The latest Quantum Studio artist-in-residence, Nadia Lichtig, has recently been announced in the University of British Columbia’s (Vancouver, Canada) Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery October 7, 2025 newsletter (also received via email),
ARS SCIENTIA – BRIDGING ART AND SCIENCE AT UBC
Building on exhibitions like The Beautiful Brain and Drift, the Ars Scientia research project connects artists with physicists to explore the intersections between the disciplines of art and science. A collaboration between the Belkin, the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute, with project support from the Institut Français du Canada and the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, we’re pleased to share news of Ars Scientia‘s latest initiatives.
Quantum Studio Artist Residency with Nadia Lichtig
We are happy to welcome French-German artist Nadia Lichtig as this year’s Quantum Studio Artist-in-Residence, a collaboration between the Institut Français du Canada and UBC’s Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute and the Belkin through Quantum Studio, which is part of the larger West-West residency program supported by Institut Français du Canada. Nadia Lichtig’s multidisciplinary practice explores the intersections between pictorial and musical composition. Her works emerge from a continuous process of translation, where each medium reconfigures the other. She creates immersive installations, shaped by multilingualism, embodied listening and the notion of the “ghost image.” Her work unfolds across both artistic and musical scenes, in France and internationally, under her own name or various pseudonyms. Nadia Lichtig’s one-month residency (October 8 to November 7 [2025]) will conclude with a presentation of her research – a score and live performance – in the final week of her residency, details to follow!
Brains, Poems, AI and Forensics: Inside Ars Scientia’s Prize for Artful Science Writing
This past academic year, we invited UBC students to contribute an essay exploring the profound and often catalyzing connections between the two fields of art and science. We are pleased to share the winning essay by Dalmar Yusuf, alongside writing by three distinguished runners-up, Ever Roberts, Robin Lei and Wendy Yang! Their writing offered fresh insights, compelling examples and bold reflections on how creative and scientific thinking can inform and enrich one another.
Since its launch, the Quantum Studio residency has been made possible through a vital partnership between the French Consulate and UBC’s leading arts and science institutions. The program supports meaningful collaboration between artists and researchers across quantum physics, quantum computing, materials science, and beyond—creating a fertile space for cross-disciplinary inquiry.
Nadia Lichtig’s work bridges pictorial and musical forms through a process of continuous translation—her installations imbue painting with sound, visual imagery with sonic texture, and engage concepts like multilingualism, embodied listening, and the “ghost image.” During her residency, she will produce Event Horizon, a monumental painting paired with a sound composition inspired by quantum theory and the philosophy of Karen Barad. Developed through dialogue with the QMI research community, the piece aims to probe the fragile thresholds between visibility and disappearance, memory and perception, presence and absence.
Although specific collaborations remain to be shaped once Nadia arrives, researchers, students, and artists interested in exploring possibilities are warmly invited to engage with her during the residency. As in previous editions, these spontaneous encounters often yield rich creative and intellectual fruit.
Public programming—including artist talks and open discussions—will be organized throughout her stay. These will offer glimpses into the evolving creative process and foster connections between disciplines.
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All about Nadia Lichtig
If you click on the READ MORE… link in the newsletter, you’ll be directed to the Quantum Studio Artist Residency 2025: Nadia Lichtig webpage where you’ll see Nadia Lichtig (right side of screen) and can click on a second READ MORE instruction to find more detail about her work,
Nadia Lichtig is an artist currently living in the South of France. In her multilayered work, voice is transposed into various media including painting, print, sculpture, photography, performance, soundscape and song—each medium approached not as a field to be mastered, but as a source of possibilities to question our ability to decipher the present. Visual and aural aspects entangle in her performances. Lichtig studied linguistics at the LMU Munich in Germany and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris, France with Jean-Luc Vilmouth, where she graduated with honours in 2001, before assisting Mike Kelley in Los Angeles the same year. She is currently pursuing a PhD in artistic research. Lichtig taught at the Shrishti School of Art and Technology, Bangalore, India as a visiting professor in 2006, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Valence in 2007 and is professor of Fine Arts at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-arts of Montpellier (MOCO-ESBA), France since 2009. She has collaborated with musicians who are also visual artists, such as Bertrand Georges (Audible), Christian Bouyjou (Popopfalse), Nicolu (La Chatte), Nina Canal (Ut) and Michael Moorley (The dead C). Lichtig worked and works under several group names and pseudonyms (until 2009: EchoparK, Falseparklocation, Skrietch, Ghosttrap and Nanana).
