The Contemporary Paradigm and Cognitive Neuroscience

Hi - sorry for the delay in writing. You know how it is: you have the best of intentions but things come up. So I gave a lecture in Oz  on the gnostic ideology underpinning Cognitive Neuroscience. There are papers available, there's also a journal call for this subject which will soon go large. Everyone loves CG and MFRI scanners because they seem to offer proof where before there was only conjecture.

Eye tracking only tells you where eyes are triggered to move to, which talks about design but not art, it talks about mechanics but not aesthetics. As it stands in the attached paper the researchers are careful to say that CG and MFRI scanners only imp lie certain things - and of course everyone's executed because the medieval latin scholar has access to 'proof' as much as the hard core scientist - but the truth is the proof is circumstantial.

The Arts and Humanities Research Council has called for the cultural values evaluation project to reveal ideas of the value of culture and art that are more empirical than flowery french prose and at back of that the work of the Frankfurt Group, already criticised as a misdirection by Thomas Crow in 'The Intelligence of Art'.

But - because society functions in faddist terms (as a friend of mine says: "academics are like cows in a field they hear a loud bang and all look in the same direction" - but you can substitute artists, cinematographers - whatever you like here) then we can be sure that rock and roll currently finds its resting place in Cognitive Neuroscience.

And then there's the problem of what art is in an age of integration (having superseded convergence). It's said by Emeritus Professors of Cognitive Neuroscience that the Artist is the cognitive formative node that sits within a cognitive distributive network - and that art is what it is to be human, not just a thing that humans do (note the Gnostic position) - so the question arises in an age when everyone has a platform for screeching their individuality (and here I always laugh at the Italian phrase: "Few are called; But many answer"): what is the function of art within a paradigm that few even recognise has superseded an older paradigm that no longer functions?

I make art work that is cognisant of this set of problems and have two new works that directly deal with the central problem of the role of the artist - one of which I have to premier which has taken a year and is a triptych which feature a reconstruction of Dali's Crucifixion (really). I'm also preparing to do a performance event where I engage with the celebrity Ted lecture stance which is called: 'An Anatomy of Light'. This is a lecture in-the-round which invites the audience to consider how the world is illuminated, how we use light to manifest 'moving images' and what happens when light ceases to operate in the universe (I say moving images but that's a complete fallacy - it is the mind that moves).

So there it is, that's what I've been thinking about lately - how to deal with a new era of human thought given that contemporarily we're still thinking in old pattens.