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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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17/01/2025

Fantastic opportunity from CERN for Geneva-based artists – deadline 17 February 🎊
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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.

06/12/2024

✨INSIDE THE MIND SERIES✨

In the seventh interview of our series on neuroaesthetics, Dwaynica Greaves speaks to Ellie Pritts, a new media artist renowned for blending creative technology and narrative through analog and digital mediums.

Their conversation ranges from the use of AI within Pritts’s artistic practice and the benefits AI can provide to artists, to her resilience in the face of neurodegenerative challenges and her drive to continue creating immersive worlds where she and her viewers can feel limitless.

To find out more, visit the Inside The Mind Series on our website, or follow link in bio.





📸 1. Portrait of Ellie Pritts by Lissyelle Laricchia 2. ‘Chance’ by Ellie Pritts, shown at her solo exhibition ‘Calderúnicae’ at Kunstverein Ludwigsburg Museum in 2023.
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23/10/2024

The measurement of moisture is key to ‘hygrosummons (iter.01)’, artist Simnikiwe Buhlungu’s commission for the Chisenhale Gallery. The puddle and the hygrometer, the scientific instrument used to measure humidity, are her starting points. As the gallery describes it: ‘A series of buckets contain puddle samples collected from four geographical sites – the Tswaing Crater in Soshanguve, the backyard maize garden of Buhlungu’s mother, the Salse di Nirano Nature Reserve in Fiorano Modenese, and puddles outside of Chisenhale Gallery. Leaking, irrigating, and vibrating, they are connected by the hydrological cycle, where a puddle in Johannesburg might travel across the same atmospheric current as another in East London. As the samples reverberate and evaporate across borders, contamination and kinship become indistinguishable from one another.’ 

The show title combines the ‘Hygro’ from hygrometer with ‘summons’, as a reference to the calling, gathering, and convening of puddles that takes place. That led Buhlungu to think about methods of measurement outside of the Western canon of science, and she came across the hair hygrometer – a single strand of hair used to perceive humidity in the air – it will then kink. Raffia is similarly hygroscopic, so Buhlungu set up zithers with raffia strings and robot pluckers. The strings change tone in response to humidity in the space. Visitors hear a recording from the show’s opening day, together with the same composition played live, setting up sonic dissonance caused by the varying level of moisture. That traces – sonically measures, one might say – the movement of water, moisture, and the puddles throughout the space.

Buhlungu points out that ‘hygrometers are everywhere; in chicken coops, violin cases, museum collections, HVAC systems. While they are often used to keep conditions as dry and consistent as possible, what if we let things be as they are? Allowing soaking, pooling, swelling, warping, dissonance? Could these states open up other ways of understanding, firstly the spaces in which contemporary art can exist, but more broadly, the world and its complexities?’

30/08/2024

Jeremy Deller: ‘The Problem with Humans’, 2018, from the lithograph edition of 85.

This wittily cynical perspective on the human project is by Jeremy Deller, though he commissioned Stuart Sam Hughes to do the original painting. It comes from the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield, which is selling the editions arising from reviving a pioneering scheme to introduce children to the best in contemporary art. The original School Prints subscription scheme ran between 1946-49: artists were asked to contribute ‘something suitable for children’ in keeping with the wider push for social and cultural changes aimed at making a better world post-war. The Hepworth’s new scheme is designed more to offset the diminished importance attached to arts subjects in the GCSE curriculum. As for the content, Deller observes that ‘children are probably the most receptive people to contemporary art. They have no preconceptions, no intellectual animosity towards art; they just receive it in a very primal, clear way. For a child it must be very interesting looking at modern and contemporary art because they see themselves within it, they see things they could maybe do.’ His contribution calls to mind discussions about the intelligence of cephalopods, the difference between their distributed brains and our more centralised intelligence, and what we might learn from that. Those matters are key interests of the artist collective 0rphan Drift – you can read more in Seisma’s 2021 article Can Octopuses Change the World?

