Author Archives: L Ackermann

Arts Week 2018: Building a hive mind through immersive art

Eva Menger, freelance copywriter and MA Contemporary Literature & Culture student at Birkbeck, reports on Bee Composed Live, an immersive art and sound project featured in Arts Week 2018

When a bee flies into your piano, there are a couple of things you can do. You can choose to ignore it, get a bit annoyed, or carefully listen to the sound it produces and simply let it amaze you. Lily Hunter Green, contemporary sound artist, composer and current artist-in-residence at Birkbeck, opted for the latter. Starting in 2014 with ‘Bee Composed’, a project that involved transforming old pianos into beehives, she is now working towards ‘Bee Composed Live’, a live performance in which contemporary dancers, music and audiovisual compositions will function as an immersive and collaborative representation of the hive mind. As part of Birkbeck Arts Week, she shares her fascinations, findings and future aspirations.

Still of video projecting the collective consciousness of bees.

Bees are extraordinary. The way in which they work is astonishingly efficient and surprisingly relatable to our own neatly organised society. What makes them unique, however, is their ability to work as a collective consciousness. Despite having their own job roles – from bouncer bees to cleaner bees and architect bees – they are not autonomous and only work as part of something bigger, a phenomenon Hunter Green suitably calls ‘the hive mind’. Sharing life footage of this process, Hunter Green shows how it promotes togetherness – a strategy she doesn’t only applaud but tries to apply to her own way of working as well. Collaborating with people from all over the world, including molecular biologists, choreographers and computer scientists, she aims to educate on the science of the hive as well as the reasons why more and more bees are dying.

Having said that, she doesn’t want people to leave her performance feeling hopeless. Narratives around pesticides, climate change and modern farming are to be taken seriously, but hopelessness can lead to inaction – and that’s where Hunter Green wants to make a change. Unlike the 1950s science fiction trend of giant insects ruining everyday life, Hunter Green is keen to show how insects are something to be inspired by. Creating an understanding of their vital role in life through art will hopefully make people see that planting bee-friendly flowers in their gardens will already make a significant difference, she explains.

A piano-turned-into-beehive.

Turning bee science into a life composition seems appropriate both due to its resemblance to Greek tragedies (if there is more than one queen bee around, a violent battle awaits) and geographical nature. As just one of several dances bees perform to communicate with each other, the waggle dance serves to navigate the way to newly discovered food sources (fun fact: the better the food, the more excited the dance). The image below shows one of the contemporary dancers Hunter Green collaborated to visualise this process.

In addition to this dance, ‘Bee Composed Live’ includes visual recordings from the piano hive and original new compositions, ultimately intending to create a simulation of the hive mind. With issues as complex as bee extinction, immersive visualizations can help to create a public understanding. Learn more about Lily Hunter Green and her meaningful work, here.

Art and memory in Berlin

Kathryn Hallam-Howard, BA History of Art student, writes about the recent course trip to Berlin where she and her classmates explored museums, considered architectural practice and discussed methods of memorialisation.

Birkbeck students in Berlin

On Monday 15 April 2018, a group of enthusiastic students gathered on Berlin’s Museum Island to begin this year’s History of Art field trip. Kasia Murawska-Muthesius and her husband Stefan Muthesius coordinated the trip and brought considerable expertise and personal experience to it.  Inside the futuristic Humboldt Box, we learnt about the work to construct the Humboldt Forum. This world centre for culture will sit upon the former site of the historic city palace of the Hohenzollern Prussian kings. A stroll down Unter den Linden took us to Bebelplatz, where in 1933 the burning of books by Jewish writers took place. A counter-memorial, designed to challenge the monumentality of conventional memorials sinks into the square and can only be seen through a glass panel. Created by the Israeli artist Micha Ullman, it consists of plain white, empty bookcases, capable of holding 20,000 books. Continuing this theme, we then arrived at The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.  The work of New York architect, Peter Eisenman, it consists of 2,711 slabs of varying heights and is continuously accessible day and night allowing for a completely immersive experience. Slightly uneven and disorientating, it allows the visitor a unique personal experience and its size and lack of a focal point questions the conventional concept of a memorial. The day concluded with a visit to the Reichstag parliament building and Norman Foster’s glass dome with its double helix, spiral ramps.

