 Welcome to this live stream. Today we're going to be discussing the art of the Rosetta mission and basically just going through what happened with Rosetta, London Fillay on the Comet, and how that's inspired SIA, it's on their work. So first off, I want to introduce myself. I'm Kelly Stanford. I'm a science communicator from the University of Hull. And I think our guests would like to introduce themselves. Katharina, do you want to go first? Oh, my name is Vikatzirina Smirnova, and I am Russian, but I am now living in Seattle. I'm an artist, and my inspiration comes from science. So that's really short introduction. What else to say? Mark, do you want to go ahead? Yeah, so I'm Mark McCorkren, and I work for the European Space Agency, and I am the senior advisor for science and exploration. That spans all of what we do in all of the various astrophysical missions, the solar system missions, fundamental physics, but also human space flight and robotic exploration. And at the time of Rosetta, the core part, the landing of Fillay on the surface in 2014, I was in charge of the Outreach and Communications Group for the Science Directorate at the European Space Agency. So the work you see here is representing a big team of people who worked on that who continue to work in communications for the European Space Agency, most of them. Excellent, right. Let's get to the questions then. First off, it's going to be sent around 67p and Rosetta specifically. And then we're going to look at ESA's sidecom outreach initiatives and stuff. So first off, I've got a question for Caterina. So you've sented your art around the Comet 67p. Can you tell us about how the project came about? Was it just like you were interested in it, like you've seen it on the news, or were you approached by ESA? How did that happen? Well, first of all, I heard of this project via this platform called SLOOP, and I've been watching a live viewing of the landing of Fillay to the Comet. It was just one of those science live streamings that I watched on that program, and it just inspired me so much. It was fascinating to me. How is it even possible to reach the distant comet, not only that, but even blend things on it? So I was immediately cooked. And I started painting my artwork based on the photography taken by Rosetta, which was already following the Comet 67p for a while. And it created some paintings by them when ESA actually reached out to me saying, like, hey, you're painting our comet. Do you want to comment on that? And this is how it all started. I was in communication with Claudia Minion, actually, her name is Claudia. And she helped me to get acquainted with the science community exploring the comet. I was invited to participate in a science meeting in Amsterdam. And, well, it's Lord Dwight, I think, it's called, a little place. So I traveled, I brought my paintings, and from that on it just catapulted into the sky. This project became so much bigger as an art project for me than I anticipated to begin with. So this is how really it all happened. I met Mark, too. Mark, I remember when I met you, you were at ESA, you just biked a long distance to your work. In a biking outfit. Yeah, well, yes, many people was, I mean, I think Matt Taylor said recently, I just saw him Matt Taylor, the project scientist for Rosetta. It's first time I've seen him in many months. And he said he didn't recognise me because I wasn't dressed in lycra, cycling lycra. It's probably true. I do spend a lot of a lot of time dressed in lycra. Mark, apart from the lycra, as we've already established, as someone close to the mission and working at the European Space Agency. Can you see the science and the work you and your colleagues are close to represented in such an artistic way? I think it's a good question because, you know, it's often very easy to get lost in the thing you're doing. And I think that's true of all of us, right? If you kind of have a job or a hobby or an obsession, it's very easy to sort of focus on that and forget the wider context. And Rosetta had a very wide context. In fact, maybe I can just sort of illustrate that by showing a couple of slides to begin with, because, you know, as I say, you need to step back occasionally and see how much impact some of these things can actually have. So if I just share this little introduction here. So this is, you know, an artist's impression with a real photograph of the comet and then artist's pictures of the two spacecraft Rosetta and Filet in the background. And I think, you know, just to remind everybody before we talk about the art and science, this is an amazing scientific mission in terms of trying to understand the origins of our own solar system by studying a primitive body. But it reached out well beyond that. And I think that was, you know, partly the excitement of the mission, what it was as an adventure, as a technical achievement, as a scientific endeavour. But also because people could relate to it through the communications that our team did and then through people like Catarina, who did things on top of that we didn't even dream of. I mean, Catarina is a little bit hiding her light under a bushel there because not only did she paint the comet, she painted it with water, which had been adulterated with extra deuterium to kind of mimic the comet. So it was really mixing the two things. But let me just sort of remind people of the influence that the mission had. You know, so the front cover of Science magazine is the breakthrough of the year. Two Google doodles. Andrea Ackermatso, one of the top 10 