Creating new circuits in art means creating them in the brain too. - Gilles Deleuze¹

Perception of ideas leads to new ideas. - Sol LeWitt²

Introduction

V.S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein describe the following discoveries in relation to seagull chicks³:

A seagull chick will beg for food by pecking at its mother’s beak. It will peck just as vigorously at a disembodied beak… or even at a stick with a red dot at the end (the gull’s beak has a vivid red spot near the tip)… As far as the chick’s vision system is concerned the stimulus is as good as the entire mother bird… What is even more remarkable is that a very long, thin brown stick with three red stripes at the end is even more effective in eliciting pecks than the original beak. [This] had inadvertently produced a super-stimulus.

They conclude:

If there were an art gallery in the world of the seagull, this ‘super-beak’ would qualify as a great work of art – a Picasso.

Neuroaesthetics is essentially the study of the correlation between neurological processes and aesthetic experience and/or expression. It is born out of a notion of aesthetics that relate specifically to art works (rather than natural beauty) and the rise of phenomenology (i.e. it is situated in the German Continental philosophical tradition).

This essay will outline the key concepts of Neuroaesthetics. It will then put these into context with the broader concept of aesthetics and its history before discussing the particular insights that neuroaesthetics brings to a critical appreciation of non-figurative, minimal, conceptual and media art. It will become apparent that neuroaesthetic’s heritage within an aesthetic tradition that limits the discussion of aesthetics to art works (and excludes natural beauty) and which is founded in phenomenology makes neuroaesthetics a particularly useful framework with which to analyse the cultural transformations, and their effects on people, that are taking place as culture and experience become dominated and supplanted by man-made media that are more phatic than ‘natural’ experience. The ‘super-beak’ will stand as an metaphor for all artificially created, phatic media and information excess that we experience daily. The progress from disembodied representation to abstraction and then conceptual refinement that the seagull chick experiment describes will stand as an allegory for the development in art away from figurative representation towards abstract and conceptual art. The narrowing of focus from a general visual effect towards a specific neurological and intense response is a great example of what Warren Neidich has denoted as the movement from ‘visual ergonomics’ to ‘cognitive ergonomics’⁴. The way that the chicks themselves learn to appreciate the abstract form more than the natural form of a beak serves to some extent as an analogy for Neidich’s idea that our brains sculpt and are sculpted by culture to the degree that an 18th Century brain would not be wired to interact successfully with 21st Century culture, and why families around the world have discovered that the children are more likely to be able to program the video recorder (or Tivo or DVR) than their parents.

Also provided here is documentation of a computer simulation of brain function for vision. The computer simulation processes visual information from a video camera attached to a computer and is a demonstration of the theory of Neuronal Group Selection. It analyses the video feed for (i) light and colour intensity and (ii) for motion, and uses this information to allow ‘neurones’ and their network of connections to either survive or die based on the degree to which they are stimulated over a certain threshold. The documentation in this essay describes what happened when this computer simulation of a brain was asked to watch three TV shows – MTV, BBC Parliament, and a movie trailer channel.

Neuroaesthetics

Parcelation and Binding

We do not see with our eyes, but also with our brains. As described by Zeki⁵, Neidich⁶ and others, the brain’s primary visual cortex, which is located at the back of the brain, has a number of specialised regions that process particular aspects of vision. The most significant of these have become known as V1, V2, V3, V4, and V5 but there are others, such as the ones that specialises in face and object recognition. Areas V1 and V2 the most directly connected to the optic nerve, and it is from these areas that visual information is passed to the other areas. The process by which areas of the brain specialise to process specific aspects of information is known as parcelation. Area V4 processes colour information and area V5 processes motion information. Later in this essay a computer model will be introduced that simulates the effect of Neuronal Group Selection on these areas. Within these areas specific neurones may specialise to the degree that they only respond to, for example, the colour red, motion in one direction but not another, or horizontal but not vertical lines⁷.

Once visual information has been broken up into its constitutive elements, it is easy to imagine that is must be brought back together again in some way so that a coherent perception can be formed within consciousness. This process is known as ‘binding’; but this term is somewhat misleading if it is taken to mean that the resultant processing is somehow brought back together to a specialist integrating function of the brain. To Zeki, this is not the case. There is no re-routing of processed information. Instead, it is the specific patterns of neuronal activities taking place in each of the neuronal assemblages at more or less the same time⁸ that in fact constitute conscious perception. There is a level of ‘micro-consciousness’ between the lowest level of neuronal activity and unified consciousness:

It is not the activities in the different processing-perceptual systems [that] have to be bound together to give us our conscious-perception of a scene, but rather that it is the micro-consciousness generated by the activity of different processing-perceptual systems that have to be bound together to give us our unified precept.⁹

