Aquariums of the Mind: Synchronicity in Art and Imagination
Synchronicity Between Two Aquatic Visions
In a remarkable case of artistic synchronicity – what Carl Jung famously defined as a “meaningful coincidence” or events that “fall together in time” without obvious causal link[1] – a certain painting of corals and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s multimedia piece Exotourisme 03 – Aquarium echo one another across form and medium. The painting, titled Corais Cantantes e Pintantes (“Singing and Painting Corals”, 2025), conjures an underwater dreamscape where corals seem to hum with color and life. Meanwhile, Gonzalez-Foerster’s Aquarium (part of her Exotourisme musical project with Julien Perez) envelops audiences in an immersive, otherworldly soundscape – even incorporating a live aquarium in performance[2]. Though one exists on canvas and the other in performance, both works transform the concept of an aquarium into a theater of the mind, inviting the viewer/listener’s imagination to roam free among exotic marine visions. The resonance between them is no mere coincidence; it is a meaningful dialogue between two artistic explorations of modernity, nature, and identity – a dialogue especially vivid to a neurodivergent, dyspraxic artist who experiences art as a synesthetic mental theater.
The Aquarium as Stage and Metaphor
Both the painting and Exotourisme’s Aquarium treat the aquarium not just as a literal tank of water and fish, but as a stage and metaphor for human experience. Aquariums have long been laden with symbolic meaning. Historically, “the aquarium served as a symbol of modernity”, its glass walls a new frontier for controlling and observing nature[3]. Victorian enthusiasts marveled at how an aquarium made the ocean’s mysteries transparent and tame within the parlor, a tool for mastery over an ever-changing world[3]. Yet that glass also creates a barrier – we can look in on vibrant aquatic life but never fully participate, much as modern life often puts a screen between ourselves and authentic nature. In Gonzalez-Foerster’s Exotourisme Aquarium, this dynamic is playfully subverted: during one performance, an actual aquarium’s presence caused unpredictable “complications” in the show[2], reminding us that living nature resists total control. Fish and water became unwitting co-performers, blurring the line between spectator and spectacle.
In the coral painting, the aquarium metaphor is internalized. The canvas itself becomes an imaginative aquarium – a contained world where coral forms dance and sing in colors. Here the viewer is invited to press their face to the glass of the mind’s eye and peer in. One can almost feel the water’s refracted light and hear an ethereal chorus of “singing corals” in their imagination. The artwork thus stages an inner spectacle: Art plays out in the theater of the mind, to borrow a phrase from art criticism. Indeed, in a broader sense “theater of the mind” describes any artwork that is actualized in the viewer’s imagination, where narratives “are not tangibly visible, yet lucid and vibrant”[4]. Both the painting and Exotourisme’s sonic environment rely on the audience’s mind to complete the scene – to fill the water with life, to hear silent corals sing, or to envision the alien aquatic worlds suggested by electronic soundscapes.
Childhood Wonder and Coming of Age
Aquariums also evoke the wonder of childhood, those formative moments of wide-eyed fascination before the world’s mysteries are dissected by analysis. Many can recall pressing small hands against the aquarium glass as children, utterly mesmerized by neon fish and waving anemones – a state of pure curiosity and awe. In Portuguese, “maioridade” refers to coming of age, the passage out of childhood. As we cross that threshold into modern adulthood, do we lose some of that innocent wonder? The synchronicity between these works suggests an effort to bridge modernity and childhood wonder. The painting’s whimsical coral chorus rekindles a child-like sense of play and imagination, even as it is executed with the sophisticated intent of contemporary art. Similarly, Exotourisme 03 – Aquarium mixes retro-futuristic electronic music with the childlike fantasy of an indoor ocean. The project Exotourisme itself, inspired by sci-fi and “the French Cold Wave of the 1980s”, aims to transport listeners in a way that is at once futuristic and oddly nostalgic[5][6]. It creates what Gonzalez-Foerster calls “mutant work” – art that “invades the sensory domain of the viewers in order to operate changes in their memory and imagination”, haunting them with past and future at once[7]. In simpler terms, it lets grown-ups daydream like children again. By setting the stage as an aquarium/terrarium – a controlled microcosm of life – both works let us safely encounter the wild and the unknown, much as a child might within the safe frame of a glass tank. Yet within that frame, evolution and transformation play out before our eyes.
