Fwd: warren neidich

Hi, all. Warren Neidich asked me to forward this to the list…

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Date: Sep 1, 2005 4:33 AM
Subject: warren neidich
To: [email protected]


Dear Marisa,

I hope you have had a pleasent summer. I would like to take this
opportunity to invite you to the opening of my exhibition entitled,
Earthling, which opens at the Michael Steinberg Fine Arts on Sept. 8th and
runs to October 8th. Because you are probably not that familiar with my
work I copied my bio below. If you do come by the gallery you will notice
that I am more interested in the effect of new media on the culture then
the technology involved although I am presently research fellow in
computing at Goldsmiths College. best wishes warren


Warren Neidich, Goldsmiths College, London Neidich believes that a role
of the artist is to enlarge the notion of what art is and what it can be.
Art is a continually expanding universe of possibilities that through its
interaction with other discourses generates new languages with which the
mind can play and create. He uses photography, cinema, and new media to
discover the ways that aesthetic practice, philosophy, architecture, and
design interface in abstract ways with new ideas of perceptual becoming
such as neuro-plasticity and Neural Darwinsim/Neuroconstructivism.
Together they reconfigure and revitalize conceptual based practice as new
means to produce and distribute information.. In the end these co-evolving
systems form a collective choreography produce ways to understand the
construction of global subjectivities, what he refers to as Earthling.
He calls this methodology "Neuroaesthetics" a term he coined in 1995 in a
series of lectures he presented at the School of Visual Arts, New York
City. He founded the Journal of Neuro-aesthetics and co-founded www.
artbrain.org. in 1997. He organized the exhibition Conceptual Art as a
Neurobiologic Praxis in 1999 at the Thread Waxing Space, New York City.
In the past five years he has organized many conferences including "Can
Art Investigate the Brain", College Art Association, New York City, 1999,
"Buildings, Movies and Brains", UCLA Department of Art, 2002, "The Phantom
Limb", and "Neuroaesthetics," Goldsmiths College, 2005. The
"Neuroaesthetics" conference acted simultaneously as a provocative
academic exercise and transgressive multi-authored art work. It dealt
with a broad range of concepts such as bio-political systems, technology
and constructed subjectivity, the cultured bran and mutated observer,
drugs, altered states of consciousness and minimalist/post-minimalist
ideas of form and the relationship between d.j. culture and sampling. His
art work has been internationally exhibited in such institutions as the
Whitney Museum of Art, New York City, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Ludwig
Museum, Koln, , Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles and the
Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis, Minnesota just to name a few. Recent
group shows include Go-Between, Magazin 4 and the Bregenzer Kunzverein,
2005, Bregenz Austria Library,Librarie, IDEALONDON, 2005 and Synaesthesia,
2004, Institute of Contemporary Art, London, 10 Hour Performance,
Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, Lithiuania, and Everything is Connected,
Ha,Ha, 2004 Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway, ,. A
planned one-person show will occur at the Michael Steinberg Gallery, New
York City this fall where he will present his "Earthling" project for the
first time. He was the Artist in Residence at Goldsmiths College, London
2004,2005 and is currently American representative at the Glenfiddich
Artistic Residency, Dufftown, Scotland for the summer of 2005. He is
author of many books such as American History Reinvented, Aperture, 1989,
and Camp O.J., Bayle Museum, University of Virginia He is the author of a
collection of essays called Blow-Up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain
published by DAP and the University of California, Riverside, 2003
Earthling, a collection of photographs with an interview by Hans Ulrich
Obrist and an essay by Barry Scwabsky will be published in September, 2005
by Pointed Leaf Press. .


We all know that making art is a kind of journey into the heartland of the
self and that this self is Transversal, it does not end with the body but
extends into the interactive space beyond itself. The world of things for
the hands, the visual landscape for the eyes, and language and culture for
the brain. It co-evolves through a process by which it sends out
thousands and thousands of fimbria, figuratively extensions of protoplasm,
into the real, imaginary and virtual world which is more like an
interface or membrane constructed of stable and dynamic patterns. These
physical and psychic extensions reach out and inter-digitate themselves
into the infinite array of interconnected information systems that call
out to them and reach them and embrace them. The body is one site of that
interactivity but the brain is to and it is well known that the body, the
brain and this real/imaginary/virtual interface are a co-extensive "one".
They are the most recent manifestation of co-evolutionary forces in which
these three streams of ontogeny are made to mingle and dance with each and
in the end finding points of commonality. Culture plays a significant role
in the mediation of these three systems and its evolution is mapped into
this co-extensive system. What has marked the evolution of the brain as
distinct and separate from the rest of the body is its ability to be
modified something called plasticity. This mutability and changlingness is
a result of a genetically inherited ability which allows neurons and their
connections to be modified and pruned by the combined process now called
Neural Darwinsim/Neural Constructivism. Changes taking place in itself and
in the other spheres can as a result leave their mark or imprint on to the
neurobiological substrate. Modifications in the real/imaginary/virtual or
external reality can effect the distribution and morphology of the
developing brain and as a result cultural mutations that have changed
architecture, art, design and fashion just to name a few, have
implications for how the brain is wired and more importantly how its
different parts dynamically interact.. This permutation and re alignment
of the neurobiological substrate is what is called the Cultured Brain and
it is the new configuration and design of its' maps that allow it to
process information differently, to imagine new possibilities and in the
end to reinvigorate creativity itself.

Earthling is a work that involves film,video, photography, and new media
to explore the various conditions of this new forms of individual
subjectivity that are evolving as a result of the new global character of
our experience.