Experiments turn from method to identity test

experiments and – A thematic issue of Glänta moves from natural science to poetry to ask what “experiment” really costs—who gains control, who gets freedom, and what happens when people are treated like material.

On the first page, the issue announces its rules in the way it refuses to behave. Glänta considers “experiments” from the natural sciences to poetry. and in its editorial Göran Dahlberg and Julia Ravanis point out that the very term “essay” derives from the Latin verb for experiment. experiri—so the magazine is. at once. examining experiments and performing them.

The question that keeps returning, issue after issue, is not simply whether experiments work. It’s who they are allowed to change.

Sanna Beijnoff—trained as a psychologist—starts with the most private lab she knows: her own ambivalence toward her discipline. She explores the pleasure and pain of that contradiction, focussing on the promise of increased happiness found in self-help literature. In recent books by Siri Helle and Björn Hedensjö. she finds “an unholy alliance between scientific claims and the language of marketing. ” and she describes how it slides into self-satisfied professional platitudes. Yet her discomfort doesn’t stay comfortably outside the cage. She also questions her negative reactions to those platitudes—“for who doesn’t want to be happy?”.

Beijnoff lets the argument tighten around freedom. Happiness. she writes. is coupled to freedom and play. but psychological research threatens those things when it provides behaviourist solutions and cookie-cutter advice. And then she complicates the critique: the freedom to do as one pleases is itself determined by predictable psychological mechanisms.

Her most provocative detour is “reactance,” the pleasure found in not doing what we are told. “Humans have many loyalties,” Beijnoff writes. “We want to obey, but we also want to break free. We want out. and we also want to be caught.” In her hands. the essay becomes a place to play with—and perhaps disarm—the impulse to do something else entirely.

The issue widens that personal tension into social life through Karl Palmås’s “Social experiments.” Modernism. he writes. promised a bright future. But adventure became routine. and Palmås traces the “early Crystal Palace experiment” to the shopping malls and office blocks that followed. The shift feels less like progress and more like repetition—until it becomes something harsher. Now, “shit experiments,” rolled out by tech oligarchs and authoritarian governments, use neuroliberalism’s handle on malleable human behaviour.

The practical question lands hard: can any social experimentation be salvaged for welfare and basic income needs?. Palmås answers with a distinction that reads like a plea. The plot we watch—empires falling. geopolitical maps being redrawn—has become familiar. he writes. but it’s disconnected from experimentalism as idea and practice. Even within great powers in decline. he insists. people can choose adventure over routine. follow free will. and build a road into the future. wherever it may lead.

That tension—freedom promised. freedom managed—shows up again in an extended conversation Julia Ravanis has with experimental physicist Lars Hellberg. economic historian Ann Ighe. and artist and researcher Michele Masucci. “In all experimentation there exists a tension between freedom and method, openness and control,” Ravanis says.

Hellberg confirms the tension through a formative memory. A 24-hour, 7-day-a-week experimental workshop at his high school in the 1970s shaped his development, he says. Later. when he teaches at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg—an engineering physics research university—he has over one hundred students. too many to give free rein. The comparison is blunt. At some colleges in the US, the student-teacher ratio is much lower, and the freedoms correspondingly greater.

Physics, Ighe suggests, hopes to achieve certainty through its experiments. Artistic production and research don’t chase certainty in the same way; uncertainty matters more. Masucci goes further. Artists. she argues. are the first and last experimenters. because humans organically create playful experiments—posing questions about values that cannot be answered empirically. Yet the disciplines need each other. The first image of a black hole in 2019 required artists to interpret light that humans can’t see into visible colours. The result, Masucci says, resembled an abstract painting.

Love, too, is treated like a controlled setting.

Carin Franzén looks at modern dating shaped by reality TV and dating apps. but she treats the central dilemma of love as older than the platforms: “to retain one’s self-determination and also be able to give oneself over to the throws of passion.” She finds parallels in European literature over the past millennium. and she becomes especially interested in reality shows like “Love is Blind” and “Married at First Sight.” In her view. their ritualized structure—tests. conflicts. and ceremonies around decisive moments—functions like a modern morality play. mirroring and reproducing the public’s values.

Then comes the second paradox. Franzén writes that we want relationships to be compatible with our personal autonomy and freedom of choice. but we’re also inclined to hand that choice over to experts—whether the algorithms of Tinder or the psychologists on a dating show. “Love might be free in a democratic society. ” she writes. “but the participants in a dating show must submit themselves to the conditions of the experiment.”.

She doesn’t leave it with contemporary examples. Similar experiments appear in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron. a series of stories published in 1558. often about the travails of love. What’s unique. Franzén notes. is that after every story there is a discussion between characters. offering different interpretations of its lesson—close to the way viewers of a modern dating show are invited to read outcomes.

By the time the issue reaches Lina Ekdahl’s poem “Title: Experiment,” the lab metaphor has become almost unbearable—because the experiment starts to include the body and the act of living.

Ekdahl’s poem begins with questions stacked like notes: “Can I write a text about experiments. / What are the conditions. / What do I have. / Theme. / Title. / Coffee. / Time.” It declares itself a “some kind of metatext” that no one will be satisfied with. Ekdahl explores how to write and. with reference to Marguerite Duras’s book Writing. the impossibility of doing so: “It must be said: we can’t. / And yet we write.”.

The poem also turns to the limits of the everyday—how even eating and sleep become part of the experiment. Ekdahl considers the inability to eat, sleep, and indeed to live. “Sleeplessness, an experiment I engage in every other / night. Not just me. An ever-larger experiment.” The poet meets a plumber, who warns of the dangers of not eating. He also offers the cliché “Life itself is an experiment!”.

The final experiment is to confront the inability to live: “To live. / I can’t. / Nobody can. / It must be said: we can’t. / And yet we live.”

In one issue. experiments move from lecture halls and workshops to dating shows and self-help books. from black holes rendered into colour to sleepless nights and plumbing advice. The through-line isn’t experimental method. It’s the boundary between freedom and control—how easily “trying” becomes a demand. and how stubbornly people still look for some way to choose.

Glänta experiments essay Sanna Beijnoff Karl Palmås Julia Ravanis Lars Hellberg Ann Ighe Michele Masucci Carin Franzén Marguerite de Navarre Heptameron Lina Ekdahl poetry science culture