Art
Neurophilosophy
Category archives for Art
Frida Kahlo’s life of pain
Posted by Mo on January 24, 2008 The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) had a life filled with pain. At the age of 6, she contracted polio, and this caused a paralysis of the right leg from which Kahlo took one year to recover. Then, in 1925, Kahlo was involved in a horrific traffic accident: the school bus she was travelling on…
Google Earth image of Moses parting the Red Sea
Posted by Mo on December 18, 2007 God’s Eye View, which depicts four biblical events as if captured by Google Earth, is the work of The Glue Society, a collective of writers, designers and art/ film directors based in Sydney, Australia. Says Glue Society member James Dive: We like to disorientate audiences a little with all our work. And with this piece…
Illusory installations
Posted by Mo on December 10, 2007 Opposition of Memory, by Luzern-based artist Nils Nova.
The impressionists’ eye diseases
Posted by Mo on December 4, 2007 An article in the NY Times discusses the work of Michael Marmor, a professor of ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine who has created a computer simulation of how eye diseases such as macular degeneration and cataracts have affected the painting styles of a number of impressionist artists. Claude Monet, for example, was known to…
Emotional systems
Posted by Mo on November 30, 2007 Emotional Systems is the inaugural exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Culture Centre La Strozzina at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Italy. It begins tomorrow and runs until 3rd February, 2008. The…installation…[includes] an exhibition, a publication and a programme of lectures designed to investigate the topic of emotions, proposing a reinterpretation of the correlation between…
A clockwork beetle
Posted by Mo on November 16, 2007 In his Insect Lab Studio, sculptor Mike Libby customizes real insects with parts from antique pocketwatches and electronic components from old circuit boards. Here, he describes how the idea first came to him: One day I found a dead intact beetle. I then located an old wristwatch, thinking of how the beetle also operated and…
Synaesthesia: The hidden sense
Posted by Mo on November 16, 2007 Synaesthesia is a condition in which stimuli of one type evoke sensations in another sensory modality. For example, hearing particular sounds might evoke strong sensations of colour or (more rarely) words might evoke strong tastes in the mouth. In The Hidden Sense, social scientist Cretien van Crampen investigates synaesthesia from an artisitic and scientific perspective.…
Mapping brainland
Posted by Mo on November 9, 2007 The cover of the current issue of Neuron features this brainland map, by Sam Brown, a cartographer based in New Zealand. Printed A3, A2 and A1 sized copies of the map can be purchased from Unit Seven. …created from a reference photo of a real human brain which was used to build the 3D terrain.…
van Gogh & the history of manic depression
Posted by Mo on November 7, 2007 The introductory chapter of Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression, by Frederick K. Goodwin and Kay Redfield Jamison, provides an excellent description of how Emil Kraepelin first classified manic depression (or bipolar disorder) and related conditions in the late 19th century, and how his work has influenced the way in which psychiatrists treat these…
Depictions of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome in migraine art
Posted by Mo on October 16, 2007 These pictures illustrate macrosomatognosia, the condition in which abnormal activity in the somatosensory regions of the brain causes one to perceive the body, or parts of it, to be abnormally large. Both pictures are representations of partial macrosomatognosia, in which specific parts of the body are affected. They were drawn by artists who experience migraines,…