Symposium im ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, 22.-24. November 2012In Kooperation und mit Unterstützung der Gemeinnützigen Hertie-Stiftung.

The symposium “Neuroaesthetics”, which is part of several joint projects on creativity and innovation which are carried out by the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and the Akademie Schloss Solitude and which were initiated by the State of Baden-Württemberg, has been conceptualized in cooperation with the Hertie Fhoundation with the aim of establishing a platform of com- munication between current developments in the neurosciences and the arts. The concept of neuroaesthetics was introduced to enable a definition of artistic creativity and aesthetic experience at the neuroscientific level, as the expres- sion of brain functions. Today, with the advancement of innovative media, technical media, understood as extensions of human sense organs, establish novel integrations of various sense organs. The neuroscientist Paul Bach-y-Rita spoke of “sensory substitution”, the transformation of characteristics of one sensory modality into stimuli of another sensory modality. Perception here is not the output of one modality but a result of multi-modal interactions. Cultural neuroscience, which investigates cultural variation in psychological, neural and genomic processes, can hereby be taken as a particularly fruitful field of extending the question of the brain’s mode of operation into the cul- tural field and to illustrate the influence of cultural experiences on the neural representation of the self. The synaesthetic program at the turn of the twentieth century, which was based on a medical discourse in France at the end of the nineteenth century led by Alfred Vulpian, to denominate the neurological condition in which stimu- lation of one cognitive pathway leads to automatic experiences in a second cognitive pathway, evocated in the field of music, literature, abstract painting, and avant-garde film of the 1920s and 1930s the novel conception of “Seeing Sound”. Also forming part of the IMATRONIC extended | Festival for Electronic Music, the symposium will thus take the processing of musical information, understood as a unique example for the complexity of intercommunication between different brain functions and the brain’s plasticity, as another basis to examine the interconnection of different areas of the brain.