Just a few quick nocturnal musings on some books and articles I have recently read. I am very interested in science engagement, both in museums and science centres, but also through sci-art and other alternative strategies. Quite a lot of literature on science engagement published in the 1990s up to the year 2000 appears like a struggle between people who advocate ‘interactives’ (hands-on engagement) for their accessibility, and people who fear the influx of ‘interactivity’ for creating, in fact, a new kind of passivity through mere putton pushing and an over emphasis on entertainment. While quite a few people seemed to agree that a mixture of ‘object and text based’ and ‘interactive’ engagement is probably the best solution, there was also a strong call for ‘third generation science engagement’. This ‘third generation’, following on from ’static’ and ‘interactive’ engagement, was often described as dialogue or discussion based and engaging beyond the space of the museum. As can be seen in many science museums, opinion areas and ‘discussion exhibits’ have become quite common. On some occasions they even appear to feed into current research or even policy-making. After the agitation and vibrant debate around ‘interactives’, I expected there to be quite a few articles and other contributions discussing ‘discussion exhibits’. But I have not been able to find any recent examples. No discussions about their link to ‘third generation’ science museums or critical analyses of their links to research or policy. But surely there must be! Therefore, I am issuing a ‘wanted’ notice as a call to anyone who may have information on this ‘case’…

Ah, and ‘Happy Halloween!’

(Wait a moment, this poster generator will come in handy today…)

Photo: Leon Muraglia

Four of my friends went to the Cyclotron in Oslo last Friday to attend a concert based on the research that is happening there. I managed to find the webpage for the event, but it’s in Norwegian (you might want to try the web translation). Apparently, the event was quite busy – I assume because it was both because of the music/cyclotron as well as the cheap beer – and had some interesting dynamics between people.

Photo: Leon Muraglia

As far as I can tell from my friend’s report as well as the webpage, the music was preceded by a tour of the cyclotron by a physicist. My friends seemed to like his style and the explanations he gave about physics relationship with with ‘Science’ and politics. As for the music, taped sounds from the cyclotron were used as well as liquid nitrogen (e.g. inside a loudspeaker), superconductors and a guitar. It was an experiment, so some things worked better than others, but generally, people appreciated the effort. Later in the evening, some students apparently started booing. One of my friends was explained that it had to do with a tension between the science and the humanities (?) department. Apparently, some science students wanted their space back or did not want intrusion by crazy music people – or maybe just wanted to have a quiet beer? Sounds like I missed some of this mythical art-science/two-cultures opposition business in the wild – damn! Does anybody have more information on this?

Image: Tomás Saraceno, Flying Garden. Source: Liverpool Biennial

Today (or rather yesterday, I should say!) , I treated myself to some inspiration from the outside world, away from my thesis. The events I had chose for this occasion were a talk on ‘Aquatecture’ and the ‘Radical Nature’ exhibition, both at the Barbican. Both events offered very interesting takes on ’substances’. At the center of many of the works was architecture and its perception as clunky and inert. By showing that architecture could be nomadic, invisible, boundary-defying – or that invisble things have, in fact, substance, too, this notion was challenged.

In the ‘Aquatecture’ talk, for instance, architect Frank Gutzeit talked about a way of building structures in the ocean out of something called ‘biorock’. Biorock uses electricity to make limestone grow on steel structures which then attracts reefless corals and other flora and fauna. So rather than dumping a ready-made rock into the water and fearing its erosion, the alternative process makes use of the composition and other properties of sea water in order to generate material from it rather than losing material to it.

The Open_Sailing project introduced the idea of a nomadic, self-sustaining international ocean station. Their fascinating project summary can be found here.

