Space Hack Days http://www.globart.at/space-hack/?lang=en

For the first time GLOBART is hosting a SpaceHack on “Clean Space” in cooperation with FH Wiener Neustadt and ESA BIC Austria, taking place on the 12th and 13th of October.

Programmers, scientists, designers, creators, technologists and anyone interested in space is invited. We want your ideas, your knowledge and your creativity. The topic “Clean Space” was chosen together with ESA. GLOBART opens up a platform for a 24-hours-long process. Help us figure out how to remove and prevent space debris and how to make use of green technologies in aerospace.

Who can participate?

You are a student or graduate?  You are a trainee or an employee? You are finishing your dissertation or simply next weeks blog post? Your field of expertise is aerospace engineering, environmental design, architecture, computer science, engineering, resource management, design or even media art? Your expertise is required for future-oriented space research.

What is going to happen?

You have got an idea on greening up space but you simply lack the technical know how? You really want to help cleaning up space debris but you just don’t know where to start? GLOBART Space Hack operates as both, platform and process. You are welcome to bring your own idea and develop it in interdisciplinary exchange or get inspired by a given issue on “clean space”. Our mentors will provide you with all the necessary tools to turn your vision into an elaborated project proposal. And who knows, your project might become reality soon.

More information: http://www.globart.at/space-hack/?lang=en

NEWS

mail@ulrikekuchner.com

General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union

Vienna, 20 - 31 August 2018

Vienna hosted the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union, one of the most important international conferences for astronomers, astrophysicists and space scientists, where 4000 people are expected to attend. This will open new doors for the interdisciplinary discourse we aim for.

I am honored to have been contributing in. a special way, by giving the Assembly an artistic look through the use of one of my copper etchings. They were inspired by Rene Descartes vortices theory.

GLOBART talk: Escape to space

22 August 2018 18:30

Natural History Museum

As part of the exhibition Our Place in Space:

A discussion about art, science, design and living in space.

Join astronomer Katrien Kolenberg, artist Björn Dahlem

and space-architect René Waclavicek.

Hosted by design theorist Friedrich von Borries.

http://www.globart.at/activities/globart-talk-2018/?lang=en

Check the MOVIES page for the recording of the live streaming of this fantastic discussion.

Credit: NHM Wien, Kurt Kracher

Our Place in Space

Astronomy & Art

curated by Ulrike Kuchner

Natural History Museum Vienna

20 June - 4 November 2018

https://www.spacetelescope.org/announcements/ann1807/

http://www.nhm-wien.ac.at/opis_en

https://www.spacetelescope.org/announcements/ann1806/

The focus of the exhibition is the interplay of the artistic

and scientific and personal meaning of images from the

Hubble Space Telescope - celebrating 28 years of

operating in space - and the work of artists whose

subject matter deals with the themes of space and

astronomy in a wider sense. In this way, we broach the

issue of the connection between humankind and the 

cosmos from different perspectives and explore and

foster an interchange of ideas between these tow worlds.

The exhibition distinguishes itself through the renowned

artists Steinbrenner/Dempf&Huber, Nives Widauer, Payer

Gabriel, Markus Reisinger and Yunchul Kim that have been

invited, and the young and ambitious artists from the

master class Art & Science of the University of Applied

Arts Vienna, lead by Prof. Virgil Widrich, selected through

a call. Margit Busch & Solmaz Farhang, Anna Lerchbaumer

& Eleni Boutsika-Palles, Michael Bachhofer, Daniela Brill

Estrada and Monica LoCascio are inspired by scientific

images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Their works

tell individual stories that allow the viewer to explore new

space and connections.

The exhibition is a cooperation of the Natural History

Museum Vienna, the think tank GLOBART, the University of

Applied Arts Vienna and the European Space Agency ESA.

Credit: project RegoLight, LIQUIFER Systems Group, 2018

GLOBART talk: A change of perspectives:

Science on Art/Art on Science

12 September 2018 18:30

Natural History Museum

As part of the exhibition Our Place in Space:

Artists and scientists challenge the frontier between art and science in our culture today.

Join astronomers Antonella Nota, Luca Fossati, artists Victoria Vesna, Anna Lerchbaumer, Eleni Boutsika-Palles, Daniela Brill Estrada and cultural scientist Vera Tollmann. The evening is hosted by philosopher Klaus Speidel.

I am looking forward to guiding you through the exhibition after the discussion!

http://www.globart.at/activities/globart-talk-2018/?lang=en

El Cerebro Cientifico - The scientific brain

https://www.elcerebrocientifico.com/?lang=en

I am honored to be joining the invited guests and participants at this year’s science symposium “The Scientific Brain”, organized by Colegio Hacienda Los Alcaparros in Bogota, Colombia. The STEAM conference will bring together five scientists - who are all active in an artistic field as well.

“The colloquium aims to share the latest advances in science with lecturers by five renowned experts who through a series of talks and panels will share the new findings that mark the future of science and of our planet.