people who mattered in 2014, according to Nature. And then just a couple of videos to show, you know, even how far in the zeitgeist it went, the end of year videos put together by Facebook and Google to show the influential events of the year. So let me just show the first one, what you think of Facebook. The most powerful force on this planet is human cooperation. Stop defining each other by what we are not and start defining ourselves by who we are. We can all be freer. And then the Google one, which is, you know, I could clip it a little bit more, but I found this little viral video interesting since it was also a highlight of 2014. Did you hear those words? Just rendezvousing with this comet is an extraordinary thing. We're going to make discoveries that no one's imagined yet. On that, you know, that's testament to the mission and it even makes me emotional seven years later on, right, to be kind of that influential, to have reached that many people. But that didn't just happen through the science and technology. You know, it happened through the communications team, which I wanted to flag here. I mean, some really, you know, brilliantly creative colleagues who put a lot of effort into all of this. Caterina mentioned Claudia, but a whole team that you see there. And, you know, working with artists to increase that outreach and that communications, I think was actually critical to it. It was not only the things that we did internally, but the things that were done by the people on the outside. And it kind of gets a runaway at some point. You know, you're not in control of it anymore and you don't want to be. You just want people to be inspired and let people pick up on it. And we'll talk, I'll show you some other things that we did later on. But I think to go back to your original question, what it did was ground us in what we were doing, what the team was doing and how important these kind of challenges can be when they're represented in a human artistic cultural way. They extend well beyond just the pure science and technology. And it should, you know, because we're paid by the taxpayer. It's not only about our narrow bubble. So I mean, Caterina probably can talk to more about that because why would people pick up on this? Well, you know, in my opinion, art sometimes is easier to understand than scientific data. So it needs to be in a way translated in some form that is easier to even visually or hearing about something in a simple way. So for me, I'm acting really as an interpreter from science to non-scientists using art as my language. So I'm trying to implement science into my work too. That's why when you mentioned the water, for example, what the others, a lot of things that I'm adding into the work. Because when the question comes, oh, why did you do that? Then I'm explaining about it to both for asking and therefore I'm writing the interest to science even further. That's really how it works for me anyway. Actually, that leads into a question I wanted to ask. Why paint this comet over everything else in science? Well, the comet 67P is indeed my use for many years already. So it's been the major project. Though I not only have focused on Rosetta mission, I work on other scientific discoveries and explorations. But the comet 67P is my favorite comet ever and it moves. Of course, how can I not paint it? And I always get photographic references from the Rosetta itself. There are so many beautiful, gorgeous photographs we're taking. And this is what I use usually to paint for it. So I am in love with the comet, like I say, and it's coming back this year. I'm so excited. I believe it's coming back, what is it, next month? Is it like closest to the Earth? Yeah, it's visible already. People have been taking photographs of it with the tail and everything. It comes around every six and a half years, roughly. Again, that's how long it's been since we were... Not since the landing, that was before closest approach to the sun. It's not getting particularly close to the Earth, for example. It won't be a natural object. You won't be able to go out and look in the night sky. But binoculars or an SLR camera, you should be able to take a photograph of it over the coming weeks. It's not raining. It's raining all the time. Actually, Mark, do you think represent in 67p, a more broadly, a rosette emission, helps communicate with science in a more... I don't know, I don't know how to explain this, but in a more accessible way to the public for general science communication might not be able to do. Yeah, I think so. As I said before, the mission itself has some special aspects about it, which help in terms of communicating to the public. There was this journey, this launch in 2004, this arrival in 2014. This sense of jeopardy about would the spacecraft wake up after its hibernation. And then only a few months later you arrive, you start to see the first pictures of a thing you've never seen before, right? I mean, it's not like, and I don't mean this in a demeaning, where it's not like yet another mission to Mars, right? Where we've been and we've seen it and it's a bunch of red rocks on the ground. I mean, it's, you know, there are many reasons to keep going there, but it was terror incognita, right? We had never seen it in any means. So every step you took getting closer was revealing new features about this world. And the shape of the comet. That was driving to everybody. Yeah, exactly. Even that weird thing that it turned out to be, you know, it's got a small head and a big body and people kind of say, it looks like a rubber duck. I mean, you can't plan that, right? You can't say that we're going to make it look like a rubber duck and therefore get communication. But once that happens, then you can explore. Catherine has got one cheaper person. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, so, and one of the things which I think is important, again, if I just share my screen again briefly, is that one of the things that people forget is this sort of beauty of having. Well, so this is just so that everybody can go back and look at the full picture. We won't cover it all in an hour. We did actually write a full journal. And this is not just an article. It's a full journal in the communicating astronomy with the public journal about Rosetta and the things that we did. The key things is this, right? Making cartoons. Using the fact that there are two spacecraft and that they're together for a long time and then they separate and one goes to the surface. And then we had the adventure where Philae went to sleep and didn't communicate back with Rosetta. So you can create a human story, which engaged many young kids, for example. But there was always that challenge of making sure that the cartoons were as scientifically realistic as possible in the sense of not trying, about the way the mission actually played out. And this was not something we planned at the beginning. We made the first cartoon as part of a small sequence of short movies about waking Rosetta up after the hibernation. But this one had the most traction. People kind of got into it immediately. And then we went on from that. We made a whole series of cartoons, 25 minutes worth in the end. And so that ability to connect with people through, in this case, anthropomorphisation. Some people didn't like it because they felt it was trivialising the mission, but you have to remember that communications is not a one-size-fits-all. You're trying to meet many different audiences with many different approaches. Some people just want lists of numbers about how comets are made and how the spacecraft is built out of metal. Some people bluntly weren't interested in any of that and they wanted to connect with the human side of the story. But then we go on and we connect with lots of different artists. This is just part, there's a tumbler site that Claudia put together and there's loads and loads of different pieces of artwork there contributed. People were just doing amazing things because they were inspired, like Catarina and many others. And that also led us later on to doing art residencies in collaboration here with Ars Electronica in Europe. And that's another level of connecting because it's more equivalent in a way to what Catarina did, is how do I take the science and the mission and turn that into a piece of art that both informs and inspires. It's not pure pushing communication, it's a two-way dialogue. And these two artists, Ifa Van Llynddon, Toll and Sarah Peckus, they came to Estec where we work in the Netherlands and they worked with the scientists and built up a rapport. So it was a two-way thing. They were acting as interlocutors between the public and us, not us just pushing communications out. So I think again there's a lot to be learned about opening yourself up to the many different avenues about how do you connect with an audience on something that could be quite esoteric. And you have to take risks at some point. You have to gamble a bit. And I'll talk a little bit about that later on, some of the bigger gambles that we took along the way. It's quite interesting you brought that to the site up because I actually contributed a work to it. Because at the time when all this was going on, I was in college doing my art. My art be tech. So I was basing my art around what was happening with Rosetta, what was happening around CERN and stuff like that. So that's quite nice to see that all again. And just one last comment there. I think you can plan all you like, right? But the famously say plans don't survive first contact with the enemy. I don't mean that at all in this case. It's the opposite plans with the public. By the time we finished all of this, the fact that the public were writing to us and talking about how much it had touched them. Again, it's easy to feel that you should be taking credit for this. It became something much more than we ever did on our own. It became a community effort. Much of the inspiration came from the things that other people did. But when you get to the point where you get people sending you letters saying that they changed their career in their 40s and stopped being a lawyer and went back to college to do science or to do art and kids who had changed their whole attitude towards science. And there are even kids now. I heard from a friend Richie Daly in Waterford in Ireland. He was educating primary school children. So seven, eight, nine-year-old. No, a bit older than that, maybe around 10. Showing them Rosetta and Philae through the mission. The first one of those kids has now gone to college in Dublin to study astrophysics. It makes me feel old. It's a long time ago. But that's when you touch people. That's when you change people's lives. And it's just so humbling to have been part of that. That's really heartwarming to actually hear if it has actually influenced people to get into science or change their perspective on what they can do in their art to try and show science in their art as well. I mean, I know personally it had a massive impact on myself and my viewpoint of what I wanted to do with my art. Hence why I