Conversing with Nature explores our relationship with Nature through artistic and scientific engagement and understanding. Topics include, among other things, Arts and Sciences relating to Climate Change, Ecology and Ecosystems, and interdependencies between technology and natural life.

Contributions include –

Cornelia Hesse-Honegger works at the interface between art and science. Describing herself as a ‘science artist,’ she worked for 25 years, as a scientific illustrator for the Natural History Museum at the University of Zurich. Inspired by the effects witnessed by the tragedy at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and a mutated Drosophila experiment in 1967, she has devoted her life to depicting the effects of radiation and fallout by radioactivity throughout the world. She discusses her work in Lying on a Daily Basis.

Amy M. Youngs creates eco art, interactive sculptures, and digital media works that explore interdependencies between technology, plants and animals. Her practice-based research involves entanglements with the non-human, constructing ecosystems, and seeing through the eyes of machines.  Belonging to Soil is an art installation and virtual reality experience based on a critical ecological reality.

Patrick Huse is a Norwegian painter and multi-media artist. In the early 1990’s he started a project titled Rethinking Landscape, a trilogy consisting of the three parts: ‘Nordic Landscape’, ‘RIFT’ and ‘Penetration’. In this interview with art and ecology author, John K. Grande, he discusses his ideas and work.

Hillary Waters Fayle combines textiles and printmaking techniques with found botanical and organic material, exploring the symbolism, geometry and patterns found in nature. From simple lines and ribbing to fully rendered botanics, the thread-based embellishments interrupt the fragile matter. The resulting sculptures evidence nature’s durability while juxtaposing the organic material with the fabricated additions. She discusses her work in Celebrating our connection to the land.

Siobhán McDonald is an Irish artist based in Dublin. In a practice that emphasizes field work and collaboration she works with natural materials, withdrawing them from their cycles of generation, growth and decay. Her solo exhibition, The Boglands are Breathing, presents a new body of work that critically explores the role of boglands as both repositories of our past and guardians of our future. In a multifaceted body of work, Siobhán McDonald blends scientific and creative processes to make sculpture, video, works on paper, paintings and sound pieces.

Nadezda Nikolova is a Croatian-Bulgarian-American photographic artist working with wet plate collodion photograms. Her practice is informed by an experimental approach to early photographic processes and her interest in the image as an object. The abstract landscape series, ‘Elemental Forms’, ‘Landscapes and Elemental Forms’, ‘Landscape Rearticulated’, emerged as the artist’s direct response to her surroundings and to feeling a sense of well-being and security within the landscape.

Plus, there are articles by –

 Jonathan Bate: William Wordsworth and the Romantics anticipated today’s idea of a nature-positive life.

Simon P. James: Let’s protect nature, but not merely for the sake of humans.

Benjamin Gearey, Maureen O’Connor & Rosie Everett: How art inspired by peatlands can help us confront the climate crisis.

Jana Norman: The Sacred Balance: blending Western science with Indigenous knowledges, David Suzuki’s influential book has been updated for this moment.

Pattern and Meaning 2 explores, among other things, pattern as a structural aspect of the world, scales of pattern that exist between the infinitesimal and the infinite, pattern in art and  nature, psychology and brain patterns of consciousness.

Contributions include-

Meredith Woolnough is an internationally acclaimed, award winning artist from Newcastle, Australia. Her elegant, embroidered drawings capture the beauty and fragility of nature in knotted threads. Vibrant coloured structures of organic shapes hover effortlessly above the surface, elegant and enchanting. She discusses her work in The Beauty and Fragility of Nature.

Ben Alderson-Day is an Associate Professor at Durham University and member of the Developmental Science research group at Durham. His most recent research has concerned “felt presence”: the sensation that someone is present without any sensory cues. In this interview, he discusses his latest book PRESENCE: The strange and true stories of the unseen other.