The exhibition to which the talks were conneced featured many familiar artists, architects and other inventive figures, amongst these some I had not heard of before. Philippe Rahm, for instance, who presented his ‘Pulmonary Space’. The work is particularly fascinating for me, because it explicitly deals with materiality and immateriality. Arguing against aspects of the philosophy of Hegel, Pulmonary Space intends to visualise what is often perceived as ‘immaterial’ such as air and sound. By having musicians ‘build’ cloth formations through the use of their wind instruments, Rahm draws attention to the substance as well as the space-making of air and sound. If I can read my hastily scribbled notes correctly, some of the blurb on the wall read:

‘Sound and voice are not abstract or dematerialised, even though they are invisible, they are no more transcendent than a stone or soil, and they most certainly do possess a physical, chemical and biological dimension.’

(Somewhere there is some punctuation missing I feel…) Waves possess architectual form, the materiality of air is used by organisms such as viruses. Rahm seems to work on this theme in several other works, for instance, Paradise Now! which creates spaces through smell. Molly Wright Steenson has written an interesting post on her blog on Rahm’s ‘invisible environment’ and the ‘new geography’ he envisions. I’d like to look into this a little more in the future!

Tomás Saraceno had devised another air-inspired concept, that of the ‘flying garden’ – part of his ‘Air-Port-City’ series. Again, a nomadic structure, this time its structure and inhabitants designed to be ‘air-sufficient’. Whereas Buckminster Fuller’s design focused on the perfection of the triangle, Saraceno has formed an almost spiritual bond with the ‘bubble’. A more in-depth explanation of the project can be downloaded here (PDF).

A take on invisibility and chaos appeared in the form of ‘Symbiosishood’ by architects ‘R&Sie(n)’. I first thought the name was a play with the German words for his and her (er und sie), but it turned out that it was a play on the French word for ‘heresy’. That made more sense! The ‘Symbiosishood’ piece was fascinating not only in terms of its location (a minefield between North and South Korea), but also its relation to its plant environment, which continues to proliferate because of the adverse political situation and ‘redefines its own rights in monstrous uncontrolled entropy’ – according to the architects. The building, its design based on a termite mound and its eccentric surface entirely camouflaged with an ‘invasive’ plant species, becomes symbolic of the ‘disease of the location’. The amusing thing is that when you see the blueprints, they contain quite ‘ordinary’ living spaces such as a bookshop or a cafe etc. What a combination! After having a look around their exhibition space, I was not quite sure about their notion of ‘entropy’, especially the ‘entropy’ of ‘non-domesticated nature’. I think Michel Serres, Barbara Adam, Manuel DeLanda and at least some other theorists would have to say something about/against that…

As for the contributors I had heard of, one continues to draw me in, and that is Joseph Beuys. Unfortunately, I did not have the time to watch the 57 minute (!) film that was running in the space dedicated to his work as it was near closing time. I caught a few bits which, strangely, also related to chaos. In Beuys case, chaos was embodies in materials such as grease which is transmuting between a definite and an indefinite state. Grease, wax and honey played a central role in Beuys’ work as ‘energy storers’. What inspires me most about him is his thoughts about process and thinking. As an example, for Beuys, food turns into energy which fuels out thinking. Or: the physical and thought processes that lead to an artwork are the actual artwork, rather than the resulting object. Beuys elevates the creativity of thinking, speaking and writing to the status of art. In fact, ‘everything that people place out there… should exist in the world as a question looking to be augmented, improved, enhanced’ (Beuys in ‘What is Art?’). His ideas about human-evironment relationships are equally interesting, after which our thinking and our conversations are part of ecology, but this connection is invisible to us unless we train ourselves to see it. Interestingly, the eye-opener to this relation, for him, was working with materials and learning about material processes.

Last but not least, I would like to include a video of the famous ‘Blur Building’ by Diller and Scofidio, which is often used as an example of an architectural work that questions the nature of space and spatial boundaries. And it does this in the form of a habitable cloud!

If you like to see more ‘geographical challenges’ such as Agnes Denes’ amazing Wheatfield project, visit the ‘Radical Nature’ exhibition at the London Barbican (until 18 October). Unfortunately, there is not much of the exhibition online. However, they have started to put a few videos up which you can also watch via youtube.

