The Art & Science of Looking (2011)

Thirty-three student and staff researchers from six disciplines across four Schools at the University of Westminster investigated these questions through a year long research project designed to explore how we look, see and interpret microscopic worlds.

Broad Vision brought together researchers from the diverse fields of Photographic Arts, Imaging Science, Illustration, Computer Science, Psychology and Biomedical Science. Microscopy and other imaging technologies were used to explore themes of scale and abstraction, seeing and analysing, science and art.

Students with wide eyes and open minds took the laboratory into the studio and the studio into the laboratory, stepping out of the comfort of familiar territory into unknown disciplinary processes and modes of thinking. By engaging with different – but related – disciplines students had opportunities to see through the eyes of others and developed the means of sharing, developing and communicating their subject-specific knowledge in novel and exciting ways.

The research conducted was disseminated through exhibitions, publications and presentations at conferences and symposia. The Broad Vision project developed innovative approaches to inquiry based learning across art and science disciplines, which informed future collaborative projects and proposals.

The Broad Vision ‘The Art & Science of Looking’ team are:

Zainab Asuni
Ursula Brandes
Barbara Brown-Villedieu
Anand Damodaran
Ramon de Assis Figueiredo
Joshua Dinsmore
Abigail Doe
Sara Farajallah
Mellissa Fisher
Uma Hirani
Natalia Janula
Sami Jora
Nina Jørgensen
Oleg Kurbatov
Moacir Lopes
Fiona Marchbank
Hannah-Sian McGuinness
Maeve McMahon
Susan Patrick
Lukasz Pieczatka
Katie Rayner
Jinesh Revagar
Debbie Sears
Anjelee Tamara Sharma
Ailish Sullivan
Simon Vitanza
Theo Wheale

WORKING WITH

Heather Barnett
Dr Mark Gardner
Dr Mark J P Kerrigan
Frantzeska Kolyda
Christine McCauley
John Smith

Project Lead: Heather Barnett

Educational research: Dr Silke Lange

Photography: Chiara Ceolin

With additional input during Phase 1 of the project from: Dr Aleka Psarrou, Dept of Computer Science & Software Engineering, and student researchers: Richard Adams, Dahae Choi, Irina-Ildiko Csapo, Maria Cueva, Harry Dalkins, Stephane Gowrea, Neta Harduf, Uma Hirani, Tom Howes, Haider Hussein, Bita Jalali, Andrzej Strzalkowski, Kevin Wong.

Special thanks to: All at Westminster Exchange, especially Dr Barry Stierer, Dr Dalene McShane, Prof Lesley-Jane Earls-Reynolds, Joanne Jenner and Luke Smith; the Schools of Life Sciences, Professor Jane Lewis, Dr Bob Scott, Jenny MacKenzie, Suhel Miah, Dinesh Shah, Glen Witherspoon and all laboratory technical staff; Electronics and Computer Science, Dr Aleka Psarrou, Dr Daphne Economou, Dimitris Parapadakis, Dr Thierry Delaitre and his team; Media, Arts and Design, Andy Golding, Sally Feldman, Dave Freeman, Jae Park, Dr Silke Lange; and Social Sciences, Humanities and Languages, Professor Hazel Dewart.  London Gallery West: Aviva Leeman & Michael Maziere; Simon Walker and The University of Greenwich;
Dr Paul Hibbard and Louise O’Hare, St Andrews University; The Museum of the History of Science, Oxford University, for the generous use of their entire archive of Victorian and Edwardian micrographs.