“If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO₂ will need to be reduced… to at most 350 ppm.” – Dr. James Hansen, NASA climate scientist

Today CO₂ registers at 400 parts per million in our atmosphere, and industrial civilisation contributes another 2 ppm annually – dangerously high levels that risk triggering irreversible climate change impacts. (http://350.org/about/science/ ) Simultaneously, ecocide is endemic across our planet; the UN Environment Programme estimates 150-200 species go extinct every year.  And scientists suggest we have 10 years to secure a viable future for biodiversity and our children.

This issue highlights a variety of artistic responses.  Internationally acclaimed artists Ackroyd & Harvey explain how their work often evolves through collaborations with scientists. Melissa Tuckey discusses socially engaged poetry in the US; plus I explore David Cooper’s surrealist painting; ecologically engaged British theatre; and through my poem ‘Earth Justice’, the mock ecocide trial held at London’s Supreme Court in 2011, initiated by Polly Higgins (http://eradicatingecocide.com/ ).

Ineffective government action and the unchecked power of corporations to continue their devastating search for fossil fuels and minerals inevitably add a political dimension.  This issue features art activism responding to a range of environmental issues; and I review ‘Disobedient Objects’, an exhibition of ‘tools of social change’ at London’s V&A.

“Whatever you love, it is under assault.  But love is a verb.  We have to let that love call us to action. That isn’t what love demands; that is what love is.”  Lierre Keith

Liberal environmentalists traditionally rely on education to initiate social change, but radical thinkers such as Lierre Keith challenge this approach.  So what are the alternatives?  How have other movements been successful in the past?

In addition, Maddy Harland, editor of Permaculture Magazine, uncovers contemporary heresies that require transformation; and Dr. Jamie Vishwam Heckert talks about the inner freedom he’s discovering to tackle structures of domination.

Transformation

Noun: A marked change in form, nature, or appearance.

Transmutation

Noun: the action of changing or the state of being changed into another form.

The changing of Bodies into Light, and Light into Bodies, is very conformable to the Course of Nature, which seems delighted with Transmutations.

Sir Isaac Newton – Opticks, 2nd edition (1718), Book 3

Only by discovering alchemy have I clearly understood that the Unconscious is a process and that ego’s rapports with the unconscious and his contents initiate an evolution, more precisely a real metamorphoses of the psyche.

Carl Gustav Jung – Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

“The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn’t need to be reformed — it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education, but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.”

Ken Robinson – The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

How does the ‘alchemic’ process relate to the theory of consciousness? What is the relevance of alchemy as a metaphor in the modern world? How can creativity be encouraged? This issue looks at the idea of transformation in many ways – from the relationship between the mind and body, to structure and variation in pattern, as well as the relationship between time and space in quantum theory.

Featuring artists exploring the work of physicists, physicists studying the artistic process, this issue explores ideas that cross the boundary between art and science.

Plus, with Sir Ken Robinson, an internationally recognized leader in the development of creativity, innovation and human resources in education and in business, we explore the need for creative transformation in education and how to discover our ‘Element’.

“Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.”

Haruki Murakami: Kafka on the Shore

“All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man’s life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.”

Albert Einstein: Out of My Later Years – The Scientist, Philosopher, and Man Portrayed Through His Own Words [Moral Decay (first published 1937)]

Science, art, and religion can be seen as having in common humanity’s need to explore, describe, and attempt to explain its place in the world and the universe.

This issue explores pioneering ideas and their implications and engagements within the context of future art, science and religion.

Is there a ‘Poised Realm’ between the Quantum and Classical Worlds? How is this realm related to consciousness? Is the universe a gigantic quantum computer? Are we at an important point in our history in terms of how we understand complexity and information in terms of theology? Can there be a dialogue between opposites? How can we promote new ways of perceiving the land and our relationship to it in the 21st century?

And, what can these questions tell us about the future relationship between art, science and consciousness?

