Interdisciplinary Collaboration Wheel

2017

Interdisciplinary Collaboration Wheel, printed wood, acrylic, metal, Neus Torres Tamarit. Photo: Alexander Kent for the Royal Society.

Neus had the great opportunity to collaborate with the Royal Society in their project 'Changing Expectations' about envisioning research culture in the year 2035. As part of this project, her colleague Julie Light, from the MA Art and Science, wanted to create a ‘Museum of Extraordinary Objects’ belonging to the year 2035. Neus was already reflecting about interdisciplinary research, and how people from different disciplines can collaborate, as this is a crucial part of her artistic practice; collaborating with geneticists, and computer scientists. This subject came up in one of the pilot workshops organised by the Royal Society. I got inspired by this and ‘Collaboration’, subject proposed by the Royal Society team.

Neus wanted to create an object that would choose a team randomly, and in a way that the person using such object couldn't influence the decision. Neus added professions related to science, humanities, craftsmanship, and professions that are emerging or don’t exist yet, like AI trainer and Galaxy Explorer. Neus wanted to provoke thought and give insight about how diverse a team can be and how interdisciplinarity is becoming more prominent, especially from STEM to STEAM.

Neus made a spinning wheel using the design of a Codon Wheel, which helps visualising which aminoacids will be produced from the series of codons (sequences of 3 basepairs of RNA).

This design was very present in her artistic practice and in her early research during the MA in Art and Science at Central Saint Martins. It was interesting to decontextualize it by adding a profession in each of the boxes, and the collaboration wheel became more interesting and challenging to play with.

Neus created and constructed the object, and Reggy Liu constructed the base.

The Museum of Extraordinary Objects PDF link to the Royal Society website https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/projects/research-culture-images/the-museum-of-extraordinary-objects.pdf

The Museum of Extraordinary Objects link to UAL: Central Saint Martins website https://www.arts.ac.uk/colleges/central-saint-martins/stories/the-museum-of-extraordinary-objects

'Changing Expectations' launch. Photo courtesy of The Royal Society.