Deeply connected to nature and interested in human consciousness, Alicia Blaze Hunsicker is inspired by both science and spirituality. She discusses her work in Painting as a form of meditation.

Plus, there are articles by –

Davinia Fernández-Espejo: How we identified brain patterns of consciousness

Priya Subramanian: The maths behind ‘impossible’ never-repeating patterns

Maxim Lavrentovich: Why does nature create patterns? A physicist explains the processes behind crystals, stripes and basalt columns

Natasha Ellison: Alan Turing: how the world’s most famous codebreaker unlocked the secrets of nature’s beauty

Richard Taylor: Fractal patterns in nature and art are aesthetically pleasing and stress-reducing

(Previous explorations can be found at www.interaliamag.org/issue/pattern-and-meaning/)

Landscapes of the Mind explores, among other things, creative realms and states of consciousness, art and neurodiversity, the connected and multifaceted brain, dreams and mental imagery, ecology and sculpture.

Contributions include –

Judith Alder is a British visual artist with a multi-faceted practice, working across a range of media and processes. Central to her work is a fascination with biology, physics and the history of scientific endeavour and science fiction. In her latest show, Vital Signs, she assembles a body of interconnected works grounded in research and inspired by accessible science communicators and visionary writers like HG Wells, Primo Levi, Kazuo Ishiguro and Stanislaw Lem.

In Unlocking a shift in perspective: The secret is hidden deep within the folds of our brains, textile artist, Chrys Zantis, explores the mystery and complexity of our brains and different perspectives of (un)conscious experiences. The works extend on current neuroscience research–conveying the internal workings of our brains.

Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway have worked together since the early 1990’s, developing large scale performances, multimedia installations and site-specific work, usually in collaboration with organizations and experts across many specialized fields. In 2013 they developed Foghorn Requiem, a requiem for disappearing sound, performed by the Souter Lighthouse foghorn, three brass bands and fifty ships out in the North Sea. In this interview with art and ecology author, John K. Grande, he discusses this work as well as their other projects.

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. Planet of Dreams 2022, follows a personal dream journey across continent and through time, observing how dream guides us. Planet of Dreams asks ‘in what ways can the dream state guide us?’

Visual artist, writer, and educator, Taney Roniger, discusses Visual Art and the Veracity of Touch. Since the late 90s she has been exploring the relationship between art, science, and the spirituality of immanence in both her work as an artist and in numerous essays and symposia.

LYU, SHAOFAN is a contemporary artist and Professor at The Fine Arts Academy of Guangzhou, Guangdong, China. His recent monumental public sculpture, Light of the Flourishing Age, is an excellent example of the current mode of collaborative thinking, development and experimentation combining art, science and technology which is taking place all over China today. His project was the first landscape sculpture directly associated with high-speed trains, known as ‘Gaotie’, in China. In this article, professor and sculptor Billy Lee, discusses the development and creation of this public sculpture.

An artist with a deep sense of working with the ‘poetic imagination, Helen Garrett discusses her work and the ‘conversation’ she has with her work during its creation in Landscapes of the Mind. Her interest lies in the multi-dimensional nature of consciousness, with paintings evolving and developing as different images emerge.

Florian Coulmas is Professor of Japanese Society and Sociolinguistics at the IN-EAST Institute of East Asian Studies at Duisburg-Essen University.

Plus, there are articles by –

Don Arnold: Where are memories stored in the brain? New research suggests they may be in the connections between your brain cells.

Alice Gorman – Looking back from beyond the Moon: how views from space have changed the way we see Earth.

Szonya Durant: Eye movement science is helping us learn about how we think.

Amanda Tink: Les Murray said his autism shaped his poetry – his late poems offer insights into his creative process

And, Poems by Lynne Goldsmith

Other Minds explores, among other things, the nature and existence of minds across various lifeforms, biophilia and reciprocity, sentience and the interconnectivity of intelligence across species, and natural and living networks.

