Elements: oxygen

In advance of the upcoming Elements event at Wellcome Collection I spent an hour filming the brilliant Dr Andrea Sella (one of the event’s curators) as he gave me a tour of some of the elements in question. I’ll be sharing these on the blog over the next week or so, but you can also see all of them on our YouTube channel. It was a fun shoot, following him as he demonstrated experiments and bits of lab kit. There was a small fiery explosion, liquid nitrogen, clouds of purple iodine and more. I also get an inadvertent cameo role as he naughtily wore reflective glasses for the oxygen section, which I spotted too late.

In this first one, he shows us how oxygen will be turned from a gas into a liquid for use at the event (which has to happen behind the scenes on the night for health and safety reasons), and reveals its unusual colour. I had NO idea that this was what oxygen looked like.

Elements presents a world of immersive chemical performance, ingestion, activity and intrigue across all four floors of Wellcome Collection on Friday 8 April, 19.00–23.00.