Presenting physics-informed work-in-progress, Carsten Nicolai’s HYbr:ID opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (MACRO). A listening lounge featuring a sound piece that “oscillates between more stylized, dilated rhythms and dreamy atmospheres generated by low frequencies” inspired by Hermann Minkowski’s 1908 model of spacetime takes centre stage. Also presented are related drawings and graphics in which the German artist pushes the limits of musical notation.

Indian artist Rohini Devasher publishes a reflection on her recent CERN residency, outlining efforts to move beyond the standard model of fundamental forces in particle physics—and in her practice. Devasher draws a connection between the “multiplication, magnification, distortion” that black holes rip in space-time with video feedback and shares drawings that map the implications of the “new modes and methodologies of research and practice” she was exposed to in Geneva (image: Beyond the Standard Model, 2023).

For Quanta, science journalist Anil Ananthaswamy traces the backstory of AI image generation. In his telling, a probabilistic model (image) proposed in a 2015 paper by Jascha Sohl-Dickstein set the stage for a subsequent denoising technique now used in DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and other models. The technique reconciles the gap between generated images and training images, helping generative models provide lucid responses to whimsical prompts like “goldfish slurping Coca-Cola on a beach.”

Delving into their (eponymous) new film (image, 2022), “Capture,” a solo exhibition by Metahaven, opens in Trondheim, Norway. In it, the artist collective explores ‘knowability’ on three fronts: a rumination on the inscrutability of bats, CERN’s hunt for the Higgs boson, and the remarkable qualities of lichens. Their displayed media, and accompanying textiles and collages contemplate consciousness in “both speculative deeply implicated ways,” writes curator Stefanie Hessler.