Science and the Nation is an evening of science by non-scientists, taking place at E:vent on Friday 29 May, 7–11pm,

Speakers: Revital Cohen, Martin Conreen, Emily Dawson, Anna Dumitriu, Ben Johnson, Kira O’Reilly & Janet Smith, Rob La Frenais, Brendan Walker

Guest curated by Tobie Kerridge & Elio Caccavale, more details and directions online at E:vent.

E:vent after show party

The Material Beliefs book pulls together two years of activity. The book accompanies the evaluation of the project by Emily Dawson, and is edited by Jacob Beaver and Sarah Pennington, designed by Hyperkit and published by Goldsmiths, University of London

This 160 page softback book is published as an edition of 1000, and includes essays by Mike Michael and Emily Dawson, and an interview with Tony Dunne. The book includes a DVD of documentary films, and will be available at the end of May 2009. More here.

Emily Dawson has written a report on Material Beliefs, which you can download here (PDF). This report was commissioned for the EPSRC (the project funder) and the project participants, and will be useful if you want to have a closer look at what the project aimed to do, and what it actually did.

Thanks to those who contributed, to the report and to the project. For those of us with short attention spans, some of the report features are summarised on the EPSRC grant page.

Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots are at Kinetica Art Fair, opening this Friday 27th February. Here’s a link to the event website, where you can see a full list of exhibitors and more details about the event:

The Kinetica Art Fair will provide collectors, curators, museums and the public with a unique opportunity to view and purchase artworks from leading international galleries, artist’s collectives, curatorial groups and organisations specialising in kinetic, electronic and new media art.

CDER is a group of objects produced as a collaboration between Aleksandar Zivanovic, James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau, you can also read a pdf of the CDER page from the catalogue.

This post is to introduce myself, I’m David Muth, a musician, programmer and artist who lives and works in London.

I joined the Neural Animat team a couple of months ago, and have been working on algorithmic visualisations of neural activity. This project is of particular interest to me, as it touches on philosophical questions about consciousness and decision making.

The method of writing computer code in order to generate imagery in real time has been of relevance to quite a few of my projects. If you’d like to find out a little bit more, please have a look at my website.

This was an evening event at the Royal Institution of Great Britain providing a conversation between participants of the Crossing Over exhibition and members of the public.

Initiated by facilitator Mark Lythgoe, a start point was the separation of science and humanities, as argued by C. P. Snow in his Two Cultures lecture of 1959. A discussion of collaborations that tried to cross Snow’s fences, moved on to some thoughtful attendee comments about the requirements and expectations of role and institution, rather than essentialist differences between practitioner types.

In this light I was reminded that the potential value of sci-art is not to do with the inspiring effect of art’s lens upon science methods, nor the nourishment of art practice by science outcomes, but rather the value of collaborative practice as it provides the resources and the time for people to do things that they might not ordinarily do, with people they might not usually meet.

Additionally, if these collaborations are transparent, and performed amongst the public, they start to work upon divisions between specialists and non-specialists, which is perhaps a more relevant division within contemporary society than Snow’s two cultures.

Above: the Bansai Cells project lets researchers discuss their work with different audiences

Material Beliefs showed three posters at the Arts & Technology symposium on October 14th at the National Theatre, organised by BioCentre. Here’s a quote from the BioCentre event page:

How can the arts conversation shape and develop public policy? Do the arts add to the hype or do they really help to inform the public of the truth about these issues? Can the arts and public policy arenas work more closely to further enrich the dialogue? If so, how? What can policy makers learn from the arts in this area?

Material Beliefs has been funded by a Partnerships for Public Engagement award, and is trying to do events that encourage a dialogue between biomedical researchers and members of the public. A key aim is to make labs permeable, to help researchers take their interests out into cultural contexts, and to use creative engagement to provide routes into labs for members of the publics.

The introductory poster shown at the BioCentre event talks about this aim in more detail. While attendees explored an exhibition at the National Theatre event, the poster contextualised two projects that have come out of the Material Beliefs collaborations, Vital Signs and Neuroscope.

Above: Matt James from BioCentre welcomes attendees to the National Theatre

Above: Material Beliefs posters

Designs from the Material Beliefs collaborations are featured in Nowhere/Now/Here, an international exhibition at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijon Spain. The show features more than 60 works ranging from everyday products, fashion, jewellery to installations and live performances.

Roberta Bosco wrote a full page article on Material Beliefs for the national paper El Pais, read the article online or download a PDF version.

The exhibition runs until 24th April 2009.

above: the foyer at LABoral

above: Jimmy with the Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots

above: Pink version of the Vital Signs monitors

Crossing Over opens tonight at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. The exhibition takes place throughout the newly refurbished building, located at the north end Albemarle Street near Green Park, London (directions here).

Material Beliefs joins Anne Brodie, Alex Bunn, Eggebert-and-Gould, Kathleen Rogers, Carl Stevenson and Phoebe von Held as exhibitors. Curated by Artakt the show explores exchanges in art & biotechnology, here’s a flyer with more information.

Come along and see the work, and join us also for an evening of discussion about our experiences of collaboration between biotechnology and design on the 22nd October, more details here.

Natural History is showing at Selfridges Wonder Wall exhibition space. It features the work of Kelly McCallum, Melanie Georgacopoulos, Eric Klarenbeek and also Biojewellery.

As a speculative project, rather than a realised product, it’s great that Biojewellery has been invited into a retail environment like Selfridges, and I accompanied Steve Jackman to film conversations with shoppers.

We spoke with anyone who was brave enough to chat to camera, about the work on show in the exhibition, and more generally about collaborations between designers and engineers, impressions of biotechnology, and the relationship between science and the public.

We’ll shortly be posting a short film with excerpts of these conversations, thanks for those who stopped and gave their consent! Thanks also to Dominique and her colleagues at Selfridges, and Jane and Lucinda who organised the exhibition.

Thanks to Dezeen who went to see the show at Selfridges and took these images…