Alexander Abbushi, Ivana Franke, Ida Mommenejad. Seeing with Eyes Closed.
Edited by Elena Agudio, Ivana Franke, co-edited by Anton Burdakov, Daniel Margulis.
Published on occasion of exhibition and symposium Seeing with Eyes Closed: Neuroscience and Art in dialogue, Peggy Guggenheim Collection Venice, 2011.
Contributions by: Alexander Abbushi, Elena Agudio, Anton Burdakov, Jimena Canales, Moran Cerf, Olafur Eliasson, Ivana Franke, Vittorio Gallese, Carl Michael von Hauswolff, Daniel Margulies, Markus Miessen, Ida Mommenejad, Tammo Prinz, Raqs Media Collective, Ulrich W. Thomale, Semir Zeki.
The symposium takes its title from an interdisciplinary project by artist Ivana Franke and neuroscientist Ida Momennejad, conceived through the support of Alexander Abbushi and the AoN. The project concerns the visual experience of flowing images induced by stroboscopic light behind closed eyes. Being aware that the seen images have no foundation in external reality, one experiences them as hallucinatory. This ‘conscious quasi-hallucinating’ challenges our sense of the real in its alternation and its permeability with the imaginary. Each person’s experience differs from that of others, and each ascribes different dimensions to the perceived space in constant transformation. Communicating the content of this ephemeral flux of unpredictable percepts stretches the limits of acquiring subjective report to extremes, and challenges the scientific aspiration to precisely measure the timing of conscious phenomena.
Graphic Design: Sibilla Ferrara /Makingthinkshappen
English. 14,8 x 21 cm, 90 pages.
Published by Association of Neuroesthetics, Berlin, 2011.
ISBN: 978-3-00-034738-2