Julie Andreyev is an artist-activist, researcher and educator in Vancouver, located on the unceded, traditional and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish people, including the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations, as well as the unceded traditional territories of nonhuman animals and plantlife. Her multispecies studio practice, called Animal Lover, explores more-than-human creativity and ways of knowing.

Lars Chittka is the founder of the Research Centre for Psychology at Queen Mary, University of London. Work in the Chittka lab is poised at the intersection between sensory physiology and learning psychology on the one hand, and evolutionary ecology on the other. Author of The Mind of a Bee, he discusses his work in The Intelligent Mind of an Insect.

“The creative partnership of Hannah and Joe is a striking example of interspecies communication within art, a category in which works of art result from the interactions and meaningful connections between two different species.” Charissa N. Terranova is a writer and educator. She discusses this creative partnership in Hannah and Joe: Interspecies Art between Bird and Man.

Robertina Šebjanič is an artist whose work explores the biological, chemical, political and cultural realities of aquatic environments and the impact of humanity on other organisms. Her projects call for the development of empathetic strategies aimed at recognising the rights of other (non-human) species. She discusses her ideas and work in Aquaforming.

Seirian Sumner is a Professor of Behavioural Ecology at University College London, where she studies the ecology and evolution of social insects. she passionately fights for the wasp to be rightly reframed in the public’s consciousness. She includes an extract from her debut book, Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps (William Collins, 2022).

Jackie Higgins is a writer and film-maker who works span the arts and the sciences. She is author of Sentient: What Animals Reveal about our Senses (Picador, 2021). She discusses this book, among other things, in The Greek Myth Born of Aristotle.

Heather Barnett discusses Observation Station, a series of interspecies interventions designed to examine how and why we look at animals, and which animals we choose to observe. The project is part of the Machine Wilderness residency programme in Amsterdam, centred on public fieldwork developing methodologies and prototypes of ‘wilderness machines’ that engage with local environmental complexity.

Plus, there are articles by –

Susan Hespos: Researchers trained an AI model to ‘think’ like a baby, and it suddenly excelled

Jason Bruck: Dolphins use signature whistles to represent other dolphins – similarly to how humans use names

Paul S. Rosenbloom, Christian Lebiere & John E. Laird: Cross-pollination among neuroscience, psychology and AI research yields a foundational understanding of thinking

Jennifer Ann McDonell: If animals could speak, would we understand them?

Charlie Durant, Max John & Rob Hammond: Six amazing facts you need to know about ants

Alexandra Schnell: Clever cuttlefish show advanced self-control, like chimps and crows

Lisa Poncet: Suckers for learning: why octopuses are so intelligent

Ways of Seeing and Perceiving explores the esoteric work of Marcel Duchamp, the philosophy of perception and vision science, the phenomenological investigations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, consciousness and neuroscience, insect vision and behaviour, machine drawing and scientific imagery.

In The Bride Stripped Bare: Esoteric Origins for Duchamp’s Large Glass, Jacquelynn Baas, a renowned curator, cultural historian, scholar and writer, contains groundbreaking research on Duchamp, Kashmir Shaivism, and Western Esotericism. Her aim is not to furnish a detailed key or step by step guide to Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Large Glass’, as others have attempted to do, but rather to provide a wider global context for interpreting ‘The Large Glass’ and assessing its cultural significance.

In his recent book, Perception: First Form of Mind, Tyler Burge develops an understanding of the most primitive type of mental representational: perception. Focusing on the functions and capacities of perceptual states, Burge accounts for their representational content and structure, and develops a formal semantics for them. Drawing mainly on vision science, ‘Perception: First Form of Mind’ is a rigorous, agenda-setting work in philosophy of perception and philosophy of science.

In The Unsettled Sense, Derek Bean focuses primarily on the eye which sees and, in particular, on seeing as a presence to our experience of the world and others. It considers how there is an inherent unsettledness and instability in the phenomenology of seeing. 

