This paper explores the intersection of art and historiography to offer a critical rethinking of Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine/Israel. It focuses on the formative years of the British Mandate (1918–1948) to examine how leisure and recreation spaces such as cinemas, concert halls, theaters, cafés, and dance venues, functioned as shared intercommunal sites for the consumption of popular art. As the paper shows, these urban venues attracted both ordinary Arabs and Jews who collectively engaged with films, music, dance and theater performances, facilitating cultural exchange and mutual influences that challenge conventional historiographical theories about their relations in this period. The historiography of Palestine/Israel and Arab-Jewish relations has long been dominated by the “Dual Society” paradigm, which depicts the two communities as entirely separate, self-contained, and monolithic entities, with violence as their only meaningful point of contact. This major interpretive framework has shaped not only academic scholarship but also public and political understandings of the conflict as historically predetermined and inevitable. However, recent historiographical approaches, most notably the “Relational History” framework, questioned this binary model by uncovering diverse interrelations, mutual influences, and complex web of social and cultural interactions between Jewish and Arab societies across different historical periods. Building on this perspective, the paper argues that the sphere of popular art reveals an underexplored dimension of everyday intercommunal relations. It shows how the two societies constantly interacted, cooperated, shaped and and transformed each other’s cultural systems. By bringing together art and historiography, the paper demonstrates how theory itself can operate as a political force. Rethinking history through relational lens becomes an act of intellectual resistance to deterministic narratives of violence and separation. In this sense, the study underscores the power of art to illuminate entangled histories and to generate alternative theoretical and political imaginaries by offering, even in dark times, ways of envisioning shared human experience beyond the confines of nationalist discourse.

What does it mean to think, act, and create within a world composed not of discrete, binary entities and identities but of systems that are interdependent, reciprocal, and nested? In the face of ecological chaos, social fragmentation, and technological acceleration—all of which demand new modes of responsiveness and accountability, at a new pace—this is an increasingly urgent question. My arts-based doctoral research approaches systems thinking relationally, as both a conceptual methodology and a creative practice: I combine media art, sculpture, diagrams, and performance, using techniques of expanded cinema and the Light and Space Movement to explore neurodivergent and non-colonial ontologies.

Proposal:

Presentation: A system may be understood, per Donella Meadows, as a set of elements that are interconnected such that their interactions generate distinctive patterns of behavior over time, revealing responses that are characteristic of the system itself. My research draws upon systems thinking, Enactive Cognition—viewing humans as processes nested within other processes—and Participatory Sense-Making—which emphasizes the co-regulation and dynamic flows between agents in relation. My experiments engage a fundamental question underlying my practice: Can artworks be made using node-based media and feedback at the human scale to reveal the structures and operations of feedback at other-than-human scales?

As a PhD candidate at RPI, my work is shifting from representing systems dynamics to engaging them. From a systems thinking perspective, my goal is to set conditions for processes that unfold through feedback, iteration, and relational responsiveness. My decades-long practice of using techniques of expanded cinema and the Light and Space Movement—combining moving image, glass, diagrams, and sunlight in works—explores neurodivergent and non-colonial ontologies. I have begun using node-based and generative media (Houdini, Touch Designer) to create murmurations and particle generators as means of visualizing, for example, how the dynamics that emerge between people in dialogue can take on autonomous form. Building upon that work, I will soon be using Touch Designer to experiment with live and recorded feedback—light, sound, EEG, gesture—translating these signals into performative video-sculptures. In this sense, Touch Designer serves not just as a tool but as a collaborator: a responsive system through which I can explore patterns of reciprocity, attention, and resonance. At ISTP, I will discuss and present recent experiments with generative systems, bio- and video-feedback systems, and videosculpture to enact divergent ways of sensing, processing, and exchanging information, i.e., ways of knowing.

