Outputs
Book: Theological Imagination by Judith Wolfe
Professor Judith Wolfe’s book The Theological Imagination was released by Cambridge University Press in October 2024.
Online seminar: Art in Conversation
A multidisciplinary seminar on art, hosted by the University of St Andrews in collaboration with The International Association of Synaesthetes, Artists and Scientists, has concluded. Seven seminars focused on synaesthesia and multisensory perception in cinema, perfumery, design, cuisine, literature, music and visual arts.
Article: Perceived Meaningfulness of Semantically Non-Congruent Stimuli Increases in Art Context
The article describes a series of empirical studies that investigate how the art context increases the perceived meaningfulness of semantically non-congruent information.
Article: Meaning Making in an Art context Affects Semantic Distance: the Case of Semantic Inconsistencies in Written Language
The article builds on our previous work, which discovered that the meaningfulness of semantically non-congruent information increases in the art context. It empirically investigates how this effect of increased meaningfulness influences the tendency to connect remote concepts—one of the key mechanisms of creative thinking.
Article: Art and Commercial Stances Shape Bodily Sensations of Everyday Activities
Contemporary art often uses ready-made objects, which might change the way people perceive them. The article describes an empirical study that, for the first time, investigated bodily sensations associated with everyday objects in the art context, using the bodily sensation maps method.
Article: Icons and paintings: differences in psychological distance, empathy, and the feeling of personal communication
The article delves into how Eastern and Western Christian visual traditions influenced the way people perceive the distance between themselves and Gospel events.
Article: Art schema effects on upregulation of social cognition
The article describes a set of empirical studies that investigated how people interpret indeterminate images in different contexts. It showed that the art context increases the tendency to attribute social meanings to indeterminate images.
Article: Dennis Bray, ‘The Body of the Artist, In the Body of Christ’
The article investigates ways that the body contains and reveals works of art. The artist’s body is one primary place that artworks are located, and so too is Christ’s body (the Church). The paper concludes by arguing that Christ is revealed to the Church and to the non-believing community through Spirit-empowered artworks.
Database: Everyday Objects in Art
The database features a collection of 58 artworks depicting everyday objects, organized by their object type, and can be useful for researchers investigating object perception.
Exhibition: Transept ‘(a)void’ Exhibition: Interviews with the Artists
Transept, a group of artists and theologians connected with ITIA (the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts) at the University of St Andrews held its annual multimedia art exhibition, (A)void, in April 2024. The exhibition was an artistic exploration into the realm of absence. Through a wide array of mediums, artists investigated the depths of darkness, emptiness, and the unknown. It examined the ways in which we embrace or evade the voids in our lives. Our team conducted a series of interviews with the artists who took part in the exhibition.
Colloquium: ‘What is Art?’: a colloquium on the upcoming book ‘What is Art?: An Introduction to Aesthetics’ by Dennis Bray
A colloquium on the upcoming book ‘What is Art?: An Introduction to Aesthetics’ by Dennis Bray.