Mariana Manhaes – Thisthose (Window)

Chris Draper Head of Illustration at Anglia Ruskin produced a beautifully evocative video about the summer exhibition which you can view at

Here is a selection of other images relevant to the Visualise programme of public art works

Alan Sutcliffe - Founder of Computer Arts Society with his work. (Credit: jo Joelson)

William Latham with his work in Ruskin Gallery (image: Jo Joelson)

Elena Cologni with her Elastico work (image: Bronac Ferran)

One of the youngest visitors to the exhibition: Lizzie Muller's daughter (image: Bronac Ferran)

Mike Brick/Kip Gresham (& Fernando Pessoa)

Professor Marilyn Strathern at opening night of Poetry, Language, Code

Susie Olczak installing her work for the lawns at Institute of Astronomy: Limits of Seeing event

Reality Rules - Parker's Piece (image: Bronac Ferran)

Lagoglyph Sound System (Rob La Frenais & Eduardo Kac) . (Image credit & next: Jo Joelson)

Mike Brick with his work in exhibition made in collaboration with Kip Gresham

Elena Cologni: Elastico (Credit: Bronac ferran)

Games Artists Play - Presented by Liliane Lijn

Peter Ride and Lucas visiting Mike Brick/Kip Gresham Prints

Eduardo Kac and John Williams in Print Room

Work by William Latham in Poetry Language Code show

Opening night exhibition with Prof Maggie Boden, Andy Robinson, Bronac Ferran, Ernest Edmonds and others (credit: Jo Joelson)

On 5th July from 5.00-8.00 pm artist Liliane Lijn led a special game with Twitter.  Her very successful series Power Game was extended for VISUALISE and was played live in the Ruskin Galleryon the big screen.

For more information about this exciting artist’s game see www.powergameonline.com or read further below:

All images by Tim Bowditch courtesy: Zabludowicz Collection

Power Game is an exploration of the meaning of power and of the prejudices and preconceptions that people attach to words. It has been staged several times since its first staging in 1974 when underground filmmaker Derek Jarman and Middle East commentator Patrick Seale took part in it. Power Game has now been adapted to the digital medium, using Twitter as its platform. In its new digital incarnation, Powergame Online will use Twitter feeds, and will be viewable on a specially made web site where registered players and the MC will be represented by their twitter avatars.

Originally staged by Liliane Lijn during the Festival for Chilean Liberation at the Royal College of Art, London in 1974, Power Game was recently staged at the ICA in London, at Baltic in Gateshead, during the AV Festival and in March 2011 at the Arches in Glasgow. Played as an altered game of Chemin de Fer, using a pack of word cards Lijn invented, Power Game is principally concerned with the power of words and how people interpret meaning, depending on their interests and preconceptions. It is both a game and an unrehearsed performance, which investigates the politics of identity and power.

Lijn uses ‘the casino’ as a metaphor for a capitalist democracy, a society in which everyone supposedly has an equal chance to succeed. The idea to base the game on Chemin de Fer, the French casino game preferred by James Bond, looks back to when, at the age of 14, her father would beg her to accompany him to the casino to bring him luck. He would portray the casino to me in a golden light as a place of elegance and dreams.

For the initial staging of Power Game, Lijn asked the invited players to be prepared to gamble on the meaning of words. Derek Jarman, who was then just beginning to make his super 8 films, had worked all weekend to come with enough cash to play. He came dressed in a white tuxedo. Michael Kustow, then director of the ICA, came as a 4 star general and sat with Patrick Seale, the political commentator and art dealer, at one end of the table.

Powergame Online was invented by Liliane Lijn and designed in collaboration with Andi Studer and Richard Wilding.  In this iteration it has been commissioned by Bronac Ferran, Guest Curator, Visualise especially for the Ruskin Gallery.

Power Game never fails to generate interesting thoughts and debate on the meaning of power.

Credits: http://powergameonline.com/credits

http://www.lilianelijn.com/power-game-ica-trailer.html

Review of Power Game, at Zabludowicz Collection by Paul Hardman

“This is Power Game, an invention of Liliane Lijn, it is billed as a performance, and indeed it does have qualities of a performance, but the players are not actors, they are participants, and the arguments they use in this power struggle are their own.”

