Making Shadows in Sci Comm

It has been a busy week here in Science Communication. While the Sci Comm’ers have completed and presented our Group Projects, the Science Media Production team have completed their Documentaries and Radio Packages.

All of the projects had to communicate an aspect of the courses covered last term (‘Philosophy of Science’ and ‘The Media Representation of Science’) and could do so either through a film or audio product, or through a more artistic product. And they were all brilliant. I was a bit worried when we started these projects, especially since some of the previous years’ projects were shown to us were so cleverly executed (see, The Scientist, Maps of Knowledge and Ros the Rat and the Paratime Shifts).

Many of the groups this year produced art works and I think this made a refreshing change from the animations and videos from last year (perhaps this a cyclical pattern?). It was great to see the different takes on the ideas presented in class. My group decided to build a shadow sculpture, based on the work of these rad people. I’ve wanted to build one of these for a while, but have been a bit scared to do so, thinking that these would be really difficult to make.

Luckily my group were awesome at mobilising ourselves and getting all of the equipment we needed. After planning what we would build, and how we would build it, the next step was to get some building materials. Our story starts on an arctic morning, in the tundra just south of Wembley. Somehow we managed to obtain loads of offcuts of wood for about a fiver! We then lugged these for half a mile or so along the A40 towards Park Royal tube station. This was a low point… We were cold, we were lost underneath the weight of our building material and we were almost late for afternoon lectures.

Soon enough, we started by drawing an outline of the shadow we wanted to create. We then projected this outline onto a wall to create an even larger outline! This was fun. We could do this. It wasn’t too fiddly. With this outline, we could then start building the sculpture properly.

Drawing the outline

 This was a trial-and-error process since it was often really difficult to form the shadow. I made a little time-lapse of the process which I think shows the stop-start nature of our construction (this isn’t as good as my colleague’s time-lapse but we are waiting for copyright approval to upload that – also, apologies since I didn’t record the whole process, so the sculpture at the end of the video isn’t finished!).

At last! We finished our sculpture. We thought it was dope. But what would other people make of it? We decided to organise an open-viewing to exhibit the work. I think this went pretty well really. People seemed to like it and we got lots of questions and comments. People took photographs. There was even a spontaneous round of applause. I recorded a video of some of the event, and while it’s rubbish quality, I like watching everyone making sense of the structure.

A brief description of the project greeted guests during our open exhibition

It’s been a fun group project and I enjoyed listening to everybody else’s presentations. Other group projects included: an immensely fun murder mystery party; a board game called ‘Science Beat’; a 3D sculpture of the brain; some glassblowing; a strange mockumentary which asked importantquestions about the documentary-making process; some street art based on #TheBrianCoxEffect; some anamorphic art; and a radio play based onWimbledon as philosophers of science hit ideas back and forth. I hope to add links to these pages once there is an online record of them.

The final product showing Isaac Newton sitting underneath and apple tree. From left to right, the group members are: Alice Hazelton, myself, Tasch Mehrabi.