October 2-4, 2010

Workshop overview

The Neuroaesthetics Workshop brings together a diverse group working in the areas of Neuroscience, Social and Critical studies of Science, design and data visualization,  new media aesthetic practice, and relational art for a weekend workshop. The workshop pursues, over three days, varied critical aestheticisations of  brain waves with attention to their computational logic.  The workshop, hosted by  (OCADU Professor) Paula Gardner and her mobile lab team at OCADU working on the SSHRC funded project Biomapping: mobile interventions in self-computation and spatial aesthetics.

Plan:

Paula Gardner will address how new media art, and the Biomapping project, aims to push aesthetic representations toward modes of metaphoring scientific discourses and practices.  Sean Montgomery will lead inquiries into research practices that create brain waves and name then, and standard scientific practices of representing brain wave data.  Rob King  will walk the group through analysis of the Neurosky’s algorithm and its mode of transferring brain wave data to representations.  Science and Technology Scholar Joe Dumit (UC Davis)  will present his research on PET scanning practices and neuroexistentialism, to suggest critical ways of thinking about practices of knowing brain waves.  Patricio Davila will lead the group through contemporary ways of thinking about data as aesthetics, and the theoretical linkages between the two.

The group then will imagine critical pathways into the data—representations of it, metaphors of its practices of becoming, etc— through the creation of aesthetic manifestations over two practical days in the Mobile Lab.

Dissemination

Our inquiries, conversations, documentation and discoveries will be posted to this website at the conclusion of the workshop.  Comments are welcome on our discussion board, or by contacting Paula Gardner at pgardner@faculty.ocad.ca.