There comes a point in organizing a symposium where the spreadsheets, late-night emails, emergency print jobs, missing easels, poster tubes, volunteer T-shirts, and endless logistical puzzles finally stop feeling like separate tasks and start becoming something cohesive.
It’s very early morning in Amsterdam, just hours before Synesthesia: Interdisciplinary Research in a Multisensory World begins, and that feeling has finally arrived.
After two years of planning, our community is gathering. Researchers, artists, musicians, clinicians, and synaesthetes from across the globe are coming together to share ideas about perception, creativity, consciousness, dreaming, sound, color, and the wonderfully complicated ways humans experience the world.
It has been joyful. It has been exhausting. Often both at the same time.
Organizing a symposium like this depends on an enormous amount of generosity and collaboration. I am deeply grateful to our symposium chairs, keynote speakers, presenters, artists, volunteers, local hosts, sponsors, and attendees for helping bring this event to life. I am especially grateful to the IASAS board of directors for what we’ve built.
Soon the doors open…
People arrive…
Conversations begin…
This thing that has existed for so long in planning documents and Zoom calls and imagination and budget plans finally becomes a living community.
Right now, every bit of exhaustion feels worth it.
