ENGAGING WITH SCIENCE

The unprecedented growth of digital information and data provides opportunities for government service delivery and better policy-making. It also brings considerable challenges which could wipe out the benefits and lead to unforeseen consequences. In particular as data grows in its power, complexity and ubiquity it becomes increasingly alienating to individuals. This is arguably causing a shift towards ‘post-truth’ politics and a questioning of the value of expertise.

What role can art play?

1. Visualising evidence

Much art is visual, and many people benefit from visualising information beyond tables of data.

Inequality (above) shows health inequality across the UK and is from a series of data paintings. The top row shows the UK’s richest communities, the lower row the poorest. Each column corresponds to a life stage, with the furthest left column 0-4 years and the furthest right 85+. White signifies a very low percentage in poor health, and black signifies a very high percentage. The image shows that people in the poorest communities experience increasingly accelerating poor health from their early 30s to their late 50s compared to richer communities.

Rainbow Nation (right) shows the 11 official languages of South Africa. The intermingling of thin layers of paint tells us something about how different linguistic groupings interact and overlay in South Africa. Similar to Inequality, this piece explores whether providing data in a hand-painted and aesthetic manner increases engagement with scientific information.

2. IMMERSIVE DATA INSTALLATIONS

The 20 Year Gap (below) develops these principles into an immersive installation which participants can explore and interpret in their own ways. The installation shows the number of years people can expect to live in good health across the 215 areas in the UK. The height of each amber bottle is coded to the average number of years in good health. It shows there is a 20 year gap between the top performing area - Richmond-upon-Thames - and the lowest, Blaenau Gwent in Wales.

The blue bottles in The 20 Year Gap show life expectancy, revealing another policy challenge. The gap between blue and amber bottles shows time spent in ill-health in each location. Participants can explore what they think of this. Is high life expectancy good if disability-free life expectancy is low? How might problems differ individuals, carers, and the NHS - and what might this mean for policy? Immersive, multi-component art installations allow an open exploration of these issues, rather than more didactic model of communication whereby people are told about problems. This can allow audiences to better own narratives, explored further here.

3. IS SCIENCE IMPORTANT in policy-making?

Lucy Kimbell’s Applying Design Approaches to Policy Making: Discovering Policy Lab, dynamically illustrated by Holly Macdonald, considers the perspective of the policy-maker. The illustration to the right is a powerful depiction of the life of a policy-maker - multiple, competing pressures from a policy-making ecosystem which includes Parliament, pressure groups, the third sector and business; piles of documents stacking up; and a computer screen which gives a simple message ‘HURRY UP!‘.

Paul Cairney presents a picture of a competitive environment where different forces fight for supremacy in driving policy. He employs the concept of “bounded rationality” to identify how policymakers think. Policymakers can only gather limited information before they are 6 required to make decisions. The question then becomes: how does a topic, issue, problem or idea successfully secure attention in this limited space?

Works such as Microscopic, Macroscopic (below) aim to influence how science is held in society. The scientific discovery of the Higgs Boson is possibly one of the greatest of our age. However it is impossible to see what was quickly termed the ‘god particle’ with human eyes, and many visitors to CERN are left underwhelmed by the explanations wheeled out by earnest scientists (e.g. listen to Will Self’s walking tour). The Microscopic, Macroscopic film and soundtrack attempt to capture the sense of awe and wonder at particle physics in CERN.

The aim of works like these, is to interest the viewer not just in CERN, but in science per se.

The same is the case for Nine Quadrats (2017) which celebrates the humble biology sampling technique used by aspiring ecologists the world over (Figure 13).

“SPECULATIVE DESIGN” + ART + WALTHAM FOREST

Forest of the Future? features work by Liv Bargman (an illustrator based in Leyton), SRG Bennett (a mixed media artist based in Walthamstow), Cat Drew (a designer based in Leyton) and Phoebe Ridgway (a painter based in Newham). This cross-disciplinary collective of local creatives has formed to apply the emerging discipline of speculative design to the specific local context of Waltham Forest. Speculative design is the practice of creating speculative visions of a future world, some of which may be positive, some less so. The aim is to use these speculations to help decision-makers - politicians, citizens, consumers, voters, businesses - think about what a better future can look like, and how to achieve it.

WHY THIS EXHIBITION, NOW?

There is a clear link to one of Walthamstow’s most famous, William Morris, who could be considered a proto-pioneer of Speculative Design with his utopian novel News from Nowhere.

Some of Morris’ ideas - which may have been seen as unfeasible at the time, such as a clean river Thames and physically healthy humans - have become reality over the next 100 years. What far-fetched ideas of today may become tomorrow’s reality?

Now is an amazing but also fraught time for Waltham Forest. Growth, regeneration, opportunity, knife crime, gentrification, pressure, change, immigration, Brexit, dreams and hope, all so eloquently captured in Greenaway and Greenaway’s film for the opening of the Borough of Culture.

It feels like now is a time where there is so much change, so much up for grabs, yet where the chance of being isolated and disempowered is so stark.

One of the motivations behind Speculative Design is that it is better to talk about the future than not: by speculating more, at all levels of society, and exploring alternative scenarios, reality becomes something we are more empowered to change.

We can’t predict the future, but we can think about what we do and don’t want, and that is democratising in itself. This is has additional worth when big data, global finance and politics appears to diminish choice.

There is also the link to the Borough of Culture. This amplifies the sense that now is a time to consider the Borough’s future. There’s a lot of focus on the borough, and a lot of difficult questions.

Now is a good time to think: what do we want our Waltham Forest to be in the future?

SEEING AND BUYING ARTWORK

Future of the Forest is on show at the Pictorem Gallery at 383 Hoe Street, London E17 9AP. The exhibition runs from 2-25 May 2019. Normal opening hours are Tuesday-Saturday, 9am-5:30pm. The artwork is for sale. Please either contact Avtar at the Pictorem Gallery (via email or on 02085200340), or me directly at srgbennett@gmail.com.