A strong sense of place is not what you would associate with a festival that, in large part, inhabits the abstract world of pixels. Yet Frequency, Lincoln’s thriving digital arts festival, is heavily imbued with just that.

Inhabiting all available spaces, from empty shops to fruit carts and churches, the fourth iteration of the biennial festival entwines itself in the city’s chocolate-box architecture to explore this year’s theme of displacement – at a personal, local and global scale.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the work Duet, housed within the shell of what until recently was one of Lincoln’s oldest family businesses. Outwardly an unassuming blocky conglomeration of screens hosting fleeting, disconnected answers to invisible queries, the real workings of this collaboration between UK artists Invisible Flock and Indian designers Quicksand function beneath the surface.

An app to accompany the work pairs users in India and the UK, who get to know each other gradually by answering a single prescribed question a day, carefully crafted not to elicit a simple yes or no answer. Who knows whether slow social media will catch on, but there is something decidedly fascinating about the prospect of being so connected and yet so distant – and I confess I am currently waiting to find out whether my partner believes animals have souls.

If not quite a soul, Phonofolium et Lux by artists Scenocosme creates an eerie impression of sentience. This digital/arboreal hybrid encourages audiences to caress the foliage of a small tree, which responds to electrostatic energy by generating a soundtrack that lurches from the organic to the mechanical in a surprisingly hypnotic fashion.

Going virtual

The arrival of virtual reality on the digital arts scene was inevitable, yet in a similar way to theatre’s recently awakened fervour for binaural audio, it is easy to see how enthusiasm for the technology can overwhelm the storytelling itself.

Take WHIST, a work that merges film and augmented reality in a piece inspired by Sigmund Freud. Unfortunately, a beautiful collection of sculptures is viewed only through a headset camera feed, where they serve as mere physical triggers for a series of 360-degree recorded performances.

Losing the potency of the actors’ physical proximity, and failing to capitalise on the headset’s claustrophobic potential, AΦE’s journey feels constrained by its VR prison, and more like a nightmare that David Lynch may once have had about live art.

At the other end of the scale, Empire Soldiers by Metro-Boulot-Dodo is a perfectly pitched use of the form. Content to allow audience members a seat throughout, the purpose of this richly designed world is not its own existence, but to focus you on that of its subject – a Caribbean soldier recruited to fight in the first world war. A deft use of sound builds a short, poetic and moving experience.

Tardigrades and nematodes

Hurtling outwards from our planetary home, the subjects of Andy Gracie’s Deep Data Prototypes _1, _2 + _3 are unlikely to make any sound at all – with microscopic tardigrades and nematodes playing starring roles in several active astrobiology experiments. Exploring the parameters for life, Gracie exposes his test subjects to the extreme magnetic fields of our own gas giants and the gravity of exoplanetary super-Earths, while seedlings strive for life in the lighting conditions of both a real and fictional Mars.

Gracie’s work perfectly embodies the intersection of calibrated experimentation and art, with each prototype representing a staggering number of hours in the lab consulting with planetary scientists.

Ascending the aptly named Steep Hill to Lincoln’s famous cathedral feels like a journey back in time in more ways than one. Proudly touted as Frequency’s most analogue offering, Assemble’s Log Book houses four real-life hewers in the chapter house, slowly shaping freshly felled trees into beams. Rhythmic and hypnotic, it would be easy to pass an entire afternoon immersed in the smell of resin and the sea of scattered woodchips. Frequency may take you to the farthest reaches of space, but it will always reach out to ground you again.

The runs in Lincoln, UK, until 29 October

leads the pack for science at festivals this summer. Following its debut at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire last year, this fusion of music, science and culture tackles the big themes, from the depths of the oceans to how to leave Earth. And you can hunt for new pulsars with the BBC’s Sky at Night team, get your hands on some graphene in the Star Field, and explore earthquakes in the Planet Field.

