Arts Catalyst

Nicola Triscott is the director and founder of the Arts Catalyst. The Arts Catalyst is an art-commissioning organisation that explores connections between the arts world and the scientific community within the socio-political and cultural contexts.
The Arts Catalyst work opened up new possibilities and opportunities to artists across specialisations to gain access to science. This was achieved by the promotion of artist residencies in science laboratories and field stations, research clusters, workshops, conferences, symposiums and seminars.

Nicola Triscott presented Arts Catalyst's main activities, its aims and some of their projects.
Arts Catalyst is best known for the projects within space research given that they have been working with the European Space Agency (ESA) since 2005. The Arts Catalyst was commissioned to carry out a study into the cultural use of the International Space Station, and since then they have been developing several cultural activities for the human spaceflight, microgravity and exploration division, artist residences and some other projects.
Meanwhile, the Arts Catalyst began to develop some projects with MIR, at Star City in Russia. The main outcomes were the MIR Campaign, MIR Flight 001, UK Space Art Forum, Gravity Zero- Russian Parabolic Flight, Artists&Cosmonauts, MIR – Art in Variable Gravity, MIR Dream of Space.

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Nevertheless, the Arts Catalyst promotes activities connected with other scientific fields. The Nuclear: art&radioactivity started with a residency at the British Atomic Nuclear Group and Simon Hollington & Kypros Kyprianou transformed it into an exhibition with their installation and some public discussion on radioactivity issues. In order to increase public debate on climate change, the Arts Catalyst promoted art residencies in the Poles with scientific field teams. As an end result they published the book Bipolar and organised a show at the Burlington House, a symposium called POLAR: Fieldwork & Archive Fever and also several public talks under the name of POLAR: The Art & Science of Climate Change.

Regarding the Arts Catalyst work in biotechnology it is worth mentioning the film Marching Plague, by the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), which was presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. The film documents a performance in Stornoway, which recreates some government actions on warfare related to the distribution of bacterial agents. Steve Kurtz, from CAE, raises questions on bio-weapons and bioterrorism in a very controversial work that later got him in trouble with the FBI. Also, the Arts Catalyst organised a BIOTECH ART WORKSHOP with Symbiotica in which Oron Catts and Gary Cass introduced artists into biotechnological practices such as DNA extraction and fingerprinting, genetic engineering, selective breeding and tissue culture techniques.