Warren Neidich Livres

"Cognitive architecture questions how evolving modalities - from biopolitics to noopolitics - can be mapped upon the city under contemporary conditions of urbanization and globalization. Noopolitics, most broadly understood as a power exerted over the life of the mind, re-configures perception, memory and attention, and also implicates potential ways and means by which neurobiological architecture is undergoing reconfigurations. This volume, motivated by theories such as 'cognitive capitalism' and concepts such as 'neural plasticity', shows how architecture and urban processes and products commingle to form complex systems that produce novel forms of networks that empower the imagination and constitute the cultural landscape. This volume rethinks the relations between form and forms of communication, calling for a new logic of representation; it examines the manner in which information, with its non-hierarchical and distributed format is contributing both to the sculpting of brain and production of mind."--P. 4 of cover.

To visualize a brainstorm through diagrams is a proven strategy to generate

We live in a world of tremendous connectivity and little collectivity, leaving us witness to the diffuse degrading of personal freedoms. The resurgence of racism and sexism, the power of the global art market, the de-emphasis of theory and the humanities in university curricula, and assaults on privacy such as digital profiling are just a few examples of the strategy of normalization and governmentalization in the digital economy. That massive demonstrations against American and British involvement in the Iraq War had no effect is a direct result of our use of archaic forms of resistance to solve twenty-first-century problems. Artist/writer Warren Neidich’s thought-provoking and timely Glossary of Cognitive Activism updates the epistemological foundations of resistance. Cognitive capitalism assumes that wealth production is the product of a brain highly attuned to hyper-branded, designed sensibilities. This project considers as antidote the role of diverse aesthetic production in the creation of diverse neural maps and network configurations.

This publication is based on the exhibition of the same name hosted by the Verein zur Förderung von Kunst und Kultur am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz e. V., Berlin, April 28 to June 24/August 19, 2017. Accompanying the two major neon sculptural installations from that exhibition, The Statisticon Neon and Pizzagate, it is an analysis of the emerging political conditions of late-stage cognitive capitalism, conditions in which the brain and mind exist as the factories of the 21st century. Of particular interest in this analysis is the brain’s neural plasticity, and the role of new technologies in harnessing its potential. Also crucial is the role of art in creating new, distinctive methods, atmospheres, and intensities with which to thwart new methodologies of subsumption.

Wie groß ist das Potenzial der Kunst, um die Beziehungen zwischen kulturellen Objekten in jeweils spezifisch austarierten kulturellen Ökologien zu beeinflussen und zu verändern? Lassen sich diese Veränderungen und Einflußnahmen direkt in Veränderungen der neurobiologischen Architektur der kulturellen Subjekte übertragen? Mit anderen Worten: »Hat die materielle Welt, insbesondere die von Künstlern geschaffene, einen kausalen Einfluß auf die Entwicklung der funktionalen Anatomie und der Struktur des Gehirns? Und welche Rolle spielt die Kunst bei diesem Unterfangen?« Neidich unternimmt es, den Historischen Materialismus Marx’scher Prägung als neurobiologische Grundvoraussetzung auszulegen. Die Geschichte der Objekte und ihrer Beziehungen untereinander, die in sie eingebettet sind und die sie zugleich verkörpern, stellen nicht nur eine Erzählung des Objektes, bzw. der Objekte und ihrer epochalen Beziehungen dar, sondern bilden vielmehr ein Narrativ ihrer Instanziierung in den materiellen Zuständen des Gehirns, und beinhalten somit die Möglichkeit einer Transformation unserer Vorstellung vom Denken selbst.