As part of Imperial College London's poet-in-residence public engagement project, poet Dan Simpson has collaborated with Tom Hodson, a PhD student in physics. Using Tom's research into collective behaviour and unconventional states of matter as inspiration, Dan and Tom collaborated to create poetry on the themes of chaos, order and heat. They chose to give the pieces a digital format with changing visual elements to reinforce the science behind each text. Produced with creative computing student Sophie Nadel, these are the resulting poetry experiments.
Dan Simpson is a writer, performer, producer, and educator - and poet-in-residence at Imperial College London. A former Canterbury Laureate, Dan has been poet-in-residence at Glastonbury Festival, Waterloo Station, National Trust Stowe, and St Albans Cathedral. His two collections of poetry are Applied Mathematics and Totally Cultured (Burning Eye Books). Dan has performed around the world including Chicago's Uptown Poetry Slam, Sofar Sounds Auckland, Edinburgh Fringe, and on the BBC. Dan creates pioneering work using crowdsourced and roaming poetry for organisations such as the Royal Academy of Arts, National Museum of Scotland, Southbank Centre, and the European Commission. Often working in scientific contexts, Dan has appeared at popular science events and festivals - and is half of Dr. Illingworth and Mr. Simpson, devising interdisciplinary science communication events and projects
Tom is a PhD student at Imperial College London looking at how electrons behave within disordered crystal lattices. He spends his work days writing code, doing mathematics and occasionally colaborating on crazy projects like this one. His studies have brought him from his hometown near Birmingham, through Cambridge, physics travels to CERN, Geneva and Samarkand, Uzbekistan to London where he's currently based... and occasionaly Munich. In his spare time, he likes to build things, bake bread and dabbles in keeping bees.
Sophie Nadel is a student at Camberwell College of Arts (UAL) studying Graphic Design with Creative Computing. She works at the intersection between education and design aiming to bring cohesion and accessibility to academic work.