Ramachandran and Hirstein suggest that artists ‘either consciously or unconsciously deploy certain rules or principles (we call them laws) to titillate the visual areas of the brain’¹⁰. Whilst it may be argued that still life and portrait painting to some degree are art forms that are targeted at areas of the brain that specialise in face and object recognition, these figurative art forms are also of necessity processed by areas V1 – V5. We shall see later in this essay that the movement towards abstraction in art can be understood as a form of ‘parcelation’ of artistic endeavour that mirrors how visual perception operates in the brain. Art that consists primarily of blocks of colour, or of horizontal and vertical lines is art that is in some ways directed at the assemblages of neurones in the brain that process these particular aspects of vision. The ‘super-beak’ that they describe is one example of this kind of cognitive ergonomics because it has been abstracted to the point where it appeals intensely to a more narrowly defined part of a bird’s brain, and it is because of this criteria that Ramachandran and Hirstein jokingly suggest that it might be considered art.

If you can see a dalmation in this picture you are experiencing binding. Ramachandran and Hirstein imply that there is some aesthetic pleasure associated with binding such as this.¹¹

Neuronal Group Selection

Edelman’s theory of Neuronal Group Selection12 uses a model based on Darwinian natural selection to describe how the brain develops. His key point is that neurones that are stimulated more strongly and/or more often than others build stronger connections with neighbouring neurones and get to survive. Indeed those areas of the brain which are highly stimulated become more plentifully populated with brain cells to support their particular functional specialisation. Those areas that are not so highly stimulated do not develop and may even die out (the process by which they die out is called ‘apoptosis’. This process by which a structure is altered by experience, which Edelman terms ‘Experiential Selection’ is also known as ‘epigenesis’ and results in what Neidich refers to as ‘the sculpted brain’.¹³ The individual memories and cultural information that is stored in the ‘sculpted brain’ generally dies with the brain, except if the person has committed their experience and memories to some medium outside of their brain such as a work of art or architecture, or possibly in the rare case where an evolutionary change in the species occurs.

Of course brains also develop in utero, and do so in a similar manner to the other organs and limbs that develop out of cell-division according to chemically-controlled cellular division. The brain develops a basic architecture whose structure is governed by genetic inheritance and influences during pregnancy before it is able to be sculpted by experience. The means by which some parts of the brain develop and specialise even prior to birth is called ‘developmental selection’ by Edelman and it results in what he calls the ‘primary repertoire’, referring to the initial capabilities of the brain.

Edelman provides a third process, termed ‘reentry’, which provides the conditions for binding. Neidich explains reentry thus:

This process synchronizes selected neural networks and maps located at a distance from each other in disparate areas of the brain to fire together and thus allos for the correlation of events occurring in the world… Reentry allows for changes in synaptic efficiency taking place in one area to be accounted for by changes in another.¹⁴

In this way the brain is able to affect itself in its own processing and development as well as being affected by outside stimulus. This perhaps provides a basis for the possibility of thought being able to direct the development of the brain, or at least to explain at the most elementary level how it is possible for musicians to improve their technique by ‘practicing’ playing their instruments in their imaginations when no instruments are to hand.

Remapping

Brains sometimes get damaged, or sometimes (as in the case of blindness) there is a sensory deficit specific to some individuals that means that the architecture of the primary repertoire does entirely suit. That’s OK, because brains have a capacity known as plasticity, which means that parts of the brain can vary in their function, and which means that one part of a brain can supplement or substitute for another part of the brain (a process known as remapping). Generally speaking, the parts of brain that taken on or take over a particular function are close to where such functions would normally be situated, and this is what gives is the principle of proximity.

Plasticity and proximity are important in relation to cultural understanding because they provide a neurological explanation for certain forms of fetishism¹⁵. For example, the parts of the brain that process sensations to the feet are nearby to the parts of the brain that process sensations to the genitals, and this proximity may explain foot fetishism if, for whatever reason, one part of the brain is supplementing the processing of another part’s information. This is sometimes presented as an alternative to psychoanalytic interpretations, but it may still be possible that psychoanalytically significant experiences could be the cause of such partial remapping.

Surrealism’s attempt to address what the surrealist’s though was, in psychoanalytic terms, the subconscious mind may be, in some cases, understood as attempts to discover or even bring about possible neurological remappings.

Synaesthesia, in which people report “seeing” sounds or “tasting” colours, which Kandinsky was believed to have suffered from, and which was the inspiration for the recent ‘art-house’ Playstation2 game Rez, can also be understood in terms of remapping.