went full-on sci-artist and I'm still stuck with that tool today. So yeah, it's really, really, probably blown up a bit actually. It's quite an emotional topic for myself. But yeah, Catherine, one last question. So we can wrap up this little portion of the interview. Have you got any plans to continue this Rosetta project on? Cos obviously the mission created so much data, so much material that scientists are still coming through, I believe, till now. So I was wondering whether you wanted to jump back in and see how you interpret it differently than what you did back then. Yes, I do have plans to continue. And as a matter of fact, I have continued this year as for Return of the Pumits, I've created new artwork. And this time, though, I'd like to address a question of how important Pumits are for forming life on planet Earth. And of course, we don't know the origin of life on Earth, but there are a lot of data that was collected and even via the Rosetta mission that makes you think that, possibly, Pumits have a lot to do with forming life. We wouldn't be sitting here and having an international conversation via Zoom if it wouldn't be for the Pumits, perhaps. Because not only did Pumits bring a lot of water to planet Earth because mostly they are made out of ice and dust, but they also brought important ingredients like phosphorus, which is just crucial for life-forming, and amino acids, glycine, I believe, was found on the Comet 67P in particular, and a multitude of organic molecules. So that in a good environment when the Earth was falling off, potentially all of these ingredients made all together and started this really basic form of life. And so for this new work that I've done this year, I decided to not only create that special water that Mark has mentioned, but I generally use electrolysis to increase the level of heavy water in the regular water and then using that water to paint the comet. But I decided to create actually a columnist of bacteria and add that yet into the water as well to represent the possibility of the life that is starting via the comet. So I actually have prepared a little video to show you the process of me creating this artwork for this year. I'm going to share it with you. Okay, let's give me a second. Here I'm showing that I'm generating water via electrolysis. You can see the separation of oxygen and hydrogen. I sampled actually the little 3D printed comet that I showed you earlier and got bacteria from directly from that and were from colonies in the country dishes. Then I basically added it into the water. You see there's a lot of splashing in my work and this is all for the active parts of the comet's journey under the comet, closer to the sun and it ejects all of this stream of water that is melted with the sun. It's like a free feel of cometary tail behind the comet's ice flash a lot. I'm also adding a little different effect for the artwork to make it look different in the work that I've done before. I'd like to also point out that the music that you're hearing on the background is Lee Mottram. He is a clientist from Ireland, from England. He was yet another artist and musician, a collaborator who I've inspired to compose specifically for this project. He's not been to New York, I've lived in New York for many years and he've travelled with me also to ESA too while I was presenting my work and played live. He's composed music inspired by the sonifications of the comet by many of the same, right, Mike? This project is so diverse. I've decided that just one media as a watercolour is not enough. I have to really study comets from different senses. If paintings would be a representation of the visual sense then there is also, we have so many. We have hearing, we have taste and smell. There was that card that was created. It was the smell of the comet 67P. I have one of those. It stinks a lot. The smell goes through everything. Plastic bags and they have travelled internationally fine and then by the time I arrived my whole language smelled like a comet. Not only for you as scientists to explore the comet and get so much data but also for me as an artist I feel like I have to be implementing different media to make it more diverse and cover all sorts of aspects of the discoveries of the comet. I would like to continue, of course, I don't think this project is done. I think there are scientists still, data is being still analysed. The comet is going to be coming back. The comet 67P stands for periodic. It comes back every six and a half years. I will continue. Just to keep you busy we are now building another comet mission called Comet Interceptor. Rondevue is going loiter in space and wait for a comet which may not be periodic. It may be just a once in a lifetime comet which would come from the outer solar system or even if we are lucky from another solar system, an interstellar comet. We won't be able to land on it because of the difference in velocity but to fly past it and see one of these even more primitive objects. That will be coming along in a few years time. I am curious to find out if you can catch what other organic materials present on that comet just to see what brought us here. Are we from solar system or are we from much further? It will be exciting, yeah. One last question as well, Catherine. I was just wondering, do you actually have a background in science or is it just something that you have gone into as you have explored the topic? Well, I am one of those that Mark mentioned earlier. I actually am a lawyer who switched to being an artist. My education