Silent Signal Symposium

Hannah Redler

Hannah works with international artists, technologists, scientists and photographers on interdisciplinary projects for galleries, museums, digital public space and the built environment.

She is currently the Open Data Institute Associate Curator in Residence which she combines with teaching and independent projects, including in 2015 co-curating Tate's 'Light and Dark Matters' events series with Institute of Physics and Tate Programming teams and contributing as a guest curator to The Lowry's 'Right Here Right Now' digital art exhibition.

From 2005-2014 Hannah was Head of Science Museum Arts Programme commissioning and curating artists interventions, exhibitions, events and research projects against a variety of scientific themes.

Dr Sarah Cook

Sarah Cook is a curator and writer and co-founder of CRUMB, the online resource for curators of new media art. She is co-author (with Beryl Graham) of the book Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media(MIT Press, 2010) and co-editor (with Sara Diamond) of Euphoria & Dystopia: The Banff New Media Institute Dialogues (Banff Centre Press, 2011).

Sarah has curated and co-curated international exhibitions of contemporary art and new media art including: Broadcast Yourself (2008) for AV Festival 08, Newcastle; Mirror Neurons(2012) for National Glass Centre, Sunderland; and Biomediations (2013) for Transitio_MX_05, Mexico City.

She is currently Dundee Fellow at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design where she curates the programme for LifeSpace Science Art Research Gallery and works as an associate curator with New Media Scotland and with NEoN Digital Arts.

Dr Silvia Camporesi

Silvia Camporesi is bioethicist with a background in biotechnology and philosophy of medicine. She is based at the Department of Social Science, Health & Medicine at King's College London where she directs the Master's programme in Bioethics & Society. Silvia works on the ethics and policy surrounding the application of genetic technologies to selective reproduction and to enhancement in elite sport.

Her first book, ``From Bench to bedside to track & Field: the context of enhancement and its ethical relevance``, was published for University of California Medical Humanities Press in 2014. Silvia was formerly at the Centre for Humanities & Health at King's College London and at the Department Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at University of California, San Francisco.

Katie-May Boyd

Katie-May Boyd is a Costumier with a first class honours in Costume for Performance from the London College of Fashion. During her final year of this course she worked on the Parasite Project with the scientists from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Parasitology at the University of Glasgow.

Katie-May’s passions lie in the unusual ways that costumes, textiles and the body can ignite peoples interest and understanding of complex ideas in and around the biological sciences.

Her past work has included dance costumes at The Royal Ballet School, tech-fashion hybrids at Studio OX and costume-prop creations for the London 2012 Olympic Ceremonies. Currently she produces costumes for Madame Tussauds. She hopes to undertake a Masters in Art and Science at Central Saint Martins in the next academic year.

Daksha Patel

Daksha is an AHRC funded practice-led researcher at Northumbria University. Her practice is concerned with digital systems that are used to scan and map the human body, and she is particularly interested in medical visualisations. The process of drawing is central to her practice. She draws with materials that are unstable and fugitive such as oil, animal fat, latex and clay, as well as more traditional materials such as graphite on paper.

Her work is exhibited nationally and internationally, and she regularly undertakes residencies in scientific institutions. Recent exhibitions include the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester; John Rylands, Manchester; Touchstones, Rochdale; Imperial War Museum North, Salford; and the National Taiwan University of Arts, Taipei.

Daksha is a visiting artist/lecturer at UCA (University for the Creative Arts) and MMU (Manchester Metropolitan University).

Tracy & Hobbs

Tracy & Hobbs work in the areas of lit sculpture and animation respectively. They have worked collaboratively on site-specific animated installations and community projects since 2009. The artists’ main point of collaboration has been to share the tools and methods of their practice through workshops and events to create spectacle, and to engage the public in the stories or nature of a specific site.

Dr Gill Haddow

Gill is a sociologist based at the University of Edinburgh in Science, Technology and Innovation Studies. Maggie’s Story comes from a project currently funded by the Wellcome Trust, Society and Ethics University Award focussed on ‘Animal, Mechanical and Me: The Search for Replaceable Hearts’. This research seeks to uncover what it feels like for people to live with augmentations from non-human animals and machines that are placed inside their bodies. Not only does it consider whether or not a person still feels any differently, but also whether it is preferable to have a non-human animal or machine used (or even say, a less than ideal human donor).

This research is a culmination of a long interest in new medical technologies that seek to repair, replace or regenerate parts of the human body. From an early interest in organ donation and transplantation, through to DNA databases, and later research on xenotransplantation and biofabrication Gill has sought to understand the spaces between and in the human being.