Power Game

At the special Private View on 5th July Liliane Lijn’s Power Game Online (see elsewhere on the site) was played live on the big screen in the Ruskin Gallery and almost fifty people signed up to play online between 5.00 and 8.00 pm.

Artist Elena Cologni installed her highly original work - Elastico -   at Anglia Ruskin under the Games Artists Play theme which reflects back on a game she played when a child in Italy and which also has a direct relationship to recent research work which she has been carrying out around Cambridge.   This game requires collective effort from four people in order for one person – the fifth – to be able to play with it.  Elena has also installed a fascinating series of drawings and projection near the work which is in Studio 103 just off the Ruskin gallery.  The work can be viewed from 2.-00-6.00 pm Tuesday-Thursday inclusive this week.

Elastico - Elena Cologini (Image: Marina Velez)

From 2nd July at Parker’s Piece,  Bettina Furnee and Dylan Banarse’s ‘Reality Rules’ has been open for participation by citizens until 12th July – you are invited to participate to dream up new rules for a fair society…. More information about Reality Rules at: http://futurecity.co.uk/12-artists-for-cambridge/ and http://2bok.com.  Come along during period from 12 noon to 2.00 pm each day to receive Rules for the Day printed specially on letterpress for public distribution.

Bettina Furnee will also contribute work to the gallery exhibition; her piece, Powerhouse, made in collaboration with Tim Siddall of Anglia Ruskin’s Film Department, is a time lapse film that resulted from an eight week game which Furnee conducted with staff and users of the Cambridge University Library in 2008. It has never been shown publicly and Visualise Cambridge is delighted to present it as part of Games Artists Play within the Poetry, Language, Code exhibition. Furnee staged an 8 week continuous word association game at Cambridge University Library during Full Easter term 2008. The game started off on 22^nd April with a single first word ‘powerhouse’ on display in the entrance hall of the library and came to conclusion on 13^th June with the final word ‘albatross’. Over 53 days a chain of 483 words, linked by association, was displayed. Half of these words were submitted individually by library users or staff, who were asked to respond with the first word, which came to mind. This word was then displayed next, and so on. The rest of the words constituted collective dominant responses, polled from over 7,000 submissions made on-line. All words were colour coded by gender and origin. Of all submissions 61% were made by women, and 39% by men. The words most frequently displayed in the library were: ‘house’, ‘mouse’ and ‘play’ (4 times each), followed by ‘books’, ‘cheese’, ‘happy’, ‘control’, ‘power’ and ‘sad’ (3 times each).

Bettina Furnee - from Powerhouse game

In a very special contribution from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil (the next host for the Olympic Games)  Mariana Manhães ‘s ‘Thisthose (window)’ (sent by post by Rio to Mill Road Cambridge) has been installed in the Ruskin Gallery studios from 5th July and offers a phenomenally interesting audio-visual insight into the reality of looking into a window in Brazil.

Mariana Manhães: ‘Thisthose (window)’

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Games Artists Play’ was conceived and curated by Bronac Ferran, Guest Curator Visualise programme

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw8gpfmp6ps

William Latham: Cauliflower Mutation

‘POETRY, LANGUAGE, CODE
- Sourcing the In-visible’
VISUALISE Summer Exhibition 2012, curated by Bronac Ferran

Artists: Giselle Beiguelman/Mike Brick and Kip Gresham/heath bunting/Chris Draper/Ernest Edmonds/Bettina Furnee/Tom Hall/Eduardo Kac/William Latham/Liliane Lijn/London Fieldworks (with Steve Beard and Kaffe Matthews)/Gustav Metzger/Alex McLean/Alan Sutcliffe/ubermorgen.com, Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico.
VENUE: The Ruskin Gallery and Studios, Anglia Ruskin University, East Road, Cambridge CB1
DIRECTIONS: Campus map HERE    Cambridge map HERE
DATES: Thurs 21st June – Thurs 12th July 2012.
OPENING TIMES: Open Tues – Fri,  2-6pm
PRIVATE VIEW (All Welcome): Thurs 21st June, 6.00 – 8.00pm
. Opening Talk: Professor Margaret Boden
. Performances at 7.00 pm  by Alex McLean and Tom Hall.

