seismamag

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.

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.

15/04/2024

Visitors to Geneva can currently see Pace’s ‘Inner Cosmos, Outer Universe’, a group exhibition showcasing thirty-odd works by seventeen artists from across the gallery’s international programme. They share, says the gallery, ‘a fascination with space, from cosmological heights to the molecular foundations of the self’. Our visual fine arts editor, Paul Carey-Kent, took a look at work by five of the artists showing at the exhibition: Leo Villareal, Kiki Smith, Latifa Echakhch, Richard Pousette-Dart, and Jeff Koons.

Kiki Smith’s sculpture, ‘Standing Stars II’ (shown in the first image above) can be read as stars connected to the earth; or as trees, the foliage of which takes the form of stars. Either way, the celestial and the arboreal comes into conjunction, consistent with Smith’s world of equality between all things: human, animal, vegetal, cosmic …

Leo Villareal is fascinated by the capability of mathematically defined systems to generate unpredictable sequences, and cites in particular the work of the Liverpool-born mathematician John Horton Conway (1937–2020). Composed on a square array of LED lights arranged in columns, each of Villareal’s ‘Cloud Drawings’ (‘Cloud Drawing (Large) 2’, 2018, shown in the second image above) pulse in non-repeating sequences in accordance with their own unique, randomized evocation of natural phenomena.

The full article is now available to read on our website, link in bio.

‘Inner Cosmos, Outer Universe’ is on show at Pace Gallery, Geneva, 15 March – 4 May 2024






📸 1) ‘Standing Stars II’ (2013) by Kiki Smith. Bronze, 39-1/4” x 27-1/2” (99.7 cm x 69.9 cm) © Kiki Smith, courtesy Pace Gallery 2) ‘Cloud Drawing (Large) 2’ (2018) by Leo Villareal. LEDs, custom software, electrical hardware, and metal, 68” × 68” (172.7 cm × 172.7 cm) © Leo Villareal, courtesy Pace Gallery
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11/04/2024

✨ INSIDE THE MIND ✨ For the sixth interview in this series, neuroaesthetician Dwaynica Greaves speaks to Professor Norah Zuniga Shaw, an artist, writer, and creative director for performance and technology projects at the intersection of body, ecology, collaboration, and liberation.

Zuniga Shaw’s award-winning digital projects and collaborations, including ‘Synchronous Objects’ with William Forsythe and ‘TWO’ with Bebe Miller, have toured widely and internationally and been presented at venues such as the Pompidou Center Paris, Taipei Arts Festival, PACT Zollverein Essen, Sadler’s Wells London, Hebbel Theater Berlin, Spring Dance Utrecht, BUDA Kortrijk, Wexner Center for the Arts (Wex) Columbus.

As a teaching artist based at the Ohio State University (OSU)’s Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD), Zuniga Shaw teaches courses in interdisciplinary research and composition, intermedia performance, critical theories of the body, performance and technology, curation, embodied digital literacy, and dance improvisation.

This full interview is now available on our website – link in our bio.





📸 1) Norah Zuniga Shaw performing the ‘Climate Banshee’ in December 2019. The ‘Climate Banshee’ is an ongoing series of performance included in ‘Climate Gathering’ transmedia performance rituals and as a social media installation on IG . Photograph by Seth Moses Miller .
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24/03/2024

✨ARTIST INTERVIEW✨ Conrad Shawcross doesn’t so much make works about mathematics and science – though he is certainly informed by those disciplines – so much as approach his artistic investigations in a comparable manner, experimenting with concepts, and building on the results in depth over many years as he pursues particular streams of thought.

Our visual fine arts editor, Paul Carey-Kent, caught up with Shawcross to discuss three long-running aspects of his practise: his use of the tetrahedron; the combination of time, light, and shadow; and Shawcross’s rope-making machines, including ‘The Nervous Systems (Umbilical)’, 2023, which employs an irrational – non-repeating – system. That’s because ‘the three arms are of different lengths, and all the gearing is aperiodic, so there’s no common denominator in the machine. If you try to follow one of the spools, it won’t go where you think it will … And so the machine will never come back to the initial conditions of the starting point.’ The rope will come down as a cone, and if you cut a cross-section, ‘it will be unique. It’s designed to have the string replaced each year, so it will run out after exactly twelve months, so there’s this moment when you replace the spools annually. In theory it can run 24/7 forever, but in 10, 20, 30 years you could extrapolate the exact moment that a cross-section represents – a bit like an ice core, it will be a unique moment in time.’ Meanwhile, ‘the rope will build up, accruing into a soft play area, almost, of organic fireproofed wool.’

