Deconstruction. Transformation explores ideas and works involving deconstruction/transformation in art, science, philosophy, photography, alchemy and climate change.

Annie Cattrell’s practice is often informed by working with specialists in neuroscience, meteorology, engineering, psychiatry and the history of science. This cross-disciplinary approach has enabled her to learn about cutting edge research and in depth information in these fields. She is particularly interested in the parallels and connections that can be drawn within these approaches in both art and science. She discusses her work in Transformations.

Steven Connor is Professor of English at the University of Cambridge. Since 2018 he has been Director of CRASSH. His areas of interest include magical thinking; the history of medicine; the cultural life of objects and the material imagination; the relations between culture and science; the philosophy of animals; and the body, sense and sexuality. He has also written on contemporary art for Cabinet, Tate Etc, Modern Painters and others. His essay, ‘Mutantis Mutandis’, is on the work of Annie Cattrell.

Micaela Lattanzio is a Roman photographer and artist who explores the fragmentation of female identity through the deconstruction and the subsequent reworking of female portraits. Her work explores the intricate paths of consciousness and self-awareness, the body and is a reflection on social relationships, on the specific weight that our presence has in our environment. She discussed her work in Fragmenta and beyond.

Grant Maxwell is the author of The Dynamics of Transformation: Tracing an Emerging World View, How Does It Feel?: Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Philosophy of Rock and Roll, and Beyond Plato’s Cave. He has served as a professor at Baruch College and Lehman College in New York, and he has written for the American Philosophical Association blog, American Songwriter magazine, and the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture. He discusses his ideas and work in On ‘The Dynamics of Transformation’.

Artist, Jared Vaughan Davis, often deals with topics ranging from epistemology, mythology, ancient and modern cosmology, and the science of ‘belief’. He shows some of his latest work in Deconstruction.

Brett Reif is influenced by Arte Povera and specializes in non-traditional media wall work, sculpture and installation. His use of common household materials, surfaces and objects along with raw, natural objects to create drawings, paintings, reliefs, sculptures and installations, nurtures home materials to embody our stress, conflict, hope and fear. He discusses his ideas and work in Transforming common materials.

Todd McLellan is a photographer and fixer from Canada. He was formally educated in photography at the Alberta University of the Arts but gained the bulk of his knowledge working in the field. He works both in the commercial photography/motion world as well as developing his personal work. His most recent photo series Things Come Apart is a teardown of our everyday objects.

Cecelia Chapman is a Massachusetts based artist, born in San Francisco. Her work revolves around video, essay, storytelling, and works on paper and merges the documentary and experimental. Club Paradise: don’t be a tourist…vacation culture, capitalism, consciousness 2017-2019 examines vacation culture photographed and filmed on Cape Cod.

There are articles by Elizabeth Gruner: Why the ancient promise of alchemy is fulfilled in reading ; Hannah Hoag & Jack Marley: Climate crisis – here’s what the experts recommend we do ; Duncan Brown & Edo Berger: Cosmic alchemy: Colliding neutron stars show us how the universe creates gold ; Frank Wilczek: Why physics needs art to help picture the universe ; and Dirk Messner: The digital revolution could unlock a green transformation of the global economy.

Plus, a feature on the exhibition, UMWELT, at BioBAT Art Space, which includes the work of Meredith Tromble, Patricia Olynyk, and Christine Davis.

Disturbances explores such subjects as artistic responses to psychological trauma and contemporary readings of anxiety, dynamic interplay of complex systems in nature, interactions between vision and sound, the flow of liquids, and brain patterns of consciousness.

Daniel Hill is a painter, sound artist, curator, educator, and writer whose work explores the relationship between visual art, sound, and science. His paintings employ a rules based system in which the notion of embodied cognition is an inquiry as well as the balance between the aesthetic and conceptual. He discusses his work in Interlocking Systems of Making.

Esther Rolinson is a British visual artist who explores the use of new media technology as well as long-established artistic languages such as drawing and sculpture. Her interest in bringing consciousness to our sensations led her to work with light. She discusses her work in Ten Thousand Thoughts.

Harold Offeh is an artist working in a range of media including performance, video, photography, learning and social arts practice. He often employs humour as a means to confront the viewer with historical narratives and contemporary culture and is interested in the space created by the inhabiting or embodying of history. He discusses his ideas and work in Mindfully Dizzy.

