whisper

Whisper is an interactive game requiring instinctive responses. It takes the form of five computers encircling a pool of honey. Each computer invites the viewer to play an interactive game, asking questions about individuality. The digital responses of each participant are combined and projected into the honey pool, creating a unique image of Whisper and what it is that makes us human.

Incoming information of every kind – sight, sound, touch, smell, taste – is transformed into electrical signals and integrated in the brain to weave an electronic loom of sensation. Most of these patterns flicker and vanish: a few are fixed in chemical form and somehow become memories, behaviour patterns, emotional states – the very stuff that makes us human.

Collaborators: AMX, Malcolm Garrett, Ross Phillips, Martyn Ware/Glenn Gregory www.illustriouscompany.co.uk, Sonia Baka/Liam Dunn, James Wellburn/Matthias Kispert, Mark Miodownik, King’s College London

Supporters: Pfizer and an Arts & Business New Partners Award supported by the National Lottery and the Department of Culture Media and Sport.

Collaborators: Rachel Hazell www.hazelldesignsbooks.co.uk and Lucie Schofield, Kingston University, Chelsea College of Art & Design, Jackie Wills.

Supporters: Lever Faberge's, Project Catalyst.

Seven textile figures ‘The Death Dresses’ suspended from scaffolds tell an unmorbid and elegant story of mortality. The dresses further explore whether the race from death fans the creative drive. Each element tells a different story of death and its implication on creativity.

The ticking of the telomere clock inside each cell leads to aging and death. There are two kinds of cell 'death' - the programmed and the accidental. Programmed cell death has a special appearance in cells. It sculpts our bodies and makes us mortal. This process can be suspended, as happens in cancer cells, so the bringer of death may also be the bringer of immortality.

Collaborators: Helen Bailey Studio, Heriot Watt University Textiles department, Trish Belford, CERN Institute, Chelsea College of Art & Design, Michael Sanders, metal work.

This figure poses questions on female sexuality and how it might inform the creative process. Visitors touch a prone evocative female sculptural figure, their reactions subsequently recorded and analysed. Pheromones released into the environment of this figure may impact on the visitor reactions.

Sexuality is a mixture of emotions and chemical signals. The hormone estradiol influences desire in women, though it may do so more by 'controlling' male responses to female sexuality than by affecting the woman directly. She influences the male to mate at the time most suitable for her. But humans are not puppets of their hormones as many animals are, and desire is influenced by feelings and context, sight and sound - where does one stop and another start?

Collaborators: Chelsea College of Art & Design Textile department, Asylum Models, Sarah Taylor, Fibre Optics, York University Electronics Department, Annejkh Carson.

A large scale public experiment is conducted in a minimal gallery laboratory where underlit troughs of liquid display each individual experiment. The experiment conducted is called the BZ reaction – for which the results remain tantalizingly unexplained.

As an exhibit, the BZ reaction was inspired by a real science experiment discovered in 1958 by a Russian chemist, B.P.Belousov and further developed by A.M Zhabotinsky. In simplistic terms the outcome of the mixing citric and sulphuric acid, potassium bromate and cerium salt cannot be predicted, and further does not follow the 2nd law of Thermodynamics. The mechanism of the reaction is randomly operated and defies explanation. The importance of the existence of such phenomena within Mental is their ability to dissolve boundaries between art and science. Scientists cannot explain everything, and in the BZ exhibit the artist is similarly rendered useless.