Perceptions
Issue 98 November 2026
AI Doesn’t Need a Singularity to Change Everything
Artificial intelligence does not need to reach a technological singularity to transform society. This article examines its potential to advance medicine and science alongside risks involving employment, concentrated power, misuse, and loss of human control. It distinguishes general intelligence, superintelligence, and the singularity, while questioning confident predictions about their arrival. Its central argument is that AI’s impact depends on the authority and access people grant it, as well as its capabilities. Independent testing, meaningful oversight, and the ability to operate without AI are essential to preserving human control.
When No Agent Can See the Whole System
A group of agents can coordinate successfully without any member possessing a complete picture of the system in which it acts. This essay examines the gap between collective performance and collective understanding. Through a search and rescue thought experiment, it argues that more agents do not automatically create more knowledge when their observations share the same blind spots. Distributed intelligence becomes epistemically stronger only when it preserves dissenting local models, records discarded possibilities, tests system boundaries, and creates routes for genuinely new evidence to enter. The central question is not whether a network can produce coherent behavior, but whether it can detect what its own architecture prevents it from seeing.
Art and a Sense of Being
Primarily a visual artist, Paul Forte also writes essays and poetry. Forte’s career as an artist began in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1970’s. Influenced early on by Conceptual art, Forte has employed a variety of media over the years to realize ideas, including making and self-publishing artist’s books and related objects.
“An experimental approach to art making coupled with an abiding sense of the poetic are the hallmarks of my art. It is an art that has explored this approach and sensibility through a variety of media and artforms over the years: Word works and poetry, artist’s books and book works, performance art, drawings, collage, montage, and assemblage. Central to much of this work is the use of found or appropriated material.”
In ‘Art and a Sense of Being’, discusses various forms of visual art that are dependent upon presenting images of their work via digital media, with the argument there is no substitute for an immediate, physical engagement with art.
Experiencing and Expressing Body Emotions vs Mind Feelings (VS2/VS3)
This illustrated practice-based essay explores how similar emotional experiences may emerge through different processing routes. Using two visual studies; VS2.1 Instantaneous Signal-Flight and VS3.1 Abandoned in Space; Alexander Nathan examines fear as an immediate body-driven response to a present external threat and anxiety as a mind-driven feeling that accumulates through interpretation, time, and anticipated future conditions. The works are considered through both their creation and viewing, revealing how attention, movement, visual detail, and meaning can produce similar surface experiences through markedly different underlying processes.
Almost Recognisable: Looking at machine images before meaning settles
Tan Liyuan reflects on images developed at Whispart Studio that invite recognition while resisting a settled description. Through close readings, enlarged details, a selection comparison and views of physical works, the article examines the encounter between generated forms and the familiar names viewers bring to them. Dreams and the inverted spectrum thought experiment offer ways of considering familiarity and the limits of shared descriptions. Grounded in the artist’s practice, the essay asks how a scene can convey an unsettling yet coherent mood while leaving its objects and events open to interpretation.
COLD LIGHT: MECHANISM, WONDER, AND THE AESTHETICS OF BIOLUMINESCENCE
A memory of wanting to see the Pacific glow becomes a problem of method: what happens to wonder when a luminous phenomenon is explained? This essay argues that scientific mechanism need not disenchant aesthetic experience. Marine bioluminescence is chemically specific, biologically functional, and still capable of carrying symbolic force. The mistake is not using science in art; it is treating scientific vocabulary as prestige paint. When mechanism is respected rather than merely borrowed, luciferin, oxygen, neural control, disturbance, wavelength, and survival can deepen rather than diminish the imaginative field.
Evolutionary Conditions of Nature – Logos
Leonardo Mancini is an Italian interdisciplinary artist and author working across visual art, moving image and architecture. The experimental video Logos (2014) and the painting series Evolutionary Conditions of Nature (2016–2024) are part of the artistic research of Leonardo Mancini, whose practice explores the relationships between energy, matter and consciousness, probing their common generative order.
Eyes on the road – Chapter 2
Florian Coulmas is Professor emeritus of Japanese Society and Sociolinguistics at the IN-EAST Institute of East Asian Studies at Duisburg-Essen University. He has published numerous books, including one about Hiroshima, where he once lived. In 2016, he was awarded the Meyer-Struckmann-Prize for Research in Arts and Social Sciences.
“Eyes on the road is a travelogue which isn’t really a travelogue because it is about a journey fifty years back.” Eyes on the road (chapter 2) is the second part in the series of his journey.
Moths in art history: centuries of creativity reveal the beauty of a misunderstood insect
Samuel Shaw is a Senior Lecturer in Art History at the Open University. I work on the history of art and exhibition culture in Britain, with a particular interest in the visual cultures of natural history. My project ‘Art and Ecology’ explores how historic objects in collections across the UK can be used to engage audiences with environmental issues. I have published widely on subjects including the art market, natural history and empire, and art and cosmopolitanism.
AI could transform mathematics, but humans will still need to be in the loop
Carolin Antos has been assistant professor for Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Konstanz since 2018. She works at the interface of philosophy, mathematics and logic, having studied all three at the Universities of Erlangen, Frankfurt am Main, Venice and Vienna.
She received her doctorate in mathematical logic at the Kurt-Gödel-Research Center (University of Vienna) in 2015. After coming to Konstanz with a Marie-Curie Grant, she has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Konstanz.
She received a Freigeist-Fellowship of the VolkswagenFoundation in 2018 and has since been leading her own research group at the Department of Philosophy. Her work is in philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science and epistemology.
Balthasar Grabmayr is a Junior Professor of Philosophy at Tübingen University. Before that he was an Azrieli International Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Haifa and concurrently held a postdoctoral position at the Blavatnik School of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University. He received his PhD in Philosophy from Humboldt University of Berlin. His research mostly focuses on logic and the philosophies of logic, mathematics and computation.
What faces in paintings can tell us about how we perceive emotion
Zoe Thurtle is an interdisciplinary researcher and PhD candidate in Cognitive Psychology at Sheffield Hallam University. My research combines psychology, empirical aesthetics and fine art to investigate how people perceive and interpret emotion in visual art. I hold degrees in Fine Art and Psychology (BA, MA, MSc), a PGCE, and am an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA).