Category: Chain Reaction

P R I M E R – a foretaste of Chain Reaction!

The Centre for the History of the Sciences and the School of Biosciences are getting very excited about their forthcoming exhibition Chain Reaction! at the Sidney Cooper Gallery (22 November – 21 December). Here’s a taster of work by Katy Price that will be on show … P R I M E R Cork boards, …

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Chain Reaction! Workshop 2

The second workshop of the Chain Reaction! project took place on 18 April 2013. We spent the day in the nice new Colyer-Fergusson Music building at the University of Kent, a fittingly creative space in which to have artists discussing their practice. The workshop was thoughtfully planned and run by Caterina Albano of Artakt and …

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Chain Reaction! video posted on YouTube

The film maker Mike Bellinger has posted his promo for Chain Reaction! on YouTube.  Click to view and enjoy Steven Shapin and Bruno Latour set to video game-style electronica.  Thanks, Mike!

Fellow experimenters in art and science part II

Sarah Craske, one of our Chain Reactionists, put me onto this one: BioARTCAMP.  There’s also a video of the project.  BioARTCAMP was a project run out in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains, bringing together artists and scientists into an unfamiliar and necessarily improvisatory environment.  This simple act of transportation has a transformative effect on …

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Fellow experimenters in art and science part I

brain images

Fellow experimenters in art and science part I Since Chain Reaction! got underway, several people have sent links to other projects around the world. Do You Mind? is a New Zealand collaboration based on neuroscience (thanks, Janet Young!).  Its rationale is pretty much the opposite to ours; rather than demystifying science for artists, it’s trying …

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On opening some black boxes

What is the history of science?  A clichéd answer might invoke a parade of big names: Galileo, Darwin, Einstein.  But this is a really rubbish history if we are trying to get people to understand and engage with science in the present day.  Will solar power save us from global warming?  Do neutrinos move faster …

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The birth of Chain Reaction!

The logo of the University of Kent's Creative Campus initiative.

Beginning a Chain Reaction! Chain Reaction! is an attempt to do some creative science communication in a way that embodies approaches taken by historians of science. On a simple level, it celebrates a piece of laboratory kit the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) machine, which is 30 years old in 2013.  By rapidly multiplying fragments of …

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