Science Through Art network project wins AHRC funding
Friday 1 March 2013
Dr Milton Mermikides from the Department of Music and Sound Recording has won a grant to fund an unusual international research network of scientists, writers, choreographers, musicians and artists.
Science Through Art: A Chimera of Cultures will support collaborative science-art projects and practices, promote interdisciplinary discussion and exchange of ideas, compile knowledge resources, and generate multimedia sci-artwork to foster wider understanding of medical topics.
The grant (from the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) 'Science In Culture' scheme) was won in conjunction with Dr Alex Mermikides, Senior Lecturer in Theatre at Kingston University.
The pilot project of Science Through Art is BloodLines, a development of Milton’s Hidden Music project, which has created a number of compositions through the translation of biological processes into sound via digital technology. The source material includes the colour, shape and DNA of microbacterial colonies, the shape of the coronal suture of the human skull, MRI scans of the human brain, tree rings and the passage of molecules through a cell membrane.
In BloodLines, Milton took daily blood-test results generated during his own treatment for leukaemia and translated them through digital audio technology into an electronic composition - with each second of music representing a day of treatment - to form an ‘autobiological’ work.
The AHRC funding will help Milton and Alex (Milton’s sister and bone-marrow donor) to develop BloodLines through collaboration with haemotologists Dr Van De Velde (Belgium) and Dr MacDonald (UK), and digital animator/artist Dr Anna Tanczos. This will include a lecture presentation/performance exploring the dramaturgy of bone-marrow transplant through scientific representations, data sonification and visualisation and recorded interviews with doctors, donors and recipients. BloodLines has performances scheduled at the Rose Theatre, Kingston, Antwerp University (Belgium), the European Bone Marrow Conference and the Science Museum, London.
Milton is also presenting a lecture on music creativity at the British Library (in association with UCL Neuroscience) on March 15th 2013:
Your Creative Brain: Neuroscience of Imagination
You can listen to extracts from the Hidden Music project at Milton’s website.
