Symposium „Making Worlds // Fare Mondi“

A Neuroscience and Art project

June 4th, 2009, from 2 until 5 p.m.

Peggy Guggenheim Collection – Library

Dorsoduro 704, 30123 Venezia





On the occasion of the 53rd Venice Biennale, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the Marino Golinelli Foundation have invited the Association of Neuroesthetics to organize a symposium on art and neuroscience.

The symposium will take place on June 4th in the Library of the Guggenheim Collection and is organized in collaboration with the Ernst Schering Foundation.

Given the theme and the title of this year’s Biennale, AoN decided to engage in debate surronding this relevant topic.

“The title of the exhibition, Fare Mondi // Making Worlds,” says Director Daniel Birnbaum, “expresses my wish to emphasize the process of creation. A work of art represents a vision of the world and if taken seriously it can be seen as a way of making a world."

As modern neuroscience continues to show that every human brain is constantly involved in creating worlds, the topic of the Biennale is of high interest not only for art but also for neuroscience.

Neuroscientists have also come to understand that their object of study, the brain, is not a passive chronicler of what happens in the external world, but an active participant creating the world that we experience. Both the neural processes which give rise to unique subjective experiences, as well as their artistic products, are intertwined in perpetual remaking of reality. As we approach these intersections of “Fare Mondi” art and neuroscience can find much to share with each other.

How can the cooperation between these disciplines contribute to the development of art and neuroscience, as well as to a better understanding of the “Conditio Humana”? Is cross-pollination between each disciplines respective theories and methodologies a viable reality? The panel, which will not be a public event but a round table for experts, will focus on these reflections.





Structure:

The discussion will consist of three 50 minutes sessions all-revolving around the

common theme of the symposium.

Each session will begin with a brief introduction by three of the panellists, who will focus the topic of discussion in relation to their work.

The first panel will be introduced by Semir Zeki and Pae White and moderated by Ludovica Lumer, the second by Vittorio Gallese, David Freedberg and an artist (TBC), and the third by Christine Macel Ernst Pöppel and Davide Balula.




Confirmed participants:

Davide Balula, Artist

Jonathan Cole, Clinical Neurophysiologist, Poole Hospital and University of Bournemouth, UK

Jonathan Fineberg, Director, Illinois at the Phillips, The Center for the Study of Modern Art, Phillips Collection, Washington DC and Professor of Art History, University of Illinois

Ivana Franke, Artist

David Freedberg, Pierre Matisse Professor of Art History, Columbia University; Director of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America

Vittorio Gallese, Professor of Human Physiology, Faculty of Medicine and Surgery of Parma, Dep. Of Neurosciences

Florian Hecker, Sound artist

Peter Horn, MD, Department of Neurosurgery, Charite'

Ludovica Lumer, Neurobiologist and gallerist

Christine Macel, Curator, NMAM Centre Pompidou, Paris

Riccardo Manzotti, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Institute of Human, Languange and Environmental Sciences, Milan

Daniel Margulies, Ph. D. student at Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences

Jorge Otero Pailos, Architect, Professor of Architecture, Columbia University, New York.

Ruggero Poi, Education administration, Cittadellarte (project by Michelangelo Pistoletto, artist)

Ernst Pöppel, Professor of Medical Psychology, LMU Munich

Philippe Rahm, Architect

Eva Ruhnau, Scientific Manager of the Human Science Center Munich

Sissel Tolaas, Artist, Professor of "Invisible Communication and Rhetorics" at Harvard Business School

Arno Villringer, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig

Pae White, Artist

Semir Zeki, Professor of Neuroesthetics, University College London




Installations:

Berlin 1 – Berlin 2, a smell installation by Sissel Tolaas

Neues Synchrophone, a sound installation by Florian Hecker



For more information please contact: Elena Agudio, Project Manager

Pannierstr. 29, 12047 Berlin, +39.3398297837, +49.1635429825, elenaagudio@gmail.com





The Association of Neuroesthetics is a non-profit organization linked to Charité Medical University in Berlin, founded by artists, curators, architects and neuroscientists from Paris, Munich and London and Berlin. It aims to explore and nurture links between the arts and neuroscience from a broad perspective: by providing educational resources, public events and developing and supporting interdisciplinary research and art projects. For more information: www.association-of-neuroesthetics.org



