Exploring the Sublime: Learning to Listen Across Multiple Channels

What moves us beyond what we deem ourselves to be?

This course takes the sublime as its entry point, the awareness of the grandiosity of existence that opens us to uncertainty, to what lies beyond our explored territories, and to the full complexity of being alive in a shared world.

Through that opening, we learn to listen differently. Listening here is a transdisciplinary practice that “un-selves” us, situating our research within wider ecological, cultural, and cosmological contexts — and challenging the assumption that knowledge has a single origin or center. Drawing on pluriversal, intersectional, and decolonizing frameworks, the course creates space for multiple standpoints to meet in dialogue.

In an era shaped by accelerating technologies and AI-assisted research, the capacity to think critically, collaboratively, and across difference becomes not a luxury but a necessity. This course aims to cultivate networks of mutual responsibility and fluency, grounded in the conviction that our diversity is a source of strength, not complexity to be flattened.

Students will engage with varied modes of inquiry, ranging from cosmology and physics to intersectional humanities and philosophy, and further into artistic, somatic, and performative practices. Guest lecturers from science, the arts, and the humanities will contribute throughout. The course unfolds through interactive lectures, field visits, and sessions held in varied spaces. Each student may bring a topic of interest or be supported in identifying one, through a range of methods, with sustained attention to how we ask questions, generate knowledge, and position ourselves in relation to what and whom we study.

The course concludes with an oral presentation in which students share the connections and learnings that emerged through their practice.

Performance as
World-Making

The Art of listening through Embodiment

Performance is a world-generation practice that allows for the interplay of our perceptions and relations. In my artistic practice, performance becomes a research on how we inhabit and co-create meaning. Embodiment becomes another channel of inquiry. In this search for knowledge—this need for portals of wonder through which shared imaginaries can be recombined—embodiment offers generative ground. Performance opens temporary co-habitations that unsettle habitual perceptions. In the images above, from a performance at the Stork Fountain in Copenhagen, passersby became collaborators in transforming the site; the landscape shifted, and with it our relations to it. Such moments invite the “otherwise”, imagination, play, and experimentation with the realities we think we inhabit.

Pluriversality: Confronting our living praxis

The Art of listening through diverse voices

Pluriversality expands and confronts the way we listen. It is a decolonial approach to epistemology and ontology that challenges the idea of a single world, a single method, a single way of knowing. Instead, it insists on the power of diversity and on confronting how our institutions determine what counts as knowledge.

Heisenberg reminds us that “what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” If this is the case, then part of the work is the courage and tenderness required to examine those methods, especially when they reveal what is uncomfortable, strange, or historically discriminatory.

Pluriversal approaches draw on global epistemologies and practices that hold time, temporalities, memory, and futures differently — not with the aim of replacing one worldview with another, but in shared affection distanced from dualities. These include performative, poetic, ritualistic, and community-rooted forms of knowledge as in Gloria Anzaldúa’s imaginative bodily flights; revitalizations of archives; and reflections on erasure and nonlinear temporalities, like Olufemi’s experiments for the otherwise. Thinkers like Rasheedah Phillips and Audre Lorde remind us that knowledge is shaped through cultural experience and embodied feeling, while Haraway’s situated knowledges emphasize partiality, relation, and accountability. Together, they reject objectivity as detachment and frame understanding as a transformative and political act.

Scientific Methodology

The Art of listening through Phenomena

The study of entropy and the so-called arrow of time begins by revisiting the foundations of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, and how these frameworks define the properties and evolution of physical systems. This research examines entropy through these theoretical frameworks while questioning the assumptions embedded in the approximations that underlie them.

Our current scientific understanding of time largely relies on reductionist, metric frameworks rooted in classical thermodynamics and Newtonian physics. However, examples across different scales—from nanoscale molecular dynamics to self-gravitating systems—challenge many of the commonly used methods. This project therefore revisits statistical mechanics in regimes involving small particle numbers and long-range gravitational interactions, investigating how equilibrium and temporal directionality emerge—or fail to emerge—in self-organizing systems. By attending to the subtleties within these regimes, concepts often treated as stable begin to shift, revealing the limits of our standard approximations.

More broadly, this work explores how the arrow of time may depend not only on physical processes but also on scale and observation. It raises the possibility that the temporal asymmetry we experience is shaped in part by memory and perception, while the quantum nature of physical systems allows for fluctuations that may include local or temporary reversals. Whether such fluctuations occur but remain inaccessible to human perception is an open question motivating this investigation.

This is the website of Clara F. Cores, a trans disciplinary practitioner of mystic Otherness.

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