Tag Archives: Creativity

The Spiritual In Art Collective

THE SPIRITUAL IN ART COLLECTIVE is an international collective dedicated to research into the spiritual dimension of contemporary art. Formed in 2026 following an international Open Call, the Collective brings together artists from different geographical, cultural and disciplinary contexts. They are united not by a common aesthetic or a predetermined definition of the spiritual, but by a shared willingness to explore its meaning and possibilities within contemporary art.

Eyes on the road (chapter 1)

Florian Coulmas is Professor emeritus of Japanese Society and Sociolinguistics at the IN-EAST Institute of East Asian Studies at Duisburg-Essen University. He has published numerous books, including one about Hiroshima, where he once lived. In 2016, he was awarded the Meyer-Struckmann-Prize for Research in Arts and Social Sciences.

“Eyes on the road is a travelogue which isn’t really a travelogue because it is about a journey fifty years back.”

Why AI Makes Us Anxious About Our Own Thoughts

This essay argues that generative AI does not destroy originality but exposes the weakness of the idea that thought can be pure, untouched and entirely self-generated. Drawing on the author’s experience as a hydrologist, it compares AI-assisted writing with scientific modelling: both tools produce outputs that require human judgement, interpretation and accountability. The essay proposes that authorship should be understood not as freedom from influence, but as the responsible transformation of inherited material. Originality, on this view, begins after influence rather than before it.

‘CHOKE’: A meditation on grief and the alchemy of the abject

Claire Morgan is a UK-based Irish artist. She concluded a 3-month residency at Stiftung Bartels Fondation, Basel, with a solo exhibition, ‘Choke’ (14 – 21 June 2026). Coinciding with Basel’s international art week, this artist-initiated presentation of deeply intimate new work marks a profound evolution in her practice, stepping back from the scale of her signature suspended installations to embrace an intensely personal, visceral vulnerability.

Visualizing the Invisible: Resonance, Water and Light as Photographic Event

‘Visualizing the Invisible: Resonance, Water and Light as Photographic Event’ traces a four decade investigation into photography as physical event rather than descriptive mechanism. Spanning the caustic works of the Vanitas, Glass and Ophelia series through to the recent Cymatic Water + Light body of work, this essay proposes that invisible forces — resonance, pressure, frequency, surface tension — do not require invention. They require conditions through which they become legible. Working exclusively in analogue process, Alexander James Hamilton constructs systems in which frequency, liquid and light are brought into controlled relation. The resulting photographs are not representations of these forces but their material consequence. Authorship, in this context, is not diminished through physical process. It is intensified by it.

Knowledge Works

‘Knowledge Works’ uses analog as well as digital processes: painted surfaces, historic books’ title pages, scattered and appropriated imagery, scanned and layered and interwoven via digital tooling to create small to very large prints on paper. The pages are found in science, philosophy, and science-vs-religion books from the 17th to early 20th centuries, probing that epoch’s history of revolutionary change in human thought and knowledge.

HELIOS

Tom Liggett is a London-based artist and final-year BA (Hons) Photography student at Arts University Bournemouth. His practice operates at the intersection of photography and science, investigating how invisible forces such as radiation, oxidation and electrical discharge can generate images beyond the limits of conventional photographic processes.

Biological DNA Art: Beauty Is in the Eye That Is Beheld

Claude E. Gagna, Ph.D., is a Professor of Biological Sciences at the New York Institute of Technology. His research focuses on the structure and function of DNA and RNA, including noncanonical (unusual) nucleic acid conformations in biological tissues. In parallel, he develops interdisciplinary bioart. ‘Biological DNA Art: Beauty is in the Eye that is Beheld (Bulbus Oculi)’, is a series of mixed-media works developed as an ongoing experimental and archival practice, focused on stabilizing and integrating non-human eye globes and purified DNA from multiple species within acrylic composite matrices on canvas supports. The work is conceived not only as visual art, but as a form of biopreservation and experimental archive, in which biological materials are maintained with consideration for long-term molecular integrity and the potential for future retrieval. It also engages in an evolutionary framework, bringing together biological materials from multiple species to reflect shared structural origins and divergence across life. The work emerges from laboratory-derived, peer-reviewed methodologies adapted for artistic production, raising questions about the boundary between preserved scientific specimens and visual artifacts.

Pilgrimage to Myyrmäki – The Silent Music of Things

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. ‘Pilgrimage to Myyrmaki – The Silent Music of Things’ recounts her visit to a church in Finland and her recent artworks it inspired.

Beauty Found (Where it Wasn’t Meant to Be)

Stephen Nowlin is Los Angeles-based artist, curator, and writer whose practice is inspired by science, the histories of science and art, and theories of knowledge. His work employs the use of digital tools, photography, and scanning technology, resulting in small and large-scale limited edition archival pigment prints. Artist in Residence, Mount Wilson Observatory, California.