Quantum Biology Residency

Alex May was awarded an Institute of Advanced Studies fellowship as artist in residence for 2023-24, working with Dr Youngchan Kim at the University of Surrey School of Biosciences. The fellowship focused on an artistic expression of quantum biology and time reversibility, and on how those ideas relate to personal and cultural experiences of time and memory.

The residency brought an artistic perspective to Surrey’s Quantum Arrow of Time project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation. Through conversations around photosynthesis, DNA mutation, and other quantum effects in biology, the fellowship opened a new area of research for May while keeping attention on the lived and symbolic dimensions of scientific knowledge. The aim was not to illustrate the science, but to explore how difficult, often invisible processes might be translated into visual and experiential form.

That made the residency a strong fit with May’s wider practice, where technology and mediated systems are used to think about what can be recorded, what remains uncertain, and how memory is shaped by forms of representation. The fellowship later fed into The Cabinet of Intangible Curiosities, extending those questions through video sculpture and moving image.

Further information was published by the University of Surrey Institute of Advanced Studies.