A Labyrinth Of Memory, Wonder and Captivity There are novels that construct imaginary worlds, and novels that make the ordinary world feel temporarily imaginary. Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi manages both. Published in 2020, sixteen years after Clarke’s debut, the novel begins…
Exploring the latest research on what altered-states reveal about reality There are few questions more likely to make neuroscience suddenly resemble philosophy than this one: what should we make of a person who takes a psychedelic drug, enters what appears…
On a wooded Surrey hillside, a small mortuary chapel turns local clay, medieval ornament, Art Nouveau and a Victorian fascination with world religions into something almost hallucinatory. Its creator, Mary Seton Watts, has spent too long in the shadow of…
Long before “immersive art” became a cultural industry, the Argentine-born radical was using lights, mirrors and games to prise spectators from passivity. Tate Modern’s luminous retrospective reveals both the promise and the paradox of participation. Very little stays obediently…
The Right To Doubt: Ai Weiwei Unfastens History Transforming the Aviva Studios Warehouse into the black box of history: a monstrous chandelier of bones hangs overhead, as an encyclopaedia of bombs covers the back wall, and a boat nearly…
The mirror talks back: building a vocabulary for a trillion new minds Antikythera’s new research programme imagines artificial intelligence not as a helpful assistant, but as a vast population inhabiting its own social and institutional ecology. The prospect is…
The Strange Biology Of Meaning Dylan Evans’ book Placebo: Mind Over Matter in Modern Medicine remains one of the sharpest investigations into how belief shapes biology, and why that should unsettle both sceptics and true believers alike. First published in…
Exploring Escher’s Exhibition You know the images, even if you can’t place the name: staircases that ascend forever and arrive back at their starting point, hands that reach out of the page to draw each other into existence, fish that…
The Smart Ring That Tracks Nothing: More Mindful Or Just Better Branding? Your smartwatch just buzzed. Your phone just lit up. An app you haven’t opened in three weeks sent you a notification about your heart rate variability. The paradox…
