Neurociencia y
the arts today
Michael Century, Siri Hustvedt, Denis Pelli,
Jillian Scott, and Kyralesa Claire (KC) wiley
in conversation with Ellen K. Exacción
P AJ explored the growing discourse on the concerns of body, mente, y
consciousness that the arts share with neuroscience during a panel enti-
tled “Neuroscience and the Arts Today: Shared Interfaces,” which took place
on December 11, 2012, at the SoHo gallery, Location One. Five individuals joined
artist and moderator, Ellen Levy, to discuss this theme, including another artist, a
dancer, a musician, an author, and a neuroscientist. This conversation is a transcrip-
tion of the panel.1 Where necessary, information appears in brackets in the text.
The featured artists and performers have built on recent neuroscientific knowledge,
incorporating social, cognitivo, or affective discoveries in their art. Some work col-
laboratively with neuroscientists while others work alone. All are engaged in com-
municating their insights about the body and mind to the general public, and many
are educators. Hoy, knowledge gained in cognitive neuroscience by those working
in the visual arts, performing arts, literature, and music has amplified productive
approaches to creativity, emotion, and even the healing process. The reverse is also
true: neuroscience sees art as an increasingly valuable resource, and its practitioners
are finding ways to apply this knowledge. Novel therapies are in the process of
developing by using knowledge of brain function and basic physiology to improve
well-being, and artist/performers as well as scientists have undertaken a role in this
proceso.
Michael Century is professor of new media and music in the arts department at
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He was program director for cultural research at
the Montreal Centre d’innovation en technologies de l’information, and taught in
the graduate program in communications at McGill University. Century initiated the
Art and Virtual Environments project, Banff Canada (1991–94), and was panelist and
co-author for the U.S. National Academy of Sciences 2003 report on information
technologies and creative practices.
Siri Hustvedt is a novelist and essayist who lives in Brooklyn, Nueva York. She received
her PhD in English literature from Columbia University in 1986. She is the author
of a book of poems, six novels, a book of essays on painting, and two additional
8 PAJ 105 (2013), páginas. 8–23.
doi:10.1162/PAJJ_a_00157
© 2013 Ellen K. Exacción
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collections of essays. She recently won the Gabarron International Award for Thought
and Humanities.
Ellen K. Exacción, PhD, a New York-based artist who has exhibited widely, is special
advisor on the arts and sciences at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual
Arts and was past president of the College Art Association (2004–6). Her honors
include an arts commission from NASA, an AICA award, and a Distinguished Visit-
ing Fellowship of Arts and Sciences at Skidmore College.
Denis Pelli is professor of psychology and neural science at New York University. Él
is co-inventor of the Pelli-Robson contrast sensitivity chart, which is widely used
clinically. He works on object recognition, including how we recognize letters and
how we read, and on crowding. Pelli is an editor (associate advisor) for Journal of
Vision (2001–ongoing) and an editor for PLoS ONE (2008–ongoing).
Jillian Scott, a widely-exhibited media artist, has designed aids for blind actors and
interactive sculptures. She is professor for research in art and science at the Institute
for Cultural Studies in Art, Media, and Design at the Zurich University of the Arts
(ZhdK) Suiza, co-director of the Artists-in-Labs Program, and vice director
of the Z-Node PhD program on art and science at the University of Plymouth, Reino Unido.
Kyralesa Claire (KC) Wiley is a dancer and choreographer who graduated with a
BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 1992. Wiley has performed with many dance
companies including the Chicago City Ballet, Carol Blanco, and the Son Mu Ga
dance company. She began working with Parkinson’s patients in 2009 and developed
an ongoing dance and choreography workshop with Parkinzone, a theatre group
for people with Parkinson’s disease based in Rome, Italia. Wiley’s choreography for
the stage has been presented at Context Theatre in New York and the St. Stephen’s
Cultural Center in Rome. Her choreography for film can be seen in the films of Abel
Ferrara and Cheryl Kaplan.
NEUROSCIENCE AND THE ARTS: AN INTRODUCTION
LEVY: The primary interface we are addressing in this panel is that between the
arts and neurosciences. Both fields offer perspectives on how people perceive, think,
and act, and the study of perception has long characterized their commonality. El
reason we are here today is to explore what some have called “embodied percep-
tion.” This term stresses the unity of bodily response made to varied signals from
the environment. This is not new information; we have known for some time that
visual perception is not solely visual but is influenced by affective, proprioceptive,
and tactile dimensions as well as by the goals of the perceiver. What is new, cómo-
alguna vez, are some of the shifts in practice occurring in both the arts and neuroscience
in response to the recognition that perception is embodied, and this is the main
focus of today’s discussion.
I think embodied perception is well portrayed in the following passage from a book
by one of our panelists, Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men:
LEVY / Neuroscience and the Arts Today 9
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But there is another aspect of long marriages that is rarely spoken about.
What begins as ocular indulgence, the sight of the gleaming beloved, cual
incites the appetite for around the clock rumpty-rumpty, alters over time.
