Tag: multisensorial

Ways of Looking: Alternative Encounters with Art and Artifacts

“When we encounter something beautiful, we usually experience two kinds of reactions. One may be moved by learning the background of the work or the artist, while the other one is an emotional excitement we feel for no apparent reason.”— Suntory Museum of Art. One would guess that this quote is based on theories of lateralization, stating that the right hemisphere of the brain controls emotion, while the left hemisphere is dominant in language expression. While there is evidence that discounts the left/right brain concept, many people still believe in this distinction and that their preference for reason or emotion may be genetic. Held at the Suntory Museum of Art in Tokyo, Japan, from April 27 to June 2, 2019, “Information or Inspiration? Japanese aesthetics to enjoy with the left side and right side of the brain” plays with this debate in brain science and invites visitors to experience art via two routes: the information route and the inspiration route. (read more...)

#ExistenceOnSearch: Multispecies encounters and knowledge dialogue at the in-between space

Colombia is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world. According to Colombia’s Biodiversity Information System (SiB Colombia), the country has 51,330 species, including 1,909 species of birds, 528 species of mammals, and 1,521 species of freshwater fish. Colombia ranks second in the world in terms of biodiversity. Its territory is an interweaving of different ecosystems that favors a profusion of life, much of it endemic. However, many of these species are threatened by a variety of human-influenced factors: from the expansion of the agricultural frontier and intensive ranching to the effects of global warming on ecosystems. Humans are also protagonists in the production of life as “diverse,” at least in its existence as data. Biodiversity requires the cataloging, comparison, identification and counting of the living. Without these activities, it would be impossible to state the figures mentioned above. (read more...)

Art, neuroscience and ethnography

Neuroscience The brain is a wild and wonderful thing. Even in a damaged, broken, or diseased state, it performs wonders. Oliver Sacks, neurologist and prolific writer, knew this and he wrote a series of books that documented the inner machinations of injured minds. These are detailed clinical studies of patients, documenting the unusual and often unimaginable. Many of these conditions are extraordinarily rare, drawn from only one or two documented cases. Oliver Sacks collected these clinical case studies, presenting them to his readers like some sort of text-based museum of the absurd. Almost ethnographic stories. Many of his patient accounts are studies in imagination, delusion, sensory, and memory – a ‘frenzied confabulatory delirium’ (Sacks 1998: 109), ‘kaleidoscopic mutations’ (108), ‘sensory ghosts’ (66), and an 88-year-old woman living with neuro-syphilis who preferred the state of ‘mania’ (103). His stories speak of the visceral of the injured mind – sensitivities, time slippage, pain, (read more...)