The first phase of Prof Kemp's project is about gathering in. There are an enormous amount of ways that space has been represented on flat surfaces and on three-dimensional surfaces. There is the perspective from the Renaissance period onwards and the spaces of modern physics - four-dimensional space, quantum mechanics, relativity - all of which do not deal with these absolutely straightforward boxes of space that we are familiar with.

In the future, Prof Kemp's team is going to be thinking about how - through the use of exhibitions, artists, and the Internet - they can bring into a public and specialist domain different ways of representing space. This will enable them to begin to communicate in a way which has not been done adequately up until now. Prof Kemp hopes that they can open up peoples' imaginations to get a broader grasp of the possibilities of space: of infinite space, of different sorts of space, of movement in space. He highlights the exciting work of Patrick Hughes who, for several years, has been making spatial pictures which open up other worlds - worlds of movement, worlds of strange infinite spaces of an illogical kind.

Prof Penrose thinks that in mathematical physics, specifically in relativity theory, Einstein’s theory of space time, one needs to think about four-dimensional space time. Unfortunately, four-dimensional space time isn’t the sort of thing we readily visualise in our experience! He says that to develop a skill to be able to handle four-dimensions has been important for him.

Prof Kemp thinks that most scientists have a way that they are used to thinking about space and they are only aware of a very small slice of all the possibilities. So one of the interesting things is that it can provide a sudden tweak of surprise in the scientist and get a different way of thinking or a different way of constructing an image of something:

"If you say "does the scientist literally learn from art for his or her science?", I think the answer probably is predominantly "no" but it is the wrong question. The question is: how are artists and scientists scratching the same kind of itch."

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