Accelerating Human Imagination

Thursday 24^th November 2016 & Friday 25^th November 2016

Venue: The University of Liverpool in London, 33 Finsbury Square, London, EC2A 1AG

A workshop entitled "Accelerating Human Imagination" was held 24-25 November at the University of Liverpool in London campus. Supported by HSS and the Department of Psychological Sciences, it was convened by Paul Watry, Maureen Watry and Simeon Yates in collaboration with Sheldon Brown, Director of the Arthur C Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UCSD.

The day and a half event attracted 42 participants from a variety of institutions and organisations. The workshop explored the concept of imagination as a way to connect the arts, humanities, and sciences.

Presentations from Liverpool included: Richard Koeck (on the relationship between urban space, architecture, and the moving image); Tuba Kocaturk (on the role of design in shaping our futures); Will Slocombe (Speculative Fiction: on artificial intelligence reading and writing); Alexis Makin (Perception and the imagination); and Zoe Alker (on innovative research techniques to visualize and explore crime and punishment across the nineteenth century).

External participants included Google; The Royal Shakespeare Company; the National Theatre; FACT; the British Library; the British Museum; the Wellcome Trust; Goldsmiths; along with independent artists and scholars. The keynote was given by Sheldon Brown.

This is the first step towards building a collaborative relationship with the Arthur C Clarke Center for Human Imagination to examine future forms of culture based on the themes of speculation and the human imagination.