[ISEA2012] Panel: Jill Scott — Synaptic Scenarios for Ecological Environments

Panel Statement

This panel is about how artists and scientists can collaborate with cognitive scientists to addresses environmental issues. Through these collaborations new metaphors and analogies about sensory perception might arise to cause a more pro-active discourse with the public about environmental problems. Creative Economies: “Econotopias,” explicitly addresses the need for more sustainable social practices, but can new technologies and scientific methods actually help to verify embodied ecological experience or promote “citizen science”? Digital media might be a viable tool to act as a catalyst for debate and encourage us to deal with “how we might think” about ecological novel problems, rather than “what to think” about them. The raising of our bodily awareness and perception may also affect our levels of attention and force us to reconsider our denial of the sustainability problems at hand. By explicitly exploring the relationship between cognitive psychology and environmental science we claim that public engagement actually requires controversy and an opening up of scientific debates past the consensus view as well as the mainstream media view. However this level of engagement also requires that we gain a more fundamental understanding of our bodily-sense of place within the ecological environment and its complex systems.

  • Jill Scott (Chair), Professor for Research; University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Zurich, Switzerland
  • Ellen K. Levy, PhD; Faculty, IDSVA (Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts), USA, Co-Convener