Videos from The Arts Catalyst's commissioning programme. The Arts Catalyst commissions art that experimentally and critically engages with science. We produce provocative, playful, risk-taking projects to spark dynamic conversations about our changing world.
Chris Oakley, Simon Hollington, Kypros KyprianouMore information ...Nuclear power is re-emerging as a concern for our times, both as a generator of energy and as part of a defence strategy. Today it seems to stand for the failed utopian promises of modernism and a fresh hope for a carbon-free future. The contradictions that lie at its core have provided a rich source of questioning for artists, scientists, ecologists and activists for many years.The Nuclear exhibition explores these intricacie...
More information ... “The neighbour, neither friend nor enemy, is the one who may not be in your "network", but is nevertheless in your world.” (Sukumaran)This ambitious project is Sukumaran’s first major one-person exhibition in the UK. In The Neighbour, two ostensibly “mobile” habitats share space. One is a “static” mobile home from the late 1970s, which developed as a way for lower-middle class families to partake in “caravan culture”, or escape longer term from the city and its property re...
www.artscatalyst.orgTruth Serum was an off-site participatory performance, linked to a gallery installation, exploring the pharmacology of truthfulness.The Office of Experiments' experiment in consensual self-experimentation in support of freedom from artistic censorship was conducted with volunteers in a secret venue in Liverpool on Saturday 29 March 2008. The project sought to highlight the case of artists such as Steve Kurtz and Critical Art Ensemble, and their persecution in the USA, which...
THE ARTS CATALYST website >>>Poetic Cosmos of the Breath was an experimental solar dome created by artist Tomas Saraceno. It was launched at dawn on the 22 September 2007 at Gunpowder Park, Essex, UK. Tomas Saraceno is an artist and architect whose utopian vision for cities that float in the air - changing form and joining together like clouds - has led him to create a series of experimental structures such as balloons or inflatable modular platforms that can be inhabited and exploit natural e...
THE ARTS CATALYST website >>>Artist Brandon Ballengée's work bridges the gap between biology and art. He combines a fascination with amphibians, fish and insects with techniques of fine art imaging. For the past ten years, Ballengée's primary field of study has been amphibian declines and deformities. During 2007 and 2008. The Arts Catalyst has commissioned artist Ballengée to lead a UK study into declining amphibian species, through participatory lab and field-based research investigations, w...
THE ARTS CATALYST website >>>Documentation of the 2nd International Artists Airshow, presented by The Arts Catalyst and Landscape+Arts Network Services, 30 June 2007 at Gunpowder Park, Sewardstone Road, Waltham Abbey, Essex, UK. This was a day of international artists’ projects reflecting the explosive and ephemeral nature of Gunpowder Park – a former testing ground for high explosives - and investigating the artists' almost impossible dream of flight. Australian artist Ben Blakebrough’s one-p...
The Arts CatalystCommissioned by The Arts Catalyst for
The Arts CatalystSimon Faithfull’s Escape Vehicle no.6 started as a live event commissioned by The Arts Catalyst for its 2004 Artists Airshow. The live audience witnessed the launching of a weather balloon with a domestic chair dangling in space beneath it. Once the apparatus had disappeared into the sky, they then watched a live video relay from the weather balloon on a giant screen as it journeyed from the ground to the edge of space (30km up).
The Arts CatalystFilmed on location on the Isle of Lewis, Scotland,
