Carasoul: The Imaginal Mind
Meet artsist Kaeti MacNeil. She is an extraordinary artist whose work blurs the boundaries between temporal sensations and spatial materiality. A painter and animator, Kaeti’s award-winning short film Carasoul: a Portrait in Nth Dimensions (2022) has been celebrated for its innovative exploration of consciousness, winning Best Animated Short at the Artists Forum Festival of the Moving Image in New York City.
Kaeti is an American artist creating paintings and animations. Her film Carasoul: a Portrait in Nth Dimensions (2022) won Best Animated Short at the Artists Forum Festival of the Moving Image in New York City. Her work depicts temporal, immaterial sensations and perceptions as spatially material extensions of the body. She earned a BFA with Distinction from OCAD University in Toronto specializing in Drawing & Painting: Digital Painting and Expanded Animation. Her fascination with human origins, particularly our gifts of individual personality, self-awareness, and intelligence, drives her inspired pursuits through art history, cognitive science, and theoretical physics. Her work has been exhibited in Toronto, Seattle, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City.
Kaeti lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her husband Galen, and an ever-growing collection of flowering plants. She enjoys hiking, rollerblading, gardening, and decorating her home. She plays classical piano and, of course, creates art.
Tell me about yourself, how you became an artist, and about your art form.
I was very imaginative growing up and began painting in high school. I painted directly onto the canvas without prior sketching, rendering the completed image from the top left corner across the canvas diagonally to the lower right corner. I held the fully formed image in my mind and saw it on the canvas as I painted. This practice became my baseline as an artist.
I pursued a career as a graphic and toy designer. Early on I created plush toys while operating a small company, Tyler Poncho Toys. I sold at craft fairs, consignments in Providence and Chicago, and distributed at comic-cons. This was a fun and playful business that led to a professional role in licensed toy design. As a Senior Designer / Brand Manager on Monster High and other brands, I was able to realize my childhood toy design dreams.
After some time, I began painting my own ideas again. While making those still images on canvas, I saw a narrative in the paint. I painted in layers and photographed each transformation. Conceptually, I considered these layers of paint to be like a succession of moments in time, the transience of each moment in life where only layers of memory remain. I assembled these into very rough animations. Across several years of work, I created a 13-minute-long animation. During its completion, the company I worked for declared bankruptcy. I started looking at going back to school to complete a bachelor’s degree.
In a quick succession of weeks, I shared my animated film at a portfolio review with the Experimental Animation program at OCAD University in Toronto, and experienced Hilma af Klint’s Paintings for the Future exhibition at the Guggenheim. Witnessing the realization of her carefully laid plans for an exhibition in a “temple” with a spiral staircase made a profound impact on me.
Her story is better known now, but I’ll share a few key points here. Her most significant body of work are The Paintings for the Temple—193 paintings created between 1906 and 1915. She considered this her Great Commission. The Ten Largest she created without sketches, instead working directly onto papers laid on the floor.
Af Klint was influenced by the Darwinian concept of evolution. She saw evolution as a process that extends beyond biology, pervading the cosmos on physical and ultimately spiritual levels. She depicted spiritual development as a progression from one canvas to the next, while evolution itself is depicted as a spiral—a symbol of continual growth and change. Spiritual evolution is the mechanism by which one can approach the divine and develop one’s soul through various intermediate and successive stages to an even purer form. Af Klint also depicted duality and the apotheosis of the soul in her works.
During her lifetime, she only displayed these paintings once in London. She realized her art would not be appreciated during her lifetime, which led to the decision that her paintings should not be shown until at least 20 years after her death. She began preparing detailed notebooks filled with diagrams and explanations of her work. This was to ensure that her art would be understood years after her death. She created plans for the display of her Paintings for the Temple. She envisioned a temple made of 4 stacked disks with a spiraling staircase inside. A year before her death, Frank Lloyd Wright began the plans to create the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. After her death, her nephew preserved her works until the 1980s, when they began to be recognized as separate from, but a part of, the abstract art movement in art history.
When I visited the Guggenheim Museum and saw her large paintings arranged in the intended progression from one image to the next, I realized she was “animating” the transformation of her images in each new canvas, the way I had been creating my own paintings.
I chose to study for my BFA in the Experimental Animation program at OCAD University in Toronto. My BFA thesis, Carasoul: a Portrait in Nth Dimensions (2022) is an award-winning animated short. It’s two-and-a-half minutes long and can be viewed below
What inspires you?
Friends, the beauty of the natural world, observing patterns, trying to understand the mysteries of the universe. I’m a curious person and am always looking to learn more about people and the world. I better understand what I learn by creating art about it. My thoughts always become clearer when I can depict them outside myself, view them as art, write about them, and discuss them with other people. It can be difficult to implicitly understand one another’s subjectivity, but attempting to communicate through visual language, sound, and motion can express more than language alone. Hearing another’s experience of the same topic, or how we understand each other’s points of view, always broadens understanding and is part of the process.
