On 1 April the Edinburgh International Science Festival returns to the city. The event will see 250 speakers and 270 events across 29 venues, promising the most spectacular SCeince Festival to date.
Edinburgh International Science Festival powered by EDF Energy is Europe’s biggest science festival and a major event in the world’s Festival City. The Festival explores the intersection of science and technology with the digital and creative industries and invites audiences to Get Connected.
This year the Festival has created their biggest and most ambitious arts programme to date and will be staged at some of Edinburgh’s leading arts venues, including Summerhall, the National Museum of Scotland and the Printmakers Gallery.
The highlights of the arts programme will include Contemporary Connections – an exciting exhibition highlighting the space where art meets science including a 3D journey through a black hole. Lichtsuchende: Cybernetic Sunflowers with Maslovian Behaviours which stars small static robotic creatures, which form an interactive sculpture, created by Dave Murray-Rust and Rocio von Jungenfeld. Four specially commissioned interactive artworks that form part of the Play On Exhibition and A Hidden Order – showing the bonds between art and music through geometry and mathematics.
This year’s art programme is all about exhibitions, asking what happens when art and science connect and when artists and scientists meet and collaborate?
The arts and sciences have long been regarded as separated disciplines, but they share a fascination with making sense of the world around us and our place in it.
On its own, science can have limited scope to tackle societal change, but in an increasingly connected world, there is growing recognition of the complementarity between the sciences and the arts and humanities and the potential for creativity and innovation that these connections can generate.
Through residencies, ongoing collaborations and the sharing of ideas, artists take inspiration from real-world research and transform it into experiences that engage, enthrall and raise some profound questions about our relationship with our world and with each other.
At the National Museum of Scotland, the interactive family-friendly Play On exhibition takes centre stage in the Grand Gallery. Taking place across four immersive zones –Picture This, Game Theory, Make Some Noise and Toy Box – Play On will showcase digital innovation and technology from Scotland and beyond, including four specially commissioned artworks from The Dennis & Debbie Club; Will; Roy Shearer; and Kirsty Keatch. Also look out for Dialogues: When Art Meets Technology, a discussion with the Play On artists about their work and why they use technology.
You can see the world from a different angle in International Images for Science 2017, The Royal Photographic Society’s new exhibition which brings amazing images of everything from galaxies to a computer chip, supported by Siemens as part of the Curiosity Project. At Edinburgh Printmakers, Firedamp: Revisiting the Flood is Sean Caulfield’s first UK solo exhibition, exploring the impact of technology on the environment and our bodies.
