UOA 32: Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory

Staff conducting research: Vicky Isley, Paul Smith

boredomresearch is a collaboration between artists Isley and Smith, who are internationally renowned for their projects combining art, science and technology.

Working with Oxford University neuroscientists, Isley and Smith’s Dreams of Mice captured data displaying the patterns of neuron activity in sleeping laboratory mice. The artwork enabled complex neuroscientific research to be disseminated in a form understood more intuitively by experts and non-experts alike.

AfterGlow is a real-time digital animation depicting malaria transmission, created in collaboration with Glasgow University. It leads the viewer on a visual journey through a landscape illuminated by glowing spirals, representing mosquito flight paths and infected blood. AfterGlow won the prestigious moving image Lumen Prize award in 2016 and has been exhibited all over the world.

For Robots in Distress, boredomresearch worked with computer scientists from Austria’s Graz University during the creation of the world’s largest underwater robot swarm, designed to monitor pollution in Venice Lagoon.

By representing research data in visual, intuitive formats, boredomresearch provided their scientific collaborators with a fresh outlook, encouraging questions and insights into abstract concepts at the frontiers of research. As well as communicating research, all three art-science projects exemplified and promoted the actual practice of communicating science through art.

The projects have been featured as part of art exhibitions, with more than three million engagements from scientists, industry, civil society, policymakers and the public recorded for the Silent Signal exhibition, which featured Afterglow. 

Staff conducting research: Dr Oliver Gingrich, Dr Alain Renaud

Gingrich and Renaud are practice-based researchers and members of the Analema Group, an arts collective which creates participatory experiences that explore the relationships between sound, colour, light, movement and form. They created three multi-sensory experiences which focused on audience participation through KIMA, an art and research project investigating the visual properties of sound. 

KIMA: Voice represents participants’ vocal harmonies in 3D form. BU worked with researchers from the Centre for Performance Science – a partnership between the Royal College of Music and Imperial College London – to explore how such harmonies can measure social connectedness, happiness and loneliness.

KIMA: Noise is an interactive sound art piece, developed with an urban noise and health expert from Queen Mary University London, which examines the negative effect of urban noise on social behaviour, health and wellbeing.

KIMA: Colour, created with scientists and curators from the National Gallery and data and algorithm experts from King’s College, allowed audiences to experience a deeper understanding of the art and science of colour in its paintings by transforming the colour data into light and sound installations.

Engagement with the KIMA installations improved wellbeing by increasing feelings of social connectedness, particularly during the first Covid-19 lockdown. The projects raised awareness among clinicians and decision-makers of the benefits of participatory art. KIMA: Colour, in particular, provided evidence of the way in which digital platforms can enable art collections and museums to stay relevant in the 21st century. The work also increased the public discourse on the relationship between art and health, including the detrimental effects of urban noise on wellbeing in KIMA: Noise.

Staff conducting research: Dr Shaojun Bian, Professor Lihua You, Professor Jian J. Zhang, Jon Macey

BU researchers have been tackling the problem facing animation studios of producing high-quality virtual characters within a short time scale.

BU developed two new techniques to improve skin deformation (the representation of skin and its transformations and movements); was a partner in a European Commission-funded project looking at geometric modelling, image processing and shape reconstruction; and worked with Humain Ltd. to develop new techniques of facial blendshapes.

Before developing the new techniques, getting a 3D virtual character into production took anything from a few days to a few months. The new techniques enabled Humain Ltd. to reduce the time frame for creating models with realistic facial expressions from 30 days to minutes, resulting in significant time and cost savings.

As well as saving time, BU’s new techniques helped make the company’s workload more streamlined and efficient - transforming its facial development pipeline from a labour-intensive process by highly specialised artists to a simple command line interface everyone in the company can run.

The techniques developed by BU researchers at the company enabled them to work with world-leading organisations in the technology and entertainment industry, including Activision, Google and Microsoft.