Founding Members of the Association of Neuroesthtetics (AoN):

Dr. Alexander Abbushi MD, Dept. of Neurosurgery, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin

AON Executive Board, CEO

Prof. Karl Einhäupl Director, Dept. of Neurology, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin

Prof. Detlef Ganten CEO, Charité- Universitätsmedizin Berlin

Daniel Jesse Business Advisor, Berlin, AON Business and Tax advisor

Christine Macel, Curator, MNAM Centre Pompidou, Paris

Prof. Ernst Pöppel, Director, Institute of Medical Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich

Tammo Prinz, Architect

AON Executive Board

Prof. Eva Ruhnau Director, Human Science Center, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich

PD Dr. Ulrich-Wilhelm Thomale, Consultand, Pediatric Neurosurgery Dept. of Neurosurgery, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, AON Executive Board, Treasurer

Prof. Peter Vajkoczy, Director, Dept. of Neurosurgery, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin

Prof. Semir Zeki, Professor of Neuroesthetics, University College London





Team of the AoN:

Elena Agudio, art historian and curator

Anton Burdakov, BA Nat Sci, artist

Ana Gomez Carrillo De Castro, medical psychiatrist and researcher

Dada Held, Dipl. Psych.

Katharina Krawczyk, art historian

Barbara Krimm, graphic designer

Daniel Margulies, PhD student, School of Mind and Brain

Jutta von Bündigen, library administation









Installations by:


Sissel Tolaas was born in Norway 1961 and grew up in Norway and Iceland. She now lives in Berlin, where she runs the RE_searchLab Berlin for SMELL & COMMUNICATION, where she among others have 2500 molecules to her disposal.

She studied mathematics, chemistry, linguistics and visual arts in six different countries, concluding her formal studies with a doctorate in Chemistry from Princeton. She has been working with smells for twenty years - groundbreaking/intense/interdisciplinary/international - continuously expanding the contexts where they are considered. She is an excellent expert in her field. She started by collecting smells - existing archive of 6730 smell from all over the world - and training her nose to recognize them and categorize them as other than good and bad, in other words can one precept smell relating to them only intellectually and letting out the emotion? She has developed research projects - very often presented in art context - in order to use chemistry, neuroscience and modern technology to present smells and nonverbal communication on different scales. Smells at a personal level, including sweat from men with fear attacks, were exhibited at i.e. MIT and in the National Museum of China for the opening of the Beijing Summer Olympics. In Berlin an apartment was occupied by the smells of its last inhabitants and nothing else. Sissel Tolaas has spent months and years performing in-depth collection and analysis of the smells in neighborhoods and cities around the world i.e. Berlin, London, Stockholm, Paris, Mexico City. Upcoming exhibitions will take place at i.e. the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, Casino Luxembourg, Basel Miami.

In addition to her artistic activities, Sissel Tolaas works actively with different kind of business and academia. International Flavors & Fragrances Inc., New York, generously supports her work. The perfume industry regards her activities as a provocative signpost to the future. She advises companies on how their smell identities can carry important information. Sissel Tolaas often speaks at universities. This year she was awarded the Rouse Visiting Artist-in-Residence at the Harvard GSD. She also has an appointment for research and teaching at Harvard Business School. She is also building up a Sensory Research Platform in the North Sea connected to the University of Stavanger Norway.

Florian Hecker was born in 1975 in Augsburg and lives and works in Vienna.

Undoubtedly far-reaching, Hecker's work discards all formal habits embedded in our listening patterns. In this process, computer - generated sounds evolve into a phantasmagoria of acoustic impressions where spatial movement and psychoacoustic phenomena intertwine. For this same reason, conventional music terminology would be too limited for any form of categorization.

In this work, specifically designed software is constantly manipulated by the artist; between both, the boundaries blur and the listener no longer knows who is responsible. It is, this collaboration that continuously allows a stretch of our perceptual fabric where, new textures cannot be analyzed by former and definite aesthetic idiosyncrasies.

