Annie Carpenter

para-lab invited the public to join them as they came together to display and discuss a series of ongoing collaborations between artists and scientists. On Display was an accumulation of artifacts resulting from the process of collaboration, as well as workshops and a mini symposium to contextualise the work. The exhibition and associated events acted as a marker along the way of long-term, open-ended collaborations.

Testing the Field was a transdisciplinary field trip, designed to bring together students from both the School of Art and Faculty of Science and Engineering. "[The project] is the second of hopefully many art/science pedagogic research experiments" says Annie Carpenter, associate lecturer at Manchester School of Art and founder of the project. "We hope to form an established and ongoing collaboration between the faculties and explore the mechanics of a cross-faculty unit being incorporated into the regular curriculum. Testing the Field hopes to build on the successes and failures encountered." Testing the Field consisted of a trip to Middlewood Ecological Trust with 20 students from across the two faculties. The students took part in workshops in poetry, experimental sound recording, and ikebana, amongst others. Rachel Kelly and Sam Illingworth were invited along by Annie Carpenter to run workshops using the Japanese practices of Ikebana and Haiku to explore interdisciplinary collaboration and to promote new learning discussion and reflection amongst staff and students.

Part of Moon Live Talks, Tour de Moon. Earth-Moon is a mechanical sculpture exploring the view of our planet as the moon. The piece is activated by connecting to a Zoom call with the Earth and a talk by Carpenter where she demonstrates the sculpture and talks about the science behind the Earth-Moon system.

Science and Art are two disciplines that are usually treated as mutually exclusive entities, and yet which have much to offer each other in terms of process, experimentation and analysis. The field of SciArt (or ArtSci) is a relatively new one, in which scientists and artists work together to create information and demonstrations that are neither the science of art nor the art of science but are instead interdisciplinary investigations that utilise the unique strengths and overlapping commonalities of both fields. As well as the products and processes that are created via such collaboration, the introduction of artists and scientists to one another is an exceptionally valuable prospect which can have a significant impact on the working practices of both sets of collaborators. To further develop this field and these opportunities for collaboration, it is necessary to introduce scientists and artists to the potential of working together at an early point in their careers, ideally when they are still in tertiary education. Manchester Metropolitan University has been involved in several art and science programmes that involve science and art undergraduate and postgraduate students working together to create performances, experiments and demonstrations. This includes the UK’s first dedicated SciArt course, residential field trips, and exhibiting at an internationally- renowned gallery. Here we present the outcomes of this work, discussing the development of these schemes and presenting future opportunities for early career scientists and artists to collaborate further.

First commissioned by Castlefield Gallery for their Miniature World exhibition, Central Engine Maintenance Performance went on to be further developed for KOSMICA: Ethereal Things (organised by KOSMICA Institute and Arts Catalyst). The performance involves the demonstration of a sculpture attempting to model a black hole accretion disk. It is activated when a fire extinguisher is released to produce dry ice which then pours from the orbiting vessel and curves into the spinning fan. Whilst operating the sculpture, Carpenter talks to viewers about black holes and the inherent failure involved in attempting to model them in three dimensions.