On November 17th took place the opening of the work by choreographer and dancer Anna Rubirola DIA ZERO(Day Zero), within the program in Situ Dance Festival, at Arts Santa Monica, Barcelona.
DIA ZERO is a piece that discusses destruction and the emptiness and silence it generates afterwards. It explores the trail of devastation and follows its consequences. It is a piece that approaches destruction from the physical body but it uses physical domestic resources and sound elements. Irene Lapuente, founder of La Mandarina de Newton, collaborated in this project as part of the scientific advisory group.
Science of the City has left behind a huge virtual print, plenty of videos. We have to take in account not only the 50 videos sent by the participants of the SOTC global competition, but many pieces of art created specifically for the exhibition. Is not surprising, after all, that the exhibit seen last May in Arts Santa Mònica has been documented with a good amount of videos as, for instance the Opening of the exhibition.
Media has made its own interpretation of the project, as we see in the stories of La Malla Tendències and the Pla B of Barcelona Television or the live connection by Connexió Barcelona, also from BTV.
Daily newspaper
Agendas of ARA, La Vanguardia and El Periodico de Catalunya newspapers, included the Science of the City as one of the remarkable cultural offers of the week. El Periódico, meanwhile, also published an extensive news in the section Gran Barcelona. Also El Heraldo de Aragon, from Zaragoza, dedicated an article inside the Tercer Milenio supplement.
supplement.
At a broader level, the digital editions of those media have shown a special interest to discover scientific evidence in everyday life. The Catalan edition of El Pais.com they collected in their culture section while the blog “Art in the Age of Silicon“, also from this medium showed in the video Skup “The amazing makeup of the atom” to explain the co-creative process started months ago with the video contest. Something similar was seen in 3cat24.cat,, using the same resource to introduce the project.
Minutes before the opening of the exhibition, a mobile unit of COM Ràdio approached to Arts Santa Monica to explain in all detail the scope of this cultural program to the listeners of the Extraradi program. Two days earlier, in the same station, Irene Lapuente had already explained the project from the main studio of Eureka!. In a similar way, the Altra Ràdio radio program invited Irene Lapuente to speak about this initiative a week earlier. More recently, in June, the unique humor of Pa ciència la nostra offered his particular vision of the Science of the City project.
For those who want to remember the opening of the exhibition Science of the City, and for those who couldn’t come, here you have the video of the event. Enjoy it!
The Science of the City project attracted the interest of La Malla Tendències TV who produced the wonderful video that you see here. It is a good way to learn more details about the research and experimentation process behind the nine pieces of art that have been exposed at Arts Santa Mònica for nearly two weeks.
With a flexible and imaginative style, this report shows between different videos created by people all over the world and builds a story from them. It adds the collective views and experiences of all participants in the process: citizens who submitted videos, artists and curators. Irene Lapuente, explains the genesis of the whole project. Inés Navarro, tells us why her team of citizen participants decided to choose a lunar eclipse as the subject of their video. She also tells us about and what they got to know from the astronomy buffs that they met on Montjuïc, a the hill that overlooks Barcelona. Borja Leonardo Fermoselle and Aleix Molet, two artists of the IMARTE art research Group, explain how they elaborated their own re-interpretations of scientific facts taking their curiosity as a starting point, as other citizens did.
Looking at the final results, there is no doubt that everyone has some way or other integrated the science in their lives, creating a source of new questions for the future.
Soon you will have the chance to explore the artwork inside Science of the City, a clear invitation to look from a different perspective even the smallest details of urban everydayness, posing our own questions about science.
All these nine pieces are in fact the synthesis of a research process that began with the analysis of the contents of the 50 videos sent for two months by participants from around the world in the categories of Fiction, Question and Experiment. From this work we created a database of scientific issues in the city that, among other things, allowed us to visualize the existing differences between popular and the expert cultures regarding the concepts of science or city.
The exploration of semantic fields and etymologies also served as a basis for the artists of IMARTE group, a work which has revealed surprising connections between proposals of citizens, scientific principles and their own artistic projects.
We then describe the set of art pieces in the exhibition, along with the videos that inspired them:
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A start is white, Eugènia Agustí
The piece refers to the blank page as the starting point of a work and considers what would happen after covering the roofs of entire blocks of houses with white geometric figures to act as attractors of sunlight.
Inspired by the video “White-topped buildings, who loves the Sun?”, of Anna Cabré
Urban Legends, Monste Carreño and Raquel Muñoz
Confronting the way how urban legends and false scientific stories arise and are established leads us to reflect on how we perceive images related to the context in which are introduced.
Inspired by the competition process
Urban Fossils from yesterday and today, Mercè Casanovas
Human constructions enclose large amounts of fossils. This artwork wants to show many of them inside a piece of land from Barcelona where you can see traces of the past, but also of the present, to be discovered years later.
Inspired by the first video of la Mandarina de Newton “Urban fossils”
Urban passage, Borja Leonardo Fermoselle and Sergi Selvas
The meta-city of the XXI Century is a paradigm of our society, a multifaceted look created from a series of images showing the nature of a regenerative system based on the fragmentation.
Inspired by of videos submitted
Text Local Alignement, Aleix Molet and Eloi Puig
Working in a similar manner as DNA sequences are compared to extract
functional links between genes, the transcripts of two videos about science and the city have been aligned.
This proposal works exploring the transcripts of the videos: “City Sounds- A New Source of Energy?” of Emily DeHority and “Why the planet Earth changes?” of Universidad de los Niños
Xanthoria parietina, scattering, Cristina Pastó
Lichens are the result of the symbiosis of a seaweed and a fungus that are used as bioindicators of air pollution levels in cities. Two species have returned now from the space totally unaffected by exposure to vacuum.
