The Scientist in Residence (SiR) programme offers CSM postgraduate students the opportunity to collaborate with leading scientists from Tokyo Institute of Technology and London universities.
Since establishing the Grow Lab at Central Saint Martins in 2019, we have invited cutting edge scientists to share their research with our art and design students, opening it up to be reimagined and re-presented through a process of transdisciplinary ‘hacking’, bringing new questions, methods, and mindsets to the research. As an action research project, the collaboration also involves UAL faculty and visiting social scientists, observing the translations and transformations that take place.
From simple beginnings billions of years ago, life on earth has evolved into vastly complex and diverse kingdoms supporting an estimated 8.7 million species. But what were those beginnings and how can we study them now?
Mattering Life invited Professor Masahiko Hara (Tokyo Institute of Technology) and Professor Nick Lane (University College London) to share their research on the origins and evolution of life, exploring the energies and flows in matter, particles, and cells. Twenty-four postgraduate students from across Central Saint Martins were selected from an open call to work with the scientists, responding critically and creatively to the research presented. Through a week of experimentation knowledge, concepts, and processes were exchanged between disciplines, with new perspectives and interpretations presented back to the scientists and to a public audience.
Through transdisciplinary experimentation, Mattering Life engaged practically and conceptually with a range of questions exploring our definitions of life and the liveliness of matter, the forces that drive the flow of energy and information, and the origins of intelligence. We also explored how laboratory experimentation attempts to re-create the conditions for life and examined the role of storytelling and imagination in trying to understand events that happened 4 billion years ago
Students from across UAL came together for a week in February 2022 to explore the dynamics of living systems at different scales. With live online links to laboratories at Tokyo Institute of Technology and Queen Mary University of London students were exposed to specialist scientific research and state of the art imaging technologies and conducted remote experiments to observe cellular activity at nano scale.
Defining questions of interest prompted by the research presented by the scientists in residence, students developed their own creative investigations in the Grow Lab at Central Saint Martins, devised participatory behavioural experiments and examined local field sites. Collectively they explored the dynamics of living systems, the processes of synchronisation and the mechanics of patterning across scales… from macro to micro and beyond.
This film documents the experimental process as students responded to the scientific research and bought their own knowledge, practices and questions into play.
Short films produced by student groups exploring how we can tune into the frequencies of other organisms and systems, and questioning the possibilities of non-anthropocentric research.
Scientist in Residence Programme 2019/20
Hacking Hearts invited international research scientists working on heart disease, energy harvesting and cellular sensing to collaborate with postgraduate students from art, design and performance disciplines at Central Saint Martins. Through a process of interdisciplinary experimentation their research was reimagined and re-presented at a public symposium, opening up many social, cultural and philosophical dimensions.
Read more about the 2019 Scientist in Residence project
Hacking Hearts