Truth versus Accuracy

As we run up to the Northern Art and Science Network Symposium in Leeds tomorrow (Saturday March 19th) let me point interested parties to an exhibition in York that runs until March 31st.
Sphere of Accuracies Zone of Truth is at York's Bar Lane Studios and includes cibachromes and prints by Tracey Holland, complex drawing by Greg Bright, intricate (and expensive) glass models of microbes by Luke Jerram and pop-art style prints derived from physics by Frederique Swist.
My reaction to the show was that it was much more rewarding than Visceral (see previous post), worked better as art and if you wanted to get into the science, there was plenty of that.
View the brochure for the show .
On Wednesday, as part of York Science Week Professor Gary Peters who co- curated the show (with Frederique Swist) and is a Professor at York St John, talked about the difficulties of of the art/science debate and the sterlity of much of the argument. He suggests that instead of trying to represent or explain science through art, we should be looking for the common impulse that underlies the desire to explore both. For an idea of where his work is heading, try this

Guy Morgan

Watch your metaphors

Spotted this in the Nature News Highlights from February 23 2011:

Philip Ball asks whether scientists are addicted to using imagery at the cost of misleading the public and themselves.

Guy Morgan

Gut feeling

The Visceral show at the Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin is in its final days. Billed as science meets art, and transplanted from SymbioticA in Perth,Australia, it made me ponder on what's the best way to fuse the two, but I'll get onto that later.

The Science Gallery itself is like a mini Wellcome, in a corner of the campus but separated by the elevated DART train that crosses the city, it has a glass wall onto the street and two levels. One euro for the brochure – essential for getting the gist of the show and then the exhibits.

• A mocked up lab which the public weren't allowed in but could be stared into like a cluttered vitrine. This was where the Semi Living Worry Dolls are incubated, based on the dolls that are given to Guatemalan children to whisper their worries to. These tiny dolls are hand crafted out of degradable polymer and seeded with living cells that eventually take over. Visitors are encouraged to whisper their thoughts into the dolls' “digital ears” .

• Afterlife: Immortalisation of Kira and Rama which uses foetal calf cells to recreate some kind of Egyptian inspired reliquary.

• Proto-animate which uses non coding DNA to produce images in Petri dishes, set up in a darkened version of an old fashioned school room complete with desks.

• The Cryobook Archives is a series of handmade books combining human and pig tissue and other cells. They're in a freezer, so they don't go off and spark ideas of information storage and the the old fashioned idea of binding real books with human skin – particularly those of executed convicts.

• Transjuicer which takes recorded songs about bones and cows, turns them into vibrations which pass through cow bones and then turns it back into music via a laser interferometer so you can listen on headphones.

• Latent Figure Protocol is an installation which uses cut up DNA sequences' bar code to produce patterns such as the international copyright symbol ©. The whole fuss about patents and who owns what in bioengineering is the thing that springs to mind here.

• Host – an installation of 200 live crickets (not that they seemed very lively) each in a glass jar, while a heavily pixelated video about the sex life of insects plays on one wall. On the other is an oscilloscope with a crackling recording of the activity of the aural nerve of a cricket listening to the lecture.

• Silent Barrage is possibly the most technically complex installation, so I hope I'm describing it correctly. In a space about four metres square there are rows of poles in which the public move about, those movements are detected and translated into signals that are sent to stimulate a bunch of nerve cells in a dish in Atlanta, Georgia. All this is recorded on graphs which surround the poles. Scientists hope that if they can understand how to quieten the activity in the nerve cells, that will help them understand how to treat epilepsy more efficiently. It seems to me that this a rare case of a work which not only uses science to create art but potentially offers some real scientific benefit in return.
  Talking to one of the explainers who were on hand to demystify the science, he thought it was scientifically the most interesting piece but didn't appreciate it as art. I thought it was the most artistically successful – or would have been if it weren't so technically sophisticated that the internet link kept breaking and it was out of action every other day.

There are other pieces too.

So what to make of it all? Going by the visitors' book, people enjoyed it. Someone had even travelled over from England especially to see it.

Over the past month there have been a series of talks and discussions about the science, ethics and technologies involved. In the past, SymbiotcA have described their shows as provocations, and if they get people thinking that's good. What troubles me is that I felt rather underwhelmed. The radio pieces I'd heard before seeing Visceral seemed rather unclear and now I can see why. It's possible that in confronting complicated science you can over think your response or get too involved in the minutiae.

Art is best at tackling emotion and big questions about existence. Make the metaphor too detailed and cram too many ideas into a piece and it can become unfocussed. It might still be entertaining, but then so are the push button exhibits at the Science Museum or the NASA website. Scientific images have a beauty of their own, if we're going to intervene artistically we have to add inspiration, not get in the way. Trying to explain science through art isn't possible, we can't describe the universe precisely through words and pictures - that's why we use maths – but we can express how we feel about it. That's what I would have told the worry dolls.