Installation:

Extending and supporting this presentation, I propose a looping video installation of recent short works (see below). These may be projected in a darkened space (equipment: projector, speakers, wall or projection screen) or played on a monitor (equipment: sufficiently large monitor, speakers, media player). These works are 1) The Cloud Model, 2) video excerpts of the 2025 International Symposium for Assistive Technologies in Music and Art (ISATMA*25) in which The Cloud Model features, and 3) the film/expanded cinema/manifesto from which The Cloud Model emerges, Stitching the Future with Clues. (Please see Vimeo captions: under user “Oilly Oowen” click “…more”)

1. The Cloud Model: https://vimeo.com/1055014843

2. ISATMA 2025 (excerpt): https://vimeo.com/1089255506

3. Stitching the Future with Clues (excerpt): https://vimeo.com/647940094

Artist Bio:

Allison Leigh Holt is a neurodivergent, anti-disciplinary artist, a Fulbright scholar (Indonesia), and the first person in their household to graduate high school. A current Lucas Arts Fellow at Montalvo Art Center, they have held residencies at EMPAC, Djerassi, the Cemeti Institute for Art and Society (Indonesia), Bullseye Glass Company, and the Experimental Television Center; and resident researcher roles at Sanggar Perbakayun, the Santa Barbara Center for Art, Science and Technology, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Notable exhibitions include Eye Filmmuseum (The Netherlands), The Ford Foundation Gallery, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, BAMPFA, Stanford University, SFMOMA, The Exploratorium, Cemeti Institute for Art and Society (solo, Indonesia), The North Dakota Museum of Art (solo), and San Francisco Cinematheque. They have lectured at Stanford Arts Institute’s Imagining the Universe: Cosmology in Art and Science; FEMeeting: Women in Art|Science|Technology (Canada); RIXC Art-Science Festival (Riga, Latvia); After Agency (Mickiewicz University, Poland); Video Vortex (Indonesia); the 20th Annual Science of Consciousness Conference; the American Anthropological Association Conference; and the Yogyakarta International New Media Festival. At the University of North Dakota Writers Conference, Holt was in dialogue with science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson and theoretical physicist Brian Greene; and has served on the Mind & Life Summer Research Institute faculty.

Holt’s commissions include The Ford Foundation Gallery, San Francisco Arts Commission, the David Bermant Foundation, the Zero1 Biennial, Pro Arts Gallery, and UC Santa Barbara’s Denise Montell Molecular Science Laboratory, where they are also included in the collection. They have taught at San Francisco State University, Massachusetts College of Art, and developed Neurodivergent Media, an experimental media pedagogy for autistics. Their writing features in journals like Panorama, Public, Leonardo, and Yale’s Theater Magazine. Holt studied at The Evergreen State College (BA), Massachusetts College of Art (MFA), and now, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Ph.D. candidate).

Art as a Medium of Theoretical Self- and World-Critique in Dark Times

A Morphological Analysis of Goya’s “Black Paintings” and Their Contemporary Relevance

Research Question:

How can art - understood in terms of Psychological Morphology - serve as a medium of theoretical self-knowledge and world-understanding in dark times of political and symbolic crisis?

Thesis:

Goya’s Black Paintings can be read as paradigmatic aesthetic articulations of the paradoxes of an entire cultural epoch. Paradoxes that still shape our present and whose intensification becomes increasingly evident today. Created during a period of political and societal upheaval, these paintings mark the beginning of modern art and continue to provide an aesthetic access to the structural problems of contemporary world-construction. Through art-based experiential work with these images, such paradoxes can be revealed and made experientially graspable.

Theoretical Context

Wilhelm Salber’s Morphological Psychology is largely unknown internationally, yet in Germany it has been successfully applied as a qualitative methodological approach in market, media, and cultural research. Nonetheless, Morphological Psychology offers a rich perspective on everyday culture, art, and media and resonates with contemporary art and cultural psychologies, such as those stemming from the Frankfurt School or Lacanian theory.

