sciart Award Winners 2002

Issue date: 14 March 2002

Scientists and artists living in an Antarctic research station and the secrets of the 'harbinger of death' moth are two of this year's projects

"There is a certain daring awkwardness to bringing scientists together with artists in a territory where fact lives up to its reputation as stranger than fiction. These are brave experiments which combine the poetic ambiguity of art with science's admiration for nature's bluntness." Janna Levin, Advanced Fellow in Astrophysics, University of Cambridge, 2002.

This year sees the third and final series of annual sciart awards originally conceived in 1996 by the Wellcome Trust and since 1999 supported by the sciart Consortium. This experimental initiative has been extremely successful in helping foster now over thirty innovative projects and encouraging new ways of breaching the art-science divide. This year's sciart award scheme provides opportunities for artists and scientists to work together in disciplines ranging from poetry, performance, and visual art, to psychology, genetics and neuroscience. This year's awardees' proposals can be seen on www.sciart.org from 18 March 2002.

Science / Art Research Station for Antarctica
Nicola Triscott, Rob La Frenais, Marko Peljhan, Martin Price
This project incorporates an artist/scientist living experiment destined for remote environments, ultimately Antarctica. The Makrolab is a hexagonal, cylindrical pod the size of a space station that will house three scientists and three artists in any isolated area. The space will allow for intriguing juxtapositions such as a scientist measuring the effects of global warming working in the same remote environment as an artist cloud-sampling halfway up a mountain - work quite separate in its intentions and method. They will sleep, eat and pursue recreational activities in the same close space, while transmitting their results and personal impressions to the web.

From Code to Code: Patterning the Evil Eye
Nick Skaer, Lucy Skaer
Code to Code investigates pattern and its meaning in the fields of Developmental Genetics and Contemporary Art. The areas of research have a central theme in common: the relation of the visible to the underlying structure. The aim of the project is to clone a coding sequence (a gene) from the Death's Head Hawk Moth (Acherontia atropos) which is instrumental in the establishment of the moth's pattern. The Deaths Head Hawk Moth has a pattern on its thorax, which bears a strong resemblance to the human skull. This unusual patterning is the basis of its profound cultural significance as a harbinger of death and evil omens. The final public art will use live adult moths, releasing them into an environmental context in which their pattern has a symbolic meaning associated with their cultural significance.

How to Live
Bobby Baker, Dr Richard Hallam
During a period of collaborative research for performance artist Bobby Baker and Psychologist Dr. Richard Hallam they will jointly explore the fields of cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) / dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) and their relationship to dramaturgical concepts. The period of research will culminate in the fashioning of a set of new 'life skills' based on the practice of CBT/DBT. They will conduct a 'controlled experiment' that tests out audience reaction to these 'skills'. This will result in a collaborative paper presenting the results of this experiment and other joint discussions of the science/art distinction in psychological therapies, illustrated by relevant documentation on the findings of this research. The final artwork will take the form of a performance / seminar in which Bobby Baker will teach a set of 'life skills' to a wide range of audiences. Ultimately, a 'self-help' video, book and website will be created to complement the project.

Seeing How We See
Oliver Sumner, Jennie Boulter, Laura Camfield, Dr Nigel Foreman
The project will explore chronological and spatial perceptions in young adults with disabilities, through a series of workshops enabling them to participate in the creation of their own 3-D virtual autobiographies. The collaboration, hosted by Camden Arts Centre, London, assists young adults with disabilities to express their memories & perceptions by creating verbal and visual material which is then developed into 3-D virtual environments that are tailored to their perceptual needs.

Memory and Forgetting
Dr Tom Shakespeare, Anna Wilkinson
Memory is what defines us as individuals, while neuroscience explores what we have in common. Memory is both an intangible personal and poetic experience and the subject of the 'hard science' of brain research. It epitomises the two approaches of art and science. Four artists will work with four scientists/clinicians to explore how each can contribute to the others practice to generate work for a public exhibition in March 2003 at Newcastle's Hatton Gallery. Other outcomes of the project will include new models of memory and forgetting; richer research data and better understandings; new representations of memory and disorders of memory and deeper understandings of the experience of mental disorder.

Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science
Robert Crawford
This project's aim is to have ten 'scientifically commissioned poems'. Ten innovative scientists would be invited to read a collection of poems by one of ten contemporary poets, then to provide the poet with a 'provocative object' (a test tube, a robot, a tour of a laboratory -- whatever seems most appropriate). Each scientist would then meet the poet to talk about the object further, and exchange ideas about working methods, general philosophies, and specific concerns. After that the poet would make a poem, and the scientist write a short response to it. Poems and responses would form the basis for public performances of the commissioned work at STANZA, Scotland's Poetry Festival, in 2002 and 2003. The aim is to make the commissions interesting both to the literary and scientific communities, to give them wide public exposure in front of live audiences, in broadcast form, and, eventually, in book form.

Other collaborations include Soundless Music by Sarah Angliss, GéNIA, Mark Jiggins, Ciaran O'Keeffe and Dr Richard Wiseman; The Power of the Image - Explorations in Reality Monitoring by Dr Pamela Briggs and Neil Murray at Northern Stage; Cell by Peter Ride, Jane Prophet and Dr Neil Theise; and Scents of Space by Josephine Pletts, Usman Haque and Dr Luca Turin.

Media contacts:
Shaun Griffin
Wellcome Trust Media Office
0207 611 8612 or s.griffin@wellcome.ac.uk

Nick Hallam
0207 439 0972 or media@nickhallam.demon.co.uk

Notes to Editors:
Originally conceived in 1996 by the Wellcome Trust, the sciart Consortium -supported by the Arts Council of England, the British Council, the CalousteGulbenkian Foundation, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA), and the Wellcome Trust - encourages partnerships between artists and scientists to work creatively on projects that have a public impact. For more information, visit www.sciart.org

The Wellcome Trust is an independent, research-funding charity, established under the will of Sir Henry Wellcome in 1936. The Trust's mission is to foster and promote research with the aim of improving human and animal health. The Trust invested £810,000 in art that has public and scientific impact in 2001.