Leah Clements’s practice is concerned with the relationship between the psychological, emotional, and physical, often through personal accounts of unusual or hard-to-articulate experiences. Her work also focuses on sickness / cripness / disability in art, in critical and practical ways. She discusses her work in To Not Follow Under.

Artist William Holton’s work is an exploration of complex systems in nature, and the dynamic interplay of structure and contingency that makes up the universe. Using compressed air to create and move small currents of paint, he yields control to my materials so that these basic units become force fields, drawing energy within themselves like a vortex and radiating it outward. He discusses his work in Exploring Complex Systems in Nature.

Sarah Howe is a UK based artist whose installations situate still and moving image within sculptural space. Her work stands in the crossing between a material and psychological landscape, in a reach to illustrate heightened inner states. Her installation Consider Falling is rooted in research into derealisation (the condition of feeling that reality is unreal) and depersonalisation (a feeling of detachment from oneself, or that oneself is unreal) collectively referred to as DPD.

Plus, there are article by Martin Archer: We’ve discovered the world’s largest drum – and it’s in space ; James Sprittles: We may just have solved the great mystery of why drops splash ; Davinia Fernández-Espejo: How we identified brain patterns of consciousness ; and Giuliana Mazzoni: Our obsession with taking photos is changing how we remember the past.

Altered States explores such subjects as the science and experience of psychedelics, altered and augmented states of consciousness, neuroscience and the clinical use of psychedelics, machine language, literary illustration and digital 3D representations of artworks.

Marta Kaczmarczyk is an expert in persuasive science and technology. She is interested in demystifying the psychedelic experience and creating a scientific framework that would be more accessible to the Western mind and more relevant than the shamanic or new age framework which is popular in the psychedelic community. She is a co-founder and a coordinator of the Psychedelic Society of the Netherlands; a non-profit organization focused on advocating a safe use of psychedelic substances. She discusses her work in Demystifying the psychedelic experience.

Steve Sangapore is a contemporary oil painter based in Boston, MA. Using vastly different stylistic approaches with various series’, his work can be described as an amalgamation of realism, surrealism and abstraction with thematic focuses on the human condition. In Superposition he shows his recent series of artworks.

Dr Peter Sjöstedt-H is an Anglo-Scandinavian philosopher of mind who specializes in the thought of Whitehead and Nietzsche, and in fields pertaining to panpsychism and altered states of sentience. He discusses his ideas and work in Philosophy and Psychedelics.

Fine artist Luciana Haill works with brainwaves (EEG signal) exploring consciousness & expressing the results through digital media, performance, sound & drawings. Her artworks focus on sleep, more specifically the discrete states of Lucid Dreaming (awareness within a dream & the ability to take control) & ‘Hypnagogia’ – a more commonly experienced state at the onset of sleep & day-dreaming. She investigates the neural correlates & reveals these to the audience as changes in textured soundscapes & data visualisations. In, Ecstasis, she discusses her latest work.

Joshua Burraway is a medical anthropologist working at the intersection between social and political theory, cultural phenomenology, addiction medicine, and psychiatry. He is interested in how historical and structural forces shape different modes of subjectivity, in particular with regards to altered states of consciousness induced by psychoactive chemicals among homeless substance-users. He discusses his work in Becoming somebody else.

Paul Broks is an English neuropsychologist and science writer. Trained as a clinical psychologist at Oxford University, he is a specialist in clinical neuropsychology and is the author of The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars. Garry Kennard is a painter, writer and founding director of Art and Mind. A fascination with how the brain reacts to works of art has lead Kennard to research, write and lecture on these topics. In their correspondence, On ‘The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars, Paul Broks discusses the production of this book with Garry Kennard, its illustrator.

Dr. Sheena Calvert is a philosopher/artist/designer and educator, working at both University of the Arts, London and the Royal College of Art. She is particularly concerned with exploring the implications of emergent language-based technologies, including developments in ‘natural’ language technologies, which potentially impact on the future of human language. She discusses this in Language: The Non-Trivial Machine.

Sidney Perkowitz, Candler Professor of Physics Emeritus at Emory University, writes about science and art, and other popular topics in science. He discusses recent developments in the reproduction of artworks in Altered States: 2D digital displays become 3D reality – Digital Technology Lets You Touch Great Art.

