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

This Intensive seminar 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 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 — approaching what cannot be said or captured directly — is not an escape from these pressures; it is a way of meeting them, 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 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 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, and enriched by guests from this sister project, 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.