To what extent do measurements from an electroencephalography headset provide evidence of the aesthetic contemplation state of the person wearing it? In the 2015 neuroaesthetic research project Action Potential, the art and science Interspecifics collective monitors the brain electrical activity of a group of visitors to an exhibition about Octavio Paz, the famous Mexican poet,   and uses these measurements as material for sound composition. What is discovered in this experiment is not exactly a scientific result, since the EEG readings neither validate nor refute any hypothesis about aesthetic experience, but it is also not art in a conventional sense, as it depends entirely on clinical measurement protocols. This ambiguity is the point because by submitting aesthetic encounter to empirical instrumentation, Interspecifics lays bare the assumptions that usually keep the two domains apart with science requiring falsifiable propositions and art resisting reduction to data. What emerges at their contact surface is a productive friction instead of a synthesis, a mode of inquiry that measures and composes without limiting expression, taking us to reconsider what counts as knowledge and what counts as form. (read more...)