Modesty aside, Âéśš´ŤĂ˝ is at the festival in strength, so watch out for: , with Catherine Brahic on the unknown talents of the cave artists at Chauvet and Lascaux; Frank Swain becoming as he explores how tech is changing our bio natures; Penny Sarchet wondering – complete with dancing parrots, bopping seals and cat music; and Sally Adee explaining .

Up in the thrillingly beautiful Brecon Beacons in south Wales, is cranking out a wide-ranging space theme, as Explorer Dome turns the Omni Tent into a mobile planetarium. Or if you just want to dance or trance out, rock down to the algorave, where electronic music and visuals are generated live by algorithms.

Tents, talks and tests

That daddy of all festivals, , has its Green Fields host a science tent that offers festivalgoers the chance to experience a supernova explosion, explore aeronautics and astronautics with real rocket parts, and test how reaction times and decision-making change under pressure – or just get blown away with the Lego Wind-Tunnel Simulator.

What makes us who we are is up for debate at. There’s Theatre Re’s The Nature of Forgetting, which looks at the neurobiological research into dementia and real-life experience of it. Or you can check out the festival’s ongoing collaboration with the Wellcome Trust, through a host of talks and experiments in the Faraway Forest. For sheer fun, catch Unlimited Theatre’s How I Hacked My Way into Space, the story of one man’s adventure told from where it happened – his garden shed.

is still the newish kid on the block, but alongside music this year from Bonobo, Laura Marling and Michael Kiwanuka, it has old hand Guerilla Science bringing its unique sense of fun, with workshops on lucid dreaming and sensory speed dating.

Guerilla Science will also host a gig on attraction and identity at , featuring sensory speed dating and personality tests. And a special life drawing session will offer the chance to get a different perspective, with the audience trying to draw the world as perceived by people with perceptual disorders.

has some serious chemistry kit at The Apothecary, where you can make your own bath bomb, while the festival’s Sigma tent explores our obsession with bringing animals back from extinction and the experience of synaesthesia.

Smaller-scale highlights

Highlights among the smaller festivals include sporting a science dome as part of its Out of this World theme, visitors to Ěýsnuggling up for a more traditional picnic-blanket approach to stargazing, and offering the relaxingly titled Tea and Theoretical Physics.

Makerspaces are on the rise, with SHMakerspace and its 3D printers at in Guildford. But if you’d rather break something than make it, ’s Wrekshop might be just the thing – though you may accidentally learn some electrical engineering in the process.

There’s lots on offer for kids too, with offering woodcraft and stargazing. Or they could learn about bees in the craft area at , attend the Jedi Training Academy at Bluedot or take some classes in the genie labs at Always the Sun.

In the wake of the world’s hottest year on record in 2016, festivals are taking a more focused approach to climate change, with low-carbon energy topping the bill in the science and tech pavilion at this year’s in Anglesey. You can try creating kinetic energy on pushbikes, explore how water turbines work, and create and race F1 cars. Or if you’re feeling more contemplative, you can listen in to the story of local mathematician William Jones, the man who proposed one of the most useful symbols of all time – Ěýπ (pi).

Planes, trains and automobiles

If you fancy venturing farther afield, we have some top tips from mainland Europe for you. If you’re a serious Björk fan, hurry to Barcelona in Spain. She’s headlining with a 4-hour DJ set at on 14 June, and her .

The festival runs concurrently with the ł§Ăł˛Ô˛š°ů+D International Congress of Digital Culture and Creative Technologies (at which Bjork will also speak). The congress has an and the (you-have-to-be-there) “phosphere” installation by Daito Manabe and his Rhizomatiks studio, inspired by the process of mineral crystallisation.

Along with a line-up boasting the likes of The Weeknd and Lorde, Danish has a dedicated makerspace, where you can draw with 3D pens, laser cut and – perhaps most important for the festivalgoer – Ěýmake your own solar-powered cellphone charger so you can snap selfies powered by the sun.

