Mendeleev’s revenge

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Visiting the exhibition Periodic Tales at Compton Verney for New Scientist, 27 October 2015

The haunting, slightly bilious yellow-green of uranium glass fascinated Victorian interior designers. Uranium metal glows green in ultraviolet light, and this property lends uranium glass a subtle yet compelling inner fire.

The Victorians made any number of knick-knacks out of the stuff. The exhibition Periodic Tales at Compton Verney – a stately home near Stratford-upon-Avon, UK, best known for its collection of British folk art – boasts a piano foot, an ornamental castor fashioned to spread the weight of the parlour piano.

It is mildly radioactive, which triggers all manner of safety protocols. “We installed it using special gloves,” says Penelope Sexton, the exhibition’s curator. “I shudder to think what any passing Victorian would have made of us.”

Sexton is leading Compton Verney’s long-term campaign to become a contemporary arts venue as well as a “grand day out” for visitors from London and central England.

Periodic Tales combines simple objects made from different elements – a tiny lead figurine from the Aegean islands is the oldest, dating from around 2500 BC – with art that draws contemporary mischief from Mendeleev’s world-changing periodic table of the elements of 1869.

Before modern chemistry, it was assumed that the properties of fundamental materials were innate and could be combined. By that logic, blending sulphur’s yellow and mercury’s sheen ought to have made gold. Mendeleev, a Russian chemist and inventor, spoiled that happy dream, codifying the elements we recognise today in a table that reflects a profound atomic reality we know to be true but cannot directly see.

To read the periodic table is to be confronted by how baffling the world is.

Solids, liquids and gases nestle against each other for reasons that cannot be unpicked by simply resorting to an intuitive understanding of the human-scale world. The queer thing about calling this show Periodic Tales is that there are no tales to tell, only a stunned acknowledgement that one can, in the same moment, both be handed the keys to the material world, and firmly locked out of ever intuiting it.

The artworks Sexton has chosen struggle for purchase. Simon Patterson’s periodic tables of celebrity are facile. And Cornelia Parker‘s circle of crushed silver ornaments is almost as pretty as a well-lit silver object would have been had she not crushed it in the first place. Maria Lalic‘s chrome mirrors are pure Ikea (pictured below).

Periodic Tales: all the elements of a splendid failure

But there are some stunning successes, too. The frames of John Newling‘s wall-mounted Value; Coin, Note and Eclipse (pictured at the start of this story) capture the alchemical transformation of a living plant into gold coinage, by way of pressed kale leaves and the judicious application of gold leaf. It is a narrative piece, rooted firmly in the safe ground of material production, value and exchange.

It is significant, I think, that other standout pieces also explore the way some elements are more or less effortlessly turned into cultural signs – quite literally in the case of Fiona Banner‘s neon Brackets (An Aside).

There is much else in the show worth seeing: Danny Lane‘s Blue Moon makes cobalt positively drinkable. And there’s plenty to think about: another work by Parker, Stolen Thunder, is a display of handkerchiefs stained by the tarnish rubbed off famous objects.

But the real draw – counter-intuitive though this is – is the necessary failure of the show. Mendeleev’s table is a masterpiece of objectivity. Its truth refuses to be anthropomorphised, moralised upon, or otherwise domesticated. Undaunted, Sexton brings us right to the edge of what art can do to communicate science.

“I’m not alone in here”

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Exploring Yellowbluepink at Wellcome Collection in London

 

Three bands of light – one pink, one yellow, one blue – illumine the obliterating smog that artist Ann Veronica Janssens has used to fill the Wellcome Collection’s first-floor gallery. This white-floored, white-walled, white-ceilinged room is trying very hard to disappear.

There’s no directionality to the light here, so there is no sense of up or down. Your first sensation is not so much of falling as of leaning, or rather, of being leant, like a roll of carpet propped against a wall. This sensation, that you are suddenly operating out of kilter with the real geometry of the world, does not go away.