To read their full conversation, please see the link in our bio 🔗





📸 ‘The Nervous System (Umbilical)’, 2023. Artwork Render by Richard Forbes-Hamilton © Conrad Shawcross. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.
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28/02/2024

Alejandro Guijarro: ‘MIT I’, 2013, ‘Harvard I’, 2013, ‘MIT IV’, 2013, ‘Berkeley I’, 2012, and ‘Cambridge V’, 2012.

Tristan H***e gallery have included one of Alejandro Guijarro’s blackboard photographs from his series ‘Momentum’ in their excellent group show ‘Apocalypse Now’, bringing a novel inflection to it by suggesting that its equations can be linked to end-of-world scenarios. The Spanish photographer photographed university blackboards as he found them, using a large-format camera, then printed them at life size. In his words ‘I became increasingly interested in all the academic institutions around the world that are working on new theories of reality – in particular quantum mechanics, which says nothing is for certain, everything is a matter of possibilities’. The blackboards he found ‘were full of equations, numbers and symbols, written by physicists making statements about the world and what it looks like to them. They were precise and exact, yet to me they looked like abstract paintings.’ We’re used to quantum physics underlying the landscape, but here it also seems as if landscapes might underlie quantum physics, especially when – as in ‘Cambridge V’ – the caretaker had partially wiped the board. Yet, as Guijarro says, ‘there are still the remains of things that had been written there, traces of the past. So in a way, I’m not just photographing one moment. It’s a bit like the history of science: someone invents a theory, then someone else comes along with a different theory, erasing what has gone before. So it continues: theories are written and erased, but traces remain.’ These images are over a decade old now: the chances are that whiteboards and interactive screens have almost entirely replaced blackboards by now – no traces will remain, and the project has slipped into the history of science education.




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20/02/2024

We were pleased to hear that the winner of the prestigious £40,000 Artes Mundi 10 prize is Taloi Havini (born Bougainville, Nakas/Hakö tribe; lives and works in Australia). You can read a full overview of her art as part of the TBA21–Academy Series at Seisma online, providing context for what won the prize.. At Mostyn, Llandudno, she presents a major immersive video installation, ‘Habitat’. The three-channel work continues her ongoing investigation into the legacy of resource extraction and Australia’s fraught relationship with the Pacific. Havini also presents ‘Where the rivers flow, (Panguna, Jaba, Pangara, Konawiru)’, a series of 40 prints extracted from the artist’s film archives following her journey through the centre of the tropical island of Bougainville. At Chapter, Cardiff Havini presents a further new photographic work comprising a mural and three lightboxes, entitled Hyena (day and night). The shows last to 25 Feb.




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📸 Portrait of Taloi Havini ©️Taloi Havini
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19/01/2024

✨SEISMIC SCIENCE✨In our fourth interview of the series, we speak to Dr Ross Piper, a zoologist, author, and photographer, who has travelled widely for research projects and as a presenter on wildlife shows for the BBC and Sky channels.

For SEISMIC: ART MEETS SCIENCE, Dr Piper responded to Claire Morgan’s work, ‘Heart of Darkness’, from an entomologist’s perspective. Here, he tells us how his fascination with insects took hold at an early age and about the ways in which creativity is woven through his work.

To read more of this conversation and the SEISMIC: ART MEETS SCIENCE exhibition, please visit our website, or tap the links in our bio 🔗





📸 1) Dr Piper and colleagues on BBC Myanmar expedition, using a light trap up a tree to attract insects. Photgraphy by Anwar Mamon. 2) Dr Ross Piper ©️Ross Piper. All rights reserved.
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