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24/07/2024

In 2020 Sophie Clements explained to Seisma how she liked to set up situations in which she doesn’t have full control – explosions, for example. We caught up with her at New Art Projects in a group show of four performatively-inclined artists, alongside Jenny Baines, Carali McCall and Cathy Rogers. ‘Come to Ground (Surrender)’, 2023, relies on a fan that – despite some cross-drafts from open windows and doors – proves one of the more predictable processes she has followed. It is perhaps a more political than scientific work, as the material for this striking flag is that of emergency blankets. That is to say, an impermeable metalised plastic sheet. Such blankets trap up to 90% of the radiated body heat that would normally be dispersed into the environment, so keeping people warm largely with the heat they are already – as always –generating and losing. That might make you wonder why they’re not used more widely day-to-day, but they are also noisy, easily torn, and trap moisture, so making for an uncomfortably sweaty night.

   

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📸 Sophie Clements with her work ‘Come to Ground (Surrender)’, 2023, at New Art Projects, July 2024.
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26/06/2024

Cathryn Shilling trained with Peter Layton, who runs London Glassblowing, and went on to curate its gallery in Bermondsey from 2000-19. She often reinterprets the traditional technique of caneworking – forming lengths of glass in the kiln, and then using them to add patterns to blown glass – by weaving the rods together like textiles. You can currently see her two part installation ‘The Path We Follow II’ in Bermondsey, where Shilling is one of 30 glass artists in the exhibition ‘Planet Earth’. A wall piece visualises the temperature change across Europe from 1845 to 2020, while a group of vessels represent an assembly of eight European nations, each displaying their own rise in temperature change over 80 years. The data is taken from the website showyourstripes.info, produced by Professor Ed Hawkins, of the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading. The graphics, conceived as the simplest way to convey the trend, show the stripes turning from mainly blue to mainly red in more recent years, illustrating the rise in average temperatures since the Industrial Revolution. In order to raise awareness, the graphs and graphics on the site are freely available for use – and 21 June was ‘Show Your Stripes’ day on which, for example, the stripes were projected onto buildings round the world and adopted by sports participants.

   
 
 

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📸 1 and 6) ‘Show Your Stripes’. 2) Data image by Professor Ed Hawkins. 3 to 5) ‘The Path We Follow II’ by Cathryn Shilling. Photo credits: Ed Hawkins or Ester Segarra.
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05/06/2024

24/05/2024

Seisma’s April article ‘Inner Cosmos, Outer Universe’ featured artists sharing a fascination with space in a double sense: from cosmological heights to the molecular foundations of the self. New York artist Trisha Baga’s current show would have fitted right in.

‘Contact’ at Société, Berlin, combines personal imagery with dazzling starscapes culled from deep space photography, articulating her sense of an intimate connection between human existence and the celestial realm. ‘I paint images from outer space’, says Baga, ‘because they are the shapes of the way the world works, and they are the shapes of our own consciousness’. The effect is that Baga becomes an extension of the James Webb Space Telescope, zooming out into the depths of space as recently revealed, while at the same time turning in towards the minutiae of daily life. A screen is also suggested by the unusual colouration, as if the brightness adjustment might be faulty.

In ‘Earthshine’ we see the stars come into the studio – which is filled with so much stuff that Baga wears a headlight to sort through the materials and potential sources of inspiration! We see keyboard, paints, palette, a stack of canvasses, another painting from the series and an apparently taped-off area suggesting that a camera has been covered up: Baga, who often uses video, is playing with surveillance issues through the idea that the painting might want to look at us. Baga’s baby is also visible far right, and ‘The Milky Way’ refers to how Baga does the night feeds by bottle, while partner Molly covers the day by breast. The title refers not just to that and to our galaxy, but to the myth of its origins: Zeus let his son, born of a mortal woman, suckle on Hera’s divine milk when she was asleep. When she awoke and realised she was breastfeeding an unknown infant, she pushed him away and the spurting milk became the Milky Way.

 

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📸 Trisha Baga: ‘The Milky Way’, 2024 – Oil on canvas 183 x 214 cm and ‘Earthshine’, 2024 – Oil on canvas 229 x 305 cm. Courtesy the artist and Société, Berlin. Photos

17/05/2024

HOW RADIOACTIVE IS THE GREEN GLASS CHAIR?

