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30/08/2025

Beauty meets menace in the three-sculpture group ‘Familiars’, 1992, the key work in ‘Apprehensions’, the Whitechapel Gallery’s survey of Hamad Butt’s sadly brief career. Butt was born in Lahore, Pakistan in 1962 and moved to live in East London with his family in 1964. He studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths, 1987-90, and so coincided with the Young British Artists (YBA) generation, many of whom studied alongside him there.

In ‘Familiars’, glass forms contains three halogens that have both helpful and harmful potential: when first shown, the risk of leaks generated some press controversy. Butt himself explained, in a 1991 text he wrote to set out the theoretical thinking behind his planned works: ‘I am interested in the relationship between art and science, particularly the shift in modes of thought from alchemy to science (medicine and chemistry) and, more tentatively, the prospect of a metachemics, which might have an equivalent kinship to metaphysics as chemistry does to physics. What is being considered in the apprehensions that constitutes the extent of our acknowledgement of substance?’

Full article now available on our website, link in bio 🔗

‘Hamad Butt: Apprehensions’ is currently showing at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, 4 June – 7 Sept 2025.




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📸 1) ‘Familiars 1: Substance Sublimation Unit’, 1992, by Hamad Butt. 2) ‘Hamad Butt: Apprehensions’, 4 June - 7 September 2025, Whitechapel Gallery, London. Photo: Damian Griffiths. 3) Hamad Butt at home
c.1980–87. Image © Jamal Butt. All three shown courtesy the artist, Whitechapel Gallery, TATE Collection, and the photographer.
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15/08/2025

In our newest article, we explore four science and art shows from the annual Gallery Weekend in Berlin.

Kathrin Linkersdorff at Haus Am Kleistpark, including her latest series ‘Microverse’ (2023 onwards). As artist in residence at the Institute for Biology/Microbiology, Humboldt University, she collaborated with microbiologist Prof Regine Hengge to examine the behaviour of streptomycetes in biochemical processes of decay.

Numero Cromatico at AOA;87. The art and research collective merges visual arts, design, architecture, and literature with scientific knowledge. Their AOA;87 exhibition included neon works highlighting phrases, and tapestries with poems, both emerge from custom-built AIs.

Jimmie Durham at Barbara Wien. Durham’s ‘The Aharonov-Bohm Effect’ (1989) presents a less widely-known quantum phenomenon whereby charged particles are influenced by an electromagnetic field, even though they move exclusively through a region free of magnetic fields.

Alfredo Jaar: ‘The End Of The World’ for the Kesselhaus at KINDL. Following research supported by geologist Adam Bobbette, Jaar focuses our attention on a diminutive cube of layered raw materials. Extraction of these materials is fraught with human rights violations and environmental destruction: the exhibition booklet sets out details metal by metal in ten essays by Bobbette.









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📸 1) Kathrin Linkersdorff: ‘Microverse III / 2’ (detail) 2025. 2) Numero Cromatico: ‘I am not here, as you see’, 2025 Photo Numero Cromatico, AOA87, Berlin. 3) Jimmie Durham: ‘The Aharonov-Bohm Effect’, 1989. Courtesy the artist, kurimanzutto, Mexico City/New York and Barbara Wien, Berlin. Photo Enza Monetti © Jimmie Durham Estate. 4) Alfredo Jaar: ‘The End of the World’ – installation view at KINDL. Photo Jens Ziehe, 2024 © Alfredo Jaar/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2025.
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10/08/2025

When Music Meets Attention: How Background Tunes Shape Focus

A new study explored how young adults with and without ADHD use background music during daily activities of varying cognitive demand.

Results revealed that those with ADHD tended to listen more during both stimulating and low-effort tasks, favoring upbeat, energizing tracks.

Neurotypical participants more often chose relaxing and familiar music for complex activities.

Despite differences in preferences, both groups perceived music as equally beneficial for focus and emotional well-being.

These patterns suggest that music choice may reflect underlying differences in attentional needs and arousal regulation.

The research points toward the possibility of tailoring “cognitive playlists” to support individual focus and mood.

08/08/2025

Alicja Kwade has inaugurated a new location for Iceland’s i8 Gallery with the major sculpture ‘Archibiont’, 2025 (shown above). Within the work, a static, black powder-coated steel frame evolves into organic imagery, as the smooth steel transforms into highly textured, verdigris tree bark and animal antlers made of bronze. That fits with the title, a combination of the architectural with the natural, as a ‘biont’ is the biological term for any discrete unit of living matter, from a single-celled bacterium to a complex multicellular organisms like us. It also fits with her practise as a whole, as set out in Seisma’s full article of March 2023. In her words: ‘What I do is question the world, through a philosophical approach which uses moments from science to somehow understand the world.’