Plus, there are articles by Elizabeth Tunbridge: How the power of art can help scientists like me understand the experience of schizophrenia ; Robert Pepperell: How a trippy 1980s video effect might help to explain consciousness ; and Christian Jarrett: Ketamine trips are uncannily like near-death experiences.

What is certain is that we are witnessing the appearance of an intelligence with the potential of unlimited creativity. We don’t have to go to Mars to seek new intelligences, they are developing right next to us. And – extraordinary to contemplate – we are beginning to merge with them.

Arthur I Miller: On The Artist in the Machine (Interalia Magazine – September 2019)

AI and Creativity explores ideas and work on the cutting edge of art and artificial intelligence, robotics, artificial neural networks, and computer-created art.

Professor Arthur I Miller is an authority on creativity, in both the arts and sciences. In his latest book, The Artist in the Machine: The World of AI-Powered Creativity, he introduces us to AI-powered computers that are creating art, literature, and music that may well surpass the creations of humans. In this exclusive interview he discusses ideas and work that forms the subject of his book and celebrates the creative possibilities of artificial intelligence in art, music, and literature.

Anna Ridler is an artist and researcher who works with information and data. She was a 2018 EMAP fellow and was listed by Artnet as one of nine “pioneering artists” exploring AI’s creative potential. Georgia Ward Dyer studied Philosophy at the University of Cambridge before developing an art practice which focuses on creating conversations about abstract, complex ideas by making them tangible through process-led, multivalent works. In Fairy Tales and Machine Learning: Retelling, Reflecting, Repeating, Recreating they explore their own versions of classic tales which are mediated through different machine learning tools; from image captioning to speech-to-text conversion.

Simon Colton is a British computer scientist, currently working as Professor of Computational Creativity in the Game AI Research Group at Queen Mary University of London, UK and in the Sensilab at Monash University, Australia. In From Computational Creativity to Creative AI and Back Again he compares and contrasts the AI research field of Computational Creativity and the Creative AI technological movement, both of which are contributing to progress in the arts.

Sofia Crespo’s work consists of different projects working with artificial intelligence, computed image recognition, and neural networks. Her project, Neural Zoo, explores how creativity combines known elements in a specific way in order to create something entirely new. In the process of generating new creatures, that don’t exist yet, she offers a perspective on how similar human creativity works. The creator, in this case, would be the algorithm itself, but with a human artist as its muse.

Ahmed Elgammal is Professor at the Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University. Director of the Art & AI Lab. Executive Council Faculty at the Center for Cognitive Science at Rutgers University. His research focusses on Computer Vision, Visual Learning, Data Science in Digital Humanities, and Human motion analysis. In Meet AICAN, a machine that operates as an autonomous artist, he discusses his research on Art & AI.

Gene Kogan is an artist, programmer and leading educator in the field of creative AI – who is developing the world’s first decentralized autonomous artist. He is a collaborator within numerous open-source software projects, and gives workshops and lectures on topics at the intersection of code and art. He discusses his work in Art and Generative Systems.

Ernest Edmonds’ art is in the constructivist tradition and he is a pioneer in the use of computers and computational ideas. His art explores algorithms used to relation to colour, time, communication and interaction. He first used computers in his practice in 1968, first showed an interactive artwork with Stroud Cornock in 1970 and first showed a generative time-based computer work in London in 1985. He discusses his ideas and work in On Computational Art.

Taney Roniger is a visual artist and writer based in New York. Her work has been shown in a number of venues in the States and abroad. Since 2012 she has been a contributing writer at The Brooklyn Rail, for which she served as Guest Editor in December 2017. She discusses her ideas in In Praise of Form: Towards a New Post-Humanist Art.

Kit Yates is a Senior Lecturer in mathematical biology at the University of Bath. His job consists of taking real-world phenomena and uncovering the mathematical truths that lie behind them. He extracts the common patterns that underlie these processes and communicates them. His latest book is called The Maths of Life and Death.

Plus, there are articles by Rui Penha & Miguel Carvalhais: If machines want to make art, will humans understand it? ; Hakwan Lau: Is consciousness a battle between your beliefs and perceptions? ; and Melissa Avdeeff: AI’s first pop album ushers in a new musical era.

And, a feature on Ai-Da, the world’s first ultra-realistic AI robot artist.

