THE LAB
THE LAB
PHLSPH began as a bridge between artists and philosophers.
Over time, that conversation has led us to a clearer focus: we are now the Image and Thinking Lab, a space dedicated to exploring the image as a mode of thought.
What images can do
We start from a simple observation: in most encounters with images, we ask what they mean. We are more interested in their conceptual processes—the way they set up relations, hold contradictions, and offer a different kind of purchase on ideas.
From the image towards thinking
Our inquiry moves from the image towards thinking, not the other way around. This is not about illustrating philosophical concepts with photographs. It is about asking what kinds of thought become possible when we take the image seriously, in its expanded sense, as a medium of inquiry—whether it is fixed, moving, or made with AI.
© Clare Strand
Why this matters
This matters because philosophy and theory have been slow to engage with the visual environment they now inhabit. By working directly with the image—its structures, its constraints, its ways of showing—we hope to give abstract thought new tools: for teaching, for research, and ultimately for a practice where thinking and making happen together.
Come as you are
There is no single entry point. You might respond to an open call, follow an inquiry as it unfolds, or spend time where images are taken seriously as thinking. The lab shifts shape depending on who is in the room. The archives hold earlier work—philosophers on images, artists on process—moving from theory towards the image. That work has its place. The energy now moves elsewhere.
What holds it together is a question: what happens when we stop using images to illustrate thought and start letting them generate it?
The lab upskills both communities—but not in the usual way. Artists don't leave with theory lite. Theorists don't leave with illustration. The exchange is sharper: conceptual tools for the eye. Visual intelligence for the page.
© Clare Strand
Alongside the lab’s research, one-on-one mentoring runs in parallel. For projects that need fresh eyes. More on that here.
Dr Alexandra Athanasiadou works at the intersection of visual practice and philosophical inquiry. She is the founder of the PHLSPH Lab: Image Thinking Lab.
For fifteen years, she has worked with images—inside museums, galleries, and universities, but never quite contained by any of them. Her route through the photography world has taken her from the Museum of Photography in Thessaloniki to Candlestar in London, from European platforms like Transeurope PhotoProject to curating and setting up a photography award with IOM Central Asia, from a research program at the University of Crete to her current roles as a Special Scientist at the Technological University of Cyprus, an external tutor on the MA Photography and Society at the Royal Academy of the Arts in The Hague, and a teaching position at the School of Visual and Applied Arts, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
Along the way, she built something between the usual categories: a practice that draws on academic training (a PhD in Aesthetics; the Courtauld; Oxford; Panteion University) but refuses to stay in its lane. The work sits at the edges—close enough to both the art world and the academy to know their rules, far enough in to move freely between them.
The lab is where that space becomes visible.
Conceptual engineering. Imagination as a tool for disruption.
