ART AS A GUIDE: ENGAGING WITH NEUROSCIENCE AT ‘EDGE’
Insula by Ashley Middleton, Anna Mechlińska, Bileam Tschepe, Célia Landry (SomaLab). An immersive installation that integrates biology, light, sound, and BCI technology into an interactive experience of neural networks where viewers are immersed in their mental state as determined through a brain-computer interface and algorithmic design. Photo credit: Ashley Middleton, Anna Mechlińska, Bileam Tschepe, Célia Landry (SomaLab)
FEATURING NEURONAL SCULPTURES, SYNAESTHESIA-INDUCING PAINTINGS, CONCEPTS OF VISION AND CONSCIOUSNESS — EDGE: BLURRING THE BORDER BETWEEN ART AND NEUROSCIENCE — BRINGS SCIENTIFIC CONCEPTS TO THE PUBLIC THROUGH AN ENGAGING MULTIMEDIA AND MULTISENSORY EXHIBITION.
We stand around Paths Relit, a multimedia installation at EDGE’s exhibition titled EDGE: blurring the border between art and neuroscience. Ian Stewart, one of the four coordinators of EDGE, stands inside the sculpture of a neural network that hangs from the ceiling, his head between eighteen interconnected pathways; a crown of thorny neurons.
‘Recognising that art isn’t limited to an aesthetic experience, that it can also involve information transfer, opens up a hugely powerful way of thinking about what you involve art in and what you try to bring to an artistic space,’ he says from inside the sculpture.
PathsRelit by Tina Ghelani, Josef Lilljegren, Karl Pannek
A piece that reflects on the complex modes by which neurons in the brain connect with one another. The piece tackles this topic through different visualizations enacted out in three pieces. Photo credit: Nailya Bikmurzina
The multimedia installation, Paths Relit, takes the complex subjects of synaptic plasticity and memory formation and makes them easily understandable and relatable. It is effectively impossible to see a memory being formed in the brain, but the installation renders this concept visible through a sculpture, video, and print triad.
This is what EDGE’s exhibition is all about: placing people inside scientific concepts through sensorimotor interactions with art. EDGE challenges scientists to see beyond their strictly prescribed realm and introduces artists to scientific concepts and methods to push their own work. It also aims to bring neuroscience to the public in an engaging way by using art as a medium.
EDGE coordinator Corinna Kühnapfel explains:
‘In a certain sense, both art and science attempt to understand and describe the world around us: both practices are research. What differs is their traditions, methods, ways of communicating and their audiences. Art creates experiences that are more memorable by evoking emotions, aha-moments, or understanding, compared to when reading a scientific text. Art therefore provides different means and access through which viewers can explore a scientific topic.’
This year’s EDGE exhibition in Berlin was split into two parts: Part I was hosted by the MIND foundation from October 15th-18th, and Part II was planned for early November in Alte Münze, but was moved online to a virtual exhibition due to Covid-19 restrictions.
Conceptualising neuroscientific ideas using art
The sculpture component of Paths Relit in which Stewart stands represents a neuronal microcircuit where white and red LEDs help to visualise action potential propagation between different nodes of the network. The white pathways represent positive memory formation while the red pathways represent negative memory formation. The red pathways are generally shortest, a representation that reflects how negative memories are prioritised in our brains, why we need them for survival. It is why we so vividly remember the bitter taste of a berry or why we still cringe at those particularly embarrassing memories from youth.
PathsRelit by Tina Ghelani, Josef Lilljegren, Karl Pannek. Photo credit: Sofia Bergmann
PathsRelit by Tina Ghelani, Josef Lilljegren, Karl Pannek. Photo credit: Sofia Bergmann
While Paths Relit conceptualises the constant push and pull between positive and negative memory formation, the video on the wall next to it shows how plastic and malleable these interactions between neurons can be. This video uses images captured from neurons and shows a looping sequence which models how information can flow between neurons. It is essentially an impression of what synaptic plasticity looks like; an ever-changing and life-long balance of strengthening and weakening connections in the brain. A final print then renders an image of this plasticity frozen in time; a snapshot of a memory.