‘Fallen leaves’ memorial

Glorious sunshine greeted us on Tuesday and we again found ourselves on Museum Island, analysing the purpose of a museum. We visited three of the island’s museums  – the Neues Museum, the Altes Museum, the Bode Museum – examining in detail their fine staircases and expansive entrance halls. In the Alte Nationalgalerie, we saw the eclectic range of one of Germany’s foremost nineteenth-century painters, Adolf Menzel.  This was followed by another fine staircase and an exhibition, The Beauty of the Big City, containing paintings of Berlin from 1800 to the present at the Museum Ephraim-Palais.

On Wednesday, we enjoyed a bus tour around some key sites in the outskirts of Berlin. First stop was the Albert Einstein Science Park to see Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower. This unique building was erected between 1919 and 1922 and is where Einstein worked on part of his Theory of Relativity. It is a fine example of expressionist architecture. This was followed by a tour around the garden suburb of Dahlem, where we saw villas, built by Hermann Muthesius, Stefan’s great-uncle and a noted architectural historian. This also presented a great opportunity for the architecture fans to see excellent examples of modern Berlin housing estates. These six examples of low cost housing were built by housing cooperatives and are now designated UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Based on English Garden Cities, they combine multiple occupancy flats with green spaces, emphasising health and wellbeing – and not one bit of graffiti in sight!   After refuelling in the magnificent student canteen at the Free University, we went to the Moabit AEG factory, designed by Peter Behrens, in whose architecture practice, Water Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier all worked. Our final stop was a fabulous exhibition of German painting, montage and caricature from 1890 to 1930 – Berliner Realismus. It included works by many artists declared degenerate by the National Socialists, like George Grosz, Käthe Kollwitz, Otto Dix and John Heartfield. Dinner at Zum Shusterjunge Kneipe in the fashionable Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg rounded off the day.

Einstein Tower

Thursday began with a walk to the old Nazi air ministry, designed by Mies van der Rohe before arriving at the Kulturforum, to see his only post-war building the Neue Nationalgalerie, which was unfortunately shrouded in scaffolding and tarpaulin. The Kulturforum is a collection of cultural buildings built up in the 1950s and 1960s at the edge of West Berlin after most of the once unified city’s cultural assets had been lost behind the Berlin Wall. It is characterized by its innovative modernist architecture. After a visit and lunch at the Gemäldegalerie, we visited the site of the German Resistance Memorial Centre dedicated to the many Germans who actively resisted or sacrificed their lives opposing the Nazi dictatorship. Two of the best known was the writer Thomas Mann and the painter Käthe Kollwitz. The day drew to a close with a visit to the Berlinische Galerie, which is dedicated to modern art, photography and architecture. It lies close to the Jewish Museum, where we were given a tour of Daniel Libeskind’s interactive building, which uses axes and voids to articulate the Jewish experience of diaspora. One memorable exhibit is ‘Fallen Leaves’ by a Jewish artist, Menashe Kaddishman, which commemorates all victims of violence. Over ten thousand round iron plates lie on the floor in one of the building’s voids. Each plate has facial features cut out of it. The artist invites you to walk across the work and it is totally unsettling to trample across people’s faces and to hear the sound of iron grinding against iron. Eerily, those visitors who walked to the end of the void partially and then completely disappeared.

