The rapid diffusion of artificial intelligence has unsettled more than the labour market. It has given rise to two related anxieties: an existential unease about human meaning, agency, and uniqueness—“AI anxiety”—and a quieter abdication of critical effort to machines, which recent works call “cognitive surrender.” The remedies most often proposed for these conditions, among them...
The TransformativeArts Framework (TAF) holds that the neural systems recruited to make and perceive art are not peripheral modules but expressions of the core architecture of thought. This essay asks whether contemporary neuroscience supports that claim, and it identifies three observations that the predictive-processing literature on the arts has not yet made. Peer-reviewed neuroscience from...
This study examines the mediumistic paintings of Guo Fengyi (郭鳳怡 1942–2010) through the lens of Daoist inner contemplation (neiguan 內觀) and traditional Chinese medicine. Guo developed distinctive self-cultivation techniques, including Ziran Chaoneng Gong (自然超能功 Natural Superpower Qigong), Qi’e Gong (企鵝功 Penguin Qigong 氣功), and Liu Ling Shuzi Gong (劉陵數字功 Liu Ling Numerology Qigong), which...
This article documents and analyzes a three-month intercultural performance collaboration with Metamorphosis Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia, during the summer of 1992—a pivotal moment following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Drawing on the author’s fieldwork methodology developed through decades of collaboration with Indigenous communities in Alaska, Southern Africa, and Siberia, the...
Daoism is an important indigenous religion of China that emerged from ancient totemic worship and shamanic practices, encompassing mysterious ritual arts known as fulu (talismans and registers). Daoist fulu writing constitutes an important content and manifestation of Daoist spiritual calligraphy, representing a significant embodiment of Daoist sacred knowledge and mystical power. This paper...
Beginning in 1966, Victor Moscoso designed many of his psychedelic posters for the stroboscopic light shows of the San Francisco dance halls. Moscoso innovated a new mode of print that depended on its environment—kinetic lithography, a product of creative experimentation. He developed multiple iterations of this medium; however, installing it outside of its original context of the psychedelic...
On 6 January 1973, Chilean media artist Juan Downey exhibited Plato Now at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York. A hybrid multichannel video installation and performance, this was Downey’s restaging of Plato’s Parable of the Cave—the “Now” registering what the myth might look like from the vantage of his own historical moment. And whereas Plato’s original operated through an...
This is an interview with moving image artist, writer, and contemplative practitioner, Marilyn (M) Freeman by artist, Cat Auburn. They explore Freeman’s contemplative filmmaking practice, ‘Cinema Divina’ and the relationship of Freeman’s life, artistic practice and research interests to autotheory. Autotheory is widely held to be the coalescence of autobiography with theory (or philosophy)...
This article presents a project which is an experiment in the emerging field of human-machine artistic collaboration. The author/artist investigates responses by the generative pre-trained transformer (GPT-2) to poetic and esoteric prompts and curates them with elements of digital art created by the text-to-image transformer DALL-E 2 using those same prompts; these elements are presented in the...
The snake is a potent entity in many cultures across the world, and is a noticeable global theme in rock art and inscribed landscapes. We mobilise our long-term ethnographic research with southern African KhoeSan peoples to situate and interpret the presence of snake motifs in the region’s rock art. We contextualise the snake as a transformative ontological mediator between everyday and...