists in residence. The interventions were designed to get the attention of the internal audience of 6000 workers at CERN and make the artists' presence felt. Often these interventions also attracted the press such as Nature and The Huffington Post. This photograph of the Strangels intervention by the dancer Gilles Jobin and his company in the CERN library went viral around the world, attracting a substantial external audience to the programme.
Public Engagement Training for Scientists
This work involves
Training scientists in public engagement, using my experience as a BBC producer to teach them how to think about creating ideas to attract the public.
Teaching scientists how to present ideas to the public, how to be interviewed by the media, and how to pitch ideas to publishers.
For NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Techology and Art) I was commissioned to write a programme called Science in a Box which was teaching scientists these skills.
Creating Dialogue
This work involves
Producing talks, using my BBC producer expertise to select guests, create informed and illuminating discussions.
Programming interdisciplinary talks series and conferences, such as at the Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens, devoted to Movement, Matter and Light between a physicist and an artist. Or the Pestival conference held at ZSL on Insects and Design featuring designers, literary theorists and entymologists.
These are all strategically aimed at audiences.
For Arts at Cern, public live discussions by the Collide artists in residence with their physics inspiration partner were held at the beginning and the end of the residencies. These were designed to engage the external audience, to break down the barriers between CERN and Geneva, and to raise public awareness particularly amongst the influential international audience of Geneva hungry for culture.
