Visual art can be a powerful activist tool to combat biodiversity loss and foster greater emotional regard for non-human animals. This exhibition presents an auto-ethnographical account of a visit to Uganda. Personal meaning maps, paintings and films aim to stimulate awareness of endangered and vulnerable primate species and evoke increased empathy towards supporting conservation.
Despite a long history of preserving plants in herbariums, medicinal plants are often underrepresented in public-facing educational institutions such as museums. The Speculative Herbarium intertwines scientific practices used behind the scenes in herbaria with visual art and poetry, offering an insight into the important preservation work occurring in herbaria.
As use of AI grows and new applications emerge, so do questions around its ethics. What are the ethical dilemmas which have emerge? How do we use AI for good? What examples are there and how do we learn more about these issues? In these LASER Talks we explore these issues from a number of perspectives including crises facing the arts sector, inclusion and the environment. Proposed solutions owe much to games culture in terms of audiences and interactive experiences. New audiences can be reached with new meaningful experiences, marginalised groups can use AI to reach beyond their challenges and entirely new approaches to protecting the natural world can emerge.
It has been 165 years since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, a landmark text in evolutionary biology. To mark this occasion, we invite you to join us on an expedition to Hilbre Island, a landmark in the river Dee estuary and our Galapagos in the North West of England. We embark on a creative investigation of the islands ecologies through storytelling, observational drawing, poetry and performance, looking closely at how the land, sea and humans interconnect. We will depart West Kirby on foot and walk to Hilbre island, listening to an audio guide that comprises a history of the island and oral histories from local residents. On the island, attendees will choose to take part in one of two workshops that observe and document the island: creative writing and charcoal rubbings will record the islands geology and generate a mapping of the islands geological history; a field sketching workshop will identify species of migrating birds visiting the island, before drawing an evolutionary (phylogenetic) tree. Finally, a poetry performance based on collected oral histories and poetry, will be performed in a costume that turns a performer into the native sea lavender. We will then walk back to West Kirby before high tide.
Type Iax supernovae: Extreme thermonuclear explosions
A neutron star binary merges somewhere in the Universe approximately every 10 to 1000 seconds, creating violent explosions potentially observable in gravitational waves and across the electromagnetic spectrum. The transformative coincident gravitational wave and electromagnetic observations of the binary neutron star merger GW170817 gave invaluable insights into these cataclysmic collisions and fundamental astrophysics. However, despite our high expectations, we have failed to see any other event like it. In this talk, I will highlight what we can learn from other observations of mergers seen directly in gravitational waves or indirectly as a gamma-ray burst and/or kilonova. I will also discuss the diversity in electromagnetic and gravitational-wave emission we can expect for future mergers and showcase tools to help maximally extract physics from existing and future observations.