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The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination was established to promote an integrated, interdisciplinary approach to the understanding of creativity and the imaginative process.

The Center creates and supports projects, public forums, research and information gathering which foster cooperation and dialogue among diverse disciplines, while seeking to create public awareness of these efforts.

To achieve its mission the Center holds roundtable discussions with participants from various fields (neuroscience, psychology, mathematics, psychoanalysis, humanities and art, philosophy and theology), offers a forum for presentation of works in progress, and is developing a data base on imagination with the aim of becoming a clearing house for all available literature on the subject.

The Lure and Blur of the Real.  Video link.

Participant bios:

Barbara Browning
Associate Professor, Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts.

Ph.D., 1989; M.A., 1986; Comparative Literature, Yale University
B.A., 1983; Comparative Literature, Yale University

Major Interests: Brazil and the African diaspora; dance ethnography; race, gender and postcoloniality; spirit possession and healing.

Affiliations: Modern Language Association; Society of Dance History Scholars; Congress on Research in Dance; Brazilian American Studies Association.

Fellowships/Honors: Fulbright Fellow; Fellow, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; President’s Award for Teaching, Princeton University; Mellon Visiting Professor, Tulane University; De La Torre Bueno Prize for Best Book in Dance.

Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky)

Known by his stage name DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid (born in 1970), is a Washington DC-born electronic and experimental hip hop musician whose work is often called “illbient” or “trip hop“. He is a turntablist, a producer, an author and a postmodern intellectual. He borrowed his stage name from the character The Subliminal Kid in the novel Nova Express by William S. Burroughs. He is also a professor at the European Graduate School. from Wikipedia.

John Cameron Mitchell

is an American writer, actor, and director. He is best known for his motion pictures Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Shortbus. He is currently in production for Rabbit Hole starring Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhart, Dianne Wiest and Sandra Oh adapted from David Lindsay-Abaire’s play of the same name. from Wikipedia.

Rick Moody

is an American novelist and short story writer best known for the 1994 novel The Ice Storm, a chronicle of the dissolution of two suburban Connecticut families over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, which brought widespread acclaim, became a bestseller, and was made into a feature film of the same title. from Wikipedia.

David Shields

is an American author of nonfiction, fiction, and works that resist generic classification. His new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Knopf, 2010), is, according to the publisher, a “rigorous and radical attempt to reframe how we think about ‘truthiness,’ literary license, quotation, and appropriation.” Shields’s previous book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (Knopf, 2008), a meditation on mortality, was a New York Times bestseller. from Wikipedia.

Fred Tomaselli

is an American artist. He is best known for his highly detailed paintings on wood panels, combining an array of unorthodox materials suspended in a thick layer of clear, epoxy resin. Tomaselli is represented by the White Cube gallery in the UK and the James Cohan Gallery in USA. from Wikipedia.