Philip Nova explores the question, what happens when we die? in his essay, Can consciousness continue after death? A Neuroscientific Perspective.

In Jack Tait: Master of the Analog Drawing Machine, Paul Brown, Nick Lambert, Frederic Fol Leymarie & Glenn Smith present an introduction to the extraordinary and wide-ranging work of analog drawing machine artist Jack Tait.

Plus, there are articles by –

Joanna Mendelssohn: Ways of Seeing at 50: an icy blast of a book about male voyeurism, art, capitalism and so much more.

Jamie Theobald & Ravindra Palavalli-Nettimi: Flies evade your swatting thanks to sophisticated vision and neural shortcuts.

Felice Frankel: Science images can capture attention and pique curiosity in a way words alone can’t.

Mike Richardson: The tongue: how one of the body’s most sensitive organs is helping blind people ‘see’.

And, feature on the exhibition Reimagining Joya which involved alumni from the MA Art & Science, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

Changing Space. Changing Time explores light, movement and art; biophilia and the interconnectivity of intelligence across species; biological time; astronomy and deep-field images; the evolutionary tree of life; brain charts and time; Black Holes, warped spacetime and the Arrow of Time.

Paul Friedlander is an artist who first trained as a physicist. He became fascinated by art involving the use of movement and light in the late 1960s. In 1983 he made an important discovery of the chaotic properties of spinning string and invented chromastrobic light – “light that changes colour faster than the human eye can see”. Friedlander applies his scientific knowledge to his art and is heavily influenced by chaos theory, string theory and cosmology. He discusses his ideas and work in World Lines.

Darya Warner works at the intersection of art and science by bridging growth/connections with human and non-human actors through the prism of Climate Change. By addressing site-specific history, ecology, and local systems of communication, Darya aims to cultivate a new form of hybrid space for “intermatter” interaction with an emphasis on the interconnectivity of intelligence across species. She discusses her ideas and work in Collaborating with Living Matter.

Nicholas P. Money (Nik Money) is a gentleman of letters, mycologist, and professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is the author of popular science books that celebrate the diversity of the microbial world. His latest book, ‘Nature Fast and Nature Slow: How Life Works, from Fractions of a Second to Billions of Years’, is a vision of biology set within the entire timescale of the universe. It is about the timing of life, from microsecond movements to evolutionary changes over millions of years. He discusses the book in On ‘Nature Fast and Nature Slow’.

Laura Stack is a visual artist, educator, and eco-enthusiast residing in Minneapolis, MN. She creates biological abstract paintings, ink collages & installations informed by science, science fiction, and the natural world. Her work alludes to fictional organisms and plays with the tension between organic and synthetic. She discusses her work in Biophilia.

Seattle artist Buster Simpson is a pioneer in the field of urban environmentalism and art in public spaces. Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, Simpson has been dedicated to working in the public realm; his method is grounded in a farsighted contract between the artist and where he lives. His career parallels the rise of public art in the Pacific Northwest and he has played a crucial role in establishing Seattle as a significant center for community-minded artistic practice. In an interview with art and ecology author, John K. Grande, he discusses his ideas and work in Buster Simpson – Proto-Habitat Design Sculpture.

Rohini Devasher is an international artist and amateur astronomer based in Delhi, India. Her practice spans film, drawing and printmaking, mapping the ‘antagonism’ of time and space. ‘One Hundred Thousand Suns’ is another kind of rendering of the Sun, assembled from data that is both historical and contemporary. work explores the notion that there may be multiple readings and avatars of data depending on the site, the observer, and the mode and method of observation, collection and preservation.

Artist and writer, Richard Bright, has addressed the relationship between art, science and consciousness for over 40 years. He studied Fine Art and Physics before founding The Interalia Centre in 1990. Since then, he has lectured extensively on art and science and written articles on James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy and Susan Derges, among others. He is co-author of The Art of Science (Welbeck Publishers, 2021).   He shows some of his recent work in Time Waves (II).

