This chapter will elucidate the importance of investigations within Neuroscience as they historically informed art practice. What will be studied is the early forays into how the brain interprets various stimuli and how it processes information within creative fields. I will provide a survey (within psychology and cognitive studies) regarding perception, reception, and colour theory through the lens of synesthesia, a condition in which living entities experience things through their senses in various ways simultaneously.

Since the advent of technical media like film, photography, gramophones, typewriters, telephones, radios, televisions, computers, video technology and the World Wide Web, a wide variety of cultural techniques for recording, processing, and transmitting information have been linked with the human body and its sensory organs, this has occurred mainly through cybernetics, body objects and wearable technologies, psychology of mind, and artificial intelligence studies. These technologies were also widely adopted by media art practitioners who were ready to exploit or subvert their potential. Technology as an intermediary of states in consciousness (at least within Western contexts) stems mainly from the Greek notion of “metaxy,” or the connection of mind to the material world- a kind of transfer of abilities as mind/body extension in the conscious sensorium of being in-between.[1] Writing itself proposes this as a record and report to be transferred and recounted. Perhaps this connection between mind and material was also taken up in the idea that tools become extensions of the self; indeed, the leap between reality and imagination as it plays out in one’s life extends into any creative practice as thinking leaps from one place to another.[2] So, the duality of being in between mind and matter and physical and metaphysical inherently adapts to technology. In the realm of information, it may serve both purposes, such as synaesthetic imagination and thinking prostheses manifesting as physical forms and various processes in a connected digital sensorium. One sense to another (in synesthetic terms) connects one technology to another. This idea of being transmitted opens the door to anything and everything trans:  translated, transmitted, transexual, transmogrified, transspecies and alike. This is not just a plurality of various directions where thought, process and material are conjoined but where being conscious meets the struggles in the world. The proposition that technology might amplify discourse and imaginative creations further emphasizes this.

One of the difficulties in our relationship with technology is that with miniaturization and computational power comes a need for more human comprehension of the processes involved. It’s not likely that any conjoining of machines to humans will solve this problem or that there can be any ethical checks and balances in the distant future. Between speed and the complexities of computation, we are destined to lag as a species unless we build on task-oriented strategies linked to the complexities of the world—a lesser of many evils, I think.

[1] “Metaxy.” Wikiwand. Accessed September 12, 2024. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Metaxy.

[2] The MIT Press Reader. “When Objects Become Extensions of You.” The MIT Press Reader, November 16, 2020. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/when-objects-become-extensions-of-you/.

Authors explored include Rudolf Arnheim, Suzzane Langer and Anton Ehrenzweig.