A Clash of Culture is not a Disaster, it is an Opportunity (Alfred North Whitehead)

Dialogue can be considered as a free flow of meaning between people in communication, in the sense of a stream that flows between banks. It may turn out that such a form of free exchange of ideas and information is of fundamental relevance for transforming culture and freeing it of destructive misinformation, so that creativity can be liberated. (David Bohm, 1990)

I think it’s very strange that ‘knowledge’ has been divided up in to disciplines where there’s really a continuum between things, and people have diverse ways of understanding (Anna Dumitriu, 2014)

Art/Science collaborations abound. The emergence of Sci/Art initiatives is growing, becoming common-place. Dialogue and collaboration between the arts and sciences has provided the potential to create new knowledge, ideas and processes beneficial to both fields. Artists and scientists approach creativity, exploration and research in different ways and from different perspectives, but when working together there is the opportunity to open up new ways of seeing, experiencing and interpreting the world around us.

How and why do artists engage with science? Why are scientists interested in collaborating with artists? What are the mutual benefits? What new forms of public access are created when scientists open their laboratories to artists? What can a designer learn from consulting a biologist? The more you look, the more you realize that the lines between disciplines have blurred.

A recent white paper emanating from MIT argues that the intersections of arrays of scientists (from many disciplinary areas) will be the next Kuhnian scientific revolution, a revolution broadly known as Convergence. Nobel Laureate Phillip Sharp, one of the authors of the MIT white paper, has noted: “Convergence is a broad rethinking of how all scientific research can be conducted, so that we capitalize on a range of knowledge bases, from microbiology to computer science to engineering design. It entails collaboration among research groups but, more deeply, the integration of disciplinary approaches that were originally viewed as separate and distinct. This merging of technologies, processes, and devices into a unified whole will create new pathways and opportunities for scientific and technological advancement.”

Are we in the beginning of a  ‘Convergence Revolution’? And how does this apply to both the Arts and Sciences. 

In this issue, we begin the first of a what will be a continuing exploration of the connections, both theoretical and practical, between disciplines, and its implications and engagements within the context of art, science, philosophy, culture and cultures.

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” – Confucius

“Life emerged, I suggest, not simple, but complex and whole, and has remained complex and whole ever since” – Stuart Kauffman: At Home in the Universe.

“If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we’d be so simple that we couldn’t.” – Ian Stewart: The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World

Is the world simple or complex? Ask particle physicists and they will probably try to persuade you that the world is simple and governed by the Laws of Nature or by a single Theory of Everything. Ask a biologist, an economist a social scientist or an artist and they will tell you quite the opposite: the world is a collection of complexity and chaos. So who is right? Or is that the wrong question? Is it actually more complicated than that?

New scientific perspectives on complex systems, emergence and information have taken on wider philosophical and ‘religious’ implications. This issue explores these implications and engagements within the context of science, art and theology.

What is complexity and how does it emerge? Is there a hierarchy of complexity? Is information more fundamental than particles and can it be given objective meaning? How are artists engaging with the complex? Are we at an important point in our history in terms of how we understand complexity and information? What do these answers tell us about the nature of art, science and consciousness?

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 do brains imagine? How are consciousness and imagination related? How many ‘types’ of imagination are there? And can the imagination be ‘educated?

These are just some of the questions that are explored in the Interalia Magazine’s first issue, ‘Celebrating the Imagination’.

Modern ideas about the imagination were powerfully shaped during the Romantic Era in 19th century Europe. Romantic poets, scientists and philosophers conceived of the imagination as a primary force behind the production of knowledge of all kinds, fiercely debating about the nature of the imagination, how it worked, and why its prodigious creative potential might endanger the rationality and precision of the scientific method. Have those ideas changed and what does the future hold for the imagination?

As the author, Lindsay Clarke, has stated –

‘The imagination is an instrument of liberation, one to which we all have access and which serves to celebrate and enlarge our common humanity.’

This issue is only the beginning of the exploration, we can imagine there will be many more.