Science has a part to play in the future development of communities across the world, and it needs to work in these communities and for them, not be something that occasionally impinges upon them from the outside, and having grass-roots level engagement facilities that are the natural place for people who need to make use of science seems to me to be the key to making this work. http://www.appropedia.org/TheFWD_IanSimmons

Citizen science or more to the point Community science has been in my thinking this year. I had

• a residency at 25SG where I turned a gallery into a site for exploring science, making plastic and glowing bacteria, and
• went to Madrid for Interaactivos’10 Community Science, and
• contributed to Future is…, Allenheads
• contributed to Questioning Digital Inclusion, Access Space

Out of both of these came out this idea, of how as a Scientist I could benefit the people and communities around me. Also, what knowledge of the community would I need. How could I learn more about what is going on in a community? I don’t have concrete answers but an example from a different sphere. At future this.. David Butler mentioned Artist Ella Gubs’s “Whats Missing?” project in North Shields in which she asked the locals what was missing in their community. What she discovered was that there was a lot more positive things happening than met the eye.

In the full article, Ian Simmons related how he helped mediate in a argument about whether a neighbours use of snail bait could have killed another neighbours cat. Of course there was no dosage table on snail bait and cat mortality, but there was basic information, and Ian could explain to his neighbours why it would not have been possible for the cat to have been killed by the snail bait.

TheFWD IanSimmons

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This is an entry in The Future We Deserve – a collaborative book project about the future. See all the entries or talk about this entry.

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Using Science Locally

Recently I found myself in the back lane here in Whitley Bay, sorting out some weirdness with the recycling bin and talking to the chap next door, who specialises in teaching mystic running techniques, when the local ‘cat lady’ came up and started accusing him of ‘murdering’ a cat by putting slug pellets on his veg garden, which she assumed it had eaten. He was a bit put out by this, so I said I’d look into it from a scientific perspective and work out whether this was likely to be possible. So, having worked out the type of pellets, found out what they actually contained and in what concentration and the size of the deceased cat, it was clear that the beast would have had to eat a heaped tablespoon full of the things in order to croak, which put my neighbour’s mind to rest, if not, entirely, our cat lady’s. What relevance, then has the Whitley Bay Cat Poisoner got to do with sustainable futures? Well like many cities, Newcastle has a big landmark hands-on science centre, but there’s no reason why this should be the only model for this kind of thing. We need science centres that are relevant to my neighbour and the cat lady, small, local places, more like libraries and community centres than flagship visitor attractions, where instead of it just being lucky that I was about when the matter of cat poisoning arose, it’d be natural to go ask these kinds of questions. True, you may say, but haven’t we got Google for that? In a way, I suppose, yes, but then it needs people to know what they are looking for to make the connections, there is no chart out there that conveniently tabulates slug pellets/lethal cat dose, believe me, I’ve looked. Such a place would also have a small array of regularly changed simple hands-on exhibits where people could drop in and explore casually, clear updates on the latest science news, family workshop activities, kid’s weekend and holiday clubs, they would also provide support for science in local schools, work with the community on projects where science might be useful to them, and like libraries you might have two or three in even a small town. It’s not rocket science, the basic models exist for all these functions – science centres, community science outreach, co-enquiry programmes with universities, science shops, all of these are part of the jigsaw that could come together to create this kind of initiative. It just needs someone to decide to do it, and a moderate amount of money. Science has a part to play in the future development of communities across the world, and it needs to work in these communities and for them, not be something that occasionally impinges upon them from the outside, and having grass-roots level engagement facilities that are the natural place for people who need to make use of science seems to me to be the key to making this work.

Ian Simmons hit the nail on the head, how do we make this ability to wade through knowledge and come up with the pertinent facts, accessible? how does it in turn engage people in seeing science as serving them rather than big business?

I feel lucky to be in Newcastle, like my hometown of Adelaide, there is a lot going on, but it is not always apparent.

• 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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