Transducing the Unknown…

Through presentations by practicing artists, experiencers and theorists, our Fall 2027 conference, Art and the Impossible, takes up the artistic encounter with impossible phenomena. Its deeper claim is that these three are often one. The work may arrive rather than be made — the impossible transduced into form through someone willing to get out of the way and receive. What is art, then, as an experience rather than an object or performance?

Experiencer does double duty here. One person is met by something unbidden and turns to art to render it. Another makes a practice of receptivity and so becomes available to be met. The two arrive at the same condition from opposite directions, and the theorist who stays with this material long enough tends to be altered by it as well. Each role, followed far enough, becomes the others — which leaves an open question the conference will put to its participants: whether art has always been a technology of contact.

The CFTI archives already hold some of these materials. Among the letters, transcripts, and case files are drawings made by people trying to render something for which they had no precedent. These works sit at the edge of the documentary record, functioning as evidence and expression at once, and they raise questions a transcript cannot answer. What does the made thing carry that the account of it leaves out? What do artists understand about reception — about attention, surrender, and craft — that researchers of anomalous experience have yet to learn from them?

The program will explore audio, visual, performance, narrative, and multimedia forms. Experiencers who reach for art to express their anomalous experiences, artists who “get out of the way” and surrender to a creative impulse, and theorists of both will share space for three days, on the premise that creating art is itself a mode of inquiry—a conversation with the unknown.

The conference is co-hosted by Prof. John Sparagana of Rice University's Department of Art, and Prof. Jeffrey J. Kripal. Programming will extend into Sarofim Hall, Rice's new home for the visual arts, whose studios, galleries, and 215-seat cinema let students’ work be seen and heard rather than only discussed. Sarofim stands across the street from Hudspeth Auditorium, home of the first three Archives of the Impossible conferences, where we will gather as well. The short walk between the two buildings traces the question this conference is asking.