Perceptions of Reality

Issue 80 November 2023

Uli Ap and Alien AI: Alien Infinite and Artificial Intelligence, The Yellow One.

Uli Ap is an artist and Alien AI: Alien Infinite and Artificial Intelligence, The Yellow One. They reside between London and New York, all over the globe and extra-terrestrial; and work at the intersection of art, science, technology, film, performance, immersive interactive installation and alien agency.

The artist works across non-linear defragmented films and spatial immersive audio-visual environments to transfer physical experiences through digital realms. Disruptive performances occur in their interactive installations, where virtual and physical experiences merge and aim to destabilize and alter participants’ mental states. Uli Ap invented Alien Artificial Intelligence in 2020. The AI inhabits a borderless alienation land, as a gaseous matter; fluid and undefined.

Perception and Reality

David Rickard is a New Zealand artist based in London, UK. His original studies in architecture have had a lasting impact on his art practice, embedding queries of material and spatial perception deep into his work. Through research and experimentation his works attempt to understand how we arrived at our current perception of the physical world and how far our perception is from what we call reality.

becoming ocean becoming me

Peter Matthews is an English artist who works exclusively along the coast, in the ocean and occasionally, over the last few years, creeping inland into the mountains and deserts. As a landscape-based artist, his work explores a direct and lived experience with time, place, space and the physical and spiritual relationships with nature. He does not work from a studio and therefore his works and process of being out in the landscape challenge and seek balance with the elements of the ever-changing climate, earth and extended universe.

From control towards vulnerability

Claire Morgan is an Irish artist, born in 1980 in Belfast.

“Being alive can be beautiful and horrific. Every living thing is in this state of constant transition. I am intrigued by those simultaneous senses of spiritual communion and unpalatable intrusion that come about through awareness of our connectedness, and of our vulnerability.

My practice has been focussed on how we humans understand and interact with the rest of the natural world, and our unwillingness to acknowledge our absolute lack of autonomy or control. I look at humans as animals, and the complexity of our intellectual dislocation from the landscape that sustains us. We behave as individual entities with fixed identities, but the reality is less clear.”

Twilight Language

Shuster + Moseley is the conceptual art studio of Claudia Moseley (b. 1984) and Edward Shuster (b. 1986). The artists create light-mobiles comprised of assemblages of suspended lenses, and sculptural installations of abstracted screens and deconstructed prismic geometries, using glass interfaces to mediate light. Central to the practice is an approach to a language of light, exposure and spectrality, through which the artists synthesise their engagement with the meditative traditions and related cosmologies; an esoteric approach towards space and place, which employs a diagrammatic poetics; and a critical engagement with technoscience.

Destabilizing assumptions and expanding imagination

The collaborative artist as avatar 0rphan Drift (0D) has explored the boundaries of machine and human vision since its inception in 1994. It was co-founded by Maggie Roberts, Ranu Mukherjee, Suzi Karakashian and Erle Stenberg in London. It has taken diverse forms through the course of its career, sometimes changing personnel and artistic strategies in accordance with the changing exigencies of the time. In recent years 0D has been considering Artificial Intelligence through the somatic tendencies of the octopus – as a distributed, many-minded consciousness.

Paying attention to space

Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva is a contemporary visual artist working across varied media of sculpture, installation, video, sound, photography and architectural interventions. Her materials range from the extraordinary to the ordinary and the ephemeral or discarded to the highly precious; they have included organic materials, foodstuffs and precious metals, such as caul fat to gold leaf. Central to her practice is a response to the particularities of place; its history, locale, environment and communities. She is interested in how the exchange of knowledge might develop through collaborative working and in the contexts of landscape, heritage, science and community as offered by each location.

The Fox & The Tarn

Garry Kennard is a painter, writer and founding director of Art and Mind (www.artandmind.org). A fascination with how the brain reacts to works of art has lead Kennard to research, write and lecture on these topics. With Rita Carter and Annabel Huxley he devised and directed the unique Art and Mind Festivals which attracted leading artists and scientists to explore what light the brain sciences can throw on contemporary culture.

Beyond the Bounds of Thought

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 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). Co-author of ‘The Art of Science’ (Welbeck Publishers, 2021).

