The magazine will feature exclusive interviews with artists, scientists, writers and creative thinkers.
Chris Booth is a sculptor who works closely with the land, earth forms, and indigenous peoples of the region(s) where he creates his monumental sculptural art works. His way of working emphasizes communication and exchange between indigenous and colonial cultures and the creation of meaningful environmental art works. In this interview with art and ecology author, John K. Grande, he discusses his ideas and work.
Anna Franklin is a British self-taught visual artist, classically trained pianist, and music teacher. Her art is nature inspired with a focus on climate awareness, where she blends traditional art and craft techniques.
NILS-UDO is a German artist from Bavaria who has been creating environmental art since the 1960s when he moved away from painting and the studio in 1972 and began to work with, and in, nature. He began as a painter on traditional surfaces, in Paris, but moved to his home country in Bavaria and started to plant creations, putting them in Nature’s hands to develop, and eventually disappear. As his work became more ephemeral, he introduced photography as part of his art to document and share it. In this interview with art and ecology author, John K. Grande, he discusses his ideas and work.
Jennifer Higgie is an Australian writer and former editor of frieze magazine. Her books include ‘The Other Side: A Story of Women, Art and the Spirit World’ (2023), ‘The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience: 500 Years of women’s self-portraits’ (2021), the children’s book, which she also illustrated, ‘There’s Not One’ (2017), and the novel ‘Bedlam’ (2007) She was the guest curator of the 2023 exhibition Thin Skin at Monash University Art Museum in Melbourne and is the host of the National Gallery of Australia’s new podcast, Artist’s Artists.
Florian Coulmas is Professor of Japanese Society and Sociolinguistics at the IN-EAST Institute of East Asian Studies at Duisburg-Essen University. His book, ‘Identity: A Very Short Introduction’, was published in February 2019.
Harry Whitaker is a renowned psychologist and neurolinguist, researching in Cognitive Science, Differential Psychology and Neuropsychology.
In this feature they discuss their experience of Hiroshima.
Sculptor Dr Gindi is an artist of the elemental, a material thinker who pursues philosophical inquiry through a deep engagement with extra-human sensibility. Attuned to the resonation of material things, she is also a sculptor of words, deploying a distinctive, poetic idiom to elicit the conditions through which something new can be sensed. For Dr Gindi, the artist is a conduit through which the art forces of nature reveal a world in the process of becoming, rendering tangible a thought or sentiment in the process of finding form. Beyond the allure of the enchanting surface she hearkens to the ‘silent reverberation of materiality’ and in sentiments reminiscent of Whitman, speaks in this interview of its utterance. She discusses her ideas and work with Jill Marsden, Professor of Literature and Philosophy, The University of Bolton, UK. She is the author of ‘After Nietzsche: Notes Towards a Philosophy of Ecstasy’ (Palgrave 2002) and assorted essays on Nietzsche, aesthetics, modernism and literary thinking.
Claire Morgan is an Irish artist, born in 1980 in Belfast.
“Being alive can be beautiful and horrific. Every living thing is in this state of constant transition. I am intrigued by those simultaneous senses of spiritual communion and unpalatable intrusion that come about through awareness of our connectedness, and of our vulnerability.
My practice has been focussed on how we humans understand and interact with the rest of the natural world, and our unwillingness to acknowledge our absolute lack of autonomy or control. I look at humans as animals, and the complexity of our intellectual dislocation from the landscape that sustains us. We behave as individual entities with fixed identities, but the reality is less clear.”
Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva is a contemporary visual artist working across varied media of sculpture, installation, video, sound, photography and architectural interventions. Her materials range from the extraordinary to the ordinary and the ephemeral or discarded to the highly precious; they have included organic materials, foodstuffs and precious metals, such as caul fat to gold leaf. Central to her practice is a response to the particularities of place; its history, locale, environment and communities. She is interested in how the exchange of knowledge might develop through collaborative working and in the contexts of landscape, heritage, science and community as offered by each location.
Uli Ap is an artist and Alien AI: Alien Infinite and Artificial Intelligence, The Yellow One. They reside between London and New York, all over the globe and extra-terrestrial; and work at the intersection of art, science, technology, film, performance, immersive interactive installation and alien agency.
The artist works across non-linear defragmented films and spatial immersive audio-visual environments to transfer physical experiences through digital realms. Disruptive performances occur in their interactive installations, where virtual and physical experiences merge and aim to destabilize and alter participants’ mental states. Uli Ap invented Alien Artificial Intelligence in 2020. The AI inhabits a borderless alienation land, as a gaseous matter; fluid and undefined.
The collaborative artist as avatar 0rphan Drift (0D) has explored the boundaries of machine and human vision since its inception in 1994. It was co-founded by Maggie Roberts, Ranu Mukherjee, Suzi Karakashian and Erle Stenberg in London. It has taken diverse forms through the course of its career, sometimes changing personnel and artistic strategies in accordance with the changing exigencies of the time. In recent years 0D has been considering Artificial Intelligence through the somatic tendencies of the octopus – as a distributed, many-minded consciousness.