DARE Art Prize announces 2017 shortlist

A new initiative from Opera North and the University of Leeds' Cultural Institute, the DARE Art Prize challenges artists and scientists to work together on new approaches to the creative process. 

The shortlist for the inaugural prize includes a project that would see the Chorus of Opera North transformed into a 'whale choir', an installation of optical illusions based on research into galactic 'cosmic bubbles', and an interactive film installation about the behaviour of slime. Yes, slime. 

Applications for the prize – set up to celebrate the tenth anniversary of a partnership between two of the North's leading arts institutions – were received from around the globe, from artists working in the fields of visual arts, music and literature. All are keen to work with the University of Leeds' researchers in the creation of new work, ranging from music to sculpture, holograms to interactive instals.

The winner will be announced on 13 February and matched with a researcher who shares their vision. They will then work towards an unveiling of their year-long collaboration in March 2018.

Check out the shortlist of weird and wonderful proposals below.

DARE Art Prize 2017: The shortlist

Marina Rees is based in Iceland, where she has been researching and mapping the skeletons of whales using sound. Her proposal would focus on the modes of communication between marine mammals with darkened installations receiving live transmissions from marine environments, and the Chorus of Opera North transformed into a whale choir.

Melanie King is interested in the visual language used by astronomers. The work of Professor Tom Hartquist of the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leeds has been central to her investigations – King is currently studying towards a PhD at the Royal College of Art – and she has related his research on ‘cosmic bubbles’ to soap bubbles in 17th-century painting. She proposes an installation of experimental optical and perceptual illusions based on the University’s own galactic surveys.

Samuel Hertz is a composer and performer working out of Berlin and San Francisco. He aims to collaborate with researchers from the School of Earth and Environment and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Scientific Research in Music on a performance involving low frequency infrasound, which is below the limits of human hearing but can be felt, and may have an effect on mood and emotions.

Robin Dowell and Joanna Lampard have backgrounds in sculpture and illustration respectively, and have developed a collaborative project on the poetic idea of culturing and classifying emotions with a scientific rigour. They are keen to work with psychologists, bacteriologists and physicists on new work on this theme, in the form of sculptures, images or books.

Writer and artist Gary Zhexi Zhang is already engaged in a project involving cultivating slime mould and observing its “swarm intelligence” and “social” behaviours. He proposes an interactive film installation — and possibly a performance with Opera North­­ — which uses the slime’s behaviour as a model for the creative process.

“The proposals have ranged from the beautifully simple to the devilishly complex, each showing the appetite that contemporary artists have to work with cutting edge science and research,” said Dominic Gray, Projects Director at Opera North.

“The thinking and experiences of artists and scientists are often thought to be mutually exclusive," added Professor John Ladbury of the University of Leeds, "however the collaborative proposals submitted for the DARE prize not only show that this is not the case, but reveal the beauty and excitement of a symbiotic creative relationship between the two fields.” 

For more information on the DARE Prize and the partnership, visit dareyou.org.uk