Good things come in threes

Florian Coulmas is Professor of Japanese Society and Sociolinguistics at the IN-EAST Institute of East Asian Studies at Duisburg-Essen University. He has published numerous books, including ‘An Introduction to Multilingualism’ (OUP, 2017) and ‘Writing and Society: A Introduction’ (Cambridge University Press, 2013). In 2016, he was awarded the Meyer-Struckmann-Prize for Research in Arts and Social Sciences. For the past three decades he has served as Associate Editor of the ‘International Journal of the Sociology of Languages’, during which time he has observed the steadily increasing use of the concept of identity in both general and scholarly publications. His book, ‘Identity: A Very Short Introduction’, was published in February 2019.

‘QBism’: quantum mechanics is not a description of objective reality – it reveals a world of genuine free will

Ruediger Schack is a Professor at the Department of Mathematics at Royal Holloway, University of London. He obtained his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics at the University of Munich in 1991 and held postdoctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, the University of Southern California, the University of New Mexico, and Queen Mary and Westfield College before joining Royal Holloway in 1995. His research interests are quantum information theory, quantum cryptography and quantum Bayesianism.

How to test if we’re living in a computer simulation

Dr Melvin M. Vopson is an Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Portsmouth. His previous appointments include two postdoctoral fellowships at the University of York, senior R&D scientist at Seagate Technology (a world leading high-tech company) and over six years as Higher Research Scientist at the National Physical Laboratory.
Melvin’s major scientific contributions are in the fields of solid state caloric effects, thin film growth technologies, multiferroic materials and their applications, optical techniques of characterisation of solids, development of novel metrologies and innovations based on ferroic materials, theoretical studies of non-equilibrium phenomena, fundamental physics, and information physics.
Melvin developed new optical techniques for the characterization of solids, novel metrologies for multiferroic materials, a non-equilibrium theory of polarization reversal in ferroelectrics, and novel technologies for digital memories, including the discovery of a 4-state anti-ferroelectric memory effect, the discovery of the multicaloric effect in multiferroic materials, the discovery of the mass-energy-information equivalence principle, or the 5th state of matter, and the discovery of the second law of infodynamics.

How our unconscious visual biases change the way we perceive objects

Beverley Pickard-Jones is a Lecturer in Psychology at Bangor University.
“My primary research revolves around the exploration of priors in visual perception across different age groups. By employing visual illusions as investigative tools, I seek to contribute to a deeper understanding the intricate workings of perception and cognition. I also research pedagogy in higher education and am particularly interested in how to harness the power of technology to augment learning.”

Quantum physics: our study suggests objective reality doesn’t exist

Alessandro Fedrizzi is Professor of Physics, Heriot-Watt University.
“My research focuses on the development of photonic quantum technology and its application to experimental quantum information processing—from foundational research to quantum communication, computation and metrology. Quantum technology is now on the brink of delivering devices that can surpass the capabilities of their classical counterparts. Photonics plays a key role in this quantum revolution, providing a scalable quantum processing platform in its own right, but also due to its unique ability to coherently connect other physical architectures. My goal is to drive all facets of this development, from improving primary photonic capabilities to creating scalable hybrid quantum systems.”

Dr Massimiliano Proietti received his Ph.D. in physics under the supervision of Prof. Alessandro Fedrizzi at the Heriot-Watt University in 2020. His technical expertise covers technologies including ultra-bright single-photon sources at telecom wavelength, single-photon detectors, polarisation-entanglement sources, multipartite entanglement and the design of photonic graph states for quantum networking and computation. He worked on topics such as quantum metrology and sensing, multi-party quantum key distribution and quantum foundations, leading to a number of high-impact publications in these areas.

Cosmological models are built on a simple, century-old idea – but new observations demand a radical rethink

David L Wiltshire is a Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. His research interests are in general relativity, cosmology and quantum gravity.
He began his career working on higher-dimensional gravity, brane worlds and black holes as a PhD student in the Cambridge relativity group in the mid 1980s. He has subsequently explored a large range of ideas on topics including quantum cosmology, gravastars and dark energy. Since the mid 2000s his research has focused on the averaging problem and backreaction in inhomogeneous cosmology. By revisiting the foundational principles of general relativity, he has developed the “timescape cosmology”, a phenomenological viable alternative to the standard cosmology, without dark energy.

David is on the editorial board of Classical and Quantum Gravity, an IUPAP representative on the committee of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation (ISGRG), President of the New Zealand Institute of Physics, and a member of the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi). He is also a past President of the Australasian Society for General Relativity and Gravitation.

Eoin O Colgain is Assistant Lecturer in Physical Sciences, Atlantic Technological University.