Our final day came around all too quickly and we emerged onto Karl-Marx Allee to see the wide boulevard created to accommodate the monumental military parades of the East German communist government. At the Berlin Wall memorial, we followed part of the route of the wall along Bernauerstrasse. Here the façades of the now disappeared buildings formed the East German border whilst the footpath beside them was West German territory. This led to residents jumping from windows to escape to the West until the East German authorities bricked and cemented the windows and doors to prevent this. After a visit to the exhibition in the Visitor Centre, we hopped onto the U-Bahn to visit an area called the Hansaviertel. After WW2 much of Berlin lay in ruins including this neighbourhood. To rebuild the old Hansaviertel, fifty-two architects including Walter Gropius, Oscar Niemeyer, Alvar Aalto, and Max Taut were called upon to design an entirely new quarter, complete with church, theatre and library. The project was christened “Interbau 1957” and the eventual outcome was a less dense, green residential area. It was seen as an impressive showcase of the modern lifestyle and seemed a suitable place to conclude our review of the art and architecture of Berlin. Our heartfelt thanks must go to Kasia and Stefan for organising such an interesting and informative trip.

Graduate spotlight: Jo Holloway, MA Creative Writing

Jo Holloway, who graduates with an MA Creative Writing this week, discusses her time at Birkbeck and how her course has helped her to develop her writing career.  

When I decided to undertake a master’s degree, I always knew it would be at Birkbeck. I work full time, so the evening classes and part-time courses were perfect for me. However, unlike many people, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to study. I considered History (which was the subject of my first degree) or a Master’s in Education (I’m a teacher so this would have helped professionally), but then I realised there was one thing I’d been working on for a number of years: a novel. Everyone has at least one in them apparently, but writing mine had been a struggle, and that’s putting it mildly. I had several beginnings of various stories, one that had stalled at the halfway point. I just had no idea where to take it. I realised what I wanted was guidance, expertise and feedback on my writing so that I would know, hopefully, that what I was writing wasn’t absolute rubbish! And so I applied to study for a Master’s in Creative Writing. Was it the right choice? Definitely.

During the course, I completed modules in reading and writing short stories, screenwriting, genre and a final workshop where I began to put together the backbone of my dissertation, which I completed over the summer. Each module complemented the others and taught me about point of view, structure, character, dialogue and the many other components that make a story. We read and discussed a variety of texts including David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, the screenplay of The King’s Speech, and short stories by authors such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ali Smith and Raymond Carver to name but a few. Above all, we wrote. During the first unit, I wrote three short stories to be critiqued by my peers. The feedback that I received was invaluable. It allowed me to improve my stories and have more confidence in my ability as a writer. Two of the stories I workshopped during this unit have been published, one online and one in print in the Mechanics’ Institute Review, Birkbeck’s annual anthology of short stories.

While I’m talking about the Mechanics’, it seems appropriate to mention the other opportunities outside the taught units that were available to me during my MA. Birkbeck’s anthology of short stories is an Arts Council-funded project, open to all writers across the country. Not only have I had the pleasure of being published in the anthology, it also led to reading my work at the MIR live events, which was a wonderful (if slightly terrifying) experience. And then there’s the wealth of expertise that was shared with us. Prior to the course, I would have had no idea about how to approach an agent or publisher, or what to expect from the editing process. But now, I feel much more confident with this aspect of being an author too.

As for my ambition of finally finishing writing a novel, I am well on my way. The dissertation for the final unit of the MA was the first 15,000 words of my young adult sci-fi novel. After handing it in I am now in the process of writing the rest of it and aim to have a completed draft by the end of the year. Best of all, through the wonderful people that I have met on the course, my novel continues to be workshopped in a writing group formed of several graduates from the Creative Writing MA. I honestly loved studying for my master’s, and it has given me a great foundation on which to build my writing career.

Driving innovation in the UK through collaboration and the Industrial Strategy

Yossie Olaleye from the School of Business, Economics and Informatics reports on a recent conference at the Birkbeck Centre for Innovation Management Research (CIMR) on the UK’s Industrial Strategy.

Innovation and technological advancement lie at the heart of industrialisation. In November 2017, the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) published the UK government’s Industrial Strategy White Paper, which presents a ‘modern’ long-term plan to boost productivity across the country through innovation, infrastructure development, and collaboration. The Industrial Strategy focuses on the 5 foundations of productivity – ideas, people, infrastructure, business environment, and places – and the government hopes to encourage collaboration with industry, academia, and civil society to create an economy that works for everyone.