The opposite example to remapping is the case of ‘phantom limbs’ where sensations and sense memories for limbs persist even when they are amputated. Zeki has suggested that this phenomenon may be explained by the brain needing to be able to have memories of the time before the limb was lost. The brain is part of a body, and sensations in the world often presage movement in it. Maintaining what might appear to be redundant processing centres in the brain for amputated limbs may be what makes memories of actions such as walking possible. MRI scans have shown that recollections of actions essentially involve the same areas of the brain as the actions themselves. This again is further proof that there is no final place where memories are stored in the brain any more than there is some consolidating functional area that brings together the previously parcelled and processed aspects of visual information. This connection of the brain to the body, and to some extent this partial refutation of the possibility of the mind beyond the brain, demonstrates how close neuroaesthetics is to phenomenology and to the theories of philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty¹⁶. It is the basis of Deleuze’s analysis of Cézanne and Bacon’s interpretation of sensation¹⁷.

This connection of motor function with brain function is at the heart of Jung’s technique of word association. In François Dagognet’s essay Toward a Biopsychiatry it becomes clear that the technique of word association is, for Jung, less about finding psychoanalytic significance in the words that an analysand chooses, but in the physical responses (shortness of breath, hesitation, body tensions) that occur during the session. Dagognet suggests that ‘measuring the latter is tantamount to measuring the behaviour of the subject in full interface (at the mind-body juncture). Starting from such psychophysical measurements, Jung unearthed complexities of dramatic scenes that otherwise never would have come to light’.¹⁸

A computer model of visual neuronal selection

The Model

I created a Movie in Macromedia Director that was able to take a direct feed from a video camera. The Director movie analysed the video feed frame by frame to detect the degree of light in any one area and also movement (the difference in colour one any part of the image from one frame to the next).

The Director movie showed a pixellated image of the video camera feed to represent how retina cells might transmit visual information to the brain. It also showed two sets of cells (as small dots). One set of cells represented colour detection, and the other represented motion detection. Colour detection corresponds to area V4 of the brain, and motion detection corresponds to area V5 of the brain.

Initially the cells in each area were set as being ‘alive’ and connected to their neighbours. However, if each cell was not stimulated frequently enough above a certain threshold coded into the program, the cell would die and it associated connections would die with it (a full code listing is provided in the Appendix to this essay). Essentially, areas of the video feed that were consistently dark caused cells to die in the corresponding colour detection area. Areas of the video feed that were mostly static caused corresponding cells in the motion detection area to die.

This model is a reasonably good topological model for how areas of the visual cortex operate and is a good demonstration of Edelman’s theory of Neuronal Group Selection¹⁹, especially since Zeki²⁰ has pointed out that neuronal processing areas tend to be square or rectangular and have a similar structure to the external structures that they are responsible for processing. The model is simplified in that connections between cells do not vary in strength (they are either there or not) and also that no new cells are created to provide greater resolution where there is a lot of light or activity.

The Method

In order to explore Neidich’s ideas concerning the effect of artificial and phatic images on how the brain is sculpted by culture²¹, my model was made to watch TV for 30 seconds at a time. It watched music videos on MTV, the committee investigation into Equitable Life on BBC Parliament, and a trailer for Rugrats, the Movie. The results are provided below.

The Results

MTV The model watched an R&B video on MTV that was fairly moody. The retina image is shown on the top. The colour/light processing assemblage (left) died out quite quickly for lack of stimulation. Music videos have plenty of edits and movement in them, however, so the movement assemblage (right) was able to survive.
BBC Parliament The model watched the select committee discussing Equitable Life. The retina image is shown on the top. The colour/light processing assemblage (left) survived because the scene was well-lit. There were no edits and only one person’s head moved all the time so the motion assemblage (right) mostly died out.
Trailer for Rugrats the Movie The model watched a trailer for Rugrats the Movie. Rugrats is a children’s cartoon. Both the light/colour assemblage and the movement assemblage survived well. No cells died in the movement assemblage because the show was very fast-moving.

Aesthetics

Poetics and Aesthetics

In his essay What Aesthetics Can Mean²², Jacques Rancière points out that what we take to be the conventional meaning of aesthetics (‘the part of philosophy that deals with the properties of artworks and with the properties that allow us to sense and appreciate them as such’) required a number of specific (and quite recent) changes.

Firstly, it had to be agreed that forms of thought and philosophy are up to the task of discussing art objects, that art objects can be the subject of thought and discourse separate from their execution. Secondly, it required a ‘transition from the age of poetics to the age of aesthetics commonly described as the revocation of a system of norms founded on the principle of mimesis’.²³

In the age of poetics works were judged by the viewer based on their capacity of figurative representation based on a principle of mimesis. Discernment was based on the judgement of the viewer’s ability to decide the degree of mimesis that had been achieved. The age of poetics, which Rancière suggest is only really a couple of hundred years old, provides the conditions for conceptual art in that modern aesthetics move away from concentrating on the viewer to concentrating on the ‘material and principle’ of the work. This goes some way to explain the shift that Virilio describes as the movement away from ‘representation’ to ‘presentation’.²⁴

