A new poetics of place: engaging public audiences with deep science through an art-science installation

This essay offers a practitioner reflection on an art–science installation titled Perpetual Motion, presented at Art Central Hong Kong in 2021. The work places visitors between two records of path-taking: a handmade carpet derived from the firing patterns of neuronal grid cells and a suspended mobile of pre-1500 AD mtDNA haplogroup maps tracing deep-time human migrations. Developed under conditions of enforced confinement and shaped by the practical constraints of access, copyright, and institutional ownership of scientific imagery, the installation explores what becomes possible when an artist works directly inside high-profile scientific visual languages rather than illustrating them from the outside. Drawing on observations and visitor questions recorded during facilitated sessions, the essay examines the conceptual operation of juxtaposing these two scales of path-taking and the practical realities of presenting such work in a high-traffic public setting. It contributes to the growing body of practitioner accounts that document the productive frictions and modest possibilities of aesthetic engagement with complex science.