We will explore how a true scientific brain develops and the fascinating work of those who operate at the intersection of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics). be opened by the Minister of Education and the Director of Colciencias.”

The Colloquium, “The Scientific Brain” will take place on Friday November 16 at the JW Marriott Hotel in Bogotá located at Calle73 No 8-60 and will be held from 7:30am to 5:45pm.

The event is endorsed by the Humboldt Institute, the Colombian Institute of Astrophysics, the Colombian Observatory of Technology and Science and ANDEP and it is presented by Colegio Hacienda Los Alcaparros.

This event will coincide with the opening of

Our Place in Space Bogota

https://www.elcerebrocientifico.com/our-place-in-space/?lang=en

on November 14 at Atlantis Plaza Bogota.

This group exhibition with feature art from myself as well as 5 local artists inspired by the imaging of Space. In addition, a group of 15 students from Kinder 4 – 11th grade will also share their interpretations. 

Bogota is getting ready for El Cerebro Cientifico - The scientific brain and Our Place in Space Bogota!

What a ride! With new art in the making and some serious getting ready for the colloquium organized by Los Aclaparros, I have also had the pleasure to talk about art/science to El Tiempo,

https://www.eltiempo.com/vida/ciencia/entrevista-con-ulrike-kuchner-la-astrofisica-que-estara-en-colombia-en-noviembre-281236

and RCN Radio,

https://www.rcnradio.com/entretenimiento/exposicion-con-imagenes-de-la-lactea-se-podra-ver-en-bogota

amongst other outlets.

In November I have had the great pleasure to participate in the Colloquium El Cerebro Cientifico - The scientific brain and Our Place in Space Bogota: an unforgettable experience that included working with the talented and creative students at Colegio Hacienda Los Alcaparros, meeting wonderfully humble and talented scientists, artists, educators and organizers connected to the events in Bogotá.

http://www.alcaparros.edu.co/project/el-cerebro-cientifico-2/

The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them — especially not from yourself” philosopher Daniel Dennett counseled. In our science driven world, we often forget that data is collected, created and processed by humans and as such, data owns an anthropomorphic quality. In her artistic work, astronomer and artist Kuchner highlights human errors and mistakes by appropriating technical defects of the instruments used and creating some new, artistic ones. The freedom to include and to play with the meaning of mistakes showcases humanity in the data and acts as the transition from science to art.

In science, we are conducting test after test to minimize biases and uncertainties, in the arts we are free to create them and to emphasize them if we wish — “if only to give something clear and detailed to fix”(Dennett). Thus the art piece shown here highlights the most useful and yet most uncomfortable tool of science, and perhaps of humanity itself: making mistakes.

In “Data with Empathy”, intentional human errors mixes with “errors” of machines: the used image is a raw (i.e., unprocessed) exposure from the Cassini spacecraft during a fly through of Saturn’s rings. In a world were we train machines to be flawless and to precisely predict our next steps, Kuchner wants to showcase the human learning processes through brilliant original mistakes and eluding to the paradox of culture’s deep seated fear of being wrong. “Data with Empathy” is as much a celebration of mistakes, “the only opportunity for learning or making something truly new”(Dennet), as it is of space exploration — the pinnacle of a journey of historical risk-takings, that has evolved through learning from the details of the mess we have made as humans.

                                                Data with Empathy, 2018

                                                Screen Print on Offenbach bible paper

                                                70x100 cm each

Physicist Ryogo Hayano, STEM researcher Andy Shouse, me, climatologist Shawn Marshall, programmer/entrepreneur Trevor Townsend at the opening of Our Place in Space Bogotá.

I was delighted to participate as an artist in the Our Place in Space Bogotá exhibition, presenting a new piece called “Data with empathy”.

The Space Art, Science and Culture workshop “Of some visions in/for the 21st Century”, a Leonardo/Olats workshop was held from March 23rd-24th 2019 in Paris.

https://www.olats.org/space/sasc21/2019/sasc21_2019.php

Organizers Annick Bureaud and Ewan Chardronnet brought together a diverse group of artists and scientists in a fascinating and historical environment: house of rocket scientist pioneer and Leonardo founder Frank Malina. We contemplated, debated, dreamed out loud, we planned and connected and supported. We discusses questions such as: What do we want to do in space and why? What kind of space habitat are we envisionning? Is space tourism such a great idea? What would be a space ecology and a sustainable access to space? What kind of art are we interested to deploy and create? Should we move on with our previous approaches or can we already witness new alternative visions? Where do space sciences stand in relation to art and culture ?

We recorded a series of podcasts (to be published here: https://www.olats.org/space/sasc21/2019/podcasts.php ) where each of us contemplated what attracted us to space, and where we stand on such provocative oppositions as “Humans or Robots”, “Dark night or Full Moon”, “Astronomy or Astronautics”, “Colony or Space Station”, “Space Art or Space Culture”.

