-
Charlotte Jarvis, Music of the Spheres, Photo: James Read
Exhibition
Music of the Spheres
12 Jun 2015 – 5 Jul 2015
Regular hours
- Saturday
- 11:00 – 17:00
- Sunday
- 11:00 – 17:00
Address
- Southwark Park
- London
England - SE16 2DD
- United Kingdom
Travel Information
- Buses 1, 47, 188, 199, 225, 381, C10, P12 all stop at Canada Water
- Canada Water on Jubilee and London Overground Lines
- Canada Water on London Overground Line
Charlotte Jarvis with Dr. Nick Goldman and The Kreutzer Quartet.
About
Music of the Spheres utilises new bioinformatics technology developed by Dr. Nick Goldman to encode a new musical recording by the Kreutzer Quartet into DNA.
The DNA has been suspended in soap solution and will be used by visual artist Charlotte Jarvis to create performances and installations filled with bubbles. The recording will fill the air, pop on visitors skin and literally bathe the audience in music.
Dr. Nick Goldman and Charlotte Jarvis have been working together for the past year to create a series of moving visual and musical experiences that explore the scope and future ubiquity of DNA technologies.
The Kreutzer Quartet's new composition for string quartet loosely follows the traditional form of a concerto, in comprising of three musical movements. The second movement only exists in the form of a recording encoded into DNA.
For the exhibition the DNA will be suspended in soap solution and used to create silent installations filled with bubbles. The bubbles will be accompanied by a video projection showing the musicians playing in the server room of the European Bioinformatics Institute, Cambridge.
In response to the growing challenge of storing vast quantities of biological data generated by biomedical research Dr. Nick Goldman and the European Bioinformatics Institute have developed a method to encode huge amounts of information in DNA itself. Every day the huge quantities and speed of data pouring into servers gets larger. When research groups sequence DNA the file sizes are too large to be kept on local computers. It is this problem that was the motivation for Nick Goldman to develop his new technology. Their goal is a system that will safely store the equivalent of one million CDs in a gram of DNA for 10,000 years. Nick's work was has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian and on BBC News amongst other media outlets.
The Kreutzer Quartet will play the full-length composition live during the preview on 12 June timed with the setting of the sun through the large westerly windows. During the passage of the second movement the stage will fall silent, the music will be released into the auditorium in the form of bubbles. The performance will be accompanied by film projection and a discussion about the project.
