neutronica.org

new innovation, arts & science with the european spallation source

On the 15th of September 2009 I had the pleasure of giving a short “stand up science” talk at the Q-day event in Lund, Sweden. I prepared myself to deliver a most flipped-out presentation, but the competition for that was pretty hard when being squeezed in among main speakers like the Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis, the parapsychologist Susan Blackmore, the world famous artist Spencer Tunick, the founder of Atari and the gaming industry Nolan Bushnell and Kristofer Lundström from the Swedish national TV being the conference moderator.

Q-day was the opening day of the European Innovation Conference (Innovation in Mind) this year and gathered a large audience. Q – Signs of tomorrow was started in Lund, a city largely characterized by vivid contacts and interplay between the largest university in Scandinavia, innovative corporations and an exciting cultural scene. In Lund, there is a thousand-year-old tradition of innovation and the creative interchange of ideas.

Q-day is an arena for cross-border meetings between people who share curiosity and a burning interest in the future. Q-day takes as its point of departure the fact that new and exciting things tend to start, not in the centre, but in the periphery, in the points of intersection between different ways of thinking, different backgrounds different types of knowledge, cultures and ideas.

Being a musician and composer myself, now working as a communications officer within corporate identity and new media at the European Spallation Source (ESS) in Lund, I took this opportunity to promote the future ESS materials science center and our recently launched neutron music project. Enjoy this video and prepare for some wild connections, moving from the world of music over to the pictoral arts, ending in the domain of accelerators and particle physics!

Welcome to this cozy little place of fuzzy logic and other things that might provoke the world of civil engineers and scientists where I now have so many wonderful friends and colleagues. What is Neutronica? Could it be the noise between the neutrons, the acoustic music of microcosmos (yes, Bela Bartok..), “new electronica” or just playing with arts and science in various ways? Neutronica will among other things generate a soundtrack for ESS that the audience will be able to hear at the premiere of our planned Neutron Music Festival under the direction of the famous trumpet player Håkan Hardenberger.

You should contribute! There is a whole world of creative musicians, composers and artists among the researchers and scientists that will benefit from the ESS. Coming from the school of arts, I also know a lot of artists who dig nature science and other existential triggers that seeks the answer to our lives. You are all welcome to contribute with material to this blog and to develop the concept and artform of Neutronica.

Personally, what attracts me to the arts is what attracts me to science: Innovation, the imaginative play and curiosity to find new dimensions, solutions to problems, or just having fun. I believe art and fuzzy logic is the birth of science.

In other words, the aim of Neutronica and this blog is to explore and express the meaning of life!

Let’s begin..