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Exploring particular issue themes, articles will be created by contributors via invitation, commission and open submission from subscribers.

Drawing is just a thought

Jean-Pierre Hébert is considered a pioneer in the field of digital art from the mid-1970s on. He has developed his personal computer code into a powerful tool that drives plotters and custom-built devices, pushing the artistic and technical boundaries and creating an original, extensive body of work. Long before modern computer displays allowed one to pre-visualize an idea, Jean-Pierre was imagining and creating amazingly complex pieces, existing only in his mind—and in his code. Hébert produces works on paper, including ink and pencil drawings, etchings and dry points from polymer and copper plates. He also creates sand, water and sound installations, and artist’s books.

The aim of his work remains an expression of quiet beauty and peaceful meditation.

Jean-Pierre Hébert co-founded the Algorists in 1995 with Roman Verostko. Since 2003, he has been artist-in-residence at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he has organized and curated several Algorist group shows. In 2012, he received the ACM Siggraph Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art.

The Encounter: A new play by Complicite/Simon McBurney (review)

Simon McBurney’s new play, The Encounter, transports us into the humid depths of the Amazon, his storytelling served by the enveloping presence of binaural technology. In 1969, National Geographic photographer Loren McIntyre became hopelessly lost in a remote part of the Brazilian rainforest while searching for the Mayoruna people. His encounter was to test his perception of the world, bringing the limits of human consciousness into startling focus.

Threading scenes of his own life with details of McIntyre’s journey, McBurney incorporates objects and sound effects into this solo performance to evoke a rainforest landscape. Transmitted direct to the audience through provided headphones, the show’s ground-breaking sound design plugs into the power of the imagination, questioning our perceptions of time, communication and our own consciousness.

In Surgical Sleep

“The body – its anatomy and physiology – remains a powerful material and source of study for contemporary artists. In recent years some have chosen to explore different states of (un) consciousness (such as sleep/ dreams, sleep deprivation, hypnosis) – placing themselves in intense and sometimes risky situations, where their experiences and perceptions of these states are recorded and re-contextualised as artworks.” Louise K Wilson is a visual artist who makes installations, live works, sound works and single channel videos. Processes of research are central to her practice and she frequently involves the participation of individuals from industry, museums, medicine and the scientific community in the making of work.

In Their Right Minds: The Lives and Shared Practices of Poetic Geniuses (a review by Garry Kennard)

In 1976, Julian Jaynes proposed that the language of poetry and prophecy originated in the right, “god-side” of the brain. Current neuroscientific evidence confirms the role of the right hemisphere in poetry, a sensed presence, and paranormal claims as well as in mental imbalance. Left-hemispheric dominance for language is the norm. An atypically enhanced right hemisphere, whether attained through genetic predisposition, left-hemispheric damage, epilepsy, childhood or later traumas, can create hypersensitivities along with special skills. Dissociative Others may arise unbidden or be coaxed out through occult practices. Based on nearly twenty years of scientific and literary research, this book enters the atypical minds of poetic geniuses Blake, Keats, Hugo, Rilke, Yeats, Merrill, Plath and Hughes by way of the visible signs in their lives, beliefs, and shared practices.

Revelations by Flicker, Dreamachines and Electroencephalographic signals in art

How did ordinary tools in the Neurophysiology department become means for spiritual enlightenment ?

The combination of brainwave (EEG) monitoring by the early adopters with stroboscopes induced side-effects in many of the clinical experimentees in neurophysiological research, hallucinations that were named ‘Flicker.’ Patient’s experiences described increasingly bright, complex patterns of colour behind their closed eyelids. Soon Cyberneticians, psychologists and artists were spontaneously informing this interdisciplinary exchange, during a time of pioneering chemistry, new artistic styles and by their implementation of new tools for experiencing Art. I will describe how artists’ work, including my own, is harnessing the EEG signal, bridging various methods and arousing questions in art and human experience.

The Power of Place: Sacred Sites and the Presence of the Miraculous

“Long before there were religions, there were regions of the earth.” Acclaimed photographer and anthropologist Martin Gray has spent the last 35 years on an amazing pilgrimage: visiting 800 sacred sites in 155 countries around the world. In ‘The Power of Place’ he reveals just how devoutly pre-industrial cultures everywhere worshiped and respected our Earth.

Visual Perception, Abstraction and Invention: an Exploration

“In questioning what we see we must inevitably have recourse to our experience of the physical world around us. The pictorial offers us a way to explore these experiences and reinvent the world we see. While the picture plane may be viewed as a window onto an illusion of space, it is also the surface upon which spatial reality may be rebuilt.” Nathan Cohen is an artist interested in how we see the world around us and how this can be altered through images and physical interaction with space and visual form. As well as exhibiting internationally for over 30 years, he set up the MA Art and Science at University of the Arts London (CSM) in 2011.

Multiple Contemporaries & Sacred Indian Art

The indelible connect between art, faith, and life transcends stylistic, geographical, chronological, and ideological boundaries. It traverses beyond past and present, human studies and sciences, or classical/folk/traditional and contemporary art. There is empirical evidence in civilizational footprints, of the profound bond between arts and spirituality. This is reflected in multiple contemporaries be it in Indian sacred art, or cultures from around the globe.

John Atkin: Corby Railway Sculpture Project

“My intention is to fabricate the large-scale artwork in stainless steel in order to capture the modern environment to of the railway station, and to use polished surfaces to reflect the movement of passengers and visitors to the station. I also want the sculpture to be a celebration of Corby’s renewal over the many decades of rebuilding since the 1980’s, when its industry and identity were brought to an abrupt halt.”

Five Paragraphs and Seven Pictures

Critics have commented on the lyricism and exuberant colour of James Faure Walker’s paintings, surprising given that since the eighties computer graphics has been central to his work, alongside oil paint and watercolour. They have also mentioned his independent stand, using photos of pedestrians, birds, shops, at the same time as having developed an ‘abstract’ language. As Stuart Morgan wrote in 1985, “His doubt may lead to one of those careers which bridges older and newer practice, and which opens more doors than it closes”.