The partners age and change and become so accustomed to the presence
of the other that vision ceases to be the most important sense. I listened
for Boris in the morning if I woke to see his half of the bed empty, listened
for the flushing toilet or the sound of him filling the tea kettle with water.
I would feel the hard bones of his shoulders as I placed my hands on them
to greet him silently while he read the paper before going to the lab. I did
not peer into his face or examine his body; I merely felt that he was there,
just as I smelled him at night in the dark. The odor of his warm body had
become part of the room.
All of us can identify with similar experiences. What then are the shifts in outlook
and artistic practice that are actually occurring due to the recognition of embodied
percepción? I believe that they are demonstrated in awareness by practitioners in
the arts who offer a potential for healing related to issues of attention and bodily
movimiento. They are also shown in a critical awareness of technological interfaces and
their potential for both good and harm. Sucesivamente, these shifts have inspired those in
one profession to look around and see what others in altogether different arenas are
doing. As philosopher Gilles Deleuze said, the “encounter between two disciplines
doesn’t take place where one begins to reflect on the other but when one discipline
realizes that it has to resolve for itself and by its own means a problem similar to
the one confronted by the other.”2
In addition to Siri’s turn to neuroscience, you will see this reflection among our other
panelists. Por ejemplo, KC Wiley is a dancer who realized that her practice had pro-
found implications for those with movement disorders. And Jill Scott is a media artist
who has exploited art’s potential for expanding somatic vision and understanding.
My own realization was that art, when engaged, can train attention. Part of Michael
Century’s interest in sound was its role as a transformative technology. All of us have
found that neuroscience was addressing similar issues.
Denis Pelli, the neuroscientist with us today, looked at the work of Chuck Close
to better articulate the relationship of size to scale. When members of the Optical
Society of America awarded him a Leadership Award/New Focus Prize, en 2000,
they stated that “Through leadership in visual science, Dr. Pelli has benefited artists,
scholars and the visually impaired. His work has made significant contributions that
have transcended both interdisciplinary and international boundaries.” Denis, please
describe some of your research.
PELLI: I am very keen on both neuroscience and art. I’m going to present a duality
here of some work that I did trying to figure out perception as a scientist and then
a parallel in something that an artist is doing. The first thing I will talk about is how
size affects shape. Shape is supposed to be a property independent of size. Let me
show you that it’s not. [He then shows images from a PowerPoint presentation and
10 PAJ 105
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asks the audience to shout out the letter they see, over seven slides. Exactly the same
image is shown each time, but successively smaller.]3
This is a weird pattern that I created with a bunch of letters. First you will see let-
ters that are somewhat strangely constructed in that what looks like an “F” or “E”
from one distance (despite having some strange curves) will look like a “D” from a
greater distance. People who are farther away will see different letters. [The audi-
ence responds to his request for information about what they see.] This shows that
each time the thing is reduced in size, it’s perceived differently. This parallels some-
thing in a Chuck Close work. [Pelli shows two differently sized images of Close’s
painting, Maggie, side-by-side in three successive close-ups.] This is a painting of
su hija, Maggie. The big image is a little bigger than the actual painting. Próximo
lo, we have a smaller reproduction. What you observe, if you look at the smaller
uno, is an attractive young woman. En particular, she has a good nose. But in exactly
the same image, just bigger, she has lost her nose; it is flat. You can walk back and
forth and see this duality. Up close, her face is a flat plane made up of blocks. Far
away, it becomes a continuous shape. When it’s small your visual system successfully
extracts the shape information from the shading. But this fails — shape from shading
fails — when the image is big.4
Now I am going to talk about crowding. I will first show you one bit of science and
then two artists who have done things that are related. Primero, let me explain what
crowding is. This is something that happens in the periphery of vision. If you look
at this image [an “A” in chaff] you will see a bunch of sticks. In the sticks you see
an “A” among the sticks. Now move your eye to the red minus. Keep your eye there.
Now you still see the sticks, but there is no “A.” We think that what has happened is
that your visual system is integrating too much and has put it all together ( “A” and
paja) and tried, unsuccessfully, to make one object out of the whole mess. The bars
represent features. If you look directly at the “A” or at the green plus, your visual
system can isolate the relevant features of the “A” and identify it. If you fixate too
far away, on the red minus, the brain combines features from the “A” and the chaff,
and you get a jumble instead of a letter. This is crowding.5
Here is a wide panorama. While you are looking at it, it is mostly seen peripherally.
Your peripheral visual field is subject to crowding. I think that’s relevant to looking
at Pablo Picasso’s painting, Nusch Éluard, 1938. Keep your eye on the fixation cross,
and look at her out of the corner of your eye. What do you see? She’s blue. She has
two eyes. She’s pretty! Your peripheral visual system can’t tell that things are in the
wrong place. It’s like the sticks I showed before if it’s all bundled together. Your visual
system can’t see the problems in this girl, and she looks healthy. This happens in
several of Picasso’s cubist paintings. They are monstrous when viewed directly but
seem normal when viewed out of the corner of your eye.
Another thing inspired by crowding is seen in the work of choreographer Julia Gleich.
