Tag Archives: Secret Garden Party

Science and music festivals such as Latitude 2015 and some Guerilla Science

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Science has been gaining prominence at music festivals in Britain if nowhere else. I wrote about the Glastonbury Festival’s foray into science in a July 12, 2011 posting which featured the Guerilla Science group tent and mentioned other of the festival’s science and technology efforts over the years. More recently, I noticed that Stephen Hawking was scheduled for the 2015 Glastonbury Festival (he had to cancel due to personal reasons).

The 2015 Latitude Festival seems to have more luck with its science-themed events. according to a July 22, 2015 posting by Suzi Gage for the Guardian’s science blogs,

Why do people go to music festivals? When I was 18 years old and heading to Reading festival the answer was very much ‘to listen to Pulp and Beck in a field while drinking overpriced beer and definitely not trying to sneak a hip flask on to the site’. But I’ve grown up since then, and so, it seems, have festivals.

At Latitude this weekend, I probably only watched a handful of bands. Not to say that the musical lineup wasn’t great, but there was so much more on offer that caught my attention. The Wellcome Trust funded a large number of talks, interactive sessions and demos that appeared both in their ‘hub’, a tiny tent on the outskirts of the festival, but also in the Literary Tent at the heart of the festival and at other locations across the site.

The programming of the science content was imaginative, often pairing a scientist with an author who had written on a similar topic. This was effective in that it allowed a discussion, but kept it from becoming too technical or full of jargon.

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Dr Robin Carhart-Harris, an expert in psychedelics, was paired with Zoe Cormier, author of ‘Sex Drugs and Rock and Roll’ in the Literary Tent, to discuss the use of psychedelics as ‘medicine for the soul’. [emphasis mine] Robin was very measured in his description of the trials he has been involved with at Imperial College London, being clear that while preliminary findings about psilocybin in treatment-resistant depression might be exciting, there’s a long way to go in such research. Talking about drugs at a festival is always going to be a crowd pleaser, but both Robin and Zoe never sensationalized.

A highlight for me was a session organised by The Psychologist magazine, featuring Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and Fiona Neil, author of The Good Girl. Entitled ‘Being Young Never Gets Old’, it claimed to ‘debunk’ teenagers. …

Gage’s piece is a good read and I find it interesting she makes no comment about a literary tent at a music festival. I don’t know of a music festival in Canada that would feature literature or literature and science together.

Guerilla Science

I highlighted Zoe Cormier’s name as a participant (born in Canada and living in London, England) as she is a founder of Guerilla Science, the group I mentioned earlier with regard to the Glastonbury Festival. A science communicator with some fairly outrageous events under her belt, her and her co-founder’s ‘guerilla’ approach to science is exciting. I mentioned their annual Secret Garden event in a Aug. 1, 2012 posting where they sang and danced the Higgs Boson and otherwise celebrated elementary particles. The 2015 Secret Garden Party featured rest, noise, and neuroscience. (Perhaps it’s not too early to plan attendance at the 2016 Secret Garden Party?) Here’s an excerpt from this year’s lineup found in Louis’ July 15, 2015 posting on the Guerilla Science website,

Friday [July 24, 2015]

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12:00 – Rest & Noise Shorts

Crash, bang, shush, zzz… four short talks about rest and noise from artist Zach Walker, psychologist Will Lawn and neuroscientists Ed Bracey and Melissa Ellamil.

13.00 Speed, Synapse… Go!

Two teams go head-to-head in a competition to see whose neurotransmitters can move the fastest. What happens when cocaine, marijuana and ketamine are introduced? Join us for some fast and furious neuroscientific gameplay.

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15.00 Craft a Connectome

Help us transform the Guerilla Science tent into a giant model brain with a tangle of woolen connections. Neuroscientists Julia Huntenburg and Melissa Ellamil will be on hand to conduct our connectome and coax it into a resting state.

16.00 Sound, Fire and Water

We test out our new toy: a fire organ that visualises sound in flames! Join engineers from Buro Happold and artist Zach Walker as we make fire, water and cornstarch dance and jump to the beat.

Saturday [July 25, 2015]

11.00 Hearing the Voice

Philosopher Sam Wilkinson explores the idea of the brain as a hypothesis testing machine. He asks whether thinking about the mind in this way can help explain mental illness, hallucinations and the voices in our heads.

