Page 90 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

90experiment involving the vision of neuroscience maestro, Antonio Damasio.Born in Portugal, Professor Damasio laid the foundations of neuroscience, a science that is still in its embryonic stages. His books, The Feelingof what Happens, Descartes’ Error and Lookingfor Spinoza, are referenced by all neuroscientists and used as a cornerstone for their activities. Together with his wife Hanna, a prominent neuroscientist in her own right, Damasio runs the Brain and Creativity Institute, as well as teaching neuroscience, psychology and philosophy at the University of Southern California.When it came to creating ‘neuroculture’, we took inspiration from some of his conclusions, such as ‘The images we perceive are cerebral constructs triggered by an object and not spec- ular re ections of the object’ or in the chapter Of Appetites and Emotions from Looking for Spinoza, ‘emotions precede feelings’.Others had also been inspired by Damasio, leading to hundreds of experiments linking audiovisual elements and neuroscience, that in turn gave rise to di erent lines of neuroscienti c investigation, such as neuromarketing, cognitive experiences, mental gymnastics for disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorder or atten- tion de cit disorder.When it came to creating ‘neuroculture’, we took inspiration from some of Damasio’s conclusions like ‘emotions precede feelings’.Many of these experiments seemed to be of interest and we started to look for studies that had measured and decoded neural impulses in the context of art. Surprisingly there had been very few. The rst one we came across was a groundbreaking project in Switzerland, which aimed to analyze di erent perceptions of an art object in an environment divided by race.We were thrilled to discover that the most advanced laboratory in the world, the EuropeanOrganization for Nuclear Research (CERN) had an Artists in Residence program, that involved musicians, writers, dancers and contemporary artists, some of whom were specialized in math- ematical and neuroscienti c processes, inspiring engineers to think outside the box and search for creative solutions with a view to establishing a scienti c basis for entirely innovative systems.We were also aware that an article had been published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neu- roscience, talking about controlled experiments carried out by a team from Houston University for the Menill Foundation that sought to mea- sure cerebral activity in context – a departure from the sterile and controlled environment of the laboratory.Jos Luis Contreras-Vidal and his team aimed to establish the contrasting levels of neural acti- vation between the two environments, taking into consideration sex, age etc., believing that in the ‘uncontrolled’ context of an exhibition, the readings would be higher than when the subject was exposed to audiovisual prompts in the laboratory.These were just some of the elements that inspired us to create ‘neuroculture’, conceived of as a tool to enable cultural institutions to change their strategies when measuring the impact of their exhibitions, rather than as a laboratory study.Neuroscience in SpainNeuroscience in Spain is at the teething stage with most activity taking place within a univer- sity context. The Complutense in Madrid runsa Masters in Neuroscience, the Autonomous University of Barcelona does a Doctorate as does the Spanish Society of Neuroscience while other institutions have di erent research programs underway, such as Granada University or the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Lan- guage. There are also a variety of small start-upsWHERE ART MEETS NEUROSCIENCE · XIMO LIZANASmart culture. Analysis of digital trends