A concentration on the ‘material and principle’ of the work serves well to describe certain aspects of contemporary media art. However, if the neuroaesthetic interpretation is to be accepted, this in turn is in some senses a neuropoetics because, if the artworks are considered to be ever more cognitively ergonomic they reinstantiate not exactly the judgement of the viewer but the affect and effect of the work on specific parts the viewer’s brain as in some ways the arbiter of the work’s quality. However, if the neurological effect informs both the material and the principle of the work, then the work is properly neuroaesthetic precisely to the degree to which it is ‘neuropoetic’. It is arguable, too, that works of media art are works of ‘brain sculpture’, where a targeted change in neurological configuration may take place as a result of a work. In this case the finished work is the brain of the viewer, and since the brains of the viewer structure themselves closely with the structure of the stimulus²⁵, mimesis is achieved in the resulting neurological structures. ‘Brain Sculpture’ could be the radical art form that derives from a theory of neuroaesthetics, where the finished work is the reconfigured brain of the viewer. This is perhaps an alternative, but equally ethically challenging, concept of the neuroaesthetic future of media art that Peter Weibel describes as ‘Quantum Cinema’:

Advances in neurophysiology and cognitive science give rise to the hope that future engineers will succeed in implementing these discoveries in neuronal and molecular machines that transform the technology of simulation to deceive the eye into a technology of stimulation that in turn deceives the brain… Scaling is a question of future cinema. Working on the level of supramolecular chemistry or nanotechnology, can we invent a cinematographic apparatus that enables us to manipulate ony only singular neurones, cells and neuronal networks… the crisis of representation will be resolved only when we develop a technology of effectors.²⁶

This is potentially a radical updating of Jean-Luc Nancy’s observation in relation to painting that ‘there is no art that is not the art of a clear touch on the obscure threshold of sense’²⁷.

Aesthetics and the senses

In The Aesthetic Theory of the Arts²⁸, Jonathan Rée establishes that the first use if the term ‘aesthetics’ in relation solely to works of art and to the exclusion of beauty in nature belongs to Lessing in Laokoön in 1766. This is the beginning of a history, of which neuroaesthetics is the latest inflection, where contemporary models of sense apparatus are used to categorise the arts. For Lessing, that meant, according to Rée, an attempt to map the ‘five arts (architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry)… onto the traditional five senses’²⁹. The aim of aesthetics was therefore established as ‘the theoretical attempt to connect the different bodily senses to the various fine arts’³⁰. Lessing also established the idea that vision is special whilst music and poetry (the auditory arts) were temporal.

According to Rée, Kant developed these ideas in the Critique of Judgement but made explicit the idea that ‘inner intuition’ was purely temporal whilst ‘outer intuition… gave us access to objects in space’³¹. It is these distinctions, and the designation of art forms that can be easily correlated to individual senses as ‘pure’ that enabled Hegel to privilege auditory arts as the highest form since they were less ‘grossly physical’ than the others, more aligned with his the concept of ‘inner intuition’, and purely related to one particular sense.

Neuroaesthetics is, to an obvious and significant degree, many of its own foundations in how aesthetics was defined in relation to art and the senses at these points. There are two marked differences, however, which I will discuss in the next two sub-sections. The first is the privileging by neuroaesthetics of the visual; the second is an apparently correlated disinterest in auditory arts - speech, music and poetry.

Photography, cinema, and the death of representation

Lessing, Kant and Hegel were all writing in the time before photography. Niepce’s first photographs were produced in 1827, and Hegel died in 1831. They did not witness the displacement of painting by photography; in particular they did not see the development of painting into a temporal medium (traced from, for argument’s sake the Futurist Giacomo Balla’s Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash through to Jackson Pollock time-based abstract expressionism through to process-based conceptual painting and beyond). Nor did they see the temporalisation of the mimetic image image by cinema. Nor did they see the abstraction of painting into works that appear to more directly appeal to specific areas of the brain in an analogous manner to the ways in which art was previously celebrated if it seemed to purely address a particular sense. Nor did they see the creation of moving window frames that looked out onto and sped through the landcape following the introduction of the first passenger-carrying steam locomotive in 1929 (George Stephenson’s Rocket).

Neuroaesthetics has stopped denigrating the visual arts not because it is correcting earlier misconceptions about those forms by previous philosophers of aesthetics, but because the visual arts themselves now conform to the standards and ideals that were instigated at the institution of aesthetics.