The festival has also teamed up with Stop Spild af Mad (“Stop Waste of Food”) and Det Runde Bord (“The Round Table”) to stop food waste, using excess food to provide healthy and nutritious meals for asylum centres and shelters. And it’s hosting Âéśš´ŤĂ˝ favourites The Yes Men in its Art Zone.

In the picturesque Hungarian city of Sopron, boasts a spectacular line-up of international musicians and a host of cultural treats, from fire-juggling to the Always Drinking Marching Band. There is also a healthy dose of science, in the form of logic and action games, mini-lectures and spectacular experiments in the festival’s science centre – as well as programmes on innovation and natural sciences from the University of West Hungary.

on Óbuda Island in Budapest, Hungary, promises performances that explore what it means to be human. Perhaps the star of the show is , choreographer Mourad Merzouki’s mesmerising dance exploration of the boundary between virtual and real life.

Alongside some leading electronic artists such as Ben Frost and William Basinski, in Brussels, Belgium, is showcasing the best tech-art crossovers, displaying the work of this year’s STARTS prizewinners. These include I’m Humanity by Etsuko Yakushimaru, which explores the future of music by encoding it in DNA.

Moon moving away from conjunction with Jupiter, approaching trine with Venus.

It’s not exactly a diagnosis you’d be thrilled to receive from your doctor, but this was the medical opinion Lucy Boswell received when she visited hers in 1602 to ask whether she might be pregnant.

It was just one of the verdicts that astrologer-physicians Simon Forman and Richard Napier doled out to thousands of patients across decades of practice. Their accumulated notes – some 30,000 pages of horoscopes, religious speculations and documented physical symptoms – form some of the most extensive private medical records in history, and are the springboard for Casebooks, a new exhibition in London.

Cursed by a witch

For the past 10 years, the University of Cambridge has been . Available free of charge, it makes for fascinating, if baffling, reading. Lucy Boswell was told she had been cursed by a witch (sharing culpability with the moon); that this passed for medicine, even in the age of bloodletting and belief in the four humours, is mildly alarming.

Casebooks serves to highlight the digital archive’s existence. The curators invited six artists to take inspiration from Forman and Napier’s curious practice.

Lurking beneath a University of Westminster building just off Marylebone Road, and accessed via an underground car park that wouldn’t look out of place in a CSI cold open, the exhibition at the Ambika P3 gallery greets you with shouted slogans. Jasmina Cibic’s Unforseen Forseens (shown above) is a corridor, filled with painters who constantly redecorate it with stamps that show the iconography of progress through generic, propaganda-style images.

And the painters punctuate their work with staccato, Soviet-era pronouncements about the glory, importance and predictability of the future. Their rhetoric is repetitive – all bombast, no substance – by chance echoing some recent pronouncements from the Trump administration. In the weeks leading up to the March for Science in Washington DC on 22 April, the topicality of Cibic’s piece can only grow.

Some of Casebooks’ artistic interpretations are more literal than others, but no one felt it necessary to hide behind the time period of the source material. Here you’ll find artists ready to tease out our modern and oh-so-technologically advanced relationship with the alchemical, the astrological and the anatomical.

Mental Metal, a video installation projected onto three satellite dishes by Lindsay Seers, serves as a subtle reminder that, like Forman and Napier, we still appeal to the stars for answers, albeit in more cogent and quantifiable terms. Through the seamlessly alternating dialogue of an actor who plays both Forman and himself, artist Lindsay Seers blends medieval and modern concerns to highlight that they really aren’t all that different.

Is she cheating on me? How do I move on from loss? Can we ever have children? If you loathe the idea of a person purporting to tell you your fortune, how do you feel about taking advice from an AI?

Artist Lynn Hershman LeesonĚýsubtly undermines our ridicule of past practices with a real-time “consultation bot” that blurs the boundary between superstition and fact, nudging uncomfortably close to the role that Google and WebMD play in modern life.

Her 3D holographic Real-Fiction BotnikĚýoffers 17th-century-style personal predictions: it can “diagnose” you and deliver your horoscope. Leeson’s work reminds us that superstition and home remedies delivered by seemingly trustworthy digital emissaries are still nothing more than the sum of their parts.