PathsRelit by Tina Ghelani, Josef Lilljegren, Karl Pannek.
Tina Ghelani, one of the three artists behind the piece, says it serves as a reminder to try to hold on to positive memories as well. ‘This is a way to show you the macroview, to show you how memories connect, but also to bring in the philosophical aspect of synaptic plasticity. We weigh negative memories heavier because we repeat them more often, but this can be done for positive memories too as we have all the power to modulate them,’ says Ghelani.
Necessity Precedes Itself by Andrey Kharitonov. Exploring the link between visual art and neuroscience, asking how slices of scientific data or snapshots depicted in a painting can represent something much larger and complex. Photo credit: Andrey Kharitonov
Ghelani, who drove the concept and spent countless hours during lockdown weaving and bending wires of LED lights in her apartment, is a postdoc at Charité, Berlin. She reached out to Karl Pannek, a programmer who helped her develop the programmed elements of the sculpture, and Josef Lilljegren, a data visualiser who did the video and poster accompanying the sculpture. She says that interacting with art is tremendously important for her science:
‘During my PhD, I visualised neurons in 2D, but I’ve always wanted to see them in 3D structures. That’s why I made the sculpture, so I could walk through neurons. There are things I can’t achieve in my science when I’m being analytical. Art allows me to gain understanding into these cant’s, it gives me a way to subconsciously mull over the data and concepts I work with each day. It also helps me to see and share my research in a simplified way.’
Fortuitous subterfuge by Andrey Kharitonov. Exploring the link between visual art and neuroscience, asking how slices of scientific data or snapshots depicted in a painting can represent something much larger and complex. Photo credit: Andrey Kharitonov
Interacting with neuroscience through multisensory engagement
By interacting with the art at EDGE, the science begins to rub off on you. Concepts stick like pollen on bee legs, urging you to stop and ask more questions in your quest for the nectar of neuroscientific knowledge.
Recent research suggests that stopping to appreciate the aesthetics of something facilitates learning about it (Sarasso et al., 2020). This idea of ‘stopping for knowledge’ is driven by hedonic feedback: it directly drives you to ask questions and seek information. The subjective pleasure obtained during this aesthetic analysis motivates the viewer to more deeply assess things (Berridge & Kringelbach, 2015). Ultimately, a passive appreciation of art is simply not enough: one must fully experience it through interaction in order to truly conceptualise and mentally consolidate the concepts at hand; it is about touching it, feeling it, interacting with all aspects of it that makes the knowledge stick so keenly.
Multisensory interactivity is crucial for achieving EDGE’s mission of using art to communicate science. ‘The medium of art is accessible, and people innately know how to consume art in a way,’ says EDGE coordinator Amy Young. ‘We always try to have an element of interactivity in our exhibitions: giving people the chance to experience data helps them gain a new understanding of science.’
Around the corner from the Paths Relit exhibit, participants line up for PreSonar to chant and meditate in isolation. One by one, participants sit in a candle-lit closet in front of a microphone, wearing noise-cancelling headphones. Guided to chant freely, each individual becomes encompassed by the echoes of their own voice through headphones, with additional sensory feedback from vibrations fed into a device in the chair. The effect is that the participant is in a chanting circle with their self, with the exhibit integrating concepts from Eastern philosophy with modern science and psychology.
Dream Extractor 3000 by Bahar Gözmener. An experimental short film dealing with subconscious processes reality, and how the millennial generation copes with topics such as coming of age, digitalization and mass media culture. Photo credit: Bahar Gözmener
In PreSonar, Nicolas Endres, a psychologist, worked with audio-designer Steffan Günther and Anna Marike-Kanitz, an artistic methods researcher and clinical psychologist, to relay a personal experience for each participant by connecting them with their own voice, body, and mind. ‘One important aspect of PreSonar is coming in contact with yourself,’ says Endres, ‘I think voice is a very good tool to realise, how am I feeling? What’s going on? What are some blockages?’