Giacomo Balla – Dynamism of a Dog on Leash (Leash in Motion) (1912)

Neuroaesthetics, speech, and poetry

Aesthetics, says Rancière, is ‘not the fatal capture of art by philosophy. It is not the catastrophic overflow of art into politics. It is the originary knot that ties a sense of art to an idea of thought and an idea of the community’.³²

The quantity of writing within the discourse of neuroaesthetics that concerns music or poetry is significantly less than that which deals with vision, the visual arts, and visual culture. The auditory and temporal arts are by no means denigrated, but they are somewhat overlooked. A related and surprising omission is much discussion of the role of other people in inducting people into culture and sculpting their brains through story telling, folklore and other forms or oral culture. Whilst times are evidently more media-rich now than they have ever been before, it is also true to say that we are more specifically more information-rich than previously and also more of us are literate than ever before. People spend a lot of time reading text of all kinds and discussing their interactions with all forms of culture with others.

Art, Media Culture and Neuroaesthetics

Art

In Inner Vision: An exploration of Art and the Brain, Semir Zeki demonstrates the links between German phenomenology and neuroaesthetics. Equating Platonic ideals with Hegelian Concepts, he suggests that such pure forms are now to be found in the brain, providing some experimental evidence to support the idea that perhaps 1% of the brain (a small percentage, a lot of neurones) respond to objects in the world consistently regardless of the angle from which they are viewed. This suggests that there is some basis for conceptual recognition within the brain, and provides a journey for pure forms from the ‘out-there’ Platonic metaphysics via the concealed Hegelian Being within beings, into the pure concept registered in a neural configuration.

Through an analysis of Mondrian, Malevich, Nicholson, Monet and Seurat among several others, he is able to show that there is a general trend in painting towards abstraction, simplification and analysis (in the case of cubism and Fauvism) through which various schools of painting increasingly specialise in address specialist neural configurations (horizontal and vertical lines, squares of colour, dots of specific wavelengths etc.). He also shows that certain forms of kinetic art are particularly well adapted to how the brain processes movement information. Similar arguments are put forward by Ramachandran and Hirstein ³³

Media Culture

Warren Neidich introduces the concept of the ‘conspecific visual niche’³⁴, by which he means the totality of sensory and cultural experience that is available to any given species. His point is that in contemporary culture, human beings reside in naturespace (which we share with other organisms), urbanspace (which we share to a far lesser degree), mediaspace and cyberspace (which we do not share at all). Not only do we not share these with other organisms, but previous human generations do not have them in common with us. The post-modern human is therefore uniquely able to navigate each of these ‘scapes, sculpting them and having our brains sculpted by them. We live in a specifically artifical environment where much of our perceptions are more or less deliberately designed to be ‘phatic’ and to appeal more directly to our own neurology. Our ‘mutated brains’ constitute a ‘real/virtual interface’ which is:

A laboratory where new combinations of objects and relations are in constant flux as part of shifting experimental paradigms³⁵

If Susan Greenfield’s explanation of consciousness occurring only at the point of flux (‘when the wax is melting’³⁶) then consciousness may be considered to be the ‘real/virtual interface’ itself.

The Creative Subject

Zeki asks himself why human beings have vision at all, and concludes that ‘we see in order to be able to acquire knowledge about the world’³⁷. Whilst this is a more compelling explanation than we need to able to see in order to find our way about (plenty of animals can’t see and manage OK), he goes on to quote Matisse as saying

Seeing is already a creative operation, one that demands an effort³⁸

And this seems better able to get to the heart of the matter. A great deal (in fact an ever-increasing majority) of the knowledge that we seek to acquire is man-made. We see in order to be able to create knowledge as well as to be able to acquire it.

When the brain is confronted with having to learn a new skill, MRI scans show that initially a lot of the brain’s capacity, spread throughout its entirety, is deployed in learning and mastering it. Eventually, though, certain regions of the brain come to specialise and it appears that less mental effort is required. This is the essence of re-entry, and it suggests that, as Bergson claims:

To some degree, all recognition is recollection³⁹

Once re-entry is achieved, the brain establishes patterns of neurological activity that correspond with what is happening at that instant as it relates to memories of previous instances. Less of the brain is taken up with familiar activities.

As the brain is sculpted there is a corresponding recollection for every repeated stimulus. This is somewhat reminiscent of Derrida’s analysis of Freud’s early speculations in neurophysiology⁴⁰. In Freud and the Scene of Writing Derrida shows that experience in Freud’s neurological model can never be original because it depends on a previous neural pathway having always already been laid down in advance of it. In this way, he shows that both memory and experience depend on différance between paths rather than existing as paths themselves. Whilst the neurological models in Zeki, Edelman and Niedich are less to do with pathways and more to do with simultaneous states, the very possibility of sculpting and re-enactment imply that perception and interpretation are functions of difference and repetition/iterability. What is significant about neurological configurations is not their essential characteristics in relation to specific stimuli, but more broadly it is their capacity for acquiring novel forms and more especially for being reproduced. The fascination that art practice has for novelty yet also for reproduction is mirrored in the most crucial underlying capabilities of our neurology.

