Festival of the Mind returns to Sheffield

• Festival of the Mind, an 10-day programme of events which brings University of Sheffield research to life, is returning to the city for its 7th edition 
• Free and open to all, the Festival includes activities, installations, exhibitions, films, performances, podcasts and talks for the public to explore the University research which  is helping to tackle some of society’s biggest issues
• This year’s events are based around the themes of creativity, participation, cohesion, and learning
• Alongside events in the Spiegeltent and Millenium Galleries, the Festival will also take place in Persistence Works, an award-winning studio complex on Brown Street, part of Yorkshire Artspace

Highlights for Festival of the Mind 2024 include:

• Estate - An examination and a celebration of working class communities, and the art that has been produced from within them. Using special collections and archives, the exhibition will look at writers such as Barry Hines (Threads), Jack Rosenthal (Yentl, Coronation Street) and Richard Hogart (The Uses of Literacy).
• School Meal Memories - This documentary film follows three individuals from different backgrounds in Sheffield as they retrace their journeys from home to school and share their memories of school meals and the stories associated with them.  Revisit the school meals of the past, explore policy changes in school meals from the 1900s, and reflect on present-day challenges. 
• Call of the Void - Experience the music made by violent cosmic explosions and colliding black holes in distant galaxies. Call of the Void is an original soundtrack created by genuine intergalactic signals captured by observatories surveying the night sky, mapped into musical notation and pressed to limited edition 12” vinyl for an immersive, high-fidelity listening experience.
• Holy Herbs and the Psychoactive Revolution - An art exhibition and talk on the herbs and plants at the heart of Europe’s ‘psychoactive revolution’ between the 16th and 18th centuries. The Installation will explore botanical dimensions of psychoactive revolutions and different states of intoxication including alcohols, tobacco, sugar, cocoa and substances like opium, coffee and tea. The images will be displayed on acetate sheets one after the other, encouraging viewers to walk between them and be immersed within the intoxicants.
• Ageing = Frailty? - Explore and challenge frailty, as visualised by artist Seiko Kinoshita and the University’s flagship Healthy Lifespan Institute. This unique art installation will represent the lived-experience of our communities.
• Virtual Voyage through the Milky Way - This VR exhibit takes viewers on a colossal space voyage, starting in our Solar System, passing through the Orion Nebula, moving out of the disk of our Milky Way to view it from above, before zooming into our Galactic Centre to explore the supermassive black hole in its nucleus.
• We’re taking the pi$$: recovering valuable resources from waste - A walk-through unisex walk-through WC prototype constructed with bubble columns containing different species of microalgae. Visitors will learn how urine can be used to grow algae, which can be used to make a variety of products as part of a circular economy.
• A Techno Live Coding Masterclass - This event is both a masterclass in techno music production, and an introduction to computer programming. Sheffield techno legends The Black Dog will co-host a workshop with academic experts, in which participants will learn to live code music. The workshop will conclude with a gig, in which every participant will hear their musical contribution played as part of an ensemble piece. 
• Resurrection - Harnessing media that spans the history of human art-making from Cave Art to Artificial Intelligence, Resurrection brings to life two extinct Ice Age species -- the mighty Steppe Mammoth and the adorable Sicilian dwarf elephant – to examine our relationship with nature, and challenge us to create a better future.