Unseen. Seen.

Issue 15 August 2015

Unseen: The Lives of Looking

Unseen: The Lives of Looking’ is Dryden Goodwin’s first feature-length essay film. The film focuses on four individuals, each with a distinct relationship to looking – an eye surgeon, a planetary explorer, a human rights lawyer and an artist/filmmaker. Told through Goodwin’s closely observed drawings, camera work and multilayered soundtrack, the film explores different scales, forms and reasons for looking, in a poetic and metaphysically charged journey.

NanoArt – Atomic / Molecular Sculptures and Landscapes

NanoArt is a new art discipline at the art-science-technology intersections. It features nanolandscapes (molecular and atomic landscapes which are natural structures of matter at molecular and atomic scales) and nanosculptures (structures created by scientists and artists by manipulating matter at molecular and atomic scales using chemical and physical processes). The work of Cris Orfescu, an artist and scientist, is a reflection of this technological movement.

Metamorphoses in Art & Science

In 2010, bio-artist Sarah Craske stumbled upon a very early English translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in an East Kent junk shop. It dated from 1735, and in its nearly 300 years of existence it had passed from reader to reader, picking up layers of biological history (bacteria, viruses, skin cells). Uncovering the invisible from its pages, Metamorphoses in Art & Science develops shared ways of working in new & emerging fields, through the collaborative inter-relationships between the sciences, arts & humanities.

Exploring the Invisible

For nearly 10 years, Simon Park, an internationally recognised molecular microbiologist, has worked at the fertile intersection between art and science. As well as collaborating with artists, he also produces his own work, his practice being inspired by the aesthetics and processes of the usually invisible microbiological world. He recently won the Peter Wildy Prize for his outstanding outreach work in microbiology.

Ectoplasm and other Membranes.

Mike Phillips is Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts at Plymouth University ( School of Arts & Media, Faculty of Arts), the Director of Research at i-DAT.org and a Principal Supervisor for the Planetary Collegium. His R&D orbits a portfolio of projects that explore the ubiquity of data ‘harvested’ from an instrumentalised world and its potential as a material for revealing things that lie outside our normal frames of reference – things so far away, so close, so massive, so small and so ad infinitum.