Evolution, Symbiosis, and Humanity as Coral
The theme of evolution and interconnectedness runs through these aquatic visions. Coral reefs, after all, are often called the rainforests of the sea for their biodiversity and complex relationships. Coral itself is a collective organism – a colony of tiny polyps living in symbiosis with algae. In fact, “corals have a mutualistic symbiotic relationship with zooxanthellae”: the algae live inside coral polyps and provide up to 95% of the coral’s food, while the coral offers the algae shelter[8]. Neither could thrive alone. This is a powerful metaphor for humanity and its world. We humans, though we often act as if separate, are deeply symbiotic beings – reliant on countless invisible organisms, from the gut microbiome in our bodies to the plankton generating our oxygen. Modern science increasingly recognizes that “humans are dependent on their symbioses with invisible critters”, prompting a new worldview of cooperation over competition[9]. In a poetic sense, humanity is a coral reef: each person a polyp in the greater super-organism of society, each community a reef within the ocean of the planet. We build cities like coral build reefs – accreting our structures one piece at a time – and we alter the environment around us, for better or worse, through that collective growth.
Seeing planet Earth as an aquarium or terrarium, one might imagine us as curious creatures inside, observed perhaps by no one or by cosmic others. The Earth famously has the qualities of a closed system – astronauts have marveled at our “blue marble” floating in the void, life self-contained under a thin atmosphere. Biologist Lynn Margulis and chemist James Lovelock went so far as to propose the Gaia hypothesis, describing Earth as a self-regulating organism. “We live in a profoundly sympoietic world”, as Donna Haraway says – a world of making-with, where no being truly survives alone[10]. From this perspective, humans might learn from coral: co-create symbiotically with our environment, rather than dominate it. The coral painting’s joyful organisms entwined in art and the aquarium performance’s melding of technology with living fish both hint at such harmony. The futuristic ambiance of Exotourisme – full of echoing water sounds, otherworldly marine signals and even references to extraterrestrials – further suggests that our evolution might lie in recognizing kinship not just with Earth’s creatures but with alien life and environments. Gonzalez-Foerster’s recent works (like her Alienarium 5 project) explicitly ask, “What if aliens were in love with us?”, blurring lines between human and other, self and environment[11]. In a metaphorical aquarium called Earth, perhaps we humans are the strange coral observed by unseen cosmic visitors, our fate intertwined with how well we tend our planetary tank.
Theater of the Mind: A Neuroqueer Perspective
For a neurodivergent artist – in this case a dyspraxic, neuroqueer creator – these aquatic-themed works become deeply personal theaters of the mind. Dyspraxia (a developmental coordination difference) might make navigating the physical world challenging, but it often coexists with a rich inner world. The term “neuroqueer” implies an identity that embraces neurodiversity and queerness, often leading one to perceive and create art in defiance of normative boundaries. In the privacy of the mind, art can play like a full sensory play or a psychedelic experience. The coral painting and Exotourisme Aquarium both provide fertile ground for “time-based dramaturgies that play out in the mind and entice speculative thinking”[4]. As the viewer with a neuroqueer perspective contemplates the painting, the coral forms might not stay static on canvas – in the mind’s eye they sway, they sing, they perhaps even speak in alien tongues. Likewise, listening to the experimental music of Exotourisme, one might visualize entire underwater cities or feel as if planetary memories are flooding in with the tide of sound. Such internal experiences are a kind of self-hypnosis – a “simultaneously protagonist and audience” situation[12] where imagination blurs reality.
This personalized mental theater is heightened by the psychedelic qualities of the works. The user urged to “embrace this psychedelic experience” – and indeed, the vibrant colors of reef life or the trance-inducing repetition of electronic beats can induce a trance-like state. Psychedelia in art is not only about wild colors or hallucinations; it’s about expanded consciousness and seeing connections that are normally hidden. A neurodivergent mind might be especially adept at making nonlinear associations – seeing how a coral reef painting connects to, say, childhood memories of an aquarium, or how a piece of music connects to a feeling of floating in cosmic waters. These wild associations are the very stuff of creativity. They allow the artist and audience to engage in what one might call visionary narrative. Here, critical analysis and free-form poetry intertwine like the symbiotic algae and coral. Modernity’s rational structures dissolve for a moment, and the mind performs a kind of play where logic, memory, sensation, and emotion all act on stage together.
