Making noise about Silent Signal

I am delighted to share that Silent Signal, an interdisciplinary project that I began developing at Animate with Gary Thomas and with my scientific chum Bentley Crudgington back in November 2012, has been funded and is now in production. The process was quite a labour of love, but with the support of the Advisors at Wellcome Trust, particularly the ever encouraging Meroë Candy, we are now able to realise the project.

We spent seven months developing the project last year and during this time we focused our energies on sourcing a group of gifted and enthusiastic artists and scientists, and then paired them up so that they could each develop an artistic project based on scientific research that fitted the vision of the project. We also secured the five partner organisations that we will be working with to share the artworks and the processes behind them with audiences across the UK. You can discover more about the R&D process on the Silent Signal site.

Then came the application process for the Wellcome Trust’s Large Arts Awards. We submitted our expression of interest in January, nervously waiting an answer for a month, before we heard that we were through to the next stage. We had to bring together our vision with the ideas and objectives of our partners and collaborative pairs into one form with some tight word limits. And then more waiting. And then one Friday morning the invitation wondrously appeared in my inbox inviting us to present the project to the Funding Committee.

With that we sprang into action and from four different locations in the UK, Bentley, Dr Paddy Brock, Vicky Isley from boredomresearch and I, crafted a fifteen minute presentation using Google Drive and Google Hangouts. We presented to an impressive panel of art and science experts in an austere room at the Wellcome Trust, and lo and behold, managed to satisfy the committee that Silent Signal brought together great collaborations and had the potential to inspire audiences. And to boot we were one of only two applicants this year to be granted this illustrious award.

Now to producing the six artworks, overseeing the collaborations and getting the multitude of exhibitions, events and workshops arranged for their launch in 2016…

Silent Signal is an Animate Projects production with support from the Wellcome Trust and Garfield Weston Foundation.