The Bernier/Eliades Gallery is pleased to present the fourth solo exhibition of Charles Sandison in Athens, titled The Athens Algorithm. The opening will take place on Thursday, November 27, 2025, from 19:00 to 21:00, in the presence of the artist. Sandison is a media artist renowned for his pioneering work in computer-generated video projections.
In The Athens Algorithm, Sandison traces a luminous thread from the birth of Western reason to the age of artificial intelligence. The exhibition unfolds in Athens – the city where philosophy, mathematics, and myth first converged – as a meditation on the human desire to translate thought into form, and language into living systems. At its centre lies the figure of Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, whose imagination bridged the Romantic and the rational. She foresaw a “poetic science,” an art of numbers capable not only of calculation but of expression – a fusion that Sandison reinterprets through generative code, algorithmic light, and immersive digital architectures. The works inhabit the space like living texts: constellations of language and data that evolve, decay, and reform. Each algorithm becomes a philosophical proposition – an act of reasoning given motion and light. The result is a dialogue between eras; between Athens, where logic was born, and Lovelace, who gave it consciousness; between mythos and machine, emotion and analysis. Through this meeting of ancient and modern intelligences, The Athens Algorithm asks what it means to think in code, and whether algorithms – like myths – are our new instruments of belief.
Charles Sandison (b. 1969, UK) lives and works in Tampere, Finland. Raised amid the isolation and silence of northern Scotland’s landscapes, he received both his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the Glasgow School of Art. A self-taught programmer, Sandison found in coding a profound artistic language that replaced his early explorations in drawing and painting. In the mid- 1990s, he moved to Finland, a place where culture and nature resonate deeply and shape his generative works. He has received numerous distinctions, including the National Percent for Art Awards (Finland, 2021) and Ars Fennica (Finland, 2010), and has exhibited widely in leading international institutions. Selected solo exhibitions include the Denver Art Museum (USA, 2025), Tampere Art Museum (Finland, 2024), Peabody Essex Museum (USA, 2019), Helsinki Art Museum (Finland, 2017), Musée Départemental de l’Oise (France, 2015), The Bourse (Belgium, 2015), and Kunstmuseum Basel (Switzerland, 2014). His work has also been featured in major group exhibitions, among others, at the Centre de design de l’UQAM (Canada, 2024), UCCA Centre for Contemporary Art (China, 2020), Centre Pompidou (France, 2018), Fondation Louis Vuitton (France, 2016), and Istanbul Modern (Turkey, 2011). In April 2025, the permanent installation Pythia by Sandison was inaugurated at the “pi” of Delphi, Greece, commissioned by the Polygreen Culture & Art Initiative (PCAI).