My thesis-writing related cabin fever got briefly interrupted today through a message from a friend (thanks, Richard!) who pointed out this exciting project to me: making ice cream clouds with the flavour of your choice to start conversations about nanotechnology!

The ice cream clouds are manufactured within a blue ice cream van, complete with ‘mind that nano particle’ signage. And you thought my plasticine idea was weird!

Source: The Cloud Project

According to the website, the van currently resides at the RCA itself, so go check it out and chose your personal dialogue flavour. There are some connected events, too, such as talks by nano artists and scientists. If you cannot make it, the project website has some photographs and lots of information around the project.

Here is a ‘taster’:

“Developments in nanotechnology and planetary-scale engineering point to new possibilities for us to conform the global environment to our needs. These advances combined with a dream to make clouds snow ice cream have inspired a series of experiments that look at ways to alter the composition of clouds to make new and delicious sensory experiences. Using ice-cream as a catalyst for interesting dialogue, the project’s focus is to welcome people into a mobile space that sits outside institutions, letting new audiences experience and imagine emerging scientific developments and their consequences.”

Image source: Exploring the Invisible

Thanks to a friend who specialises in knowing about free things in London (thanks, Ron!), I found out about the Tesla art-science group at UCL and their free talk series, facilitated by Gordana Novakovic and Amanda Egbe. Conveniently close to the British Library where I’d been hovering over some books for most of the day, their most recent talk, ‘Creative Collaborations with Superorganisms’ also made a convenient break from reading/writing routine. The talk was given by Dr. Simon Park, a microbiologist from the University of Surrey, who became interested in engaging people with field through art-science.

I think the talk would have been equally interesting had he just talked about microbes for hours. After all, one doesn’t get exposed to the intricacies of the field through mainstream media very often, apart from the one half hour of ‘The Material World’ once a week if you’re lucky or, somewhat second hand, through a food scare or the like. Although I do listen to ‘The Material World’ as often as I can, there were quite a few things in his talk I did not know about or had ascribed to the latest fantasies of social scientists or science fiction writers. The biggest surprise, perhaps, was that we can culture and study only a small part of bacteria ‘out there’ (I think it was around 1% !) – there is a vast area of what Park terms ‘Dark Microbiological Matter’ of which we don’t know what they do in the environment.

At the beginning of the talk, Park traced the joint human-bacterial history and co-evolution. Obviously, humans entered the picture a bit later and remain ‘a process instead of becoming a finished beast’ (I think he was quoting W. Hou Je Bek there). Park showed how our body is made up of distinctly separate, but symbiotic bacteria and cell territories. A telling example later on about our relationship with bacteria was death by cyanide: cyanide is not harmful to the body, but kills the bacteria in such a fashion that the bacterial exodus kills the body.

In terms of our human-bacterial future, Parks pointed towards the current climate change debate. He lamented that we only know that bacteria can have huge effects on the climate, but about the ‘how’ we can only speculate.
Next, we were given an insight into bacterial life which is ‘not as simple as people think’. For instance, they can respond to their environment, order themselves into formations, communicate with each other, pack hunt, ‘vote’ on a decision (e.g. sporulation) and grow into different shapes according to their environment. Their behaviour ‘in the wild’ also differs from their behaviour in controlled laboratory environments (must be one hell of a job to study them!). It was interesting to hear that bacteria sometimes ‘form patterns that scientists don’t understand yet’.

Park then moved on to the ‘art side’ of the talk, drawing attention to the fact, that microbiology already meets art (the word ‘bacteri-art’ came to my mind…) in both useful and annoying ways: all art has invisible microflora growing in or on it (which can destroy artworks or be the purpose of them at the same time), and there is, of course, an overlap of artistic and technical representation in science illustration. We were shown some examples of ‘art directly or accidentally portraying microbes’ – examples of illnesses or notable absence of bacteria – and some more recent examples of artworks where microbes were used as part of the artistic process, starting from Alexander Fleming’s ‘germ paintings’. Other artists included Daro Montag, Edgar Lissel and Susan Boafo (who used algae and light for her project ‘Speaking with the Sun’).