Most of my work explores phenomenal consciousness and my sense of subjectivity. I am always fascinated to learn the most recent theories in cognitive science. I’m curious if these developing theories could aid in explaining how the creative process and mental visualization work within us. Learning about process philosophy is expanding my questions. How does the mind create the moment where we can correlate all these contents, understand our relation in a nexus, and experience concrescence? Global workspace theory suggests that the perceptions in our brain travel across multiple areas, with EMF activity varying the connectivity for higher-order thinking to emerge. Integrated Information Theory is one field seeking to measure the quality of these conscious states and explain the variances. An important development is the updated theories about sentience – the ability to sense and be aware, move, react, and decide – as the true baseline of consciousness. This means that many more living beings are truly conscious, even if they can’t speak our language or build our tools.
Overall, my fascination with human origins, particularly our gifts of individual personality, self-awareness, and intelligence, drives my inspired pursuits through art history, cognitive science, and theoretical physics. Hilma af Klint’s Paintings for the Future exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City deeply moved me to explore my own understanding and communicate it through animated paintings and breath vocals.
Ultimately, the impressions that viewers of my work have shared are the greatest inspiration. At the opening exhibition for Carasoul, several people were deeply moved, sharing how they felt a sense of renewal towards pursuing their own inspirations. Hearing others’ perspectives on these topics is the most illuminating because my subjective perspective expands into a shared intersubjective space. This is part of why I’m learning more about process philosophy, particularly the ideas of nexus, interrelatedness, and community in the process of becoming. I’m glad to share my work and meet many fellow learners here.
How did you start expressing cosmology in your art?
I began questioning what is the truest sense of a person, their soul, their essence. My life turned upside-down many years ago when all the external things I thought were me had changed, so I needed to answer what was truly me, even while being an everchanging being. What makes you you? This led to years of artmaking, learning theories of the soul through history, and exploring my own experience. I discovered more about the dynamic process of coming into being and sought to make this a more conscious effort.
How has your discovery of process thinking affected your art?
I recently found your organization through reading Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s journal article, “A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications.” I was taken by the descriptions of reality being in a process of becoming, with this enacted by experiential creativity through time. To quote: "it lies in the very nature of things for events of experiential creativity to occur—for partially self-creative experiences to arise out of prior experiences and then to help create subsequent experiences. The process by which our (sometimes partly conscious) experiences arise out of those billions of events constituting our bodies at any moment is simply the most complex example of this process—and the only one the results of which we can witness from the inside."
I began reading Process & Reality and found the video series on OpenHorizons.org. When I watched Lesson 17 of the “What is Process Thought?”, I resonated with the diagram and description in that video. I saw similarities between the understanding of my soul and the process of becoming depicted in Carasoul. I'm drawn to learning more about process philosophy because what I've learned so far makes sense to me.
In the process of making my animated short, I developed an idiosyncratic cosmology of the soul. This was described in nine parts, depicted in the diagram below. In the following list, I include my original idea and the interpretation that aligns with process thought.
Nos. 1-3 are the physical body itself, the vital organs summarized as a ‹Torus› magnetic center, and the circulations of the electricity-based nervous system and blood-based circulatory system. In Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious by Antonio Damasio, he discusses how consciousness is processed in other parts of the body beyond the brain.
No. 4, The psychic membrane/aura is a representation of electromagnetic fields of the body and mind, affected by the felt sense of the body in an environment, filling and interacting in space, shaped and disrupted by architecture. How do different shapes/spaces make you feel? I am inspired in this exploration by Aaron Betsky’s The Monster Leviathan: Anarchitecture.
No. 5, the 4D Bodies represent memory. Imagine memory being held in tangibly felt fields that take the shape of the past selves that contain the memories. These intangible hyperbodies repeat around the physical body like a hypercube. They are strongly pulled by olfactory memory and assembled by personal patterns through time.
In Process Thought, the 4D bodies are like the Past Actual World.
No. 6, the Carasoul is a representation of the imaginal mind, focused on visualization as an organizing principle. This is the head-soul, the mind’s eye, the visuospatial sketchpad of the psyche. It performs self-reflection as internal mirrors and paradigm shifts. Visually, it's composed of brain waves being sorted as if outside the body in space. If it can be tangibly seen, how long is your thought?
In Process Thought, the Carasoul connects with Subjective Forms.
No. 7, the Shadow Hands, are semi-sentient hands pulling at the 4D bodies and affecting the mobility of other areas. Since this part can seem to have a will of its own, it can act in concert or opposition to the other parts. I represented this as hands since it has the power to act upon the self and the world.
In Process Thought, the Shadow Hands are like the Prehensions connecting to the Past Actual World.
No. 8, the Future Hands, one’s grasping towards the future, sensing through touch in the darkness outside the figure’s light. This part stretches beyond the known of the self's current illumination to bring into being from the yet-to-be. This part is also hands because it is the primary actor on the self and world. Do your hands push or pull you where you’re going?
In Process Thought, the Future Hands are like the Possible Subjective Aims. In the film, when the Future Hands reach out, and a new body appears in the lightning strike, that is like the Actualization of the Ideal Subjective Aim. This new state of Being overtakes the present moment of the figure; their Chosen Subjective Aim has come into being.
