Next week, the Brown Arts Institute is making magic happen on campus with The Logic of Illogic, a two-day convening of artists and scholars working across disciplines to consider the entanglements of perception, power, and how we define the "real."

But behind the magician's curtain, there's no secret sorcerer conjuring The Logic of Illogic out of thin air. It has been materializing over months of planning, research, and conversation, in conjunction with BAI's PRIZMA Arts & Research Residency. PRIZMA treats creative practice as a research endeavor involving the same intellectual rigor and process as other modes of knowledge production: ideas are born, evolved through research, and born again.

PRIZMA Artist in Residence Jeanette Andrews, whose work in performance, installation, audio, and film builds on her training in parlor and sleight-of-hand magic, has been in residence at BAI since the spring semester. She began by conducting research in Brown University Library's Special Collections, working with The Discoverie of Witchcraft, an exceedingly rare 16th-century volume housed in the H. Adrian Smith Collection of Conjuring and Magicana at the John Hay Library. Reginald Scot's text offers one of the first published descriptions of a magic trick, which Andrews transposed into a piece for cello using a notation key of her own devising that translates Morse code into score.

Andrews' close work with the text, and her incorporation of the volume itself into her first public performance at Brown, In Plain Listen, exemplifies the aim of PRIZMA: to entangle visiting artists with the distinct facilities and resources available here, and to facilitate interdisciplinary exchange in the spirit of the Open Curriculum. In March, In Plain Listen brought Andrews into conversation with Virginia Krause, Professor of French and Francophone Studies, who studies demonology and witchcraft in the early modern era.

Now, with The Logic of Illogic, Andrews' research into the anthropology of magic, the cognitive and psychological bases of sensory perception, and the overlaps between choreography and computational study becomes the aperture through which a public panel will consider this current moment, one rife with misinformation, generative AI, and deepfakes that trouble our very sense of reality. Thursday evening's public panel kicks off the conversation, and a daylong closed working session on Friday gathers nearly a dozen scholars and practitioners from across the country, including eight Brown faculty members from TAPS, Music, American Studies, Cognitive and Psychological Sciences, Linguistics, English, and Visual Arts.

This is only the second semester of Andrews' residency (PRIZMA artists engage with Brown for anywhere from two to six semesters), but the conversations coming out of The Logic of Illogic will shape her work this January. That's when the Main Hall of the Lindemann Performing Arts Center performs a magical transformation of its own, entering its "Ambisonic Cube" formation so Andrews and other artists can experiment with its one-of-a-kind sonic capabilities.

Behind the Scenes @ BAI is the Brown Arts Institute's editorial platform, offering a series of peeks at the art work behind the artworks. BAI presents the culmination of the creative process across many media (the performances, the exhibitions, the screenings), but we also celebrate the evolving, the in-progress, the iterative, and the time, research, and collaboration it takes to bring an idea to life. There's always something happening here: a candid conversation with a visiting scholar, a course visit to a church of robots, a team of specialists reshaping the Main Hall into a whole new venue for the next big show, artists conducting research in the Physical Media Lab. We're here to show you both the method and the madness.

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