A new gallery show in Oxford presents the work of artists affected by neurological conditions, and contemporary art inspired by discoveries in neuroscience. We interviewed the three co-curators of the show about issues in art and neuroscience.
Greg Dunn is a visual artist and has a Ph.D in neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania. It’s not so easy to tell at first glance whether Dunn is painting a branching pattern of a plant or that of a neuron. But maybe that’s the point.
Elizabeth Jameson found her art when her own brain lost one of its most basic functions. We are proud to feature an online gallery of some of her brand new works.
A personal essay about the meaning of genius and the importance of intellectual ancestry.
The cold humanists have arrived: a parade of skeptical voices, mostly from the humanities, that has steadily gone about dismissing the brain sciences with a cold, cynical, and doubtful attitude— as if neuroscience has long overstayed its welcome, and must now be hurried out the door. Noah Hutton offers a response.
Ahead of an art/brain panel discussion this week in Brooklyn, NY, Noah Hutton presents an outline of the current state of the dialogue between the arts and brain sciences, with three major lines of inquiry apparent.
Noah Hutton reviews The Deconstructive Theatre Project’s recent production of The Orpheus Variations. In its innovative blend of live projection and constantly shifting scenery, the play was a fascinating reflection of the constant stitching-together of human consciousness.
Ben Ehrlich reviews Jonathan Gottschall’s new book, “The Storytelling Animal,” whose main idea is a magical one: we are Homo fictus– fiction fiends– creatures of an imaginative realm called Neverland, “where we ramble in make believe.”
Visual art and neuroscience are stitched together in a new gallery show in New York City at MUSECPMI, and the results are a mixed bag of intriguing syntheses and frustrating shortcomings. Noah reviews “Seeing Ourselves.”
The Brainwave series returns to the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City, where artists and scientists enter into a one-hour public dialogue. Neuroscientist Carl Schoonover and director François Girard took the stage last week to talk about opera and emotional reality.
The renowned educator and subject of the new documentary film “Brooklyn Castle” talks about the game of infinite possibilities.
The New York City-based group NeuWrite hosted a public debate on minds, maps, and the future of neuroscience between Sebastian Seung of M.I.T. and Anthony Movshon of NYU. The debate was a barometer of where neuroscience stands in the 21st century.
To kick off our new season of The Beautiful Brain Podcast, host Noah Hutton sits down with Carl Schoonover, author of “Portraits of the Mind,” to talk about how we have imaged the brain from antiquity to the present.
In this month’s podcast we proudly present a conversation with the outspoken artist and author Garry Kennard. Kennard, the founder of artandmind.org, and has hosted many conferences and festivals that have brought together leading thinkers in the fields of art and brain research.
In this month’s podcast, Noah Hutton speaks with British artist Andrew Carnie, whose current installation at the GV Art Gallery in London uses slide projections to explore the evolving narrative of the brain.
Sam McDougle explains the purported evolutionary relevance of that horrible nails-on-chalkboard sound.
Interesting new reasearch suggests that individuals perceive different “amounts” of free will in themselves vs. others.
Language, upright posture, tool-making — these are examples of commonly cited “human-specific” behaviors. But how unique are these behaviors to us clever, hairless apes? New research on a bird from the South Pacific shows that some humbling evolutionary parallels can be lightly drawn between human and nonhuman tool-using behaviors.
Show poster – click to enlarge
We are excited to announce that we’ve partnered with the Neuro Bureau to organize a major group show exploring the brain through art, entitled Subjective Resonance Imaging, to be held in Seattle from June 16-20, in conjunction with the 2013 Human Brain Mapping conference. The show will feature many of the artists we’ve presented here at The Beautiful Brain, including Greg Dunn, Katherine Sherwood, Elizabeth Jameson, Constance Jacobson, Andrew Carnie, Jason Snyder, and many more. There will also be a thorough show catalogue we will be publishing, featuring images of all the artwork in addition to essays and interviews with thought leaders in neuroaesthetics.
From the exhibition press release, available as a PDF:
Seattle, WA— A new breed of art exhibition is rolling into town—one that takes shape in the heart of a scientific conference about mapping the human brain, a pursuit perhaps never more in vogue than we find it today.
According to cognitive scientist Pierre Bellec, who helped organize Subjective Resonance Imaging, “The exhibit offers a prism for both playful and thoughtful reflection. These artworks provide us with useful concepts and metaphors as we delve further into the unique aspects of human brain function and grapple with the meaning of brain mapping. It is our hope that this collection will contribute to the ongoing dialogue between artists and the neuroimaging community as we converge toward a shared landscape of inquiry.”
From Nina Sellars, working in Australia, who creates mixed reality pieces that integrate links to digital scans of her own brain, to Julia Buntaine, working in New York City, whose sculpture provides conceptual footholds to grasp metaphors of brain structure and function, Subjective Resonance Imaging finds artists at this interdisciplinary vanguard working with a wide range of materials and thematic interests.
Noah Hutton, founder of the online magazine The Beautiful Brain and curator of Subjective Resonance Imaging, says, “This is a band of explorers who have all shone their light on the vast and uncharted realms of the human brain; their maps may be more subjective, but they are cartographers nonetheless.”
The show asks timely questions about the borders between art and science, subjective and objective images, and the source of self-knowledge. It is accessible to the public and will be open daily from June 16-20, in the lobby of the Washington State Convention Center, and was made possible by generous contributions from Frontiers, the International Neuroimaging Data-Sharing Initiative, Max Planck Institute, Child Mind Institute, the University of Montreal, Canada, and The Instituto do Cérebro do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.