is law which I don't practice anymore. So I don't have any scientific education though I get a lot of inspiration starting from my father who was an engineer, an absolutely phenomenal engineer and so starting from my father who was an engineer perhaps to do with the phenomenal engineer and so since childhood, plus I was born in the USSR so space was a big thing in my country and so all of the boys wanted to be a Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space or a firefighter but that's really, for me, I study science on my own you might say and I try to do a lot of research before I proceed with an art project. I don't want to make any mistakes. If I'm not sure then I'll get in touch with scientists and ask scientists directly their opinion on that. So as for the cartoon that you mentioned Mark also you don't want to give wrong data, wrong information to the public for me the same way. I was just also wondering have you tackled any other scientific topics with your art, Caterina? Are there any other missions you've tried tackling? I don't understand the question. Any other missions? Have you done work on other space missions or is it just Rosetta? No, I have done work in the past as well as right now. I'm following the epicolombo a mission to Mercury. I've actually while visiting ESA with my work for Rosetta, I've had a chance to see the spacecraft being built and now it is really close already approaching Mercury by now following this mission. I've met scientists from ESA as well as JAXA, a Japanese Space Agency because it is a collaboration project. So using that data once we get to Mercury I'll start working on that at the moment. Flying by Earth and Venus it's a long journey as usual of course, very complex. Also I've done some ceramic sculptures for ESA Pathfinder which is the Gravitational Waves exploration also project by ESA as well and I met also scientists for Gravitational Waves exploration from LIGO. So Renier Wise he works at MIT the Nobel Prize winner who actually has detected the first gravitational waves. So there are many so much science really, it's hard to really like pick one project and stick with it. So I like to work on the various projects. So I just know we have actually flown past Mercury for the first time with Bepi Colombo that was on the 1st of October but that's the first of six flybys so we loop around until 2025 but it was amazing to see the first images come back from Mercury a few weeks ago and in the name of art and science work with some musicians in the UK a short piece of music which goes with the animation Anil Sebastian and Ingmar Camelagaran, just continuing the art and science collaboration there even on something very short just a days event but it's good stuff we're there finally. I have a bunch of questions actually for you Mark so firstly you've briefly touched on this but I was just wondering as a whole how does the European Space Agency engage with sci-artists to communicate the research on these different projects is there a yearly thing that is similar to what EGU runs each year with the artist residency for example? Yeah so we've done things on an ad hoc basis in the past and there have been a number of events around the agency so of course we've spread around Europe so sometimes these things have been local in one country or the other the thing I showed you a couple of moments ago with Sarah Peckus and Eva van Lindentoll was a competition which we ran with Ars Electronica who were based in Lynts in Austria so that was open to the world and we got some really interesting people applying for that we only had two slots to give away but due to all sorts of internal things at ESA we didn't manage to do it straight away but by the middle of 2019 we said we've really got to kick off something regular here so working with Karen O'Flaherty who was involved in the ESA comms team for Rosetta and one of the project scientists Kate Isaac who is the project scientist for our chaos mission a small exoplanet mission to establish a new art residency and then of course coronavirus happened and we want to have people on site we think it's important that it not be virtual that people get the chance to interact with the scientists and the engineers and actually take something away tangible from having been there so we kind of postponed it for a while until very recently actually and in fact I think the deadline is still open we have opened a near term restricted one available only to artists resident in the Netherlands and we've done that purely for pragmatic reasons that we can inside a country it's easier to ensure they'll be able to travel here because we just don't know what might happen in the next six months so that's open and that's collaborating with people called the Science Gallery in Rotterdam and also the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam so we're looking at astrobiology life looking at from the biology perspective astrophysics perspective but the intention then is to open that up fully internationally again and have it be a regular call annually once we've got this first pilot out of the way so to speak sounds negative out of the way we're doing it that way first but the intention from the beginning was to restart these because we found them really rewarding both for us and for the artists I mean it certainly Caterina's talked eloquently about how it kind of changed her life and the same is true with some of the other people we work with and I don't you know I don't mean that in the sort of sense that we are the holders of some