Photo: Lisa Skuret

This LUNÄ Talks is hosted by members of Time Capsules and Conditions of Now, a trans-disciplinary art project bringing together artists and curators who each also operate within a second field, such as a yoga teacher, writer and a practicing GP.  The group invite the audience to participate in a series of playful engagements with time and presence. The event coincides with the full moon, in homage to the original Lunar Society.

LUNÄ is a facsimile of the original table around which an influential group of industrialists, poets, inventors, doctors, writers, physicists, chemists and thinkers known as the Lunar Society met each month in Birmingham between 1765 and 1813. Members included James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood, Matthew Boulton, Joseph Priestley and Erasmus Darwin and they forged strong links with Bristol based contemporaries including Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Beddoes.

The society was given its name by the monthly meeting of the members at full moon during which the participants discussed their latest research, with the aim of learning from each other and sometimes they would develop projects collaboratively or support each others projects.  Since January 2011 the table is used in different locations including England, Austria and the Netherlands for an ongoing series of critical discussions updating topics that occupied the Lunar Men as new scientific and industrial developments, but also art, education and social rights.