We think Dark Matter is some mysterious particle which we think is zooming around, through the earth, through rooms, through the air, through whatever environment you are reading this. I say “zooming” because we think it is moving at several hundred kilometres per second. We think it is there because when we look at the motion of objects such as stars and galaxies, we can only explain how fast they are moving due to some extra gravitational acceleration created by some matter which must be there but which we cannot see.

Professor Malcolm Fairbairn: 95% of the Universe is Missing (Interalia Magazine July 2019)

Dark Matter explores the elusive building blocks of our Universe through art and physics – and why 95 per cent of it cannot be observed.

Contributions include –

Brian Clegg is an English science writer. He is the author of popular science books on topics including light, infinity, quantum entanglement and surviving the impact of climate change, and biographies of Roger Bacon and Eadweard Muybridge. In this exclusive interview he discusses ideas relating to his latest book, ‘Dark Matter & Dark Energy: The Hidden 95% of the Universe’

Aura Satz’s work encompasses film, sound, performance and sculpture. Interested in modes of heightened perception and sensory disorientation such as flicker and psychoacoustics, Satz has used various technologies as the subject of her work, including the Chladni plate, Rubens’ tube, theremin, mechanical music, phonograph grooves, dial tones, drawn/optical sound and early colour film. She discusses her work in Voices.

Semiconductor is UK artist duo Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt. They make visually and intellectually engaging artworks which explore the material nature of our world and how we experience it through the lens of science and technology, questioning how these devices mediate our experiences. They discuss their work in Exploring the material nature of our world and how we experience it.

Professor Malcolm Fairbairn is a member of the Theoretical Particle Physics and Cosmology Research Group, Kings College London. His research lies at the boundary between cosmology, particle physics and astrophysics. In particular, he is interested in dark matter, dark energy, cosmological inflation and particle astrophysics. He discusses his ideas in 95% of the Universe is missing.

Rachel Pimm works in sculpture, video and performance to explore environments and their materialities, histories and politics often from the point of view of non-human agents such as plants, minerals, worms, water, gravity or rubber. Working in sound, Lori E Allen uses sources including obscure dialogue, background noise, cut-up word percussion and distorted popular television themes to create unique audio landscapes. They discuss their collaborative work in On the Surface.

Yu-Chen Wang’s central practice is drawing, allowing her to explore and meditate on mechanical and biological forms, and the ways in which their bodily borderlines blur and mutate. From these extemporisations, she then finds collaborative routes that take her work into the realms of fictional text, provoking the subsequent production of sculptural installation, performance, music, and film, in various combinations. She discusses her ideas and work in There’s more to this than meets the eye.

Andy Holden is an artist who works in a variety of mediums. His immersive new installation, ‘Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape’, for the Science Gallery London exhibition ‘Dark Matter: 95% of the Universe is missing’ reflects on the physics of a cartoon environment which defy the normal conditions of gravity, force, and velocity. He discusses his ideas and work in Cartoon Logic.

Experimenting with ideas of time, space and physicality, Carey Young’s body of artistic work explores law as a separate kind of ‘reality’, one with its own inherent subjectivities and points of breakdown. Missing Mass (2010) is exhibited at the Science Gallery, London exhibition ‘Dark Matter: 95% of the Universe is missing’.

Plus, there are article by Carole Mundell: Experiment picks up light from the first stars – and it may change our understanding of dark matter ; Juri Smirnov: Dark matter may not actually exist – and our alternative theory can be put to the test ; Ian G McCarthy: Our study suggests the elusive ‘neutrino’ could make up a significant part of dark matter ;  Jamie Farnes: Bizarre ‘dark fluid’ with negative mass could dominate the universe – what my research suggests.

And, information on the Science Gallery London ‘Dark Matter: 95% of the Universe is Missing’ exhibition.

The French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard wrote ‘Man is an Imagining Being’, but what do we imagine we are talking about when we speak of the imagination? Or, to put it another way, can we imagine the imagination? Where do our ideas about the imagination come from? How are creativity, imagination and philosophy related? Are there ‘types’ of imagination are there and can its capacity sometimes be restrictive? And can the imagination be ‘educated’?

These are just some of the questions that are explored in Celebrating the Imagination (Part 2).