magic information which changes people's life it's a dialogue and the great thing about having artists with us is some of the scientists to begin with they're a little bit skeptical why should I talk to an artist you know what am I going to get from this I'm busy I've got a mission to run but I know that when they sat and talked and got that perspective so to speak they were very enthusiastic about it and came away with some really interesting ideas about how the public view their mission as well and what their not responsibilities I guess you would call it how do you think outside the box and how do you go about communicating so yeah we do things in an ad hoc basis mission by mission sometimes centre by centre but I am you know really hoping that we can actually establish a much more regular thing as you say like EGU, CERN have done this ESO do this other big research organisations you know it's not rocket science we should be able to work with artists pretty regularly yeah actually I wanted to touch on a little event that you've put on called space rocks do you want to talk a bit about that yeah let me just quickly pan through a couple more of these slides so I can get to the end because that will inform space rocks a little bit I mean one of the things that we did during Rosetta as well one thing now that we commissioned is that people were you know saying oh you need to create some kind of audio visual experience to go with it, a bit equivalent to this this is the very famous, these are stills from the famous NASA film called the 7 minutes of terror which accompanied the landing of a curiosity rover on Mars in 2012 and it's a kind of very exciting but it's a very engineering driven film it says you know what do we have to do we have to get through the atmosphere we have to deploy the parachute use the heat shield, parachute, thrusters drop the rover onto the surface and when it came to Rosetta we felt we needed to do something like that but we also realised that the filet descent towards the comet was not seven minutes of terror going through the atmosphere but it's kind of seven hours of boredom nothing happening right and if you're being realistic there's no sound unlike on Mars where it's perfectly legitimate because there's an atmosphere you can have the thrusters and everything else the comet was just a silent movie in that sense so we decided to take a big risk and do something completely different and that was to make a science fiction film about the mission I'm not going to show it but I'm going to show some of the story board and concept art which went into it it's a film called ambition and the idea is that this is sort of setting the deep future this is the picture behind me here we filmed it in Iceland with Aidan Gillan from Game of Thrones and Ashling Franciosi who was later in Game of Thrones so it had some sort of bit of a celebrity pull but the idea was this theme about did comets bring water to earth and did they potentially bring life to earth and this was all before we'd actually arrived at the comet and so it was a lot of extrapolation and as I say this concept art about how you would represent some kind of nano technology so it's all very you know woo woo science fiction but we tried to keep it as what's the word not realistic but as informative as possible there is a central question about this mission and how can we use science fiction to draw in a completely new audience as a consequence so as I say we ended up filming it in Iceland on this barren landscape some brilliant work done by a Polish company called Platigymarge Tomiek Baginski who has subsequently gone on to be the showrunner on the Witcher Oscar nominated director it's amazing that we get these people involved because they wanted to work on something that wasn't selling soap it wasn't just about a commercial for selling a product and we made some interesting things so you can find the films online there's a trio of films there's a trailer, the main film and then there's an epilogue which was two years later but we also made a making of film which talks about the inspiration behind the story and alternate stories and the ways that we tried to bring the art and science together and there's a beautiful moment at the end of the film where it said one of the artists that worked on it said it's absolutely crazy that we have to make a science fiction film to get people engaged in something that is utterly brilliant that's nuts, right? It should just be something people are interested in but I'm still very proud of that because it was a risk out of the box and there was some really very great feedback that won lots of prizes and lots of people said you've kind of changed the discourse about science communication but there was also music there was custom music made for it and this is bringing me on to the space rocks thing actually there was the main album for ambition the film itself is only seven minutes long but there's a full album by a Tannas Falcoff there a guy called John Crossley in the UK did a whole show of his music and then Ed Blakely did a classical album called the Rosetta Suite so these are all available again ambition was sort of for the mission but the others people just did them like Catarina did what she did and then we went to the point so this is still from Blade Runner of course and one of the most well known science fiction composers historically is Van Gellis who did the music for Blade Runner and he made a full album about Rosetta as well so my brother is an artist a visual artist and installation work