I went to Cambridge yesterday and talked with scientists at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).
I went to the Scott Polar Research Institute in search of the symbols Peter Lancaster Brown drew to document auroras he saw on Heard Island in the 1950s.
BAS scientists described their work with ice cores and sea floor sediments, and their roles in climate change research. Animations will be made to reflect and respond to their words.
So far no record has been found of the Lancaster Brown “jumble of hieroglyphics – pure facts for scientific analysis”… at the Scott Polar Research Institute. However, I was given a lead to follow up.
The sun was shining and so I explored Cambridge by push bike.
I found an exhibition of visualizations made by artists and scientists at Kettle’s Yard:
Beyond Measure: Conversations across art and science
Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge
…explores how geometry is used by artists and astronomers, bio-chemists, engineers, surgeons, architects, physicists and mathematicians – among many others – as a means to understand, explain and order the world around us. It draws on parallels between the artist’s studio, the laboratory and the study as equivalent places for thinking, imagining and creating.
Curated by Barry Phipps, Kettle’s Yard’s first Interdisciplinary Fellow
I bought the catalogue to a previous exhibition at Kettle’s Yard…
Lines of Enquiry: thinking through drawing
Published by Kettles Yard, University of Cambridge, to accompany the exhibition, 15 July – 17 September 2006
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On the way back to London, I called by…
Chris Drury
Antarctica: a heartbeat of the earth
Beaux Arts, Cork Street London
The new art of nature – that movement in art to which Drury’s work belongs – opposes to an objective seeing of things ‘out there’ a subjective being within nature, in which observation itself is understood as part of the phenomenological actuality of what Heidegger termed ‘being-in-the-world’…
…Artists [like Drury] found themselves developing a variety of very different creative strategies in order to be truthful to their experience of what Gaston Bachelard, the French Philosopher whose Poetics of Space was highly influential on their generation, called ‘life in the round’.
Mel Gooding
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The Poetics of Space is a book by Gaston Bachelard published in 1958. Bachelard applies the method of phenomenology to architecture basing his analysis not on purported origins (as was the trend in enlightenment thinking about architecture) but on lived experience of architecture. He is thus led to consider spatial types such as the attic, the cellar, drawers and the like. This book implicitly urges architects to base their work on the experiences it will engender rather than on abstract rationales that may or may not affect viewers and users of architecture.
Wikipedia
Accessed 2008-04-29
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At BAS I was given a catalogue…
White Horizons: British Art from Antarctica, 1775-2006
Exhibition catalogue
The exhibition was curated by David W H Walton and Bruce Pearson, 2006, and took place at the Edinburgh International Convention Centre, 12-23 June 2006, as part of the xxix Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting hosted by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
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