I’m not alone in here. The other explorers are just about visible as they come within braking distance of me. The walls are another matter. The light reflected off the smog and the light reflected off the walls are indistinguishable. The walls may as well be made of glass for all that you can see them. Hitting one, I turn and move forward, running a finger along the hard surface to keep my orientation – and promptly bump my nose on another wall.

The room is a rainbow of mist. You step through an airlock arrangement into pink mist. If you walk straight ahead you will shortly pass through a yellow murk and into a blue cloud.

Those loose synonyms – mist, murk and cloud – aren’t just there to get what might have been a repetitive sentence past the subeditor. They have significance.

Ann Veronica Janssen's room of fog bumps you through the rainbow

The pink zone is a true smog, the one that most obviously messes with your perceptions. It feels profoundly, viscerally wrong – faux psychoanalytical explanations of being trapped in a womb seem irresistible.

The pink zone robs me of things to see, and also of the actual sensation of seeing. I am made painfully aware of the floaters scudding over my eyeball. It’s probably best to avoid this show when you’re recovering from the night before.

The yellow middle zone is a queasy, transitional space, that seems to shift depending on whether I approach it from the blue end of the room or the pink end. I find it hard to stop here.

In the blue zone, in contrast to the pink zone, it is virtually impossible for me to imagine that I cannot see. There’s still nothing around me, but the nothing feels familiar and natural. I’m walking on air. What could possibly go wrong? As I think this, I stub my toe: another wall.

“I love what I do and I’m really good at it”

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No matter how far he runs, Matt Damon cannot escape the attentions of New Scientist

 

Towards the end of Ridley Scott’s The Martian, marooned NASA astronaut Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) says goodbye to the habitat that has kept him alive for more than 500 days. As he enters the airlock to leave, he pauses, turns – and there, on a table, is his space helmet. Sourly, he snatches it up: he has nearly gone and killed himself again.

Set about 30 years in the future, The Martian tells the story of how Watney survives at the very cusp of death, at which every trivial error, every moment of forgetfulness, will kill him in about 35 seconds. Jeopardy is the stuff of adventure movies. What makes all this different is its remarkable lack of interest in what jeopardy feels like “inside”, and its loving depiction of how people should deal with it.

Before he shot his last scene at the Korda Filmpark, outside Budapest in Hungary, CultureLab caught up with Damon, who was tasked with conveying what it would be like to survive for 18 months only on potatoes grown in your own faeces. He explained: “Ridley and I agreed The Martian is not one of those existential survival movies. Neither is it just a popcorn kind of whizz-bang, he’s-never-really-in-danger type of experience. The key is to have the audience feel the enormity without it seeming ponderous. And it has to be funny, because Watney and his colleagues are capable of doing really dangerous things and having a good sense of humour about them.”

No wonder NASA got behind the film: its tale of the administration’s daring, unsanctioned bid to rescue one of their own gives every department a hero. But where The Martian gets interesting is in its refusal to take heroism at face value. Watney survives because he is smart and knowledgeable, can get by without company and likes the sound of his own voice; and because coming up with a strong, snarky one-liner can make his whole day. He survives because, as he says in a message meant for his parents, “I love what I do and I’m really good at it.”

This distillation of NASA’s philosophy is endorsed by Ellen Ochoa, director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, who praised Weir’s book for encapsulating aspects of mission training. “It is a very realistic scenario of what we go through when we train crew members and flight controllers, who must quickly analyse a situation and prioritise tasks,” she said. She added that resilience is “probably the single most important characteristic to have as an explorer, and Watney proves to be extraordinarily resilient”.

The film’s whole approach favours accuracy over visual bombast. Less spectacular than Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2013), and a lot less silly than Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), The Martian has exploited NASA’s enthusiasm well, conjuring up habitats, spacesuits, spacecraft and launch vehicles that carry its stamp of approval.

