Tag Archives: Culture

Mistaken Identity

Since the early 1990s, Paul Vanouse’s artwork has addressed complex issues raised by varied new techno-sciences using these very techno-sciences as a medium. His artworks have included data collection devices that examine the ramifications of polling and categorization, genetic experiments that undermine scientific constructions of race and identity, and temporary organizations that playfully critique institutionalization and corporatization. These “Operational Fictions” are hybrid entities–simultaneously real things and fanciful representations–intended to resonate in the equally hyper-real context of the contemporary electronic landscape.

What’s lost when we’re too afraid to touch the world around us?

Chunjie Zhang is Associate Professor of German, University of California, Davis. She works in the areas of eighteenth-century studies, postcolonial studies, global modernisms, and cosmopolitanisms. She is the author of ‘Transculturality and German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism’ (Northwestern University Press, 2017), which delineates a transcultural discourse from the 1750s to the 1830s and highlights non-European impact on German travel writings, dramas, Robinsonades, philosophy of history, and theory of geography. Zhang has published on Goethe, Herder, Kant, George Forster, radical Enlightenment, and the representations of China in Europe. She is also coeditor of “Goethe, Worlds, and Literatures,” a special issue of ‘Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies’ (2018).

Demystifying the psychedelic experience

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 Psychedelic Society of the Netherlands; a non-profit organization focused on advocating a safe use of psychedelic substances.

Becoming somebody else

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.

In Praise of Form: Towards a New Post-Humanist Art

Taney Roniger is a visual artist and writer based in New York. Her awards and honors in the visual arts include three Yaddo fellowships, a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and a traveling fellowship from the Stacey Sussman Cavrell Memorial Foundation. Since 2012 she has been a contributing writer for The Brooklyn Rail, for which she served as Guest Editor in December 2017.

Imagination in Education

“At this time, the world we live in is in great need of a balance between our heads and our hearts, so that we may connect to the ‘tap-root’ in us all by opening us to the realm of imagination, inspiration and integration.”

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, first published in the launch issue of Interalia Magazine, is re-published here as a tribute to her creativity, compassion and imagination.

Creativity, Imagination and Philosophy

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.

Creativity, Imagination and ‘Finding Your Element’

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 an exclusive interview for the Interalia Magazine he discusses subjects such as the transformative role of creativity and imagination in education and how we can all ‘Find Our Element’.

Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

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. A founding member of the rock band Blondie, in 2006 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He retired from music to take up BA in philosophy. He now writes for several journals in the UK, US, and Europe, lectures widely and his books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Drawing on the work of Owen Barfield, Goethe, Henry Corbin, Kathleen Raine, and others, and ranging from the teachings of ancient mystics to the latest developments in neuroscience, his book ‘Lost Knowledge of the Imagination’ 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.