[In April, 2012, Gleich’s new ballet in Brooklyn included five minutes based on Pelli’s
research on peripheral vision and can be seen at http://denispelli.com.] You are
LEVY / Neuroscience and the Arts Today 11
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looking at thirty seconds of a ballet. Watch the guy on the left. She has the dancers
crowded together. Your visual system will interpret them as one person and not as
three people. You need to keep your eyes on the guy to the left. When seen out of
the corner of your eye, the group of dancers on the right is perceived as one object.
LEVY: One of the reasons I invited Siri is because she is resisting academia and is
incorporating information about neurobiological concepts very subtly and poetically
into her work.
HUSTVEDT: Thank you. Just to give you a little background, I was one of those girls
who read novels and more novels and ended up with a PhD in English literature.
I was not a science geek, but as a child I had migraines and auras including Alice
in Wonderland syndrome, which I still experience. When I got older I began to try
to make sense of these experiences. I am not alone. I have met many psychiatrists,
neurologists, and psychoanalysts who entered their fields because they themselves
or someone close to them had a neurological or psychiatric condition. In college I
became interested in the neurology of mysticism. There was already quite a lot written
about this in the early seventies. While I was working on my PhD, I found myself
interested in the aphasias, various kinds of speech problems some people with brain
injury develop. I applied that research to my dissertation on Charles Dickens in con-
nection to his complex use of pronouns and how they serve to illustrate questions
of identity in the novels.
I published my first novel in 1992. In one section of the book, the heroine is in a
neurology ward with debilitating migraine. This reflected my own experience in
Mount Sinai in 1983. I had a headache for a year. I have always read deeply in psy-
chiatry, psychoanalysis, medical history, and philosophy, but it wasn’t until about
fifteen years ago that I began to study neuroscience. I was invited to join a discus-
sion group that met every month at Cornell-Weill, which continued for three years
until it disbanded. I also volunteered as a writing teacher for psychiatric in-patients
at Payne Whitney, a job that lasted three and a half years and was one of the richest
experiences of my life. Then I developed a seizure symptom and wrote a book about
él: The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. The condition remains undiag-
nosed, but the book has created a second life for me, because since its publication
I have been repeatedly asked to give lectures on neuroscience and neurology from
an interdisciplinary perspective.
I want to say something very important. There are genuine epistemological prob-
lems involved in having interdisciplinary conversations. Sin embargo, we can give
one another a lot if actual dialogue takes place and we remain open. Neurociencia
has entered my fiction. In my most recently published novel the narrator makes a
number of jokes about and critiques of neuroscience. The more you know the more
critical you become. It’s also helpful to remember that, despite advances, there is
no conceptual model for the brain-mind. We have no theory of consciousness, y
there is a lot left to learn.
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CENTURY: I am the odd person out. Because I don’t actually work in the field of
neurociencia, I was asked to be part of this for more speculative comments from
the musician’s point of view and that’s what I’m doing. You know there’s been some
fifty years of ways of thinking of music and the interface of music and the brain. Él
goes back to brain wave music of the sixties and seventies and ongoing works in
the performing arts, including what goes on in my Center where synchronization
between brain waves and performance is a practical aspect of the work.6 This is a
burgeoning field. I’m very interested in the kinds of plasticity that come out of that.
We musicians are taken as models of a plastic brain, especially where the output
has to do with gaining skills and crossovers into other areas. I’m not really going to
make a direct kind of connection with that body of research. But my recent interest
in this area comes out of reading a book on the divided brain. It raises the idea of
different types of attentional strategies. Years ago we spoke of differences between
the right and left hemispheres in terms of what each hemisphere does. Por el contrario
Ian McGilchrist’s book, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the
Making of the Western World, leads me to think about different attentional strategies
and music theory.
SCOTT: I’m sure we are going to end up in a very fascinating discussion here, and it is
just the kind of discourse that we need to encourage. I’m going to talk about “Neuro-
media,” a term I coined ten years ago to describe the relation between media and
neurociencia. My own historical background is body politics, and I have traced a
trajectory from feminism to media philosophy to human biology and genetics. Este
interest has grown into areas of cognition and cross-modal interaction. In an early
work called Taped from 1975, I am literally “taped to the wall” and talking to the
public through a microphone. To me it was an important statement; it was about
breaking out of isolation and away from my own art history. In a second project,
called Digital Body Automata, de 1995, I showed how our concept of the body was
being changed by bio-technological developments. I looked at human biology and
genetics — that was a very important year for genetic cloning. Por 2002, I had become
very fascinated with cognition and cross-modal interaction. It was then I coined
the term Neuromedia. I made collaborative attempts to apply perception to various
media and interactive technologies. What’s important to me is to bring together self-
reflection (arte) and objectivity (ciencia) within the artwork and combine them with
the sensory perception of the viewer. I aim to utilize how our sensory perceptions
work so that the actual artworks can become visceral and embodied experiences.
One of the very influential people that I met in 2002 was the neuroscientist Paul
Bach-y-Rita. He spent a long time exploring the sensory modalities of human
skin — vibration, pressure, and temperature — and in the end designed a project called
Brain Port. This project consists of a camera mounted on the head of a blind person.