Our Leonardo Space Art & Science 2019 Podcasts are online!

After the dreams, enthusiasm, skills and knowledge of the 20th Century that put humans in outer space —be it directly or indirectly with probes, satellites, and other scientific instruments— what are the current visions and approaches of and for space art, science and culture as we have entered the 21st Century and the "Age of Anthropocene" on Earth?

On March 23rd and 24th 2019, artists, scientists, engineers and cultural players gathered to discuss those issues during the Leonardo Space Art Science workshop in Paris. (http://www.olats.org/space/sasc21/2019/sasc21_2019.php)

We asked them to play a "card game". In a set of cards, each participant answered the same first question "what has attracted you to space" and then two others that they picked up blindly.

We are very happy to provide you with their answers in those eight choral podcasts. Enjoy listening!

http://www.olats.org/space/sasc21/2019/podcasts.php

Annick Bureaud (Leonardo/Olats)

So happy to be part of the Suratómica initiative!

https://www.suratomica.com/?lang=en

Based in Colombia, Suratómica is a network of creative makers (artists, designers, filmmakers) that actively connects their work to scientists from latin America.

The first edition of Suratómica is realized in collaboration with art@CMS, https://artcms.web.cern.ch/artcms/, an outreach and education

initiative from the CMS Experiment at CERN (European

Organization for Nuclear Research).

It was my pleasure to host the Symposium Of Clouds and Clocks at Nottingham Contemporary on 29 February 2020 (shortly before in-person meetings sadly became impossible).

We met for an afternoon of talks and discussions with leading artists and academics crossing the boundaries of arts, science, and computing, developed as part of the multidisciplinary exhibition Sensing Systems by Matt Woodham, at Bonington Gallery.

Art and Science share a common goal: to challenge common views of reality. As a creative crossroad, the contemporary field of ArtScience has been gaining momentum in recent years. Successful ArtScience merges the objective and the subjective with equal voices. It investigates and shapes the intersection between artistic concepts and developments in science and technology; experimenting with new ways of conceiving knowledge.

In this afternoon symposium, a panel of artists, scientists and ArtScientists will share their interdisciplinary research. Experts in systems across scales, from galaxy evolution to molecular nanotechnology, will discuss common dynamics in nature.

Suratomica went online! http://www.suratomica.com/festival

After the cancellation of the in-person festival in April, Suratómica ventured online in October 2020 for an amazing bi-lingual virtual festival!

Watch my contribution “Do I dare disturb the Universe” on youtube as part of their Art and Science Master class:

Do I dare disturb the universe?

This fragment of a T.S. Eliot poem sets the tone for my talk in which I will contemplate the role of “truth” and “errors” in science and art. I ponder human-made machinery in trying to capture the universe; to split it into its pieces, to dissect it, learn from it and why making art with it is so important.

Aftere thee talk, artist Monica LoCascio, physicist Jairo Alexis Rodríguez, moderator and artist Daniela Brill Estrada and I continue discussing symmetry, thee beauty in making mistakes and the processes that emerge as our artistic practices grow.

I’m so grateful for this fantastic experience!

Do chickens see green stars? That’s the title of a recent podcast episode by the error bar, a podcast that fact-checks neeuro-science enwes.

I had the pleasure of chatting about the mystery of why -- seemigly -- there are no green stars, about color vision, errors in science and what art has got to do with all of this.

Together with host Nick Holmes and psychophysicist Christopher Taylor we managed to talk about everything from dead picels to UV-sensitive eyes of chickens; all inn one podcast.

A transcript is provided here: transcript.

Thank you University of Nottingham for selecting me for the rising star award in public engagement!

It’s been a difficult year for public engagement and many plans are on ice or had to change dramatically. I am excite about new interventions that will engage the public and newe, creativee ways of communicating!

The LASER Talk Brussels from June 15th 2021 can now be re-watched.

Filmmaker Els van Riel, artist Paul Malone and myself were presenting our work and discussed “Light, time and the collaborations between art and science”. It was moderated by Edith Doove with an introduction by Alexandra Dementieva.

I feel like wee could only scratch the surface, there is so much scope for more!

I look forward to joining participants and organizers of OpenGLAMS fourth cultural hackathon in October (to be held as hybrid). It’s been wonderful to get ready through contributing with a blog post that focuses on imperfect data and art science thinking (in German).

The mission of OpenGLAM is to provide access to knowledge and data of cultural heritage institutions (GLAM = Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums). On its way, OpenGLAM participants embark on a variety of projects, from on-site educational programs to digitization of works to increase access.

We also recorded a podcast episode “If it’s worth it, let me work it” in which we discussed overlap between evolving galaxies, 3D printed maps and tile stoves, we identified barriers and got excited about the hackathon.

I was one of the assessors for the University of Nottingham Physicis & Astronomy Yellow Book & Sound Inspired project, which is a wellbeing project based on creative creations for anyone in Nottingham, created by developinsite. Thank you for your trust, it was a pleasure to look at people’s creative expressions that were created during the lockdown times of the pandemic. 