but I have to say my brain is mostly triggered by music that's where for me the ultimate emotion in art comes from music and so the thing that we I think there's a bit that's going to play some music here so maybe I don't want to play that right now but let me jump ahead of that jumping from that we got hooked up with a guy called Alex Milas in the UK and Alex at the time was the editor of or the chief executive officer of a bunch of people called Team Rock and they published music magazines Prog magazine Metal Hammer and various other classic rock and he was inspired and he got in touch with us through Matt Taylor Matt Taylor was the project scientist and over time we decided we wanted to do something which brought together scientists engineers, artists musicians and that led to space rocks so we've done two big live events in London and you can see we've got astronauts, we've got musicians we've got science fiction authors and we do a series of things where we'll talk about real science so we've got Tim Peacon stage talking about what it means to go to space as an astronaut Shazad Timon here talking about working on robotics in space and we had other people talking about dark matter people talking about Bepi Colombo and Mercury and we also had celebrities along so we've got in the bottom left corner there we've got Jason Isaacs Trek and also from the Harry Potter films Lucius Malfoy Dominique Tipper from The Expanse and you know pulling people together to create an entertainment plus information a day now flip side to that is of course in the last year and a half we haven't been able to do live events so what we have done is continue it online this is a bit of advertising but we've done 58 of these episodes of what we call uplink in dialogue with people from music from art from poetry from engineering, from climate change to Bepi Colombo to Rosetta how you fly a spacecraft the science you do there and we've had Apollo astronauts we've had Van Gellis himself we've had Nobel Prize winners and so it's been amazing to keep that going over the last 18 months and we'll certainly do more but we're really looking forward to going back to physical live events as well so Space Rocks has been a great way of us connecting with a wider range of artists extending beyond what effectively started with Rosetta so are you going to plan on doing an in-person event next year or? obviously we've probably been more cautious than some people about going back to live events the first two big Space Rocks events were in the UK London at the O2 and we'll go back there again definitely but we're the European Space Agency so we have a remit to do this not just in the UK so in fact we would without giving too many secrets away about exactly where and when before lockdown we were in Poland looking at venues for a big event there working with our friends who worked on the science fiction film and so we've got lots of enquiries Germany, France, Italy, Spain we'll definitely be going back to live events but as I say probably in 2022 we won't be doing one before the end of this year and one final question before we go on to the Q&A section I was wondering if you do art yourself I was looking at your website last night and I was quite shocked it turns out you photographed David Bowie in concert and they're really good photographical I'm old, what can I say when I was a student we're talking about the 80s now I worked at the Edinburgh Festival as a photographer for the thing called the Festival Times photographing all of the acts going to venues and doing things also where they were living but I was a concert photographer for a while so those pictures of Bowie that you saw from Murrayfield in 1983 and weirdly a couple of weeks ago somebody published on Twitter put a picture of Bowie just before he went on stage at that gig and a black and white picture he's standing in that beautiful let's dance suit which are in my pictures the amazing thing is that I am just out of shot because he was standing in the tunnel as he walked past us to go on stage at that gig so I photograph you two on their first tour I'm embarrassed to say I also photograph Cajagugu and loads of other bands so what can I say I'm really interested in photography and I've done lots of concert photography over the years but just these days to purely as an amateur but you mentioned the art thing I'm just going to reach out a screen here for a second one of the projects so as I said I work with the musicians on putting music over some of our videos that we make and through Space Rocks I've come to get to know Anna Phoebe she's a violinist based in the UK has worked with many bands but also is a composer in her own right so during lockdown I was just mucking around with my phone and garage band and just making noises synthesising noises something I've done forever I can't play anything but I can make noises and she this is her album which just came out I'm going to call it Sea Souls I was going to call it Sea Songs but this is actually an album full of stuff and one of the tracks on there she took some of my noises some of my soundscape stuff and it's incorporated into the track so I'm kind of pretty cool also on the same album is Phil Manzanera from Roxy Music that my little noises are on the same album with a real musician or lots of real musicians so yeah for me my art is photography and mucking around on a synthesiser I can't paint anything and I can't play anything properly but I leave that to the professionals and the inspired amateurs who do it way better than I can okay we're