THE COMMITTEE FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE STUDIES PRESENTS

Part of the NeuroCultures: Lecture Series at the CUNY Graduate Center

Suzanne Anker

Fundamentally Human: Contemporary Art and Neuroscience

Thursday October 6, 2011, 6–8p

The James Gallery @ The CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, New York

Free and Open to the Public

As narratives embedded in contemporary texts, films and visual art, discourses concerning the neurosciences have emerged within a cultural context. From Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist to Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report to Art and Neuroscience Fellowships sponsored by the Italian Academy at Columbia University in NYC, research in the neurosciences has set into motion questions relating to the social, aesthetic, and political impact of such scientific findings. In addition to scientific value, neuroscientific images, concepts and theories reflect shifts in perception and expression. In part, brought about by technological intervention, what was once thought to be the stuff of science fiction is now actually real. Fundamentally Human: Contemporary Art and Neuroscience, explores the ways in which state-of-the art technologies are intersecting and augmenting the artist’s imagination in the 21st century. From algorithmic computation, to robotic drawing to rapid-prototype sculpture, high-tech ways and means transform data into aesthetic experience.

SUZANNE ANKER is Chair, BFA Fine Arts, School of Visual Arts. Anker is a visual artist and theoretician working with genetic imagery. Her work has been shown in museums and galleries including the Walker Art Center, the Smithsonian Institute, The Phillips Collection, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in Japan. Anker is host of The Bio-Blurb Show, an Internet radio program sponsored by WPS1 and the Museum of Modern Art. She is the co-author, with the late Dorothy Nelkin, of The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age (2004). ADRIENNE KLIEN, Sciences and Arts, Graduate Center, will serve as moderator.

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Women and Society and the Center for the Humanities, Graduate Center