A|Cerca del Origen is published!!

It was my pleasure to write the introduction chapter of the new book “Near the Origin” which is a collection of texts written by participants and artists of the Suratómica network. Some of this is based on our trip to CERN, where to integrate Art and Science with Latin American scintits working at CEERN.

The digital Spanish version can be viewed and downloaded here: A|Cerca del Origen

Please feel free to reach out if you would like to read the English original of my chapter.

SEADS is part of the Architecture Biennale in Venice 2021!

The video piece “100 ways to say we” . The project "100 Ways to say We" is a hybrid marathon format, a pre-enactement of multiple futures. The utopian marathon in a seemingly dystopian present unites 100 ideas by artists, theorists, activists and collectives from all over the world for a future "We".

For SEADS, this was lead by Angelo Vermeulen & Fred Sena.

It was a fantastic experience to guide 20+ bright and incredibly creative performing arts students at RITCS Brussels (Royal Institute of Theatre, Cinema and Sound) in their annual Winter School. This year, SEADS invited them to react to the tension between the climate crisis and the new space race.

Check out the program and our documentation of these fantastic two weeks, including pictures of workshops and events, as well as the final art piece that was created by the students.

It’s exciting that our project Digital Warmth -- Designs that keep you warm that was created during OpenGLAM’s hackathon last year was selected for  seed funding for the Incubation programme by the DOORS: Digital Incubators for Museums network.

This project will support the Kaiser Frannz Josef museum at a moment in which attitudes towards the digitalisation of the sector are changing. For the next three months, we dive deep into the realms of digital and give small and medium-size museums a voice in the transformation of the sector and a change to make their ambitious pilots a reality.

DOORS has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No 101036071.

“Despite the urgency, digital strategies for the future can be neither makeshift nor standard. We must take the time to engage critically with technology and address concerns around it, move beyond a perception of digital technologies as cutting-edge appendixes and instead, understand them as part of a broader context in which they must integrate harmoniously. Only then will museums reach the digital maturity levels that can sustain the integration of technology into existing practices, thus becoming adaptable, diverse, and inclusive spaces.” DOORS project.

A collaborative vision and pathways for transforming academia

That’s the title of a blog post that I am proud to have contributed to for the community blog in2insights, providing research resources for understanding and acting on complex real-world problems.

As a starting point for the discussion, Careoperative members shared ideas on how the current academic system discourages the kinds of leadership required for sustainability transformations (Care et al. 2021). In the article we discuss our vision for academia in 2050.

Written by The Care Operative and “Transforming Academia” workshop participants at 2021 International Transdisciplinarity Conference

Thank you so much for awarding me the Tri-Campus Award from the University of Nottingham for “Outstanding Contribution to the Research Community”.

This recognizes “the contributions that a postgraduate researcher or member of postdoctoral research staff has made to the University’s research community between January and December 2021.”

It is finally time to talk about SPACE Lab[co-creative art-astronomy experiments].

This project is co-created by myself and Nicola Rae and has been awarded the STFC Spark Award for Public Engagement and the Lewisham Creative Change Award as part of the Mayor's London Borough of Culture 2022 programme, We Are Lewisham. We are partnering with Jazmin Morris, Tech Yard and Creative Computing Institute, UAL and Jane Hendrie, LEAN (Lewisham Education Arts Network).

SPACE Lab is a year-long multi-layered project that will show an expanded field of experiments as artworks codeveloped by artists with astronomers.

It combines experiment as artworks developed by artists with astronomers and a number of interdisciplinary STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and maths) initiatives to school children and the general public in the South London borough of Lewisham, recognised as a diverse and socio-economically deprived area with low science capital.

Information (in German) can be found here: Digital Warmth . Project partners are the Kaiser Franz Josef Museum in Baden, Austria, Museumsmanagement Niederoesterreich, the AIT (Austrian Institute of Technology) and myself.

Artists across all media will be paired with scientists that are open to this extended inter-disciplinary experiment. We will seek  advice from diverse and inclusive groups for guidance, support and involvement.

More on this here, here and here.

In the next months there will be a lot more about this, so watch this space!

Kat Smith, UAL

It is a special pleasure to give a talk to an audience that is wonderfully engaged and comes along with you on the journey.

Thank you Pint of Science science festival for allowing me to speak about

The patterns of the Universe - A guide to the art and science of our place in the cosmos.

as part of the Back to the Future evening on 9th of May 2022.

audience notes left behind.

Lovely to reconnect with my alma mater University of Applied Arts Vienna and join the group of the Gender Art Lab at this year’s Venice Biennale Sessions, which addresses universities, academies of fine arts and higher education institutions with a special project.

And extra special to see Yunchul Kim representing Korea’s pavilion, after having had the pleasure to work with him twice, incl. curating his work for Our Place in Space in Vienna a few years back.

