Brain Awareness Week 2008 -Drawing on Consciousness
'Drawing on Consciousness' was a special symposium organised by the Institute of Neuroscience and Culture Lab. The symposium included:
- Professor Humphrey's keynote lecture,
- a performance by the poet and playwright Valerie Laws,
- presentations by the artists Susan Aldworth and Richard Talbot and neuroscientist Fiona LeBeau,
- an interdisciplinary panel discussion including philosopher Sinead Murphy, musician and theorist David Clarke, neuropathologist Elaine Perry and neuroscientist Anya Hurlbert, led by Sally Jane Norman, director of the Culture Lab.
Consciousness Symposium Keynote Lecture, 14 March 2008 - The Necessity of Consciousness: Why Human Zombies Would be an Evolutionary Dead End
Professor Nick Humphrey, Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, LSE
The hard problem of consciousness is to explain the experience of qualia - the felt redness of red, the felt pain of a bee sting. But everything gets easier once we realise that what has to be explained is not how qualia can exist as objective entities but rather why the conscious subject should believe that they exist. In this lecture I'll lay out a programme for doing this. I'll make radical proposals as to how the "qualia illusion" is created, and why sustaining this illusion is biologically adaptive - how it turns our life around.
Scribing the Soul – Exhibition at Customs House
Susan Aldworth's art explores the nature of consciousness. In 1999, the experience of observing her brain live on a monitor during a diagnostic brain scan triggered an ongoing fascination with the relationship between the physical brain and the sense of self. Since then Aldworth has worked and collaborated with doctors, neuroscientists, neuropsychologists, etchers, artists and musicians in pursuit of this elusive subject. She has observed numerous brain scans in hospitals and undergone research brain scans herself to try to make sense of the material basis of personality. In parallel with these investigations she has experimented with etching techniques in collaboration with master etcher Nigel Oxley and developed a radical method whose chemical processes are analogous to those in the brain that might be responsible for personality. Aldworth also works with animated film, digital print and light installation. Scribing the Soul is the result of her tracking consciousness over the past seven years. The works in the exhibition employ a variety of forms which have been chosen in response to the environments in which Aldworth has worked during this project.
She used graphite and acrylic inks on paper when observing cerebral angiograms in a hospital operating theatre, as this enabled her to respond with an immediacy to medical procedures. These drawings produced on location were the inspiration for the experimental etchings created in the studio after each session. The etchings have an intensity and were able to be far more considered than the location drawings from which they are derived.
The inclusion of film in Susan Aldworth’s work was a departure for her but seemed an obvious medium to explore in this context. This body of work consistently refers back to the lines and pathways of cerebral arteries seen during scanning procedures during her residency at the Royal London Hospital. Aldworth found these authentic marks of the brain aesthetically exciting and they became the language used to develop her work. Recently, Aldworth has spent some time observing the work of neuroscientist Dr Fiona Le Beau at the Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle University. Le Beau studies the activity, connections and networks in the cerebral cortex that are involved in cognitive processing and consciousness. But there is a fundamental methodological problem in consciousness research for scientists – the fact that conscious experience is always tied to an individual, first person perspective.
Aldworth’s new works are routed in this interface of art and science.
