This October IF Oxford, the science and ideas Festival celebrates its 35th year. A fortnight of activities filling museums and theatres, Rose Hill community centre, a goldsmith’s in Summertown, a church on Bonn Square, a bar on the Cowley Road, and the fusion campus at Culham. The programme is built by hundreds of people, representing academic research groups, local businesses, and cultural communities and charities across Oxford and beyond.
That genuine collaboration, made possible by a small independent charity with no institutional parent, allows a physicist to share a room with improvising musicians, or a chemistry workshop to begin in an art gallery. The Festival cannot happen without the sponsors, contributors and volunteers – or, most importantly, the people who turn up, take part and make it theirs.
Ruskin, weather and the record of the sky
In February 1884, John Ruskin stood in front of an audience at the forefront of technological change and described a new kind of cloud he had been watching for years: a plague-wind, sun-blighting, which he blamed on the furnaces of industrial England. Then, it seemed eccentric. Presented now, it is climate reporting. Storm-Cloud: Observations of the Sky restages that lecture at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History on Saturday 24 October. Developed by Dr Tom Payne at Sheffield Hallam University with a team of artists and scientists, it combines live spoken text, digital projection and a weather soundscape built for the piece. The museum stays open afterwards, with a bar, and the collections there to wander. Earlier the same afternoon, the Ashmolean opens its Western Art Print Room for Ruskin’s Skies, where visitors can see his own watercolour studies of cloud and light, some annotated in his hand with observations on pollution. The thread continues at the John Radcliffe, where Anna Dumitriu’s BioArt: Infusoria occupies the hospital’s Artlink Corridor Gallery for the whole Festival period. Made in the lab as much as the studio, the work explores antimicrobial resistance, water systems and the microbiome. It is free, drop-in, and open around the clock. “Ruskin was looking at the sky and keeping a record,” says Dane Comerford, Festival Director of IF Oxford. “That is what scientists do, and it is what artists do. It’s remarkable that they’re often kept in separate buildings. During the Festival everyone is invited to get together.”
From ore to colour
Here, a workshop starts with a lump of rock and ends in a stained-glass window. Grind malachite with a pestle and mortar, test what comes out then set up a chemical reaction to collect copper metal while oxygen fizzes off. Then grow a silver mirror in about a minute. Compare this with samples of coloured glass and understand colour as metal ions absorbing some wavelengths and letting the rest of the light through. Metals and Colour from the Earth runs at Rose Hill Community Centre on Tuesday 20 October with the Oxford Polish Association, and The Chemistry of Colour at Modern Art Oxford on Thursday 22 October, both supported by the Royal Society of Chemistry. A third version appears inside Zone ONE on 29 October. The Polish connection is deliberate. Wrocław, Oxford’s Twin City, is home to an Academy of Fine Arts whose glass studios are world-renowned, and you can meet their Head of Glass Conservation and Restoration, alongside local stained-glass artist, Phillip Dove, recognisable from many doors and windows in homes across Oxford and beyond. And the 35 on the cover of this year’s programme? Thirty-five hand-made coloured enamel discs, made by Lucia Goldsmiths in Summertown. There, you can make your own at their enamelling workshops on Mondays 19 and 26 October, taking home a pendant or a keyring. Becca Rowland opens her home studio at Harcourt Hill on 31 October and 1 November to see how fused glass artworks are made, from kiln to finished piece.
Families, zones and half term
Is a crow cleverer than a chimpanzee? Wrong question, as you’ll find out during Amazing Animals at The North Wall on Tuesday 27 October. Nate Rae of Braintastic! Science takes apart the idea of a league table of intelligence, looks at how researchers actually test animal minds and arrives somewhere more interesting: there are many kinds of intelligence, brains differ, and the things that make a brain feel wrong for school are often the things that make it good at something else. There’s opportunity to drop-into a hands-on workshop before and after either of the two shows, with animal-research-inspired challenges to try.
The Festival’s interactive zones are the answer to the biggest half term question: what to do?! Like most of the Festival, its Zones use Pay What You Decide (PWYD) with a free option for those who need it. All Zones are packed with researchers and makers and last a whole day; you are asked to book your arrival hour.
