Architecture student wins Research Images as Art/Art Images as Research award

A striking image demonstrating the science behind a flock of starlings in flight has been announced as the winner of this year’s Research Images as Art/Art Images as Research competition, run by the UCL Doctoral School. 'Birds of a Feather' (pictured) by Chris Falla, an MArch Architecture student at The Bartlett, captures the unseen bonds which choreograph starling flight paths by freezing a moment in time of a simulated flock of particles. The image was chosen as the overall competition winner.

Commenting on his win, Chris Falla said: ‘I am truly honoured to have been selected as this year’s winner. This competition gives a great opportunity to put the spotlight on the beauty found within research rather than only giving shine to the final product or result.’

The competition and exhibition, which is in its 12th cycle, saw a record number of entries from across UCL – over 360 images were submitted from all ten faculties. The winning images were selected by a panel of judges from around UCL based on their aesthetic appeal, the nature of their subject matter and technical quality.

Professor Sharon Morris of the Slade School of Fine Art, Chair of the Judging Panel, said of this year’s entries: ‘One of the challenges presented by research across different fields at UCL is that of the representation of research data.  All the images have a form of representational function – but those dealing with the transformation of complex data, or the presentation of medical imaging, appeared to have the greatest difficulty in finding new conventions of representation.

I think I’m right in saying that we all felt that the range of colours and the interactions of a default range of colour for these data representation has become over-familiar.  We were therefore delighted to find images, which transposed data with greater sophistication and imagination.’

Read more and see all the runners up on UCL News