We spent the better part of the day in the London Bridge area of the city and learned about Science Gallery London from Daniel Glaser (pictured above.) It is part of the Global Science Gallery Network begun in Dublin in 2008 to engage 15-25 year olds with science. More specifically to engage them “where art and science collide” through a variety of media—film, theater, immersive and online experiences, art of all types, and the like. London is the second location for Science Gallery and it will officially open in 2016. In the meantime, it is in pre-season mode, as it were, before its new home is created. Set in the shadow of the Shard and just steps from the London Bridge Tube and rail stations, Science Gallery is at a busy crossroads and the ideal spot for attracting an audience. It is affiliated with King’s College and all of the future Science Gallery locations (goal is to have a global presence of eight of them by 2020) will be based at universities. But part of their mission is to engage with the entire community and to be a bridge between academe and the city. Future sites include New York, Bangalore, and Melbourne. Why not San Francisco, I say?
According to Dan, their enthusiastic and well-qualified director, the plan is to have 3-4 seasons each year around a common theme. This fall (September and October 2014) is a time of experimentation and a prototype of what is to come. The SG folks worked with youth in the community as well as with staff and researchers at King’s College to find out what topics and concepts interested them and then have commissioned professional artists and producers to create works. This is a facilitated approach to content development, but one that gets at what the young people want to know about, not what the adults or program staff think they should. Dan and his staff did six months of engagement work ahead of any programming. One novel aspect is that the media team is comprised entirely of youth and led by two sisters, aged 17 and 19, who have 16,000 You Tube subscribers.
Theme for the fall is FREQUENCIES: Tune into Life and it relates to the sounds of life, to the rhythms and cycles of our body. Involvement in FREQUENCIES includes: a juggler interacting with children, a cellist at the cancer center, a DJ with a market trader, looking at the physiology of sleep, and the participation of a hospital porter and a lung pollution expert. The emphasis in program development is on rapid prototyping with nine collaborators having just one week in which to create a new sound, and a sound that would be open source!
Science Gallery will have no permanent collections and will focus to some extent, but not exclusively, on issues of health and medicine, given its location on the Guy’s campus. This campus is home to the medical school and Guy’s Hospital. There will be several pre-seasons prior to the official opening of Science Gallery in 2016. Future themes are likely to be: “Spare Parts” (transplantation), “Teeth,” and in 2016, “Addictive.” For this last theme, they will do engagement work with addicts, pushers, specialists, and others in order to generate ideas for the works themselves.
Beginning in 2015, the building they are now in will be renovated to include a theater, a wide open gallery-like space, production facilities, and a cafe. Project cost is 12 million pounds which is a combination of funds from the university, from individual donors, and the Guy’s Hospital charity. Ongoing operating costs will come from the university budget.
Students involved in the project were recruited through the Youth Media Agency and are paid for their time. For those familiar with the California Academy of Sciences, Science Gallery has elements of NightLife, Brilliant!Science, Careers in Science, and Teen Advocates for Science Communication (TASC) with its flash mobs. One significant difference is that all events are free; some revenue will be realized from the cafe and a shop. The current staff is quite small, around a dozen individuals, plus three working on commission for this season, and the students. Attendance goal for the first year is 350,000.
We had the privilege of attending one of the FREQUENCIES events, a performance by Bishi, a Bengali British musician and singer based in London, which featured images from a lab recording of her sleep patterns juxtaposed with haunting music and singing. It was different and certainly combined science with art. It will be informative to watch how Science Gallery London evolves, how they define success and what outcomes they achieve. And it would be fun to return in 2016 when they are up and fully operational in their new space.
