John Rux-Burton

Media Overview

John Rux-Burton has delivered more than fifty conference keynotes worldwide, appearing across Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia/New Zealand.

He has introduced keynote speakers including Sir Tim Smit, The Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick, and Bonita Norris, and shared stages with broadcasters such as James Naughtie.

A frequent contributor to international conferences, radio, television, and podcasts, he is known for clarity, humour, and his ability to connect with audiences. His presentations have been recognised by CASE for excellence in communication and audience engagement.

Expertise

• Art, meaning, and Simulism: how we make meaning in the act of looking

• Photography and digital imagination: the human ghost in the machine

• The dialogue between East and West in contemporary aesthetics

• The creative process: experimentation, failure, and artistic risk

• Landscape and philosophy — gardens as acts of symbolism and thought (as he has termed topogenesthetics)

• Satire and myth in contemporary writing

• English literature and art history

• Communication, empathy, and the art of attention — lessons from training over 2,000 people worldwide for over 100 major university clients

• Philanthropy, and creative leadership

About Simulism

Simulism is the aesthetic philosophy originated by John Rux-Burton.

It holds that meaning is not discovered but made, forged through the human act of seeking it.

Against the see-saw of modernist certainty and postmodern irony, Simulism embraces simultaneity: comedy and tragedy, faith and futility, the real and the imagined existing together without resolution.

The gesture of making, whether through language, image, or landscape, becomes the ethical act itself: an assertion of humanity in an indifferent universe.

In fiction, Simulism reveals moral truth through satire; in poetry, it finds revelation in the fleeting; in digital imagery, it melts photography into invention; in the garden, it re-enchants matter.

Simulism is not paradox but coexistence — a celebration of the mind’s need to create coherence, even knowing coherence cannot hold.