Portrait of the mind project
WProject Overview
In this project, you will create a work that examines the inner workings of the mind and how exterior influences change how the mind perceives things.
Essential Questions:
Artists to consider
Salvador Dali
Umbo (Otto Umbehr)
The Surrealists
Scientific Illustrators
Gemma Anderson http://www.gemma-anderson.co.uk/portraits.html
Kathleen Fox http://www.axisweb.org/seCVPG.aspx?ARTISTID=3222
Lisa Park http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/06/artist-lisa-park-manipulates-water-with-her-brain/
Christopher Relander http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2012/06/superb-multiple-exposure-portraits-by-christoffer-relander/
Resources
Hidden Brain Podcast
Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships.
https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510308/hidden-brainwww.npr.org/podcasts/510308/hidden-brain
Robert Krulwich Science Blog (not just brain and psychology, but more!)
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/
Radiolab (radio show that deals with science, the brain and more!)
http://www.radiolab.org/series/podcasts/
Ted videos on psychology
http://www.ted.com/topics/psychology
Ted videos on how the mind works
http://www.ted.com/playlists/1/how_does_my_brain_work.html
http://www.ted.com/themes/how_the_mind_works.html
Psychological Studies for Everyday Life
http://www.spring.org.uk/
Freud Museum
Lots of exhibits related to Freud’s work
http://www.freud.org.uk/
Freud Museum online exhibit on Dreams
http://www.freud.org.uk/exhibitions/online/dreams/
The Mind’s Self-Portrait
by DANIEL M. WEGNER
Study on how the mind thinks of itself
http://scholar.harvard.edu/dwegner/files/minds_self_portrait.pdf
Excerpts from abstract and introduction:
ABSTRACT: Scientific psychology and neuroscience are taking increasingly precise and comprehensive pictures of the human mind, both in its physical architecture and its functional processes. Meanwhile, each human mind has an abbreviated view of itself, a self-portrait that captures how it thinks it operates, and that therefore has been remarkably influential. The mind’s self-portrait has as a central feature the idea that thoughts cause actions, and that the self is thus an origin of the body’s actions. This self-portrait is reached through a process of inference of apparent mental causation, and it gives rise to the experience that we are consciously willing what we do. Evidence from several sources suggests that this self-portrait may often be a humble and misleading caricature of the mind’s operation— but one that underlies the feeling of authorship and the acceptance of responsibility for action.
Minds are marvelous to look at from the inside. In addition to all the things we can see that seem to be out there--all the sights and sounds and feels and the like—our minds also afford us views of themselves. Gilbert Ryle (1949) described minds as seeming almost self-luminous, as though they light themselves up from the inside. The view of their workings that we gain through our minds moment-to-moment provides a series of ideas that seems to lay out their operation in full detail. In a sense, our minds present us with their own theory of psychology—or perhaps something more akin to a set of laws. The mind’s self-portrait appears as a complete picture of its own operation, something so simple and clear that we can’t help but believe it. And the major feature of this self-portrait is the idea that we cause ourselves to behave.
Consider the classic case of lifting a finger. You think of lifting it and it goes up. You think of putting it down and it goes down. Up, Down, Up, Down. This regularity is striking. Your thought seems to cause your action, and you get a distinct sense of authorship with each movement. The mind depicts to itself no other part of the process whereby the finger moves. The thought pops into consciousness, and the action too is consciously observed, and that’s it. All the machinery in the mind’s basement that might be creating this conscious show--the rest of the mind and brain--remains unobserved. The mind’s eye view of the causation of action creates a caricature, then, a simple conscious snapshot of what may be an immensely complicated set of processes involving multiple sites of brain activation and a welter of unconscious cognitive processes—a mechanism that could only be discovered in full detail with an infinite supply of government grant money. The mind simplifies itself.
PAINTING A PICTURE OF THE CREATIVE MIND / It’s in this delicate negotiation of conscious choices and unconscious summons that art finds its form and communicative power.
By Steven Winn
Part 1, Part 2 below
http://articles.sfgate.com/2007-05-28/entertainment/17244673_1_poet-laureate-robert-hass-unconscious-processes-dreams
Excerpt: Four years ago, American Conservatory Theater actor Gregory Wallace began dreaming about birds -- birds standing, poised precariously on one leg, birds nesting and lightly ruffling their feathers. One day during a rehearsal for "Waiting for Godot," Wallace found himself assuming a new posture at the beginning of the second act, just after his character has been beaten.
