Poetical Science Event: Activating Poetical Science: Mysticism, Tech & Future Poesis
This event functions as a micro-residency and the opening activation of a curatorial research project grounded in Ada Lovelace’s integrated approach – a “Poetical Science”. Ada Lovelace, daughter of poet Lord Byron and mathematician Annabella Byron, was a visionary thinker who combined mathematical training with imagination. Lovelace saw mathematics as “the language of unseen relations,” and her writings outline what she called her “Scientific Trinity” of discovery: Concentration, Reason, and Intuition. For Lovelace, these capacities were inseparable, weaving the poetic, the metaphysical, and the scientific into one.
In the session, together we will explore alternative modes of knowing, making, and imagining beyond techno rational paradigms. This event draws on Livvy Penrose Punnett’s research into Lovelace’s idea of “Poetical Science” - a term used to describe an integrated mode of thinking were imagination and analysis work together. The workshop will feature an introduction from the co-curators Livvy Penrose Punnett (M4C & AHRC Researcher at Nottingham Trent University in collaboration with Nottingham Contemporary) and Katie Simpson (Senior Curator, Nottingham Contemporary) as well as guided sessions from the invited speakers: Dr Isobel Elstob, Clémentine Bedos, Emii Alrai and Emma Cocker (chair).
Liv Penrose Punnett is an independent curator, consultant, and M4C & AHRC Researcher at NTU & Nottingham Contemporary. Drawn to alternative ways of knowing, Liv uses contemporary art to unpick, question, and re-imagine, and has curated numerous Arts Council supported exhibitions and events, working with artists such as Susan Hiller, Dorothy Cross, Feral Practice, and Tai Shani. Liv is a member of the Artists Information Company's Artists Council, The British Art Network, and is a Fine Art lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University. Previously, as founding Director at Haarlem Artspace, a rural contemporary studio and gallery in Derbyshire, Liv led experimental cultural programmes focused on spiritual ecology and intersectional environmentalism.
Clients & employers include The National Trust, Artes Mundi, Wales, New Art Exchange, Nottingham, and Arusha Gallery, London. Liv holds an Arts and Humanities Research Council Award, the SIA Gallery Award and the Jonathan Ruffer Curatorial Award, and her publications are held in The Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, The Ruskin Archive, and the Tate Library and Archive.
Isobel Elstob is Assistant Professor in Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Nottingham. Her research explores how contemporary artists engage with marginalised, obscure or traumatic historical narratives. Her monograph Reimag(in)ing the Victorians in Contemporary Art: Britain and Beyond (2023), which was also converted into an exhibition (2023-4), examines how artists revive Victorian visual technologies, such as magic lanterns, deploy taxidermy as a contemporary medium, and re-present overlooked histories and colonial narratives centred on Nigerian and Caribbean histories. More recently, Isobel’s work has been focused on the visual cultures of British natural history in the late-18th century and the central role played by illustration, taxidermy and display in knowledge-making in this period. Isobel sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Historical Fiction and the advisory board for Languages, Texts, and Society. She has contributed to panel discussions and given keynote lectures and conference presentations nationally and internationally, and directed art engagement events for galleries and museums. Her publications include contributions to the essay collection, Traces and Memories of Slavery in the Atlantic World (2019), and articles in Visual Studies, the Journal of Victorian Culture and the Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies.
Emma Cocker is a writer-artist whose research involves diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and poetic-performative approaches to working with and through language. Cocker’s writing has been published in Failure, 2010; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; Live Coding: A User’s Manual, 2022, and in the solo collections, The Yes of the No, 2016, and How Do You Do?, 2026. Cocker often works in collaboration with other artists on durational projects, where the studio-gallery or site-specific context is approached as a live laboratory for shared artistic research. She is co-founder of the Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research, and Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University, UK.
Clémentine Bedos is a transdisciplinary artist exploring the relationship between mind, body, and consciousness within hegemonic systems of identity. Their lived experience at the crossroads of cultures, races, and sexualities informs their nondual thinking and holistic approach. Through collaborative experimentation and embodied research, they create immersive experiences that disrupt the colonial and ableist logics of emerging technologies, reclaiming the body as a site of knowledge, historical healing, and emancipation.
Emii Alrai is an artist whose work spans material investigation in relation to memory, critique of the western museological structure and the complexity of ruins. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her work operates as large-scale realms built in relation to bodies of research which concern archaeology and the natural environments objects are excavated from. Her practice weaves in oral histories, inherited nostalgia and the details of language to question the rigidity of Empire and the power of hierarchy to interpolate the static presence of history. The installations physically weave together hand built clay vessels which are patinated to look like ancient artefacts, steel braces and polystyrene hewn into amorphous landscapes.
Mimicry and theatricality are at the heart of the work, with forms covered in gypsum, sand, tar and various pigments to create monumental environments that replicate the ideas of a romanticised past and the histories of archaeological excavation. In this material exploration in relation to bodies of research, Alrai’s practice allows for conversations around memory, nostalgia and language to surface critiquing current structures of rigidity and how these may stem from the lasting shadow of imperialism. Beyond merely critiquing or reproducing these structures, the work’s bending of time and space imagines ways in which to go forward in our understanding of history, its retelling and its romanticism and opens dialogue with the ways we engage history in our construction of the future.
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Access
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This event will be held in The Space.
Speakers will use microphones.
This event is wheelchair accessible.
If you have any questions around access or have specific access requirements we can accommodate, please get in touch with us by emailing info@nottinghamcontemporary.org or phoning 0115 948 9750.