None of the elements of Casebooks sits perfectly alongside each other, yet they are all complementary. An insight into the original practice they are not; for that you need to do your own reading before you arrive. That said, there are banks of computers here that let you browse the digital archive of Forman and Napier’s cases – and, indeed, accounts of Forman’s frankly fantastical life. (He was an inveterate womaniser who would cast astrological charts in order to find missing socks – another timeless concern.)

Before leaving, spare a final, contemplative moment for Federico Díaz’s BIG LIGHT, a deep pool in which a lone figure tends to a robotic arm draped in foliage. There’s more than an echo of anime in this portmanteau creature, and it does well in making sense of Casebooks’ unifying theme: why we fleeting inhabitants of the universe look to the eternal fixtures of the natural world for answers to our internal dilemmas.

[exhibition_info title=”Casebooks” gallery=”Ambika P3″ gallery_link=”http://www.p3exhibitions.com/” location=”London” fromdate=”17 March” todate=”23 April”]

OURS is a restless planet. While we walk unawares over the remnants of massive eruptions, it is easier than ever to train a camera on Mount Etna’s latest effusions. The power of Mount St Helens and Pinatubo lives long in memory, in part because their recent activity is well documented, and in 2010 the whole world watched as Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull grounded European air traffic.

It seems odd, then, to imagine a time when volcanoes were the stuff of legend and religious speculation. It is, however, just this evolution of our relationship with Earth’s most dynamic geology that Volcanoes, a new exhibition at the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries, sets out to explore.

Confined to just one room in the Weston Library, and taking about an hour to explore, Volcanoes cuts an admirable swathe through the history of our encounters with its namesakes – from a carbonised papyrus scroll discovered in the Roman town of Herculaneum after the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 to videos of recent activity around the Pacific Ring of Fire.

While extensive prior knowledge is not required, the exhibition does rather necessitate jumping feet first into certain terminology. Volcanologist David Pyle offers a gentler crash course in the exhibition’s accompanying book, Volcanoes. However, the texture and intricacy of original illustrations and diagrams by the likes of Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher and explorer Alexander von Humboldt are worth seeing in person, as they have been considerably scaled down for the book so as not to produce a publication that would dwarf the average coffee table.

Some surprising revelations include the longevity of volcano tourism, which kicked into high gear after news of Vesuvius’s spectacular 1631 eruption spread rapidly through Europe thanks to the recent proliferation of the printing press. Less than 100 years later, visitors to the Marylebone pleasure gardens in London could witness the “Forge of Vulcan” – a vivid firework display built around a representation of Mount Etna.

By the 19th century, naturalists and travel writers like Isabella Bird and Constance Gordon-Cumming were spending months in Hawaii, hiking up Kilauea to witness the “awful waves of unquenchable fire [which] surge and writhe without ceasing”.

“The book gives voice to those living near sites of volcanic activity, through interviews and poetry”

Several stunning eruptions during the 1800s had worldwide effects, particularly Indonesia’s Tambora in 1815. It led to the “year without a summer” of 1816, and caused agricultural devastation across a Europe largely unaware of the eruption. It also yielded the novel Frankenstein, when the inclement weather noted by Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (soon to become better known as Mary Shelley) in her diary kept her holiday party indoors during a trip to Lake Geneva.

In perhaps its most arresting aspect, the exhibition gives voice to those living near sites of activity, with the people of the Caribbean island of Montserrat recounting their experience of the Soufrière Hills eruption through interviews and poetry. The four-year eruption began in 1995 and devastated the island, eventually burying the abandoned capital Plymouth – once home to 4000 inhabitants – in ash.

Pyle, also the exhibition’s curator, weaves his own experiences and insights into the book, as well as drawing on first-hand accounts from throughout history. He also explores what can be done to prepare for the immediate effects and long-term fallout of eruptions.