Various questions emerged from the debate around the white paper, including how the government will support science and innovation research, and how to drive growth and local inclusion across the country. These questions formed the basis of the all-day workshop on Innovation and the UK’s Industrial Strategy hosted by Birkbeck’s Centre for Innovation Management Research (CIMR) on 23 March 2018. The event brought together a group of policymakers, including Paul Drabwell, Deputy Director of Science Research & Innovation and Dr Rosa Fernandez, Economic Adviser on Local Business Growth at BEIS, industry experts such as Professor Birgitte Andersen, CEO of Big Innovation Centre, and renowned UK academics who travelled from Kent, Oxford and Sheffield to share their latest research and comparative perspectives on the Industrial Strategy.

The objective of the workshop was to explore the trends that led to the formulation of the Industrial Strategy, and the possible outcomes of implementing the Grand Challenges outlined in the white paper, focusing on innovation, collaboration, and local partnerships. While the workshop dealt with several topics, including the impact of Brexit on achieving the strategy’s outcomes, presented by Birkbeck’s Professor Klaus Nielsen, two key themes stood out: local, regional and national engagement to deliver on economic opportunities, and driving innovation through digital skills development.

Paul Drabwell opened the workshop by emphasising the government’s commitment to increase R&D spending to 2.4% of GDP by 2027. He said that the UK “has world-leading science research, excellent universities, and innovative companies,” and it is these strengths that will drive the implementation of the strategy. Increased R&D funding will enable UK universities to continue to excel in international league tables, collaborate more with industry partners, and encourage innovation across the country, a theme which runs throughout the Industrial Strategy. Despite the UK’s strengths, Paul Drabwell noted that there are issues around local engagement in the country, which means that there is a crucial need to drive productivity and maintain a high level of employment. This is a challenge the government hopes to resolve through the £1.7 billion Transforming Cities Fund to improve intra-city transport links and promote local growth within city regions. Dr Rosa Fernandez expanded on this point with a presentation on the role of place in the Industrial Strategy, highlighting that the UK government intends to build on local strengths to tackle the issue of poor distribution of economic activity across the country.

A key question at the workshop was the role of research and the UK’s academic institutions in delivering the possible outcomes of the Industrial Strategy. We heard from Dr Keith Smith at Imperial College London who discussed the need for multinational collaboration to deal with innovation challenges across different industries, and Birkbeck’s Professor Helen Lawton Smith who presented research on the importance of local enterprise partnerships (LEPs) in addressing the challenge of regional inequality in the country. Professor Jeremy Howells from the University of Kent and Professor Tim Vorley from the University of Sheffield focused their presentations on the potential for business schools to convene and work with other social science schools to create solutions for the challenges of productivity and job creation discussed in the white paper.

The takeaway from this workshop was that collaboration – from government, industry, universities, and local communities – is essential if we are to achieve the ambitious objectives of the Industrial Strategy, as well as greater investment in research and innovation to support skills development.

One notable example of such collaboration is the Institute of Coding (IoC), which was announced by Prime Minister Theresa May at the World Economic Forum 2018. Birkbeck is a partner in a consortium of over 60 universities, businesses such as IBM and Microsoft, and professional bodies, to tackle the digital skills gap in the UK through the IoC. By bringing together such diverse perspectives, the CIMR workshop stimulated debate and provided useful suggestions for how academics can work effectively with business leaders and the government to drive innovation in the UK through research collaboration and meaningful partnerships.

Many thanks to all who participated and attended the workshop.

Organisers: Professor Helen Lawton Smith, Professor Klaus Nielsen, Professor Jeremy Howells, and Dr Rupert Waters.

Further speakers:

  • Professor Sharmistha Bagchi-Sen, State University of New York
  • Professor Åsa Lindholm Dahlstrand, Lund University
  • Dr Alexander Grous, London School of Economics and Political Science
  • Dr Carl Hunter, CEO & Managing Director, Coltraco Ultrasonics Limited
  • Professor Ewart Keep, SKOPE, Oxford University Skills
  • Professor Slavo Radosevic, University College London
  • Professor Roy Sandbach, Northumbria University

Further information: