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A snapshot of 2005

In this year at Warwick:

  • Warwick hosted the International Children’s Games – providing accommodation, entertainment and sports facilities to over 1300 competitors from 50 cities from around the world.
  • Warwick was voted as having the best campus of any British University by students surveyed by Opinionpanel.
  • Warwick Sport was founded.
  • The Launch of Warwick’s 40th anniversary celebrations took place. The 7th May was Open Campus Day - There were performances from the Coull Quartet and the Renaissance Singers in the Atrium at University House, Archaeology and Geology Tours around campus, Robot football in the Engineering Department and sports displays and tasters at Westwood and the Piazza. On the 23rd May a Free Gala Concert with fireworks was held in the field outside the new Maths and Stats Building. There were performances by the University Big Band, Wind Orchestra, Brass Band, and its Symphony Orchestra and Chorus.
  • The Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) 2000 came into force on 1st January 2005. People inside and outside the University now had the right to access all types of recorded information held by the University.

  • Warwick joined a government pilot project – “The Carbon Trust Project” – aimed at reducing carbon emissions produced by HE institutions.

David Batchelor suggests that colour is found in urban environments but it is a concept with which the west is uneasy – colour is kitsch, infantile, immoral, seductive. It is associated with the ‘other’. In the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy emerges from her black and white Kansas world into the technicolour of Oz.In his book Chromophobia, David Batchelor quotes the philosopher Roland Barthes:

“Colour … is a kind of bliss … like a closing eyelid, a tiny fainting spell ….. If I were a painter, I should only paint colours; this domain seems to me free of both the Law … and Nature (for after all, don’t the colours of nature come from the painters?)”

This work is undeniably urban - against nature. The colours reflect the neon liveries of shops, they are cased in discarded signage boxes found in skips. Batchelor hopes that it will give the people in this building pleasure, a kind of bliss, as the colours reflect endlessly through the glass panels and windows of this work place.

This work was purchased for the University of Warwick Art Collection by the Contemporary Art Society Special Collections Scheme funded by the Arts Council England Lottery.

And in the world:

  • Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France for a seventh consecutive time.

  • Hurricane Katrina strikes the Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama coastal areas. Levees separating Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, Louisiana were breached by the surge, ultimately flooding roughly 80% of the city of New Orleans and 1600 perished Hurricane Katrina.
  • Pope John Paul II dies; over 4 million people travel to the Vatican to mourn him.
  • London Bombings: Four explosions rock the transport network in London, three on the London Underground and one on a bus. Over 50 deaths were reported, and over 200 injured.

  • Live 8 concerts happen in members of the G8 cities around the world to put pressure on the Leaders of the G8 countries to do more for the world's poor.

 

2005

Against Nature | David Batchelor