Gary Lachman is the author of twenty-two books on topics ranging from the evolution of consciousness to literary suicides, popular culture and the history of the occult. In an exclusive interview, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, he discusses his ideas that draws us back to a philosophy and tradition that restores imagination to its rightful place, essential to our knowing reality to the full, and to our very humanity itself.

Ryota Matsumoto is an artist, designer and urban planner. In The Alchemy of Oblique Topography he shows his artwork that reflects the morphological transformations of our ever-evolving urban and ecological milieus.

Sir Ken Robinson is an internationally recognized leader in the development of creativity, innovation and human resources in education and business. His inspiring TED talks have been viewed more than 25 million times and seen by an estimated 250 million people in over 150 countries. In Creativity, Imagination and ‘Finding Your Element’ he discusses subjects such as the transformative role of creativity and imagination in education and how we can all ‘Find Our Element’.

Nicholas Wiltsher is a philosopher, working on imagination, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, phenomenology, and feminist philosophy. In this exclusive interview he discusses his ideas on the relationship between philosophy and the imagination.

Lindsay Clarke is the author of seven novels, including The Chymical Wedding, which won the Whitbread Award for Fiction in 1989. He has been Writer in Residence at the University of Wales, Cardiff, where he became a long-term Associate of the MA Creative Writing programme. In The Mythic Imagination he discusses the role of the imagination from Ancient Troy to the Present Day.

Dana Simmons is a neuroscientist, science-artist, and medical writer in Chicago. She is endlessly fascinated by the beauty in the brain and the patterns that are ever-present throughout microscopic and macroscopic nature. She shows and discusses her work in The Purkinje Pattern.

Dustin Stokes is a philosopher at the University of Utah, having previously researched and taught at the Universities of Sussex and Toronto, in both philosophy and cognitive science. His research includes work on perception, imagination, and creative thought and behaviour. In this exclusive interview he discusses his ideas on creativity, imagination and philosophy.

In Cassini’s Dreams, artist China Blue and her team translated the raw data from the dust and ice particles combined with an artistic interpretation of what would be heard from Cassini’s viewpoint as it travelled through and around Saturn’s rings, to create the bases of her exhibition at the Venice Biennale 2019.

Sacha, Duchess of Abercorn OBE was an innovator in creative education and the founder of The Pushkin Trust, an organisation that supports creative learning and education across Ireland, works to provide and support a holistic model to spark imagination and deepen awareness of our collective creativity, our humanity and ‘the child’ within each one of us.

Sadly, Sacha died on 10 December 2018 and this interview, Imagination in Education, first published in the launch issue of Interalia Magazine (May 2014), is re-published here as a tribute to her creativity, compassion and imagination.

On a bright, still December day author, artist and poet, John Moat, meditates on the connection sea, streams and fountain have with the Imagination and the Sacred… and much more.

And poet, James Harpur, celebrates the imagination in Opera – an impromptu school trip back in the day which as much as an opera as the actual opera we went to see.

There are articles by Tom McLeish: We talk about artistic inspiration all the time – but scientific inspiration is a thing too ; Valerie van Mulukom: How imagination can help people overcome fear and anxiety ; Amy Kind: Imagination is a powerful tool: why is philosophy afraid of it? ; and Howard Rachlin: Teleological behaviourism or what it means to imagine a lion.

Plus, a feature on the exhibition Borderlines at The Edge.

An overall definition of identity? If I gave one, I would almost certainly invite reproof for ignoring this aspect of the concept or that. If you twist my arm, I would say identity is about repulsion, something that allows me to say this is mine, not yours; ours, not theirs; deserving of my/our loyalty, attachment and respect, and, by implication, to discriminate others.

Florian Coulmas: On ‘Identity’ (Interalia Magazine, April 2019)

Identity explores current thinking on personal identity as well as national/global identities.

Contributions include:

Florian Coulmas is Professor of Japanese Society and Sociolinguistics at the IN-EAST Institute of East Asian Studies at Duisburg-Essen University. His latest publication, ‘Identity: A Very Short Introduction’, was published in February 2019. In On ‘Identity’ he discusses the concept of identity, its history and our contemporary understanding.

Inspired by an aesthetic in which art, science, medicine and ecology intersect, Elaine Whittaker’s transdisciplinary art practice considers biology as contemporary art practice. In Contained she shows works abstracted and transformed by her mother’s experience of living in a TB sanatorium.