"I was aware of standing in a different way," recalled the actor, who played the tramp Estragon in ACT's 2003 production, "cradling myself, holding my arms as if they were wings. I felt like I was perching. I think those dreams just sat in my body in a particular way and affected my physical approach to that role. I don't know that I could be more articulate about it than that. It was a very kinesthetic thing. My body was responding to things that weren't necessarily logical or sensible."
What Wallace experienced is a central, animating mystery of the arts. How do the unconscious processes of the mind flow forward and take shape in a theatrical performance, a poet's rhythms, a dancer's gestures, a composer's harmonies or a painter's shapes and colors? How do artists apprehend and tap their unconscious depths? Or, for that matter, would they rather leave them alone? What do we, as spectators, listeners and readers, understand of our own responses to art that transcend the conscious means of reception? Is the unconscious always to be trusted? Or could it be, as UC Berkeley Professor and former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass sometimes suspects, that "the unconscious is incredibly conservative and consciousness is much more flexible and adaptive?"
What happens to us when art connects to the unconscious?
By Steven Winn
Part 2, Part 1 above
http://articles.sfgate.com/2007-05-29/entertainment/17244095_1_unconscious-modern-art-digital-age
Excerpt:
The connections that paintings and dance performances, movies and novels and music make to us beyond our conscious perceptions of them are primary and transporting. Our unconscious, deep-seated responses are what bring us back to the arts for more and more, nourishing and renewing us just as food and air and water do. At the same time, we're carried away from our sensory and analytical selves, lifted or plunged into a web of emotion and association, a fretwork of glinting filaments radiating out in so many directions.
For some, this becomes a linking to the divine, to something ineffably transcendent. For others, it opens pathways to a shadowy and only fleetingly accessible territory in themselves. It may be a means of communing with an artist's own unconscious essence or of riding the mythic tides that flow timelessly through the arts. It may be a key to cultural codes or the workings of a particular artistic medium. It may open the deepest wells of delight and terror. Or it may be nothing so mysterious at all, but rather a function of physiological events in the brain and nervous system that may someday be thoroughly describable and understood.
Information about Kathleen Fox Exhibit
Kathleen Fox, from The Spaces of the Unconscious exhibition at the Freud Museum, 2010
“Kathleen Fox situates her practice within the critical context of surrealism, a movement explicitly grounded in creative response to Freud's psychoanalytical discourse.
The exhibition is centered in a collection of mounted boxes that use light, sound and texture to introduce themes of eroticism and death that underpin the realm of the unconscious. The work aims to model and explore Freud's spatial concept of the conscious and unconscious mind - for which he used the metaphor of a house and its component rooms.
Set in a space that was once Freud’s bedroom, the exhibition is divided into two areas. From a lit conscious area housing Freud’s domestic furniture and personal belongings, the viewer passes through a membrane to a darkened area representing the unconscious. Here, through closer inspection via small apertures, the contents of the mounted boxes are revealed. Imaginative spatial dimensions are explored in each scenario where the participant is taken on a journey into a world of the dream or the unconscious.
The installation questions the way in which the thresholds between the conscious and the unconscious are negotiated and how the viewer is impelled into spaces that are simultaneously real and imaginary. It invites re-assessment of how Freud's theory has been utilized and developed within surrealism, something which will be a central theme of the accompanying one day conference, to be held on Saturday 09 October.”
Please fill the following requirements:
· Unity/Variety
· Balance/Emphasis/Contrast
· Rhythm
· Repetition
· Proportion/Scale
· Figure/Ground Relationships
8. During this process, keep thinking about the choices you make. Why are you making these choices? What is guiding you in developing your composition and concept? Consider what messages are being sent by your choices.
In this project, you will create a work that examines the inner workings of the mind and how exterior influences change how the mind perceives things.
Essential Questions:
- What does a psychosis or neurological functions look like? How can we visualize it?
- How can you document the actions and functions of the brain?
- In what ways are our brains influenced? (Chemically, environmentally, psychologically, physically, emotionally, etc.) How do these influences shape our brains actions and functions?
- What is the difference between conscious and subconscious thought and actions?
