October 27, 2011
The Glamour Factory
Six months ago it was just an ambition: to host a late night at a major art gallery in London. Take science into a new habitat, to add to our collection of music festivals, banquets, sewage treatment plants, department stores, crumbling art deco power stations, indie art gatherings, and immersive cinematic celebrations. Who, after all, would expect to see science sidle up alongside paintings, sculptures and heads made of frozen blood.
Well, we would for a start – as would Contemporary Vintage, who (in their own words) say:
“There’s a gap between the way culture is traditionally communicated and people’s everyday lives. Contemporary Vintage fills that gap by connecting people to culture in ways that are relevant to them.”
Replace the word “culture” with the word “science”, and you essentially have the ethos of Guerilla Science. Our union was, you might say, meant to be.
So we were delighted when they brought us on board to curate a Late Shift Extra to complement Glamour of the Gods, the National Portait Gallery’s current exhibition of Hollywood portraiture from the industry’s “Golden Age”.
Marlene Dietrich: Iconic.
Together with Contemporary Vintage and DJ duo The Broken Hearts, we produced The Glamour Factory, an evening of makeovers from Illamasqua, cocktails from Hendricks Gin, posing classes, lectures, workshops, photography sessions, music and live dance performances in The Broken Hearts Cocktail Lounge (check out more in their radio show for JazzFM here) – all throughout four floors in the central London gallery on October 7, 2011.
We brought science into the cultural spread, putting the concept of “glamour” under the microscope and exploring the science behind facial recognition, identity, and gender.
July 8, 2010
Equalising The Gender Roles
We made a metre-long Reuben’s tube two months ago.
“That’s awesome!” they said. “Can you make it three times larger?”
OK. Even though we weren’t sure a three-metre beast had ever been built. Why not?
But this time, Zoe, whose father is a carpenter and who grew up around power tools, wanted to play a big part in building it.
“Let’s equalise the representation of gender roles. Girls can be carpenters too.”
And so she did.
Except she and Steve hadn’t quite clocked just how big the thing was before they got there.
0