In the last part of the talk, Park presented some of the outcomes of his own collaborations. In the first of these, the ’60 Days of Goodbye Poems of Ophelia’, artist Jo Wonder and Park tried to recreate the John Everett Millais painting with bacteria to document the painting’s life cycle. It was quite amusing to hear Park talk about ‘finding a suitable bacterial palette’ for the ‘morphing painting’. I wonder what Millais would have though about this endeavour…

Other projects included the ‘Microcosmos’, an installation using the colour, shape and even DNA sequences to created sounds and moving visuals, ‘Cybernetic Bacteria’ which explored links between organic and digital forms of communication, a project amplifying ‘bacterial fingerprints’, ‘Exploring the Invisible’ during which bioluminescent bacteria were grown in such quantities that they could run their own photobooth, and ‘Creative Collaborations with Natural Unruly Forms’, a project using Park’s ‘favourite’ species: slime mould. The latter explores the slime mould’s capacity to move over objects in search of food, creating ‘intelligent biogenic designs’. If I remember correctly, slime mould can even find the quickest way out of a maze (which I probably wouldn’t ;) ).

The Q & A was also very fascinating. We all came from quite different backgrounds with different interests in the subject matter, so the questions and comments ranged from our body’s design based on cell death to the ‘geology of blood’ (how iron and other ‘inorganic’ substances evolved into the body from the environment). The latter prompted Park to talk about the ‘arms race’ between the body and bacteria to bind iron during an infection.
So, by the end of the evening, we all ended up with a positively weird picture of hungry, ambitious, sociable, hitch-hiking, exploring, communicating bacteria which artist are helping to ‘express themselves’ in different sort of ‘collaborations’, for instance, by making them grow on and in different materials (I most vividly remember the growths in the agar agar jars and the shockingly exquisite bacterial fabric designs). It made me very curious about what kind of ‘collaborations’ there will be in the future between different forms of live – in and outside of art. Watch this space!

If you would like to see an edited version of this talk or come to future sessions, please have a look at the Tesla archive and blog. There is also a facebook group!

There are two kinds of themes I’m looking at. The first set of themes consists of the discussion themes from the workshops. While most know issues around nanotechnology were touched upon in all workshops, in each session, a core theme seemed to emerge in addition. These themes could be summed up as follows:

- how to communicate forces at the nanoscale through symbolic materials / practices
- the precautionary principle and communication to the public
- ‘thinking in other dimensions’
- human desire for perfection/control
- ‘humans should focus on the natural side’/what is nature?
- ‘nano is overrated’
- patenting/property

The other set of themes are the issues that I felt emerged from the workshops. These could be summed up as:

- what kind of influence did the materials have on the conversation-while-modelling e.g. did the hands-on activities enable different/new kinds of ideas?

- parallels of experimentation in workshops with scientific experimentation. I noticed that some participants came up with designs similar to the ones described in scientific publications they could not have known about (e.g. using Brownian Motion as part of a design rather than treating it as an obstacle). Could this method create a bridge between non-scientists and scientists in public engagements?

- the difference between the Mutable Matter ‘data’ and that of other public engagements with nanotechnology/new technologies in general. A lot of the data resembled that of other public engagements – similar themes (e.g. potential risks and benefits) were discussed. Some of the data that I could not find in other reports may have been edited out to meet policy-makers’ requirements. In the GM Nation? report some of these discussion themes were grouped and somewhat side-lined under the header ‘Non-material values’. Most other issues resembled questions that scientists and philosophers continue to ask such as. An example would be: what are we perceiving/what is really there and how does this affect our dealings with/design of nanotechnology.

- how can engagement with the topic be sustained?

From today, will start posting some of the outcomes from the Mutable Matter workshops. The workshops took place in Nottingham (2), Leeds (2), London, Milton Keynes (2) and Southampton.

