Gallery’s CEO will attend the 2014 Conference PSCT, discussing the relationship between art and science and public engagement with issues of S&T

By Maísa Oliveira and Graziele Scalfi

Imagine how many failed attempts the brazilian Santos Dumont made until the plane 14-bis lifted flight for the first time in 1906. Imagine the resistance and criticism with which the bacteriologist Oswaldo Cruz had to deal as a major responsible for the health reform tha controlled the bubonic plague and the yellow fever in the city of Rio de Janeiro in the early twentieth century. Imagine the mistakes made by Pelé to shine on the lawns and achieve worldwide recognition as king of football. In engineering, as well as in the health sciences, sports and many other areas of human activity, failures and criticisms are part of the learning process and this is the kind of reflection that the exposure Fail Better (https://dublin.sciencegallery .com / failbetter), opened in Dublin (Ireland), since February of this year, invites the public to do.

Besides inventions, personal objects and texts about engineers, athletes, writers, teachers who made history from their “beautiful, heroic and instructive” failures, are scattered by the sentences in the Gallery, such as “When was the last time you failed?” and “Doesn’t matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”. The idea is to encourage visitors to share their own failures and, at the same time, to invite them to think of the failure from a new perspective, not as the opposite of success, but as a natural part of the creative process. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahlwxgGSKug).

The exhibition takes place in Science Gallery (https://dublin.sciencegallery.com/), of Trinity College Dublin. Founded by a group of researchers in February 2008, the Gallery is characterized by being an emerging kind of cultural space, where science dialogues with art in an environment of interaction. Like the Fail Better view that addresses the flaws, the Science Gallery comes to broad themes, such as “light” and “fear”. With this purpose, it counts with the collaboration of scientists, designers and artists in interdisciplinary planning of exhibitions that seek to provoke public debate on these issues.

During the 13th PCST Conference, participants will have the opportunity to hear Michael Gorman, CEO of Science Gallery International and Associate Professor of Creative Technologies at Trinity College Dublin, on May 8, at 16:15 in the plenary “Science in Culture”. Gorman has international experience in public engagement in science and technology. He created and developed exhibitions and events in the United States, Europe and Ireland. He is the author of several books, including Buckminster Fuller: Designing for mobility (Skira, 2005).