going to move on to the air well yeah I leave it to my brother he's a real artist yeah so we're running out of time so let's swiftly move to the Q&A section so if you've got any questions you want to ask either Catarina or Mark please get them in as soon as possible so we can go through them while we're waiting for those to go in I've got one question for both of you is there a takeaway message or a piece of advice you want to give people who are interested in engaging in science and art? Catarina go first well from my perspective I would say that if you are an artist and you would like to work on a sci art sphere then don't be afraid to get in touch with scientists because they are open they are also human beings like you are they actually have a lot of common scientists and artists so they would be really often to perhaps answer your questions and help you with something because they are also curious so what are you doing and why are you contacting me so it's all possible it's all doable you can easily get collaborations with scientists if you are an artist and I would just mirror that I don't know at the moment probably 10 different artists and musicians on various projects and they've made the connection and sometimes it's just can you advise me on how to get a particular image or a particular piece of data which I can then build into my art and others are saying I just want to do something what would be an interesting topic and we have a whole range of the planetary missions the solar system missions and you see something and there are some which are much more abstract and Catarina talked about gravitational waves for example ripples in space time that's a whole different level of abstraction and it's not just the space science there's also the human exploration the robotic exploration earth observation Anna Phoebe put together a beautiful piece of music about looking down at the earth and what you can learn from above and yeah on both sides have an open approach to that relationship because you might go in as a scientist saying this artist can do this but commissioning art is great I mean I'm all for it right because obviously artists don't live on fresh air alone I mean the financial side is important and you can commission art and do that but in some ways I'm much more interested in being open minded and saying well here are some things we do how does that inspire you rather than saying I want a painting of this because that might not be the best outcome it might not be the most imaginative and the other one reversing completely the artist should come in with an open mind and say well I know you build spacecraft but what are the technologies what does it mean to be a human working on these things what is the sense of discovery as much as the mechanics of discovery sorry did you want to add to that Catarina no I agree the way it goes is that perhaps artists inspire scientists to come up with space missions questioning originally is that even possible to go to space an artist would come up with this magical image of some distant planet scientists would think about it look at it at the picture and decide oh is there an atmosphere on that planet why don't we go and explore so it is mutually important I think the two spheres one is so abstract and imaginary and the other one is so precise and you know detailed they yet have to go together I believe that's why this collaboration between art and science I think is an important thing it should just continue and encourage it so anybody who wants to work in a sci art sphere it's just great beautiful with support okay I've got one question for you Catarina then sadly we'll have to end because we are running out of time quite a bit so Catarina the question is what art supplies do you use for example what types of paints do you use is it strictly painting do you do sculpture do you want to elaborate on that different media absolutely depending on the project which of course some media is better for one project some better for another ceramics I love ceramics water color is well you call it the water media really because I mix my water color is myself and various collaborations you know I also implemented augmented reality into the work as well it just depends on the project I never know what am I going to choose for the next project I don't have any media that they stick with maybe I'm more known as for watercolor paintings in large scale but otherwise I'm absolutely so all those are like all the rosetta paintings are actually watercolor I thought there was a oil you know like really thinned out oil water made sense to work with water because water is important for the comet you know kind of drop the water to planet earth so water media is important awesome so sadly I'm going to have to end it here because we are running out of time but thank you so much everyone for coming along thank you so much to Mark and Caterina for going through all these questions and you know opening dialogue between science and art we are going to be running a dedicated sci art session again next year as part of EGU 2022 so if you want to take part in that you can submit your abstracts hopefully early next year and if we're double lucky we might have it in person so you might be able to exhibit some work as well so yeah please keep your eyes peeled on the official EGU website and also EGU's Twitter account where they'll be giving out updates on all these sort of things and also announcing open calls for each session sorry so yeah thank you bye thanks Kelly bye Caterina bye bye Mark