I tried to recruit non-scientist participants, however, some participants had a background in science or a strong interest in it. Most participants were recruited from Open University alumni as well as Open University undergraduate courses and were between 26 – 65 years old.

But, first of all, what happened in the workshops?

A workshop was designed as a mixture of hands-on modelling and dialogue and was divided into four phases. In the first one, I showed participants ‘atoms’, or, rather, images of ‘atoms’ made with the help of a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM). For this phase, I showed examples where atoms appeared round and ordered in more or less recognisable formations. I then asked the participants whether they could imagine making something with these atoms if atoms did look like this. Provided they had the facilities to do this – what would they design? The participants were then invited to symbolically realise some of those designs with materials such as plasticine, magnets, ’slime’ and polystyrene balls.

For the second phase I, again, used STM & AFM images – this time using more ‘liquid’ looking ones to potentially question the first set of images. Again, I asked whether the participants could imagine designing something from what they saw.

The third phase focused on the forces and other conditions at the nanoscale and how they might contribute to a design and/or the imagination of this scale.

In the fourth phase, I introduced designs that scientists and graphic designers had come up with so they could be discussed or compared to the participants’ own designs.

Here are some examples of the kind of designs and stories that emerged in the workshops (mostly from the first phase). Some were intentionally humourous, but sparked off quite serious discussions.

1. A nano wound dressing that helps tissue to repair itself. One of two designs that related to nanotechnology’s use in medicine (the other one related to cancer detection).

2. A ‘designer atom’ (‘Labyrinthium’) that changes its properties according to how the electrons (represented by the polystyrene balls) are distributed. This model (as well as the ‘Mexican atom’ model) led to a discussion of copyright, patenting and other property-related issues.

3. This is an example of questions that related to ‘what is already there’ on the nanoscale that we may or may not know about, may or may not integrate into ‘nanotechnology’. The model represents a two dimensional plant or ‘nano fossil’.

4. Here, a participant imagined how the nanoscale is already present in and impacting our scale. The participant’s chosen example was ‘interconnectivity between species communities’: how knowledge about how plants work together at different levels could help us ‘invent’ new plant communities and help promote certain species. A follow-up discussion branched off into different, but related directions: how ecosystems work, how ‘communication’ happens between parts of ecosystems, the creation of ‘chimeras’ through technology and how influential humans are on the environment.

5. This model represented communication between ‘primordial building blocks’. The discussion of this model revolved a lot around how to imagine and think oneself into what is going on at this scale including the temporal dimension of this scale (what has been going on for billions of years). There were similar examples of struggling with the imagining of this ’scale of life’.

Not all participants engaged in modelling. Different reasons were given for this. Amongst those were:

- accepting the method would signal complicity with the idea of nanotechnology which the participant was highly sceptical about
- already having made one’s mind up about the subject and not wanting or needing to further explore the subject
- ‘people do not learn anything from hands-on activities’

In these cases, discussions took place following the same phases, but without the modelling.

I’ve just received an invitation to an exhibition which might be of interest to some readers. It is inspired by the novel ‘Star Maker’ by Olaf Stapledon.

The exhibition is on from 12 June 2009 – 12 July 2009.

The invitation did not say anything about place or time, but I assume it can be viewed at E:vent, 96 Teesdale Street, London, E2 6PU, between 12am – 6pm Friday to Sunday.

More information should be available here.

Mutablematter is back and blogging. And has just returned from the Future, as my band-mates call Japan. So it was only fitting that we went to see the somewhat oxymoronic ‘Museum of the Future’ – the Miraikan. Basically, the Miraikan is a science museum, but rather than explaining the history of science and technology, it presents what is happening or being developed right now. The only chance we had to go was on a busy Sunday between soundcheck and gig. The train that took us to the museum very much resembled the London Docklands Light Railways – and even went through a Docklands-like landscape. Only a little more extreme, of course. Here is an example building close to the museum…

We wondered whether it has sliding doors and lifts you have to speak to. The museum itself was surprisingly tame. We expected it to be fully robot operated and more like an ethereal white gallery-like shrine to convergence. Instead we found ourselves in a very hands-on, very human-run space. In the permanent exhibition (‘Innovation and the Future’) we visited, you could touch robots, operate an atomic force microscope and flip the switches inside a deep sea diving bell.

