Since the summer of 2021, ESS has been involved in a remote and mainly digitally based artist residency called Nanocosmic Investigations – Artists in Conversation with ESS.
The residency has been funded by the European Regional Development Fund through Wisdome Innovation and is a collaboration between Malmö Museums, Lund University's Inter Arts Center (IAC) and ESS.
As a result of an international open call, seven artists working within performance, video and sound were matched with engineers, biologists and physicists at ESS, and held digital conversations during the autumn. This week, the Inter Arts Center in Malmö is hosting an exhibition to present the different artistic outputs that came out of these conversational collaborations.
“Wisdome Innovation was looking for partners to carry out cross-disciplinary residencies, and we saw it as an opportunity for new audiences to interact with and experience the science and technology of ESS,” says Joanna Lewis, Public Engagement Officer, who has been co-ordinating the project from ESS’s side. “A residency like this allows artists and scientists to discuss their work in-depth, make connections and together find ways to bring to life the complex and fascinating things that we do here at ESS.”
The collaboration was designed as a pilot project and an experimental residency, above all, as it took place in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. This meant that the artists were not able to visit the facility. Nevertheless, the conversations held were fruitful for all participants, creating new insights on arts and science schemes. Furthermore, the artists could participate with no geographical constraints, leading to collaborations crossing continents, with artists based as far as India and Lebanon.
“It is impressive to see how ESS's complex research activities can be communicated with the help of artistic forms of expression,” says Mats Fatstrup, Deputy Director Malmö Museums. “The output of this residency shows how different artistic techniques can offer new opportunities for enhancing and improving learning, education and problem solving across a broad base. I hope it will inspire, arouse curiosity, and create interest in science.”
The main inspiration animation and film maker Christine Kettaneh gained from the discussions she had with accelerator physicist Natalia Milas was the idea of a horizontal path, a horizontal travel, and all the cumbersome efforts needed to make it happen, which ended up in a video work called Transverse. The central question in the conversation between visual artist and film maker Axel Straschnoy and ESS Technical Coordinator Iain Sutton was how a research facility like ESS changes the way we see, or what it means to see, both from a physical and a social point of view. Artist and spatial sound designer Tim Bishop and ESS Mechanical Design Engineer Beniamino Gentile focused on psychoacoustics, aiming to help people without much scientific knowledge to experience ESS with the work Particular acoustics.
The artistic residency and collaboration between media artist and researcher of Screendance Jeannette Ginslov, AR/VR media artist Keith Lim, and Nuclear Physicist Emil Rofors, intended to discover how bodies, visualising techniques and visual media may be re-imagined, re-visualised and re-embodied, by exploring small-angle neutron scattering (SANS). Structural Biologist Swati Aggarwal and artist and researcher Ashley Middleton developed a new 3D animated work based on the behavioural complexities of protein crystals. And finally, sound artist and curator Ish S, in collaboration with ESS Accelerator Physicist Bryan Jones, created the installation Two Squares as an interpretation, a rendition of various states of the neutron, and its influences from the subatomic level to the cosmological.
Nanocosmic Investigations - The exhibition
Location: Inter Arts Center, Bergsgatan 29, Malmö
Opening hours: 6 - 10 April at 12.00–17.00
More about the exhibition at IAC
More information about the artists