This chapter will elucidate the importance of investigations within Neuroscience as they have historically informed art practice. What will be studied are the early forays into how the brain interprets various stimuli and processes information within creative fields. This section deals with perception, reception, and colour theory through the lens of synesthesia, a condition in which individuals experience sensory input in multiple 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 mind and matter, and the physical and the metaphysical, inherently connect to technology. In the realm of information, it may serve both purposes: synaesthetic imagination and thinking prostheses that manifest as physical forms and various processes within 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 directions in which 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 greater 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 attuned to the complexities of the world—and it’s in this that the arts and creative fields antagonize the bastions of power that attempt to shape the future. Devoid of cross-sense technologies, they lack a way to negotiate ethics.

[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.