Plus, there are articles by –

Martin Barstow: James Webb telescope: a scientist explains what its first, amazing images show – and how it will change astronomy.

Cherine Fahd: How the James Webb deep field images reminded me the divide between science and art is artificial.

Sam Baron: Time might not exist, according to physicists and philosophers – but that’s okay.

Matthew Wills: Evolutionary tree of life: modern science is showing how we got so much wrong.

Chris Impey: Say hello to Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

Richard Bethlehem & Jakob Seidlitz: Brain charts: first comprehensive view of how the brain changes over a lifetime.

Tjaart Krüger & Emil Roduner: Unpacking a mystery of physics: Why processes in nature operate only in one direction.

Matthew Bailes & Vivek Venkatraman Krishnan: Warp factor: we’ve observed a spinning star that drags the very fabric of space and time.

And, poetry by Lynne Goldsmith.

Conscious explores individual and collective consciousness, philosophy of mind, brain mapping and the human brain project, consciousness and quantum physics, and reflections on drawing.

Suki Chan is a London based artist and film director. Her films take audiences on an immersive journey and shines a light on subjects that are under-represented across the human condition: from dementia, sight-loss, identity to belonging. Dr Marius Kwint, Reader in Visual Culture at the University of Portsmouth, discusses her recent installation, Conscious, which explores the future of our individual and collective consciousness, weaving a narrative through the secret lives of bees, humans and artificial intelligence.

Jack Symes is a public philosopher and writer. He is currently a teacher and researcher at the University of Liverpool and is best known as the producer of The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast. The podcast, in which Jack discusses philosophy with the world’s leading thinkers, has over 75,000 regular listeners. His first book, Philosophers on Consciousness: Talking about the Mind, was published by Bloomsbury in February 2022. In Talking about the Mind, he discusses his ideas and work on philosophy and consciousness.

Heidi Whitman’s installations, constructions, paintings, and drawings are invented terrains or mental maps. She discusses and shows some of her work in Brainstorms, Terrains and Mental Mapping.

Robert Horvitz studied art at Yale University. Upon completion of his B.A. degree he was hired by Yale to teach drawing. From there he went on to teach courses in contemporary art at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and studio art at Phillips and Abbott Academies. He discusses his ideas and work in Revelations.

Siobhán McDonald’s practice draws attention to contemporary topics dealing with air, breath and atmospheric phenomena, weaving scientific knowledge into her art in a poetic and thoughtful manner. In The week the sun touched the earth, she discusses and shows work from her recent exhibition.

Artist and writer, Richard Bright, has addressed the relationship between art, science and consciousness for over 30 years. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally and was the recipient of the Visions of Science Award, The Edge, Andrew Brownsward Gallery, University of Bath (Second Prize Winner). He is co-author of The Art of Science (Welbeck Publishers, 2021). He shows his recent series of works in FlowDancing.

Plus, there are articles by –

Barbara J Sahakian, Christelle Langley & Katrin Amunts – The Human Brain Project: six achievements of Europe’s largest neuroscience programme.

Mir Jalil Razavi & Weiying Dai: Brain wrinkles and folds matter – researchers are studying the mechanics of how they form.

Cristiane de Morais Smith: Can consciousness be explained by quantum physics? My research takes us a step closer to finding out.

Magda Osman: To what extent are we ruled by unconscious forces?

Contemplating Connections explores contemporary interactions between the Arts and Sciences.

Paul Walde is an artist, composer, and curator. Walde’s body of work suggests unexpected interconnections between landscape, identity, and technology. In 2013, he completed ‘Requiem for a Glacier’, a site-specific sound performance featuring a fifty-five-piece choir and orchestra live on the Farnham Glacier in the Purcell Mountains. In this interview with art and ecology author, John K. Grande, he discusses this work as well as his other projects.

