Ken Stange is a writer, visual artist, occasional scientific researcher, and Professor Emeritus at Nipissing University, where he taught psychology for forty years, including a course on the Psychology of Art, which he is currently teaching online. He works in many forms and likes to mix his media. His works include poetry, fiction, non-fiction, journalism, scientific research reports, computer programs, philosophical essays, visual art, a weekly blog about interesting ideas. (His book, A Smoother Pebble, A Prettier Shell, published by Penumbra Press, was a collection of his art works integrated with poems and an extended essay on the relationship of science to visual art.)
His writing remains his primary passion. His works include 19 books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, hundreds of publications in literary magazines, and he won the 2011 Exile/Vanderbilt prize for short fiction. He calls all his books "hypotheses" because of his interest in the integration of the sciences and the arts. For over a decade he has been devoting much of his energy to his recently published non-fiction trilogy about the similarities and differences of creativity in the arts and the sciences: Secret Agents Past; Secret Agents Present; and Secret Agents Future.
His other recent books include a collection of short fiction, (God When He's Drunk, 2012); a work combining his art with his tanka poems (Embracing The Moon: 25 Little Worlds, 2013); a memoir of a bike trip with his son from New Orleans back to Canada (Going Home: Cycling Through The Heart Of America, 2014); and a tongue-in-cheek guide to Canada (Explaining Canada: A Primer For Yanks, 2014).
Current works-in-progress include a new collection of poetry (DiVerse Dedications), a collection of aphorisms (Hippokritic Oaths), and a memoir (Chicago Days: Growing Up Absurd On The South Side).
He also has had articles in computer magazines, written commercial software for test evaluation, been an arts columnist, as well as published in refereed scientific journals on empirical aesthetics, statistics, and computer research applications. He has presented papers at numerous international conferences, most of which relate to creativity, and in 2011 gave a TEDx talk on “Redefining Creativity”. He was the founder and editor of Nebula Magazine from 1975 to 1984 and currently edits the reincarnated Nebula as a very unperiodical Internet publication committed to interesting work that often bridges the 'Two Cultures' of science and art.
As a visual artist interested in the interface between the visual and literary arts, as well as the boundary between science and art, the computer seemed the perfect medium with which to explore these colourful 'gray' areas. So his visual art always contains textual elements. These digital works are collaged together from digital photographs, mathematical experiments with such things as fractals, free-hand (or rather ‘free-mouse’) drawing, and image manipulation tools—with the textual element as a sort of glue. The final digital image is called a “contruction”.
The digital images are then individualized when creating hardcopy works by running monoprints, each of which is made unique by carefully varying some feature of the original digital image for the printing process. He has had numerous juried and curated exhibitions of his prints, and his work in represented in numerous public and private collections. His latest book, Art’s In The Head, Not The Hand, is a full-colour retropsective of his digital art.
His extensive CV is available at: http://www.kenstange.com/cv/KenStangeCV.pdf