Guy Morgan

Making music with radioactivity and brainwaves

I came across this listening to Science in Action on BBC World Service last Friday (Feb4th) - it's towards the end of the show:
"Cosmic rays and radioactive music
At the University of Plymouth’s Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival, one composer decided to try and create a duet with radioactive particles and a violin."
To find out more go to:
Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival 2011
"Re-Sounding Science"
Thursday 10 February – Sunday 13 February 2011
One of the UK’s most innovative festivals of contemporary music with 3 days of performances and premieres of the latest in contemporary classical music, including performances, compositions and talks by Eduardo Miranda, Will Dutta, Ten Tors Orchestra, John Matthias, Luciane Cardassi, Plaid, Nigel Morgan, Quayola, liminal (David Prior / Frances Crow), Roy Ascott, Cafe Concrete and Alexis KIrke.

The Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival 2011 – titled “Re-sounding Science” - will re-evaluate, re-educate and promote artistically science’s role in society, sustainability and the arts. It will challenge stereotypes by drawing musical inspiration from the hugely positive part science and technology have to play in our future, both in our everyday routines and our creative life."
There's also the NeuroArts Festival running at the same time.

Another item from Plymouth can be heard on BBC World Service's Digital Planet where "Tracey Logan reports on the brainwave that has led to a whole symphony being composed in the mind of a computer. And she visits the Centre for Computer Music Research in southern England to see how music can be composed simply by staring at a computer screen." It's around 9 minutes in.

Posted by Guy Morgan

New Funding for Dialogues Seminars

We are pleased to announce that NASN has obtained new funding from Arts Council England to produce a new series of Dialogues Seminars. The series will start in April 2011 and it will consist of monthly seminars that will culminate with an event in April 2012.

Detailed information will available shortly in our website.

Posted by Hondartza Fraga
www.northernartsandscience.com

How Bees see the World

Database shows how bees see world in UV
By Neil Bowdler Science reporter, BBC News
Creeping Zinnia as we see it (left) and with UV shades made visible (right). The petals clearly appear two-toned to bees, the concentric colours drawing them towards the nectar Creeping Zinnia as we see it (left) and with UV shades made visible (right). The petals appear two-toned to bees, the concentric colours drawing them towards the nectar

Researchers are being offered a glimpse of how bees may see flowers in all their ultra-violet (UV) glory.

The Floral Reflectance Database (FReD) was created by researchers at Imperial College London and Queen Mary, University of London.

It enables researchers to "see" plant colours through the eyes of bees and other pollinating insects.

Bees have different colour detection systems from humans, and can see in the UV spectrum.

Details of the free database are published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE.

"This research highlights that the world we see is not the physical or the 'real' world - different animals have very different senses, depending on the environment the animals operate in," said Professor Lars Chittka from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences.

"Much of the coloured world that's accessible to bees and other animals with UV receptors is entirely invisible for us. In order to see that invisible part of the world, we need this special machinery."
How a cactus appears in UV light How a cactus appears in UV light

The researchers collected what's called "spectroreflective" measurements of the petals and leaves of a large number of different plants. These measurements show the colour of plants across both the visible and invisible spectrum.

Users of the database can then calculate how these plants appear to different pollinating insects, based on studies of what different parts of the spectrum different species see.

Scientists have inferred what colours insects see by inserting microelectrodes into their photoreceptors, and by using less invasive behavioural studies.

Seeing the world as insects may see it can reveal "landing strips" which are invisible to the human eye. These act to guide insects to the nectar they feed on.

These landing strips might take the form of concentric circles of colour or dots.

"Quite often, you will find in radial symmetrical patterns that there is a central area which is differently coloured. In other flowers there are also dots in the centre which indicate where there is basically an orifice for the bee to put in its tongue to extract the goods."
Greenhouse use

But what is the point of such a tool beyond giving researchers an insect's view?

Professor Chittka says seeing these invisible colours may have commercial applications in the greenhouse and beyond.

"Every third bite that you consume at the dinner table is the result of insect pollinators' work. In order to utilise insects for commercial pollination purposes, we need to understand how insects see flowers.

"We need to understand what kind of a light climate we need to generate in commercial glass houses to facilitate detection of flowers by bees."

Co-author Professor Vincent Savolainen, from Imperial College London, says the database also offers us new perspectives on how plant colour evolved.

"We hope this work can help biologists understand how plants have evolved in different habitats, from biodiversity hotspots in South Africa to the cold habitats of northern Europe," he says.

"FReD's global records may show how flower colour could have changed over time, and how this relates to the different insects that pollinate them, and other factors in their local environment."

via Guy Morgan

Bee there

Fri, 17 December, 7:30pm – 10:00pm

Rymer Auditorium, University of York, York

Celebrating the bee in science and art

The Bee Symphony: http://www.york.ac.uk/concerts/programme/thebeesymphony/

The evening is for people to become immersed in the sounds and rhythms of bees. In addition to The Bee Symphony, the programme will feature other sound performances and talks by scientists on current research on bees and the current perils that they face. Tickets: £10 (concessions £8); students. £3

via York in Transition

Guy Morgan