 

Notes

¹ Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, New York, Columbia University Press, 1995.

² Sol Lewitt, Sentences on Conceptual Art [1996], in Conceptual Art, ed. Peter Osborne, Phaidon, New York, 2002

³ V.S. Ramachandran and W. Hirstein, The Science of Art, Journal of Consciousness Studies: Art and the Brain, Volume 6: June/July, 1999

⁴ Warren Neidich, Blow Up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain, New York, Distributed Art Publishers, 2003

⁵ Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999

⁶ Warren Neidich, Blow Up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain, New York, Distributed Art Publishers, 2003

⁷ Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999

⁸ Warren Neidich describes these events as happening simultaneously; whilst Zeki argues that there is evidence to suggest that related information is not processed at the same instant or for the same duration in different parts of the brain.

⁹ Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999

¹⁰ V.S. Ramachandran and W. Hirstein, The Science of Art, Journal of Consciousness Studies: Art and the Brain, Volume 6: June/July, 1999

¹¹ V.S. Ramachandran and W. Hirstein, The Science of Art, Journal of Consciousness Studies: Art and the Brain, Volume 6: June/July, 1999

¹² Gerald M. Edelman, Neural Darwinism: Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, Oxford, Oxford, 1989

¹³ Warren Neidich, Blow Up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain, New York, Distributed Art Publishers, 2003

¹⁴ Warren Neidich, Blow Up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain, New York, Distributed Art Publishers, 2003

¹⁵ Warren Neidich, Blow Up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain, New York, Distributed Art Publishers, 2003

¹⁶ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge, 2002

¹⁷ Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation, London, Continuum, 2002

¹⁸ François Dagognet, Towards a Biopsychiatry, in Zone 6: Incorporations, Zone, New York, 1992

¹⁹ Gerald M. Edelman, Neural Darwinism: Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, Oxford, Oxford, 1989

²⁰ Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999

²¹ Warren Neidich, Blow Up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain, New York, Distributed Art Publishers, 2003

²² Jacques Rancière, What Aesthetics Can Mean, in From an Aesthetic Point of View: Philosophy, Art and the Senses, Ed. Peter Osborne, Serpents Tail, London 2000

²³ ibid.

²⁴ Paul Virilio, Art and Fear, Continuum, New York, 2000

²⁵ Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999 and also Warren Neidich’s dictum that ‘networked relations in the real world configure network relations in the brain’

²⁶ Peter Weibel, The Intelligent Image: Neurocinema or Quantum Cinema?, in Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film, Ed. Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel, MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 2003

²⁷ Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota, 1997

²⁸ Jonathan Rée, The Aesthetic Theory of the Arts, in From an Aesthetic Point of View: Philosophy, Art and the Senses, Ed. Peter Osborne, Serpents Tail, London 2000

²⁹ ibid.

³⁰ ibid.

³¹ ibid.

³² Jacques Rancière, What Aesthetics Can Mean, in From an Aesthetic Point of View: Philosophy, Art and the Senses, Ed. Peter Osborne, Serpents Tail, London 2000

³³ V.S. Ramachandran and W. Hirstein, The Science of Art, Journal of Consciousness Studies: Art and the Brain, Volume 6: June/July, 1999

³⁴ Warren Neidich, Blow Up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain, New York, Distributed Art Publishers, 2003

³⁵ ibid.

³⁶ Susan Greenfield, The Private Life of the Brain, Penguin, 2000

³⁷ Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999

³⁸ Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999

³⁹ Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, Zone Books, New York, 1999

⁴⁰ Jacques Derrida, Freud and the Scene of Writing, in Writing and Difference, Routledge, London, 1978

Appendix – Code listing for computer model

This model uses code from the ‘Creative Mirrors’ program that comes with the WebCam Xtra in order to display the retina image on the model.

-- this Director program processes a video feed

-- from a camera attached to a computer

-- and provides a topological diagram

-- for how neurones get to die or survive based

-- on the degree to which they are stimulated by

-- visual information.

-- just as the brain 'parcels' the processing of different

-- elements of vision, this program parcels the video feed

-- into light/colour detection and motion sensing.

global webcamxtra

property w

property h

global visionexcite

global visionboredom

global movementexcite

global movementboredom

-- lists (arrays) that will be used to identify movement and vision

global visiondeath

global motiondeath

global previousimage

global currentimage

global movementimage

global visionimage

global cumulativevision

global cumulativemotion

global countblack

global countstill

global iloop

on beginSprite

-- set up the initial variables and lists

-- excitation threshold and boredom (death) thresholds

visionexcite = 100

visionboredom = 20

movementexcite = 20

movementboredom = 20

-- lists (arrays) that will be used to identify movement and vision

visiondeath = list()

motiondeath = list()

previousimage = list()

currentimage = list()

movementimage = list()

visionimage = list()

cumulativevision = list()

cumulativemotion = list()

countblack = list()

countstill = list()

iloop = 0

-- start webcamxtra and turn off globs processing for speed

w = 320

h = 240

webcamxtra = new (xtra "webcamxtra")

webcamxtra.start(w,h)

webcamxtra.findglobs(0)

-- get an initial image from the camera

webcamxtra.update()

-- the images and the 'cells' are made of sprites that are placed

-- on the stage in a disorganised way.

