Neuroaesthetics on empyre

This month’s conversation topic on empyre* is “Pictures of the brain: a look at the relationship between brains, imaging technologies and the field of neuroaesthetics.” Facillitated by Michelle Barke. I’m dipping in this weekend, but for those interested, empyre brings together artists and researchers working broadly in the field of new media. Facillitator intro:

Much has been written on the relationship between the visual arts and neurology with a large focus, notably from Semir Zeki the prominent neuroscientist, on perception. Much of this discussion has been driven by the question of what we see when viewing an artwork and what processes take place neurologically in this seeing. Less has been said in neuroaesthetics on the implicit and complex question of the role perception (especially that of the viewer, receiver or interactant in the work) has in the actual creation of the work. These questions, however, are of immense importance to media arts and to contemporary art practice. So a question I’d like to raise for this topic is the issue of active perceptual engagement with the work of art in order to create, compose, receive and *complete* it. This is what Alva No from the field of cognitive science refers to as the enactive approach to perception[i]. This is where, I hope, new media arts will contribute to the debate.

I believe there is a unique, and often problematic, relationship that the technologies and approaches adopted by artists working in this field bring to discussions about collaboration and engagement between the arts and sciences. Throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s, new media arts actively pursued a relationship to genetics and code and digital art. Examples can be seen in the pursuit of generative art, the use of genetic algorithms and metaphors of biology used in much art of this period. Now perhaps the time has arrived to look more closely at what processes, concepts and metaphors have been deployed within the neurosciences. And already an emerging field of new media arts practice is actively engaged with neuroscience.

Of course all of 20th century film theory, which I am currently getting through as part of a course taught by Patricia Pisters here at UvA, touches differently on this supposedly undertheorised? enactive relationship of the mind to the visual image, so I will try to write up something that is in some way critically and summarily useful if only to my work here and increasingly urgent essay.

GUESTS

Trish Adams is currently artist-in-residence with the Visual & Sensory Neuroscience Group, at the Queensland Brain institute, The University of Queensland. Under the leadership of Professor Mandyam
Srinivasan this research group focuses on the cognitive and navigational abilities of the honey bee. http://www.qbi.uq.edu.au/index.html?page=52793 Trish?s first artwork outcome from the residency was the DVD  installation: HOST, University of Queensland Art Museum, 2008.

Lucette Cysique is a neuropsychologist who is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the University of New South Wales – Brain Science. Her main research focus is the neurocognitive complications of HIV infection. Her methods of research includes neuropsychology, cross- cultural neuropsychology, longitudinal statistical modelling and MRI- based imaging. Her current project is looking at the interplay of age and HIV on brain functions.

Alan Dunning has been working with complex multi-media installations for the past two decades, using the computer as a tool for generating data fields and, most recently, real-time interactive environments. Since 1980, he has exhibited in more than 100 shows and has had more than 70 catalogues and reviews published on his work. His work has received numerous awards including grants from the Daniel Langlois Foundation, SSHRC, the Canada Council and the Alberta Art Foundation. He is represented in many collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He currently is the Head of the Media Arts and Digital Technologies Programme at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary.

Paul Woodrow has been involved in a variety of inter-disciplinary and multi-media activities since the late 1960s, including performance art, installation, video, painting and improvised music. He has collaborated with many artists including, Iain Baxter (N.E.Thing Co.), Herv? Fischer (The Sociological Art Group Of Paris), Genesis P. Orridge (Coum Transmissions, England), Clive Roberstson (W.O.R.K.S, Canada). He has exhibited extensively in Japan, France, Italy, Sweden, England, Belgium, Russia, Puerto Rico, Argentina, and the United
States, including the Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm and The Tate Gallery, London. He has received numerous awards from Canada Council and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. He is currently Coordinator
of Graduate Studies, in the Art Department at the University of Calgary.

Alan Dunning, Paul Woodrow and Morley Hollenberg are the main participants in a team of scientists, artist and technologists developing the virtual reality and bio-electrical work, Einstein’s Brain Project.

Tina Gonsalves is currently honorary artist in residence at the Institute of Neurology at University College London and visiting artist at the Affective Media Group, MIT. Combining diagnostic imaging, biometric sensors and mobile technologies, her installations, films for television, and software investigate emotional signatures both within the body and among interactive audiences. Since 1995 her work has shown internationally at venues including Banff Centre for the Arts (CA); Siggraph (US); International Society for the Electronic Arts 2004; European Media Arts Festival; Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (JP); Australian Centre For Photography, Sydney; Barbican (UK); Pompidou Centre (FR), Institute for Contemporary Art, London; and Australian Center for the Moving Image, Melbourne.

Andrew Murphie is the editor of the open access, online journal, the Fibreculture Journal and Associate Professor in the School of English, Media and Performing Arts, University of New South Wales, Australia. He works on: theories of the virtual; post-connectionist and poststructuralist models of mind; Guattari and Deleuze (and others – he’s not quite a card carrying ‘deleuzean’); art and interaction; electronic music (especially in Australia); critical approaches to performance systems and what he calls ‘auditland’; biophilosophy and biopolitics; innovation; education and techology; contemporary publishing.

John Onians is Director of the World Art Research Programme in the School of World Art Studies at the University of East Anglia, and is the author of a number of books, including Classical Art and The
Cultures of Greece and Rome, published by Yale University Press. He is the founding editor of the journal Art History (1978-88) and the editor of the Atlas of World Art (2004). Johns most recent book is NeuroArtHistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki (Yale University Press).

Barbara Maria Stafford is the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor, Emerita, at the University of Chicago. Her work has consistently explored the intersections between the visual arts and the physical and biological sciences from the early modern to the contemporary era. Her current research charts the revolutionary ways the neurosciences are changing our views of the human and animal sensorium, shaping our fundamental assumptions about perception, sensation, emotion, mental imagery, and subjectivity. Stafford’s most recent book is Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images, University of Chicago Press, 2007.
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[i] Alva No?, Action in Perception (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), p 2
[2] Steven Rose, The 21st Century Brain: Explaining, Mending and Manipulating the Mind (London: Vintage Books, 2006), p 146

* for some reason the actual discussion pages only date on my computer up to March 2008 so to read the posts (if you aren’t subscribed already) you need to go to the Archives section – see the month of september.