This proposal requests support for an international interdisciplinary conference to take place at the University of California at Irvine in December 2016. The goal is to establish a new interdisciplinary field of inquiry, which brings together cognitive neuroscience and arts by bringing about a complex conversation encompassing neuroscience, cognitive science, anthropology, design, human-computer interaction, the arts, and philosophy. The conference seeks to bring together approximately 200-250 attendees encompassing all levels of faculty, postdoctoral scholars, and graduate and undergraduate students from the sciences, arts, social sciences, and humanities. Participants will include designers/ theorists from Holland, an art historian from Mexico, and cognitive neuroscientists from all over the country. The project will integrate research and education by creating a new undergraduate preparatory class, which will introduce students from all disciplines on the UC Irvine campus to research at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and the arts. Proceedings and video documentation of the conference will be freely available, and an affiliated three-month public exhibition will serve to address the societal implications of this research.
This conference will bring the arts and sciences together in a new context that holds the promise of new opportunities for research; arts and cultural practices have for long confounded cognitive scientific explanation, and have been excluded from consideration as cognition. The conference seeks to leverage current neurocognitive research and the perspectives of embodied, distributed, and enactive cognition to develop new discourses in arts and cultural practices. It also seeks to generate international interest in the new coalition of cognitive research and theory that justifies a (qualified) rejection of cognitivist/computationalist paradigms of cognition. Meeting these goals will serve to define a new interdisciplinary field, consistent with the embodied and material turns, but inherently critical, for example, of some aspects of neuroaesthetics. Finally, the conference will enable artists worldwide to use the latest developments in cognitive neuroscience to inform their artistic practice, and it will enable scientists in these disciplines to use the insights from these new art forms as the basis for new collaborative research with cognitive neuroscientists.