Dr Alexa Wright

Alexa Wright is an artist based in London and is Reader in Art and Visual Culture at the University of Westminster. She works with photography, video, sound and objects. She is fascinated by narrative, and is currently interested in fragmenting and recontextualising personal narratives as these can reveal so much about what it is to be human. Motivated by her own sense of strangeness and displacement, Alexa’s curiosity is channelled into unsettling works that challenge the viewer or listener to move out of their comfort zone. In the making of these works she often takes herself into situations where people are at their limits. These include: US jails, where she interviewed people convicted of murder, the opera, where she photographed singers during and after performance, and, most recently, two day centres for people recovering from acute mental difficulties.

Bentley Crudgington

Bentley is a biomedical scientist currently working in veterinary virology. He began his unhealthy interest in infectious diseases and host/pathogen interactions with an BSc in Marine Biology with a focus of histological investigations of Marine Parasites. He moved on to a MSc in Cellular Pathology focusing on biological signalling in granuloma formation in bTB across different species. He is currently a PhD candidate at Imperial College London where he is researching the use of viral vectors as a metaphylactic intervention strategy in the control of swine disease.

He is also interested in how interdisciplinary collaborations can assist scientists in exploring the ethics of biomedical research, in particular the use of animal models and biological materials. He is Scientific Advisor on the Silent Signal project.

boredom research

boredomresearch is a collaboration between British artists Vicky Isley and Paul Smith. Fascinated by the mechanics of the natural world, they use computational technology to simulate natural patterns, behaviours and intricate forms that gradually change over time.

boredomresearch’s work opens channels for meaningful dialogue and engagement between public and scientific domains. Their artwork Real Snail Mail was the world’s first webmail service to use real snails, challenging our cultural obsession with speed and received worldwide attention.

Based at the National Centre for Computer Animation, Bournemouth University, their work benefits from a fine blend of art and science – allowing them to achieve projects underpinned by a deep appreciation of the creative possibilities of technology.

Dr Darren Logan

Dr Darren Logan studied Biochemistry at the University of Bath before undertaking his PhD in the evolution and function of genes that control pigmentation. He moved to The Scripps Research Institute in 2005, where he was awarded a Skaggs Fellowship.

In 2010, he joined the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and became an Investigator for the Medical Research Council’s Centre for Obesity and Related Metabolic Disease, leading a team of eight researchers to identify genes involved in sensory perception, cognition, memory and behavioural psychiatric and cognitive disorder by combining genetics, behavioural testing and neural activation studies.

His work involves studying the innate social behaviours of mice. Investigating how they communicate and interact with each other, and with other species, not only enables revelations about how behaviour is encoded in our brains, but also allows us to identify the genes that influence this behaviour and locate those responsible for behavioural malfunctions in humans.

Dr Megan MacLeod

Dr Megan MacLeod graduated from the University of Glasgow in 2001 with first class honours in Immunology and received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2005. Her research took her to Denver, USA where she worked with Philippa Marrack and John Kappler, two of the world’s leading immunologists.

She is currently working at the University of Glasgow, funded by Arthritis Research UK to examine the immune cells that are central regulators in autoimmune disease and rheumatoid arthritis. Her research aims to improve our understanding of how the immune cells, CD4 T cells, regulate immune responses in infection and autoimmunity.

Eric Schockmel

Eric Schockmel is a London-based moving image artist and director from Luxembourg. His work spans a personal practice and commissions, as well as freelancing in the creative industries. He creates expressive artworks for digital and physical environments, including installations, screenings, projections, prints, desktop, mobile and TV screens, exploring themes at the intersection of art, science and technology. In 2015 he began directing an animated documentary about the origins of science fiction.

Eric has an MA in Communication Design from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

Charlie Tweed

Charlie Tweed is an artist and academic based in Bristol. He is currently a lecturer in Digital Media and Culture at Bath Spa University. He has an MFA in Art Practice from Goldsmiths, London and an MA in Digital Media from Oxford Brookes University. He is currently completing his Arts and Humanities Research Council funded PhD at Kingston University where he is developing a large-scale video installation.

Awards include the Galerie Klatovy Klenova prize at the Start Point European Academy Awards 2008; the ECO 09 prize; and Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2007.

Solo shows include: Notes I, II & III at Spike Island, Bristol, Animate Projects and Alma Enterprises, London; i am algorithm at Aspex, Portsmouth and Exeter Phoenix; residency programme at Grizedale Arts.