Nadia Lichtig is a French-German artist, based in Montpellier, France.
She is the new recipient of the Arts & Sciences residency program “Quantum Studio, Vancouver” a program created by the French Institute of Canada in 2023, in partnership with the Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute (QMI) and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia (UBC).
Nadia Lichtig succeeds Caroline Delétoille (2024) and Javiera Tejerina Risso (2023). The artist will be in residence in Vancouver from October 8 to November 7 2025.
Nadia Lichtig is an artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores the intersections between pictorial and musical composition. Her works emerge from a continuous process of translation, where each medium reconfigures the other. She creates immersive installations, shaped by multilingualism, embodied listening, and the notion of the “ghost image.” Her work unfolds across both artistic and musical scenes, in France and internationally, under her own name or various pseudonyms. She also teaches at MO.CO. ESBA in Montpellier and is currently pursuing a PhD in artistic research.
Special note: Lichtig’s work was last here in Vancouver as part of the Drift exhibition at the Belkin Gallery.
Not quite related (mushroom music)
The talk of music, visual art, physics, and “… a continuous process of translation, where each medium reconfigures the other” reminded me of Tarun Nayar (Modern Biology) and his work as described in my May 27, 2022 posting “The sound of the mushroom,” where he sonifies data he collects from mushrooms and other plants,
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A May 13, 2022 article by Philip Drost for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) As It Happens radio programme highlights the “From funky fungi to melodious mangos, this artist makes music out of nature” segment of the show, Note: Links have been removed,
At the intersection of biology and electronic music, you can find Tarun Nayar plugging his synthesizer equipment into mushrooms and other forms of plant life, hoping to capture their invisible bioelectric rhythms and build them into tranquil soundscapes.
“What I’m really doing is trying to stimulate joy and wonder and create these little sketches or vignettes using the plants themselves, so I like to think of it as definitely a collaboration,” Nayar told As It Happens guest host Helen Mann.
Nayar is an electronic musician and former biologist in Vancouver who uses his TikTok account and Youtube page, Modern Biology, to show off his serenading spores. And his videos have millions of views.
To make his fungi sing, Nayar uses little jumper cables to connect the vegetation with his synthesizer and measure their biological energy, or bioelectricity, which has an effect on the notes.
“The mushroom is contributing the pitch changes and the rhythm, and the synthesizer, which I have the mushroom plugged into, is contributing the timbre or the quality of the sound,” Nayar said.
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I have a Modern Biology update, which takes the music to an unexpected place, from a June 23, 2025 article by Barb Sligl for MONTECRISTO magazine, (Vancouver, Canada-based)
In the cocoon-like interior of the restaurant Burdock & Co, [emphasis mine] headphone-clad diners focus intently on the plates before them. Forks pause midair between bites as people don’t just taste, they also listen to the food. I watch the gleam of neon-illuminated earcups—like blips on an amplifier—and tune in to the warbles emitting from a DJ setup, where a tangle of cables is plugged into a Buddha’s hand citron.
Behind the deck is Tarun Nayar, the Vancouver-based musician known as Modern Biology. He’s performing here for the first of a new series of Taste Sound dinners. Tonight, the theme is “Citrus-Scented Rain Under a Snow Moon,” a sensory meld of electronic and organic that’s a collaboration between Nayar and Andrea Carlson, the chef-owner of the Michelin-starred restaurant.