Despite skewing heavily towards European accounts, because the exhibition draws largely on the Bodleian’s own archive, Pyle aims for a global perspective on the human story of the forces that shape our planet. An antidote to the sensationalism of many a supervolcano documentary, Volcanoes is well worth exploring in both its forms.

Volcanoes, Weston Library, Oxford, UK, to 21 May

by David M. Pyle, Bodleian Library Publishing

This article appeared in print under the headline “Inside the volcano”

, GV Art London until 30 October

by , Basic Books, $27.50

We’re all only a night or two of decent sleep away from being high functioning, entirely successful members of society – right? If we could just sneak in that magical extra hour or two of shut-eye, wouldn’t the world be a better, kinder, possibly even cleaner place? This thought sustains many of us through our hectic working days; the carrot getting us to the weekend, the next holiday, the chance for more rest.

However, while sleep is the most obvious way in which we rest, neither naps nor nocturnal unconscious sojourns made it into the top ten most popular activities revealed by the Rest Test, a survey of more than 18,000 people in 134 countries. As it turns out, from reading to daydreaming, rest is something we understand as a necessarily conscious experience, a deliberate disengagement from the rhythms of life’s obligations.

With pieces inspired by the survey’s results now on display in a new exhibition, Rest and its Discontents, it seems that our definition of rest is quite an amorphous thing. For some, it is the opposite of work, for others, the antithesis of noise and protest. It appears to be more easily signified by the absence rather than presence of certain qualities, and so mapped out across the ironically peaceful setting of Mile End Art Pavilion in London’s East End are fragmented responses to the idea of restlessness, from a range of artists, researchers and activists.

Seeking restfulness

Although it doesn’t provide much by way of satisfaction for those keen on hard data, there is a dreamlike quality to some of the extended film installations that explore descriptive experience sampling – a method used to document people’s thoughts when their minds wander – distilled into aural and visual vignettes. You can see data in the very fabric of the room’s scattered benches: dot density reflecting the frequency that words such as “stress”, “music” and “alone” were used by the survey’s participants.

It would be easy to find your own restfulness, looking out at the rippling water of a nearby pond and enjoying the Listening to the City at RestĚýsoundscape by Guerilla Science, Aino Tytti and Bradley Garretta on the wireless headphones that permit you to roam, unmoored, about the space.

Yet where the exhibition concerns itself with responding – visually, emotionally, texturally – to rest’s purported opposites, author Alex Pang is here to provide the hard numbers in his new book, Rest: Why you get more done when you work less. This is a paean to a balanced life in which he argues that work and rest are not opposing forces, but an essential, reciprocal partnership.

With an emphasis on rest’s benefits for the creative mind, Pang proposesĚýthat it has a place in our lives as a learned skill – one that must be honed and tended to just as we would practise a musical instrument or train for a marathon.

Rest – NOW!

Citing everyone from Charles Darwin to Steve Jobs, he suggests our approach to relaxation should be as structured as that for other tasks, highlighting the importance of a daily routine and of deliberately stopping at an allotted time, even if we are at the peak of our productivity.

Although he overlooks the wide acknowledgement that we enjoy more leisure time than our historical counterparts, it is useful to explore the cultural implications of the “competitive busyness” that pervades modern working life. Here Pang’s examples from past centuries are largely male because rest, creative or otherwise, has presumably been alien to many women throughout history.

There is also a very Silicon Valley flavour to his approach – walking meetings are all well and good in Google’s aptly named Mountain View campus, and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s corridors of power, but quite another thing on the noisy, polluted streets of central London on a rainy December day.

Engaged brain

While many of us may be prepared to accept the idea that we only work effectively for 4 hours a day, the creative experiences of writers, artists and Victorian naturalists are regrettably unlikely to bring about the downfall of the modern 9-to-5-plus-checking-your-emails-out-of-hours.

However, one of Rest’s most interesting revelations is the potential importance of the default mode network: a series of interconnected areas of the brain that automatically switch on as soon as we cease to concentrate on external tasks. Although this has only been an active area of research since the 1990s, studies indicate that this network may have a vast influence on our inner lives, being implicated in everything from memory to cognitive impairment and empathy. This “resting state” is barely less energetic than the engaged brain.