Artists to consider
Salvador Dali
Umbo (Otto Umbehr)
The Surrealists
Scientific Illustrators
Gemma Anderson http://www.gemma-anderson.co.uk/portraits.html
Kathleen Fox http://www.axisweb.org/seCVPG.aspx?ARTISTID=3222
Lisa Park http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/06/artist-lisa-park-manipulates-water-with-her-brain/
Christopher Relander http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2012/06/superb-multiple-exposure-portraits-by-christoffer-relander/
Resources
Hidden Brain Podcast
Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships.
https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510308/hidden-brainwww.npr.org/podcasts/510308/hidden-brain
Robert Krulwich Science Blog (not just brain and psychology, but more!)
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/
Radiolab (radio show that deals with science, the brain and more!)
http://www.radiolab.org/series/podcasts/
Ted videos on psychology
http://www.ted.com/topics/psychology
Ted videos on how the mind works
http://www.ted.com/playlists/1/how_does_my_brain_work.html
http://www.ted.com/themes/how_the_mind_works.html
Psychological Studies for Everyday Life
http://www.spring.org.uk/
Freud Museum
Lots of exhibits related to Freud’s work
http://www.freud.org.uk/
Freud Museum online exhibit on Dreams
http://www.freud.org.uk/exhibitions/online/dreams/
The Mind’s Self-Portrait
by DANIEL M. WEGNER
Study on how the mind thinks of itself
http://scholar.harvard.edu/dwegner/files/minds_self_portrait.pdf
Excerpts from abstract and introduction:
ABSTRACT: Scientific psychology and neuroscience are taking increasingly precise and comprehensive pictures of the human mind, both in its physical architecture and its functional processes. Meanwhile, each human mind has an abbreviated view of itself, a self-portrait that captures how it thinks it operates, and that therefore has been remarkably influential. The mind’s self-portrait has as a central feature the idea that thoughts cause actions, and that the self is thus an origin of the body’s actions. This self-portrait is reached through a process of inference of apparent mental causation, and it gives rise to the experience that we are consciously willing what we do. Evidence from several sources suggests that this self-portrait may often be a humble and misleading caricature of the mind’s operation— but one that underlies the feeling of authorship and the acceptance of responsibility for action.
Minds are marvelous to look at from the inside. In addition to all the things we can see that seem to be out there--all the sights and sounds and feels and the like—our minds also afford us views of themselves. Gilbert Ryle (1949) described minds as seeming almost self-luminous, as though they light themselves up from the inside. The view of their workings that we gain through our minds moment-to-moment provides a series of ideas that seems to lay out their operation in full detail. In a sense, our minds present us with their own theory of psychology—or perhaps something more akin to a set of laws. The mind’s self-portrait appears as a complete picture of its own operation, something so simple and clear that we can’t help but believe it. And the major feature of this self-portrait is the idea that we cause ourselves to behave.
Consider the classic case of lifting a finger. You think of lifting it and it goes up. You think of putting it down and it goes down. Up, Down, Up, Down. This regularity is striking. Your thought seems to cause your action, and you get a distinct sense of authorship with each movement. The mind depicts to itself no other part of the process whereby the finger moves. The thought pops into consciousness, and the action too is consciously observed, and that’s it. All the machinery in the mind’s basement that might be creating this conscious show--the rest of the mind and brain--remains unobserved. The mind’s eye view of the causation of action creates a caricature, then, a simple conscious snapshot of what may be an immensely complicated set of processes involving multiple sites of brain activation and a welter of unconscious cognitive processes—a mechanism that could only be discovered in full detail with an infinite supply of government grant money. The mind simplifies itself.
PAINTING A PICTURE OF THE CREATIVE MIND / It’s in this delicate negotiation of conscious choices and unconscious summons that art finds its form and communicative power.
By Steven Winn
Part 1, Part 2 below
http://articles.sfgate.com/2007-05-28/entertainment/17244673_1_poet-laureate-robert-hass-unconscious-processes-dreams
Excerpt: Four years ago, American Conservatory Theater actor Gregory Wallace began dreaming about birds -- birds standing, poised precariously on one leg, birds nesting and lightly ruffling their feathers. One day during a rehearsal for "Waiting for Godot," Wallace found himself assuming a new posture at the beginning of the second act, just after his character has been beaten.
"I was aware of standing in a different way," recalled the actor, who played the tramp Estragon in ACT's 2003 production, "cradling myself, holding my arms as if they were wings. I felt like I was perching. I think those dreams just sat in my body in a particular way and affected my physical approach to that role. I don't know that I could be more articulate about it than that. It was a very kinesthetic thing. My body was responding to things that weren't necessarily logical or sensible."
