The Art of Innovation

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The Art of Innovation: Celebrating Speed

Celebrating Speed

BBC Radio 4 - The Art of Innovation, Celebrating Speed

Ian Blatchford and Tilly Blyth on the Futurists' lust for speed in a new age of cycling.

Sir Ian Blatchford and Dr Tilly Blyth focus on the Futurists art movement's obsession with new dynamos of modernity and its glorification of speed and risk in a new age of cycling

Sir Ian Blatchford and Dr Tilly Blyth continue their series exploring how art and science have inspired each other. They focus on responses to a new love of personalised transport and the thrilling exhilaration of speed brought about by the humble bicycle.

As Tilly reveals, the exquisite yet simple design of John Kemp Starley’s Rover Safety Bicycle ushered in the 1890s Golden Age of Bicycles – an affordable means of social mobility for all. For a new movement of Avant Garde artists – the Futurists – the energy and velocity of the humble bicycle came to symbolise Italy’s rapidly changing industrial, emotional and moral landscape.

Ian visits London's Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art to examine Umberto Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Cyclist, in which man and machine appear almost as one. The bicycle became star propaganda for the Futurists, whose manifesto set out to challenge traditional society and instil a new disruptive order amidst a future based on technological advance, new freedoms and the ever accelerating pace of modern life.

Producer Adrian Washbourne

Produced in partnership with The Science Museum Group

Photograph (C) Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London

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Factual: Science & Nature: Science & Technology

How art and science have inspired each other.

Sir Ian Blatchford and Dr Tilly Blyth explore how art and science have inspired each other.

In this landmark series, art historian and Director of the Science Museum Ian Blatchford and technology historian and Head of Collections of the Science Museum Tilly Blyth explore the art of invention and the invention of art and reveal the symbiotic relationship between the two. Many feel science takes the magic out of creativity. These programmes show how scientific advance facilitates creativity. And further, how artistic and scientific endeavour are inspired by the same desires and, often, are the result of intimate conversations between good friends. Galileo's painter friend Ludovicio Cigoli paints a maculate moon on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel and what does Galileo see when he looks through his telescope? A maculate moon. The poet Samuel Coleridge and the chemist Humphrey Davy were very close friends. Scientific innovators are creative thinkers. And the creation of art is dependent on technological development, as well as an aesthetic sense. Throughout history, artists and scientists have both desired to make sense of the world around them and change it, 

Produced in partnership with The Science Museum Group. 

Image credit: Science Museum Group Collection © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum.

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