-- this code arranges each 'cell' into rectangular arrays

-- Each cell is set to being alive and counters that track

-- movement and light are set to zero

repeat with y = 0 to 11

repeat with x = 0 to 15

i = y*16+x+1

sprite(i).loc = point(x,y)*20 + point(175,10)

sprite(i+200).loc = point(x,y)*20 + point(20,270)

sprite(i+400).loc = point(x,y)*20 + point(350,270)

c = webcamxtra.average(x*20,y*20,x*20+10,y*20+10)

currentimage[i] = c

visiondeath[i] = FALSE

motiondeath[i] = FALSE

countstill[i] = 0

countblack[i] = 0

movementimage[i] = 0

visionimage[i] = 0

cumulativevision[i] = 0

cumulativemotion[i] = 0

end repeat

end repeat

end

on exitframe

-- put some rectangles around the position of the cell nets (a cosmetic measure)

lc = color(159,168,255)

(the stage).image.draw(10,260, 330, 500, lc, [#shapeType: #rect, #lineSize:1])

(the stage).image.draw(340,260, 660, 500, lc, [#shapeType: #rect, #lineSize:1])

-- copy the current image into the previous image

-- the difference between them will be used to track movement

previousimage = currentimage.duplicate()

-- get a new image (for some reason have to do this twice to avoid alternately unchanging frames)

webcamxtra.update()

webcamxtra.update()

iloop = iloop + 1

repeat with y = 0 to 11

repeat with x = 0 to 15

i = y*16+x+1

-- get the average value for a 20 x 20 rectangle in the image

c = webcamxtra.average(x*20,y*20,x*20+10,y*20+10)

-- set the main vision display with the colour values

sprite(i).color = c

currentimage[i] = c

-- do the maths for movement and vision

-- first do the maths for vision

vd = sqrt(c.red*c.red + c.blue*c.blue + c.green*c.green)

if vd<visionexcite then

countblack[i] = countblack[i] + 1

if countblack[i] >= visionboredom then

visiondeath[i] = TRUE

sprite(i+200).color = rgb(255,255,255)

end if

else

visionimage[i] = vd

end if

cumulativevision[i] = cumulativevision[i]+visionimage[i]

-- now do the maths for movement

pc = previousimage[i]

md = sqrt((c.red - pc.red)*(c.red - pc.red) + (c.blue - pc.blue)*(c.blue - pc.blue) + (c.green - pc.green)*(c.green - pc.green))

if md < movementexcite then

countstill[i] = countstill[i] +1

movementimage[i] = 0

if countstill[i] >= movementboredom then

motiondeath[i] = TRUE

sprite(i+400).color = rgb(255,255,255)

end if

else

movementimage[i] = md

cumulativemotion[i] = cumulativemotion[i] + 1

end if

end repeat

end repeat

-- draw first set of lines

repeat with y in [0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10]

repeat with x in [1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15]

i = y*16+x+1

ixv = x*20 +20

ixm = x * 20 + 350

iyv = y*20 + 270

iym = y*20 + 270

-- draw lines for first part of vision section

if visiondeath[i] = TRUE then

sprite(i+200).color = rgb(255,255,255)

lc = color(255,255,255)

if y <>0 then

-- draw line above i

(the stage).image.draw(ixv,iyv-3,ixv,iyv-17, lc)

end if

if x <> 15 then

-- draw line to right of i

(the stage).image.draw(ixv+3,iyv,ixv+17,iyv, lc)

end if

-- draw line below i

(the stage).image.draw(ixv,iyv+3,ixv,iyv+17, lc)

-- draw line to left of i

(the stage).image.draw(ixv-3,iyv,ixv-17,iyv, lc)

else

lc = color(0,0,0)

if y <>0 then

if visiondeath[i-16] = FALSE then

-- draw line above i if cell is alive

(the stage).image.draw(ixv,iyv-3,ixv,iyv-17, lc)

end if

end if

if x<> 15 then

if visiondeath[i+1] = FALSE then

-- draw line to right of i if cell is alive

(the stage).image.draw(ixv+3,iyv,ixv+17,iyv, lc)

end if

end if

if visiondeath[i+16] = FALSE then

-- draw line below i if cell is alive

(the stage).image.draw(ixv,iyv+3,ixv,iyv+17, lc)

end if

if visiondeath[i-1] = FALSE then

-- draw line to left of i if cell is alive

(the stage).image.draw(ixv-3,iyv,ixv-17,iyv, lc)

end if

end if

-- draw lines for first part of motion section

if motiondeath[i] = TRUE then

sprite(i+400).color = rgb(255,255,255)

lc = color(255,255,255)

if y <>0 then

-- draw line above i

(the stage).image.draw(ixm,iym-3,ixm,iym-17, lc)

end if

if x <> 15 then

-- draw line to right of i

(the stage).image.draw(ixm+3,iym,ixm+17,iym, lc)

end if

-- draw line below i

(the stage).image.draw(ixm,iym+3,ixm,iym+17, lc)

