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.
The University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Morris & Helen Belkin Art Gallery (The Belkin) sent an October 4, 2024 series of announcements (received via email). Here are two of the announcements, Note 1: You can see all of the announcements on The Belkin events webpage, Note 2: The art/science event is second, Note 3: Links have been removed
Conversation with Weiyi Chang and Lisa Myers
Tuesday, October 8 at 12:30 pm (online)
Please join us for an online conversation between guest curator Weiyi Chang and Lisa Myers, an artist and curator based in Toronto and Port Severn and a member of Beausoleil First Nation. Myers has worked with anthocyanin pigment from blueberries in printmaking and in her stop-motion animation. Her participatory performances involve sharing berries and other food items in social gatherings, reflecting on the value found in place and displacement; straining and absorbing. Recently, her artistic practice has expanded into audio and augmented reality projects that draw attention to the histories of the land, dislocation and gentrification. Through close attention to Myers’s practice, this conversation will allow us to reflect on themes and concerns articulated in An Opulence of Squander, currently on view at the Belkin.
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Artist Talk with Caroline Delétoille
Wednesday, October 16 at 3 pm
As part of Quantum Studio, artist-in-residence Caroline Delétoille will discuss her collaborative partnerships with scientists and engineers while embedded at UBC’s Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute. Delétoille will address her studio and research practices and share some initial insights about “Quantum Sensation,” a project initiated in 2023 in close collaboration with a physicist and philosopher and the focus of her residency at UBC. This talk is part of Ars Scientia, a larger research initiative which seeks to foster knowledge exchange across the arts, sciences and pedagogies.
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More about …
The conversation between Weiyi Chang and Lisa Myers is one of a series known as “Of Other Earths.” Here’s more about the series and the upcoming October 8, 2024 event, from The Belkin’s Conversation Series: Of Other Earths webpage,
Join us for Of Other Earths, a series recuperating forgotten, suppressed and abandoned histories to reconsider capitalist and colonial relationships to the planet and its inhabitants. Multiplying and compounding environmental harms are radically destabilizing earthly habitats, calling into question the viability of existing productivist paradigms that require continuous resource extraction and consumption.
This online conversation series hosted by curator Weiyi Chang foregrounds practitioners who aim to decentre and unsettle the logic of perpetual growth by examining alternative approaches to human-planetary relations. In each session she will engage an artist or scholar about their work in the context of one of the provocations running through the exhibition An Opulence of Squander. These dialogues will offer a generative way to think about how we engage, care for, and conserve past works of art and artists and the ecological lessons that experience might hold.
An Opulence of Squander draws primarily from the Belkin’s collection and focuses on works that critique the imperative for growth at all costs, growth that has contributed to our collective ecological and social conundrum. The works resist the growth imperative and reflect on the dual exploitation of labour and nature.
Join us at the Belkin for an artist talk by Quantum Studio artist-in-residence Caroline Delétoille, who will discuss her collaborative partnerships with scientists and engineers while embedded at UBC’s Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute. Delétoille will address her studio and research practices and share some initial insights about “Quantum Sensation,” a project initiated in 2023 in close collaboration with a physicist and philosopher and the focus of her residency at UBC.
Everyone is welcome and admission is free.
Caroline Delétoille’s month-long artist residency is a collaboration between the Consulate General of France in Vancouver and UBC’s Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute, the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery through Quantum Studio, which is part of a larger program of residencies sponsored by the Embassy of France in Western Canada.
This talk is part of Ars Scientia, a larger research initiative which seeks to foster knowledge exchange across the arts, sciences and pedagogies. Since launching in 2021, we have developed a wide variety of programs, including pairing artists and scientists in residencies to explore the potential for academic art-science collaborations. Artists provide new ways of imagining research and knowledge exchange as a dimensional counterpart to the research carried out at Blusson QMI. Through the development of conversation programs and panel series in tandem with the creation of an ongoing artist residency, Ars Scientia addresses questions of pedagogical outcomes, interdisciplinary research and the emergent interstices of art and science.
Caroline Delétoille
Artist
Caroline Delétoille is a Paris-based visual artist with a previous academic foray into mathematics. Her work interrogates questions concerned with memory, the ordinary and dreams. Though her practice is focused largely on painting and photography, her writing is central to the search for pictoriality and narration. Delétoille’s work has been exhibited in France and Spain. She is currently developing an exhibition with Musée Maison Poincaré in collaboration with the Kastler Brassel Laboratory and Quantum Studio.
Programme de résidence Arts & Sciences « Quantum Studio »
Caroline Delétoille est la nouvelle lauréate du programme de résidence Arts & Sciences « Quantum Studio », un programme créée par nos services avec nos partenaires de l’institut canadien Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute et la galerie d’art vancouvéroise Morris & Helen Belkin Art Gallery de l’Université de Colombie-Britannique. Caroline Delétoille succède à Javiera Tejerina. L’artiste viendra à Vancouver du 14 octobre au 12 novembre, sur le campus de l’université.
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La résidence, ouverte à l’ensemble des pratiques artistiques, a pour but de rendre plus accessible le travail des chercheurs en sciences quantiques (physique quantique, informatique quantique, physique de l’infiniment petit, sciences des matériaux, physique fondamentale) par le biais de l’art ; les échanges entre scientifiques et artistes sont au coeur de cette résidence.
Nos partenaires offriront à l’artiste un espace de réflexion dans lequel elle pourra se réunir avec les chercheurs, échanger sur leurs pratiques, apprendre de leurs travaux respectifs réfléchir ensemble à un projet créatif, à la croisée des arts et des sciences.