The artists behind PreSonar aimed to create a space for people to let go and chant unapologetically. They believe the PreSonar experience can be therapeutic; an idea which comes from combining the somatic marker hypothesis with the theory of Samskara in Buddhism. The somatic marker hypothesis proposes that emotional processes and feelings guide behaviour and decisions (Damasio, 2005; Muñoz, 2017), and Samskara says that every action or intent leaves an imprint on the deeper structure of a person’s mind. Releasing these fixed tensions and emotions through chanting and vibration, they believe, is a critical way to tackle issues such as trauma.
Sens(e)scape by Roxana Ardeleanu, Painting and audio multimedia piece exploring how the brain connects colour to sound through synaesthesia. Photo credit: Sofia Bergmann
Sens(e)scape by Roxana Ardeleanu, Painting and audio multimedia piece exploring how the brain connects colour to sound through synaesthesia. Photo credit: Roxana Ardeleanu.
Sense(e)scape by Roxana Ardeleanu is another exhibit which utilises multisensory experiences leading participants to pause for knowledge. She poses the questions: what does it mean to hear as if looking, to look as if hearing? Greeting the visitors at the exhibition’s entrance, her large abstract painting is meant to be looked at while listening to an accompanying audio soundscape played through headphones. After several minutes engaging with Sense(e)scape, the piece starts to feel truly psychedelic as paint strokes, splatters and drips appear to fall or pulsate in congruence with the white soundscape coming from the headphones. The soundscape effectively results in the perception of dry paint appearing fluid and dynamic.
Sense(e)scape is about synaesthesia; a cognitive cross-perception trait seen in around four percent of the population, where stimulating one sense can involuntarily activate other senses (Banissy et al., 2014). It could be a sneeze ‘sounding’ yellow, coriander ‘smelling’ purple, or it could result from deep associations between language and our senses. By interacting with Sense(e)scape we were able to conceptualise synaesthesia and experience the way sensory perceptions can blend and cross-associate.
Dream by Shahryar Khorasani. Using graphite, charcoal, ink and watercolor, Khorasani’s drawings explore his dreams, emotions and subconscious. Photo credit: Shahryar Khorasani
Incidentally, Ardeleanu herself has synaesthesia. Her piece ignites this state within viewers, giving them a glimpse into the remarkable phenomenon:
‘This piece is part of ongoing research I’ve been doing about placing myself in different ambient places to explore my synaesthetic experience. This piece was an experiment where I wanted to translate my visual experience into an auditory one’
Inspiring the public
In Part I of EDGE’s exhibition, artists were available to talk to guests, which made the event feel like a combination of a conference poster session and a vernissage. This aspect is sadly lacking in the virtual exhibition, but many artists have made video talks about their pieces to inspire and enable discussion.
The interactions between guests, scientists and artists at EDGE facilitate discourse and knowledge transfer in a truly unique manner. In Ardeleanu’s work, this translation comes through understanding artistic representations of different sensory states. For others like Paths Relit it is about discovering how the brain forms and prioritises memories, while PreSonar tackles the notion of detaching from memories in search of the self.
But according to EDGE coordinator Amy Young, science isn’t always readily available and accessible to the public:
‘One of the things about the scientific process is that a lot of the research output is behind a paywall. I think art gives a possibility to share with a wider audience what would normally not be open to the public. We [scientists] are still in this ivory tower a lot, and I think art is a fantastic way to open up scientific concepts to non-experts.’
EDGE is championing the idea of a natural unity between science and art to share scientific knowledge and foster curiosity amongst the public. One aspect of this is creating physical spaces for neuro-art exhibitions; another is building a community of artists and scientists to collaborate on exploring humanity and the neurosciences. As Ghelani says, ‘There are really big open questions, and I see scientists braving the darkness and getting into it. I see artists doing it too. This is something that is an extremely strong connector.’
More on this exhibition and EDGE can be found at: https://edge-neuro.art
References:
Berridge, K. C., & Kringelbach, M. L. (2015). Pleasure systems in the brain. Neuron, 86(3), 646–664.
Muñoz, J. M. (2017). Somatic Markers, Rhetoric, and Post-truth. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 1273.