On Neuroaesthetics

Erik Morse at Artforum:

“Neuroaesthetics can perhaps be understood in the Duchampian sense,” he claimed in a 2004 interview. “Neuroscience is a readymade, which is recontextualized out from its original context as a scientific-based paradigm into one that is aesthetically based.” He pointed to Conceptualists like Dan Graham and Sol LeWitt as precursors of a later generation of artists who would act as mediators between an increasingly technologized and monetized society and its hyperactive visual culture. Neuroaesthetics endeavored not to produce a synthesis of neuroscience and aesthetics, but rather to estrange the former from normal usage—much as Duchamp did the bicycle wheel and bottle rack—and reenvision in a more psychodynamic capacity its tools for mapping cognitive categories such as color, memory, and spatial relationships, in order to reveal, in Neidich’s words, “the idea of becoming brain.”

Chaoid Gallery was an offshoot of artbrain.org and Journal of Neuroaesthetics, founded in 1996 by Neidich and artist Nathalie Anglès as a critical and curatorial project devoted to the dissemination of neuroaesthetic theory within media arts, a discipline then in its infancy.

more here.