Basically this camera records an image and converts this image into black, grey, y
white levels, feeding this image to a microarray device with pins. The movement of
the pins corresponds to these camera levels, and the device is placed on the tongue.
Thus this device bypassed the optic nerve and the blind person is able to “see though
LEVY / Neuroscience and the Arts Today 13
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their tongue.”7 [Bach-y-Rita transduced the optical images picked up by a televi-
sion camera into vibratory or direct electro-tactile stimulation that was mediated by
tongue receptors.] With that evidence of cross-modal interaction I found myself on
a mission to create electronic skin — or e-skin — based on tactile perception.
Here you see eskin on display at Kulturama, a show I currently have on at the science
museum in Zurich.8 In this version, you can manipulate an object that resembles a
nipple on a breast. You have electronic sensors built into the object based on pres-
sure, temperatura, vibration, and proprioception. I also worked with congenitally
blind people in workshops in order to test Bach-y-Rita’s ideas of tactile information
and Braille pattern reactions, and organized teams of people to explore translation
problems between embodiment, the environment, and stimulation on the skin. I
learned that new codes could easily be learned and that we could build custom-
ized potentials into wearable interfaces for congenitally blind people. Together we
also designed a stage for people who are blind. Through interfaces they could have
feedback onto their skin, but also actuate images on the stage as in a cultural event.
Por ejemplo, visually impaired people could create visually oriented cultural events
for a sighted audience rather than the reverse.
Más tarde, this interest led me to create a lot of sculptures, which were based on my resi-
dencies in neuroscience labs at the University of Zurich. In Somabook, Por ejemplo, el
viewer can actually interact with the spine like an open book, the pages of which are
two touch screens. Here various chapters represent maps of the somatic cortex and
their correlations, and a dancer can be manipulated to interpret the movements of
bodies with various problems. She also demonstrates how to exercise the peripheral
nerves because she has been trained in Body-Mind Centering techniques. In neu-
roscience they often investigate the problems of physical impairment, and my aim
was to use tactile perceptions to show these problems, like the loss of balance or of
tactile contact. Por ejemplo, by touching the images of this dancer with spina bifida
you can discover the relationship between these kinds of problems and molecular
guidance. The viewer can also put his or her hand directly into the neural tube, y
by stroking strip sensors, control the growth of axons across the screen. In Somabook,
the viewer is “learning by doing.”
En conclusión, what do we get out of collaboration? Artists can be enabled to explore
sensory perception, can play with different sorts of impairments and work with
disabilities — this is an important new area for artists to move into — and they can
utilize scale on genetic and cellular levels. What do scientists get out of it? They get
different approaches about their research and how to bring research to the public.
They see their research from another perspective. They think about how to bring this
research to the public. They see and can think about how to build their experiments
differently. This is a very responsible way that artists can help scientists. It’s a two-
way street; perception is at the heart of both disciplines. Because it is at the heart,
the opening up of a dialogue between the disciplines can take place.
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WILEY: I will give you my history. Dr. Nicolo Modugno started a theatre group for
people with Parkinson’s disease. It was based on research in Italy at the time that
captured data when scientists were scanning the brain while actors were memoriz-
ing lines. Modugno founded this group along with some professional actors. I felt
that dance teaches us about the body. As you know, Parkinson’s disease deals with
movement disorders. I met with the group once a week for three hours. The first hour
and a half was the dance class I developed with the Dance for Parkinson’s Disease
program at the Mark Morris Dance Center, along with some of his dancers, y el
second part — the creative part — was original material we would develop together
and have them perform. When I would talk about my work people would say I’m
a dance therapist. I would say, No, I am developing material as I always would as
a choreographer. But it was being developed under a neurologist. A lot of physical
therapists became very interested in the work I was doing, and I began to work with
a team of therapists incorporating dancing technique into the physical therapy. So
what I found as an artist was that the problems it presented to me were to identify
the physical capabilities people could have and what was involved. I opened the
group to their families and caregivers. One reason is that I wanted this to be an
activity that they could participate in with other family members, and I wanted the
families to see what was involved. Very often members of the family would say, “I
had no idea that my sister, my brother, my mother was capable of doing this.”
What I loved most about it was that it challenged my preconceived notions of what
a dancer is. My ideas were that dancers were very particular kinds of people — young
and physically capable of anything. I was working with people who were not young
and had Parkinson’s disease, and they were really limited but doing phenomenal
cosas. It opened a whole new world for me. By looking at physical therapy, it allowed
me to really search my knowledge of dance and work with people that I normally
never thought I would be working with — physical therapists, neurologists, etcétera.
Hospitals are now doing this and incorporating programs similar to what I am doing.
