Panel Statement
Panel: The Institute of Unnecessary Research
Although a growing number of scientists are now looking at the effects of the internet on the brain, they are in fact just looking at the tip of an iceberg. They are leaving unexplored the rest of the complex fabric of the digitally enabled contemporary environment, which is in constant two-way interactive communication with our bodies, and with our plastic brains, changing them in an unknown manner. The specific branch of neuroscience that studies brain plasticity – the ways in which the brain can radically modify and reconfigure itself through interaction with the environment – has great potential for helping us to understand the brain’s particular susceptibility to digital technologies. This applies not only to the internet and the broader digital environment, but also to the multi-sensory experiences within the growing body of process-based arts enabled by digital technologies, and in particular interactive art. Can we be sure that neuroscience will one day look at the whole picture, and provide us with explanations of these phenomena? Or might it be that there is a role left for interactive artists, keen to research the very essence of their artistic medium and its effects on their audiences, to push research forward to pursue, produce, and apply the necessary knowledge?
- Gordana Novakovic was originally a painter, with 12 solo exhibitions to her credit, she now has more than twenty years’ experience of developing and exhibiting large-scale time-based media projects. Her artistic practise and theoretical work that intersects art, science and advanced digital technologies has formed five Cycles: Parallel Worlds, The Shirt of a Happy Man, Infonoise and the ongoing Fugue. A constant mark of her work throughout her experiments with new technologies has been her distinctive method of creating an effective cross-disciplinary framework for the emergence of synergy through collaboration. Gordana exhibited and lectured at leading interdisciplinary festivals and symposia, and artistic and scientific conferences. Her works from the ongoing Fugue Cycle has been widely presented and exhibited. Alongside her artistic practice, in the last six years Gordana has been artist-in-residence and also a Teaching Fellow at Computer Science Department, University College London, where she has founded and curates the Tesla Art and Science Group. She has received a number of international and British academic awards. fugueart.com gordananovakovic.org