Brain Art and Neuroscience

209 Pages·2020·5.52 MB·English

BRAIN ART AND NEUROSCIENCE

The first of its kind, this book examines artistic representations of the brain after
the rise of the contemporary neurosciences, examining the interplay of art and
science and tackling some of the critical-cultural implications.
Weaving an MRI pattern onto a family quilt. Scanning the brain of
a philosopher contemplating her own death and hanging it in a museum. Is this art
or science or something in-between? What does it mean? How might we respond?
In this ground-breaking new book, David R. Gruber explores the seductive and
influential position of the neurosciences amid a growing interest in affect and
materiality as manifest in artistic representations of the human brain. Contributing
to debates surrounding the value of interdisciplinary engagement happening in the
neuro-humanities, Gruber emphasizes the need for critical-cultural analysis within
the field. Engaging with New Materialism and Affect Theory, the book provides
a current and concrete example of the on-going shift away from constructivist
lenses, arguing that the influence of relatively new neuroscience methods (EEG,
MRI and fMRI) on the visual arts has not yet been fully realised. In fact, the very
idea of a brain as it is seen and encountered today—or “The Brain,” as Gruber calls
it—remains in need of critical, wild and rebellious re-imagination.
Illuminating how artistic engagement with the brain is often sensual and suggest-
ive even if rooted in objectivist impulses and tied to scientific realism, this book is
ideal for scholars in Art, Media Studies, Sociology, and English departments, as well
visual artists and anyone seriously engaging discourses of the brain.

David R. Gruber is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Cogni-
tion and Communication at the University of Copenhagen. His research spans the
rhetoric of science, body studies, and the public understanding of science. Much
of his work focuses on the role of neuroscience in society and the reasons why
brain findings can be so persuasive. He is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of
Language and Science with Lynda Olman and creator of the neuro-humanities
website, Neurohuman.com.

BRAIN ART AND
NEUROSCIENCE

Neurosensuality and
Affective Realism

David R. Gruber

First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2020 David R. Gruber

The right of David R. Gruber to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978–0–367–89818–2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978–0–367–89819–9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978–1–003–02130–8 (ebk)

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
vi
Preface
vii

1 Ancient histories of the brain concept
1

2 Neurosensuality and brain art
43

3 Affective Realism and brain art
73

4 Brain art on the ontological stage
130

Conclusion: for the love of the momentary brain
158

Index
179

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people work together to bring a book into existence. I want to thank Vilija
Stephens for leading the publication process at Routledge. Thanks also goes to
Jason Kalin for reading an early draft, for being patient with my ramblings, and
for providing much-needed guidance. Deep gratitude goes to Lindsey Gruber for
her many long hours working through these ideas with me and for not being
afraid to say that I am making no sense (true acts of love). I would also like to
thank David Rieder for teaching me that making art is a way of building ideas
unimaginable otherwise. All of these people, and more, have supported me and
contributed to this book.

PREFACE

To read this book, you must pull your heart out of your chest and in its beating
rhythm see a brain. You must watch the traffic and be blinded by the flow of
neuronal pathways. Stare up at the night sky and see only bursts of oxygen
inside of your skull. After this, you must look at a brain scan and focus your
eyes deep into the pitch black lingering ominously behind the painted blue
blobs of neural activity; there, absorb the immensity of human ignorance stirring
in and around the impenetrable dark core of the amygdala.
You must scan your own brain to read this book. Transpose your darkest
secrets onto the baseline BOLD variance.1 Whisper your dreams in neuroscience
discourses. Lay the body passively down. Allow the chill of the air-conditioning
and the smell of cleaning fluid in the neuroscience lab to be but the passing of
positively and negatively charged ions across neural membranes. Then march
forward into the tunnel of light in the functional magnetic resonance imaging
tube like an exhilarating journey to heaven. Emerge anew and plunge into the
brain scan like a baptismal bath. But be prepare to encounter the unimaginable.
Be prepared to dislodge all of your expectations.
Imagine now that you are walking into a movie theater. You sit down and
realize, quite suddenly, that you have seen this film before. Then you see your-
self on screen acting in the film. You feel every detail in your chest. The film is
replaying your own memories. And then you know: the projection is you. The
reel is your frontal lobe firing away. Your eyes are doing the flickering. You
run outside to escape what feels like a nightmare. Gasping for breath, you look
up at the sky. A million terrible thunderstorms roar across the horizon—it’s all
neurons firing. You are inside of your own brain. An apocalyptic dream, no,
a revelation. You stand in a concert crescendo of Die Walküre materially
enacted. You scream and hear your own voice echo back, but when you do,
the sky glows a brilliant and hellish red. Then you scream for the fright of it.

You wake up in bed. The comfort of home. You grab your head and feel
the contours of your skull. You turn to the mirror and breathe a sigh of relief
when you see your face, red and sweating. You wipe your forehead, touch your
chest, and take a deep breath. It feels good to have a body again. You turn to
the window, throw open the curtains. Suddenly, a glowing 200-foot-tall
neuron, whirling like a giant electric octopus arm, zaps you with a shuddering
bolt. It obliterates your existence.