As I sample each dish, Nayar plays ambient music that is textural, moody, atmospheric—a trippy translation of the plant ingredients’ bioelectricity. The Buddha’s hand is murmuring. The Japanese sudachi fruit [a citrus found in Japan] is singing. Kind of. Nayar is channelling their fluctuations of energy—via electrodes and clips attached to the fruit—into a sonic composition at the intersection of music and biology.
The latent life force of the diminutive sudachi sphere is literally amplified in Nayar’s interpretation of its electrical currents. And its yuzu-like flavour intensifies in my mouth. This link between the senses goes back to the memory-inducing smell and taste famously wrought by Proust’s madeleine taken with tea, but recent research reveals that sound also affects taste. The work of Charles Spence, an experimental psychologist and author of Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating, shows how different frequencies and volume influence taste—findings demonstrated tonight by Nayar and the sudachi’s twang and tang.
After the citrus soundscape at Burdock & Co, I meet Nayar in the Bloedel Conservatory, where he’s planning a live recording that includes the renowned Vancouver jazz multi-keyboardist Chris Gestrin. We sit on a bench amid the lush, teeming life and cacophony—including a pair of green-winged macaws perched behind us. Their squawks and trills punctuate our conversation as my glasses fog up in the humid environment of 500 plant varieties that include rare cycads and a corpse flower.
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The biosonification device used to do this is akin to a modified polygraph machine, Nayar says. “It’s like a Grade 6 science project. It’s not crazy science like splitting atoms,” but it’s also on the frontier of fascinating research in botany and mycology. He cites SPUN (Society for the Protection of Underground Networks) and Michael Levin (a leading researcher in the “cognitive glue” of bioelectricity), as well as John Cage and Brian Eno (pioneers of generative music) and Sam Cusumano (an engineer and the creator of the first commercial biosonification device in 2012). Even a century ago, Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, who Nayar calls India’s Einstein, laid the groundwork for plant neurobiology and invented instruments to detect plant signals.
Educated as a biologist himself, Nayar moved to Vancouver about 25 years ago to pursue a master’s degree in oceanography. But his career morphed into professional music from performing as a DJ to co-founding the popular band Delhi 2 Dublin and playing high-profile venues including Glastonbury and Burning Man. Now biosonification has reconnected Nayar to his academic roots. “It’s kind of a dream come true,” he says. “I can approach it as an artist, but I understand the science.”
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… Through immersive events—from the botanically themed Taste Sound dinner at Burdock & Co to a Mushroom Church performance in the historic De Duif church in Amsterdam—he prods humans to commune with plants. He’s brought together people in parks on “field trips” and in concerts from Berlin to Bangalore and performed at Art Basel Miami and the Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm.
Three UBC/Belkin Gallery art/science events are being highlighted here. Only the first one is ‘made-in-Vancouver’.
I covered the Quantum Studio artist-in-residency of Caroline Delétoille in some detail in my October 7, 2024 posting. I have news about her then upcoming artist talk, along with more information about the Quantum Studio artist-in-residence programme.
Drift
This show was originally developed bythe Arthur B. McDonald Canadian Astroparticle Physics Research Institute and SNOLAB (science facility located deep underground in the operational Vale Creighton nickel mine), both in Ontario. The exhibition along with the Ars Scientia initiative were highlighted in my September 6, 2021 posting.
The Beautiful Brain
This was not simply an exhibition, it was part of a series of events in Vancouver being hosted by the neuroscience community. Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s ‘beautiful brain’ show, developed by the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota with the Instituto Cajal, remains on of my favourites; it’s mentioned here in my September 11, 2017 posting and, again, in my May 9, 2018 posting as it made its way from New York to Boston’s Harvard University.
Finally, I look forward to getting details about Lichtig’s presentation of her research (a score and live performance) in the final week of her residency sometime between November 1 – 7, 2025.
