Posts tagged art
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When most of us admire a piece of art, it triggers a cascade of complex neural activity; a wash of emotion and meaning that fills our brains and prompts deep thought. But does that happen for people with neurological conditions, too?
Forthcoming Oxford-based exhibition Affecting Perception seeks to explore that very question, through a combination of art, seminars and school workshops. Organised by Martha Crawford, Cosima Gretton and Rachel Stratton, who together form the AXNS collective, the aim is to understand how artists and their work are affected by neurological conditions.
The team is working with the University’s Department of Experimental Psychology and artists who suffer from conditions ranging from dementia to brain damage, in order to help the public understand how art and neuroscience are intertwined. “We’re trying to engage the community with the kind of learning usually kept in the University,” explains Martha Crawford.
Helping them achieve that are Prof. Glyn Humphreys and Prof. Charles Spence, both from the University’s Department of Experimental Psychology. Individually, they’ll be leading seminars during the exhibition which explore the overlap between academia and art. “There’s a coarse level of understanding of neuropsychology outside of academia, which means people are sometimes scared of neurological conditions,” explains Professor Glyn Humphreys. “I think anything we can do to raise awareness has to be a good thing.”
During the course of the four-week exhibition, Prof. Humprheys will talk about visual agnosia: a condition where patients can’t associate visual stimulus with meaning. It’s a rare condition, but it’s of interest to artists and scientists alike. Separating meaning and aesthetic is a trick used by artists to explore the two more thoughtfully; Humphreys’ patients still have little choice but to face the world that way.
Elsewhere, Prof. Spence will talk about subtle forms of synesthesia, called cross-modal correspondences, which affect us all. Synesthesia is that odd condition where stimulating one sense leads to automatic experiences in a second; cross-modal correspondences are more subtle, like the way red stars make many of us think of bitter flavours. Plenty of famous creatives have used the phenomenon to great effect — and during his talk, Spence will explain how it can help amplify our enjoyment of art.
There’s no denying that these are weighty subject indeed. But by understanding them just a little better we can achieve a better grasp on the neurological conditions that many suffer — and break down the stigma attached to them, too.
Affecting Perception runs from 4th-31st March 2013 at venues across Oxford. Admission is free. For more information, visit http://axnscollective.org.
You Wish Your Neurons Were This Pretty
When Greg Dunn finished his Ph.D. in neuroscience at Penn in 2011, he bought himself a sensory deprivation tank as a graduation present. The gift marked a major life transition, from the world of science to a life of meditation and art.
Now a full-time artist living in Philadelphia, Dunn says he was inspired in his grad-student days by the spare beauty of neurons treated with certain stains. The Golgi stain, for example, will turn one or two neurons black against a golden background. ”It has this Zen quality to it that really appealed to me,” Dunn said.
What he saw under the microscope reminded him of the uncluttered elegance of bamboo scroll paintings and other forms of Asian art, and he began to paint neurons in a similar style. He supplements traditional brush painting with methods he’s developed on his own, such as blowing a drop of ink across a surface. The ink spreads much as a neuron grows, Dunn says, propelled by a natural force, but forming random branches as it finds its way around microscopic obstacles. “I like the concept of drawing on similar forces to produce the art,” he said.
Dunn has sold commissioned works to research labs and hospitals, and he says his prints are popular with neuroscientists, neurologists, and others with a special interest in the brain, including people with neurodegenerative disorders. “I think it helps them come to terms or appreciate this thing they’ve been so vexed by,” Dunn said.
The images in this gallery are drawn from his imagination, but they’re informed by his knowledge of neuroanatomy. ”One of my frustrations with grad school was the necessity for absolute adherence to truth, and principles, and facts,” Dunn said. “I’m inspired by anatomy but not a slave to it.”
Soma by the Flaming Lotus Girls translates the anatomy of neurons into metal, fire and light; magnifying the microscopic world to an epic scale. In Soma, an elegant axon arch connects an earthbound neuron with its partner floating overhead.
Soma is an interactive sculptural installation depicting two communicating neurons made of stainless steel, copper, aluminum, bronze, resin, fire and light. Each of Soma’s two neurons has a spinning fire nucleus. The nuclei are counter spinning balls of flame with variable speed motors.
Fire and light flow like electrochemical signals between Soma’s two neurons. Spinning balls of fire form the neuron’s nuclei. Slender dendrites extend to the sky and reach down to the earth, emitting constant flame and color changing light.
Soma is 25 feet high and 50 feet long. It is roughly a rectangular shape that occupies approximately 5,000 square feet including the fuel depot. She uses up to 100 gallons of fuel per hour.
There are 35 Dendrites using approx. 21’ of stainless steel tubing each. 735 feet of stainless steel tubing was used for dendrites over all.
Two dodecahedrons constructed from 24 stainless steel pentagons comprise the cell bodies of Soma, and enclose the nuclei. Each pentagon used about 10’ of stainless steel tubing. A total 240 feet of stainless steel tubing was used for the dodecahedrons.
There are flame effects running down the axon which simulate signal neurotransmission. Participants control the “neurotransmission” by pushing buttons. A “Sparkle Poof” simulates release of neurotransmitters at the synapse. Each aerial dendrite and the axon burn with continuous flame effects.
