MATTEO BULTRINI. NELLO SPECCHIO DEL COLORE [On Facing Colour]

Studio Polyhedra, Roma · 23 – 31 maggio 2015
Inaugurazione: Sabato 23 maggio 2015, ore 19:00

Matteo Bultrini (Roma, 1979) è uno dei più promettenti e influenti artisti italiani nel panorama pittorico del momento. Le molteplici ricerche sul colore del XX secolo trovano nella sua opera il loro punto di confluenza estrema. Anche se il suo tragitto è autonomo, il suo lavoro oscilla tra le grandi polle cromatiche di Serge Poliakoff e le raffinate e aristocratiche trame di luce di Victor Pasmore: una ricerca che racconta, come in un poema, l’alfabeto del colore, una lettera di luce.

A cura del Prof. Carmine Benincasa, ‘Nello Specchio del Colore’ (23 – 31 maggio) raccoglie 30 opere rappresentative della ricerca dell’artista in quest’ultimo triennio.

La mostra inaugura la prima stagione artistica di Studio Polyhedra – il nuovo spazio espositivo di Polyhedra, organizzazione impegnata nella sinossi comparata tra arte e scienza e finalizzata alla ricerca artistica e contemporanea.

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A one-day workshop taking place at UCL, 29 April 2015.

[Deadline for submission has passed]

On Being the Right Size: Science, Technology and Scale

Scholars in the Science and Technology Studies community, broadly construed, have had much to say about specific kinds of scale. For example, we have asked how measurement scales are built, how science travels from local to global and back again, how laboratories transform microcosm and macrocosm, how models stand for the world, and how big science differs from table-top experiment. Likewise history, sociology and philosophy of technology have yet adequately to bring scale and scaling into view. But what can we say about scaling in general? What do models, games, photographs, maps, instruments, units, inscriptions, amplifiers and laboratories have in common?

We want to ask: how is scale in science governed? Can, or should, big science ever become small again? What scales should STS and HPS study? Is there more to scale than the local and the global? What are the relationships between materiality and scale? Are technologies always implicated in changing scale? Is the human scale the best scale for science?

We are particularly interested in fresh thinking about scale that is integrative, bold, playful and not afraid to challenge sacred cows, big or small.

The workshop will involve short papers from speakers, invited and found through an open call, with plenty of time for discussion. We are planning a mix of historical, philosophical and sociological perspectives.

More information on the STS department can be found here.

“The Body, the Brain, Symbolic Expression and Its Experience: An Experimental Aesthetics Perspective”

Wed Feb 11th 6pm & Feb 18th 6pm.
Chandaria Lectures, Senate House (London WC1), Room 349, third floor

Description

Cognitive neuroscience can shed new light – from its own methodological reductionist perspective – on the aesthetic quality of human nature and its natural creative inclination. By exploiting the neurocognitive approach, viewed as a sort of ‘cognitive archeology’, we can empirically investigate the neurophysiological brain-body mechanisms that make our interactions with the world possible, detect possible functional antecedents of our cognitive skills and measure the socio-cultural influence exerted by human cultural evolution onto the very same cognitive skills. We can now look at the aesthetic-symbolic dimension of human existence not only from a semiotic-hermeneutic perspective, but starting from the dimension of bodily presence. In so doing we can deconstruct some of the concepts we normally use when referring to intersubjectivity or to aesthetics and art, as well as when referring to the experience we make of them.

This approach, which I’ll designate as ‘experimental aesthetics’, can enrich our understanding of symbolic expression and its reception, by studying their neural and bodily components. The definition of art and the way we appreciate it are  both historically and socio-culturally determined. However, while acknowledging that aesthetic experience is multilayered, the cognitive primacy of our reactions to the outcomes of symbolic expression can be challenged. In the course of the three lectures ’ll review empirical work on the aesthetic experience of static and moving images like paintings,  and movies. I will posit that the aesthetic experience of the outcomes of human symbolic expression can be grounded on the variety of embodied simulation mechanisms they evoke in beholders.

I will show that the symbolic processes characterizing our species, in spite of their progressive abstraction and externalization from the body, keep their bodily ties intact. Symbolic expression is tied to the body not only because the body is the symbol-making instrument, but also because it is the main medium allowing symbols experience.

It will be concluded that cognitive neuroscience can surrender us from the forced choice between the totalizing relativism of social constructivism, which doesn’t leave any room to the constitutive role of the brain-body in cognition, and the deterministic scientism of some quarters of evolutionary psychology, which aims at explaining art exclusively in terms of adaptation and modularity.

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Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.

Thanks to Ubu Web, it is possible not only to read Borges, but to hear him also. Here Borges’ complete NortonLectures, at Harvard University (1967-1968)