-- draw line to left of i

(the stage).image.draw(ixm-3,iym,ixm-17,iym, lc)

else

lc = color(0,0,0)

if y <>0 then

if motiondeath[i-16] = FALSE then

-- draw line above i if cell is alive

(the stage).image.draw(ixm,iym-3,ixm,iym-17, lc)

end if

end if

if x<> 15 then

if motiondeath[i+1] = FALSE then

-- draw line to right of i if cell is alive

(the stage).image.draw(ixm+3,iym,ixm+17,iym, lc)

end if

end if

if motiondeath[i+16] = FALSE then

-- draw line below i if cell is alive

(the stage).image.draw(ixm,iym+3,ixm,iym+17, lc)

end if

if motiondeath[i-1] = FALSE then

-- draw line to left of i if cell is alive

(the stage).image.draw(ixm-3,iym,ixm-17,iym, lc)

end if

end if

end repeat

end repeat

-- draw second set of lines

repeat with y in [1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11]

repeat with x in[0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14]

i = y*16+x+1

ixv = x*20 +20

ixm = x * 20 + 350

iyv = y*20 + 270

iym = y*20 + 270

-- draw lines for second part of vision section

if visiondeath[i] = TRUE then

lc = color(255,255,255)

-- draw line above i

(the stage).image.draw(ixv,iyv-3,ixv,iyv-17, lc)

-- draw line to right of i

(the stage).image.draw(ixv+3,iyv,ixv+17,iyv, lc)

if y <> 11 then

-- draw line below i

(the stage).image.draw(ixv,iyv+3,ixv,iyv+17, lc)

end if

-- draw line to left of i

if x <>0 then

(the stage).image.draw(ixv-3,iyv,ixv-17,iyv, lc)

end if

else

lc = color(0,0,0)

if visiondeath[i-16] = FALSE then

-- draw line above i if cell is alive

(the stage).image.draw(ixv,iyv-3,ixv,iyv-17, lc)

end if

if visiondeath[i+1] = FALSE then

-- draw line to right of i if cell is alive

(the stage).image.draw(ixv+3,iyv,ixv+17,iyv, lc)

end if

if y <> 11 then

if visiondeath[i+16] = FALSE then

-- draw line below i if cell is alive

(the stage).image.draw(ixv,iyv+3,ixv,iyv+17, lc)

end if

end if

if visiondeath[i-1] = FALSE then

if x <>0 then

-- draw line to left of i if cell is alive

(the stage).image.draw(ixv-3,iyv,ixv-17,iyv, lc)

end if

end if

end if

-- draw lines for second part of motion section

if motiondeath[i] = TRUE then

lc = color(255,255,255)

-- draw line above i

(the stage).image.draw(ixm,iym-3,ixm,iym-17, lc)

-- draw line to right of i

(the stage).image.draw(ixm+3,iym,ixm+17,iym, lc)

-- draw line below i

if y<>11 then

(the stage).image.draw(ixm,iym+3,ixm,iym+17, lc)

end if

-- draw line to left of i

if x<>0 then

(the stage).image.draw(ixm-3,iym,ixm-17,iym, lc)

end if

else

lc = color(0,0,0)

if motiondeath[i-16] = FALSE then

-- draw line above i if cell is alive

(the stage).image.draw(ixm,iym-3,ixm,iym-17, lc)

end if

if motiondeath[i+1] = FALSE then

-- draw line to right of i if cell is alive

(the stage).image.draw(ixm+3,iym,ixm+17,iym, lc)

end if

if y<>11 then

if motiondeath[i+16] = FALSE then

-- draw line below i if cell is alive

(the stage).image.draw(ixm,iym+3,ixm,iym+17, lc)

end if

end if

if motiondeath[i-1] = FALSE then

if x <> 0 then

-- draw line to left of i if cell is alive

(the stage).image.draw(ixm-3,iym,ixm-17,iym, lc)

end if

end if

end if

end repeat

end repeat

go 1

end

on endsprite

webcamxtra.stop()

end

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François Dagognet, Toward a Biopsychiatry, Incorporations - pages 517-541, ZONE by Jonathan Crary & Stanford Kwinter, NY 1992

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