As i8 Gallery puts it, Kwade ‘has developed a visual language around celestial and earthly principles and the interwoven relationships of art and nature. The continual relevance of society’s quest to apply meaning and measurement to life forces underscores the inherent mysteries of the universe, many of which remain unsolved and perpetually in a state of artistic and scientific exploration.’
‘Archibiont’ is specifically inspired by Aristotle’s doctrine of hylomorphism, which holds that everything is inseparably composed of matter (the underlying substance) and form (the structural organisation that makes it what it is). Thus, Kwade’s sculpture is not just metal, but metal shaped into aparticular form suggesting metamorphosis. Less straightforwardly, life (or the soul) was, in Aristotle’s account, the animating form of the human, leading to considerable philosophical discussion and dispute over the centuries. An updated version might hold that energy is the underlying matter within which all form occurs, reinforcing the unity of art and science, humanity and nature.




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30/05/2025

It isn’t often that gaming and its associated technologies feature in the programmes of art galleries. Janne Schimmel believes it is important to use the medium of art in this area, and a recent example is his exhibition ‘But Can It Run Doom’, described by Super Dakota, Brussels, as ‘an in-depth exploration of the intersections between digital culture, the material conditions of gaming hardware, and the evolving role of technology in our lives.’ Visitors were able to play on various consoles with games designed, tweaked or deconstructed by the Dutch artist, allowing them to appreciate the evolution of the relevant technologies and some of the cultural issues associated with the industry.

In this article, we discuss the development of gaming technology and two questionable aspects of that recent highly successful history, as explored in the show: the limitations in practice on what one might expect to be the complete freedom to act in virtual worlds; and the parallel restrictions and pressures on how the technology can be used.

Full article now available on our website, link in bio 🔗


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📸 1) Janne Schimmel: ‘Strange Loop (Disgust, Fear, Happy, Sad, Snarl)’, 2024 - 3D printed resin, acrylic paint, 14 x 7 x 22 cm’ Photo © Adriaan Hauwaert. Courtesy of the artist and Super Dakota, Brussels. 2&3) Janne Schimmel: ‘Phantasmic Gateways and their Housings’, 2021. Photo © Adriaan Hauwaert. Courtesy of the artist and Super Dakota, Brussels. 4) Portrait of the artist in his studio. Photo © Adriaan Hauwaert. Courtesy of the artist and Super Dakota, Brussels.
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11/04/2025

Milan’s modern and contemporary art fair, Miart (3-6 April, 2025), included a presentation by the San Sebastián gallery CIBRIÁN of Siyi Li’s riveted aluminium works suggesting a snowflake blown up hugely under a microscope to over 2 m high, and a tear that has fallen from it. The Frankfurt-based Chinese artist’s pair of sculptures ‘Teardrop’ and ‘Teardrop (fearless on my breath)’, 2022, might suggest mourning for the loss of the poles’ compacted snow, but there is also a scientific connection.

Snowflakes are famous for their unique crystalline structures, and the same can be said of teardrops. That was the subject of an investigation a decade ago by the Dutch artist Maurice Mikkers, who found that when tears dry, they leave behind crystallized minerals and salts, forming delicate, unique patterns. Moreover, the patterns are affected by what has triggered the tear. And that’s complicated by there being three main types: basal tears, that keep our eyes lubricated; reflex tears in response to irritation; and emotional tears linked to a loss of control, whether through happiness or sadness. Those emotional tears have three extra ingredients: the stress hormones prolactin and adrenocorticotropic hormone, and the painkiller leucine-enkephalin, and Mikkers found that sad and happy tears look different.

Mikkers, who worked as a lab technician before switching to art, collects tears in micropipettes for transfer of drops to a microscopic slide, after which crystallisation takes 5-30 minutes, depending on the environment. Images 2-4 are examples of his results from his project ‘Imaginarium of Tears’, ongoing since 2015, showing the effects on the particular individuals of onions, a fan blowing air into the eye, and sorrow. Back in Milan, the phenomenon fits nicely with Siyi Li’s stated interest in ‘preserving ephemeral emotions as antidotes to shattered contemporary life’.