Bryan Saunders, a performance and visual artist, undertook a high profile experiment in creativity, starting several years ago whereby, according to the artist, he created a series of self-portraits, each one done under the influence of a different substance—pretty much an A to Z assortment, from prescription meds like Abilify and Xanax to crystal meth. Over the weeks he’d create amazing pieces, suffer mild brain damage and end up hospitalized—all for the sake of art and creation.
Gustav Metzger Thinks About Nothing
In an attempt to create a visual representation of empty thoughts, artist Gustav Metzger hooked himself up to a robot carving machine, that turned his brainwaves into a sculpture.
This data was then fed to a manufacturing robot, which carved the Null Object sculpture out of a piece of Portland Stone.
The result is a brain-like object, dotted with crystalline, ovoid shapes. Metzger’s empty brain.
The project is being exhibited at London’s Work Gallery, and an accompanying book features further explorations of emptiness, including novelist Hari Kunzru on nothingness as a productive category, and Bronac Ferran on ‘the radical consequences of emptiness’.
Null Object: Gustav Metzger Thinks About Nothing, is at Work Gallery, 10a Acton Street, London WC1X, until 9 February 2013.
“I’ve always been interested in the boundaries between human and animal, especially apes and primates, which are challenging to our ideas of being human and separate, … I decided to use artistic license and story telling to literally combine our bodies with animal bodies.” -Brian Andrews, TheScientist
The Hominid animation is based on a series of photo composites created from human and veterinary X-ray films in 2005. The series has been exhibited internationally, including at SIGGRAPH, in the Hong Kong Exhibition Center, and at numerous galleries and museums.
How Does the Brain Process Art?
New imaging techniques are mapping the locations of our aesthetic response
In Michelangelo’s Expulsion from Paradise, a fresco panel on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the fallen-from-grace Adam wards off a sword-wielding angel, his eyes averted from the blade and his wrist bent back defensively. It is a gesture both wretched and beautiful. But what is it that triggers the viewer’s aesthetic response—the sense that we’re right there with him, fending off blows?
Recently, neuroscientists and an art historian asked ten subjects to examine the wrist detail from the painting, and—using a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)—monitored what happened in their brains. The researchers found that the image excited areas in the primary motor cortex that controlled the observers’ own wrists.
“Just the sight of the raised wrist causes an activation of the muscle,” reports David Freedberg, the Columbia University art history professor involved in the study. This connection explains why, for instance, viewers of Degas’ ballerinas sometimes report that they experience the sensation of dancing—the brain mirrors actions depicted on the canvas.
Freedberg’s study is part of the new but growing field of neuroaesthetics, which explores how the brain processes a work of art. The discipline emerged 12 years ago with publication of British neuroscientist Semir Zeki’s book, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain. Today, related studies depend on increasingly sophisticated brain-imaging techniques, including TMS and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which maps blood flow and oxygenation in the brain. Scientists might monitor an observer’s reaction to a classical sculpture, then warp the sculpture’s body proportions and observe how the viewer’s response changes. Or they might probe what occurs when the brain contemplates a Chinese landscape painting versus an image of a simple, repetitive task.
Ulrich Kirk, a neuroscientist at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, is also interested in artworks’ contexts. Would a viewer respond the same way to a masterpiece enshrined in the Louvre if he beheld the same work displayed in a less exalted setting, such as a garage sale? In one experiment, Kirk showed subjects a series ofimages—some, he explained, were fine artwork; others were created by Photoshop. In reality, none were Photoshop-generated; Kirk found that different areas of viewers’ brains fired up when he declared an image to be “art.”
Kirk also hopes one day to plumb the brains of artists themselves. “You might be able to image creativity as it happens, by putting known artists in the fMRI,” he says.
Others, neuroscientists included, worry that neuroscience offers a reductionist perspective. Vilayanur Ramachandran, a neuroscientist at the University of California at San Diego, says that neuroaesthetics undoubtedly “enriches our understanding of human aesthetic experience.” However, he adds, “We have barely scratched the surface…the quintessence of art, and of genius, still eludes us—and may elude us forever.”
(Source: smithsonianmag.com)
Fly tweet
This device sends twitter messages based on the activities of a collection of houseflies. The flies live inside an acrylic sphere along with a computer keyboard. As the flies move and interact inside their home, they fly over the keys on the keyboard. These movements are collected in real-time via video. When a particular key is triggered by the flies, the key’s corresponding character is entered into a twitter text box. When 140 characters are reached or the flies trigger the “enter” key, the message containing the accumulated characters is tweeted. Thus live twitter messages are perpetually sent in real-time based on the simple movements of the community of houseflies. These constantly accumulating messages appear as records of random activity within the larger sphere of social media and networking.
(Source: dwbowen.com)
The songs of whales and dolphins can be beautiful to the ear. Now acoustics engineer Mark Fischer has created a way to make them visually pleasing too. What’s more, his technique captures more information about the sound than traditional ways of visualising whalesong.
Dementia: The Self-Portraits of William Utermohlen
About the art work: When he learned in 1995 that he had Alzheimer’s disease, William Utermohlen, an American artist living in London, immediately began work on an ambitious series of self-portraits. The artist pursued this project over an eight-year period, adapting his style to the growing limitations of his perception and motor skills and creating images that powerfully documented his experience of his illness. The resulting body of work serves as a unique artistic, medical, and personal record of one man’s struggle with dementia.
Full Article: The Dementia Plague