Apophatic Art Practice and Research

Connecting with the ineffable in times of flattening

Contributors Project / Editorial Team
  • Merel Visse
  • William Franke
  • Ryan Woodring
  • Béatrice Machet
  • Sarah Travis
  • Enaiê Azambuja
  • Sarah Tarkany
  • Peter Kline
  • Kythe Heller
  • Cailtin Gilson
  • Chelle Stearns

Learning

Hybrid Low Residency: Connecting with the Ineffable and Unsayable

(Two-day Hybrid Intensive + Extended Practice on Apophatic Art & Research, open to all)

This Intensive seminar, building towards a Fall 2026 exhibition at Drew University’s Korn Gallery and potential publication, combines artistic practice and apophatic 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 at risk of being flattened into optimized data, and in this moment of fracture, 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. Apophatic practice — leaning into what cannot be said or captured directly - is a way of meeting these pressures, including how to engage with AI, through critical-creative practice, without premature answers. It honors the most intricate human experiences — love, grief, solidarity, the slow erosion of certainty, the thing that shifts in a room just before something changes.

This Intensive, 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 experience, embodied knowledge, and consciousness that resist codification. A collaborative effort between Professor Merel Visse, author of “Sometimes, Indirect is More Direct” and Professor Ryan Woodring, founder of the Soft Data/Base, enriched by contributions by affiliated partners such as the Center for Apophatic Thought and Culture, Vision Lab, and others, course readings and screenings will pull from Humanities scholarship, 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.

Details

This Intensive has two parts, both fully available online, with optional in-person activities on Drew's campus, culminating in an exhibition at the Korn Gallery (Drew University) this Fall. We begin with two full hybrid days — Saturday, August 29, and Sunday, August 30 — running from 10:00 AM to 7:00 PM EDT (open to all, whether joining on campus or via Zoom). Campus participants are invited to share dinner and an optional evening program on Saturday. Following the opening weekend, the Intensive continues with synchronous Zoom sessions every Tuesday evening from September 8 through October 27, 7:05–9:35 PM EDT, complemented by instructor-led asynchronous activities, including personalized mentorship from the instructors.

Audience

  • Artists, scholars, art researchers, art educators across the globe
  • Degree and non-degree students

Building blocks

  • Opening Intensive: August 29–30, 10:00 AM–7:00 PM (hybrid)
  • Weekly Sessions: Tuesdays, September 8–October 27, 7:05–9:35 PM (online, synchronous)
  • Along with instructor-led asynchronous activities, including personalized mentorship
  • Optional: Publication, Exhibition at various satellite locations.

Pricing

For applicants who want to take the course without credit, please fill out this pre-registration form. Questions? Contact Professor Merel Visse or Professor Ryan Woodring via email.

Encountering

Gatherings and trajectories

Drop-in writing/studio trajectories with contributors

This summer, the apophatic.art community comes together through a series of open virtual sessions — drop-in writing and studio time to sit with what apophatic thinking means in and through your work. Consider living with this question: what is apophasis? We opened on July 8 and 9 with a shared kick-off, joined by over 45 people, followed by weekly smaller co-working virtual sessions. Two options:

  • Apophatic Commons — Train Car
    (quiet solo work, alongside others)
    Sundays, 11am–12pm ET · 5–6pm CET · 4–5pm UK
    July 19 & 26 · August 2, 9, 16, 23
  • Coffee House
    (community drop-in, more conversation)
    Wednesdays, 12–1pm ET · 6–7pm CET · 5–6pm UK
    July 22 & 29 · August 5, 12, 19, 26

No need to RSVP, no need to stay the whole hour. Come as you are; leave when you need to. Email us to receive the links.

Vision Lab Dream Incubation Studio, Four Wednesdays, July 22 – August 12 · 1:00–3:00 pm ET

In the ancient world, healing was sought not from a physician alone, but at an Asclepeion — a temple where, after purification and prayer, seekers slept in the abaton to await a dream. The dream was never merely private; it was a doorway, enacted through poetry, rite, and unknowing.

Dream Incubation Studio repurposes that sacred architecture as a sustained apophatic practice. Over four weeks, a small cohort of artists, writers, scholars, and contemplatives builds a shared abaton — engaging Attar's Conference of the Birds, Teresa of Ávila's Interior Castle, and other traditions of negative theology, mysticial writing, and apophatic creative practice, not as texts or multimedia to master, but as provocations for making from unknowing. Each participant develops an original project, alone or in collaboration, tracing an arc drawn from classical maps of transformation — Attar's seven valleys, Teresa's seven mansions — toward their own path of ascent, bewilderment, or stripping away.

Work may extend toward a pop-up installation with apophatic.art at Drew University, inclusion in Vision Lab's Harvard Belonging Conference presentation, or consideration for a special issue of the Journal of Contemplative Studies on contemplation and the senses — all optional and contingent on the shape and readiness of each project.

Limited to fifteen participants, to protect the depth each project deserves.

To Apply: Send a short paragraph to kytheheller@visionlabcollective.com — your background, the project or question you'd like to incubate, and optionally, a link to representative work. She will email you a registration link when your application is accepted. Due Monday, July 21.

Conferences

In late June, Merel and Ryan brought apophatic.art to the Society for Artistic Research conference in Galway, Ireland — joining a global gathering of artists, researchers, choreographers, poets, and other practitioners from across Europe, North America, and beyond. We opened a workshop on Mutable Data with a simple provocation. From there, we moved into the project itself: its questions, its strategies, its contributors' voices. The conversations were generative. Several participants expressed interest in joining the project, and we came away with new connections and a renewed sense that apophatic thinking has something real to offer the field right now. The next day, we took part in a roundtable on the future of artistic research — a conversation that felt unexpectedly aligned with the questions apophatic.art has been sitting with. We were moved by contributions from all panelists, like Synne Tollerud Bull, Margit Wirth, and Gwen Rakotovao. Earlier that day, Henk Borgdorff's keynote closed with a vision of knowledge and knowing that resonated deeply with apophatic thought — a reminder that the field is finding its way toward questions we recognize.

Mutable Data: Artistic Apophatic Research

Edited screenshot from softdatabase.art. Image credit Ryan Woodring.

This workshop opens space for grappling with precarious, mutable forms of data by deepening the potential of artistic research through apophatic thought — the recognition that some realities exceed description and can only be approached through indirection, pointing, negation, and silence. Across three parts, participants engage existing artistic strategies, also drawing from the Soft Data/Base project (Woodring 2025). Pushing beyond passive notions of quantified selfhood endemic to platform capitalism, this segment focuses on the transformative potential of contextualizing certain forms of artistic practice as mutable data in a time of personal data leakage and extraction.

A not-quite round table: apophatic artistic research at risk

Apophatic approaches have shaped artistic practices for centuries, yet contemporary artistic researchers rarely invoke apophatic thought as a lens. Apophatic studies thus occupy a precarious, minoritized position, its rich conceptual knowledge at risk of being lost — and with it, a valuable resource for artistic researchers (Visse, 2024, 2025). Participants will engage with unique apophatic concepts such as excess, propensity, indirectness, and maturation through artistic research. The not-quite round table sits with a multimodal, curated publication and exhibition, circling an ongoing project — a multimodal, curated publication and exhibition on apophatic artistic research, spanning visual art, performance, media, and time-based art, and hybrid practices including bioart, land art, and conceptual art; spaces where naming often falls short.