In Morphology, the psyche is not conceived as a fixed cognitive apparatus nor as a biological computer program, but as an ongoing self-treatment of reality, which itself has an art-analog character and expresses itself through cultural and artistic forms (Salber’s psychaesthetics). Morphological Psychology draws on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (natural-scientific) morphology and positions itself as a further development of Gestalt psychology (Köhler, Koffka, Wertheimer) as well as of depth psychology in the tradition of Sigmund Freud.

From Goethe, Morphology adopts the idea of intuitive, object-adequate thinking: scientific theories are regarded as aesthetic media of the self-presentation of their objects. From Gestalt psychology, Morphology retains the insight that psychic life continues the process of forming figures (Gestalten) of reality; combined with Freud’s thesis of the unconscious overdetermination of such formations, it overcomes the classical Gestalt focus on “gute Gestalt” in favor of imperfect, constantly transforming formations, thus returning to Goethe’s understanding of morphology as a theory of transformation.

Parallel to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Wilhelm Salber developed a cultural psychology that interprets cultural epochs as provisional attempts to solve—or treat—fundamentally unsolvable paradoxes. Morphological art psychology, in turn, emphasizes that artworks provide an opportunity to encounter these paradoxes—structural tensions inherent in all cultural constructions—in an aesthetic object, offering modes of further development and transformation. Modern art in particular fulfills the task of rendering a culture’s self-treatments transparent while simultaneously challenging them, setting in motion interpretive processes analogous to psychoanalytic dream-work.

Object of Analysis – Goya’s Black Paintings

Through concrete image analyses, I aim to show how Goya’s art makes the paradoxes of modernity—paradoxes that especially concern us in today’s dark times—experientially accessible.

Wilhelm Salber regarded Goya’s famous Pinturas Negras as modern art avant la lettre and considered Goya himself to mark the transition from classical to modern painting. Goya was not only an artist but also an acute observer of his time. In his Black Paintings emerges a new type of art that seems to undermine classical ideals of beauty. Mythological motifs from art history are taken up, decontextualized, and rendered in a manner that anticipates the perceptual shock of modern art. Engaging with these works allows one to experience the fractures and gaps inherent in our culture—as well as our ways of dealing with them.

According to Salber’s cultural psychology, modernity is the epoch in which people become aware that their perspectives on reality are themselves permeated by paradoxes—an insight manifest not only in art and culture but also across the natural and human sciences. Salber referred to such paradoxical structures as Undinge (“non-things,” impossibilities, structural contradictions). Philosophically, this becomes evident in German Idealism, which arose contemporaneously with Goya’s modern art and to which progressive political theories, such as Žižek’s, still refer.

Based on qualitative interviews in which I explored long-term experiential engagement with the Black Paintings, I was able to show that these images continue to function as media of self-experience: they confront viewers with the impossibilities—Salber’s Undinge—embedded in their constructions of reality, thereby enabling a widened scope for action and reflection.

Art thus has the capacity to reflect the paradoxes of our constructions of reality—including political realities. Artworks offer intuitive, image-based theories and simultaneously operate as unconscious “symptoms” that process and express the Undinge—the gaps and ruptures in the symbolic order in the Lacanian sense. Speaking about these gaps—initiated through art—can help us reposition ourselves toward cultural and political orders in new and transformative ways.

References

Fitzek, H., & Salber, W. (1996). Gestaltpsychologie: Geschichte und Praxis. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

Grünewald, S. (2013). Die erschöpfte Gesellschaft: Warum Deutschland neu träumen muss. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag.

Licht, F. (2001). Goya: Die Geburt der Moderne. München: Hirmer Verlag.

Salber, W. (1999). Kunst – Psychologie – Behandlung (3rd ed.). Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König. (Original work published 1977)

Salber, W. (1993). Seelenrevolution: Komische Geschichte des Seelischen und der Psychologie. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag.

Salber, W. (1994). Undinge: Goyas Schwarze Bilder. Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König.

Žižek, S. (1998). Die Nacht der Welt: Psychoanalyse und Deutscher Idealismus. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuchverlag.

