Center for Consciousness Studies
University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ
April 4-8, 2006
- curated by Brian Felsen
Minda Novek
- photography
- stereography (including antique View Master and Holmes Stereo reels)
- short films
- collage
- sculpture and a few surprises
The exhibit will feature artists who are working on the development of a new verbal, musical and artistic language to notate and express the subjective experience of consciousness. Reporting the so-called "stream of consciousness" is notoriously difficult; first-person reports are intrusive, unreliable, and unverifiable. Since consciousness is not a stream but a flood, it is difficult to capture its essence with language alone: words alone are linear and slow, and the terms and metaphors of folk psychology can be coarse and misleading.
Our project is to use art to develop a new system of tropes to model the contents and "feel" of conscious experience. In music, theatrical performance, photography, poetry, and film, we illustrate the multi-layered complexity of processing systems in the brain and the significance of recursive structures. Throughout our work, we introduce new concepts and techniques to show how the experience of consciousness emerges from the clamor of competing voices within the parliamentary chamber of the mind - in the same way it does between the "voices" of two people in a marriage or an artistic collaboration.
SPECIAL RECEPTION - 7:30PM WED. AND FRI.
The opera singer Elif Savas will sing two new works. Refreshments will be served.