• Artists Zoë Walker & Neil Bromwich, Michael Pinsky and puppet doctor Professor Hilary presented The Panacea Casebook at the Baltic.

• Ben Goldacre visited the Centre for Life to talk about Bad Science and how journalists can kill.
• Adinda van ‘t Klooster talked about and demonstrated her emotion light protoype at Lunch Bytes Culture Lab Newcastle University(you can see her lecture at STEIM here.

What is the connection?  Panacea Casebook uses many of the methods of clinical trials, for treating a number of modern maladies. For  the sci fi hottub trial that therewas a small but significant changein peoples wellbeing after the hottub experience. Of course for there to be any prof that art was the cause of this, there would have to be an exact copy of the hottub (see left) that wasnt touched with the idea of being art.

Only by comparing in a double blind trial these two treatments, the art and the art placebo, could the hypothesis that “art has a beniicial effect” be tested.

Ben Goldacre talks about how clinical trials can be misused, using the Durham Fish Oil ‘trials’ as an example of  the effect of placebo, and  the problems of expectation on performance. They havent met, but it would have been interesting.  The Panacea Casebook and the Emotion Lights have connections around the way ‘art’ might be good, and engagement with new media art might be benificial to cure a social ill.

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Last Thursday night was a great event at the Tyneside by pixelpalace.

Gina Czarnecki, (rep: Forma / funded Capture),  showed three of her video pieces: Infected, Nascent and Spintex (in collaboration with Ulf Langheinrich(Austria/Ghana). North East residents might have recalled seeing her piece Spine on the side of the carillon tower at the civic centre as part of AVFest 06.

After the screenings she was in coversation with Atau Tanaka, in which we heard about her motivations, practice(including collaborating with scientists) and life story. On science, she had much to say about natural behaviour, what is real, the power of the image and what is imaginable. She observed that in order to study Leishmania, a tropical disease, scientists needed to culture the biting sand flies on hamster tails. One of the strange things was that In order to image the parasite, they had to extract the stomach lining of the fly, squish it on a slide and then it was imaged. So is what they are studying the ‘natural’ behaviour of the organism? I think the amazing thing is that science does produce results through this torturous process, that can be verified. I am also aware that these model systems are informative, and that is why they are used. Gina explained some of the nomenclature that goes with her work, that arises out of the painstaking method that she constructs it, eg the fish sequence, or the rippling vertebrate sequences from infected.

Atau posed the question “What does collaboration bring? Data, some images?” The output is a journey. For Spintex, she talked about filming ever dusk and dawn for a week in Accra, Ghana, and the change in sound that accompanies those 15 minute transitions, near the equator. Spintex shows a fraction of that activity, the main subject is people in movement, in transition, growing and changing before your eyes. Ulf Langheinrich was a visual collaborator on this project, a particulaly scary thing for another visual maker. It works though, because they are both ‘in to ‘ the vision, so there are no seams.  The grainyness in the faces reminds me of Ulf’s work, in Waveform B 2005, but much less abstract.

Lots to thingk about there… comments?

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