Adrian Holme is a teacher, writer and artist. His cross-disciplinary background encompasses biology, fine art and information science. In ‘A house built on sand?’ he presents a sociological critique of contemporary ‘identity politics’.

Jonathan O. Chimakonam Ph.D, is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Calabar, Nigeria. In this exclusive interview he discusses his aim to break new grounds in African philosophy by formulating a system that unveils new concepts and opens new vistas for thought; a method that represents a new approach to philosophising in African and intercultural philosophies; and a system of logic that grounds them both.

Matthew MacKisack is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Exeter Medical School. He has published numerous articles on the intellectual and cultural history of imagining, and recently co-curated ‘Extreme Imagination – inside the mind’s eye’, an exhibition of art by people who cannot visualise. In Notes on an Aphantasic Artist he discusses the phenomenon of ‘creativity without visualisation’.

Plus, there are articles by Giuliana Mazzoni: The ‘real you’ is a myth – we constantly create false memories to achieve the identity we want ; Caitlin Curtis: How DNA ancestry testing can change our ideas of who we are : and M M Owen: Erik Erikson knew that self-invention takes a lifetime.

Drawing Thoughts (Part 4) continues exploring current thinking on the practice and theory of Drawing, its creative, expressive and educational value, as well as its fundamental importance to translating and analysing the world.

Contributions include:-

Juliette Losq is an artist known for photo-realistic pieces which seem like a portal to another world. Her oil paintings and drawings, which include the intricate and intimate as well as large-scale works and installations, incorporate imagery from a range of diverse interests, which she fuses with her own photographs taken during explorations of overgrown and forgotten places, The result are drawings, composed of fragments from all these realities, that transport the viewer to the border between the urban world and the wilderness. She discusses her work in Between the urban and the wilderness.

Joe Graham is a Lecturer in Drawing at Falmouth School of Art, Falmouth University. He is an artist who writes about drawing and conducts research through drawing using various propositions drawn from phenomenology and ontology. His interests revolve around understanding how drawing operates as both a vehicle for expression and a mode of thought. He discusses his ideas and work in Drawing, research and philosophy.

Laura Hudson is a cross-media artist, writer and curator with a background in filmmaking and edible horticulture. In 2018 she was awarded the student prize at Trinity Buoy Wharf (formerly Jerwood) Drawing Prize, for her Nail House Drawings, and The Roger de Grey Drawing Prize. She discusses the importance of drawing in her work in Drawing as a form of learning.

Simon Head is an artist whose work incorporates drawing, sculpture, poetry and text. He discusses his work in time-image-structure.

Bethann Garramon Merkle is a multi-disciplinary science communicator and artist who specializes in sharing science through depictions of the natural world. In particular, her work explores the role stories play in shaping public perspectives of science and ecology topics. She discusses her work in Drawing Science.

Ruth Chambers is an artist whose work explores themes including the changing material culture of communication, paper culture, and the history and function of surface pattern. In On the overlooked and forgotten, she discusses her ideas and work.

Sophie Erin Cooper creates work exploring the intricacies in the natural world and intangible human experiences; such as memories, thought patterns and the passing of time. Her piece ‘A Split Second of Humanity (Phase Two)’ was selected for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2018 and is currently being exhibited on a national UK tour. She discusses her work in Fragility and impermanence.

In Exploring interconnections of order and chaos, artist Katherine Gravett discusses some of her drawings and work that draws heavily from a traumatic family event. She has also worked in collaboration with neuroscientists in Cambridge and her work has been exhibited in artistic, scientific and therapeutic settings.

Artist and writer, Richard Bright, has addressed the relationship between art, science and consciousness for over 30 years. In Think of yourself as a Wave, he shows works from his recent series of drawings where he explores the impermanent and shifting process of time and waves.

Plus, there are articles by Gabriele Neher – Leonardo da Vinci: 500 years after his death his genius shines as bright as ever ; and Christopher Henshilwood & Karen Loise van Niekerk: South Africa’s Blombos cave is home to the earliest drawing by a human.

Towards New Thinking explores contemporary thinking and work in art and science relating to such topics as climate change, our future relationship with the environment, visualizing nature, and the role of technology in social progress.