‘POETRY, LANGUAGE, CODE

is the title of a new exhibition at Anglia Ruskin running until 12th July. It explores the dynamic, constructive and formal relationships which artworks contain within themselves: the visual language, codes and grammars which artists often invent, appropriate or borrow to make art work. Exposing the often unseen underlying interior typologies, this is an exhibition about form-finding, about the processes by which visual communication occurs or composition happens. It is also a play with identity and with artistic signature in a context of the generic, the generative and the collaborative. Artworks are counterpointed with diagrams and flow-charts, with texts and subtexts and organic machines. We see the possibility of luminous human machine interaction as well as the intuitive crafted work of the hand. We understand the production of form from the inside-out and the often slow morpho-genesis by which works emerge. The exhibition includes works from the last five decades including early examples of concrete poetry and relates these to the development of computer-based artworks. A collaboration with The Print Studio, Cambridge and Kip Gresham brings to us perfectly made screenprints accompanying magical texts. The mutable, protean, traversal routes which artists take through processes of ‘formation’ are exposed and revealed. We watch how analogue moves to digital and back to analogue again. At heart is the idea of liveness, of the containment of that which might be mutable and reflexive, of biological and computational processes of regeneration from system to system in poetic circuits of flow and interaction.

Turing, Masterman and Metzger

The exhibition is timed to open on the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth and also pays homage to the work of the Cambridge Language Research Unit from where Margaret Masterman and Robin McKinnon devised one of the world’s first Computer Poems (Computer based-Haiku) for the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition in 1968 at the ICA in London. 

A previously unpublished text by Gustav Metzger, founder of Auto-Destructive Art, who studied at Cambridge School of Art (now Anglia Ruskin) in the 1950s forms a highlight of this exhibition.

In the slipstream of this lineage Eduardo Kac shows in the studios a work-in-progress commissioned by Visualise’s Art and Technology strand which connects Bare Conductive’s bio-conductive ink, silk-screening, MBed circuits made by Cambridge company ARM and a sound score developed with Dr Rob Toulson of the Anglia Ruskin CoDE Research centre.  Also on rare display is one of Kac’s holopoems: Ad Huc was made in 1991 and is a lavish example of Kac’s work using holographic media; it is one of an edition of three (this rare showing is courtesy of the Jonathan Ross Studios in London.)

Ad Huc, holopoem (1991) Eduardo Kac

Eduardo Kac working on Lagoglyph Sound System in Anglia Ruskin Print Studio

William Latham

The bio-morphic and biological is also at the heart of the work of William Latham who began as an artist in the early 1980s at Ruskin College in Oxford and won a Henry Moore Scholarship to the Royal College of Art from where he moved to become one of the first UK fine artists to sustain an engagement with computers – the progression of his work from print to interdisciplinary bio-informatics research and from fine art to gaming is depicted here in the Ruskin Digital Gallery and studios.

Computer Art

Concrete poetry written by Ernest Edmonds (known for his minimalist, formally beautiful computer art work) from 1967 will be displayed as will diagrams and visual arts work from Alan Sutcliffe, founder of the Computer Arts Society and best known for his work as part of Electronic Music Studios with Cambridge resident, Peter Zinovieff.  Other contemporary works by artists in the show will demonstrate intensive working with embedded poetics, collaborative, aural and visual languages.

Text/Image

Visualise is delighted to be working with Kip Gresham of The Print Studio in Cambridge and artist Mike Brick for a special exhibition of ‘The Size of What I See’ an exhibition of paintings and prints which illustrate the poetry of Fernando Pessoa writing as Alberto Caeiro. Caeiro [one of the many inventions or heteronyms developed by Pessoa - each having separate personality and literary style]was a unique creation; a non-thinker, a believer in the redundancy of reasoning, and a proponent of the desire not to think, merely to look and see. The exhibition invites the viewer to approach the works using the Caeiro poems as a manual, or set of instructions as a key to any meaning that the work may hold.

