IF Oxford returns: connect from anywhere
3 September 2020
From Thursday 1 to Saturday 31 October, IF Oxford, the city’s science and ideas festival, presents more than 100 events for adults, children and teenagers on a dynamic new online platform. With dance, film, debate, demos from dining tables, and suggestions for hands-on activities to try at home, the Festival brings together real time cutting-edge research from world-leading academics with wide-ranging events to excite the imagination. Festival-goers can uncover big ideas and ask even bigger questions about science, humanity, the world at large and beyond.
Visit the online Explorazone Digital to enjoy dozens of free hands-on demonstrations and activity ideas for all ages in a virtual exhibition hall and auditorium, and be teleported into Oxford city on Saturday 17 October from 8am to 9pm. Here visitors can discover the smallest particles in the Universe and travel to the edge of space, tour the Oxford labs creating the COVID-19 vaccine at Headington’s Jenner Institute or avert a catastrophic flood whilst filling up a virtual ‘swag bag’ with goodies and try-at-home experiments.
Enjoy a new contemporary dance performance created using motion-capture software during lock-down in response to the COVID-19 crisis, a collaboration between nationally-acclaimed choreographer Alexander Whitley, Oxford’s Parasol Dance Group and the Oxford University Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics.
Unearth the secrets of a good spacesuit with Daniel Craig double, stuntman and extreme adventurer Andy Torbet or join actor Steven McGann, Dr Patrick Turner in the popular BBC period drama Call the Midwife, as he joins other panellists discussing the scientific possibilities of a memory erasure in response to the film The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004).
Tempt your taste buds with an insight into the science behind your morning coffee, a foray into chocolate making, a virtual apple day or take part in a gin tasting that takes you around the world.
With poetry, politics, music and more, there’s something to intrigue everyone whatever their interests.
The majority of events are free to attend (donations are welcome using the Festival’s Pay What You Decide).