Articles by Warren Neidich:

Cognitive Architecture. From Bio-Politics To Noo-Politics

Cognitive Architecture. From Bio-Politics To Noo-Politics
Architecture & Mind in the Age of Communication & Information

Edited by: Deborah Hauptmann and Warren Neidich

English
600 pp / 235 x 170 mm / paperback
price € 39.50
ISBN 978 90 6450 725 0

Published by 010 Publishers, Rotterdam

Download Introduction from Deborah Hauptmann
Introduction: Architecture & Mind in the Age of Communication and Information

Download table of contents and feature essay from Warren Neidich
From Noopower to Neuropower: How Mind Becomes Matter (1.4 Mb)

Cognitive Architecture questions of how evolving modalities – from bio-politics to noo-politics – can be mapped upon the city under contemporary conditions of urbanization and globalization.

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Sculpting the Brain, and I don’t mean like Rodin

Part 1.

“…The most extensive modification to take place in human brain evolution – the disproportionate expansion of the cerebral cortex, and specifically of the prefrontal cortex – reflects the evolutionary adaptation to this intensive working memory processing demand imposed by symbol learning. So the very nature of symbolic reference, and its unusual cognitive demands when compared to non-symbolic forms of reference, is a selection force working on those neurological resources most critical to supporting it. In the context of a society heavily dependent on symbol use-as is any conceivable human society, but no nonhuman societies-brains would have been under intense selection to adapt to these…

Neurobiopolitics and Cognitive Capitalism

The Journal of Neuro-Aesthetic Theory #5 on the issues of Neurobiopolitics, Pluripotentiality and Cognitive Capitalism is currently in progress, including both textual and artistic projects from a wide diversity of artists, theorists and thinkers.

For an introduction into the thematic set-up, there are two texts from Warren Neidich which act as a general theoretical guide:

Neuropower

by Warren Neidich, originally published in Atlántica Magazine of Art and Thought #48-49, 2009
Neuropower in Atlantica

The Neurobiopolitics of Global Consciousness

by Warren Neidich, originally published in Sarai Reader 2006: Turbulence
Neurobiopolitics of Global Consciousness

The Re-distribution of the Sensible

The logics of perception and experience are no longer materialistically defined only by contours of geometric and linear time and space arranged hierarchically in a rigid lattice but rather follow curved, non-linear Rheimannian paradigms that are expressed in complicated, non-hierarchical, rhizomatic shifting patterns.

Trans_Thinking I: Architecture & the Mind, from Bio-Politics to Noo-Politics

October 31 & November 1, 2008
Delft School of Design: TU Delft
Organized by Deborah Hauptmann and Warren Neidich
Download Conference Outline as PDF (636 kb)

Speakers and Participants:

Yann M. Boutang, Charles Wolfe, John Proveti, Keller Easterling, Markus Miessen, Bruce Wexler, Scott Kelso, Jordan Crandall, Andreas Angelidakis, Abdul – Karim Mustapha

The aim of the TRANS_THINKING THE CITY series is to bring together experts and scholars in both the sciences and the humanities to discuss issues  of relevance to current architecture and urban practices; issues effecting our cities, polis, ethos, communities.  Trans_Thinking  is a term  employed to indicate a new mode of intellectual activity, thinking as part of mental mechanism brought…

Conceptual Art as Neurobiologic Praxis

Conceptual Art as a Neurobiologic Praxis was an exhibition curated by Warren Neidich at the Thread Waxing Space, New York City, in 1999 which attempted to make explicit certain trends and ideas that were considered important parts of the history of Conceptual Art but which had not, up to that moment, been adequately explored. The Neuro-aesthetic Reading Room is still an imaginary project proposal which in many ways builds on the concepts of Conceptual Art as a Neurobiological Praxis.

Introduction to the Conference of Neuroaesthetics

Good morning everyone, I would like to welcome you to Goldsmith’s College and our conference on Neuroaesthetics. This conference is the last of four conferences held here since January, the others being ‘A Phantom Limb Phenomena: Its Aesthetic, Cultural and Philosophical Implications’,  ‘Creative Evolution’, and ‘Creativity and Cognition’. This conference looks at the new and emerging field of Neuroaesthetics—what it is, what it is doing and where it is going. In my opinion, artists have always been implicitly interested in vision, audition, movement, language, perception, cognition, consciousness and now sampling, plasticity, and synchronicity.

Resistance is Futile

Well I’ve changed the title of my talk, just one of those things, I woke up this morning at four o’clock in the morning and put this talk together. That’s what’s amazing about Power Point, it’s a tool, it’s another dj tool, especially when you DJ your own history, or your own ideas or whatever. I live in Shorditch. I’ve lived there for a year and a half and in Shorditch there’s all this graffiti on the walls because there’s a big club scene there and I was walking around yesterday or the day before and on this wall it said, “Resistance is Futile,” which…

Intensive Brain

“The impossibility of producing a synthetic image of the city is also connected with the fact that today the perception range of urban spatial quality is much wider. Today we compose different individual perceptual experiences within homogeneous bands: veritable editing’s of perceptual sequences. And these bands even more than single static images, are the elements that construct our identity as erratic citizens of the urbanized territory.”
- Stefano Boeri “Two Paradoxes about Multitude”

Culture is part of an open autopoetic system of heterogeneous relational flows made up of evolving sociologic, psychological, historic, spiritual and economic conditions that define and delineate it in specific temporal and spatial contexts.…

BLOW UP: Photography, Cinema and the Brain

‘I am proposing the notion that we are here in the presence of something like a mutation in built space itself. My implication is that we ourselves, the human subjects who happen into this new space, have not kept pace with that evolution: there has been a mutation in the object unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject. We do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace, as I will call it, in part because our perceptual habits were formed in that older kind of space I have called the space of high modernism-The newer architecture therefore-like other…

Editor’s Note

The multidimensional map that links cybernetics, cognitive neuroscience and art commences early on in the history of cybernetics. First, cybernetics relationship to cognitive neuroscience is born out in its standard dictionary definition ” a science dealing with the comparative study of complex electronic calculating machines and the human nervous system in an attempt to explain the nature of the brain” (1) The two early pioneers of cybernetics Norbert Weiner and Warren McCollough were both involved in enlisting cybernetics in formulations of the workings of the processes of neural networks. Neural networks are groups of neurons, the basic cell of the nervous system which are responsible…

The Cultured Brain

In the following argument I will utilize a theoretical framework of neurobiology called neural darwinism or neuroselectionism to construct a means through which an ever-evolving and variable, culturally determined, external objective reality acts to inscribe itself upon the developing brain. I will first describe this theoretical model. Thereafter I will describe a narrative that tells the story of the ontogeny of the art object as it moves through linear and non-linear time.

Pierre Molinier and the Phantom Limb

Responsible for sensation to the hip and genitalia takes over the sensory function of an absent foot and leg.

Fetish

The original definition of the fetish finds its roots/routes in the religious practices of so called “primitive” societies. The fetish was defined as a menagerie of objects connected through their properties as magical charms. In nineteenth century Europe the definition of fetish evolved into anything that was irrationally worshiped.