Le travail final de l’artiste sera donc un rendu, une mise en avant du travail des chercheurs. En fin de résidence, des séminaires et évènements publics co-organisés avec l’institut et la galerie sont prévus.
Caroline Delétoille
Biographie de l’artiste :
Mon travail est une recherche constante du souvenir, une documentation de l’ordinaire. En 2019, j’apprends par un coup de téléphone que la maison de famille a été vidée la veille et son contenu jeté. De là s’amorce chez moi une interrogation sur les souvenirs, leur développement et leur importance, dans une exploration plastique des traces de la mémoire.
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Qu’elle soit vraie ou fausse, l’histoire se raconte. Partant d’images d’archives, les photographies sont les pièces à convictions d’une enquête à mener. Mes peintures font un pas de côté avec la réalité, l’espace pictural devient un terrain de jeu. Les teintes sont franches, vives, dans une atmosphère saturée de verts et de jaunes. La couleur arrive sur le regardeur, je veux qu’elle l’enveloppe, lui tombe dessus. Des plans superposés en aplats structurent la composition et viennent déjouer les lignes de fuite. La perspective contribue ainsi à nous déséquilibrer, elle attire dans un décor ornemental sans profondeur de champ. Les motifs envahissent l’espace, les objets sortent de la toile, les ombres peuvent prendre des formes étranges, presque oniriques. À mesure que les repères rationnels sont perturbés, l’imagination s’active.
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Mes peintures parlent d’une mémoire collective et individuelle à partir de scènes intimes et familières telles que le quotidien de l’enfance, mon propre vécu et des photos de famille. J’aime expérimenter la matière à travers les techniques (huile, sérigraphie, monotype, acrylique, pastels…), dans l’esprit des courants des arts décoratifs.
The English language version posted by the Consulate is a rough summary and not a translation of their French language notice but both versions have the same embedded images.
Quantum Studio
I did a little digging to find out more about this Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute (Blusson QMI) and Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery (the Belkin), both at UBC, in partnership with The Embassy of France in Canada and their art/sci residency, known as the Quantum Studio.
UBC’s Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute (Blusson QMI) and Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery (the Belkin), in partnership with The Embassy of France in Canada, are delighted to announce Javiera Tejerina-Risso as the artist-in-residence for the Quantum Studio Art & Science Residency taking place in November 2023 at UBC Vancouver.
Javiera is a multidisciplinary French-Chilean artist from Marseille, France. Having worked in art and science for more than 15 years, she has developed a collaborative approach in her creative practice enabling her to work with researchers and include their vocabulary, concepts and areas of study in her creative work.
The Quantum Studio residency aims to build exchanges between art and quantum science immersed at the renowned UBC campus and in the rich local artistic ecosystem. The artist receives a €2,000 grant and paid accommodation during the residency.
Blusson QMI and the Belkin will provide the selected artist with a space in which the artist and researchers will be able to connect, discuss their projects, and learn from one another to create a project at the junction between art and science.
The scientific topics to be explored during this residency include:
Fundamental concepts: quantum mechanics, light-
Matter and materials: low-dimensional materials, organic and optoelectronic materials, superconductors, atomic structures (2D, 3D)
The Residency is part of a larger program of residencies initiated by the Embassy of France in West Canada. Other laureates will also be present in Vancouver in the fall of 2023 as part of the curatorial residency of the Embassy’s XR Fall program [extended reality], which focuses on immersive artistic creations. [emphasis mine]
Blusson QMI and the Belkin are the founding members of Ars Scientia, an interdisciplinary program aimed at creating synergies between scientists and artists in BC. At the intersection of arts and science, Ars (skill, technique, craft) Scientia (knowledge, experience, application) presents an opportunity to foster new modes of knowledge exchange intended to invigorate art, science, and pedagogy in search of profound exchange and collaborative research outcomes.
In 2023, the French Embassy in Canada, 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), launched the Arts-Sciences Residency Program “Quantum Studio” in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
In 2024, a new edition of this artist residency will take place from October 14 to November 12 at UBC Blusson QMI in Vancouver. The program accepts applications from French artists exploring the intersections between the arts and sciences. Applications are now open and will close on May 26, 2024, at 11:59pm Paris time [May 26, 2024, at 2:59pm (PT)].
Open to all artistic practices, the residency seeks to build exchanges between the arts and the quantum sciences (quantum physics, quantum computing, physics of the infinitely small, materials science, fundamental physics).
The Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery will provide the selected artist with a space in which artists and researchers can meet, discuss their practices, learn from each other and reflect together on a creative project at the crossroads of the arts and sciences.
Prior to the residency in Vancouver, several online meetings will be organized to establish and maintain initial contact between the winning artist in France and the host team (institutions and scientists) in Vancouver.
About the residency
Objectives
Foster or consolidate a creative project.
Share their work at arts and science seminars co-organized with the Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery.
Encourage discovery of Western Canada’s scientific and artistic ecosystem, as well as forming collaborations.
Advantages
4 weeks of residence in Vancouver
Accommodation on the UBC campus and a working office at the Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute
Round-trip airfare from France to Vancouver
A €2,000 residency grant (corresponding to per diem and participation in three half-day lectures/master classes during the residency)
Networking and connections with the local ecosystem
Participation in events in British Columbia during the residency.
Eligibility
Artist carrying an artistic project in writing or development
At least 18 years old
Resident in France for at least 5 years
Speaking English
Ideally, justifying first experiences of creation mixing arts and sciences (applications from artists who have already worked or are working in connection with physical sciences will be appreciated).
This program is open to artistic practices in all their diversity (writing, visual and plastic arts, digital arts, design, dance, performance, immersive realities, sound creation, etc.).