EXPLORAZONE lands at New Road Church on Bonn Square on Saturday 17 October, opening with a quiet first hour for neurodiverse families. TECHWORKS takes over ARC Oxford in Cowley on Sunday 25 October, with robot dogs racing for a chequered flag, and a visit from Grenoble, Oxford’s French Twin City, with A Journey of Aromas Through Time, on the chemistry of vanilla, bergamot and violet and the memories they pull with them. BLAST is at The Barn in Blackbird Leys on Tuesday 27 October with fusion, quantum computing and deep-space imagery, and then there’s the showstopper, Zone ONE, at Oxford North on Thursday 29 October. At Pegasus Theatre on Sunday 18 October, The Magical Mr West and his corvid companion Crowbert present The Brain Bending Science Illusion Show, an hour of optical illusions, cognitive conundrums and surreal psychology. The Japanese optical illusion uchiwa fans are back at Pegasus too, free to try whenever the doors are open through October.
Fusion, and the business of big science
On 17 October, Photographing Big Science takes twelve or more camera-carrying visitors into the UKAEA campus at Culham with the fusion photography team, to photograph facilities so large they are difficult to photograph – and which are rarely open for the public. On 24 October, the UKAEA Open Day offers tours of JET, the record-breaking fusion experiment, and the RACE robotics facility. Both are free with a ticket. Fusion turns up elsewhere too: The Future is Fusion inside BLAST, where you can meet the people building stars on Earth, and you can find the team at other Zones too.
Living with AI
The most argumentative evening of the Festival is a double bill at The Bullingdon on Monday 26 October. At 7pm, Rosie Wilby records an episode of The Breakup Monologues, the podcast that earned her the title queen of breakups on Radio 4. Her guest is Dr Agnieszka Piotrowska, author of AI Intimacy and Psychoanalysis, and the subject is love and heartbreak in the age of ChatGPT, Claude and others. Then, at 8.45pm the room squares up to influence. Weapons of Mass Persuasion sets propaganda posters of the 1910s to 1940s against the messaging of the 2010s and 2020s, with Dr Nina Kruglikova and Gretel Kahn picking apart the linguistic machinery common to both.
And there’s more: Ghost in the Machine screens at the Ultimate Picture Palace on Tuesday 20 October, an investigative documentary on the buried history of artificial intelligence and its entanglement with racism, eugenics and power, with director Valerie Veatch present for a Q&A afterwards. Then on Saturday 17 October, The Dawn of AI imagines where all of this began with a novel event in Oxford Westgate library, next to Explorazone on the same day.
On Earth, as it is in the heavens, and a fantastical ending
Thursday 29 October belongs to Fallaize Park, the two-acre public park at Oxford North where Olafur Eliasson’s Your planetary assembly, casting reflections, colours and shadows in daylight, stands lit from within from dusk. Zone ONE fills the space with hands-on science and technology, and Creation Theatre’s Orbit walks visitors through the solar system. In the middle of it, at 4.30pm, something genuinely unusual. Dark matter makes up most of the universe, and nobody has seen any: we know it only by the way galaxies behave as though it is there. Dancing Dark Matter puts Dr Kimberly Palladino, one of the physicists hunting it on the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment, in a room with an orchestration from Oxford Improvisers and movement facilitator Sophie Stanley. Musicians build a cosmic hum, the science threads through it, and the audience is invited to get up and move to the invisible forces. Dane Comerford commented: “Equal parts science, Peter and the Wolf 90 years on, and dark matter disco, this event is supported by a charitable trust willing to take a risk, so people can experience the chaos, entanglement and joy of physics through minds, bodies and others in a shared safe space. I’m looking forward to seeing how this plucky musical experiment plays out in this year’s Festival.”
Two days later the Festival ends as it should on Halloween, for a curious and creative community. Modelling the Undead: Zombies and Health at Grassroots on Saturday 31 October hands the audience a live zombie pandemic and the roles of the people who have to manage it: the government, the military, the health service and political decision makers. The decisions are yours, the epidemiology underneath is real, and the drinks reception afterwards closes the 35th Festival.
For more on these and the many other IF Oxford events, visit if-oxford.com
