Cellular explores examples where aesthetic practice draws inspiration from the molecular sciences, capturing dynamical cellular and microscopic processes, and ways in which science investigates cellular processes in nature, neuroscience and computing.

David S. Goodsell is a Professor of Computational Biology at the Scripps Research Institute and Research Professor with the RCSB Protein Data Bank at Rutgers. His art explores the inner structure of cells and viruses, using computer graphics and traditional painting with watercolor and ink. His article describes Molecular Landscapes, a series of work created for a show at the Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University in April 2020, which was ironically postponed due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Inspired by the narratives of scientific discovery and innovation that increasingly dominate contemporary culture, Rogan Brown’s work is an attempt by a non-scientist, an outsider, to visualize, comprehend and assimilate these new ideas and new ways of seeing the world, whether it’s to do with our changing perception of bacteria or the paradigm shifts in our comprehension of the physical world that emerge from quantum physics. He discusses his work in Cellular Papercuts.

Artist Klari Reis is best known for her Petri Dish series, a multicolour set of circular blobs created using a blend of media and ground-breaking techniques. The core of her approach is the transformation and pigmentation of a UV-resistant plastic, the epoxy polymer, into unique and cutting edge artworks. She discusses her work in Exploring the microscopic.

Jody Rasch is a New York City area-based artist whose work is based on themes from astronomy, biology, physics and spectra. An expression of both the patterns of the natural world and the metaphors underlying modern science, his art allows us to see the beauty in the repulsive, to find knowledge in the unknown, to observe the unseen to more clearly see our world. By exploring the invisible, Rasch invites the observer to look beyond the “seen” to appreciate the beauty and mystery of the “unseen.” He discusses his latest work in Seeing Within.

“My artistic narrative is influenced by my experience and involvement, over the years, in the scientific study and investigation of cell structure and function……….The physical and chemical properties of atoms and molecules, the composition of matter, the energy, matter’s wear and degradation — these are the raw materials I use to compose a personal artistic landscape.” Thalia Gatzouli, an artist and nuclear physician, discusses her work in A meditation on the concept of matter and life.

Andrew McKeown has completed many large scale sculpture commissions throughout the U.K and internationally. Recurring themes within his work are those of growth, change and renewal and these natural or organic themes are often combined with site specific historical or industrial references which can be both literal and metaphorical. Andrew’s expertise is in sculpture, design and environmental regeneration. Casting and mould making processes inform and influence his work in both a practical and conceptual way and he often create installations of multiple sculptures which are cast or fabricated in durable materials such as iron, steel, bronze and stone.

“I dye, paint and stitch silk and wool to create boldly colored biomorphic wallhangings inspired by microscopic/cellular imagery – a kind of visual invented biology with textiles.” Fiber artist, Karen Kamenetzky, creates a kind of ‘invented biology’, inspired by microscopic and cellular imagery, with works zooming in on that fundamental nature of things and bringing it into vision. She works loosely from sketches but each piece travels a route of evolution and change.

Plus, there are article by Stuart Thompson: Can plants think? They could one day force us to change our definition of intelligence ; Yunlong Zhao: Linking brains to computers: how new implants are helping us achieve this goal ; Mark Greenwood & James Locke: Plants can tell time even without a brain – here’s how ; Guillaume Thierry: Lab-grown mini brains: we can’t dismiss the possibility that they could one day outsmart us ; and Madeline Andrews, Aparna Bhaduri & Arnold Kriegstein: Brain organoids help neuroscientists understand brain development, but aren’t perfect matches for real brains.

Drawing Now continues exploring current thinking and work on the practice of Drawing, its creative, expressive and educational value, as well as its fundamental importance to translating and analysing the world.

Wura-Natasha Ogunji is a visual artist and performer. Her works include drawings hand-stitched into tracing paper, videos and public performances. Her work is deeply inspired by the daily interactions and frequencies that occur in the city of Lagos, Nigeria, from the epic to the intimate. Ogunji’s performances explore the presence of women in public space; these often include investigations of labor, leisure, freedom and frivolity. She discusses her work in Drawings hand-stitched.

Images sourced from the internet often form the basis of David Haines’s work, whose practice actively examines the artist’s own position as someone who makes pictorial and textual narratives in the wake of abstraction, conceptual art and photography, and whose themes include an exploration of digital identities, online communities, contemporary myths and the indexical nature of drawing itself. His work is discussed in David Haines and the Black Mirror/Facing faces.

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. She discusses and shows her recent series of drawings in Drawing, the Body, and the Cognitive Unconscious.

History, memory, masculinity and power balance are central themes in Marc Bauer’s work that consist for a major part of black and white drawings, but extends to animation film, ceramics, oil paint and sculpture. He describes drawing as “a way for me and the viewer, to comprehend reality in all its complexity – subjectively, politically, symbolically – and show how history, memory and shifting power structures shade the present.”

Massinissa Selmani’s work aims to create drawn forms mingling a documentary approach with fictional constructions and animations, while taking as its point of departure contemporary political and social issues from press cuttings. Through confrontation, juxtaposition and even the superposition of actual elements, whose contexts have systematically been concealed, the artist creates enigmatic, ambiguous scenes unlikely to happen in reality. He discusses his work in Drawn Forms.

Shelly Tregoning’s work is a response to the intimacies of her life – “an emotional connection to those closest to me and to fragments of the everyday that I encounter. I am trying to make sense in some way, of life and personal identity – through conversations with friends, places I have been and the things I see along the way. Visually gathering ‘moments’ which inform my work, these drawings and scribbles create a scaffolding upon which I build my images”. She discusses her work in The human condition and the question of personal identity.

Artist and writer, Richard Bright, has addressed the relationship between art, science and consciousness for over 30 years. He shows his recent series of drawings in Dialogues and Double-Slits.

Plus, there are articles by Jill Gibbon: I go undercover into arms fairs – and secretly draw caricatures of the ‘hell’ I find there ; and Nicole R. Fleetwood: Through his art, a former prisoner diagnoses the systemic sickness of Florida’s penitentiaries.

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.