Is The Martian a nerd thriller? For sure: you can’t have Damon declaring he will “have to science the shit out of this” and not find yourself moving your biros to your shirt pocket. But it’s more than a love letter to science. It is an entertaining depiction of a way of behaving that keeps people alive in extreme circumstances: love your job; embrace the little you can do and do it; like it or not, death is always coming, so to hell with it. This, more than any amount of Mars-mission razz, is the real heart of The Martian, the source of its optimism, and a quality deserving of praise.

Wild, silly and enlightening

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Visiting Lofoten’s International Art Festival and the Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria, for New Scientist, 23 September 2015

SITTING on a driftwood sculpture in the middle of a large paddling pool, a man in silver face paint and bodysuit – I think he is supposed to be a fish – is shouting his lungs up. He is attempting to express the emotions of the sea.

There’s a lot of this sort of thing on the Scandinavian arts scene, and it’s spreading. More often than not it doesn’t work, but how other than by wild, ugly and very silly experiments will we work out how to express, in human terms rather than in figures, the enormity of climate change, mass extinction and the epochal depletion we are learning to call the Anthropocene?

“Disappearing Acts” was the theme of this year’s Lofoten International Art Festival. A 24-year-old institution, it is held every other year on a cluster of islands off Norway’s north-west coast, just above the Arctic circle. This year’s festival explored several kinds of disappearance: people are leaving the countryside for the cities, while globally, the countryside itself is dying off in unexpected and unnerving ways.

There’s paranoia in this vision, and a millennial impulse that has nothing to do with science. As the UN climate conference in Paris nears, however, and with Syrian refugees being spotted entering Norway from Arctic Russia by bike, some response beyond blind panic would surely be welcome.

At the Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria, a behemoth of the art, science and design scene now 36 years old, discrete “problems” find technical “solutions” in a distinctly dated manner. For example, it featured a “Future Mobility” expo, the star of which was the Mercedes-Benz F 015 Luxury in Motion self-driving car.

The F 015 is meant to exemplify a future “when there are more robots than people working in factories, everything is intelligently interlinked, autos drive autonomously and drones deliver the mail”. Don’t let the automobile styling fool you, this “car” is the size of a truck, and stuffed with exotic materials. Nearby, the curators have undercut it quite brilliantly by placing a “Fahrradi Farfalla FFX”, Austrian artist Hannes Langeder’s absurdly overstyled “sports car”, made from bicycle parts and gaffer tape, and sprayed with bright red lacquer.

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Ars Electronica is full of such arch gestures. This year it also featured PSX Consultancy, an international collaboration to produce “sex toys for plants”. Information boards explain each plant’s reproductive “problem” and then propose a “solution”. For turmeric, an infertile plant that reproduces only via its rhizomes, weather balloons will carry the plants to the stratosphere, where, it is hoped, the increased solar radiation will introduce some variety to its genome. Alas this is not true: turmeric is not infertile – it is another flowering ginger, which happens to have the option of reproducing via rhizomes besides producing seed.

This kind of intervention used to seem ingenious, then cute, but now it’s irritating. Even when the premise is right, if our deteriorating ecology has taught us anything, it’s that our solutions to discrete problems only breed more problems down the road.

Why don’t we just pay attention to what is happening to our world, and speak about that as honestly as we can? This is the idea behind SALT, a refreshingly low-key festival whose run on the Norwegian island of Sandhornøy has just ended. Over the coming years, it will circumnavigate Earth’s most northerly settlements, from Greenland to the Faroes, from Scotland to Spitsbergen.

It has staged music concerts attended by thousands, but is most itself when a handful of visitors huddle in a shack made of driftwood and shipping containers to contemplate Glimt, an installation of moving lights by Norwegian artist HC Gilje that evokes the fleeting passage of living things across the landscape.

