Sometime in early 2003 I wrote to my friend, Janna Levin, and asked her if she might have any idea how I might become artist in residence in an Astrophysics department. Janna is an Astrophysicist so she seemed like a good person to ask. She was very positive and said she'd see what she could think of.
A bit of time passed by and then one day she got in touch and said that a colleague of hers in Oxford, Pedro Ferreira, was interested.
So I went to visit Pedro and that's how it all started. We talked about the details of the residency, met a few times and agreed that I should start at the beginning of the 2003 - 2004 academic year and work until the end of the 2005 academic year. At that point the idea is to have some kind of public exhibition. The department very generously offered me space, use of a computer, and welcomed me into their midst but couldn't fund me directly so I made a couple of grant applications of which one to ACE and one to the Gulbenkian Foundation have been accepted. With theirs and the departments support I started on the 8th October, the first day of term.
Posted by Jem Finer at October 1, 2003 10:56 PM