The Cabinet of Intangible Curiosities
A cabinet-like video sculpture that stages quantum biology through compartments, sequences, and glimpses of what cannot be seen directly.
The Cabinet of Intangible Curiosities is a video sculpture that uses the historical cabinet of curiosities as a structure for thinking through quantum biology. Developed during May’s Institute of Advanced Studies fellowship at the University of Surrey, the work gathers together moving-image vignettes around phenomena that are difficult to observe directly, including robin magnetoreception, tandem dimer chromophores, photosynthesis, spherical cows, and the human fear of the invisible.
Instead of flattening difficult ideas into explanation, the work keeps them partial, housed, and slightly elusive. Enclosure, sequencing, and light become ways of holding uncertainty rather than resolving it. That restraint matters within May’s wider practice, where technological images are often used not to close a question down, but to show how memory, metaphor, and scientific understanding remain entangled.
Additional notes
- Created in 2024 during an Institute of Advanced Studies fellowship at the University of Surrey, Guildford, UK.
- Developed in dialogue with Dr Youngchan Kim and colleagues in the University of Surrey School of Biosciences.
- Debuted at the University of Surrey Quantum Biology and Blue Sky Research conference in July 2024.
- Video documentation of the work is available on YouTube.
- A related artist talk discussed the work’s inspiration, design, and construction.