SALT’s co-founder Helga-Marie Nordby apologised when I visited this September: it was so warm, you could bathe in the ocean and dry off in the sun. “It’s not usually like this,” she said. A long and eloquent silence followed.Lofotens

The disaster of the cloud itself

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Tung-Hui Hu’s A Prehistory of the Cloud reviewed for New Scientist

LAST week, to protect my photographs of a much-missed girlfriend, I told all my back-up services to talk to each other. My snaps have since been multiplying like the runaway brooms in Disney’s Fantasia, and I have spent days trying to delete them.

Apart from being an idiot, I got into this fix because my data has been placed at one invisible but crucial remove in the cloud, zipping between energy-hungry servers scattered across the globe at the behest of algorithms I do not understand.

By duplicating our digital media to different servers, we insure against loss. The more complex and interwoven these back-up systems become, though, the more insidious our losses. Sync errors swallow documents whole. In the hands of most of us, JPEGs degrade a tiny bit each time they are saved. And all formats fall out of fashion eventually.

“Thus disaster recovery in the cloud often protects us against the disaster of the cloud itself,” says Tung-Hui Hu, a former network engineer whose A Prehistory of the Cloud poses some hard questions of our digital desires. Why are our commercial data centres equipped with iris and palm recognition systems? Why is Stockholm’s most highly publicised data centre housed in a bunker originally built to defend against nuclear attack?

Hu identifies two impulses: “First, a paranoid desire to pre-empt the enemy by maintaining vigilance in the face of constant threat, and second, a melancholic fantasy of surviving the eventual disaster by entombing data inside highly secured data vaults.”

The realm of the cloud does not countenance loss, but when we touch it, we corrupt it. The word for such a system – a memory that preserves, encrypts and mystifies a lost love-object – is melancholy. Hu’s is a deeply melancholy book and for that reason, a valuable one.

Andrew Krasnow: skin in the climate game

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Interviewing the artist Andrew Krasnow for New Scientist

It’s part walrus, part human. This is the first picture released of a controversial sculpture made from human skin combined with leather, complete with tusks made from animal bone from the 1960s. “Whiskers” of human hair are also attached near its nose.

Created by US artist Andrew Krasnow, Walrus Souvenir, which is based on a pattern from a leather craft hobby kit, incorporates some of the artist’s own skin. “The rest was obtained from skin donors in the 1980s who gave their living consent,” he says.

Completed in 2000, the walrus was first exhibited in the US in response to then president George W. Bush’s recommendation to start exploratory oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The recently released photo allows the piece to be seen by the rest of the world for the first time.

Although Krasnow was originally targeting the Bush administration’s obsession with uncertainties around climate change, he now hopes Walrus Souvenir will serve to highlight the global scale of the problem. His sculpture alludes to the interconnection between human and other animal life, raising the possibility that human handiwork may one day lead to the extinction not only of the walrus, but of humanity itself, he says.

Over the years, Krasnow’s bleak and uncompromising view of US political history has landed him in just as much trouble as the human skin used in his artwork. The irony of having exhibitions rejected in the 1980s, when prior to the NAGPRA Act the US government held about 15,000 indigenous human remains without the communities’ permission, isn’t lost on him. “In terms of purposeful intent, the only agenda I have in mind for this piece is that it does some good,” he says.

The GV Art gallery in London is hoping to exhibit the walrus later this year, once they obtain permission from the UK’s Human Tissue Authority.

How we see now

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For New Scientist, a review of Nicholas Mirzoeff’s book How to See the World

NICHOLAS MIRZOEFF, a media, culture and communication professor at New York University, wants to justify the study of visual culture by describing, accessibly, how strange our visual world has become.

This has been done before. In 1972 artist and writer John Berger made Ways of Seeing, a UK TV series and a book. This was also the year that astronaut Harrison Schmitt took the Blue Marble picture of Earth from Apollo 17, arguably the most reproduced photograph ever.

