The Cabinet of Intangible Curiosities - Artist Talk
· talk
Alex May presented The Cabinet of Intangible Curiosities at the University of Surrey, marking the conclusion of his quantum biology fellowship.
Alex May presented The Cabinet of Intangible Curiosities at the University of Surrey on Thursday 11 July 2024, marking the conclusion of his Institute of Advanced Studies fellowship with the School of Biosciences. The talk accompanied the display of the new video sculpture and set out how the work grew from conversations around quantum biology during the residency.
Rather than treating the science as something to illustrate, the talk explained how the work uses the cabinet of curiosities form to hold ideas that are difficult to observe directly. May discussed the structure of the piece, its individual moving-image vignettes, and the challenge of giving visual form to phenomena such as magnetoreception, photosynthesis, superposition, abstraction, and invisibility without collapsing them into simple explanation.
What mattered here was not only the finished object, but the translation process behind it. The talk made visible how research becomes artistic form through metaphor, editing, rhythm, and decisions about what can and cannot be shown. That approach sits squarely within May’s wider practice, where digital media is used to think through memory, mediation, and unstable forms of evidence rather than to stage technology as spectacle.
The talk is available to watch on YouTube. The work itself can also be viewed in a separate video documentation recording, and the residency was profiled by the University of Surrey.