Thursday

Music and astronomy have much in common: both use a medium consisting of waves to communicate. With Shine, we want to highlight this link between light and sound, science and art. As part of the International Year of Light we organised a big science and art festival in our local theatre, with science demos explaining the nature and behaviour of light and sound. We commissioned Glasgow based composer Eddie McGuire to write a music piece based on galaxies research done in St Andrews. This Galaxy Suite was performed by the St Andrews New Music Ensemble as part of our event. We also worked with local community artist Tim Fitzpatrick, who developed a visual art installation to link the science and music components of our project together. With this mix of science, art and music, we gained access to new audiences. Since then, Shine has continued working on new ideas combining art and astronomy.

In this talk I will discuss the collaborations that we built between science, art and music, and how we linked these different disciplines together. I will also discuss how we organised such a multi-disciplinary event, how we took advantage of our different backgrounds, and how we evaluated our impact. We are also interested in exchanging experiences on using art in outreach activities to capture new audiences. The artwork of Tim Fitzpatrick will be on display during NAM.