Week 7 Post

Blog 7 

Victoria Vesna's Octopus Brainstorming is a great piece at the intersection of art and neuroscience because it delves into a conceptual framework where the users are required to shift their understanding of consciousness and awareness, "their brainwave rhythms were made visible to the audience through colored lights and sounds" (Albu). 

This use of art to comment on the connection between mind and body is also addressed in the book "Proust Was a Neuroscientist", where the author Jonah Lehrer conveys how the famous author Proust utilized language as a way to "anatomize memory", establishing a link from the physical world of smell and taste and the abstract world of our conscious thought and memory (Max). 




The unembodied, mysterious phenomenon of consciousness explored by Vesna and Proust does not just exist as a disembodied entity that does not interface with the real world. The Global Consciousness Project explores this possibility through their research, which has found substantial evidence that the synchronization of thought during large global events causes random event generators to fire non-random patterns, demonstrating a causality between the mental and physical (GCP). 




Lastly, in the Embodied Mind, Varela illustrates another example of art being utilized in a way to channel an understanding of the functions of consciousness. Within the book, the author addresses the phenomenon of fiction regarding artificial intelligence penetrating into mainstream culture. This represents fiction as a means of translating and understanding these complex questions to a generally scientifically illiterate audience (Varela).  

This phenomenon of complex topics like consciousness and the mind-body connection permeating into the popular culture is also represented by Timothy Leary and his propogation of LSD culture in the 1960s. Leary's slogan "turn on, tune in, and drop out" resonated with his Hope Chapel experiments and caused massive cultural shifts in understanding of man's place in the universe in the 1960s (Vesna). 



Joanna Harcourt-Smith was a 26-year-old European socialite in Switzerland in 1972 when she met Timothy Leary, the psychedelic Pied Piper to the flower children of the 1960s. He was 52 and a fugitive from justice, having escaped from prison in California where he was serving a 10-year sentence on drug charges. Harcourt-Smith was instantly enthralled — not just by his canary yellow Porsche 911 Targa but also by his mesmerizing eyes and his promise of psychological freedom.

References: 

Albu, Christina. Planetary Re-Enchantment: Human-Animal Entanglements in Victoria Vesna’s Octopus Brainstorming. SFU. 2020

GCP. “Introduction to GCP”. Global Consciousness Project. https://noosphere.princeton.edu/gcpintro.html. 

Max, DT. “Proust was a Neuroscientist”. NY Times. 2007. 

Varela, F. et. al. 'The Embodied Mind.' MIT Press. 1991. 

Vesna, Victoria, narr. “Neurosci + Art Lectures.” N.p., . web. 9 May 2022.


Image References:

    AZ Animals. "How Many Brains Does an Octopus Have?".

https://a-z-animals.com/blog/how-many-brains-does-an-octopus-have/.
    Nelson, Roger. "Connected: The Emergence of Global Consciousness". 2019.
    Atlanta Journal. "Joanna Harcourt and Timothy Leary".
https://www.ajc.com/news/joanna-harcourt-smith-girlfriend-of-lsd-advocate-timothy-leary-dies-at-74/M6TBBW625BBPVLIFVDJPT7HDKM/.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 4 Post

Image
               This weeks content has a direct connection and relevance to my life as I suffered a knee injury while skateboarding in high school and was forced to undergo a series of MRIs before my surgery. Within Casini's Magnetic Resonance Imaging as Mirror and Portrait, the author discusses how there are aspects of the MRI experience which make it a performative, artistic one. Through the "the mirror placed inside the scanner, the condition of stillness" ( Casini 99), one is placed into a contemplative state. To me, this experience was akin to a body scan meditation, and I see MRI's as much a performance as I do a science.                      Adding on to this performative nature of medicine is the Hippocratic Oath, which is a document that doctors continue to enact and bind themselves to this day. I think it is extremely interesting how this document from antiquity continu...
Read more

Event 2

Image
  The event that I attended was Victoria Vesna's talk at the UCLA Undergraduate Research Week convention. Throughout the talk, Professor Vesna highlighted a number of exciting projects that she has passionately worked on throughout the span of her career.  The first project that she highlighted was her Octopus Brainstorming project. I conceptually thought that the idea of this project was really innovative because it was all about trying to place yourself in the shoes of another species' consciousness. I think this project is very significant because there is an array of evidence that Octopi are extremely intelligent and possess self consciousness (Laratt), The project featured an out of sync and in sync state, the former being characterized by disarray and jazz music (Vesna Brainstorming). Continuing this line of thought of attempting to understand and appreciate other species semantic understandings of the world was Vesna's project in collaboration with Dr. Charles Tayl...
Read more

Week 8 Post

Image
  Within The Nanomeme Syndrome: Blurring of fact & fiction in the construction of a new science, Vesna and Gimzewski address how the subatomic and nanotechnological realm is completely different in its actuality as opposed to how humans visually and abstractly represent it. (Vesna and Gimzewski).  This point is reinforced by Gimzewski, who explains that our understanding and conceptualization of atoms is mediated by art.  He emphasizes how "a picture is not a representation of a molecule", and how these entities are more like "clouds of probabilities".  In the show making stuff smaller, David Pogue relates the concept of efficiency to tinyness. What is interesting about the minitiarization of technology is that in creating smaller and smaller computer chips, "we're actually using the atomic properties of the silicon". This represents a concrete utilization of this abstract microworld.  The "art in the age of nanotechnology" exhibition at ...
Read more