Venice Biennale Sessions 2022 with the Gender Art Lab of the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Yunchul Kim’s ARGOS has grown! At Our Place in Space (below) and at the Biennale (right)

It’s been really special to be able to join the in-person exhibition of the GENDER ART LAB (GAL) of my alma mater art university, die Angewandte at the beginning of November 2021 at the Haus Wittgenstein in Vienna, Austria.

The exhibition asked “What is NORM and what is NORM-AL? What does society describe as normal and how do we deal with this term, the conventions? Artists are always called upon to raise problem areas and present them to the public, and that is exactly what thee Gender Art Lab does. This questioning of the eNORM-AL motif is finally brought to the exhibition with works by students and alumni,”

It was a pleasure to participate with our

“Aleatory Whispers: Arachnids, green

ocean, phase 3!” The exhibition will also

be part of the Biennale di Venezia

Sessions next year with a video

documentation and panel discussion.

I can’t wait!

“How can work in art and culture bee rethought and redefined? What can data from cultural heritage do in other fields of work? What knowledge must bee available for this?”

In October, I had the pleasure to join the wonderful participants of the fourth cultural hackathon (hybrid) in Austria as invited mentor. We asked ourselves how wee can foster and make use of existing open data in the cultural sector and explored a variety of themes related to art, culture and technology.  Three exciting opportunities were born during these intense days. Our team started to develop and co-create a fantastic and tangible project related to connecting research, museums, citizens and platforms -- all based on an archive of historical tiles that were used for stoves! how did that happen? It was a whirlwind of creativity and design thinking. I look forward to what will happen next...

It was fantastic to speak at the University of Hertforshire’s art:sci:lab launch that included the exhibition opening and Symposium Are you thinking what I’m thinking. The focus of this symposium was the process of collaboration, its highlights and successes as well as its pitfalls, with a focus on methodologies that work (or not) in inter-, multi- and trans-disciplinary collaboration.

Excited to be an associate of this exciting new lab with the quest to “work beyond the norms of co-creation as framed by the

‘educational turn’ including those

strategies currently orthodox within

participatory art”.

The Science of Team Science Conference 2022 brought together a range of disciplines to share and advance the latest evidence-based methods in team collaboration and transdisciplinary research.

This was an amazing opportunity to learn about and discuss ways how to improve collaborative research and discovery. I was excited to connect with the community over methods to improve knowledge exchange and integration, opportunities and challenges

of interdisciplinary cooperations  between Arts, Humanities ad Social Sciences (AHSS) and STEM (Sciences, Technology, Engineering and Maths), and dynamics of research teams.

I was happy to join the excellent workshops on “Tools for Talking the Same Language across Disciplinary and Profession”, facilitated by Sawsan Khuri. Thank you!

It's been a great experience to talk about our SEADS Biomodd project and how hybrid ArtScience practices can be used for sustainability research during this year's DRHA (Digital Research in Humanities and Art) Conference in School of Art, Kingston University, UK.

Thank you to my fellow STEAM panel members Lora Markova, Sheng-Hung Lee and Toni Sant, the conference organizers and of course the wonderful SEADS co-authors Mona Nasser DDS, MSc, PhD, FHEA Nasser, pieter steyaert, Diego Maranan, Agi Haines, Zeynep Birsel, Ann Peeters and Angelo Vermeulen!

Thank you Riesa Efau for realising the exhibition "Wir haben kein Rezept" [We do not have a recipe] at Motorenhalle in Dresden. I'm happy to be represented with my work "Data with Empathy", 40 silk screen prints on bible paper showcasing processed images of a fly-through of the Cassini spacecraft through Saturn's rings. It is a homage to human and instrumental errors and highlights the most useful and yet most uncomfortable tool of science, and perhaps of humanity itself: making mistakes. In a world were we train machines to be flawless and to precisely predict our next steps, the piece wants to showcase the human learning processes through brilliant original mistakes and eluding to the paradox of culture’s deep seated fear of being wrong. “Data with Empathy” is as much a celebration of mistakes, “the only opportunity for learning or making something truly new” (Daniel Dennet), as it is of space exploration — the pinnacle of a journey of historical risk-takings, that has evolved through learning from the details of the mess we have made as humans.

I am very happy to be presented alongside SEADS' fantastic "Engines of Eternity" project and several other wonderful artists. The group show opened last Friday and will run until 5th of March 2023.

Credit last 4 pictures: Andreas Seeliger

Great news! Our DOORS (Digital Incubator for Museums) project “Digital Warmth” was selected for phase 2! The overall goal of Digital Warmth is to develop digital technologies that foster excitement, link audiences to state-of-the-art research, and raise awareness for the cultural heritage presented in local museums. Making use of creative, stimulating and engaging digital tools, we aim to improve the relationship museums and their audiences have with digital technologies, including those that are used in the academic research sector, thus also presenting an invitation to audiences to become part of current research as citizen (community-) scientists. Throughout the DOORS project, we use tiled stoves and historical tile models as a first working example for this integration and digital transformation.