The book’s argument

As a brain, we can toggle back and forth between the real and the imagined,
a dream state and a state of Being. We can Be something definable and yet
Become much more. We can sense the world but never know if it is an illusion,
imagining only, perhaps, what keeps us alive. Yet, we feel that something lurks
within the brain that it cannot or does not itself think. We then agree that we
are prisoners of this brain, but in a twist of fate, we do not know if there are
any guards nor how the walls are made. Neuronal structures seal us with
a sobriety, yet we are drunk on creativity about what the brain might be able to
do. We are not sure yet what it will mean for the human future to alter the
brain. We do not so much want to escape it but to roam its careening hallways,
cultivate its wild gardens, and expand its visionary vistas.
But the optimism can only go so far. Every time we forget a name or can’t
roll out of bed in the morning without the thought of a cup of coffee to motiv-
ate us, we feel a little unsure about making ourselves into a brain. We question
any theatrical Captain Kirk brain of commander rationalism confidently standing
up there to save us from ourselves. We double over with a sick stomach at the
dead flat yet all-encompassing description of the dictionary: “the brain is: the
organ of soft nervous tissue contained in the skull of vertebrates, functioning as
the coordinating center of sensation and intellectual and nervous activity.”2 We
feel overcome with the enormity yet ridiculous simplicity of it, “center of sensa-
tion and intellectual and nervous activity.” We get nervous; we just bought
a shitload of probiotics and need to run to the pharmacy to renew a prescription
for Monopril; we freaked out at the thought of attending the family reunion
with so many faces after twenty years; we hid in the bathroom for forty minutes
during an international conference just to avoid social contact; we dialed the
wrong number twice last week; we had a concussion in sixth grade and then
another in college; we got food poisoning in Costa Rica and couldn’t respond
to work emails for three days; we have no idea who “Ida” from high school
might be and why the hell she wants to be friends on Facebook.
In the simple dictionary description, we see the world in the head of a pin,
which is sitting on our shoulders. We discover so much more than an organ
there in that description and so much less than all that goes into the production
of just one thought. This is what makes us feel queasy: extending the brain’s
controlling power to every sensation of reality at the same time as reducing

viii
Preface

every sensation of reality to the action of “soft nervous tissue.” The idea of the
brain—of having one, of there even being such a thing—is, if anything, artful.
What a feeling—to do so much with so little, to perform the immense com-
plexity of human experience on the stage of the organ disarticulated. What
a way to be human. Art must be operative here, inherently.
As “the mediator of the unspeakable”3 and having the appearance of something
“being rounded,”4 art in the first quotation reveals the hidden, and in the second
aestheticizes and satisfies. Accordingly, once taking a form recognizable as the
brain today, an artwork can parade how our personality is a set of neuro-chemical
compositions and then crack a joke about getting some satisfaction that we have
just represented our most elegant and most true self. We can be tempted to see
the artist as a kind of Leonardo da Vinci brain of genius in making a big, round
brain that speaks “the unspeakable,” and we can celebrate the human-as-a-brain
with a haughty proclamation that its complex (but gorgeous, darling) computa-
tional aesthetic reveals its superiority among species. But we could also see a Jeff
Koons brain. A Balloon Dog brain. And then we might wonder: is this brain
a Capitalist creation? And will the brain as art ever sell to a Russian oligarch for
52 million?5 If it does, will it, like Balloon Dog, highlight the child’s play of the
artist (and scientist) and the monumentality of an industrial technique that ultim-
ately reflects back the viewer’s face in a polished consumer sheen?6

In this book, I ruminate on the approaches and materials used to build cre-
ative depictions of the brain—what I call brain art. The stitch, the fabric, the
dance, and the splash of paint stage the contemporary neurosciences often in an
unexpected way. The artworks can be tender, shocking, ironic, sarcastic, or sal-
acious. Many manipulate the images or tools of the neurosciences to generate
their interventions, to forge connections to concrete practices, and to recall how
neuroscience is a production and a set of dependencies. Philosophical trends and
social trajectories are presenced in unusual animations of material objects crafted
to appear as identifications of brains. Brain artworks perform the social shape of
the neurosciences even as they interrogate the making of that shape. The result-
ing novel neural visions beg a multitude of interpretations. For me, they show
how we imagine and instantiate the brain today.
To the point: brain art—as a brain re-visioned and re-presented—helps us to re-
see the brain scan. In almost every case and by sheer nature of existing, brain
artworks interrogate a major function of the brain scan: penetration operating under
the guise of a pursuit of deeper truths motivating the subject. Brain scan images,
like celebrated artworks, aim to expose what no person could ever know without
technical intercession, and they appear salacious when they speak what no person
would dare to admit (hidden tendencies, maniacal dreams, secret longings). Brain
art and brain scans pursue the shedding of the trivial, the ascension of vision, the
consciousness raising of the previously unrecognized/able.
I offer an existential book, romping among the rhetorical, philosophical, and
sociological. It’s a book intended for a broad readership with some sugar for the
interdisciplinary sweet tooth. I am motivated by thinking “the brain” through

Preface
ix