Zwingmann, B. (2019). Begegnung mit dem Ungeheuren: Selbsterfahrungsprozesse mit Goyas Schwarzen Bildern. Berlin: HPB University Press.

This single case study seeks to demonstrate how artists and cultural producers are applying notions of affect through art exhibitions as a tool for antiracist interventions. It provides an example of an affective exhibition seeking to move a community through grief and towards a processing of difficult emotions. Art moves people’s interior selves, the parts we feel deeply and without initial understanding, through movement, color, sound, the body, and materials (Cole & Knowles, 2008). Art tells the narrative that stirs emotions, becoming the stepping off point to mobilize (Speed Museum of Art, 2022). Affect can propel us toward potentials (Massumi, 1995), and art activates the imagination to design futures free of police and gun violence.

Art and affect inspired me to curate how I saw racism moving from centuries’ old histories through our present circumstance, life after an insurrection, the leader of the insurrection is our sitting president, and advancements won regarding police reform and education equity have been erased, but the future is wide open and full of potential.

Art can be used to draw out expressions of interior liminal spaces (Finley, 2008). These expressions, such as butterflies from nerves, goosebumps, or a reflexive movement, communicate embodied ways of knowing by listening to affective responses through arts-based methodologies. Exhibitions hold potential for affective forces to move through the narrative and to incorporate affective resonances between bodies and objects, bodies and the environment, and bodies meeting other bodies. It is becoming more common to see exhibitions curated by and featuring Black and Indigenous art (https://hyperallergic.com/).

One exhibition, Promise Witness Remembrance (Speed Museum of Art, 2022), curated by Allison Glenn in 2021, at the Speed Museum of Art, acted as a reflection of the value of Breonna Taylor’s life. As an act of retribution, the exhibition was a space where people could gather, bringing bodies together in mourning to feel and heal. Promise Witness Remembrance provided time, space, and representation, especially for Black peoples, who have had their cultures stolen and placed on display in western Museums (Krmpotich & Peers, 2013). It was followed, two years later using the new contemporary curator, with an exhibition titled Amy Sherald’s Portrait of Breonna Taylor: In the Garden, as a request from her family (https://www.speedmuseum.org/) and to fulfill the museum’s obligation to the family. Affect may have been the connective thread of these exhibitions, moved by a moment or an opportunity for her family to remember who Breonna Taylor was, while also creating space for the people of Louisville to reflect. I wonder if or how the first exhibition influenced the second and if they were both meant to serve as spaces for processing difficult emotions. These affective resonances between artwork, family, and institutions and state-sanctioned violence served as means of remembrance.

Research Questions

● How does affect theory help us understand the impact of exhibition spaces?

○ How might art curators understand exhibitions as affective spaces?

● How are art institutions affected by the community, and how do they affect their community in turn?

○ How does an art exhibition that engages with race and racism affect its host institution?

Using heuristic inquiry, which has the capacity to address the embodied sensations brought on by affect, my hope was that each interview subject’s contribution would contribute to a whole picture that showed whether or not affect emphasized any of the exhibition’s antiracist implications (Sha, 2017). Heuristics connected the depths of what I embodied with the depths of the exhibition I researched (Moustakas, 1990). In the case of this research, I carried the way art moves through the body and how the body reacts when difficult emotions pass through it. When tuning into affect, such disruptions can inspire productive, creative multimedia responses (Zembylas, 2022), but affect is not inquiry. The movement and flow of affect were the pulse that moved through the body and art as the object that catalyzed affect. “Affects, then, move between and through bodies and things that they come in contact with, providing ‘object-targets’, namely, ‘States, institutions [e.g. schools]” (p. 25) Zembylas wrote about the anti-Muslim backlash after 9/11, when hegemonic forces conspired to promote hate. A technology of power, Muslim people became the object-targets of the use of affect and discomfort. If they are to be rendered as a violent tool, might the feeling states between an art object and its audience be used as a technology of support? In other words, considering affect as the tool, institutions would make time for meaning making to be built through collaborative contribution. that necessary time for processing and shifting the themes that emerge and the imagery used to curate through the emotional ranges of grief, loss, love, and resilience, surfaces when planning an art exhibition.

