August 31, 2010
Guardian Science Podcast
Check out recordings from our antics at the Secret Garden Party this July on the Guardian weekly science podcast, including the Synaesthesia Game, our sexy science pub quiz, and interviews with scientists Tom Wright and Petra Boynton – coverage begins about 14:25 in. Have a listen here.
August 19, 2010
Green Man Festival, August 20-22
The sublime Brecon Beacons beckon. Catch us August 20 to 22 in Einstein’s Garden.
Sounds of the Universe: Lewis Dartnell & Andrew Pontzen
Walks: Friday 1330 & 1630, Saturday 1100, 1400 & 1715, Sunday 1300 & 1545
Talks: Friday 1630 w/ Andrew & Sat 1330 w/ Lewis, Yurt Stage
Hear the the bassy reverberations of the surface of our Sun, the eerie shrieks of Jupiter, and feverish radio pulses from the cores of dead stars. Plus a talk on astrobiology with Lewis on Saturday.
The Synaesthesia Game: Guerilla Science & Coney
Saturday 1215 and Sunday 1345, Yurt Stage
The Professor has made a brain – but it has synaesthesia: it hears sounds when it sees colours. Come see what it thinks you sound like to look at. Unlike anything you’ve seen – or heard – before.
Flavour Feast: Becki Clarke & Rachel Edwards Stuart
Friday 1530, Saturday 1630, Sunday 1745, Workshop Tent
Celebrate the manifold facets of flavour with our sensory smorgasbord. Sample from our menu of taste tests with expert food scientists and explore the tantalizing mysteries of your senses.
Jelly Brain Dissections: Guy Billings
Friday 1530, Saturday 1630, Sunday 1745, Workshop Tent
Come for a cuppa and a slice of delicious jelly, set in the shape of your marvellous cerebrum. We will dissect, discuss and digest the most complex thing in the known universe: your mind.
Liars Picnic: Lynsey Gozna & Rachel Taylor
Friday 1900 & Sunday 1445, Yurt Stage
How good are you at spotting a lie? Forensic psychologists will teach you to spot the telltale signs. Then put your newfound shifty skills to the test in a lying match. Prizes for the finest fibbers. Cheating is compulsory – no exceptions.
August 18, 2010
Wellcome Trust Blog
Summertime means music festival season for many, but revellers at some of this year’s events may encounter science alongside the singing. Zoe Cormier, ‘guerilla scientist’, tells us more.
Agency of adventure and play Coney with our synaesthetic brain.
Anyone who passed by the Guerilla Science tent at the Secret Garden Party in July would have had reason to look twice: costumed revellers standing in front of a giant eye to make an enormous brain sing a cascade of strange noises.
The giant, pink, flowery brain is not just any giant brain. It has synaesthesia, a condition that up to one in 23 people may possess where two senses become entwined: words can have tastes, or numbers may have smells. Agency of adventure and play Coney, paired with neuroscientist Thomas Wright, devised an interactive performance to give those with a more typical sensory framework a better appreciation of what synaesthesia feels like. Contestants were asked, as Coney put it, “to see what the brain thinks you sound like to look at” and the result was a sonic and visual feast.
By blending the latest from biomedical research and neuroscience with art, music and play to create a noisy and colourful interactive experience, the Synaesthesia Game is a unique and (we hope) effective way to introduce people to a scientific concept in ways the written word or a lecture cannot.
Guerilla Science specialises in scientific events like this. Since we began staging events at music festivals in 2007 we have moved beyond simply speaking to our audiences. We try to engage people with the latest in research by blending science with art, music and play to create interactive and memorable events in unusual and generally arts-focused settings. Our handle, ’guerilla’, stems from how we pop up in places where science and scientists are not normally found: nightclubs, food markets, cinemas and (most importantly for us) music festivals.
By nestling ourselves among cabaret dancers, fire sculptures and mud wrestling pits, we aim to challenge widespread assumptions about what science is and how it works. By surprising people with a new finding (some people in vegetative states are actually conscious) or a challenging question (is gender actually an illusion?) we hope to inspire more people to think in new ways about their own lives. And through this, we hope more people understand how ‘science’ provides a window into the complexities of the human condition.
This year’s programme was larger and more experimental than ever, in great part thanks to our funding from the Wellcome Trust. After a string of smaller events in London (including a sensory feast in Borough Market and an immersive installation on perception with Secret Cinema) we are in the middle of our biggest summer festival season to date.
July took us to the Lovebox festival in London and four days at the Secret Garden Party. Now we are gearing up for the Green Man festival this coming weekend (20-22 August). The Synaesthesia Game will be with us. Transporting a giant brain from a warehouse in East London to a yurt in the middle of a field in Wales is certainly not easy, but it is most definitely worth it.
By Zoe Cormier for the Wellcome Trust
July 23, 2010
The Guardian Science Blog
Sonic Fire, which reveals the shape of sound waves with a string of dancing flames, being demonstrated by Guerilla Science earlier this year. Photograph: Zoe Cormier
Guerilla scientists infiltrate Secret Garden Party
Synaesthesia, Petra Boynton’s intimate places, communicating with the comatose and Marcus du Sautoy all feature at this weekend’s Secret Garden Party, courtesy of Guerilla Science.
