An Introduction to the Social and Political Philosophy of Bertolt Brecht: Revolution and Aesthetics
we have collaborated ever since. When I first met Martha she had just completed a project in which she interviewed a number of clairvoyants in order to give conscious shape to the concept of an angel something that for most academics sat between kitsch and fantasy. However, in this work she gave such intellectual substance to the discussions of those who spoke with her that their visions had dignity and authority. In the same way she captured the concept of the technological imaginary at Transtechnology Research at Plymouth University in ways that attracted the minds of researchers who were looking for new paradigms, and through that group worked on dozens of projects, including Leonardo Reviews and L|R|Q. We published joint papers and shared a large research grant that allowed us to work with people that she valued at the EYE Film Institute, the Institute for Sound and Vision and the Angewandte in Vienna. She also worked independently on projects, such as the anthology Light Image and Imagination, in collaboration with Gustave Deutsch and Hannah Schimek. At the time of her death we were working with a large group of researchers from the cognitive sciences, the arts and the humanities on creativity and cognitive innovation. We also set up a small laboratory project to revisit the psychological experiments that were important to media in the late 19th century, and we were working with hospitals and the Dental School at Plymouth to build a new center dealing with health and creativity. We also established a network of researchers from across many disciplines, including Roger Malina, to work on methodological issues in particular those that involve questions about transdisciplinarity and academic collaboration. It seems today as I write this that the answers to many of our questions about academic collaboration were hidden in plain sight. Martha was a natural collaborator or perhaps, more precisely, she made it very easy for others to collaborate with her. At this distance it is clear to me that this was not simply a consequence of her intellectual qualities and her natural compassion for the world around her, but rather was the legacy of her refusal to acknowledge the dichotomy between matter and spirit as an irrefutable given. For her this refusal was a gift of personal freedom and intellectual grace; the irrevocable continuity of time, memory and perception In MeMorIaM: Martha BlassnIgg, 08 septeMBer 1969 27 septeMBer 2015
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