Nineteenth-century breakthroughs in the study of electromagnetism pointed to a vast realm of unseen forces that, with the right technologies, could be manipulated in perceivable ways. It was hardly a leap, then, to infer that science could demystify paranormal phenomena—respected physicists including Joseph John Thomson and Oliver Lodge also investigated telepathy and spirit communication.

By the mid-20th century, psychical research waned in the scientific establishment but the desire for mysterious communiqués did not, finding expression in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Born in Athens in 1925, Panayiotis Vassilakis, better known as Takis, watched as cities were electrified and the first satellites entered space, and intuited the human desire for a beam of light in the darkness, a sign from a silent universe. Over seven decades, the self-taught artist translated this curiosity into kinetic sculptures made of repurposed electromechanical parts. In his posthumous survey at White Cube Hong Kong, a selection of works from the 1960s to ’90s foregrounded his lifelong practice of giving sensory vibrancy to ubiquitous yet invisible energies.

Entering at the gallery’s first floor, I experienced the show backwards, according to the chronology in the guide, but this resulted in a diffuse acoustic engagement congruent with Takis’s interest in how the invisible speaks. Thus I heard the click of a light before I saw its source: three beacons—two red, one yellow—mounted on thin metal poles. These works belong to the iconic and long-running Signal series, sparked by an encounter in 1955 with the sophisticated signaling system at the Calais train station. The three Light Signal sculptures (1989–90) are anchored by slabs of Greek marble, blinking a code that is at once from the past and the future, gesturing at the through line from antiquity to modernity.

The room was additionally charged by a steady hum emanating from Electromagnetic Sphere (1970), in which a suspended white ball containing a magnet levitates above an electromagnet on a black glass disc. Takis finds aesthetic harmony in repulsion through this mesmerizing orbit. On adjacent walls, long iron lines curve across a crimson canvas (Magnetic Wall – The 4th Dimension, 1997), while iron cones on unobtrusive wires are tautly poised before a wide yellow ground, like rockets frozen before a crash (Mur Magnétique, 1970). Fitted with concealed magnets, these works harken to the monochrome boldness and spare geometry of minimalism, albeit invigorated through the activation of forces that hold a numinous tension in three-dimensional space.

At steady intervals, an abrasive twang echoed throughout the gallery. Following the noise, one encountered a shelf of five smaller Signal sculptures, dated 1968 to ’82. Antennas topped with rusted iron fragments and electrical rectifiers emerge from bases with odd metal forms, including a tiny headstone and I-beams, evoking a bizarre machinery. Their giant cousins—Signal structures reaching more than two or three meters high—filled the ground-floor space in a stunning dénouement. Strung at different points on the masts are various painted objects, such as a black polystyrene ball and a yellow metal diamond with a hole; two poles have lights that flash red and blue. As one weaves around these towering structures, they gently sway and blink, a cryptic semaphore system in action. Soundtracking this inscrutable choreography, Musical (1966), a white wall-mounted panel with an inbuilt electromagnet, causes a suspended needle to strike a metal string, producing an amplified jangling noise that Takis called the “raw music” of the cosmos.

Involved in the avant-garde circles of Paris and New York, the self-proclaimed “instinctive scientist” carved out a distinctive niche that has shades of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and Jean Tinguely’s metamechanics but feels less bound by the inherently modern concerns of industrial change and societal alienation. Takis’s oeuvre derives its timelessness from its capacity to distill the ethos of the scientific endeavor—the need to educe form from formlessness, clarity from chaos. His beguiling inventions are more in tune with the wild experiments of the 19th century than the rationality of the 20th, encapsulating the eternal wonder of reaching out into the ether in the hope of receiving a reply.