Following Josef Pleskot's reflection on city highways as scars or hardened arteries of the urban organism, the collaborative exhibition project Highway-Mindway challenges us to think differently about public spaces: how the highway as an architectural paradigm invites us to find new ways of understanding cities and communication alike.

As urban motorway, that literally and figuratively divides the city, while inviting new connectivities, the highway can become a pedestrian zone with views of landmarks, a space for cultural and leisure activities.

As a mindway - shared by students from the Graduate Diploma in Art and Design at the Royal College of Art in London and from Photography 2 studio at Prague's Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design - it brings together approaches to thinking about how we connect in cities and through digital highways in the Vitrínka Gallery of the Czech Centre in London and in form of a public installation in front of the Czech Embassy next door.

Drawing from their diverse backgrounds, the student exchange brings experiences from their respective international hometowns together with visual interactions and different modes of communication, initially online and later in person. Explored through technology-driven metaphorical approaches, the exhibition consists of photographs, drawings, objects and moving image - explored through installations, projections, fragrances and sound.

Project led by: Wiebke Leister, Gary Clough (RCA); Alena Kotzmannová, Tomáš Souček, Alex Bykov (UMPRUM) and curator Michal Nanoru.

Sir Christopher Wren was one of the most remarkable Gresham Professors of Astronomy. Though best known today as the architectural mastermind behind the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire, Wren’s appointment to the Gresham chair in 1657 stemmed from his enthusiasm for turning his gaze well above London’s skyline and focussing his attention on the heavens above.

This lecture will consider Wren’s contributions to astronomy and how Wren’s appreciation of and contributions to art and design, and science and engineering, were fully integrated in his life and made him a polymath on a par with Leonardo da Vinci.

Professor Katherine Blundell OBE
Professor of Astronomy
Katherine was appointed Gresham Professor of Astronomy in 2019. She is a Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford University and a Research Fellow at St John's College.

David Game College is located off Aldgate High Street in the City of London. The nearest tube station is Aldgate. The nearest overground station is Fenchurch Street. Nearby bus routes include 15, 42, 78, 100, 343 and 25. 

To reach the Keynote Lecture Theatre enter through the entrance in Jewry Street which is approximately 20m to the left of the main entrance. There will be a Gresham billboard here. There is  access for wheelchairs to the auditorium

Microbes hold astonishing speed records: the remarkable Thiovulum majus races along at 60 body lengths per second – the equivalent of Usain Bolt completing the 100m sprint in just over 0.8 seconds. Viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 replicate so rapidly that a single infection can produce 100 bn virus particles within a couple of days. And some bacteria lie dormant for millions of years.

This lecture looks at the biology behind these record-breakers, and what they can teach us about creating new materials.

Professor Robin May
Professor of Physic
Gresham Professor of Physic, Chief Scientific Adviser at the Food Standards Agency (FSA) and Professor of Infectious Disease at the University of Birmingham, Professor Robin...

The field of probability started when a French nobleman asked the mathematician Blaise Pascal to solve a dispute for him about a game consisting of throwing a pair of dice 24 times. Pascal discussed this and other problems with fellow mathematician Pierre de Fermat, in a series of letters in which they arrived at the basic principles of probability theory.

This lecture looks at dice, cards, lotteries, and other games of chance. Can mathematics help us win?

Professor Sarah Hart
Professor of Geometry
Sarah Hart is the first woman Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, and was appointed in 2020. She is Professor of Mathematics and until recently was Head of Mathematics and Statistics at Birkbeck, University of London.

 

David Böhm will explore his 17 year long collaboration with artist Jiří Franta highlighting key projects from performances and public space interventions to illustrations and book design while discussing the relationship between drawing, performance and conceptual art in their collaborative work.

18:30 | Doors open

18:45 | Guided tour of the Who Tells Whom About What exhibition with David Böhm, Czech Embassy, outdoors; Vitrínka Gallery

19:15 | Illustrated Artist Talk, Czech Embassy Cinema

Using imaginary city models with staged micro stories, leading Czech artists David Böhm & Jiří Franta draw on current social and political issues to explore the city not only as a place of neighbourhood and coexistence but also as a crowded and fragmented world, in which it is necessary to reconsider some of the basic ideas. Does the concept of nations still make sense? Wouldn’t it be possible to organise the planet better? Who sustains whom? And can we find a way to stop living at the expense of future generations? Inspired by the exquisitely staged narrative paintings, familiar from the work of artists such as Pieter Brueghel, the artists’ own tableaux will be displayed as a large scale photo series in an outdoor exhibition on the fence of the Czech Embassy in London on busy Bayswater Road, while the models themselves will be exhibited in the gallery inside. Exploring the ‘fence’ motif Böhm & Franta link the outdoor exhibition with the indoor one while referring to relations with our neighbours and borders beyond which we are not welcome, raising the question of who the ‘outsider’ really is.

David Böhm & Jiří Franta
The leading Czech artists David Böhm and Jiří Franta, an artistic duo since 2006, explore in their work the relation between drawing, performance and conceptual art. Known for drawing and painting on walls in galleries as well as in public spaces, Böhm and Franta present their distinctive perception of the world – their views on society, politics, the art scene, and mass media as well as their own feelings. In their “illustrations,” they often play with multiple meaning and irony, commenting on the life of the human community. They were finalists for the Jindřich Chalupecký Award, the top Czech award for visual artists up to the age of 35, in 2009, 2010 and 2012 and have received multiple awards for their books, the most recent one being the Illustrator of the Year Award at the Czech Grand Designs 2022 for their book City for Everyone; A Manual of Urbanism for Beginners.  

The January 2023 "Universities at the Met" seminar will be held at New Scotland Yard (Ground Floor) at 5pm on the 11th January 2023. The event is expected to conclude at 7pm.
The event is open to all.

If you would like to attend in person, please ensure you bring photographic ID in the same name as the ticket booking and select an "in person attendance" ticket.

If you would like to join via Teams, please select that ticket type and we will send you a link 24 hours before the event, and another reminder 5 minutes before the event.

### The Impact of Airbnb Lettings on Crime in London: The Promise and Perils of the Sharing Economy

Professor David Kirk (University of Oxford)

Airbnb is active in over 100,000 cities worldwide, with more than 2 million visitors on any given night. Since its launch, four million different Airbnb hosts have welcomed more than 1 billion guest arrivals. In London, 20% of households rent out all or part of their home at some point in a given year via short-term lettings, and in some districts more than 10% of dwellings are actively listed on Airbnb. Despite this phenomenal growth, little is known about the repercussions for neighbourhood cohesion or crime rates. In this presentation, David Kirk will examine the effect of the growth of Airbnb’s short-term letting activity in London on a variety of crime types.

### Gangs, Public Housing, Bombs and Knives

Carmen Villa-Llera (Metropolitan Police Service and University of Warwick)

Carmen will present research on the spatial distribution of local street gangs operating in London in the 1990-2015 period. She shows that post-WW2 high-rise buildings are much more likely to become gang areas. To resolve the potential reverse causality between gang presence and public housing, she uses the London bombing Blitz of 1940-42 as a shock to urban development which led to differential concentrations of public housing.