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Dear friends and colleagues,
With the Government more gridlocked than Euston Road at rush hour, we’ve had to wait patiently for the release of a BEIS-sponsored Science and Innovation Audit into the Knowledge Quarter. We're pleased to say it arrived earlier this month and exonerated the KQ of all collusion with leaden ideas and slow innovation. Quite the opposite, in fact. The audit reveals the Knowledge Quarter to be one of the most dynamic and innovative areas found anywhere in the world. Taking into account the key strengths, as well as existing and potential gaps, the report also looks to the future, outlining an ambitious 'KQ 2050' plan for the area to ensure it remains competitive and inclusive. Find out
more below.
Also below: No, its not an illusion, we have no private views scheduled in April, but in May you can join us on a special tour through Smoke and Mirrors: The Psychology of Magic at the Wellcome Collection.
There will also be plenty of magic on display at the Central Saint Martins final year degree show. CSM are giving Knowledge Quarter partners and friends an exclusive guided tour around the exhibition. This is the only newsletter out before these May events, so please scroll down and sign up.
More events and opportunities below, as well as our Exhibition of the Month, in which we wax lyrical about the wonderful Craft & Graft currently on at the Francis Crick Institute.
Many thanks for your continued support and interest. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @KQ_London and Facebook for the latest news and announcements, and tune into our instagram, which our amazing partners curate each week.
With best wishes,
Knowledge Quarter Team
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News
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COMMUNITY CHAMPIONS 2.0
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Photograph © Opah Cruz
Did you attend a Community Champions event? We'd love to hear from you.
We've made a super short survey for you to complete. Your answers and opinions will greatly help with our programming for Community Champions series 2. What do you think went well? What do you think we can do better? What do you think we should do next? Let us know:
Take Our Short, Anonymous Survey
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KQ Private Views
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Smoke and Mirrors: The Psychology of Magic
22 May at Wellcome Collection, 8:30-10:00
Knowledge Quarter staff and friends are welcome to join our private breakfast view of Smoke and Mirrors: The Psychology of Magic at the Wellcome Collection – a fascinating look into the complex relationship between our senses and biases, and why we may ignore logic in favour of belief in the supernatural.
See it to believe it!
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Events
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Symposium: Alternative Futures - Creativity and the Circular Economy
Friday 12 April, 9:00-17:30, Central Saint Martins
A day of inspirational talks and workshops led by artists and activists will explore the move away from the straight lines of the linear economy – the line that goes from make, waste, dispose – to lines and shapes that make for sustainable living and making.
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Lunchtime Dialogue with Lord David Neuberger
Wednesday 17 April, 13:00-15:00, Bloomsbury Institute
Join The Bloomsbury Institute for a discussion on all things legal with Lord David Neuberger, erstwhile head of the Supreme Court.
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Exhibition of the Month
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Craft & Graft: Making Science Happen
The Francis Crick Institute
A celebration of patience, scientific minutiae and drosophila can be found in the vestibule of Europe’s largest bio-medical research facility, but dross it most certainly is not. Words like wonderful, marvellous, inspiring, are not capacious enough to capture just how significant this exhibition feels.
Video installations and technical and personal exhibits have helped raise the curtain on the orchestra behind the cacophony of biomedical research reverberating around the building. The exhibition, dissected into technical disciplines, features an ensemble cast of finely-tuned individuals working at tempo and in intricate rhythms. The players are: the glass-washers – percussionists; the engineers – brass; cell services and microscopy – woodwind and strings, whose instrument to manipulate ultra thin samples under the microscope is an eyelash glued to the end of a cocktail stick; and the fruit fly teams who form the choir, in full song during a ‘bunging party’ in which the whole team race to get the stoppers on jars containing 1.5 million stunned fruit flies before they come back to life.
Your heart rate increases observing these fine margins of science in which a minor cock-up, a lapse in concentration, an hypnotic state induced by the repetitive nature of the work, can cause large-scale disruption, even ruin, to months of critical science. Consider Alan Ling, a mechanical engineer, who on his lunch breaks in his workshop creates ever smaller origami swans (these are also on display - the kind of marvel of intricacy you’d find in an eighteenth century wunderkammer) in order, as he says, just to keep his eye sharp.
In introducing this cast of unsung heroes to the world, the Crick is celebrating the fact that you certainly don’t have to be a scientist to play a part in life-changing scientific research. Fittingly, Sir Paul Nurse appearing in a video re-cap signs off the exhibition. His own labcoats-to-riches story began at 17 when he left school to become a glass washer and over many years worked his way up to Director of the Francis Crick Institute. He, more than anyone, knows the value of the technician.
Listen to Adam Rutherford on BBC Inside Science talking about the exhibition.
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Until 30 November 2019
Wed, 10:00-20:00
Thurs-Sat, 10:00-16:00
Sun-Tues, Gallery Closed
The Francis Crick Institute, 1 Midland Rd, London NW1 1ST
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