For over 40 years, Diane Burko has investigated monumental geological phenomena. Her practice at the intersection of art and science focuses on issues of climate change. Originally basing her imagery on research and visual data from scientists, she soon moved to bear witness directly in the Polar regions. She discusses her work in The intersection of Art and the Environment.

Jasmine Pradissitto is a physicist and a painter who sculpts and creates installations in plastics, light, metal, and geopolymers, embracing the dual worlds of the Scientist and Artist. Described as ‘holograms you can touch’, her sculptures in new and discarded plastics, change in colour as the observer moves. Inspired by nature, the human condition, and scientific breakthroughs, forms are melted and reshaped from plastics using an innovative process she has developed, as a commentary on an unsustainable, increasingly Anthropocene world slowly being reshaped by the things we consume and then disregard. She discusses her latest work in Why the search for a ‘Brave New World’ is to be found in your back yard.

Epicurean Endocrinology’s latest project, ‘Cooking Sex’, is a series of sex-hormone altering meals and food products that explore the endocrine-system altering properties of industrially produced food. Byron Rich and Liz Flintz discuss their project in Epicurean Endocrinology – Cooking Sex.

Sarah Sutton is an associate professor of Art at Ithaca College, who is interested in vision science, spatial structures and speculative futures. Although her work is grounded in her painting practice, her collaboration with scientists and philosophers with overlapping interests provides creativity and vitality to her painting and teaching. She discusses her ideas and work in an exclusive interview Interconnecting Perceptions.

Nicolas Strappini’s work investigates how physical science apparatus and experimental equipment can be used alongside printmaking and many other mark-making processes to form novel artworks. The formations that he creates appear to be self-authoring and generative, and use techniques that are to some degree dependent on natural, random processes. He discusses his work in Blurring boundaries between art and science.

Rebecca Gasior Altman is a writer and sociologist. Her work explores the social history of chemistry, plastics, pollution and environmental legacy— what we pass from one generation to the next. She holds a PhD in environmental sociology from Brown University, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Science and Environmental Health Network, a national think-tank. In an exclusive interview, Being Plastic, she discusses her ideas on the history and future of plastic.

Siobhan McDonald is an award-winning Irish artist interested in the changeable nature of landmass, historical events and their interconnection to time. Her latest exhibition, titled Hidden Monuments, presents a series of artistic enquiries to remind us of the Cairns, standing stones and Megalithic structures that foreshadow our architectural histories.

Artist Emma Tuck’s work is informed by natural forms and patterns, refracted through the psychological, the political and the trivial. Her work is increasingly motivated by the catastrophic impact of human actions on the natural world. She discusses her ideas and work in What I see around me.

BioBAT Art Space is the first exhibition space in New York City that is entirely dedicated to the intersection of Art and Science. Their inaugural art exhibit, Spontaneous Emergence of Order, curated by Elena Soterakis and Jeannine Bardo, features four interdisciplinary artists, Richelle Gribble, Tanya Chaly, Magdalena Dukiewicz and Tarah Rhoda, who create works based in science and technology. The article also features an introduction to the exhibition by Benjamin Sutton.

Plus, there are articles by Tony D. Sampson – Brave New World: the pill-popping, social media obsessed dystopia we live in ; Denise Baden – Environmental storytelling can help spread big ideas for saving the planet ; and Garth Paine – Listening to nature: How sound can help us understand environmental change.

“There is, of course, the neuroscience of art, where researchers seek to tease out the brain features that characterize artists, as a means to understand how the brain achieves such complex and nuanced outward expressions, and how disruption of brain networks alters these expressions. On the other hand, there is art based on neuroscience, such as mine and others in this issue, that provide an alternate view of scientific concepts. These bi-directional connections strengthen both art and neuroscience.”

Amanpreet Badhwar

The Lines that Connect is co-edited with Dr. Amanpreet Badhwar (neuroscientist and artist) and explores contemporary thinking and work on the interactions between art and neuroscience.

Contributions include:-

Canadian multidisciplinary artist Stéphanie Morissette’s works reflect on human behaviour and the use of technologies in our quotidian life as well as in the geopolitical sphere; on conflicts and their psychological impact on the different participating actors.

In this exclusive interview she discusses her project, ‘Shadows in a Labyrinth’ (with co-collaborator Dale Einarson), which reflects on the complexity, the flaws and ephemeral aspects of our brain and memory, as well as on the medium and technologies, drawing parallels with mental illness and disease like Alzheimer.

