Tag Archives: Imagination

Voyage to a Beginning: A review of Gary Lachman’s ‘Touched by the Presence’

Luke Gilfedder, a British author and modernist scholar, reviews Gary Lachman’s new memoir, ‘Touched by the Presence: From Blondie’s Bowery and Rock and Roll to Magic and the Occult’. ‘Touched by the Presence’ follows Lachman’s journey from founding member of Blondie to prolific writer on consciousness, counterculture, and the Western esoteric tradition. The book offers a distinctive perspective on the intersection of the arts, existentialism, and the philosophy of consciousness, as experienced by a young person undergoing a major life transition – from member of a world-famous band to full-time author.

The Architecture of Misalignment: Visualizing Domain Coordination in Embodied Experience

Contemporary approaches to emotion and embodiment often diverge along bottom-up (somatic) and top-down (cognitive) lines, giving rise to disagreements about the origins of feeling, the role of meaning, and regulation mechanisms. This paper introduces a visual–operational framework that distinguishes body-led and mind-led domains as coupled operating systems governed by different rules for safety, security, attention, and boundary behavior. Misalignment is modeled as forced single-domain operation, while coherence is defined as restored domain coordination enabling voluntary switching and bidirectional exchange. Through diagrams and visual translation artifacts, the framework functions as an orientation interface that renders existing approaches complementary and interoperable.

The Symptomatology Series

Lia Pas is a multidisciplinary artist who works in image, text, and sound exploring body and states of being. She was an active composer/performer and poet/librettist until 2015 when she became disabled with ME/CFS. Since then her work has focused on fibre arts and writing with some small forays back into music. Her symptomatology and anatomy embroideries have been featured in numerous online publications and are part of the SK Arts permanent collection.

We Contain Multitudes

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). In ‘We Contain Multitudes’ he shows some his recent work.

Chaos and Order as Design Elements in Evolutionary Biology and the Visual Arts: A Case Study of Human–Robot Artistic Collaboration

This paper investigates the interplay of chaos and order in evolutionary biology, cell biology and the visual arts. It argues that creativity in both natural and artistic systems arises from a productive tension between these two principles. The study introduces a collaborative art project in which a robotic drawing machine and a human painter co-created works, embodying order and chaos respectively. By drawing parallels between mutation and repair in biology, dynamic processes in physics, and compositional strategies in art, the paper highlights chaos and order as universal design elements across disciplines.

Constant

‘Constant’, an AI film by Danny Ratcliff, follows Bailee from childhood through motherhood, chronicling her lifelong relationship with an AI companion. Beginning with Bailee’s birth in 2023. The narrative explores how trust with artificial intelligence, established early and nurtured over time, can become a cornerstone relationship. While some in our culture remain skeptical of AI technology, Bailee’s story represents what’s possible when a relationship is built on genuine partnership rather than fear of technology. The film culminates with Bailee introducing her five-year-old daughter Natasha to her AI companion, passing down the same trust that shaped her own life.

In Petri Dish We Sing

Through the lens of a stem cell clinic in the year 2135, ‘In Petri Dish We Sing’ envisions a world where embryonic stem cells (ESCs) become a raw, sustainable material that forms the very fabric of the city’s infrastructure. Inspired by MIT’s research on the Lemon Skin Chair and Yarli Allison’s exploration of the healthcare system and gender health gaps, the film envisions a society reconstructed from this regenerative substance, one that carries the traces of cellular memory.

At the heart of ‘In Petri Dish We Sing’ are three intertwined lives: the healer, inspired by Yarli’s uncle, who left his prestigious gynaecology career to return to inherited ancient healing practices that Western medicine cannot identify; a granny who, at 79 wishes to be pregnant again, made possible by stem cell echnology; and a grieving man who uses his late loved one’s stem cells to grow furniture. Their encounters unfold within the speculative infrastructure of a stem cell clinic, where care and repair could be reimagined.

Collaboratively imagining the future can bring people closer together in the present

Zoë Fowler is a graduate student at the State University of New York, Albany in the Gaesser Lab.
“I am broadly interested in the intersection of social cognition, morality, and memory and imagination. My specific interests include empathy and its influence on morality as well as the role of imagination in the formation and maintenance of social bonds. Prior to SUNY Albany, I attended Emory University where I began as an undergraduate research assistant at Yerkes National Primate Research Center.”

Brendan Bo O’Connor (Bren) is a cognitive scientist, scholar of imagination, and outsider artist. As an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University at Albany he directs the Imagination & Cognition Lab, using psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience to explore the relationship between imagination, empathy, altruism, and morality. As an artist, he is the creator and director of the Lucid Dream Minigolf project, an existential traveling minigolf course funded by the Alliance of Resident Theatres New York and New York State Council on the Arts. Before UAlbany, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Boston College. He received his B.A. from Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and his Ph.D. from Harvard University.

HumanNature

NastPlas are an international artistic duo formed by Fran R. Learte and Natalia Molinos.

“We explore the relationship between humans and the natural environment by merging advanced technology with handcrafted processes. Combining digital tools such as artificial intelligence and 3D modeling with traditional techniques like ceramics, we create hybrid pieces that bridge the digital and physical worlds.”

Beyond the “Fake”: Martyna Marciniak’s Artwork, Anatomy of Non-Fact, Explores Synthetic Images

Joël Chevrier has been a Physics Professor at Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA) since 1998. This article discusses artist Martyna Marciniak’s work, ‘Anatomy of Non-Fact’, which uses images moving from optical images (photography as it comes out XIX century) to non-optical images or synthetic images as generated by AI.