‘I’ve always been intrigued by radioactivity, but it was when I learned about the 2011 nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan, that I began research the subject in depth. Not only was I was fascinated by the complex science, but I was also intrigued by how other artists responded to radioactivity in their work.’ Writes artist and researcher Lis Fields in our newest article online, link in our bio.

In her article, Fields analyses the radioactivity of ‘Chair’ from ‘Half Life’ by artist Elliot Walker, which recently featured in the exhibition ‘The Glass Heart: Art, Industry & Collaboration’ at Two Temple Place, London.

Lis Fields is an American-born, UK-raised artist based in London. Her academic background is in science and art history, and she has subsequently worked as a scientific researcher as well as in film, and as an artist and designer in New York, Los Angeles and London. Her work reflects interests in medicine and health, psychoanalysis, education, the environment and human rights – particularly issues around radioactivity. You can see Fields’s two projects about the Fukushima nuclear disaster here: www.lisfields.org  and here: www.redkimono.org




📸 ‘Chair’ (2017) by Elliot Walker. Hot sculpted uranium glass. Photographed at Two Temple Place, London in the exhibition ‘The Glass Heart: Art, Industry & Collaboration’, 2024. Photography by Lis Fields.
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10/05/2024

We recently caught up with Alicja Kwade in her Berlin studio complex. The German artist is often inspired by science, as set out in Seisma’s article of March 2023. Perhaps, then, there’s a touch of irony in how she plans her many exhibitions across the world: one room in her studio complex is full of architectural models of the relevant spaces, into which Kwade inserts indications of what she will show – finding that a hands-on approach works best. Only later do her assistants convert the physical model into 3D digital renders, which are then sent to the galleries for installation purposes. There are plenty of models in play at present: Kwade is currently showing at Museum Voorlinden, near The Hague, in the Netherlands (to 9 June, see the excellent walk-through film on their website). And coming soon are major shows in Los Angeles, Paris, Basel, and Tokyo!



📸 1) Alicja Kwade by Christian Werner.
2&3) Kwade’s Berlin studio, April 2024.
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19/04/2024

Harold Cohen’s AARON was the earliest artificial intelligence (AI) program for artmaking (described in detail in Seisma, Oct 2022). His computer collaborations are now the subject of a major survey at the Whitney Museum in New York (to May 19). That describes how Cohen (1928–2016) conceived the software in the late 1960s at the University of California, San Diego, and named it AARON in the early 1970s. The title alludes to the biblical figure anointed as speaker for his brother Moses, and questions how artistic creation is often glorified as a form of communication with the divine.

Meanwhile, in London, Gazelli Art House is presenting Cohen’s work from the transitional period 1966-74:

- ‘Quest’, 1966 – shown at that year’s Venice Biennale - is one of the last major paintings in Cohen’s pre-AI style. He was seeking by more orthodox means to devise new rules for painting – which may explain how there are some pre-echoes of the later work.
- ‘Untitled (i23-3451)’, 1969, is a coloured felt tip study with DITRAN output. Now a simple programme generates the drawing, distributing numbers in a pattern that Cohen follows in implementing his colour choices
- ‘Untitled’, 1971 is a large acrylic on canvas work, in which Cohen uses a related computer drawing as the starting point - scaling that up to make what emerges as a colourfield painting one could imagine being made ‘solo’. Although colour printing became possible in the 1980’s, it wasn’t until 2005 that Cohen found a satisfactory method for the computer to generate its own colour choices, rather than being programmed to imitate a human approach.
– ‘Silent Canyon 2’, 2008 is a typical example of what emerged from that fuller collaboration, with the computer’s colours.

From 2010 onwards, incidentally, Cohen started to add his colours on top of the computer’s choices, taking the collaboration a step further.

Gazelli Art House is also launching a new book on Harold Cohen on 7 May.




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📸 1) ‘Untitled (i23-3451)’, 1969. 2) ‘Quest’, 1966. 3) ‘Untitled’, 1971. 4) ‘Silent Canyon 2’, 2008. All by Harold Cohen ©️ Harold Cohen.