Wired Up | Residency at Arbyte Gallery

12/04/2015 by Mellissa Fisher

28th March 2015 – We’ve seen some amazing projects come together at the residency held at Arebyte Gallery in Hackney Wick, rounding up this years project on the theme of ‘Wired Up’. We’ve been lucky enough to see the students develop ideas from the very beginning, experimenting together with disciplines they had never had a chance to explore previously.

During the residency, projects continued developing and on Friday everyone took part in a work review session, discussing their projects and taking suggestions from other students and staff to push projects even further. Tweaks were made and on Saturday the doors were thrown open to the public.

Friday’s Work Review

For many of the students this was a first taste of public engagement, a chance to discuss their ideas and inspirations with people from many walks of life.

There was bio photography and glowing bioluminescent installations, infrared photography, an interactive slime mould installation, eye tracking visualisations, sensory experiments and an innovative musical instrument.

In 12 weeks students who had never before combined art and science have produced phenomenal results, showing that beautiful things can happen when, as one reviewer put it, “art and science climb into bed together.”

Mell and Danny, Broad Vision Teaching Assistants

Wired Up | This Years’ Project Begins

02/03/2015 by Danny Garside

Broad Vision is in full flow once again, with this year’s cohort of students utilising the theme of Wired Up to inspire their exploratory research. Projects are running diverse routes, with students interested in themes related to social, neural and bacterial networks; the psychological impact of the internet; dynamic systems and sensory interactions, to name but a few…

The first few weeks of working involved students delivering taster sessions, in the laboratory or the studio, in order to share a little bit of what they do. Groups of students from each discipline planned, organised and delivered interactive sessions to the students from other disciplines, to enable others to gain some insight on each others’ working environments, materials and methods.

Students running a taster session in the labs

Bacterial taster session in the labs.

Students present taste stimuli at the illustration taster session.

We’ve all been participants in psychology experiments, discussed photography in the modern digitally interconnected world, and extracted the DNA from strawberries in the science labs.

A student taking part in a quick-fire photography exercise.

Over at the Harrow campus, we’ve been shown Imaging Science tricks with colour, been exposed to Contemporary Media Practice’s variety of work and been introduced to a technique where we had to paint and draw, utilising four senses in the colourful illustration studios. These sessions allowed the students to explore new ways of thinking and communicating which helped stir the conversations of ‘What if we did this…?’ – all followed by a celebratory glass of wine.

Colour perception experiments in the Imaging Science taster session.

One really great thing about these taster sessions is that they are student led, allowing the students to become more aware of their current skills by teaching them to others in the group. This inspires students to envisage themselves as teachers, with desirable knowledge to pass on to others in the group.

This part of the project really starts to open up the minds of the students, setting in motion project ideas and questions to be explored.

The participating disciplines are biosciences, psychology, imaging science, contemporary media practice, photographic arts and illustration – students working together for 3 months on collaborative interdisciplinary projects. The results of their expirations will be shared at Arebyte Gallery on 28/29 March 2015.

– Mell and Danny, Broad Vision Teaching Assistants