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Symposium:

• ISEA2011: 17th International Symposium on Electronic Art

• NeuroArts

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• Jane Grant
• John Matthias

Venue(s):

• Sabanci Center, Istanbul, Turkey

• Chair Per­sons: Jane Grant & John Matthias
  Pre­sen­ters: Oron Catts, Paul Broks & Mag­nus Richard­son

  Rather than con­sid­er­ing the aes­thet­ics of art and music as a way of ap­proach­ing an un­der­stand­ing of per­cep­tion and brain func­tion, Neu­roArts em­pha­sizes the di­rect use of Neu­ro­sci­en­tific mod­els and ma­te­ri­als in artis­tic prac­tice. In Neu­roArts, neu­rons and neu­ronal mod­els are ex­am­ined out­side of the body/brain em­pha­siz­ing an artis­tic-en­gi­neer­ing ap­proach with ei­ther the phys­i­cal ma­te­r­ial of brain, or the adap­ta­tion of bi­o­log­i­cal mod­els of spik­ing neu­rons. In using mod­els of spik­ing neu­rons within art, sound and music, the in­ter­nal struc­ture of the brain be­comes ex­ter­nal, its plas­tic­ity ex­posed, its path­ways and net­works mal­leable. This gives us a stand­point from which to crit­i­cally en­gage and ques­tion multi-scale con­cepts such as the im­por­tance of the cell, net­work topol­ogy and plas­tic­ity, self-hood, mem­ory and con­scious­ness. The first In­ter­na­tional Neu­roArts con­fer­ence out­lin­ing the new sub­ject area which took place in Feb­ru­ary 2011 at Uni­ver­sity of Ply­mouth. Neu­roArts at ISEA de­vel­ops key themes from the first In­ter­na­tional Neu­roArts Con­fer­ence, and will con­sider two main themes:

  1. Philoso­phies of scale within Neu­roArts: from the scale of the sin­gle cell to the meso­scopic scale of brain em­u­la­tions through to emer­gent large-scale phe­nom­ena in­clud­ing self-hood and con­scious­ness.
  2. What are the re­la­tion­ships be­tween plas­tic­ity, stim­u­la­tion and fir­ing pat­terns in small brain cir­cuits? And, how can their adap­ta­tion in artis­tic pro­jects along­side synap­tic plas­tic­ity, and cel­lu­lar topolo­gies be ex­ploited to make adap­tive art?

  We hope that the ex­plo­rations of these themes will help to de­fine the bound­aries of this new sub­ject within an in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary en­vi­ron­ment.

Category:

• Panel