Blind Man's Bluff (2002)

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Single Channel Video, 01:58

A performance of a dream sequence is projected upon a head in front of a movie screen. The action takes place in Los Angeles on Beverly Boulevard that is adjacent to a building with a mirror surface. The performance is videotaped in the reflection of this building sometimes cutting to the real street scene. The constructed narrative concerns a blind man walking down the street and his uncovering of the diabolic clown under the happy clown’s costume, a truth which only the blind man can know. Crippled vision becomes thereby a metaphor for the creative self who investigates alternative paradigms outside that of the institutional notion of visible truth. The flow of the video from the screen to the skull to that of the screen again concerns the notion of the mutated observer. That in fact the brain and the mind are sculpted more effectively by artificial stimuli.


Education of the Eye (2009-2012)

Education of the Eye Part I

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Education of the Eye Part II

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Neuroaesthetics Conference (2005)

Warren Neidich Conference on Neuroaesthetics

Full texts published in the fourth issue of the Journal of Neuro-Aesthetic Theory on artbrain.org

Conference Sessions

First Dialectic: Edges of the Envelope | Chair: Charlie Gere

Brian Massumi
Ready to Anticipate: Pre-emptive Perception and the Power of the Image

D.J. Culture and Sampling | Chair: Daniel Glaser, Mental Projections

Paul Miller, a.k.a. Dj Spooky, Rhythm Science

Respondents:
Kodwo Eshun
The Affective Logic of the Sound File in the Age of the Global Sound Archive

Drugs, Altered States of Consciousness and Cultural Production | Chair: Warren Neidich

Diedrich Diederichsen
The Heuristics of Psychedelic Enlightenment

Respondents:
Margarita Gluzberg
How to Get Beyong the Market - Transubjective Reality in the Salyia Divinorum Forest (Let the Crowds in)

Martina Wicklein
The Brain on Drugs

Curating the Neuro-Sensorial-Cognitive | Chair: Andrew Patrizio, Neuro-Curo

A Discussion with:
Chloe Vaitsou
Synaesthesia, a Neuroaesthetics Exhibition

Isabelle Moffat
This is Tomorrow: A case of Psychoneural Isomorphism

Art Praxis: Part 1 | Chair: Charlie Gere

Joseph Kosuth
Celebrating Contingency

Respondent:
John Armleder
Pertinent Works

Art Praxis: Part 2 | Chair: Scott Lash

Scott Lash
Introduction to Panel Art Praxis

Olafur Eliasson
Uncertainty of Colour Matching and Related Idea

Respondents:
Beau Lotto
The Postmodern Brain

Jules Davidoff
Colour Categories as Cultural Constructs

Israel Rosenfeld
The Question of Plasticity

Architecture and Architectonics | Chair: Deborah Hauptmann

Marcos Novak
Alloaesthetics and Neuroaesthetics: Travels through Phenomenology and Neurophysiology

Respondents:
Andreas Roepstorff
Functional Architectonics of the Brain: Co-evolving Structures of Meaning

Philippe Rahm
Inhalable Spaces

Neuroaesthetics: Process and Becoming

Introduction: Warren Neidich

Charles Wolfe
The Social Brain

Armen Avanessian
Aesthetical Theory, Scientific Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art: Contrasting Concepts and Perspectives in Art

Cultured Brain 1 | Chair: Johannes Menzel

Warren Neidich
Resistance is Futile

Cultured Brain 2 | Chair: Howard Caygill

Charlie Gere
Can Art go on without a Body?

Respondent:

Lucy Steeds
André Leroi-Gourhan: Neuroaesthetics?

Cultured Brain 3 | Introduction: Warren Neidich

Barbara Marie Stafford
Soma-Aesthetics, Constructing Interiority

Respondent:
Sarah Maharaj
From the Afterlife to the Atmospherics reassessing our basic assumptions


Body-Wall Maple Cottage (2005)

Body-Wall Maple Cottage

2005

In this work a false wall made out of plywood wound its way around an abandoned cottage first blocking the staircase, then creating a false passageway that began at the original door and continued until the front wall of the house itself. This new space created a hybrid space in-between the original house and the new wall and thereby set up a dialectic between past and future with the spectator mediating between the two. The visitors were transformed into performance artists and actors and were made aware, by a small light, of a viewing device through which they were meant to look to see an enclosed domestic space reminiscent of the places of inspection so often used by Sherlock Holmes. The optical pathway for this inspection was a hole cut out of the eye of an old portrait painting that hung on the inside of this simulated do­mestic space. This opening in the painting was lined up on one hand with a hole in the wall itself and on the other with the viewer’s eyes. Together they created a machinic assemblage that was aligned with a mirror hung directly across the room which reflected the antique painting, mentioned above, and the eye of the viewer that through his or her participation was now part of. The viewer’s eye, as it looked through the painting from behind the wall, now became part of the paint­ing itself. The hidden passageway became an uncanny space in which the fragmented viewer through a transformational process of the experience of becoming an actor in this architectural scenario became a whole body again not as himself but as a painting with all the meanings pertaining to the nature of portraiture itself.


Blanqui's Cosmology (1997-2007)

Blanqui’s Cosmology exhibition, Trolley Gallery, London, 2007
B&W silver prints, Each: 16×20″

Louis-Auguste Blanqui was a famous 19th-century political activist who was jailed innumerable times for his views. In one of his incarcerations he wrote a cosmology of revolution which forms the basis of the title of this work. This work consists of over 1200 portraits I took of men and some women with shaved heads over the past 10 years. This work investigates the early roots of a modern subject. The photos are long exposure photos and document a performance in which i draw on the head of my subjects with a pen light. What results is a work that concerns not only the beginning of photography, drawing with light, but also the history of portraiture, eugenics, phrenology, spirit photography, electricity, the unconscious, x-rays, astronomy photography and hysteria.


Memorial Day (1998)

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Brainwash (1997)

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