THE ACT PRACTICE
AN ARTISTIC RESEARCH FRAMEWORK
In 2010, at an ashram in India, I was asked by Swami Niranjanananda to help his senior colleague with communication, based on what were then twenty years of work as a communication consultant. I felt honoured, and I told him: I only teach what I need to learn.
He paused. A long pause, or what felt like one. I went cold, certain I had said something wrong. Then he said I had taught him something that day. Heads turned toward me. I wanted to disappear. But the answer was true. I have always taught what I never experienced growing up: what it feels like to be truly listened to.
That is where ACT began: a practice that became a business, and that now becomes art.
Not in a boardroom. In a childhood where I learned, very early, that how something is said tells you far more than what is said. That the body knows before the mind catches up. That listening, real listening, begins not with the ears but with something much older and much deeper.
I spent thirty years building an artistic research practice on that understanding. I named it ACT: Awareness, Communication, Transformation. The name came to me in a dream in Singapore in 1997. I woke with the three words and did not question them.
Awareness
Awareness is the foundation. You cannot communicate what you have not yet seen in yourself. Neuroscience confirms what every good listener already knows: paying full attention activates the prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for self-awareness, emotional regulation, and empathy. Awareness is not a philosophy. It is a physical act. It changes the brain.
Research reference: NIH neuroimaging studies on meditation and the brain - NIH / PubMed Central: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3190564/
Communication
Communication is what becomes possible once you are present. Research published in the journal Social Neuroscience found that when someone perceives they are being actively listened to, the brain’s reward system is activated. Being heard is not a social nicety. It is a neurological event. It changes how people feel, how they think, and how they relate. A meta-analysis of over 108,000 workplace interactions found that listening quality was the single strongest predictor of relationship quality, surpassing advice, emotional support, and affection combined. Brené Brown’s research on vulnerability confirms that genuine connection requires the willingness to be truly seen: without that willingness, communication remains on the surface.
Research references:
- Social Neuroscience journal: https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/psns20
- Brené Brown - Daring Greatly, The Gifts of Imperfection, Atlas of the Heart: https://brenebrown.com
Transformation
Transformation is what becomes possible when Awareness and Communication are sustained over time. It does not happen in public. It happens in private, in the quiet between one conversation and the next, when the deeper intelligence has time to integrate what the listening revealed. Spiritual practices that cultivate this quality of inner stillness, including meditation, breathwork, and contemplative attention, have been shown in neuroimaging studies to increase the thickness of the prefrontal cortex, reduce cortisol and inflammatory markers, and improve resilience across physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual dimensions. As Brené Brown writes, it takes courage to say yes to rest in a culture where exhaustion has become a status symbol. Transformation asks for that courage.
Research references:
- NIH neuroimaging studies on meditation: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3190564/
- Brené Brown: https://brenebrown.com
You cannot skip from Awareness to Transformation without passing through Communication. There is no shortcut. There is no elevator. The same is true of materials. As an artist, I have learned that materials require listening. They have agency. They cannot be taken for granted. They demand to be heard.
The ACT practice has been applied across industries and continents, with organisations from banking to healthcare to education, in boardrooms and training rooms and one-on-one coaching sessions. It is also the architecture of my artistic practice: the three floors of The Doll House — a work of art exhibited as part of the Childhood Games series — map directly onto the three words. The kitchen where we nourish ourselves. The living room where we receive others. The bedroom where transformation happens in the dark, in the silence, while we sleep.
Art speaks what words cannot reach. It communicates through the subliminal language of image, material, light, and form, bypassing the analytical mind and arriving directly at what we feel and know before we can name it. That language has no borders. It speaks to everyone, in every culture, without translation.
This is not separate from the ACT practice. It is its deepest expression. Thirty years of research in boardrooms and training rooms worked to make the invisible visible through language and interactive, experiential learning: some of the most effective tools available for human development. And yet art surpasses it exponentially as a transformational tool. Art is not the teacher. It is the invitation: to curiosity, to listening, to dialogue, to connection, and through these, to the answers that have always been available to all of us. A work of art can reach further, and touch more deeply, than a seminar delivered to thousands.
To explore the ACT practice in depth visit acthuman.com
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THE PRACTICE IN THE WORK
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Each series gives form to and extends a dimension of the ACT research, and each carries its own line of research.
Amplify gives form to Awareness. Its research draws on the neuroscience of focused attention and on the Sashiko tradition, a Japanese embroidery practice in which stitching reinforces fabric and makes it more resilient. Both are disciplines of presence: the discovery that slowing down completely is not a loss but a form of knowledge.
- Sashiko embroidery tradition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sashiko
- NIH neuroimaging studies on attention: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3190564/
Childhood Games gives form to Communication. Its research investigates the phygital, echo chambers, digital bubbles, and colonial theory extended to data, behaviour, and attention as the new territories of extraction. The Doll House is in conversation with Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) and Plato’s allegory of the cave.
- Eli Pariser - The Filter Bubble (2011): https://www.thefilterbubble.com
- Shoshana Zuboff - The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019): https://shoshanazuboff.com/books/surveillance-capitalism/
- Henrik Ibsen - A Doll’s House (1879): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2542
- Plato’s allegory of the cave - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/
Kitsch Glitz gives form to Transformation. Its research is rooted in the Pop art lineage of Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who understood that everyday objects and substances are legitimate artistic materials. The series extends this line of research into the territory of the sacred and the bodily.
- Robert Rauschenberg at MoMA: https://www.moma.org/artists/4930
- Jasper Johns at MoMA: https://www.moma.org/artists/2947
- MAB FAAP - Museu de Arte Brasileira: https://mab.faap.br
Portraits gives form to Awareness turned outward. Its research draws on the neuroscience of empathy and on the practice of intuitive listening. Three works in the series arrived at their meaning before the painter did.
- NIH neuroimaging and empathy research: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3957224/
Flags gives form to Communication in its most public and symbolic dimension: the language of belonging, place, and shared meaning. Inspired by the work of Jasper Johns.