During 2002 I received an Arts Council England New Technology Artists Fellowship which allowed me to spend some months at Cambridge University researching possible avenues for developing collaborative research projects leading to new areas of artistic practice and new methods. During this time I worked closely with Alan Blackwell of the Computer Laboratory and James Leach of Anthropology and spent time working with and/or in the laboratories of people like Sergio Pellegrino (Engineering), Malcolm Mackley (Materials) and especially Eugene Terentjev (Physics). I also had the opportunity to visit research labs at Cambridge Display Technologies (Light Emitting Polymers) and the Microsoft Lab (interactive reading systems).
During 2003-2004 I was in receipt of an Arts and Humanities Research Board and Arts Council England Fellowship for Artists in Research Environments. This allowed me to sustain the work I had started at Cambridge and especially to further develop my research collaborations with Alan, James and Eugene. This period allowed us to explore in some detail the possibilities for applying shape memory elastomeric polymers as a medium for producing interactive artworks. The links below give a sense of the work undertaken over this period. Palimpsest is a web based artwork produced from my email correspondence with my collaborators at Cambridge during 2002.
James Leach and I also co-authored a slim volume titled Autopoeisis: Novelty, Meaning and Value. This text explores the value of novelty in art and science through jointly authored sections as well as in a text written for the book by an autogenerative language system. It also features some computer generated images. The book is published by Artwords, London.
Documentation of liquid crystal elastomers
Images of the lab