Video: Amy Ione Lecture: “Art and the Brain: Plasticity, Embodiment, and the Unclosed Circle”

Keynote lecture for Off the Lip 2015 conference at Cog Novo: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Cognitive Innovation: Conference from 9-11 Sep 2015. The lecture introduces ideas from Ione’s forthcoming book, Art and the Brain: Plasticity, Embodiment, and the Unclosed Circle see www.diatrope.com/artbrainbook.

Also posted on the page are the two other keynotes: “Roger Malina, New Forms of Art-Science Collaboration: Case Studies” and “Sundar Sarukkai, Cognitive Innovation in Mathematics”, see http://www.cognovo.eu/events/otlip15-keynotes.php#amy-ione

Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (Book Review)

Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature
by Alva Noë

Reviewed by Amy Ione
PDF

Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature endeavors to, as Alva Noë the author puts it, introduce art as “its own manner of investigation and its own legitimate source of knowledge” (p. xii) using the enactive approach that he has been working with for a number of years. According to this view, “experience is something we enact or perform; it’s not something that happens in us or to us” (p. 215), “it is something we do, or make, or achieve. And like everything else we achieve, we do so only against the background of our skills, knowledge, situation, and environment, including our social environment” (p. xii). His basic philosophical argument is that we can only understand the human mind in relation to bodily actions given that our experience is situational. Within this he claims that our lives are structured by organization and because art is a practice for bringing our organization into view, it reorganizes us.

When we consider art, Noë tells us, there are two levels we need to keep in mind. On the one hand, the defining feature of what he terms Level-1 activities is that they are basic and involuntary modes of organization. On the other hand, Level-2 activities play with and re-shape level-1 activities. The sum total is that active human experience is neither personal consciousness nor subpersonal (autonomic) consciousness. It is not personal because it is interactive and (again) situational activities add meaning to our lives in a way that does not reduce to subpersonal (autonomic) consciousness. Since technologies are a part of how we reorganize our lives, and art is an engagement with technologies, art includes a second-level manner of organization/reorganization.

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IONE, A: Nature Exposed to our Method of Questioning

Nature Exposed Book CoverNature Exposed to Our Method of Questioning
by Amy Ione

Buy it Now

Nature Exposed to our Method of Questioning explores how we create our cultural assumptions about nature, culture and ourselves.

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