Apophatic Art Practice and Research:
Connecting with the Ineffable and unsayable

This Intensive seminar combines artistic practice and humanistic inquiry to approach the profoundly unsayable, ineffable, and unquantifiable experiences endemic to human existence. In the age of AI, where complex, nuanced, ambiguous human experiences and expressions are flattened into optimized data, this course is a timely call to students across disciplines to conduct independent and collaborative artistic research in the apophatic tradition; which recognizes that some realities exceed description and can only be approached through indirection, experimentation and negation. This medium-secular course consisting of both individual and collaborative art projects and critiques, as well as readings, experiments and discussions, will introduce students to methodologies and frameworks for grappling with and materializing responses to the unsayable dimensions of meaning, embodied knowledge, and consciousness that resist codification. A collaborative effort between Professor Merel Visse, author of “Apophatic Inquiry: Living the Questions Themselves” and Professor Ryan Woodring, founder of the Soft Data/Base, course readings and screenings will pull from Medical & Health Humanities, Visual and Performing Arts, Data Science, Philosophy and more. Students can engage directly with the instructors' publication and exhibition project on Apophatic Art Practice and Research—a unique opportunity to participate in active research.