The Art of Magnetism

The Art of Magnetism was aiming at bringing the exciting and cutting-edge research on dipolar soft matter, carried out in the framework of FWF START Project “Bridging Scales in Dipolar Soft Matter”, to a wider audience. The Art of Magnetism took the advantage of Vienna’s cultural and artistic traditions to make the soft matter research more interesting and accessible through exhibitions, workshops and public lectures organized in collaboration with artists.
Events organized with in the project can be divided in three groups: public lectures/workshops for children and youth; exhibitions and educational events for adults. The first group of events was organized to develop curiosity in children of different age/gender/nationality/background about magnetic materials and scientific approaches.
For this, the collaboration of artists helped us to make the vents picturesque and eye-catching. Besides that, the presence of artists – non-specialists in computational physics –facilitated the dialogue between pupils and scientists. Participation in various exhibitions allowed the project to reach a different level of visibility. With the help of artists, ferrofluid samples were converted to interactive artworks. Thus, the visitors could come and learn about magnetic soft materials through simple touch. This way, Academia made a step forward to be understood and accepted as an important part of the modern society by people with non-scientific background. Additionally, we aimed at showing that science is cosmopolitan and gender- independent, as the group involved was very international and contained a lot of female scientists and even their children. The third group of the events had a different emphasis, it was to explain the importance of computational physics and the part of soft matter research in the everyday life, medicine, pharmacology and food production. For that, the collaboration with artists again served to impressively improve the communication means.
The events for youth and children were FIT – Frauen in die Technik on the 30.01.2017 (female students from the age of 15); UniClub plus workshop on the 16.12.2016 (young refugees 12-19 years old); public lecture at Schopenhauer Realgymnasium in the 18th district of Vienna on the 28.11.2016 (school children of an average age of 16). The exhibitions were The International Science Centre and Science Museum Day (ISCSMD) on the 10.11.2016 and at Ecsite annual conference evening event – the “Nocturne” at the Joanneum Quarter inside the Natural History Museum of Graz 10.06.2016. Finally, the third group of events was composed by an event “Science4People” at Monk in Rome on the 04.09.2016 and by the lecture on the 24.02.2017 within the Plus Lucis Fortbildungswoche 2017 | Excursion for teachers in Physics and Chemistry.