Bettina Furnee, an artist living in Cambridge will also show a time lapse film work made in collaboration with Tim Sidell (2010)  which relates to the University Library site in Cambridge where Furnee staged an 8 week continuous word association game in 2008.  The website www.powerhouse.me.uk documents the project by way of a word associationindex with graphic display, links to data and a story written by Benjamin Morris using all displayed words.

Bettina Furnee from Powerhouse Library site

Live Coding

At the Opening Event on 21st June Alex McLean made a live coding work for the Ruskin Gallery venue. For a sample of Alex McLean’s work see: http://vimeo.com/7492566

Dr Tom Hall and Kevin Flanagan of Anglia Ruskin Music Department also performed at the opening with saxophone, laptop and projections.

The exhibition will be open on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays (as well as Friday 23rd June) from 2.00-5.00 pm

Poetry, Language, Code was conceived and curated by Bronac Ferran, Guest Curator, Visualise Programme.

ALL WELCOME

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Earlier posting:

VISUALISE”s summer 2012 exhibition will bring together two strands of the Visualise programme with new works and existing works at the intersections between visual text and written word, code and language, digital poetry and hybrid forms.  We are delighted to welcome renowned artists and poets including Eduardo Kac working with Dr Rob Toulson of Anglia Ruskin’s CoDE Research Centre and ARM MBed systems,  William Latham and Liliane Lijn who will also take part in the Institute of Astronomy  ‘Limits of Seeing’ event on the afternoon of 23rd June  and produce a very special Twitter game for the Games Artists Play strand of Visualise on 5th July.

Others who will contribute to the Poetry, Language, Code exhibition are London Fieldworks (with Steve Beard and Kaffe Matthews); heath bunting; computer  art pioneer, Ernest Edmonds; Rio-based artist Mariana Manhares; Computer Arts Society founder and Electronic Music Studios pioner Alan Sutcliffe; composer Tom Hall and poet Drew Milne.

There will be a special Midsummer  Live Coding Performance on Opening Night of the Exhibition, at 7.00 pm on 21st June 2012 with Alex McLean from University of Sheffield  – see http://slub.org/ & http://yaxu.org.

The exhibition opens during the week of Centenary Events for code-master Alan Turing including a major conference in Cambridge where he lived and worked.

As part of the Art & Technology strand of Visualise, Eduardo Kac-  poet and artist  carried out R&D with partners in Cambridgeshire including the famous Curwen Print Studio to prepare work for the summer exhibition at the Ruskin Gallery. He consulted Stanley Jones, Master Printer at Curwen and other lithography specialists at the Studio, as well as Kip Gresham of the Print Studio Cambridge and also John Fyson, a colour photography expert as well as Anglia Ruskin electronics and silkscreen experts  to do tests with bio-ink and embedded systems.

For the exhibition Eduardo is also showing Ad Huc, a Holo Poem, courtesy of the Jonathan Ross Collection in London.

Master Printer Stanley Jones with Artist Eduardo Kac at the Curwen Studio (photo: Andy Robinson)

OF SLEEPING BIRDS

www.ofsleepingbirds.com

A world premiere of the VISUALISE public art commission by  artists circumstance  

What:     FREE evening musical walks through Cambridge streets

When:    Every evening (8.30pm) from Monday June 18^th – Saturday June 23^rd 2012

How:     BOOK your FREE place HERE

Where:     Meeting point: Secret city centre location sent to you when you book your place.

‘Of Sleeping Birds’ is a brand new public art project by artists circumstance. After dark from June 18-23 the streets of Cambridge will be filled with glistening and delicate strands of music as a mobile symphony crosses the city. ‘Of Sleeping Birds’ invites you to pick up a hand crafted wooden speaker box from a secret location in Cambridge, then take a twilight journey as the box in your hand becomes one player in a walking orchestra, harmonising with those being carried by others in your group as you walk.

You don’t need special skills, equipment or gadgets of your own to take part, just book as many places as you want HERE and turn up at the location emailed to you.