The embodied, connective relationship between affect and object led me to wonder about heuristics and its relationship with connection; inquiry is the lifeline that moved through my body and the art exhibition I studied, and it started with seeing the cover of the exhibition catalog for Promise Witness Remembrance. This is what Sela-Smith refers to as the “I-who-feels” (Sela-Smith, 2002, p. 58) More specifically, she states, “When someone feels an internal draw and hears the call from the deepest recesses of the self, it is almost impossible not to notice. This may be something that is being consciously or unconsciously experienced as incomplete that needs to be completed” (p. 64) Sela-Smith brought the process of heuristic inquiry back to the self by reminding the researcher that the questions, once realized, surface everywhere. “The challenge is fulfilled through examples, narrative descriptions, dialogues, stories, poems, artwork, journals, and diaries, autobiographical logs, and other personal documents” (Moustakas, 1990, p. 310). I purchased the catalog from the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum in Boston.

The catalog’s sky teal and purple cover showed the Amy Sherald portrait of Breonna Taylor looking back at me (Speed Museum of Art, 2022). The book’s cover was the initial hook, but as I scrolled through the pages, I saw examples of antiracist curatorial practices and wanted to understand what collaboration across departments looked like and how an issue as sensitive as police violence could be addressed in a museum in a city where a murder at the hands of police had recently occurred. The themes of gun and police violence will always be challenging to sit with, but through heuristic inquiry, the art connected me to my intuitive self, my body felt that the art supported processes of moving through difficult encounters.

For this study, heuristics made room for the nuance of the unfelt senses, such as intuition, déjà vu, and premonitions that the art elicited (Moustakas, 1990; Springgay, 2022). Writings by Sultan (2019), Douglass & Moustakas (1985), and Moustakas’s seminal work (1990) on heuristics guided the data interpretation, while Sela-Smith’s (2002) clear explanations of the six stages of the heuristic process supported Sultan and pushed through Moustakas to keep the focus of the self in the interpretation. As Sultan emphasized in italics (2019), “the primary purpose behind heuristic data analysis is to understand, with a vision to cocreate new knowledge, make meaning, and foster individual and collective transformation” (p. 146). Cocreating meaning is what happens within collaborative teams.

Collaboration, in which all voices are heard and considered, is an act of cocreating meaning. Massumi referred to the energy of affect as an expression that moves through bodies and objects (2002), temporarily swirling around the affected site, generating energy and causing the past to collide with the present (1995). When this energetic force collides with difference, the force is filled with possibility (Deleuze, 1968, 1994). In this paper I refer to this affective collision as an encounter. The interview questions sought to understand the energetic flow during the planning and execution of Promise Witness Remembrance and how, if at all, the exhibition impacted antiracist practices in the museum. Heuristic inquiry then helped me connect how Promise Witness Remembrance and In the Garden were related in themes and execution. Most importantly, I wondered if the experience of working with the Amy Sherald’s portrait of Breonna Taylor in these exhibitions shifted how people and institutions respond to racial differences.

The exhibition centered around the portrait Breonna Taylor painted by Amy Sherald, after she was commissioned by the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, to be used for the cover of Vanity Fair’s September 2020 issue, about six months after Taylor was murdered by police in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. This convergence of the portrait appearing in the magazine motivated a staffer at The Speed Museum, the oldest museum in Louisville, to suggest displaying The Portrait at the museum. She knew this was an opportunity for people from Taylor’s hometown to bear witness to the portrait. Conversations around organizing evolved from this place, as did the planning for the Promise Witness Remembrance. An energy swirls around this portrait. It helped open up discourse and became a force of resurrecting and reckoning with a city and nation’s legacy of gun and police violence.