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.
First and foremost, I just want to say thank you all so much for coming out. I know given the hecticness of being in London, and seeing the traffic on the way over here, its always amazing that people can get from point a to point b. After living in New York and comparing it to London, I’ve just realized I have a kind of grid mentality. We heard the gentleman earlier talk about that. And I just realized that the traffic here really alters your sense of perception of time. Its gridlock here. Anyway, to make a long story short, I am an artist,…
First of all, I’d very much like to thank Prof. [Brian] Massumi for the analysis of the new regime of power taking place in America and pretty much the globe, especially using the case of Toshiba as a case study of something that I think really exemplifies the whole way of thinking about biopower. I’d like to thank Daniel Glaser for his elucidation of science and the brain, and I very much want to thank Paul [Miller] for his multi-media lecture on the poetics and aesthetics of the mix. I think it’s kind of broadened the discussion and opened it up to aesthetics.
Earlier on this week there was series on BBC television called ‘How Art Made the World‘. While the programme’s direction presented serious difficulties for me, the last episode did have a striking proposition concerning humanity’s earliest imagery depicted in caves – the possibility that, rather than being representations of hunting scenes or anything else, these paintings have far more to do with sensory depravation, and as a result are direct neurological images projected onto cave walls.
So the precedent of the show that Richard Hamilton did in 1951 for which a catalog was published called Aspects of Form, which aspired from essays by Herbert Reed and Ernst Hans Gombrich, Rudolph Arnheim and Konrad Lorenz also had essays mostly by scientists, mathematicians, brain researchers, and also people who were interested in sound and waves and stuff like that. So what I will be talking about is the attitude of a group of artists in the 1950s towards science and the way that they positioned themselves using the role of the scientist and their methodology.
Let me start with a quote from Stanley Cavell’s most recent book, Philosophy The Day After Tomorrow: “May we think as follows, that philosophy of science can be taken to be what philosophy is. That is because Philosophy is and contended to be recognizable, or practical as a chapter of science. Whereas, were Philosophy of Art to make of itself a chapter of one or more of the arts, it would no longer be recognizable as Philosophy.”
Let’s celebrate contingency and get over it by considering the history. I was asked by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1969 to describe my work…
In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick makes one of the most famous jump cuts in the history of cinema, when he cuts from a bone being flung in the air by an ape. In this scene, Kubrick compresses the entire history of the technical and the human and makes a direct correlation between the first, and most primitive tool use, and the most sophisticated technological achievements of modern humanity. Kubrick was well known for the extensive research that he did for his films. His biographer, Vincent LoBrutto describes his, “capacity to grasp and disseminate information of like a human computer.”
Two images from Leonardo da Vinci: the brain and the genital urinary tract. Pen and ink drawing on the right, and sections of the head on the left hand side.
What I want to do is to use my 15 minutes here to add art to the movies and buildings of our event’s title. And, I want to offer a quick sketch of half a dozen or so relational positions between art and science. After which, if I have time, I’ll add just a few words about one instance of the effort to reflect on the representation of thought itself.
Well this is just an incredible pleasure to be here, and I feel very honored to speak in the context of these incredibly interesting speakers, and I hope that I can do justice to this topic. I work in a realm of inquiry, which is not exactly art, but I am very interested in trying to understand how the brain perceives the world, and how we actually create our internal reality. And what I will do is show you a couple of examples of work that we do in a technology that we call functional magnetic resonance imaging which is a modified version of what’s…
In 1877 Sir Francis Galton, a statistician and a cousin of Charles Darwin, a founder of eugenics (a project of social betterment through planned breeding), and the author of highly influential psychological texts, pioneered a procedure of making composite photographs which proliferated widely in the next three decades.[1] Fabricated by a process of successive registration and exposure of portraits onto a single plate, Galton’s composites were thought to constitute true statistic averages, representing human types — a criminal, a prostitute, an Englishman, a Jew, and others. Galton wrote about his composite pictures that they are “much more than averages; they are rather the equivalents of…
‘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…