V I S U A L I S E commissioned  circumstance to develop a new project in response to a brief to engage Cambridge and its residents in new ways of experiencing the city. ‘Of Sleeping Birds’ is in essence a performance, one which invites you, the public, to participate in a guided audio sculpture/soundscape through the city. It;s free of charge and family friendly.

‘Of Sleeping Birds’ will take place at dusk every evening between June 18 – 23 2012.

BOOK your FREE place HERE

Circumstance create cinematic experiences in unexpected locations. These experiences take many forms, from mass participation performances and intimate in-ear stories, to books, installations and workshops. Using both emergent and commonplace technology, they make films without cameras, creating alternate worlds and poetic layers in the everyday.

Circumstance is an international artists collective. They draw on our backgrounds in contemporary performance, theatre, interactive design, music composition, wearable electronics, locative and pervasive media. They have produced critically acclaimed performances across the world including Amsterdam, Budapest, Japan and around the UK.

The Institute of Astronomy in Madingley Road, Cambridge, is the wonderful venue for the second Limits of Seeing event which takes place on afternoon of 23rd June from 3.00 – 6.30 pm.  A series of family friendly art and science interventions will take place across the site, on the lawns and in the observatories as well as inside the main building, in the auditorium and in other spaces.  The event is free and is organised by Visualise in collaboration with the Institute of Astronomy, the Science & Technology Faculty at Anglia Ruskin and Wysing Arts Centre.  Participating artists will include heath bunting, Liliane Lijn, Marina Velez and Russell Cuthbert, Elena Cologni & Susie Olczak and participating scientists will include Dr Joao Linhares, Matilda Biba and Gerry Gilmore, Professor of Experimental Psychology, Institute of Astronomy.

Programme of Events

3.00 – 5.00  pm – Hands on activities inside building (Committee Room) ; Video (Corridor) and Installation in Mezzanine (Elena Cologni); films in Auditorium (Semi-Conductor and Liliane Lijn)Outdoors at/inside Old Observatories/on Lawn: Experimental works by Elena Cologi, Susie Olzcak; Marina Velez and Russell Cuthbert; Vision Science experiences designed by Dr Joao Linhares and Matilda Biba; others tbc and other activities around the site (pick up map at reception)

5.00 – 6.30 pm Auditorium:  Views from Above and Below/Art/Space/Time and Experiment – short presentations and dialogues between artists heath bunting and Liliane Lijn and Gerry Gilmore, Professor of Experimental Psychology, Institute of Astronomy.  Introduced by Professor Carolin Crawford Outreach Officer Institute of Astronomy and Bronac Ferran Guest Curator, Visualise.

Limits of Seeing – Views from Above and Below is a collaborative event organised by Visualise in partnership with Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge  and Wysing Arts Centre curated by Bronac Ferran, Carolin Crawford and Elinor Morgan.

TO FIND INSTITUTE OF ASTRONOMY PLEASE SEE LINK:

http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/contact/map

V I S U A L I S E  is engaging leading Cambridge technology companies to collaborate with contemporary artists on the creative use of technology in public life. Phillips, ARM, and Optricks Media have been  involved in collaborations with artists Proboscis, Eduardo Kac, and Bettina Furnee respectively on new innovation R+D in 2012. Anglia Ruskin University’s Deputy Dean, Parternships and Enterprise, Dr. Andy Salmon said, ” This is a fantastic opportunity for creative and technological thinking to come together in an open format in the context of our public art programme. We look forward to seeing new ideas develop and supporting future parternships”.

Three commissions have been created to take place between April and October 2012, with a number of events in Cambridge bringing their progress and ideas to the public:

Lagoglyph Sound System (Eduardo Kac)

During the Poetry, Language, Code exhibition (opening 21st June at the Ruskin Gallery and Studios in Cambridge School of Art) Eduardo Kac showed the proof of concept of a new work that uses a bio-conductive ink invented by Bare Conductive London combined with electronic circuitry made by ARM in Cambridge along with sound and engineering skills of Dr Rob Toulson of the CoDE Research Institute within Anglia Ruskin University to make something entirely new – a painting which responds to gentle touch and which then sings. The work is at early stages but already thrilling audiences who have come to the Gallery during the opening week of the show. It is hoped to bring this idea to full fruition during the forthcoming months.