Amanpreet Badhwar is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre de Recherche de l’Institut Universitaire de Gériatrie de Montréal (CRIUGM), Université de Montréal , where she works on Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and related dementias. Her research combines structural and functional imaging with clinical and genetic assessments to relate variations in brain connectivity to clinical status, and to develop early markers of AD pathology. She is also an artist. In this exclusive interview, The Lines that Connect, she discusses her relationship between art and neuroscience.

Dan Lloyd is the Thomas C. Brownell Professor of Philosophy and a Professor of Neuroscience at Trinity College, Connecticut. He is the author/editor of Subjective Time: The philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience of temporality (co-edited with Valtteri Arstila). In Notes Toward a Theory of Sensorimotor Understanding he discusses his developing research into the animation and sonification of brain activity.

Alexa Piotte is a graphic designer living in Montreal. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts majoring in Design and minoring in behavioural neuroscience psychology from Concordia University. In Design and Neuroscience she discusses her work relating design and neuroscience, including her collaborative project, ‘BDL: Mapping out the Genetic Blueprint of the Fruit Fly Visual System’, with Hunter Shaw, a Ph.D. candidate in biology at McGill University.

Tyler Sloan is a freelance data artist/scientist. While he is not developing custom Jupyter-based data processing pipelines, he produces computer-generated artwork and datadriven motion design using Open Data and formal scientific models. His artwork combines elements of his training as a developmental neurobiologist (B.Sc, Ph.D.) with his passion for Open Data. He discusses his work and thinking in Neural Connections.

Julia Buntaine Hoel is a conceptual artist whose work is inspired by and based on Neuroscience, the scientific study of the brain. She is also director of SciArt Center, and editor in chief of SciArt Magazine. Julia attained her double BA in neuroscience and sculpture from Hampshire College, her post-baccalaureate certificate in Studio Art from Maryland Institute College of Art, and her MFA of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts. She shows some of her latest work in Neuroscience-Art.

Anjan Chatterjee is a professor of neurology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He is director of the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics and a member of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. His research focuses on spatial cognition and its relationship to language. He also conducts neuroaesthetics research and writes about the ethical use of neuroscience findings in society. He discusses his ideas in Aesthetics and Memory.

Shanthi Chandrasekar is a multimedia and multidisciplinary artist with a BSc in Physics and an MA in Psychology. The underlying focus of her work is to understand the workings of the cosmos and life itself, with a particular fascination for the workings of the brain. She discusses this in Neurocosmologies.

Tia Besser-Paul shows work from her project Cellular Kinesics, an exploration of the communication methods of cells during a spinal cord injury. Heavily influenced by the research data, videos, and imaging of neuroscientist Andrew Greenhalgh, this work is a collaborative effort of science and art.

Shima Rastegarnia has a B.Sc. in computer science. She was always interested in art and uses different mediums in her paintings. Shima is also interested in graphic design, 3D modeling, and in making video games. Currently she is working at Centre de recherche de l’Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montréal (CRIUGM) under the supervision of Dr. AmanPreet Badhwar, where she hopes to gain better understanding of neuroscientific principles, along with expertise in neuroinformatics and science communication. She discusses her work in Making Art with Neuroscience.

Rosi Maria Di Meglio has recently completed a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts at Concordia University. Her artistic practice focuses on space and memory, on real life experiences and transformation. She considers herself a lyrical romantic abstract expressionist artist. Her philosophy is founded on the ideas that art has the power to move people whether they are observing or creating. She discusses her work in Guiding Memory.

Josefina Maranzano is mostly a self-taught artist. She studied medicine in La Plata and worked for a few years in Argentina as a general practitioner and a radiologist. At present, Josefina shares her life between painting and exploring new techniques in visual arts and conducting brain imaging medical research. She very recently submitted her Ph.D. thesis in neuroscience (with a focus in multiple sclerosis) at McGill University. She shows some of her work in Autism.

Richard Bright is an artist and editor of Interalia Magazine. In Neural Communications he shows some of his work, which draws inspiration from neuroscientific literature and imagery. “I create drawings that offer an interpretation on mental processes to reveal the nature of human consciousness and the process of thought, bridging the connection between the mysterious three pound macroscopic brain and the microscopic behaviour of neurons.”