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)
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…
Steven Holl asks the same question of architecture that Merleau-Ponty asks of philosophy . Can the ambulating sentient being embedded as he or she is in the matrix of concretized values as they are inscribed in that being experience and understand seeing in a context articulated for that purpose?
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.
Plasticity is a very broad notion and to explain how plasticity helps us to understand certain aspects of brain function I’m going to briefly discuss with you some clinical examples.
To begin, however, I would like to illustrate how the ways in which a normal individual perceives, understands and remembers the world can become radically altered. In his book “Touching the Rock”, John Hull, an Australian living in England, described how after he became blind in middle age he lost the ability to visualize those with whom he had daily contact, such as members of his family or friends and acquaintances he met after he lost…
“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.…
“I awoke to consciousness in a hospital-tent. I got hold of my own identity in a moment or two, and was suddenly aware of a sharp cramp in my left leg. I tried to get at it to rub it with my single arm, but, finding myself too weak, hailed an attendant. “Just rub my left calf,” said I, “if you please.”
Calf?” said he. “You ain’t none. It’s took off.”
“I know better,” said I. “I have pain in both legs.”
“Wall, I never!” said he. “You ain’t got nary leg.”
As I did not believe him, he threw off the covers, and, to my horror, showed me…