The hall was also patrolled by a large team of enthusiastic staff who kept approaching visitors in order to help them shake off the initial bedazzlement by technology. I actually spent far too long chatting to one of the English-speaking staff that I ended up with very little time for the exhibits. So, please excuse my somewhat limited descriptions. We also missed the hands-on lab and robot demos – mostly, because they were booked out well in advance. Luckily, all exhibits displayed English translations, so browsing the exhibits was comparatively easy – I didn’t have to struggle for hours (days? years?) with my Japanese dictionary.

The most prominent features of the museum are the numerous ‘opinion areas’. The first one I came across bore the curious title ‘Sea of Fertility’. On closer inspection, it was not about artificial insemination, but about giving voice to your wishes about future technologies.

The next discussion area focused on future medicine. According to the website, ‘you can… become a part of “Promoting Medicine Together” by exchanging opinions at this area’.

The last area I visited was themed ‘The environment and me’ . I thought it was interesting that the explanation speaks, again, of togetherness – a desired unification of views. This particular space reminded of what, a decade ago, tended to be described as ‘technological sustainability’.

While one could argue that the Miraikan portrays new technologies in an overly positive manner – there is a strong sense that new technologies ARE the future and that people should work together to make them work for them (and the planet) – I felt that the exhibition was enriched by the discussion spaces. The fact that opinions could be written freely and without pre-formulated sentences to tick gave visitors an opportunity to see quite a breadth of other visitors’ opinions. I could not find out whether all comments make it into the display and how the displays were edited. What I did find was that the museum staff seemed very keen on asking everybody for their opinion or whether anybody had any further questions. Many of the staff seemed to be science students – I spoke to a biology PhD student. Visitors were also encouraged to make suggestions about the museum. When I asked about the discussion exhibits (who reads the opinions – do policy makers and scientists also take a look at them? or is it just for other museum visitors?), I was given some paper in a folder to write to the museum. I also left my e-mail, so I’m hoping I hear back from them. Some readers may have alarm bells ringing about the friendly buzz of ‘we care about your opinion’ . I can empathise with this opinion, but when I was in the space of the Miraikan, I felt the value of exchanging thoughts with fellow visitors, even if it is just on anonymous note cards. What I also found interesting was that the museum worker I spoke to emphasised that they felt the questions on display are very limited – so they are collecting what people would like to ask or see in the displays (the exhibitions seem to undergo periodic re-design).

Before we had to head back to manic Shibuya, we had a quick snack at the cafe. I braved the Miraikan’s theme concoction, ‘Urameshi Soda’ (is it named after the manga character or does it have to do something with the Japanese word for ‘envious’?). As far as I could make out is was melon flavoured soda with strawberry sauce and some kind of jelly. Obviously the popular choice of the future… because we will have self-repairing teeth and bodies!

Source: Miraikan

I have taken my first ‘proper’ annual leave in five years to go on a two-week tour with my band in Japan. Brian May themed jokes from my supervisors abound. Why am I writing about this on my blog? Because I am hoping to see Tokyo’s Miraikan, the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in between gigs and soundchecks (fingers crossed!). I became aware of this museum through my research on nanotechnology. The particular parts that interest me about the museum is the ‘Designing the Future’ exhibit as well as the ‘community’ areas that give visitors an opportunity to listen to other people’s opinions and voice their own. The museum is also famous for its vivid displays on robots and artificial intelligence – I’ve even heard rumours that they have got robot guides! Currently, one of the Miraikan’s two special exhibitions is based upon the science behind the new Terminator film. The museum also offers hands-on experimental workshops as well as intriguing films about space elevators and our connection to the universe!