LEVY: As a participant in addition to chairing this panel, I will provide some informa-
tion now about my own collaborative art work, Stealing Attention, which explored
the subject of attention. What you are looking at on the screen is a urinal. The art
people here will say Duchamp’s urinal. An ingenious economist who worked for the
International Airport in Amsterdam noticed that the lack of precise aim at airport
urinals was resulting in the defacement of public property. What you see to the left
of the drain holes of this urinal is not a smudge. The economist’s idea was to have
an image of a black house fly etched onto the bowls of the airport’s urinals. Legal
scholar Cass Sunstein and economist Richard Thaler commented that if you give
men a target, they can’t help but aim at it. The outcome was that spillage declined
eighty percent. What this shows is that seemingly small changes in the environment
can influence behavior by manipulating people’s attention.
My interest is in making visible what is generally unnoticed. Let me present some
information about my collaboration with Michael E. Goldberg, Director of the
Mahoney Center for Brain and Behavior at Columbia University. We devised an
LEVY / Neuroscience and the Arts Today 15
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animation about the subject of inattention blindness.9 This is the inability to see
something directly in front of you, if distracted. A randomized animation set the
theme for an installation of panel paintings and works on paper that examined the
critical issue of where we cast our attention and the consequences of that decision.
To highlight the fact that visual selection always comes with a cost, I referenced the
con game three-card monte, and one negative consequence of the war in Iraq, el
looting of relics from national museums. In our animation, in over roughly three
minutes ten looted objects disappear from the shelves in the background of this
animation. A task was given at the onset of the video, to count the number of times
the Queen of Hearts appears. Less than half of the viewers saw the disappearing
relics. My question was to see if an art installation throughout a gallery could redi-
rect attention to what was unseen. En otras palabras, I asked whether art can change
comportamiento. The answer was definitely yes. An artist could help retrain attention. Cuando
people saw the animation a second time after walking around the installation, más
than sixty percent could then see what they had missed the first time. This installa-
tion was shown at several venues in New York, Michael Steinberg Fine Arts, and as
part of a group exhibition at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.
Our animation was modeled on a well-known experiment called “Gorillas in our
Midst,” by Simons and Chabris, who found a striking way to show how much people
missed seeing in their daily environment. They made a videotape of teams consist-
ing of white shirts and black shirts dribbling and passing a basketball. Experimental
subjects received a task to keep silent mental counts of the total number of passes
made by one or the other of the teams. During the game, a figure in a full gorilla suit
appeared, beat its breast, and walked away. More than one half of the experimental
subjects failed to notice the Gorilla.
I will conclude with an image of an exhibition that I had at Wesleyan University in
which choreographer Liz Lerman instructed her students to interact with my art
work by choreographing movements appropriate to the content of the installation,
which included the adverse effects of industry upon an Arctic environment. Hoy
it is increasingly commonplace to see these kinds of collaborations with dancers,
músicos, and neuroscientists. Artworks stress social, emotional, and metaphori-
cal dimensions that are of increasing interest to scientists. By manipulating these
dimensions, art can work with the constraints of vision and shift the viewer’s focus.
GENERAL DISCUSSION
LEVY: We have now set the stage for a general discussion. Let me start by assuring
the skeptics among us that this panel is not about neuro-imaging. Its overuse with
regard to explaining essential functions and human activities has been characterized,
en algunos casos, as brain porn. We aim to avoid this. My first question is directed to
Denis: Do you perceive a greater interest among your colleagues in art. Does neuro-
science see art as an increasingly valuable resource? En ese caso, could you elaborate on this?
PELLI: I would say that, to scientists, art is obviously very important, but it’s not clear
how to think about art scientifically. In the last ten years, a number of neuroscientists
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have tried to connect what they know about vision science to art. I like Margaret
Livingstone’s book, Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing.
LEVY: The other panelists should feel free to ask questions.
HUSTVEDT: I don’t know how many of you know that V. S. Ramachandran, otro
neuroscientist, got into a lot of trouble with members of the art community. He’s a
very clever neuroscientist, but he has a theory of art that is quite reductive, that the
simple cartoon is inevitably more powerful than, decir, a highly elaborated, baroque
imagen. He related this to the fact that newborn chicks prefer exaggerated appearances
of a maternal beak to natural ones and will readily respond to the exaggerated ones.
This is known as the “peak shift effect.” He used the phrase peak shift to summarize
visual aesthetic experience. Well, people who have been studying the philosophy of
aesthetics for a long time did not really buy this. Ramachandran’s extremely reductive
formulation demonstrates the dangers involved in interdisciplinary conversations.
Because I look at and write about visual art and care about science and philosophy
I am sympathetic to both sides.
PELLI: Can I step in? I haven’t read that work but I just feel that the danger you are
describing is the scientific method, the reductionist approach, applied to aesthetics.
As a scientist, you take some over-simplified idea and you see how far you can go
with it. You learn a lot in the process. And so, the fact that this particular example
seems incomplete is something one learns from. This is the good thing about the
scientific method.
SCOTT: I have quite a few comments on this subject. One is about the new field
of neuroscience called “neuroaesthetics,” which is really quite controversial. Aquí
scientists are attempting to determine aesthetic preferences over a range of people.
