Abstract
This article charts the development of a collaboration between poet Dr Caitlin Stobie and scientist Dr Paul Beales, resulting from their partnership in the Leeds Creative Labs: Bragg Edition. The authors show their motivations for working together and the philosophical conversations that developed as they discussed artificial life, synthetic matter, and shared terms from the humanities and sciences. Initial plans for the project were challenged and delayed in 2020; the authors discuss how they adapted to digital collaboration and secured follow-on funding for further outputs, mapping new possibilities for public engagement with materials sciences during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, Stobie and Beales consider the layering of biophysical research images with experimental poems which aim to convey complex yet complementary concepts from philosophy, without distorting the underlying scientific data.