Donald Burgy has been well-known for his futuristic conceptual artworks for more than 50 years. Much less known is his recent work on the interpretation of prehistoric drawings. In Time Traveller: Donald Burgy’s journey from the far future to the distant past, Robert Horvitz considers his recent work as a necessary complement to the earlier work and identifies a fundamental change in Burgy’s understanding of the relationship between art and science as part of this complementarity.

Planktonium is a photo series and short film about the unseen world of microscopic plankton. It is a voyage into a secret universe, inhabited by alien-like creatures. Jan van IJken filmed the plankton through his microscopes, revealing the beauty and delicate structures of the minute organisms in the finest detail. These stunningly beautiful organisms are unknown to most of us, because they are invisible to the naked eye. However, they are of vital importance for the ecosystem.

In Contemplatives in Conversation: Images in Contemplative Practice, Arthur Aghajanian and Don Salmon share their experiences and ideas about the promises and pitfalls of using images to deepen  connections to God. They also explore the contradictions inherent in our use of images for spiritual guidance, along with questions related to the intersection of art and theology.

Plus, there are poems by Eleni Cay and Lynne Goldsmith.

A feature on biological arts pioneers SymbioticA presenting ‘Sunlight, Soil & Shit (De)Cycle’ (3SDC) – a provoking arts meets science project about the three elements in our utopian future that farming is trying to live without.

And, articles by –

Joanna Mendelssohn: How the stunning abstract art of Hilma af Klint opens our eyes to new ways of seeing.

Alastair Wilson: How could the Big Bang arise from nothing?

Jyoti Mishra: Talent, you’re born with. Creativity, you can grow yourself.

Mauro Manassi & David Whitney: Everything we see is a mash-up of the brain’s last 15 seconds of visual information.

Being Us explores current ideas on consciousness (including AI, robotic and artificial consciousness), human identity, microbiology and biotechnology, and what it means to be a ‘Self’.

Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, where he is also Co-Director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. He is also Co-Director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Program on Brain, Mind, and Consciousness, and of the Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarship Programme: From Sensation and Perception to Awareness. In On ‘Being You’ he discusses his latest book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness.

Antonio Chella is a Professor of Robotics and Director of RoboticsLab at the Department of Engineering, University of Palermo. He is the author of more than 200 publications and an editorial director of scientific journals and of book series in the fields of Robot Consciousness, Computational Creativity, Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence. He discusses his work in Cognitive Architectures for Artificial Consciousness.

Taney Roniger is a visual artist, writer, and educator based in New York. Since the late 90s she has been exploring the relationship between art, science, and the spirituality of immanence in both her work as an artist and in numerous essays and symposia. In You Are Therefore I Am: From Dualism to Allocentrism (and What Any of It Has To Do With Art) she asks ““Can we imagine a kind of art made, first, for the viewer, for a shift in her consciousness, but then in addition, a kind intended specifically to turn her in the direction of otherness?”

Alexa Wright is London-based artist working across a range of media including photography, video, interactive installation and book works. She has worked at the intersection of art and medical science since the late-1990s and often works with people with mental and physical differences to make works that address questions of human identity and otherness through qualities like vulnerability and empathy. She discusses her ideas and work in People-Identities.

Philip Goff is Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Durham University. His research focuses on how to integrate consciousness into our scientific worldview. In Science as we know it can’t explain consciousness – but a revolution is coming he argues that the traditional approaches of materialism and dualism face insuperable difficulties. “On the basis of this I defend a form of panpsychism, the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world”.

Matej Peljhan is a clinical psychologist by profession and works as a psychotherapist. He holds the title ‘Master of Photography’, which is the highest title you can obtain in Slovene photography. In his photographic series, COVID-19: THINKING WITH ART, he closely monitored the changes and consequences that occur in the mental and social life of people during a pandemic.

