Page 89 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

For the past 15 years, I have been involved inthe processes that bring art and technology together. And I would like to give a very personal view based on my own experience, of the connection between art and neuroscience and the journey that has taken it from a mere idea and turned it into a methodology and a concrete system which is capable of quantifying reactions to art.This involves understanding technology as a device, meaning everything that ‘develops’the human being, freeing him from his natural constraints and projecting this development towards what we might call a new uid reality.In this basically self-su cient process that was carried out without the aid of references, books or documentation in this eld, I have had to rely on intuition to perceive the true dimensions of art and its impact on society.I have, of course, relied upon certain references, such as the great experimenters, whose workis re ected in the classic psychology of color books, based on studies from authors such as Kandinsky or the Gestalt theory or Bauhaus school of thought that analyzed, for example, the impact of color and abstraction on the observer, with techniques based on observation, experimentation and the trial and error method, which were the only research tools available at that time.Perceptual groupings, such as gure-ground perception and pregnancy and depth perception, as well as principles of grouping and games using di erent perspectives or combinations from di erent theories of color have laid the foundations for research that the subsequent more sophisticated techniques of neuroscience have been able to verify digitally.Art in itself has always, I believe, been a launch pad for innovation and an unmistakable testa- ment to the di erent cultures that thrived in di erent eras, whether in classical epochs, thehistorical avant-garde or contemporary periods. It might be hard for us to detect its narrative function from the perspective of the new vanguards but this I believe is due to a lack of perspective, since history teaches us that it has always been so and it is, I believe, simplya question of being able to get some distance on it.As an artist, suspended halfway between art and engineering, I have always been amazed at the contrast between the artist’s passionate atten- tion to detail, search for excellence and sense of vocation and the art world or ‘market’ – a much more quantitative and qualitative environment where the criteria depend on variables such as context, geographical location or media access, not to mention the approval of institutions. Art nowadays has become a business of politics and tangible assets.Neuroculture measures and decodesneural impulses in the context of art. It was conceived as a tool to enable cultural institutions to change their strategies when measuring the impact of their exhibitions.This contrast was what triggered the concept of neuroculture – the need to return society’s most important vehicle of innovation to the people while laying the foundations of objective artistic creation. And it could never have been turned into a reality without the help of an incredible team and the collaboration of various experts all keen to nd out more about one of humanity’s most basic needs. When we accept creative challenge, we are reminded that art is one of the disciplines that set us, as humans, apart from other living beings. Devoid of an apparent speci c practical use, art does not appear to directly a ect our struggle for survival.After discovering the potential application of neuroscience, the rst phase of our investigation focused on searching for other experiments previously carried out in this eld. The search didn’t throw up much more than the oddAC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 201789Smart culture. Analysis of digital trends