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Ralph Windle’s Blog on Science & The Arts

is about some big, interconnected issues:-

The long-running Arts / Science / Two cultures Debate. Why the old clichés have to STOP...

How Creative Synthesis - the bringing together of separated (Arts/Science?) modes of thought is now top-priority for Innovation...

About Ralph Windle

EYES and EARS OF THE BEHOLDER

Spring approaches with much to delight eye, ear – and brain – on the Arts/Science front.

WELLCOME IMAGE AWARDS

The winners of this year’s awards can already be viewed at www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12538048 with an excellent commentary by Catherine Draycott, Head of Wellcome Images

These images are certainly, as claimed, highly colourful and visually stunning, though the further claim – that they are important to our understanding of scientific advances – invites further questioning. There’s no doubt, however, that Spike Walker’s brilliant photomicrograph of a caterpillar proleg comes close to a positive answer with explicative and aesthetic aspects of the artefact in dazzling accord.

The judges have certainly done an impressive job in selecting 21 winning entries which “ do not simply convey scientific information, but also have aesthetic beauty”.

Winning entries are on display at the Wellcome Collection in Central London until July 2011.


Go see them if you can.

GENOMICS FORUM POETRY WINNERS

The Genomics Policy and Research Forum, housed in Edinburgh since 2004 as part of the Economic and Social Research Council’s Genomic Network (EGN), exists primarily to build links between social scientists and scientists working in the fields of genomic science and technology.

So some sceptic eyebrows were initially raised at the announcement of a Genomics Forum Poetry Competition!; until, that is, we were reminded that the Forum – in an unusual but highly welcome way - is equally mandated to engage with citizens , policy makers, business and other groups in the wider civil society around it.

The Genomics Forum is going about this aspect of its mission with great gusto, and its poetry competition is one more evidence of a refreshing and uninhibited willingness to open windows on its wider worlds.

Wide enough, it seems, to have attracted over 200 entries from around the world. The three winners and some (very) honourable mentions can be seen and read at www.genomicsnetwork.ac.uk/forum.

Thankfully, the judges were not averse to the controversy inherent in the topic, or to the unstoppable penetration of the poet’s eye. “ What marked a good poem”, the Judges’ Report states, “ was a sense of the ambivalence about the apparent possibilities of genetics, and an ability to consider and illustrate all sides of the argument. Many poems did not make it to the short list because they were too insistent that scientists play god …”.

The winner, Sophie Cooke’s ‘Forward Deck’, skilfully exploits this licence, to the further extent of its ‘double helix’ layout on the printed page.

It is growing harder to tell you apart,
genetically wondrous crew
in your superfine cruising clothes.
Your perfections are various, yet
shrink away from death ….

… You lay your head against the sunrise,
fresh as the only day that comes,
a day that is
yesterday, tomorrow and today ….

… You have undone the wheel
and laid its arc out flat ……

See the full text on the Forum website.

Flanked by Nina Boyd’s ‘Digital’ and Russell Jones’ ‘Chromosome Medley’, ‘Forward Deck’ spearheads an impressive group of new voices on the poetry of science stage. The sometimes chilling tug between the defining imperfections of our humanity and the apparently inexorable drive of genetics is precisely the territory where science, poetry and art most need each other.

PARALLEL UNIVERSE

A poetry competition ‘bringing Science to Poetry and Poetry to Science’.

Oxford’s Museum of the History of Science, which houses an unrivalled collection of early scientific instruments in one of the world’s oldest surviving purpose-built museums, is thick with the atmosphere of earlier science; but no less committed to public engagement through family-friendly exhibitions and a mind-boggling richness of lectures, exhibitions and workshops.

Where else might you go, free, to hear astronomer, Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, discoverer of pulsars, talk on astronomy and poetry; or take the family to a Saturday afternoon workshop on how to work the astrolabe?

Parallel Universe, a science poetry competition organised by the Radcliffe Science Library and Kellogg College Creative Writing Centre, announced and exhibited its 10 winners at the Museum on 1st February ( www.mhs.ox.ac.uk ); and a podcast of the poets reading their work is at www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/universe. The poets are Oxford University staff, students and alumni.

As you might expect, focus and tone are different from those of the Genome Forum’s more articulated brief; but these poets are no less incisive or occasioinally moving than their genomic peers. The two groups should read, possibly meet (?) and enjoy the stimulus of each other’s work.

Here, as taster, is a little of Patrick Toland’s elegant ‘The Naming of Stars’

Once it was easy; launch a hero
out of history, freeze him there as sure
as any gaze of Medusa.
Scoop a goddess from her shell, place
the pearl in a glade
of dark irradiance.

Then came emperors, demi-cousins,
the haulage of a bear, a hunter’s
broken shoulder.
And that’s the fix; those other victors damp
ambition, the reach of our innumerables.

So, we name a star by the shimmer of
a school-girl and her outlawed
sequined bag,
a galaxy becomes the coal that slips a fire
and chars the paisley
cometing the rug. ……

IMAGES, POETRY …. And MUSIC yet to come!

watch this space. RW.