Sciart 2006

In 2006 the Sciart scheme funded 12 new projects through Production, Experiment, and Research and Development Awards.

Silent Sound

Artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard will collaborate with Ciaran O'Keeffe, psychologist at Liverpool Hope University, and musician Jason Pierce on a performance piece and accompanying installation as part of the Liverpool Biennial 2006. The work will explore the psychology of performance and engage the public in questioning the potential of the human mind, culminating in a performance 'experiment' drawing on stylistics, languages and techniques from Victorian séance, Spiritualist performance and early 1970s performance art.

The Listening Room

'The Listening Room' is a collaboration between artist Alexa Wright and Alf Linney, Professor of Medical Physics at University College London. Within the Centre for Auditory Research, they are researching an effective means of modelling human communication. This project will create an interactive audio installation - an intelligent room that can converse with its occupants - bringing the latest sound placement and speech recognition and synthesis technologies into a clinical environment and working with scientists researching the physical and neurological aspects of binaural hearing.

In the Moment

Filmmaker Ian Knox and neuropsychologist Paul Broks are making a documentary feature film about legendary jazz guitar virtuoso Pat Martino, who was musically silenced by life-saving but memory-stripping brain surgery for an aneurysm. Through the remarkable story of his ascent from the depths of amnesia to the peak of artistry once more, the film will explore the nature of self, creativity and the brain systems underlying personal identity.

Lighting Up Computational Biochemistry

Artist Tim Head is undertaking a year's research residency at the Structural Bioinformatics and Computational Biochemistry Unit with the aim of facilitating discourse between artists and scientists, providing new approaches to public engagement and creating a new contemporary art collection. A particular focus of this residency will be to generate a dialogue between artistic and biomedical disciplines that have a common interest in computing and graphics as their core activities.

Programming by Simon Schofield, commissioned by Corporation as part of Light Up Queen Street.

Sixty Days of Goodbye Poems of Ophelia

Artist JoWonder has collaborated with microbiologist Simon Park and composer Milton Mermikides to create an animated painting out of bacteria, a version of Millais's Pre-Raphaelite painting of Ophelia.

The growth and interaction of bacteria will generate the sound and image reflecting the body’s decomposition following death.

Exploring Normality - Developing a scientific model of disability

Artist Ju Gosling is collaborating with molecular neuroendocrinologist Dr Evelien Gevers and limb development researcher Dr Malcolm Logan, as part of the NIMR Artist in Residence Programme, with the aim of developing a scientific model of disability.

Neurotopographics

Neuroscientist Dr Hugo Spiers, architect Bettina Vismann and artist Antoni Malinowski are collaboratively making a film exploring how dynamic patterns of brain activity provide a code for the structure of space.

Testimony - Afro-Carribeans and mental health

Photographer Dave Lewis and biopsychosocial psychiatrist Dr Dele Olajide will work together to produce a series of images informed by contemporary arts practice and a new approach to mental health service provision in the community.

Yellow

Visual artist and designer Geraldine Pilgrim and writer Rachel Barnett collaborate with Sphinx Theatre Company on an installation that will explore the most severe form of postnatal depression, puerperal psychosis. 'Yellow' takes as its starting point the 1899 story 'The Yellow Wallpaper' by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and the project aims to give an insight into this public health issue using film, photography and text. The consultant on the production is Dr Liz McDonald of Homerton Hospital.

Fleeting Improvised Men

Media artist Simon Pummell is working with psychoanalyst Helen Taylor Robinson to develop a script and prototype interactive DVD to portray and explore the contemporary implications of the labyrinthine inner world of Daniel Paul Schreber, who wrote 'Memoirs of My Nervous Illness' in 1903. Schreber, the son of child educator Daniel Gottlieb Moritz Schreber, was raised within punitive systems of training and discipline and suffered from severe psychosis later in life.

Nature's Great Experiment

Artist Jordan Baseman is collaborating with behavioural geneticist Terrie Moffitt and her Twin Research Team at the Institute of Psychiatry. The project will involve the development of a series of short films and a website that incorporate twin case studies, drawings, audio files and recorded interviews with the scientists.

Bio Mapping

'Bio Mapping' explores new ways that individuals make use of the information they can gather about their bodies. The artist Christian Nold has designed a device that records emotional responses to an individual's environment to create an 'emotion map'. He is now working with neuroscientists to analyse the patterns in people's emotion maps to develop new tools for the future.