Inspired by the videos about environment
Full moon and message in a bottle, Anja Steidinger
Composition created from two frames taken from the same video and expanded a thousandfold. The new creation was generated by seeking common patterns
between the digital images of a full moon and a bottle.
Inspired by the video “Les figures dans le marbre”, of Scienceadacemie
Waves, Alicia Vela
Small dots projected on a wall symbolize waves of information generated by a video, a fiction that draws an echo of itself as if it was like quantum particles coming from a spectator that interacts with physical matter.
Inspired by the video:“La sorprenent composició de l’àtom”, of Núria Jar
The infinite net, Antònia Vilà
Videographic and temporal transcription of the night sky from the recording of engraved inscriptions inspired by distant mythological cosmologies.
The net becomes a metaphor of the infinite universe in transformation.
Inspired by the movies “Les lumières dans la ville”, of Mrcopperstein y “La Luna en Montjuïc”, of Ruben Permuy
As you can guess, the exposure is not, therefore, the end of this co-creative process. The results obtained encourage us to think in new editions that allow us to move forward in the investigation of new processes at the crossroads of design, participation, art, science, technology and city.
The countdown for the inauguration of the Science of the City exhibition is ready and we have the press docs for media on the sending mailbox.
Here you can download the press release, an invitation for citizens to rediscover the urban spaces from a new scientific perspective.
It has been a long process of co-creation, but finally Science of the City comes to Arts Santa Mònica to show a living exhibition that offers us very diverse artistic views and perspectives from the city, build from 50 videos submitted by all of you to Scienceofthecity.net
On Tuesday May 8, at 19h, this participatory exhibition will open, until May 19. We will be waiting for you!
There you will find the artistic pieces created by the IMARTE research group of the University of Barcelona (UB) starting from the questions, discoveries and experiments raised by participants of the video contest. Each work is related to the videos that have inspired it.
Behind this artwork hides a meticulous process performed by la Mandarina de Newton: transcription and analysis technologies to create a document repository of issues of scientific interest in the city. From there, artists have experimented creating compositions and new images by reinterpreting the content or making transpositions to other languages. Nine art pieces are the end result of this process. All of them are born from the same surprise and curiosity, speaking us of fossil lichens, DNA, the color of the walls, the constituents of matter, the scientific method, the lights or pattern recognition. Curiosity has been the main driver for everyone (artists, experts, citizens) in order to start asking questions, a metadesign process that initiates research processes advancing in parallel, offering unexpected results.
We want also to tell you that we have come so far thanks to the collaboration of FECYT, Obra Social “la Caixa”, the Tech Museum of San José in California and París-Montagne in France, and the engagement and strong support of many people and entities. To all, thank you very much!
Remember, you can watch all the videos collected by ScienceoftheCity.net The exhibition, inspired by these clips, will remain open to visitors from May 8 until May 19th, at Arts Santa Mònica ¡Do not miss it!
The deadline for submitting videos (except in French which has a separate deadline, July 19) for the Science of the City video contest finished last week. From now on, you can start voting via the platform, which eventually will host the virtual exhibition of Science of the City. Remember that you can only vote once because the system recognizes the IP.
We are looking for the video you like the most because of its clarity, originality and format. The voting period will be open until July 14th, 2011. The chosen video will get a prize of $ 150.
A jury of five people: Irene Lapuente, Ramon Sanguesa and Albert Folk, members of Co-Creating Cultures, Patricia Homs, a member of the science area at Arts Santa Mònica and Bob Ketner, the manager of the Tech Virtual at the Tech Museum, will choose the videos that will be awarded for: the best video (600$), the best video in English (300$), the best video in Spanish (300$), the best finding (150$), the best question (150$) and the best experiment (150$).
The awards will be public on July 15th 2011 in this blog.
Thank you for your collaboration, we look forward to your vote and we wish good luck to all participants!
Science of the City promotes a different view of what science is and where you can find it in a city. Science of the City encourages participants to make a two minutes video relating science and cities. Videos can be a question, a finding or a scientific experiment. These videos will participate in an international competition with 8 different prizes.
We have organised an ideation and creation workshop, tomorrow 22nd of june at 4pm at Arts Santa Mònica. During this workshop we will propose questions and experiments and look for places where you can shoot your videos. We will sketch the script and start filming. You can bring your cell phone camera or your own camera.
You do not need any prior knowledge on science or video, but if you want to join us, please confirm your attendance by emailing irene@lamandarinadenewton.com. See you there!
Science of the City aims to promote a different view of what science is and where we can find it. With the aim of democratizing the scientific method -the ability to observe the environment, ask questions, be critical, design experiments to verify or falsify hypotheses and communicate the results. Science of the City encourages participants to make a video of two minuts linking their city with science through a question, a discovery or an experiment. During these last weeks we have begun to receive new videos. Participants have shared with us interesting challenges like: Could we use the energy from noise to transform it into electrical energy or why a clock can be invisible inside the water. Participants also experienced with skates and found answers to questions of optics. Here you can see some of the videos:
Science of the City will be represented at the Science Festival in Barcelona next june the 18th and we will also be in the Science Festival in Paris.
The call ends on June 30th for the videos in Catalan, Spanish and English, but continues until July 19th for the videos presented in French. During the month of July eight awards will be given: to the best video, the best video in Spanish, English or French, the best question, the best discovery, the best experiment and the most voted. ¡¡Go to the Tech Virtual webpage and start a project!!
Science of the City
More and more institutions are giving its support to the 
Science of the City will be represented at the 