I am excited and immensely proud to see our exhibition SPAC Lab [co-creative art astronomy experiments] come to life at A.P.T Gallery in London. Co-curated by Nicola Rae and myself, this is one outcome of a year-long project funded by STFC and Mayor of London’s Creative Change award, supported by the University of Nottingham and UAL’s Tech Yard.

Join us at the Private Views on Thursday 16 February 6-8pm and Saturday, 18 February 2-5pm!

Alistair McClymont & Rita Tojeiro

Demelza Toy Toy & Metafuturism Lab

Nicola Rae & Gravity Laboratory

SEADS & Karine Van Doninck

Anshuman Gupta & Amaury Triaud

Monica LoCascio & Ulrike Kuchner

Agi Haines & Stephen Wilkins

Young people of Lewisham & Tech Yard team

Warm invitation to join our

Finissage and Discussion event led by John Wood,

emeritus professor Goldsmiths University of London

Sunday 5 March 2023 2-5 pm

Last chance to see the fantastic artwork co-created by

astronomers and artists!

SPACE Lab presents an expanded field of experiments

as artworks co-developed by artists with scientists. It is one outcome of a year-long process involving conversations between seven collaborative teams of artists and astrophysicists exploring current research.

Curated by Ulrike Kuchner & Nicola Rae.

It’s incredibly rewarding to see the many ArtScience and creative practice projects we are realizing as the SEADS collective. From the fantastic Biomodd Bruges installation built part remotely and in-person in the midst of the pandemic, to the inspiring winterschool at the Royal Institute of Theatre, Cinema and Sound on climate change and the new space race, to the many research publications we are co-authoring, and the latest immersive and performative experience for audiences of the Theater Neumarkt in Zurich.

I have learned so much in the last year since becoming a member of the team that is coordinating this unique collective of people across the globe and across disciplines, knowledge systems, and outputs.

Excited to announce the opening of our exhibition “Digital Warmth” on the 29th of June 2023 at the Kaiser Franz Josef Museum in Baden, Austria.

At the same time, we will celebrate the kick-off of DIPworld, a new online map to connect the many hidden gems that are part of the collections of small and medium sized museum. Find out more about their history and engage with current research as citizen scientist! We showcase this new tool with the wonderful collection of historical stove tiles. We invite you to learn more about their history, regional significance and technique.

This is part of the European Commission Horizon 2020-funded DOORS Digital Incubators for Museums project, led by the Museumsmangement NOE.

Paper day! Thrilled to announce the publication of the article “Biomodd: The integration of art into transdisciplinary research practices” in the esteemed journal GAIA - Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society.

I led this study with SEADS members that provides valuable insights into the potential of art as a catalyst for transdisciplinary research and collaboration. We argue for the integration of art as a meeans to generate ideas and engage researchers and non-academic stakeholders.

We also made the front cover!

Tickets are on sale for

Mimikry: Exomoon. An immersive space experience

SEADS and Theater Neumarkt are collaborating for a new immersive theatre production. Join us in Zurich between 6 and 19 September for an interactive performance that challenges audiences to question what it’s worth loving, playing and fighting for.

I am happy to be part of the creative team leading this exciting project where audiences of all ages are invited to embark on a journey to explore a speculative future world on an exomoon orbiting a distant star. What will it look like when humankind leaves Earth to travel and settle in space? What values, identity and knowledge do wee choose to send and who should carry this legacy?

Will human settlement in space be a replica of humans on Earth or might it create an entirely new offspring of human culture?

The backdrop of a new space race and exciting scientific discoveries of planets in distant star systems provide the breeding ground for a multi-layered and multi-sensory experience.

You are kindly invited to the exhibition opening of

ENDOXƎ. Fragmentierte Identität

on Tuesday, 7 November 2023 at 6pm at

Haus Wittgenstein in Vienna, Austria

.

The exhibition centers on fragmented identities, small pieces of a complex whole. It questions how external factors impact the construction of a self. 

Our new work What they’re looking for, created together with wonderful SEADS members and Exomoon co-directors Pieter Steyaert and Mary Pedicini will be shown alongside artwork of members of the Gender Art Lab. The work has emerged from footage around our production Mimikry Exomoon: an immersive space experience at Theater Neumarkt this summer.

During the preparations and rehearsals, members of the ensemble wander through the city center of Zurich in full costume and character from an alternate reality 20,000 years into the future on a confined habitat in a distant star system. They discover our present for the first time. 2023 tastes different, the air smells different, everything seems foreign. What are we searching for? This is the entire essence of life: who are you? what are you? Answers come, more often than not, in small fragments of the whole.

I am incredibly honored to be part of the Conference “Photographs from Outer Space: A Female Archaeology of Image-Data”, curated by Barbara Grespi and Luca Guzzardi (Department of Philosophy, University of Milan).