Artists Proboscis are collaborating with Phillips to address the issue of motivation in use of personal monitoring technologies. Proboscis are interested in creating a project that stimulates a new and different debate in the health and life-style arena – moving health matters away from the pathologizing language into a language based around wellbeing, quality of life and increased awareness in life-style choices. More info here

Artist Bettina Furnee and Cambridge company Optricks Media will explore the potential of augmented reality games in engaging with a public realm space in the city. More info here

Working in Anglia Ruskin Print Room on Lagoglyph Sound System

Signing the print

In September 2011 visual artist HELEN COUCHMAN described her life and career as an artist working in Beijing and how she has capitalised on self-directed and organised residency opportunities in various contexts arund the world which have enabled her to develop her practice and expand her knowledge and skills. See www.helencouchman.com. To read a profile of Helen and her life and work in China Daily newspaper see:

See profile in ‘China Daily’ of Helen, her career and her work including her appearance in a Visualise Cambridge Science Festival here

In October the LONDON FIELDWORKS duo, Jo Joelson and Bruce Gilchrist, spoke about their work in various interdisciplinary areas from Space Art to Computer Art and Neuroscience as well as their recent transformations of natural and urban landscapes through public art in forests and in city parks and gardens. They also described their work in the Trumpington area of Cambridge city which has been commissioned by Futurecity the public art agency also managing the Visualise programme at Anglia Ruskin. See www.londonfieldworks.com

In November, leading sound and performance expert, Naut Humon from San Francisco/San Diego took the audience on a journey through from his early work in theatre and largescale outdoor performance/happenings in Californa in the 70s to his current pioneering work in 360 degree immersive audio-visual sound environments, both mobile and in situ, which inspired and stimulated a strong response from those attending and which created a fascinating perspective on possibilities for development of ‘surround’ effects within the Ruskin digital gallery space with its multiple screens. See http://www.sonicacts.com/portal/index.php/naut-humon-transitions-of-the-spacial-station-sonic-acts-xiii-2010/

In March 2012 Alessandro Ludovico, editor and founder of neural magazine and artist/collaborator on a series of significant ‘anti-monopolism’ hacking projects including Google will Eat itself, Amazon Noir and the most recent – FacetoFacebook – joined guest curator Bronac Ferran for a presentation/workshop for Cambridge University History of Art students on the subject of ‘data, manipulation and form’ which produced a lively and absorbing discussion about the nature of ethics and responsibility in the context of online ‘public art’ interventions.  See www.facetofacebook.net and www.neural.it

THE LIMITS OF SEEING an art and science panel was held as part of Cambridge Science Festival in a round room  – LAB028  – within the Anglia Ruskin Business School.

Dr Joao Linhares, photographed by Marina Velez

Continuing Visualise’s exploration of the boundaries of inner and outer space the second ART AND SCIENCE CIRCLE was duly a starry, thought-provoking, fun, interactive, public discussion. As the talk progressed we realised that light was a critical factor in any discussion of vision and that our eyes – fantastically designed circuitry  – enable and constrain us. Dr Joao Linhares proved to us in the audience that we all had our blind spots and

Professor Carolin Crawforth enlightened many of us with her explanation of dark matter and its place in the universe and thrilled us with a galaxy of images, of nebulae and star clusters

SPEAKERS:

In association with Cambridge Science Festival, Anglia Ruskin Science and Technology Faculty and Wysing Arts Centre.  See http://www.wysingartscentre.org/about/links/210.html

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Professor Carolin Crawford is an astronomer at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, and a Fellow of Emmanuel College. Her research focuses on the properties of the most massive galaxies in the Universe, using data collected from the largest ground-based and space telescopes. Carolin combines her research and teaching with her other passion – communicating her love of astronomy to as wide an audience as possible. She runs the outreach programme at the Institute of Astronomy, and in addition to giving many talks on a wide range of astronomical topics, is a regular contributor to both national and local radio programmes. In 2009 Carolin was noted as one of the UKRC’s Women of Outstanding Achievement for the communication of science with a contribution to society. See website – http://www-xray.ast.cam.ac.uk/~csc/cv.html