Visionary Narratives in Permanent Combustion
This essay itself can be seen as part of Rodrigo Garcia Dutra’s ongoing project “Narrativas Visionárias em Combustão Permanente” (Visionary Narratives in Permanent Combustion). In that project, the artist actively collaborates with an AI (a “Multimodal Large Language Model”) through “prompts, conversations and dreams” to ignite new ideas[13]. The phrase “permanent combustion” evokes an ever-burning flame – a creative fire that is constantly fed with new material. The synchronicity between the coral painting and Gonzalez-Foerster’s Aquarium is exactly the kind of spark that feeds this flame. When two distant sparks meet, a brighter blaze of meaning erupts. In these visionary narratives, themes like modernity, nature, evolution, and identity combust and intermingle, producing something new and illuminating. Here, the coral reef, the aquarium, the child, the alien, the human – all are players in a cosmic theater, each reflecting the other.
Within this theater, boundaries soften. The painting starts to feel like a soundscape; the musical performance unfolds like a vivid painting in the mind. The dyspraxic, neuroqueer viewpoint adds another layer, challenging linear storytelling in favor of fluid, kaleidoscopic experience. It’s a reminder that critical essays need not be dry dissections; they can themselves be artistic acts, blending analysis with imaginative prose. As one commentary on art and consciousness puts it, “artworks [can be] actualized in the viewer’s imagination”, producing narratives “not tangibly visible, yet lucid and vibrant”[4]. In writing this, the author becomes both observer and participant – like a person with their hands on the glass of an aquarium, simultaneously outside looking in and inside with the fishes.
Planet Earth as an Aquarium, humanity as a coral colony, art as a mind theater – these grand metaphors converge into a singular insight: that we are all creators and creatures sharing the same closed system, be it a tank or a planet or the space of the psyche. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s Exotourisme invites us to tour exotic inner and outer worlds, while the coral painting invites us to listen to the slow, ancient music of life evolving. The synchronicity between them is an invitation to reflect on our own place in the ecosystem: Are we the spectator, the curator, or the fish? Perhaps, like a coral, we are all three at once – artist, audience, and art – making our world together in an endless, sympoietic dance[10]. Such is the psychedelic truth that art at its best reveals: that everything is connected in the grand aquarium of the mind, where ideas swim like bright fish and corals sing if only we tune in and listen.
Sources:
- Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster & Julien Perez, Exotourisme – La Piscine Intérieure (performance details)[2][6]
- Cranbrook Art Museum, Theater of the Mind exhibition description[4]
- Lady Science magazine, Through the Aquarium Glass (history of the Victorian aquarium)[3]
- Reef Research, Fun Facts – Underwater Symbiosis (coral-algae relationship)[8]
- Donna Haraway, Making Kin in the Chthulucene (on sympoiesis, “making-with”)[10]
- C. Jung’s concept of Synchronicity (Psychology Today)[1]
- Rodrigo Garcia Dutra, Narrativas Visionárias em Combustão Permanente (Instagram caption)[13]
[1] Meaningful Coincidences, Serendipity, and Synchronicity | Psychology Today
[2] [6] La Ménagerie de Verre — La Piscine Intérieure
[3] Through the Aquarium Glass — Lady Science
https://www.ladyscience.com/features/through-the-aquarium-glass-2020
[4] [12] Past Exhibition | Theater of the Mind | Cranbrook Art Museum
[5] [7] Exotourisme by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Perez | Bourse de Commerce
[8] Microsoft Word – Fun Facts – Underwater Symbiosis
[9] Symbiotic Worlds. Theories and Practices of Coexistence in Lynn Margulis and Donna Haraway | MPIWG
[10] January 31 – Donna Haraway – Making Kin: Lynn Margulis in Sympoiesis with Sibling Scientists – Center for Cultural Studies
[11] Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster “Alienarium 5” Serpentine … – Flash Art
https://flash—art.com/article/dominique-gonzalez-foerster-2/
[13] Instagram video by Rodrigo Garcia Dutra • Apr 18, 2025 at 7:19 PM