Why do they like the color blue more than red? This quest becomes quite problematic
and hardly objective. The other comment is from what we found in our artists-in-lab
projects where artists have been involved in scientific research, and this leads to very
different approaches. We’ve been putting artist into labs for about ten years now,
and we really can’t generalize about how scientists or artists will react in different
situations. Some questions that often come up are: can art really be a catalyst to
promote their research to the public, and do artists want that role at all? This is one
of the biggest dilemmas because, on one hand, certainly art can somehow bring sci-
ence to the public, but we have to actually question whether that is really our role.
LEVY to PELLI: Denis, you yourself are finding that artworks are catalysts for your
own experiments.
PELLI: Sure. I spent a long time with Chuck Close’s paintings, particularly when
he had his retrospective at the Met. He had spent a long time asking the same
questions that I was. He was doing it as an artist while I was doing it as a scientist.
Artists publish their experiments, and we scientists do not. We throw the equipment
away and publish an article instead. The artist’s curiosity to understand was similar
to mine. But he exhibited his paintings and I published an article.
LEVY / Neuroscience and the Arts Today 17
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HUSTVEDT: Am I wrong? Doesn’t Close suffer from the condition, the word for
which I can never remember — propagnosia — a difficulty recognizing faces. Qué
one thinks of as a handicap has become for Close a strength in his art. Close’s story
is part of the narrative.
LEVY: I am going to change the direction slightly. We have seen some extraordinary
new concepts emerging from the neurosciences. Primero, many of us were moved by
research being done by Sperry and then by Gazzaniga on the divided brain. Entonces
we have read about experiments on neuroplasticity. Además, there was specula-
tion that is not yet proven about mirror neurons. I had a discussion with Michael
that touched on some of this but especially about the divided brain. Both of us had
been very moved by a speculative work of fiction by Julian Jaynes. Maybe Michael
could talk a bit about this.
LEVY to CENTURY: When we spoke you said how relevant ideas of the divided brain
were to you. How would you apply these ideas to sound and music?
CENTURY: That’s a complicated question. Jaynes’s book is the Origins of Conscious-
ness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I was comparing this to a more recent
book that covered that divided brain material in terms of attention rather than
hemispheric divisions, a book by Iain McGilchrist that deals with the attentive level
rather than rational versus emotional breakdowns. The way I think about this is from
a procession of time point of view. There are a couple of ways in which we take in
música. You can think of music coming in as an ordered pulse and the pulsation is
something you might be trained in. Or music can come in as a non-pulsation, a sort
of open versus measured idea. I think that the process of passing between these two
kinds of time perceptions is one of the most interesting things that we can explore
speculatively about music-making and perception.
LEVY: How are you or other musicians today incorporating some of these ideas?
CENTURY: In contemporary music-making and, I guess, I would say also interfacing
with technology, I am interested in the oscillation, as I call it, between the processing
of music as a pulsating or non-pulsating phenomenon.
LEVY to SCOTT: Jill, you are working with musicians in artists-in-labs, I believe.
SCOTT: Sí, Luca Forcucci is a musician, a composer. He basically worked at Olaf
Blanke’s lab, at EPFL in Lausanne, Suiza, where they’re conducting experiments
with peripersonal space [the space surrounding our bodies]. In a context of sound
art and acoustic pieces, he explored the relationship between interior body sounds
and the environment itself. This “in-between” space has cultural implications. Like
Alvin Lucier, who made work using the patterns of brain waves to compose music
and tried actually to control his brain on stage, Luca also explored EEG potentials.
To make a long story short, he actually took a set of interior body sounds and made
an installation where you could stand inside a circle of speakers and listen to all of
estos, then step outside and the sound would change into environmental sounds.
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When viewers moved through the installation they changed the sound. In this lab
they are also using virtual reality to explore neuropsychology. It’s an appealing lab
for media artists who are experimenting with projects in neuropsychology and
cognitive science.
LEVY to CENTURY: Recently I saw a concert at the Experimental Media and Perform-
ing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute by Kurt Hentschlager.
Many ideas of the body and about whether perception comes from within or without
are exploded in this piece.
CENTURY: The work you are referring to is a different sort of direction where there
is a certain kind of oscillation that goes on with Kurt. To get inside your head, por
the way, with a very intense rhythmicity — meaning here the way in which it inter-
acts with brain cells — is really tremendously powerful. That’s a great example of
working with a kind of micro-temporal programming, which makes a point about
the difference between traditional music and music that is either played back or
controlled by micro-timing technology. Polyphony or polytemporal composition
with traditional aspects can be very intense and the sonic experience tremendously
powerful. Now with computers there is much more work happening at the level of
micro-programming.
LEVY to WILEY: This leads directly to my next question. Your comments segue into
a question about using video as a way of giving dancers with Parkinson’s disease
feedback about their performance, about how to give information back to them about
their bodies and whether that makes a difference in their ability to control their
body. Después de todo, neurofeedback is being used to control ADHD in certain instances.
WILEY: Your question is about filming the actual process. I don’t like this because
film flattens. It makes it two-dimensional and develops a superficial awareness. Él
is not successful when working with dance. I think that’s not to say you can’t do it.
PELLI to WILEY: You made a strong point, when you were presenting your work,
that you are not a therapist. Can you elaborate?