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09/04/2025

Thank you so much Daisy Bassen for sharing your work with us 🙏💚

Daisy Bassen is a poet and community child psychiatrist who graduated from Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program and completed her medical training at The University of Rochester and Brown. Her work has been published in Salamander, McSweeney’s, Smartish Pace, Crab Creek Review, New Yo...

06/04/2025

How will current internet-inspired art look in fifty years’ time? Tate Modern currently provides a potentially equivalent opportunity to explore 20th century artists’ use of technologies that were novel to them. ‘Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet’ brings together 70 artists who engage with science and technology. Our newest article by looks at work by six of these artists.

‘Electric Dreams’ runs to 1 June 2025 at Tate Modern, London. Artists: Rebecca Allen, Marina Apollonio, Manuel Barbadillo, Alberto Biasi, Vladimir Bonačić, Davide Boriani, Martha Boto, Pol Bury, Harold Cohen, Analivia Cordeiro, Waldemar Cordeiro, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Charles Csuri, Computer Technique Group, Dadamaino, Atul Desai, Lucia Di Luciano, Ivan Dryer and Elsa Garmire, E.A.T., Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss, Herbert W. Franke, Brion Gysin, Samia Halaby, Desmond Paul Henry, Hervé Huitric and Monique Nahas, Edward Ihnatowicz, Eduardo Kac, Hiroshi Kawano, Ben Laposky, Julio Le Parc, Ruth Leavitt, Liliane Lijn, Heinz Mack, Robert Mallary, Mary Martin, Almir Mavignier, Gustav Metzger, David Medalla, Tatsuo Miyajima, Manfred Mohr, Vera Molnar, François Morellet, Tomislav Mikulić, Fujiko Nakaya, FriederNake, Georg Nees, Akbar Padamsee, Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut, Ivan Picelj, Otto Piene, Günther Uecker, Paolo Scheggi, Lillian F. Schwartz, Sonia Landy Sheridan, Aleksandar Srnec, Jesús Rafael Soto, Vera Spencer, Takis, Atsuko Tanaka, Jean Tinguely, Franciszka Themerson, Suzanne Treister, Wen-Ying Tsai, Grazia Varisco, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam, Miguel Ángel Vidal, Nanda Vigo, Stephen Willats, Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, Edward Zajec.

📸 1) Fold 2 1988 by Samia Halaby . Still from kinetic painting coded on an Amiga computer. Tate © Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut / Hamburg.
2) STEPS (1982) by Rebecca Allen Still from video. Courtesy the artist © Rebecca Allen. 3)Tatsuo Miyajima, Lattice B, 1990 and Opposite Circle, 1991 installation view in Electric Dreams, Tate Modern, 2024 © Tatsuo Miyajima . Photo © Tate (Lucy Green)

20/03/2025

Ross Bleckner: ‘What is the Grass’, 2022 - oil on linen - 183 x 244 cm

For all that visual references and environmental and cultural factors are bound to have a big influence, the principle of abstract painting is that it stems at its core from the mind rather than the world. It’s rare, though, for one of the other factors feeding in to be the mind itself. But that’s how this painting operates. That’s partly because Ross Bleckner intends the the soft focus of his compositions to reflect the workings of the mind – now attentive, now oblivious. His Brussels gallery, Maruani Mercier, says of his recent show ‘Commune’ that ‘considering the relationship between biological and psychic, cellular and celestial, the works interrogate the vulnerability of the human condition and humanity’s place in the natural order. That fits with both the American artist’s rise to fame in the context of the AIDS crisis that gripped New York in the 1980s, and with his own emphasis on ‘The idea that the body is so perfect until it’s not perfect. It’s a fragile membrane that separates us from disaster.’

‘What is the Grass’ goes further, however. Bleckner began with a scan of the human brain, transforming the network of synaptic connections into an image which at once evokes a floral meadow and a constellation in space. Alternating between the micro and the macro, the composition embraces the complexity of systems that are beyond our understanding or control. To quote Bleckner again: ‘There is an ineffable quality of imagery that you can locate but it always slips through. Things aren’t in our control as we would like them to be, they have a fluid quality and they keep moving and changing. That’s a kind of Buddhist idea. This is something that we get used to either willingly or unwillingly - things change.’

So perhaps ‘What is the Grass’ isn’t a fully abstract work. If it is, it’s an abstraction by, from and about the brain!



