Archive for Eyal Weizman

All in a day’s work

Posted in Art, Biographical, Education, Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on June 30, 2010 by telescoper

I got back from yesterday’s trip to a very muggy London with a raging sore throat and a brain as sluggish as an England defender on an action replay. Come to think of it, I must be as sick as a parrot. I’m sweating like a pig too, although I don’t know whether that’s a symptom of anything nasty or just because it’s still so warm and humid. Anyway, in view of my likely incoherence I thought I’d keep it brief (again) and just mention a few salient points from the last day or two.

I went to London as part of my duties as External Examiner for the MSc Course in Astrophysics at Queen Mary, University of London. Of course all the proceedings are confidential so I’m not going to comment on anything in detail, except that I spent a bit of time going through the exam scripts before the Examiners’ Meeting in a room that did a very passable impersonation of a heat bath. When I was later joined by the rest of the Exam Board the temperature soared still further. Fortunately the business went relatively smoothly so nobody got too hot under the collar and after concluding the formal business, a few of us cooled off with a beer or two in the Senior Common Room.The students spend the next couple of months writing their dissertations now that the written exams are over, so we have to reconvene in October to determine the final results. I hope it’s a bit cooler by then.

I couldn’t stay long at Queen Mary, however, as I had a working dinner to get to. Regular readers of this blog (both of them) may remember that I’m involved in project called Beyond Entropy which is organized by the Architectural Association School of Architecture. I’ve been working on this occasionally over the months that have passed since I first blogged about it, but deadlines are now looming and we need to accelerate our activity. Last night I met with the ever-enthusiastic Stefano Rabolli Pansera at the house of Eyal Weizman by Victoria Park in the East End, handily close to Queen Mary’s Mile End campus. Assisted by food and wine we managed to crystallise our ideas into something much more tangible than we had managed to do before on our theme of Gravitational Energy. The School has offered us expert practical assistance in making prototypes and  I’m now much more optimistic about our exhibit coming together, not to mention excited at the prospect of seeing it on display at the Venice Architecture Biennale. I won’t say what we’re planning just yet, though. I’d rather wait until it’s done before unveiling it.

Incidentally, here’s a link to a  lecture by Eyal Weizman where he gives some interesting perspectives on architectural history.

Finally, and nothing to do with my trip to the Big Smoke, I noticed today on the Research Fortnight Blog that the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW) is planning to reduce the number of universities in Wales “significantly” from its current level of 12. This is an interesting development and one that I’ve actually argued for here. Quoting Leighton Andrews, Welsh Assembly Minister responsible for higher education, the piece says

“This target does not mean fewer students,” he said in a statement. “But it is likely to mean fewer vice chancellors. We will have significantly fewer HE institutions in Wales but they will be larger and stronger.”

How these reductions will be achieved remains to be seen, but it seems obvious that quite a few  feathers will be ruffled among the management’s plumage in some institutions and it looks like some vice chancellors will be totally plucked!

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Beyond Entropy

Posted in Art, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on February 26, 2010 by telescoper

It’s a cold and rainy morning here in Geneva, but I’m really looking forward to the next few days here. I arrived yesterday evening after a flight that was longer than it should have been. It seems the French air traffic controllers went on some sort of strike so my flight from Heathrow wasn’t allowed to cross French air space. For a flight between London and Geneva that is a bit of a problem. In the end we flew west over Belgium and then down into Switzerland from the North, the whole thing taking about an hour longer than expected. Still, when I did get to where I was going I found the hotel nice and comfortable and, better still, had a very enjoyable dinner at a swish Italian restaurant. It was nice to leave the chaos of French airspace behind.

I’m here as part of an unusual research project called (ironically, in the light of the aforementioned travel problems) Beyond Entropy. Organized by the Architectural Association School of Architecture, this experiment will bring together a group of artists, architects and scientists to investigate the notion of Energy. The way this is being done is by setting up a series of groups (one artist, one architect and one scientist) to look at each of a number of different forms of energy: potential, electric, thermal, mechanical, and so on; my own focus is gravitational energy. Each group will work together over the following few days to generate ideas a collaboration intended to create a work of some sort that gives form to the specific concept of energy they’re looking at. The subtitle of the project is “When Energy becomes Form”.

After we go back home, we’ll continue to work over the following months to produce prototypes of whatever emerges from the collaboration. The results will be exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale and the Architectural Association in August 2010. It is hoped that next year these prototypes will be developed into full-scale installations for the Venice Art Biennale in 2011.

I have no idea at this stage how the collaboration will work out or what is going to come out at the other end. The canvas is completely blank. I don’t really know the artist (Carlos Garaicoa) or the architect (Eyal Weizman) that I’ll be working with either. That makes it strangely exciting. At any rate it’s certainly different from the sort of scientific workshop I usually attend.

Anyway, to kick things off we’re going to be spending most of today at CERN, where I’ll be heading by bus just about as soon as I’ve finished this blog post. Later on today I’ll be giving a short presentation about how gravitational energy relates to my own research in the hope that this will stimulate a few ideas for my collaborators. Arts-science collaborations like this have been tried before and they have a chequered history, but we’ll just have to see how it goes. It feels more like research than most research workshops I’ve been to, in fact, because I really haven’t a clue what is going to happen!

P.S. Fellow blogger Andrew Jaffe is here too, but I think I might have beaten him in the competitive blogging stakes.

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