Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

This creative-critical work draws on the archives of the Pioneer Health Centre, also known as the Peckham Experiment, held at the Wellcome Library. The Centre was established between the wars both to provide the conditions for, and to investigate, health rather than illness. The ways in which personal and group forms of vitality were conceptualized, valorized and put to work allowed poet and writer James Wilkes to think through the link between individual and societal relationships to leisure, work and health. However, the archive also holds many other strands of thinking – esoteric, biological, quasi-anarchist – and the choice of fiction as a form of writing provides a way of holding these dispersive, messy ingredients together – a way of working restlessly with restless materials.

For Hubbub, the anthropologist Josh Berson designed a field study with the aim of integrating physiological, phenomenological and environmental measures with place and time, and of giving study participants a chance to reflect on the experience of monitoring their movements. Here, Josh outlines how treating rest as a phenomenon with a spectral envelope emerged as a natural way to emphasize the non-linear interaction of all these factors.

Questions of mental health and urban life have long been central to Des Fitzgerald’s research, and his work with Hubbub has led him to further explore some of the literatures and histories that undergird that relationship, and to think more expansively about the sociology of this emergent space. Critically, engagement with Hubbub has enabled contact with a range of creative practitioners (technoscientific and artistic) interested in very similar kinds of questions. This chapter outlines the development of Des’s consideration of the empirics of urban ill-health.

This chapter explores interpretations and distortions of the visual world that occur through drawing and mind wandering. Tamarin’s writing is informed by scientific literature on doodling, fidgeting, concentration and mind wandering considered in the course of her Hubbub research, and draws on chance encounters shared with collaborators in The Hub. These interactions have helped shape the imaginative approach Tamarin takes to her writing, foregrounding the possibility of movement as an impetus for generating new thought.

This essay is the product of thinking, researching and singing lullabies. As a practitioner-researcher in Hubbub, Holly Pester led a series of workshops that experimentally and collaboratively explored lullabies through conversation and improvised song. This led to an expanded project where Holly invited artists and musicians to collaborate on a collection of new lullabies, created through friendship and improvistion. The thoughts and provocations within this chapter represent the politics and ideas that have motivated this project.

Giulia Poerio’s public engagement work with Hubbub has featured her psychological research on . Giulia’s collaborative studies aim to examine the self-reported and physiological correlates of ASMR experience.

The writer Emma Bennett first heard ‘ASMR’ (autonomous sensory meridian response) mentioned during interdisciplinary conversations about lullabies and the politics of work and rest while at Hubbub. After Googling the practice, Emma began watching Olivia’s Kissper ASMR to aid sleep and to indulge a long-held susceptibility to ‘tingles’. Here, Emma asks: Could this spectatorial practice aimed at attaining a dreamy, sleepy passivity be reframed as an active research practice? And, might this counterintuitive move raise productive theoretical questions about activity and passivity, questions that open on to the ethics of rest and its opposites?

Antonia Barnett-McIntosh’s compositional concerns lie in the specificity of sound gestures and their variation, translation and adaptation, often employing chance-based and procedural operations. In this chapter, Antonia describes how her research with Hubbub investigated musical rest and its opposites, silence and noise, and rest and exhaustion, and outlines the compositional processes at work in the development of two pieces composed during her residency: for solo alto flute (world premiere by Ilze Ikse at the Hubbub Late Spectacular at Wellcome Collection, 4 September 2015), and for string quartet (world premiere by Aurora Orchestra at BBC Radio 3’s ‘Why Music?’ at Wellcome Collection, 26 September 2015).

This chapter describes Christian Nold’s research with Hubbub, which started with working around Heathrow Airport in London and encountering the way local people are affected by the noise there. To understand the controversies concerning the impact of aircraft noise at Heathrow, it is necessary to understand the way technical metrics can systematically exclude the experience of local people. Christian seeks to address this exclusionary combination of technology and politics by building a new noise-monitoring network for Heathrow that engages equally with the social and technical aspects of noise and sees them as fundamentally intertwined.

In this chapter, Felicity Callard, Des Fitzgerald and Kimberley Staines invite the reader to join an experiment they designed specially for The Hub at Wellcome Collection and ran there for a number of months. ‘In the Diary Room’ provides a space and setting for collaborators to reflect on how they think and feel about interdisciplinary collaboration. The reader is encouraged to join an experiment that gathers together an archive tracking the rhythms, energies, detritus and restlessness of interdisciplinary labour.