By contrast, in How to See the World, Mirzoeff’s mascot shot is the selfie taken by astronaut Akihiko Hoshide during his 2012 spacewalk. This time, Earth is reflected in Hoshide’s visor: the planet is physically different and changing fast. Transformations that would have been invisible to humans because they took place so slowly now occur in a single life. “We have to learn to see the Anthropocene,” writes Mirzoeff.

Images are ubiquitous, and we have learned to read them as frames in a giant, self-assembling graphic novel. Visual meaning is found in the connections we make between those images. We used to flock to the cinema for that sort of peculiar dream logic, but now we struggle to awaken. Mirzoeff cites artist Clement Valla writing that “we are already in the Matrix”.

Simple iconography is in retreat. During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, Soviet missile trailers were visible in photos shown to the media. By 2003, the photos that US general Colin Powell showed of supposed weapons-making kit were lathered in yellow labelling, claiming to show what we could not in fact see.

Tracing the political, social and environmental implications of our visual culture, in words and black and white images, is a job of work. Mirzoeff succeeds: this is a dizzying and delightful book.

More than human

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For New Scientist: a review of Ian Tattersall’s The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack, and other cautionary tales from human evolution

THE odd leg bones and prominent brow ridges of a fossil hominid found in Belgium in 1830 clearly belong to an ancient relative of Homo sapiens. But palaeontologist August Mayer wasn’t having that: what he saw were the remains of a man who had spent his life on horseback despite a severe case of rickets, furrowing his brow in agony as a consequence, who hid himself away to die under 2 metres of fossil-laden sediment.

The “Cossack” in Ian Tattersall’s new book, The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack, exemplifies the risk of relying too much on the opinion of authorities and not enough on systematic analysis. Before they were bureaucratised and (where possible) automated, several sciences fell down that particular well.

Palaeoanthropology made repeated descents, creating a lot of entertaining clatter in the process. For example, Richard Leakey’s televised live spat with Donald Johanson over human origins in 1981 would be unimaginable today. I think Tattersall, emeritus curator at the American Museum of Natural History, secretly misses this heroic age of simmering feuds and monstrous egos.

The human fossil record ends with us. There are many kinds of lemur but, as he writes, only one kind of human, “intolerant of competition and uniquely able to eliminate it”. As a result, there is an immense temptation to see humans as the acme of an epic evolutionary project, and to downplay the diversity our genus once displayed.

Matters of theory rarely disturbed the 20th-century palaeontologists; they assigned species names to practically every fossil they found until biologist Ernst Mayr, wielding insights from genetics, stunned them into embarrassed silence. Today, however, our severely pruned evolutionary tree grows bushier with every molecular, genetic and epigenetic discovery.

Some claim the group of five quite distinct fossil individuals discovered in 1991 in Dmanisi, east of the Black Sea, belong to one species. Use your eyes, says Tattersall; around 2 million years ago, four different kinds of hominid shared that region.

Tattersall explains how epigenetic effects on key genes cascade to produce radical morphological changes in an eye blink, and why our unusual thinking style, far from being the perfected product of long-term selective pressures, was bootstrapped out of existing abilities barely 100,000 years ago.

He performs a difficult balancing act with aplomb, telling the story of human evolution through an accurate and unsparing narrative of what scientists actually thought and did. His humility and generosity are exemplary.

VR: the state of the art

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For New Scientist

THEY will tell you, the artists and engineers who work with this gear, that virtual realities are digital environmental simulations, accessed through wearable interfaces, and made realistic – or realistic enough – to steal us away from the real world.

I can attest to that. After several days sampling some of the latest virtual environments available in the UK, I found that reality righted itself rather slowly.

Along the way, however, I came across a question that seemed to get to the heart of things. It was posed by Peter Saville, prime mover of Manchester’s uber-famous Factory Records, and physicist Brian Cox. They explained to an audience during Manchester’s International Festival how they planned to fit the story of the universe on to sound stages better known for once having housed legendary soap Coronation Street.

