Forward to the future

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Bath Spa professor looks ‘Forward to the Future’ as part of £40k project to revitalise art, literature and science in Bath

Bath Spa Professor of Illustration Tim Vyner is involved in a project with the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution (BRLSI) that has just received a £40,000 grant from the Art Fund. 

The project, Forward to the Future, is designed to revitalise BRLSI in light of the impact of the pandemic. It consists of three elements: a dedicated app featuring artefact trails around Bath, a revamping of the BRLSI website, and a co-ordinated campaign to promote BRLSI, which will culminate in an exhibition in Queen Square in the new year. Tim will lead the design team for the app.

Tim said, “Forward to the Future is a fantastic opportunity to bring the BRLSI collection to a wider audience through an interactive app that takes the user on an artefact trail around the city of Bath. My role is to bring together the BRLSI curators' knowledge about each unique object and help translate that into new content developed by a team of creative narrators within the Bath Spa School of Design studios at the Locksbrook campus.”

Curators from the BRLSI will be working in collaboration with postgraduate designers and artists from the School of Design to develop content that will bring historical objects to life by telling their stories in drawing, print, 3D collage, sound, light, film and moving image. Tim explained that this kind of digital content is an excellent way to engage new audiences with each artefact’s history, its connection to Bath and relevance in the world today, before experiencing the unveiled object at the BRLSI gallery.

The grant - one of 18 given from a total of 114 applications - has been awarded through the Art Fund’s Respond and Reimagine programme, which offers flexible and responsive funding designed to meet immediate challenges connected to the COVID-19 crisis and reimagine future ways of  working. 

Bath Spa University and BRLSI are long-standing partners, with the University being formally represented on BRLSI's Board of Directors. BRLSI’s mission has been the public promotion and advancement of science, literature and the arts since its formation in 1824. Its collections span 4.2 billion years, containing more than 150,000 artefacts, specimens, books, and documents from around the world.