Scholars from Media Archaeology, Image theory, History, Women’s Study, Philosophy of Science, as well as Astronomers, and Artists will come together for three days to explore a female archaeology of the postphotographic image.

Full Program

OPEN CALL

Apply for a residency and commissioned artwork with us as part of a collaboration between the ARTlab and the Virtual and Immersive Production Studio Nottingham!

Artists are invited to apply for a commission to create a new work of art using augmented reality (AR) and/or immersive technology (XR) to form part of the upcoming Cosmic Titans exhibition. The exhibition will take place at the Djanogly Gallery, Lakeside Arts Nottingham, from 25 January to 27 April 2025 before touring.

Cosmic Titans is an innovative ArtScience exhibition that captures the creative negotiations necessary for fundamental research around the very early Universe and black holes enabled by quantum technology. This new AR/XR work will be one of the major pieces in this exhibition and should reflect its values and ambitions.

More Information and apply here.

I am excited to initiate and shape the ARTlab Nottingham , its artists-in-residence programme and exhibitions through a multitude of generous fundings we were recently awarded. Thanks to the University of Nottingham’s Strategic Innovation Fund that enables my interdisciplinary research for proof of concept studies, UKRI’s Science and Technology Facilities Council and Higher Education Innovation Funding.

The ARTlab is the University’s new incubation space for ArtScience research and practice at the forefront of astrophysics, quantum technology, mathematics and philosophy research, as well as engagement and art creation. I am happy to co-lead the development with brilliant colleagues and funders who believe in the benefits of creative co-creation through ArtScience integration. Stay tuned for more information on our residence programme, research outputs and large-scale exhibition and showcase.

Happy to announce that our latest project, bioSignals, was funded through the British Council’s Connections through Culture grant!

BioSignals is a collaborative project between the Philippines (University of the Philippines - Open University), the UK, and New Zealand (AwhiWorld) that creates a planet-wide new media artwork that bridges the three island nations through plants bioSignals will collect, process, transmit, and creatively transform signals generated from local plant life growing at each of our sites, connecting isolated entities as part of a cross-cultural dialogue about biodiversity, climate change, and resilience. We will incorporate a first-of-its-kind feasibility study to transmit bioSignals into space by partnering with the University of Nottingham’s CubeSats team.

More information and a list of partners here

It is soon time for this year’s edition of the Politics of the Machine conference, hosted by RWTH Aachen! This year’s emphasis will be on Lifelikeness & beyond. I will give a talk on Models of Word-Building in the “Models of Life - Models of Research” track and and co-chair a track on “Death, degrowth, and finitude in the age of the lifelike” together with SEADS colleagues. We will also discuss our recent astrophysics - immersive theatre project Exomoon and engage in the cultural, ethical, creative and scientific conversation around innovation at the forefront of human-machine interaction.

I look forward to a week of discussion and exploration across research and practice.

The Connections Through Culture grants programme is designed to nurture fresh cultural partnerships between East Asia and the UK

A lot has happened in the last months...

My colleagues and I led two great sessions at this year’s EASST-4S conference (Association for the Study of Science and Technology and Society for Social Studies of Science) with the title “Making and Doing Transformation” and the Inter- and Transdisciplinary 2024 conference, “ITD beyond buzzwords”. I led a creative mapping that enabled us to explore connections between ITD and STS scholarship. Outcomes of the mapping will be incorporated into an exciting book project we are working on. Stay tuned for more on that!

The 9 artists that have been working with the ARTlab Nottingham as part of our residency programme for Cosmic Titans have been creating, stirring, and engaging with scientists in Nottingham, Oxford, Imperial and more. We have had the chance to present a sneak peak at the Quantum Technology Showcase in London at the beginning of November and received extremely encouraging feedback. All of this strengthens us during the last push. Cosmic Titans: Art, Science and the Quantum Universe will open at Djanogly Gallery in Nottingham on 25th January 2025. 2 Years in the making, at least 50 hard-working people involved in creating this large-scale exhibition full of original artworks and science experiments. The ARTlab has been busy with inviting students to build interferometers out of Lego and joint prototyping sessions for the art-science production. More information about our event programme and opening times HERE.

I was especially excited to reconnect with fellow members of the ITD-Alliance “Integration Expert Working Group” and immediatly put things to use in a workshop I led on “creative Modelling for the “Spirits in Complexity” research group at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna.

It was a pleasure to join friends from WAAG Amsterdam during their workshop on improving S+T+ARTS awards programmes during this years’ Ars Electronica and before that to lead a “Big Picture Event” about Creativity in Research for Students of the Faculty of Earth Sciences, Geography and Astronomy of the University of Vienna.

I also had an invigorating zOOm ZoNE podcast conversation with the ZoNE collective where we discussed a wide range of topics, such as hot of fundamentally change our habits of thinking, how to deal with existing institutions and organisational challenges for arts and science, and why thinking out of the box is so important for understanding the universe as a whole

Then, our three bioSignals project (supported by the British Council

@BritishArts, @phbritish) exhibitions were simultaneously launched in

the UK, the Philippines and New Zealand, sending signals from plants

across the nations and into space. With project members from SEADS,

Awhiworld and University of the Philippines Open University.

