Journal of Neuro-Aesthetic Theory, No 1-5 (1997-2011)

Journal of Neuro-Aesthetic Theory #5 (2007-11)
Neurobiopolitics, Pluripotentiality and Cognitive Capitalism, a work in progress…
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Journal of Neuro-Aesthetic Theory #4 (2005-07)
Conference of Neuroaesthetics
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Journal of Neuro-Aesthetic Theory #3 (2003-04)
Buildings, Movies and Brains.
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Journal of Neuro-Aesthetic Theory #2 (2000-02)
Cinema and the Brain
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Journal of Neuro-Aesthetic Theory #1 (1997-99)
Introduction to Neuro-Aesthetic Theory
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Contributors: Warren Neidich, Charles T. Wolfe, Andrew Patrizio, Philippe Rahm, Meena Alexander, Michael Madore, Martina Wicklein, Martina Siebert, Norman M. Klein, Michael Salcman, Nicholas Wade, Nicholas Chase, Nathalie Angles, Martha Trivizas, Nicola Diamond, Mark Cohen, Lev Manovich, Laura U. Marks, Lucy Steeds, Mark Bishop, Olafur Eliasson, Margarita Gluzberg, Marcos Novak, M. A. Greenstein, Marquard Smith, Paul D. Miller -DJ Spooky, Vivian Sobchack, W. H. Zangemeister, Thyrza Goodeve, Warren Sack, Zoe Beloff, Yann Beauvais, William Hirstein, Stuart Brisley, Peter Brugger, Ralph Greenspan, Penny Starfield, Kodwo Eshun, Sarat Maharaj, Scott Lash, Steven Holl, Karen Beckman, Colin Gardner, Conerly Casey, Christiane Paul, Chloe Vaitsou, Daniel Blaufuks, Diana Thater, Ken Jacobs, Dennis Balk, David J. McGonigle, Charlie Gere, Armen Avanessian, Arnold H. Modell, Anjan Chatterjee, Andreas Roepstorff, Barbara Marie Stafford, Brian Massumi, Bernard Andrieu, Beau Lotto, Elizabeth Cohen and Michael Talley, John Welchman, Janet Sternburg, Elizabeth S. CohenJonathan Green, Joseph Kosuth, Andrea Grunert, Juli Carson and Lindi Emoungu, Jules Davidoff, Isabelle Moffat, Israel Rosenfeld, Francois Bucher, Eric Duyckaerts, Ellen K. Levy and David E. Levy, gruppo A12 and Francisca Insulza, Gregg Lambert and Gregory Flaxman

Initiated by Warren Neidich

Cretien van Campen: The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia in Art and Science (2007)

What does it mean to hear music in colors, to taste voices, to see each letter of the alphabet as a different color? These uncommon sensory experiences are examples of synesthesia, when two or more senses cooperate in perception. Once dismissed as imagination or delusion, metaphor or drug-induced hallucination, the experience of synesthesia has now been documented by scans of synesthetes’ brains that show “crosstalk” between areas of the brain that do not normally communicate. In The Hidden Sense, Cretien van Campen explores synesthesia from both artistic and scientific perspectives, looking at accounts of individual experiences, examples of synesthesia in visual art, music, and literature, and recent neurological research.

Van Campen reports that some studies define synesthesia as a brain impairment, a short circuit between two different areas. But synesthetes cannot imagine perceiving in any other way; many claim that synesthesia helps them in daily life. Van Campen investigates just what the function of synesthesia might be and what it might tell us about our own sensory perceptions. He examines the experiences of individual synesthetes—from Patrick, who sees music as images and finds the most beautiful ones spring from the music of Prince, to the schoolgirl Sylvia, who is surprised to learn that not everyone sees the alphabet in colors as she does. And he finds suggestions of synesthesia in the work of Scriabin, Van Gogh, Kandinsky, Nabokov, Poe, and Baudelaire.

What is synesthesia? It is not, van Campen concludes, an audiovisual performance, a literary technique, an artistic trend, or a metaphor. It is, perhaps, our hidden sense—a way to think visually; a key to our own sensitivity.

Publisher MIT Press, 2008
Leonardo Books series
ISBN 0262220814, 9780262220811
185 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2013-3-19)

Andrew Pickering: The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (2010)

“Cybernetics is often thought of as a grim military or industrial science of control. But as Andrew Pickering reveals in this beguiling book, a much more lively and experimental strain of cybernetics can be traced from the 1940s to the present.

The Cybernetic Brain explores a largely forgotten group of British thinkers, including Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask, and their singular work in a dazzling array of fields. Psychiatry, engineering, management, politics, music, architecture, education, tantric yoga, the Beats, and the sixties counterculture all come into play as Pickering follows the history of cybernetics’ impact on the world, from contemporary robotics and complexity theory to the Chilean economy under Salvador Allende. What underpins this fascinating history, Pickering contends, is a shared but unconventional vision of the world as ultimately unknowable, a place where genuine novelty is always emerging. And thus, Pickering avers, the history of cybernetics provides us with an imaginative model of open-ended experimentation in stark opposition to the modern urge to achieve domination over nature and each other.”

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2010
ISBN 0226667898, 9780226667898
526 pages

Reviews: M. Beatrice Fazi (Computational Culture, 2011), Jon Goodbun (Radical Philosophy, 2011).

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2020-4-17)