Laura Splan is a transdisciplinary artist working at the intersections of science, technology, and culture. Her research-driven projects connect hidden artifacts of biotechnology to everyday lives through embodied interactions and sensory engagement. She discusses her latest work in Mediating our relationship to the molecular world.

Audrey Rangel Aguirre is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of art and science. In Terras Lux Project she discusses her interdisciplinary ongoing project that enquiries into the biological realm of microbiology, microbiotechnology, astrobiology, physics, and spirituality.

Elena Soterakis is an artist exploring themes of environmental degradation and our relationship with technology and nature, through painting, sculpture, and large-scale creative productions. She discusses her recent work in Co-Genesis: New Sea Morphologies.

Art For Your World is a new campaign for WWF, led by curatorial practice Artwise, to mobilise and unite the art world in the fight against the climate crisis. From practising artists to commercial galleries, cultural centres to museums and beyond, this is a wide call to action for the cultural sector to come together with a united voice to say that climate change matters and we must act now. As part of the Art For Your World campaign, WWF commissioned three limited edition prints from acclaimed artists Chila Kumari Singh Burman, Heather Phillipson and Bob and Roberta Smith.

Plus, there are articles by –

Nicholas R. Longrich: Would we still see ourselves as ‘human’ if other hominin species hadn’t gone extinct?

 Barbara J Sahakian, Christelle Langley, Emmanuel A Stamatakis & Lennart Spindler: Consciousness -how the brain chemical ‘dopamine’ plays a key role – new research.

Henry Taylor & Bilge Sayim: Visual illusion that may help explain consciousness – new study.

And, a tribute to Dr Simon Park (1964-2021), the passionate naturalist whose work revealed the wonders of the microbial world and whose approach challenged easy disciplinary definitions. Through microphotography, videography and writing Simon opened up invisible worlds to others and provided a space for learning, for wonder and for speculation.

Meeting Points explores contemporary interactions and collaborations between the Arts and Sciences.

In Julie Harrison’s ‘Bodies’, Kimberly Lyons discusses the work of the multidisciplinary visual artist and educator who probes methods of science and mechanisms of technology to explore the dualities of nature and artifice.

Jiyong Lee is a studio artist and educator who lives and works in Carbondale, Illinois, the United States. A professor of art at Southern Illinois University, Lee has headed the glass program there since 2005. In Segmentation Series he discusses his glass sculptures inspired by his fascination with the science of the cell.

In Curating Art and Science Collaborations, Esther Mallouh discusses her work as an arts entrepreneur and consultant-curator.

In The Art and Science of Sound in The Sea, Lindsay Olson discusses her project that makes visible the invisible world of sound in the sea and densely embroidered silk panels she created as a result.

Angela McQuillan is an artist, curator and designer, whose passion lies in connecting people and showcasing creative talent and new ideas. In Meeting Points Redefined she discusses curating multidisciplinary events that convene people with diverse knowledge and skill sets.

Steve Sangapore is an American contemporary oil painter. 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 (UN?) HOLY ALLIANCE: Why the Titans of Science and Religion Continue to Clash he discusses the tension between religious systems and the scientific enterprise.

INTERFACING was a project involving Molly Macleod in 2021 that brought together scientists and patients to discuss the current role of data in pancreatic cancer research. The aim of the workshop was to spark new conversations and re-frame the context of qualitative research whilst creating a piece of new artwork that represented this.

Plus, there are articles by –

Predrag Slijepcevic & Nalin Chandra Wickramasinghe – Seti: how microbes could communicate with alien species

Reshanne Reeder – Pseudo-hallucinations: why some people see more vivid mental images than others – test yourself here

Alexandra Schnell: Sleeping octopuses might experience fleeting dreams – new study

Trevor Weekes: What makes a good scientific illustration?

And, a feature on Outwitting Cancer – Making Sense of Nature’s Enigma is an immersive exhibition exploring the latest cancer research taking place at The Francis Crick Institute, London.