Following on from my earlier residency post, I’ve been reflecting on something…

Following on from my earlier residency post, I’ve been reflecting on something that sits underneath much of the work currently unfolding on Naxos.

None of this has happened through a neat or linear process.

The chapel project, the immersive sound work Via Dolorosa, the experiments with cyanotype, plaster reliefs, virtual overlays, AI image systems, spatial installation, upcoming China exhibitions and curatorial projects have all been developing simultaneously, often pulling in completely different directions at once.

For a long time, I saw this kind of multidirectional thinking as something I needed to control more effectively. Like many neurodivergent creatives, I could move rapidly between concepts, materials, systems and associations, but sustaining coherence across them was often the difficult part.

What has genuinely shifted my practice recently is not AI as image generation alone, but AI as a structural and conceptual tool that allows complexity to remain active without everything collapsing into fragmentation.

There is increasing research around the relationship between neurodiversity and creative cognition: pattern recognition, associative thinking, nonlinear problem solving, hyperfocus, rapid conceptual linking and the ability to move between systems and disciplines. In creative practice, those qualities can become incredibly generative, but they can also produce overload when too many unresolved threads are operating simultaneously.

What interests me is that AI has started functioning less as a replacement for creativity and more as an external cognitive framework surrounding the creative process itself.

For me, it has become a way of:
holding conceptual threads together,
mapping relationships,
testing speculative directions,
tracking continuity across projects,
and allowing intuitive or associative leaps to remain active long enough to become meaningful.

Ironically, many of the things that once felt like distractions inside my process are now becoming some of the most productive parts of it.

The chapel itself has become a reflection of this way of thinking:
real architecture mixed with simulated objects,
physical relief sculptures alongside virtual interventions,
music operating spatially through the environment,
historical residue intersecting with computational image systems.

The result sits somewhere between photography, sculpture, installation, sound work and immersive simulation.

Increasingly, I’m less interested in producing single resolved images and more interested in constructing layered environments where perception itself becomes unstable, embodied and experiential.

Perhaps that is the real work emerging here.

Sense Worldwide Jeremy Brown (JB)