Helen Couchman (born UK) has exhibited widely, both in the United Kingdom and internationally.  Her first book, WORKERS 工人, June 2008 was exhibited in London and in Hong Kong and will be shown in April 2012 for the first time in Beijing. It takes the form of a series of portraits of the men and women who laboured to build the Olympic park for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Her second book, Mrs. West’s Hats (2009) consists of sixty self-portraits, referencing  her maternal grandmother, whose splendidly eccentric collection of hats Couchman wears in the photographs. Later  works include Untitled (Collecting and Dropping) (2009) Cloud series, Yellow lining (2010) and In Beijing (2011). These works address in part her negotiations with the city of Beijing where she has now worked for six years.  She now lives in Beijing and in London. More at www.helencouchman.com. 

In-Beijing-No-39-2011- copyright Helen Couchman

Dr Joao Linhares: Lecturer in Department of Vision and Hearing Sciences, Anglia Ruskin University. He graduated  in Optometry and Vision Sciences in 2002 from the University of  Minho, Braga, Portugal and was granted a MPhil in 2006, from Manchester University, UK.  He was awarded his PhD doctorate in 2011.  His research interests include hyperspectral imaging, chromatic diversity in complex scenarios and colour vision deficiency.  More at www.linhares.eu.

Joao will be accompanied by his colleague in Anglia Ruskin Vision and Hearing Sciences, Matilda O’Neill-Biba, MCOptom,  who  has a degree in Optometry and Vision Sciences in 2002 from City University, London where she is now undertaking research and currently in the final stages of her PhD.  She is also a visiting lecturer on the MSc Diabetic module, City University. Her research interests include  acquired visual function and colour vision loss in subjects with ocular and systemic conditions (ARMD, Diabetes, MS and Glaucoma); new colour vision and congenital colour vision deficiency and assessment.

Elinor Morgan is  Curator at Wysing Arts Centre which she joined as Operations Director in July 2010. She has been heavily involved with development and commissioning of Wysing’s forthcoming COSMOS residency programme. She was previously Chair of OUTPOST Gallery, Norwich, an artist-run space where she worked with a range of artists and developed various off-site projects. Since its inception Ellie has been keenly involved in the progress of the Eastern Region’s Turning Point network.  She studied History of Art, Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of East Anglia.  More at www.wysingartscentre.org.

Marina Velez and Russell Cuthbert both attained first class degrees from Anglia Ruskin University where they studied BA in Fine Art. Marina is currently completing her second and final year of the Masters in Fine Art course also at ARU.  More at: www.marinavelez.com/

LAPLAND MOON 2011 (Marina Velez)

For Limits of Seeing they are in the process of making a new video work ”Can You See What I See?‘

Artists Statement:

Most important astronomical observatories are placed in high altitude locations such as the Atacama Desert, the Andes or Hawaii,  where visibility is optimal as they are situated above clouds, water vapour and other atmospheric elements. However, scientists working in these observatories have to deal with physical and psychological high altitude related medical problems. When discoveries are made at these sites, assuring scientific rigour is paramount. This is normally achieved through a series of cognitive tests that measure both accuracy and speed of thinking, conducted between the scientists in the observatory and those based at sea level. This tension between what it is gained in vision and what may be lost in understanding highlights the idea that we do not necessarily see only with our eyes, but rather with our brains and our consciousness. This video work uses a poetic and minimal language to express the problematics of achieving universal understanding of concepts and suggests that this process is both visual and verbal. It explores the limits of vision through communication and understanding that is simultaneously inwards and outwards, subjective and objective.

Velez/Cuthbert

NEXT LIMITS OF SEEING EVENT – AFTERNOON 23RD JUNE 2012 —-AT INSTITUTE OF ASTRONOMY, CAMBRIDGE More details here to follow.

For more about Michelle’s research see: http://codephd.wordpress.com/