WILEY: I don’t have the medical background. And none of us does in this group. El
only person with a medical background was Dr. Modugli. There was research going
on but the development of the work wasn’t dictated by science. I could develop my
program according to my needs as an artist.
PELLI: It’s been said that when art becomes therapy it ceases to be art.
WILEY: This wasn’t replacement for physical therapy. It was another option. fue un
way to allow people to create something, to develop confidence as movers. Porque
those with Parkinson’s disease are limited as to what they can do, it was a way for
them to do something new and to mark their progress. It was a way for them to
explore a new territory.
LEVY / Neuroscience and the Arts Today 19
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HUSTVEDT: There was a parallel phenomenon with the psychiatric patients I taught
in my classes. I never thought of writing as therapy, but when you put words on a
page they are fixed, immovable. For people who have severe integration problems
due to their illnesses, the texts we wrote and read aloud in the class became a static
object of focus. It turned out that this did have a therapeutic effect, but that was not
the point of the class. De hecho, I always felt that it was great for people to walk in and,
for at least an hour, not have to think about their diagnoses.
SCOTT: When we were working with the congenitally blind we actually realized that
they rarely had the opportunity to design their own spaces or interfaces. Most people
design for them. In eskin we tried to think about what could be designed from their
perspectiva! This was not a therapeutic approach; it was more about them being
creative. They said afterwards that they rarely had that experience. Even though our
visually impaired people had undertaken confidence classes, contact improvisation
therapy was a new thing. En otras palabras, they had not experienced “touch” with a
lot of other people.
LEVY: One of the issues that I want to raise about technological interfaces is that
it is sometimes said that it diminishes rather than extends our knowledge of the
body — that there is a kind of leveling of one medium into the other. How do people
respond to the critique that digital information seems to level the senses so they
become interchangeable? Friedrich Kittler raises this point when he talks about the
interchangeability of the senses. The idea is that the general digitization of informa-
tion erases the differences among individual media. The theoretical rejoinder is, I
believe, from Mark Hansen who argues for the use of the living body in conjunction
with digital technology.
LEVY to SCOTT: What interfaces do you use in your work?
SCOTT: The thing is one uses the technologies around us; they exist with this gad-
getry already, such as robots with sensors. We need to step back from this visually
dominant world and think about other ways to interface with the world that are
based on other senses. That seems to be left out from digital technology.
LEVY to PELLI: Do you feel you use different technologies than the artists you come
in contact with?
PELLI: I do my work at a computer keyboard.
LEVY: It is clear that for all of us here aesthetics is key for both the artists and sci-
entists and has dictated the kind of styles with which people are approaching their
trabajar. I think there has been a change from issues of formalism, which are ocular-
oriented, to multimedia and an interest in multi-modal perception. Would anyone
like to elaborate on this?
SCOTT: I just want to say that that this collaboration between artists and scientists
is also about the level of access that artists can have to scientific tools. Scanning
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electron microscopes, atomic force microscopes, fMRIs to EEGs, and all kinds of
mapping tools like GIS — these are really important tools for our visual culture.
That’s what our artists-in-labs also find fascinating — access to use the tools that
they have not encountered before.
LEVY: On the subject of tools, I think that one of the most important has been the
development of tools that can quantify emotion and affect. This has brought emo-
tion within range of science and encouraged more scientific exploration than has
previously taken place in that area.
HUSTVEDT: I think we can say the big breakthrough exposes a deep-seated prejudice
against emotion. A friend of mine, Antonio Damasio, a leading researcher in affective
neurociencia, told me that when he decided to study emotion and the brain, his col-
leagues told him his career would be ruined. Another friend, Jaak Panksepp — who
works mostly with animals and wrote a terrific book, Affective Neuroscience: El
Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions — has been fighting for a place for
emotion in brain science even longer than Antonio has. There was a strong sense
that emotions were “squishy” — a soft and feminine phenomenon that could never
be quantified or measured. Scanning technology and growing research has changed
this by revealing brain regions implicated in emotion, but it has been a big fight.
This is significant because a computational model of mind has dominated cognitive
science for years, but emotion has not been easily fit into this schema. Computadoras
don’t feel anything, after all. When other people began suggesting an embodied
model of the brain-mind, they were attacking the computer metaphor as inadequate
and borrowing ideas from phenomenology, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, En particular.
Artists jump on the embodied, emotional band wagon because it makes intuitive
sense to us, but there are many in neuroscience who want nothing to do with it.
SCOTT: Sí, neuropsychologists are often talking behind the scenes about this.
Phenomenological variations were once considered to be one of those “esoteric
problems” but now are thought of differently. These older esoteric concepts like
synesthesia are now considered to have conceptual and creative potentials. Uno
of my students is learning a lot about it by placing herself, as a subject, into those
neuropsychological tests.
LEVY: At this point we have covered a range of issues. I would like the audience to
be able to ask some questions.
QUESTION 1: Could you further elaborate on why, when art becomes therapy, él
ceases being art?