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10/01/2025

Can expressive abstract painting be scientific? The question arises from Diane Howse’s recent exhibition ‘Ornament of Dust’ (all works 2024) at Vivienne Roberts Projects – that’s her with ‘Gravity’ (Image 5). She uses cosmic dust as a suggestive entry into the world of paintings that might be seen as adhering broadly to abstract expressionist tendencies. Earth’s surface is constantly sprinkled with space dust – submillimetre material that arrives the same way as more dramatic meteorites. The latest estimate is that over 5,000 tonnes of such matter falls annually (Rojas et al in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 2021). Each particle, as Iwona Blazwick puts in her essay for the show, ‘is also a carrier of deep time, a fragment of an entropic process that connects our here and now, with stars and planets that may have become extinct millennia ago.’ It is, in effect, a contemporary echo of how we are all famously ‘made from star stuff’ in Carl Sagan’s formulation. Howse, says Blazwick, ‘sees the world as a kinetic, ever changing ‘ornament’ of this whirling, energy filled dust, the dust from which we come and to which we will return.’ The paintings themselves can be looked at in three ways: as experiments in colour and material, gesture and form; as cloudy allusions to the idea of dust settling beyond our cognition; and as abstract representations of phenomena or scenes hinted at by their individual titles. ‘Viewing Stone’, for example, reads geologically or as a tablet, given the title (Image 2); ‘Land Fall’ as an event (Image 3); ‘Light Shift’ atmospherically (Image 4)
 
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📸 1) ‘Gravity’. 2-5) As detailed above. All works by Diane Howse. Images taken at ‘Ornament of Dust’, Vivienne Robert’s Projects, 2024©️Diane Howse. All rights reserved.
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31/12/2024

As 2024 draws to a close, we wanted to reflect on one of this year’s memorable events: the centenary of the death of Franz Kafka ((1883-1924). That anniversary triggered many perspectives on his life and work. One of the most notable was the superb Bodleian Library exhibition ‘Kafka: Making of an Icon‘, which ran alongside a lively programme of events in Oxford during May-October.

Also featured at the exhibition was ‘Insect Enemies’ by artist Tessa Farmer, a commissioned installation created in response to what is probably Kafka’s most famous story – ‘The Metamorphosis’.

This in-depth exhibition and its accompanying programme covered enough ground to incorporate science that can be related both to Kafka’s own life, and to ‘The Metamorphosis’. Inspired by these events, Paul Carey-Kent looks at the celebrated but troubled writer from two somewhat unusual perspectives: his health; and human responses to insects.

To read more of this double article, please visit our website, link in bio.







📸 1) Andy Warhol, ‘Franz Kafka’, 1980, (detail), from Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century portfolio screenprint on Lenox Museum board, 40 x 32 inches. Courtesy of Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual. 2) Kafka Making of an Icon © Jessica Chaundy, Bodleian Libraries. 3&4) ‘Insect Enemies’ (detail), 2024, by Tessa Farmer for ‘Kafka: Making of an Icon’ at The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford in 2024 © Jessica Chaundy for Bodleian Libraries and Tessa Farmer.
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13/12/2024

Astronomy comes to the fore in much of Jonathan Parsons’s latest body of work, shown as ‘Spectroscopic’ at the Coleman Project Space in Bermondsey through November-December. The title comes from ‘spectroscopy’, the scientific field of inquiry that measures and interprets electromagnetic spectra. Parsons aims, he says, ‘rather than presenting imitations of the visual appearance of the external world, to show textual information about visual knowledge in a poetic way. Everything has been prepared using computer-generated imagery (CGI), and so the show is as much about computing (and the impact this has had on my way of seeing since I was a child) as it is about the natural phenomena themselves’.

Our visual fine arts editor, Paul Carey-Kent, spoke to Parsons about some of these works, including his ‘constellation paintings’, such ‘The Greater Dog (In Memoriam)’, 2024, made with layers of acrylic paint. Parsons says he has ‘taken what is already there in the map’ – a computer-derived representation of CanusMajor, or The Greater Dog - and ‘remade it with an added optical quality’ to make a painting ‘as a window onto the infinite’. Thus we have step changes in the brightness of the Milky Way - even though the changes are gradual, the computer is programmed to make a judgement of levels then draw a boundary. And the brighter the star, the bigger its dot. The dots are in slightly different colours – yellowish, pinkish and white – to indicate the colour temperature of the stars themselves. The deep blue blobs are the location of notable deep sky objects, like galaxies – unrelated to what they look like. It’s nice that the dots are single droplets that make perfect circles. There are 88 ‘official’ constellations, so Parsons has the potential for a substantial series!





📸 1&2) ‘The Greater Dog (In Memoriam)’, 2024. Courtesy the artist©️Jonathan Parsons.