 Hello, my name is Johanna Kiniwicz and I'm the Environmental Sciences Research and Engagement Manager here at the British Library and I'd like to welcome you to Encounters Between Art and Science, a collaborative project between the British Library and the Central St. Martin's Art and Science Master's course. I used Library's Endangered Archives project. The library happened to have an amazing collection of Siberian digitalized images. I learned a lot about the science of early photography and the project was about taking this digitalized collection into a tangible realm and reinterpreting the medium to show people that actually these images were taken long time ago but are still available. We like the idea that the library is a huge collection of quite formal knowledge and what happens outside in the real world is very informal and where that gets distilled down is in people's minds. We made all these pieces of distilled knowledge into a quilt because we like that idea of information being passed on from person to person, very interpersonally. And it's also a collective effort of all this knowledge being brought together in the same way that patchwork quilts have a history of quilting circles and people sitting round and putting in a lot of time and effort collaboratively to get one product that everyone can share and experience and have a little part of. This work which is kind of combining art and science, the art side of it is photography and the science part of it is we could say is geology because all these pictures are stone surfaces that compose the facade of banks building in the city of London. Because of my interest in human consciousness and I see the library really as this storage of consciousness, what's interesting is that it's full of information but it's human consciousness that gives that information meaning and significance and makes it into knowledge really. So in the library there's basically layers and layers of human consciousness and knowledge that's been built up over time and everyone who visits the library contributes to this evolving knowledge and what I'm trying to portray here physically is how our consciousness is all interrelated and interconnected so it's really just trying to manifest that idea physically in a sculpture. I got inspired actually by stellar spectroscopy, the star atlas, nuclear radiation and observational astronomy so I started exploring different concepts and out of those concepts I created like some sculptures and some drawings. The metallic sculptures are made out of aluminium and then I used a liquid called ferrofluid which actually has a magnet underneath which creates 3D forms and this was very related to electromagnetism. The maps were actually inspired by the star atlas, however I used my imaginations well and I mixed like reality with imagination. I'm very interested in optics and how simple contraptions in optics such as the Fresnel lens which is essentially a piece of unsophisticated PVC with circular grooves can alter one's perception of reality when placed at the right angles. This is a site specific piece and it blends with the architecture of the British Library and essentially I through optics I would like to challenge one's perception of reality and have a little bit of an effortless participation from the viewers, from the visitors of the British Library just to make the piece work. My piece for this project is referencing the medieval manuscripts in the library. One of the references that I took was the online bestiary which is a fascinating range of illustrated stories. There's this lovely story that was initiated by Herodotus about the source of the colour which it is said is the result of a battle between the dragon and the elephant somewhere out there in the Orient. They obviously didn't know about cicotra so I thought what a fabulous story to illustrate. The work exhibited here is exploring phrases that autistic children and young adults use but in a way that we might interpret differently. So we might use phrases such as a close call as in that was quite risky, that was just a bit edgy there but they were interpreting it as a phone call ringing nearby. So I'm inviting the public to step into their world and understand a little bit of how they interpret our language but literally. Here I have a tactile book based on William Blake's manuscript which is held here at the British Library. What I did was take some extracts or poem that explored the human condition and what it means to be human and on the side I constructed some tactile stimulation which are built to enhance the emotional content of Blake's words. It's a sound installation and we used archives from the sound library and what it is a series of conversations that we've cut up and distributed into multiple channel speakers. And the idea with that is that it will kind of create new meanings in the conversation and it kind of, there's points at which the conversations link where they didn't actually in the original conversation so you get kind of new meanings and narratives coming through with that and it's the idea of like overheard conversations and kind of picking up information and knowledge through sound rather than text as you would normally in a library. These pieces really are a journey if you like, an exploration partly for me and partly of an aspect of the library's collection that perhaps doesn't always get to be seen but is always here showing one what to do so. I've presented if you like four imaginary journeys with philotelic issues that relate to key developments in history that I think are relevant for science and would I hope encourage in a humorous way people to begin to want to investigate those a little bit further. Force of Mortality is a sea type print by Louise Beer. She sees the British Library as a mirror to our pursuit of understanding ourselves and our environment. In this piece Louise is exploring billions of years in the future with the inevitable fate of our planet. Is it possible? This is a cyclical event that has happened an infinite number of times before and will it happen an infinite number of times again in the future? This is the wonderfully titled sculpture How I Wrote Certain of Your Books by Course Tutor and Waxwork Sculptor Eleanor Crook. The process through which reading is transformed into writing is explained by this waxwork, specifically that whereby academic endeavor may be converted into fiction. In producing this exhibit Eleanor consulted an extensive number of recent psychological studies which seek, but fail to explain the fecundity of Roussell's method. In New Technological Frontiers, Nagdiyelka Penova brings together the seemingly unrelated fields of geography and nanotechnology. She explores the map of the world as a playing field or playground, where strategic games such as chess, checkers, and go are based on the idea of conquering ground. As are modern computer games that use geographical and historical references as they're playing board. Here in Nagdiyelka is combining the visual aesthetics of the world and the atomic structure on a nano level where individual atoms are the game pieces. This digital animation is visualization of terraforming by digital media artist Cho Q, which explores the notion that Mars one day might become a habitable home for humans. His understanding of the theory of terraforming and the visual references in the video come from the research he has done reading books about Mars from the British Library's Science Collection.