Teaser images for Cosmic Titans: Conrad Shawcross with Light Cage (top left) and Ringdown (top right). Photo: Richard Ivey. 

Bottom: QT Showcase Studio Above & Below showcasing Quantum Lens (left) Lego Interferometry project (middle). Alistair McClymont experimenting with “An other Universe” reflections.

Cosmic Titans: Art, Science and the Quantum Universe is now open!

This has been a 2-year long project, our first for the ARTlab, which Prof. Silke Weinfurtner and I founded as the University of Nottingham’s first ArtScience experimentation space. We have enabled nine artists in residence to work alongside and with quantum scientists, particle physicists and astrophysicists investigating the early universe, black holes and are at the forefront of Quantum Technologies.

The exhibition is free and open now until 27th of April at Lakeside Arts, Djanogly Gallery in Nottingham, and shows commissioned artworks by Conrad Shawcross, Alistair McClymont, Daniela Brill Estrada, Monica C. LoCascio, Matthew Woodham, Studio Above&Below, David Severn and Jim Grainger.

Our public events run alongside the exhibition

there is something new almost every week.

Tickets for the events and more information can

be found ONLINE

It’s been a vibrant few months for ArtScience interdisciplinaryity -- so much has happened!

Of course, we had an amazing run with the Cosmic Titans exhibition, a public programme that we extended continuously because of demand and continuing collaborations that directly feed into the development of new physics experiments and art practice and research. The exhibition is now packed up and ready to travel to the Science Gallery London where it will be shown under the name “Quantum Untangled” from 8 October 2025 until 1 March 2026. If you missed it in Nottingham, here is your next chance to see it!

If you are interested in hosting the exhibition, please reach out! Thank you to all the content creators, journalists and colleagues who wrote and posted about it.  I intend to post more about the exceptional response we received soon.

After the opening, I joined the fantastic Lorentz centre workshop “Unlocking the Imagination: Art-Science for Radical Transformation” which brought together researchers, practitioners and curators to examine the radical potential and challenges to create spaces of collaborations responding to sustainability transformations and radical imagination.

During the experimental policy workshop at the British Academy “Times of a Just Transition” Programme, we investigated political decision-making and social justice through speculative fiction -- another powerful ArtScience project!

I’m excited that one outcome of the workshop -- a small essay I wrote -- was chosen as part of the Moon-bound book project (part of the Moon Gallery) and will be send to the moon later this year. Read more about the first permanent museum on the moon HERE.

In our monthly SEADS meetings, we have been speaking a lot about the role of art and culture beyond Earth, which questions such as “What is the role and value of art in space exploration? Why should art be part of journeys to space? How do we decide which artists gain access to space experiences -- and whose narratives and visions will shape humanity’s imaginations?”. We also ask about the ethics of contemporary space exploration and who gets to decide humanity’s path?

My colleague Pieter Staeyert and I are in the midst of writing about the Exomoon immersive theatre experience to answer the value of such an ArtScience project for early career astrophysicists and my colleague Zeynep Birsel and I use two residencies (ARTlab and S+T+ARTS) as cases for art for crossing boundaries and navigating the third spaces. I’m also contributing to a new paper on empirical accounts of integration expertise, led by Sabine Hoffmann.

I was happy to be invited to speak about Inter- and Transdisciplinary Research at the University of Nottingham’s Creative and Digital Research Cluster and Knowledge Exchange event as well as to a full room of early career women and non-binary folks in Physics. I am always amazed and touched by the enthusiasm and wish to participate by the next generations!! I am doing all I can to create opportunities for interdisciplinary PhDs and projects that cross boundaries.

The fantastic SciOut workshop (Science Communication in and out of academia straight from the creators), led by early career researchers of the Gravity Laboratory at Nottingham was another highlight. Partly because of the audience Veritasium drew, and also to highlight all the benefits ArtScience can have for this final part of scientific research.

The LEGO interferometer project,Photon Bricks, led by amazing colleague Patrik Svancara and supported by the ARTlab, has really taken off. To bring our interferometer to life, we combined LEGO with lasers and other optical components. Reach out to learn more about the loan scheme, if you would like to use the kit in your classroom or project.

Finally, the sessions I co-organised at this years National Astronomy Meeting drew full house: the “Crossing-Boundaries: The benefits of ArtScience for contemporary astronomy research” sessions brought together art practitioners, STEAM educators and astronomers to discuss collaborations from all perspectives and network. During the session “How do we make progress in science?”, we heard provocations from philosophers, ethnographers, astronomers -- and yes, an ArtScience researcher-- which led to an engaging “fishbowl” discussion that drew in the astrophysics audience in new ways, to hopefully consider new perspectives.