For the past few months, OPIGlets Gemma, Charlie and Alexi have been engaged in a collaboration between scientists from Oxford and artists connected to Central St Martins art college in London. This culminated in February with the publication of a zine detailing our work, and a final symposium where we presented our projects to the wider community.
This collaboration was led by organisers Barney Hill and Nina Gonzalez-Park and comprised a series of workshops in various locations across Oxford and London, where the focus was to discuss commonalities between contemporary artistic and scientific research and the concept of transdisciplinary work. Additionally, scientists and artists were paired up to explore shared interests, with the goal of creating a final piece to exhibit.
Gemma was paired with artist Risa Ueno. Risa’s work blends performance art and textiles, using techniques from her experience in the fashion industry, with a focus on knitting and often incorporating materials she has developed herself. For example, for her recent work “Eating DNA – Why not eat knot?” (2021-2024) she created an edible protein-based yarn for participants in her piece to knit and eat. Combined with Gemma’s research on the sequence and structural properties of nanobodies, Gemma and Risa found common themes in their work relating to form, structure, and patterns, particularly in the parallels between protein sequences and the process of knitting, and the idea of loops and folds. Their final piece was the creation of scaled-up, knitted nanobodies, with the aim being that their soft and playful nature would encourage viewers at the symposium exhibition to interact with the ‘nanobodies’, and fold them into shape, with the many possible conformations reflecting the scientific design process. Different colours of yarn were chosen to represent the separation between the CDR and framework regions, which then come together upon folding, using wire woven through the wool to allow our structures to hold their shape.
Charlie teamed up with Brighton-based musician Lewis Clay to explore the idea of experiencing the movement of molecular systems. The movement and interactions of atoms and molecules is something that is always happening in and around us but also something we don’t perceive in our daily lives (if you’re not a scientist!). Therefore, the aim of their collaboration was to try and render molecular systems into an audio-visual experience for a viewer. Lewis is interested in avant-garde approaches to making music and sound generation, especially using data-driven approaches, so it was decided that molecular dynamics simulation could be used to generate trajectories of proteins in solution to explore this concept. Over a few sessions at Lewis’s studio in Brighton, they worked to use all the data associated with these trajectories – for example, interactions continually forming and breaking – to generate a data-driven auditory soundscape using synthesisers. Finally, when it came time to install, they projected two virtual cameras inside the simulations onto the wall while playing the generative soundscape through speakers and a subwoofer to get to the finished piece. Charlie and Lewis are extremely thankful to the Balliol Interdisciplinary Institute for supporting our work and providing with the funds to acquire speakers, projectors, and other electronics necessary for this installation.
Alexi
Each artist-scientist pair installed their artwork at the LOADING… exhibition and symposium on the 11th February 2025. We are all very grateful to the organizers of this event for bringing artists and scientists together:
Nina Gonzalez-Park: https://ninagonzalezpark.com/
Barney Hill: https://www.barneyhill.com/
And finally, check out the artists featured in this blog:
Risa Ueno: https://www.instagram.com/ruru.16.ediblecat/?hl=en
Lewis Clay: https://www.instagram.com/n_umerra/