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15.00 – The Unquiet Mind

Hallucinations are our contact with the unreal but are also a window into human nature. Neuroscientist and clinical psychologist Vaughan Bell reveals what they tell us about brain function and the limits of human experience.

Sunday [July 26, 2015]

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12.00 Phantom Terrains

Frank Swain and Daniel Jones present their project to listen in to wireless networks. By streaming wi-fi signals to a pair of hearing aids, Frank can hear the changing landscapes of data that silently surround us.

13.00 Rest and Nose

Join chemists Rose Gray and Alex Bour and neuroscientist Ed Bracey to explore the links between relaxation, rest and sense of smell. Create a perfume to lull yourself to sleep, help you unwind and evoke a peaceful place or time.

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For anyone interested in Guerilla Science, this is their website. They do organize events year round.

Playing and singing the Higgs Boson

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The Higgs Boson has lead to an explosion of creativity. First, the Guerilla Science team has produced a Secret Garden Party (July 19 – 22, 2012) featuring the Higgs Boson. Here’s a video clip from the 2012 event,

Zoe Cormier (writer and Guerilla Science co-founder) notes in her July 27, 2012 posting on the Guardian science blogs,

The Particle Zoo Safari, hosted by Guerilla Science at the Secret Garden Party arts and music festival last weekend, observed the formation of another proton and hydrogen atom, the sparring of two combative electrons, polyamorous covalent bond formation, sunlight manufacture through fusion (and a ping pong ball), and the creation of deuterium – complete with dubstep to mirror the atomic weight of the heavy form of hydrogen.

With polystyrene magnets our audience-cum-collider recreated the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to produce the star of the show: the Higgs boson, sumo-suited and angry, the weightiest particle of all. “I’m hungry,” it grumpily announced, before we threw a net over it and dragged it into the tent. Too much had been spent on the particle’s discovery to let it escape now.

“The idea of the safari came from a colloquialism in physics, which refers to the set of standard particles that make up the entire universe as the ‘particle zoo’,” explains Patrick Stevenson-Keating, the designer we enlisted to help us devise a new way to explore particle physics. “This scale of subatomic particles is so different to our everyday world that there are few comparisons you can really make, so it was challenging to visualise some of the concepts.”

Here’s what the science consultant had to say about it (from Cormier’s posting),

“When I was first approached to take part, I did think it sounded a bit nuts actually, but in the end it worked out reasonably well in terms of the science – I think most people would at least remember that quarks come in threes, and they are difficult to pull apart,” says Dr James Monk of the University College London, a particle physicist who works on the Atlas experiment on the LHC, whom we enlisted as a scientific consultant. “These particles and forces are important to understand how the world works, and it wouldn’t be fitting if physicists said that we do all this fantastic research – but the rest of you can’t possibly understand it.”

It’s well worth reading Cormier’s whole post and you might even feel like taking another look at the video (I found it embedded in Cormier’s posting)  after reading.

(Last year, I featured Guerilla Science and Cormier in my July 12, 2011 posting.)

Meanwhile, the Higgs is producing music. According to David Bruggeman’s July 28, 2012 posting on his Pasco Phronesis blog,

While it seems unlikely that papers will soon come as .mp3 files with audio infographics, some are still working on hearing things we usually expect to see.

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The idea is to match energy levels found in the data with particular notes.  That way shifts in energy can be more immediately expressed as shifts in tone.  The Higgs boson peaks out of the background noise – noise that isn’t really noise from a musical perspective.

David is hoping turning data into music could be used in the future for educational purposes,

… for those who have an easier time detecting patterns in audio rather than printed data, this could be a very productive development.

I thought it would be interesting to hear some Higgs Boson music. While this piece is based on Higgs data, the composer has taken liberties after letting you hear what the untreated melody sounds like,

The composer, Ben McCormack, had this to say about the piece titled, Higgs Boson (ATLAS preliminary data),

The data was already converted to notes by Domenico Vicinanza. I then consolidated the melody to remove a lot of the large leaps, giving it a slightly better flow.

Before you say anything, I know that this (at least somewhat) defeats the purpose of the data. I’m a composer; my goal was primarily to make a fun piece of music. I inverted the melody and wrote countermelodies that aren’t mathematically-related to the original melody, so consider this more a creative work than an exercise in data analysis.

You can find out more about the Higgs Boson in my July 4, 2012 posting where I wrote about the then latest announcement from CERN (European Particle Physics Laboratory).