What Wallace experienced is a central, animating mystery of the arts. How do the unconscious processes of the mind flow forward and take shape in a theatrical performance, a poet's rhythms, a dancer's gestures, a composer's harmonies or a painter's shapes and colors? How do artists apprehend and tap their unconscious depths? Or, for that matter, would they rather leave them alone? What do we, as spectators, listeners and readers, understand of our own responses to art that transcend the conscious means of reception? Is the unconscious always to be trusted? Or could it be, as UC Berkeley Professor and former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass sometimes suspects, that "the unconscious is incredibly conservative and consciousness is much more flexible and adaptive?"
What happens to us when art connects to the unconscious?
By Steven Winn
Part 2, Part 1 above
http://articles.sfgate.com/2007-05-29/entertainment/17244095_1_unconscious-modern-art-digital-age
Excerpt:
The connections that paintings and dance performances, movies and novels and music make to us beyond our conscious perceptions of them are primary and transporting. Our unconscious, deep-seated responses are what bring us back to the arts for more and more, nourishing and renewing us just as food and air and water do. At the same time, we're carried away from our sensory and analytical selves, lifted or plunged into a web of emotion and association, a fretwork of glinting filaments radiating out in so many directions.
For some, this becomes a linking to the divine, to something ineffably transcendent. For others, it opens pathways to a shadowy and only fleetingly accessible territory in themselves. It may be a means of communing with an artist's own unconscious essence or of riding the mythic tides that flow timelessly through the arts. It may be a key to cultural codes or the workings of a particular artistic medium. It may open the deepest wells of delight and terror. Or it may be nothing so mysterious at all, but rather a function of physiological events in the brain and nervous system that may someday be thoroughly describable and understood.
Information about Kathleen Fox Exhibit
Kathleen Fox, from The Spaces of the Unconscious exhibition at the Freud Museum, 2010
“Kathleen Fox situates her practice within the critical context of surrealism, a movement explicitly grounded in creative response to Freud's psychoanalytical discourse.
The exhibition is centered in a collection of mounted boxes that use light, sound and texture to introduce themes of eroticism and death that underpin the realm of the unconscious. The work aims to model and explore Freud's spatial concept of the conscious and unconscious mind - for which he used the metaphor of a house and its component rooms.
Set in a space that was once Freud’s bedroom, the exhibition is divided into two areas. From a lit conscious area housing Freud’s domestic furniture and personal belongings, the viewer passes through a membrane to a darkened area representing the unconscious. Here, through closer inspection via small apertures, the contents of the mounted boxes are revealed. Imaginative spatial dimensions are explored in each scenario where the participant is taken on a journey into a world of the dream or the unconscious.
The installation questions the way in which the thresholds between the conscious and the unconscious are negotiated and how the viewer is impelled into spaces that are simultaneously real and imaginary. It invites re-assessment of how Freud's theory has been utilized and developed within surrealism, something which will be a central theme of the accompanying one day conference, to be held on Saturday 09 October.”
Please fill the following requirements:
- Review the resources listed above. Spend time with them. Find new ones!
- Investigate some of the artists listed above and consider how they explore the idea of the brain’s workings. Find new artists
- Complete a minimum of one page in your sketchbook exploring your thoughts on the research, essential questions and/or artists. This does not need to contain specific information, instead just play around with some of the concepts and things that stick out to you. This does not count towards your sketchbook pages for the marking.
- You will share something interesting you have found on Wednesday, 3/13
- You will share your sketchbooks on Thursday, 3/14
- On Monday, 3/18, you will share your plan for your project (see below for details on project expectations)
- Create a piece that investigates some aspect of the mind’s process and inner workings. Consider how outside influences affect the brain. Look at your above research and investigations. How do they help influence your ideas and help you figure out what you want to do? Medium of your choice
- Consider strongly your composition and use of Principles of Design that AP looks for:
· Unity/Variety
· Balance/Emphasis/Contrast
· Rhythm
· Repetition
· Proportion/Scale
· Figure/Ground Relationships
8. During this process, keep thinking about the choices you make. Why are you making these choices? What is guiding you in developing your composition and concept? Consider what messages are being sent by your choices.
portrait of the mind project STatement
Due with your project
In 2+ pages, write an artist statement about your project. In this artist statement, you should describe your concept for your project. You should also describe how your research relates to your project and how your aesthetic and technical choices support your concept.
In 2+ pages, write an artist statement about your project. In this artist statement, you should describe your concept for your project. You should also describe how your research relates to your project and how your aesthetic and technical choices support your concept.