Would The Age of Starlight, their planned immersive visualisation of the cosmos, give audiences an enriched conception of reality, or would people walk home feeling like aliens, just arrived from another planet?

Cox enthused about the project’s educational potential. Instead of reading about woolly mammoths, he said, we will be able to “experience” them. Instead of reading about a mammoth, trying to imagine it, and testing that imagined thing against what you already know of the world, you will be expected to accept the sensory experience offered by whoever controls the kit.”We will be able to inject people with complex thoughts in a way that’s easier for them to understand!” Cox exclaimed. So, of course, will everyone else.

Institutions of learning, then, had best associate their virtual reality experiments with the most trustworthy figure they can find, such as David Attenborough. His First Life is the London Natural History Museum’s joyride through perilous Cambrian shallows, built on the most recent research.

“When the film starts, try to keep your arms to yourselves,” begged the young chap handing out headsets at the press launch, for all the world as though this were 1895 and we were all about to run screaming from Louis Lumière’s Arrival of a Train. The animator, given free rein, renders tiny trilobites on human scale. This is a good decision – we want to see these things, after all. But such messing around with scale inevitably means that when something truly monstrous appears, we are not as awed as we perhaps ought to be.

VR sets awkward challenges like this. From a narrative perspective, it is a big, exciting step away from film. Camera techniques like zooming and tracking ape the way the eye works; with VR, it is up to us what we focus on and follow. Manipulations have a dreamlike effect. We do not zoom in; we shrink. We do not pan; we fly.

Meanwhile, virtual reality is still struggling to do things everyone assumes it can do already. Accurately reading a user’s movements, in particular, is a serious headache. This may explain the excitement about the two-person game Taphobos, which solves the problem by severely limiting the player’s movements. Taphobos, a play on the Greek words for “tomb” and “fear”, traps you in a real coffin. With oxygen running out, the entombed player, equipped with an Oculus Rift headset, must guide their partner to the burial site over a radio link, using clues dotted around the coffin.

“This combination,” say the makers, master’s students in computing at the University of Lincoln, UK, “allows you to experience what it would be like if you were buried alive with just a phone call to the outside world.” Really? Then why bother? By the time you have addressed virtual reality’s many limitations, you can end up with something a lot like, well, reality.

London’s theatre-makers know this. At first, immersive entertainments such as Faust (2006) and The Masque of the Red Death (2007), pioneered by the theatre company Punchdrunk, looked like mere novelties. Now they are captivating bigger audiences than ever.

Traditional theatregoers may grow weary of running confused across gargantuan factories and warehouses, trying to find where the action is, but for gamers such bafflement is a way of life, and to play scenarios out in the real world is refreshing.

Until 27 September, London-based Secret Cinema offers a similar sort of immersion: inviting you to come battle the evil Empire through several meticulously realised sets as a warm-up to a screening of The Empire Strikes Back. It’s all played at a gentle, playful pace: something between a theatrical experience and a club night.

Right or wrong, VR promises to outdo these entertainments. It’s supposed to be better, more engaging than even the most carefully tailored reality. That’s a very big claim indeed.

More likely, VR may be able to present the world in a way that would otherwise be inaccessible to our unaugmented senses. The first tentative steps in this direction were apparent at this year’s Develop games conference in Brighton, where the Wellcome Trust and Epic Games announced the winner of their first Big Data Challenge. Launched in March, the competition asked whether game designers could help scientists to better visualise incomprehensibly large data sets.

Among the front runners was Hammerhead, a team taking on the enormous task of designing a decent genomics browser. They have barely changed in a decade. Once they held barely a dozen data fields, now they need hundreds since studying the behaviour of different genes under different conditions is a multidimensional nightmare. Martin Hemberg of the Sanger Institute, who set the challenge, explained: “Genomics is very data-intensive. Trying to integrate all this and make sense is a huge challenge. We need better visualisation tools.”