Dirty science at Glastonbury

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Science outreach doesn’t have to take place in a squeaky clean museum or classroom or theatre hall; it can place in the unhygienic and dirty outdoors. Zoe Cormier in her June 30, 2011 posting on the Guardian Science blogs describes it this way,

It ended for one man with a weeping confessional about how much he missed his mum. Another told us he had a shameful preference for instant coffee. A few couldn’t remember their own names. Many screamed at the top of their lungs into the microphone. Quite a few got naked in the glow of pink neon before we swabbed them down with wet wipes

The scene was the 2011 Glastonbury Music Festival and the science outreach was performed by a group calling itself Guerilla Science (more from the Cormier posting),

It began at the entrance to a giant white cube, the Decontamination Unit, amid the muddy mess of Glastonbury. Bewildered guests – who thought it was a night club – were greeted by two guides in biohazard suits, who led them to a Microbial Zoo: an array of colourful Petri dishes bearing swirls and stripes and spots of rainbow-coloured bacteria.

Some of the strains produced these artful patterns all on their own. Proteus mirabilis, with to its whip-like tails, swims in circles at high speeds through the agar, producing concentric rings.

“Drawing people in like this helped them to learn that you really wouldn’t be able to live without these ‘dirty, disease-causing things’,” says Sarah Forbes, a microbiology PhD student at the University of Manchester, who grew the plates. She gives the example of Staphylococcus epidermidis, which lives on our skin and prevents other more virulent bacteria from taking hold.

Appearing at Glastonbury isn’t Guerilla Science’s only project, they are presenting a Dirt Banquet (at the Secret Garden Party, July 21-24, 2011). The Dirt Banquet will take place on July 22, 2011. From the Guerilla Science website homepage,

Working in partnership with chef Joe Gray, Guerilla Science will host a Dirt Banquet on the evening of Friday July 22 at the Secret Garden Party at sunset – the second and last time we will host this unparalleled experience. The first was held inside London’s unrivaled Crossness Pumping Station with experimental food artisans Bompas & Parr.

As before, this feast of filth will showcase dirty delicacies such as radioactive cheese serum, ambergris, Islay whiskey, and an aphrodisiac dessert – each course inspired by the physical, biological, ethical, architectural, social, political and temporal dimensions of dirt. Full menu, which will vary from the Crossness feast, will be announced a week before the date.

Eminent experts will accompany each course, feeding guests with ideas about the nature of dirt. Neuroscientists Zarinah Agnew and Aidan Horner will introduce us to the dirty bits of the brain. Gastronomist Rachel Edwards-Stuart, former apprentice of Heston Blumenthal, will accompany canapes. Epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani, author of The Wisdom of Whores … , wh0 will speak on sexuality over dessert. And beatboxer Yasson will serenade us with the snarling trills of the spiralidoo.

Here are a few more details about Guerilla Science’s plans for their day at the Secret Garden Party,

As always, we will hold court at one of the UK’s most colourful and riotous music festivals, the Secret Garden Party.

For our fifth first-class year we will celebrate with four days of explosions, brains, balloons, showdowns and sounds, complete with (in imagination-perfect-land), a 150-person capacity tent, a zoo, an island and a boat.

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In the meantime, we can tell you this: funded by our most generous benefactors the Wellcome Trust as part of their Dirt season of events, we will host a Dirty Day of filthy good fun.

I notice that this description on the Guerilla Science website was written by Zoe, I wonder if that’s Zoe Cormier, the writer of the piece in The Guardian. ETA July 13, 2011: Yes, Guerilla Science Zoe is the Zoe Cormier who wrote for The Guardian. She also let me know that she’s Canadian and has had some pieces published in the Globe and Mail, including this one about frogs (how could I resist?).

I like this approach and found the contrast between this creative, fun science outreach for adults as opposed to the more lecture-oriented, sober style of science outreach found in Vancouver (and, as far as I can tell, the rest of Canada too) quite striking. In Canada, the fun is usually saved for the kids.

Here’s a little more about Guerilla Science,

We mix science with art, music and play.

Every summer throughout London and the English countryside thousands of people discover our installations, films, music, live demonstrations, interactive experiments, debates, games and talks at music festivals and arts events around London.

I hope the July 21, 2011 Dirt Banquet and their other Secret Garden Party events are a great success and if I were in the UK, I’d definitely check this out (provided it’s not sold out).