To the Serpentine Gallery in London this evening for the Opening Night of the long awaited Gustav Metzger Exhibition (extraordinarily the first one person show in the UK for this 83 year old artist). The works on display reveal his range of preoccupations from torture of the human soul caught up in war and violent situations (drawing on his own experience during the second world war as a Jewish child in Nuremberg, when he lost both his parents in the Holocaust and was exiled to Britain travelling as part of the Kindertransport). His foundation in the late 50s of the Auto-Destructive Art Movement, his organisation of the Destruction in Art Symposium, involvement with the Committee of 100 anti-nuclear movement with Bertrand Russell and others, combined with his work as Secretary of  the then fledging Computer Art Society, makes Metzger an antecedent figure whose influence on many key members of the generation of artists who followed has been immense.  Acknowledgement in the form of this major exhibition in a leading London is greatly overdue.

The title of the show, Decades 1959-2009, seems ill-fitting though. This is primarily an exhibition that reminds one starkly of Merzger's childhood in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and early 40s and demonstrates the extent to which this trauma shaped and formed him.  His later preoccupations with environmental damage, the ruination of nature, the terror of the car, the damage caused by capitalism and the temporarility of media are linked in his work to an industrial and machine aesthetic that together achieve terrifying effect - reminding us all of our own role in (hu)man's self destruction and his annihilation of the world. Metzger's vision and voice are from the third and fourth decades of the 20th century - its deprivations, conflicts and its tragedies which are still playing out today and which are echoing in many ways on a number of different levels, the legacy of which have locked this new century in a tight fist. This is a charged and strange exhibition, a room full of liquid crystals is disturbingly beautiful, immersive and stilling - other pieces rip apart any sense of comfort and deny any ease.

It's the season of events before leaffalls. On Tuesday I will do a ten minute presentation on future possibilities for collaborative research in arts and humanities related fields in  the UK and Brazil at an event at the Department of Innovation and Skills in London which will see the launch of a long awaited Memorandum of Understanding between Research Funding Agencies in the two countries. I will talk about the recent Paralelo event in Sao Paulo which brought together around forty designers, artists, media researchers and others working in the spaces between in Brazil, the Netherlands and the UK and how the simple act of meeting has led to numerous unforeseen developments which simply required the spark of being together to generate results.  I will also talk about bricolabs and how it grew from nothing and runs on nothing apart from language (citing Octavio Paz on Breton, that nature is language and language for its part is nothing but a double of nature). I will also recall that Paralelo was about nature and language and the languages that connect us, months after the initial talking ceased. The reverberation of networks that grow through autopoiesis is something that perhaps the new research memorandum can help supprt us to explain. Or perhaps we just need to keep jamming. I also spent an evening last week addressing the topic of 'art, science and beyond' for a meeting as part of the British Science Festival held in a nearby art college, advertised for both artists and scientists but predominantly attended by artists (and three scientists) and numerous who said they were from the 'beyond'. My conclusion was this event was that all we need to consider are the three 'e's: education, empathy and environment - showing some great pics by North American photographer Berenice Abbott whose evocative works say more than a thousand textbooks and citing Naum Gabo, the great constructivist engineer and sculptor, - 'art acts, art asserts'....whilst science, dear old science, simply 'explores, apprehends, inform and proves' ..