Join us for a conversation between Trevor Paglen, the Moody's Leslie and Brad Bucher Artist-in-Residence, and Jeffery J. Kripal, Rice University Chair of Philosophy and Religious Thought, exploring paranormal currents in the history of science, art, and metaphysical literature. Inspired by the Archives of the Impossible, a collection of documents and oral histories related to paranormal activity maintained by Rice University's Fondren Library, this conversation will include topics ranging from physics and astronomy to art and UFOs. 

Trevor Paglen is an interdisciplinary artist whose work ranges from image-making and writing to investigative journalism and engineering. His innovative collaborations include launching an artwork into Earth's orbit with Creative Time and MIT; contributing research and cinematography to the Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour; and creating a radioactive public sculpture for the exclusion zone in Fukushima, Japan. Image Operations, Op.10 (2018), Paglen's video installation that explored bias in machine-learning algorithms, was shown in the Moody's exhibition Soundwaves: Strategies in Art + Music and subsequently acquired by the Museum of Fine Art, Houston for their permanent collection. 

Jeffrey J. Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. He is the author of Comparing Religions (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014); Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal (Chicago, 2011); Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (Chicago, 2010), among many other titles. His present areas of writing and research include the articulation of a New Comparativism within the study of religion that will put “the impossible” back on the table again, a robust and even conversation between the sciences and the humanities, and the mapping of an emergent mythology or “Super Story” within paranormal communities and individual visionaries.