WILEY: No, it doesn’t necessarily have to cease being art, but therapy has an agenda
to rehabilitate and art does not. My only criterion was to teach and create dance.
PELLI: You used the word creative as the distinguishing feature. Is therapy not
creative?
LEVY / Neuroscience and the Arts Today 21
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WILEY: The therapy can be creative if you have a very good therapist. But dance
therapy is not collaborative — they are not asking their patients to create.
HUSTVEDT: In my case I write books because I have to. If I couldn’t do it, I feel my
life would be wrecked. Making art is a need. Isn’t that therapeutic for me in some way?
SCOTT: That’s the value of freedom. You can choose if you wish to branch into the
therapeutic side.
LEVY: We can take a few more questions.
QUESTION 2 for CENTURY: A project in the MFA program at your university
involved a mind-controlled levitation experience. Could you elaborate on this?
CENTURY: The Ascent is by Yehuda Duenyas, a multimedia performance director. Él
created an interactive neuro-driven installation, which was deemed one of the largest
bio-feedback machines in the world. He built a piece that tracked brain waves and
that resulted in elevating participants in a harness in an arc. It was synchronized a
bit like Barnum and Bailey and was a big success. It was show-biz that succeeded
in making a lot of waves.
QUESTIONER: The art work used alpha and beta waves to make a spectacle, y
cognition was the content.
CENTURY: Right. The piece worked as successful exploration of the interface; él
involved the specifics of the waves.
LEVY: Coming back to the subject of therapy, such neurofeedback devices have been
used in treating ADHD.
QUESTION 3: There is a point where research in art and science merge. Porque
many of you in both fields work with dysfunction, how might your concept of heal-
ing have changed from work you have done?
SCOTT: Working with people who might be sedated changes my work. It has helped
me with respect to how I approach my own work.
QUESTION 4: The history of neuroscience collaborations has shown instances where
the art has helped the scientists. For example Heddy Lamar in the 1930s created
what became the basis of cell-phone technology. What other kinds of ways have
artists helped scientists as well as the reverse?
HUSTVEDT: By learning fields that are difficult for me I have developed another
mente. We become what we read. I tell students and young scholars and artists: read
against yourself. If you don’t like physics, read physics. If you are a scientist and dislike
novels, force yourself to read fiction. It is vital that we do not isolate ourselves in what
Habermas calls “expert” cultures. It is also vital that we examine our hierarchies. No
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one laughs at an artist who reads science. Not a chuckle. But a hard scientist who
reads, decir, a novel written by a woman, might risk being grinned at. Specialization
has its advantages but also its weaknesses. Without a dialogue between the arts and
the sciences, both will be impoverished.
LEVY: This is a great note on which to end. Thanks to all.
NOTES
1. A video of the discussion in two parts is available at http://vimeo.com/58058438 and
http://vimeo.com/58056879.
2. GRAMO. Deleuze, “The Brain Is the Screen,” interview by Peter Canning, The Brain Is the
Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, ed. Gregory Flaxman (Mineápolis: Universidad
of Minnesota Press, 2000), 369–74.
3. This demo appears as the first image in this article: norte. j. Majaj, D. GRAMO. Pelli, PAG. Kurshan, y
METRO. Palomares, “The role of spatial frequency channels in letter identification,” Vision Research
42 (2002): 1165–84. http://psych.nyu.edu/pelli/pubs/majaj2002channel.pdf
4. The image of Maggie and the analysis of Chuck Close’s paintings appear in this article:
D. GRAMO. Pelli, “Close encounters — an artist shows that size affects shape," Ciencia 285 (1999):
844–46. http://psych.nyu.edu/pelli/pubs/pelli1999close.pdf
5. D. GRAMO. Pelli and K. A. Tillman, “The uncrowded window of object recognition,” Nat Neurosci
11(10) (2008): 1129–35. http://psych.nyu.edu/pelli/pubs/pelli2008uncrowded-complete.pdf
6. En 1965, Alvin Lucier composed the first musical piece using the EEG; then David
Rosenboom developed EEG-based musical interfaces.
7. PAG. Bach-Y-Rita, Y. Danilov, METRO. mi. tyler, and R. j. Grimm, “Late human brain plasticity:
vestibular substitution with a tongue BrainPort human-machine interface,” Intellectica 1 (40)
(2005): 115–22.
8. j. Scott and E. Stoecki (editores.), Neuromedia: Art and Neuroscience Research (Berlina: Saltador,
2012).
9. mi. k. Exacción, “An artistic exploration of inattention blindness,” in Frontiers Hum Neuro sci 5
(2012): 1662–5161. http://www.frontiersin.org/human_neuroscience/10.3389/fnhum.2011.00174
/abstract
For further information about the panelists, see the following:
Michael Century: http://www.arts.rpi.edu/pl/faculty-staff/michael-century
Siri Hustvedt: http://www.sirihustvedt.net/
Ellen K. Exacción: http://www.complexityart.com
Denis Pelli: http://psych.nyu.edu/pelli/biography.html
Jill Scott: http://www.jillscott.org
LEVY / Neuroscience and the Arts Today 23
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