Neuroactivism: This is how it will free our brains from the grip of big tech.

Still from the TV-series Severance. Photo: Apple TV Plus.

Neuroactivism
This is how it will free our brains from the grip of big tech.

October 14, 2022 by Anders Dunker

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“Our physical brains have become ‘a locus of capitalistic adventurism and speculation,’ writes artist and theorist Warren Neidich, editor of a new anthology called An Activist Neuroaesthetics Reader (2022). Through his collaborative project ‘The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism 1–3’, Neidich has helped coalesce a burgeoning field of critical theory centred on the brain and neuroscientific theory. ‘The brain and new technologies have become a real battlefield,’ writes economist Yann Moulier Boutang – one of many veteran contributors from Neidich’s circle – in his contribution to the anthology.” – Anders Dunker


Interview with Warren Neidich – Artworks about Post-Truth Society and Activist Neuroaesthetics

Warren Neidich, "Pizzagate – From Rumor To Delusion," 2019, Full HD Video, 19:19 min

Interview with Warren Neidich –
Artworks about Post-Truth Society and Activist Neuroaesthetics

October 5, 2022 by Hsiang-Yun Huang

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“What connects activist neuroaesthetics to material philosophers is the idea that art is something of a record of a morphogenic ontology of aesthetic production, whereby the changing and historical relations – social, political, economic and historical – culminate in objects and things that express these changes. The form a becoming cultural milieu or habitus that then elicits changes in the brain. In fact, they mirror each other and coevolve together. The cultural matrix and the material brain are constantly evolving in tandem. The brain is not an unchangeable essence. The brain isn’t just in the skull. It is entangled with this extracranial component of the socio-political, economic and historical milieu. There is a morphogenetic process that is going on in this milieu, but there is also a morphogenetic process going on inside the brain. Bernard Stiegler called this a technological evolution rather than one instigated by genetic mutations alone, i.e. an exosomatic organogenesis.” — Warren Neidich


Warren Neidich: Museum of Neon Art

The Brain Without Organs: Aporia of Care (detail), 2022. Courtesy of Museum of Neon Art.

Warren Neidich: Museum of Neon Art

September 6, 2022 by John David O’Brien

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“The elusive relationship of the brain and the mind has always fascinated without ever quite being resolvable. It is as though we collectively hold the convoluted gray mass that constitutes the brain in suspension with respect to its relationship to the entity whose non-physical indefinability is connected, although unclearly.”
— John David O’Brien


Warren Neidich: The Brain Without Organs: An Aporia of Care

Installation view, Warren Neidich: The Brain Without Organs: The Aporia of Care, at Museum of Neon Art, California, 2022. Courtesy the Museum of Neon Art.

Warren Neidich:
The Brain Without Organs: An Aporia of Care

September 2022 by Anuradha Vikram

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“In a neurological sense, humans are already biological machines, in that our thoughts and actions are powered by electrical synapses. These countless tiny surges travel through the vast crenulated landscape of the brain, transported by axons that act as conduits to move energy from one place to another. For Warren Neidich, who studied neurobiology before becoming a conceptual artist, the workings of the brain are an endless source of fascination. His exhibition at the Museum of Neon Art, The Brain Without Organs: An Aporia of Care, takes a radically deconstructive approach to the brain as a material organ and as an emblem of human intellect, the source of our unique evolutionary advantage.” – Anuradha Vikram


The Hybrid Dialectics

The Hybrid Dialectics

March 2022 interview by Erik Morse

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“This interview between the writer and critic Erik Morse and the artist and theorist Warren Neidich took place over the course of two months in the fall/winter 2021–2022. The interview focuses on a body of work entitled the Hybrid Dialectics produced between 1997–2002 that served as bridge between his earlier performative reenactments and fictitious documents entitled, American History Reinvented, 1985–1993, and his more recent neon sculptures most notably the Pizzagate Neon, 2017–2021 and his A Proposition for an alt Parthenon Marbles Recoded: The Phantom as Other (2021–2022). Neidich’s project extends his interdisciplinary experiments carried out in the fields of cinema studies, structural film and apparatus theory which foregrounded cinematic devices and tools at the expense of the image. This forms the foundation of Neidich’s engagement with photographic medium as a form of politicized aesthetics embedded in a bidirectional embodied and extended cognition. His hybrid dialectics take off where artists like Michael Snow and Tony Conrad left off.” – Erik Morse


MONA presents Warren Neidich’s ‘Brain Without Organs’

Warren Neidich, the visionary behind “Brain Without Organs,” has combined neurological and aesthetic approaches to further understand humanity’s evolving relationship with information technologies. Photo: Olivia Fougeirol

MONA presents Warren Neidich’s ‘Brain Without Organs’

April 24, 2022 by Luke Netzley

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“As an artist for more than 35 years, Neidich has looked to combine his background in neuroscience with a distinct creative flair to explore and question the evolving networks of control, surveillance and information prevalent around the world today and how they are redefining and reshaping systems of the brain.” — Luke Netzley