We can have a sardonic approach to the idea of “deliberate rest”, and heading back to bed for an hour after lunch like President Kennedy may not be a viable solution for many of us. But next time you’re caught staring into space, it is worth remembering that you are actually exercising vital neural networks.

FIGHTS. Losses. Survivors. The language of cancer is a battleground littered with violent metaphors, but a new production at London’s National Theatre plans to change that, with an “all singing, all dancing examination of life with a cancer diagnosis”. Oh yes, a musical. About cancer.

In its very title, Bryony Kimmings and Brian Lobel’s A Pacifist’s Guide to the War on Cancer issues an open challenge to public discourse on serious illness. “[Musicals can] seem like puff pieces of art,” says Kimmings, “but actually if you think about the good ones, they deal with huge issues. Cancer should definitely be a musical.”

Lobel, who was himself treated for cancer at a young age, describes his role in the production as “navigating the muck of cancer… there’s just so much conflicting information and loud political noise”.

But even violent metaphor can be a useful tool, as Elena Semino at Lancaster University, UK, explains. She analysed the language people with cancer use in online forums, and discovered that the idea of being a fighter is sometimes empowering – with one key caveat. “The crucial thing is that nobody should have that particular way of being imposed on them. If the main way you have to conceive of your illness is as a battle that you need to fight and win, then if you’re losing it’s kind of your fault… it can have all sorts of negative consequences.”

With a view to subverting this kind of narrative, Kimmings and Lobel developed the show with an “ICU” of 10 people who’d had cancer or were currently in treatment. Sure enough, the inclusion of a quote from Audre Lorde, an African-American writer and activist who had felt empowered by the language of fighting cancer, divided opinion within the group.

While Semino’s study showed that people are likely to use violence and journey metaphors to describe their experience of cancer, it also revealed, perhaps unsurprisingly, that experiences of serious illness can be deeply individual and fluctuating. Expressions varied from person to person, and even from week to week. “Metaphor is seen by most people studying it as not just a linguistic but also a cognitive phenomenon. If you give people different metaphors for the same topic, they reason about it quite differently,” she notes.

“To be asked to hate some of me, to fight some of me, is brutal. It doesn’t matter how kindly meant it is“

Semino feels that charities strongly dominate the conversation, and they use military language to fundraise, portraying cancer as a common enemy that needs to be defeated.

Yet author and playwright Stella Duffy, whose solo play Breaststrokes explored her first breast cancer diagnosis, felt attacked by this kind of message. “What really struck me was that it was asking me to hate some of myself. To be asked to hate some of me, to fight some of me, is really brutal. It doesn’t matter how kindly meant it is.”

While under no illusion that one musical will bring about a singular cultural shift, Kimmings is optimistic: “One of our cancer patients said, ‘I am counting on this show to change the way that we talk about cancer in the public realm’, and that for me is a huge ambition but at the same time totally possible.” Lobel is hopeful that A Pacifist’s Guide will allow people to open up about what makes them vulnerable. It is easier for us to voice our own fears about illness and death by agreeing with a character who expresses similar concerns.

Can cultural experiences really change our language? “I think they can,” Semino says. “[Scientific papers are] great in their own right, but they don’t give you a sense of what it feels like to have those experiences. Narrative has the power to make you feel.” Having reclaimed the narrative of her own cancer through writing and performing, Duffy is eager for more people to own the conversation. “I don’t want to be reduced,” she says. “We’re already diminished when we’re ill. We don’t need to be diminished by the language around it.”

[event_info title=”A Pacifist’s Guide to the War on Cancer” title_link=”https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/a-pacifists-guide-to-the-war-on-cancer” venue=”National Theatre” venue_link=”https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/” location=”London” fromdate=”14 October 2016″ todate=”29 November 2016″]

This article appeared in print under the headline “Oh, what a lovely war”