No. 9, the Whole, greater than the sum of its parts.
In Process Thought, the Whole is the Actual Entity in Concrescence.



Would you explain what you are trying to convey in your video, Carasoul?
Carasoul: a Portrait in Nth Dimensions was my BFA Thesis film. It was featured in a few film festivals, the art movement the Science New Wave, and won Best Animated Short at the Artists Forum Festival of the Moving Image in New York City.
The film depicts temporal, immaterial sensations and perceptions as spatially material extensions of the body. This work is for feeling thoughts around you like waves and forms, invisible yet tangible. It questions how one experiences time, the location and duration of consciousness, the life force, and the imaginal mind.
This vision of invisible dimensions within a human experience is grounded in biological and biographical forms. We see vignettes of an abstract super-reality where the subtle phenomena of memory, sensation and imagination become visible, feeling bodies. These unseen yet vitally tangible experiences envelop our bodies in extra dimensions.
This speculative tale of the 4th dimension opens further intto Nth dimensions to express the uncertainty about the nature of the unseen layers of reality we live within. Time is like an envelope to our living bodies, informing and obscuring our experience of being a living, feeling body, capable of self-awareness and intelligent thought. The mind is the locus for apprehending sensory-rich lived experience, but there is more to a cosmology of the body that contributes to this experience.
This take on the soul was influenced by my felt sense of being and the representations of time and extra dimensions in art history. My take on extra dimensions diverged from the rectilinear diagrams that are the most prevalent in art history. I like exploring this because living bodies aren’t rectilinear, so I don’t think all abstract diagrams representing their theoretical extra-dimensional composition need to be either.
Each soul part emanates from my felt sense of it and an understanding of cognitive science inspired by Bright Air, Brilliant Fire by Gerald M. Edelman and Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Re-search, and Everyday Experience, 5th Ed. by Bruce E. Goldstein, among other works shared above. These diagrams describe my feeling of each part's actions. While the details are inspired by math, science, and art history, since I have a vivid imagination, my depictions diverge into subjective visual descriptions of sensations and perceptions that language isn't the most precise to express on its own.
Part of my interest was to use modern terms that aren't preloaded with historical meanings and definitions for the soul. We continue to discover and debate the existing definitions, but that does not necessarily aid in understanding the lived experience of the soul itself. I've found discussions on the soul can become distracted by trying to use and fit into the right definitions and comparisons, rather than truly reflecting on what it is you're experiencing first. I wanted to begin arriving at a more plain language way to talk about what the soul is really doing, and then let that knowledge inform how to label and understand any details.
Like the physical matter of the body and the electric experience of the psyche, this hybrid animation style demonstrates the unification of the carnal and the spiritual through the materiality of stop-motion paint and the super-saturated color of digital animation. This film fills a space in contemporary animation between abstraction and figuration, the mundane and the mystical, feeling a way through color and voice to share a vision of how human beings are more than they appear. A metaphysical transformation takes place expanding an individual beyond the boundaries of their interior towards a larger intersubjectivity. It is a hybrid, fluid vision of intersectional bodies communicating in the global sphere.
What projects are you currently working on or have planned?
I recently wrapped on an animated short that will be included in the Light up the Dark program at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto. This animation will be projected onto their façade December 27-29, 2024, in 30-minute loops from 6-9 PM. I’m one of eleven artists who created work for the event that aligns with their exhibition, Light: Visionary Perspectives going on now.
My piece is like visual music, a synesthetic experience of synchronized sound and visuals. Within the theme of the exhibition, I was drawn to the Light of the Eye, the Light of the Mind, and the Light of the Heart. I depict each of these arising and bringing the space to life. We see the Light of the Eye as brush stroke bursts like fireworks. The Light of the Mind appears as electric wavelengths cascading over the space. The Light of the Heart reveals veins pulsing with bioluminescence across the surface of the museum.
Additionally, I’m in development on a second animated short, tentatively titled The Quiet of the Night. This work expands the visual language of Carasoul where we see mental imagery associated with alpha waves. Now we will see depictions of the remaining four types of brainwaves: delta, theta, beta, and gamma. With the working title, The Quiet of the Night, a focus in this animated short is dream state experiences and their influence on waking life.
I’m also expanding on the depiction of the felt sense of the body. In Carasoul this is depicted as an aura – an intangible sense of your body’s personal space. This short goes further into the interrelationship between living beings and their environments – the natural vs. human-made, and how we construct and perceive our environments. This will explore the concept of anarchitecture. This visionary form of architecture captures the uncanny, mythic, and unsettling parts of architecture, those spaces that seem to have a life of their own or interact with our sense of our own individuated bodies in a strange way. I’m informed by my sensory experiences of proprioception and interoception in this work.
I’ve begun sharing my new work in process through my website: https://kaetimacneil.com/behind-the-scenes This area requires a (free) login to stop spam and bots. This member area features the new animation in progress and an in-depth look at making Carasoul.
What would you like to share that I have not asked?
I am curious to hear others’ perspectives on these topics and more stories of concrescence. What were these moments like for you? What was involved; what happened next? I’m still learning process philosophy terminology and welcome