Hammerhead’s proposal promises something close to SF writer William Gibson’s original conception of cyberspace: a truly navigable and manipulable environment made of pure information. Not surprisingly, it will take more than the challenge’s modest $20,000 to realise such a vision.

Instead, the prize was handed to two London studios, Lumacode and Masters of Pie, who collaborated on a tool that is already proving itself as it takes the 14,500 family health records in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, and spits them out in real time so researchers can follow their hunches. It even boasts privacy tools to facilitate the work of hundreds of researchers worldwide.

On current evidence, today’s VR is going to change everything by just a little bit. It will disconcert us in small ways. It will not give us everything we want. But reality doesn’t either, come to that. We can afford to be patient.

Marc Quinn: spoiling the sunset

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Interviewing Marc Quinn about The Toxic Sublime at White Cube, Bermondsey for New Scientist, 15 July 2015

I HAVE always loved Turner and his paintings of the sublime, but we no longer have the pure relationship with nature he had. We can only understand nature by interacting with it, so there aren’t many landscapes untouched by humans.

I’m a city artist so I wanted to make an image of the sublime that was more urban, seen through the goggles of the environmental paradox that if you set off to see something, bit by bit your visit will ruin it. When people say we are going to destroy the planet, we aren’t: we are going to destroy ourselves. The planet will find a new equilibrium.

Each painting in my show uses the same photo I took of a sunrise on a Caribbean beach. I printed it on to canvas and then painted on top. The colours are absurd, of course. There are pinks like those in a sunset, but when you paint them you end up with ridiculous kitschification. Turner’s palette mattered to me, but I was much more influenced by the range of colours afforded by spray paints.

Next, I marked the horizon with tape, then ground lines into the canvas, like map lines or electrical wires or flight paths, and put more tape on. I painted on that, and then started grinding away the paint. You see colours coming through. It’s layered in a very natural way: erosion, if you like.

Then I took the canvases out on to the streets and hammered them into anything to do with water – drains, manhole covers. There’s “Thames Water” indented in one place. You have this image, this element, that’s wide and pure, and then you have what we have done to it. There is a sublime, but it’s one that you have to see through our relationship to it.

But I also wanted to reflect the paradox that if you looked at a nuclear explosion miles away, you would be terrified and horrified, but you would find beauty in it.

So once I bashed the canvas, I stuck it to aluminium, twisted and wrestled with it, kicked and folded it. I wanted it to look like a found object, from off the back of a truck, or the side of a plane that’s fallen out of the sky.

Alongside the paintings are Frozen Waves, sculptures based on the erosion of conch shells by waves, made from stainless steel or white concrete. When a conch erodes, the thickest bit is the last to go. It ends up looking like a wave, the thing that produced it – nature’s self-portrait. The shell’s purpose has become nebulous; it crosses the line between representational and abstract. One of the sculptures is over 7 metres long. The bigger they are, the more it is like being on a beach with a wave coming at you.

The shell is like a scientific demonstration of time. On the back face is the past, the circles made by the accretion of time as the shell gets bigger. And there are patterns: did nature, via erosion, cause dots like a scrimshaw, or maybe they are something people used to record time or make a map? The object’s front face is the present, polished because it’s always in immediate contact with the world.

I used a 3D scanner to make Frozen Waves. If they had been made by hand, they would have felt like a human artefact. This technology is going to change everything: what will matter is not what you have made, but how you have transformed it. If you change the material from which something is made, you look at it in a different way.

I’m working on a 3D scanner for people, to capture movement and print it exactly. In a hundred years, these prints will be like daguerreotypes at the beginning of photography.

Art should reflect the time in which it is made. But maybe some things can’t be understood in the time that you made them. Take the image I created of the genome scientist John Sulston, using his DNA. I like that although it appears abstract, it’s the most realistic portrait in the National Portrait Gallery because it includes instructions to remake the sitter. I like that irony, and the idea that something can be image and object at the same time.