Jane Grant (UK)

neja — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 17:18:41 +0000

One of the holy grails of neuroscientific research is to determine the ‘site’ of memory. Many neuroscientists suggest that memory is stored in unstable synapses. As humans we have the potential to store long-term memory for around 100 years, yet the synaptic moment is around a second long. How can this be? Recent research claims that it is noise that carries ‘the imprint of all memory patterns in temporal correlations’. Could it be that randomness and indeterminacy are at the core of ourselves? The old model of mind is undone, selfhood a flickering event, temporal and reflexive, the self in the brain a phantom where memory is made up of noise incipient and uncertain.

Peter Anders (US)

neja — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 15:35:25 +0000

Peter Anders talks about his paper on the conversions of neuroscience and magic presented within the Biennale for art and technology Meta.Mor. He points out the problems that the scientists will not be able to get through if they consider a magic for being a kind of science- they might be looking at one particular element, something that happened in the brain about a certain trick, but they might mistake the trick for being just a mechanism of the trick and not the theatrical performance of the trick. Obviously, the theatrical art form is much more complex. Later on, he presents very particular point of view to the architecture – we have an environment that is increasingly responsive to us. We walk into the room and the light goes on or we walk up to a door and the door opens and it has been a fixation of architects, cyberneticians and the people that are involved in mechanization of buildings to make the building a kind of servant to the human. And he thinks we should change the perspective – that the human is magical. The the doors that opens for us are not opening because the building made it open, but because we have a presence that push the door open.

ARTISTTALK » neuroscience

Jane Grant (UK)

Peter Anders (US)