It may have been the burlesque freak show temptress who set fire to her skin, the empathic robotic bust of Elvis sitting in the eyeworks laboratory in Blade Runner, or the three metre long tube that reveals the shape of sound with dancing fire – but regardless of the victor, there are many contenders for the title of the quirkiest performers Guerilla Science has featured this year.
This weekend at The Secret Garden Party might find us a new claimant to the title – perhaps Sampa Von Cyborg, who will perform live hangings and hookings in the name of science. Or maybe the giant brain that sings when you show it colours.
Guerilla Science started four years ago, sedately enough, with eight lectures in a grassy field at the Cambridgeshire music festival The Secret Garden Party, with scientists talking about such everyday topics as “Is God a number?” and “Could we live forever?” This year we have found ourselves in the most strange and unlikely settings for science, far more bizarre than an English music festival.
Astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell, accompanied by Guerilla Scientist Louis Buckley clad in a silver spacesuit, took us on an audio tour of the stars at the Stoke Newington International Airport arts festival Distance, where he spoke alongside a performance artist offering free “spoonings”.
Then there was Secret Cinema’s grandiose homage to Blade Runner. To help the audience think about what makes us human, computer scientists Laurel Riek from Cambridge University and Peter McOwan from Queen Mary, University of London, brought robots and surreal visual tests. Seeing them chat about neural networks inside the smoky eyeworks laboratory, while above us strippers danced on platforms, and outside costumed midgets smashed vintage cars with baseball bats, was truly memorable.
At the Lovebox in east London last weekend, burlesque artist Vivid Angel performed live piercings and burnings while hooked up to live biomonitoring equipment while she discussed pain with clinical psychologist Matteo Cella. (Her favourite kind of pain? “A broken heart.”)
And the incredibly talented Vid Warren, who beatboxes while playing the flute, lent us his sonic skills as we amplified his sounds into our Reuben’s tube – a three-metre-long metal tube that reveals the shapes of sound waves with a string of dancing flames, a performance we call Sonic Fire. Our physics maestro Steve Mould (the science presenter on Blue Peter) was on hand to explain the properties of sound. As he said, “Things become more beautiful when you understand how they work.”
There are many groups doing fantastic science outreach events for the public around the world, but we’re pretty sure nobody does it quite like us. We’re especially passionate this year about creating interactive events, to break down the barrier between “expert” and “audience”. As our head of marketing Mia Kukathasan puts it, “The lab is everywhere.”
And so at the Secret Garden Party this weekend near Huntingdon in East Anglia, music psychologist Gianna Cassidy and singer songwriter Eoghan Colgan will discuss the science of musical expression, and festivalgoers will be able to help score a soundtrack for the festival using nifty interactive iPad technologies. Also on music, Cambridge neuroscientist Jessica Grahn will help us understand how babies are better at picking up rhythms than their parents and will lead the crowds with sonic social bonding routines.
Sex scientist Petra Boynton will discuss our intimate places with intimate questions and ask us where we like (and don’t like) to be touched. Boynton and other scientists and philosophers will host small intimate discussions in a boat on the lake.
Perhaps most spectacularly, agency of adventure and play Coney has teamed up with scientists who study synaesthesia to produce a game exploring this condition, in which the senses are blended. Some people “hear” colours and “smell” numbers, for example. A giant brain, created by model-maker Roseanne Wakely, will be “fed” visual stimuli and in turn will sing tunes and instructions, leading participants through an elaborate and undoubtedly original game, like “a giant visual Kaos pad” says Bowdler.
There will still be lectures. The current Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, mathematician Marcus du Sautoy will tell us about the beauty of prime numbers and why David Beckham wears the number 23 shirt.
And neuroscientist Dr Adrian Owen will explain how we can speak to people in comas. He made history recently when, after a decade of careful work, he used brain scans to prove that some people in comas are actually conscious and can communicate if asked the right questions in the right way.
We cannot imagine any reason why science would not belong at a music festival, alongside cabaret strippers and crystal healers. The theme this year is “fact or fiction”, and of course we fall into the former category. But we don’t consider this to be a handicap. As our tagline goes: truth is stranger than fiction. Reality provides the mind with incredible fodder for the imagination. Some people just aren’t willing – or lucky enough – to see it that way.
“Why does Guerilla Science exist? Simple: Science is part of our culture, yet often it’s left languishing in the lab or conveyed in dull or patronising ways,” says director Jenny Wong. “We are experimental people by nature, who like new trying new things. So ‘mixing science, art, music and play’ [our motto] reflects all of our interests. By bringing these together and collaborating with interesting people with new ideas, you can’t help but think we’ll produce something amazing. People who think in creative ways and succeed in capturing your imagination only make life more exciting.”
By helping people to experience “science” in new ways, in unexpected places and with the quirkiest of collaborators, we hope to inspire them to reflect on the complexity of their lives and how remarkable it is to exist at all.
Zoe Cormier is one of the directors of Guerilla Science
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