Modern technological development seems to be driven by a remarkably simple principle: if something can be done, sooner or later it probably will be. We can make computers faster, so we make them faster. We can connect more objects to the internet, so we connect them. We can generate images in seconds, automate decisions, modify organisms, collect ever larger quantities of data and build machines capable of performing tasks that only recently seemed to belong exclusively to hu

The Belgian painter Léon Spilliaert was born in 1881 in Ostend, a city to which he remained deeply attached throughout his life. Largely self-taught, Spilliaert stood apart from the dominant schools and movements. He is often associated with Symbolism, but his work is unique, almost timeless. From an early age, he suffered from health problems, anxiety, and severe insomnia. These struggles led him to spend much of his time at night, taking long walks along the Ostend seawal

We tend to imagine perception as a relationship between two clearly separate things. There is a subject, somewhere inside a body, and there is a world outside. The subject looks at a tree, touches a stone, listens to music or observes another person. Information travels from the external object towards the perceiving mind, where it is processed and interpreted. In this familiar picture, the world is there and we are here, looking at it. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-

There are songs we understand because we understand what they say, and then there are songs that seem to reach us before we have understood anything at all. A voice rises through layers of guitar; we catch a word, perhaps two, before language dissolves again into pure sound. We do not know exactly what is being said, yet the music can produce an extraordinarily precise emotional response: longing, joy, melancholy, tenderness, sometimes something approaching the sacred. Few ba