No night No Day, a collaboration with Cerith Wyn Evans commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary , will be premiered at the 53rd International Art Exhibition / Biennale di Venezia Fare Mondi // Making Worlds . He has presented his work internationally and extensively including Sadie Coles HQ, London, The Morning Line, presented at Biacs3, Seville, Spain, Manifesta 7, South Tyrol, Italy, all 2008; WDR, Cologne, Germany, 2007; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris, France, 2006; Casa Da Musica, Porto, Portugal, 2005.

In addition, he has an extensive discography including Haswell and Hecker, Blackest Ever Black, CD, Warner Classics, 2007 and Acid in the Style of David Tudor. Editions Mego, 2009.

Installation concept:


BERLIN 1 (memory) BERLIN 2 (reality)

a smell project by Sissel Tolaas




Smell researcher and artist Sissel Tolaas will juxtapose smell worlds from memory and reality at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection Library in Venice. She is participating in the Association of Neuroesthetics symposium for the opening of the Biennale. Combining art and science, she is interested in how precisely she is able to recall a smell purely based upon her memory of it.

On display in the garden will be smell phenomena from the former East Berlin using the phenomenological approach to on-site smells. With the help of advanced analysis tools, the smell effects repertory and a smell-adapted method, Tolaas went to places in (previously East) Berlin where the smell phenomena from the divided city are still present. There she understood the smells and collected them.

The smell world displayed in the library, on the other hand, was created from Sissel Tolaas's own memory of the smell of East Berlin in the time when it was separated from the West. She calls this a memory-based approach to on-site smells. She has ‘reproduced’ the smell of (the previous East) Berlin using chemicals and modern chemistry technology. It is appropriate that this smell be present in the library, a place of memory.

“If you get it through the nose, you really get it.”

Sissel Tolaas's project shows her interest in the sense of smell and its relationship to memory and the human brain. This connection is based in smell biology and neuroscience. By combining knowledge from these fields with the latest chemical technology (thanks to the generous support of IFF, New York), Tolaas has created smell worlds from Berlin's past to present in Venice today.



MEMORY I CITY

"Places are spaces that you can remember, that you can care about and

make part of your life... The world should be filled with places so vivid and distinct that they can carry significance... Places could bring emotions, recollections, people and even ideas to mind."

Donlyn Lyndon (Professor Emeritus, UC Berkeley)


The city can be viewed as a memory. It stores activities from the past in buildings, streets, names, cityscapes, rules, customs, and governmental structures; thus it becomes a guideline for the future. The more legible these memories are, the more the city is humane and habitable for its citizens. The city is an active memory.

Like a living system, it changes constantly, accumulating new memories and adapting to new functions.

The 'city as memory' metaphor works both ways. Human memory is an enormously fascinating but still little understood system. It does not work like a computer memory in which things are stored and then remain fixed. Every new experience changes our memory and enriches it. Perhaps understanding better the ways cities work can help us to understand human memory, including its possible dysfunctions.

SMELL I MEMORY I CITY

Smell evokes memory in a way that no other sense can. Memory and smell are closely linked; in order to identify a smell, we must first remember it, and then place the ’object/subject’ that it comes from into our mind. When the temporal cortical region of the brain (the site of memory) is damaged, the ability to identify smells is damaged. Memories, and the emotions associated with them, are prompted by strong smells. Studies have even shown that recall can be enhanced if the material was learned in the presence of a smell and that same smell is present at the time of recall. Although the accuracy of the memory is not affected by the type of sensory cue (olfactory or auditory), the intensity and vividness of the memory are increased when the cue is olfactory.

The ability to smell is closely tied to memory and experience.

No city stinks, but thinking makes it so.





























© tolaas 2009

Neues Synchrophone

a sound project by Florian Hecker



The „Neues Synchrophone“ is a music machine that Florian Hecker is presenting for the first time to the public at the library of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. The special tool, who could be defined also as a sculpture, has been inspired by the studies on the „Dream Machine“ made by the french psychologist Dr. Francis Lefebure in the 1950s.

It produces an altenating pulsanting rhythm followed by an harmonically rich tone.

An acoustic experience is always involved with the creation of a world, but in this particular situation, for the Symposium Fare Mondi // Making Worlds, Florian Hecker is presenting a real instrument able to work on the uncoscious perception and to contribute to the creation of an oniric world.