From Neurons to Picasso
This honors experience was an honors seminar, From Neurons to Picasso: How and why the brain makes art. Led by Dr. Kris Holland and Dr. Ilya Vilinsky, this course explored the connections between neuroscience and art. We explored how and why we see and perceive objects, colors, light and shade, along with a history of drawing and creativity in homo species. This course was overall just intensely interesting to me as it was outside of my traditional coursework and a primarily discussion-based course. The content we covered and the discussions we had have shifted my perspective on art and forced me to think more heavily about what the artist could’ve been seeing, feeling, and perceiving at the time of creation.
One thing that stood out to me most in this course was our brief discussion of Fluxus and performance-style art. That the simple act of doing something can be considered art is something I had never thought of. In one lab, we were split into small groups and my group was instructed to choose the most aesthetically pleasing cracker. The act of us discussing, making decisions, and the method we used were a Fluxus workshop that in itself was art. That has impacted me so much as I have begun to think of the method in which I do things and make it an artful process.
At the end of the course we were to produce a final project. I chose to take some content from a podcast we had listened to and create an infographic showcasing that content. The content of my poster is from the RadioLab podcast episodes on color.
One thing that stood out to me most in this course was our brief discussion of Fluxus and performance-style art. That the simple act of doing something can be considered art is something I had never thought of. In one lab, we were split into small groups and my group was instructed to choose the most aesthetically pleasing cracker. The act of us discussing, making decisions, and the method we used were a Fluxus workshop that in itself was art. That has impacted me so much as I have begun to think of the method in which I do things and make it an artful process.
At the end of the course we were to produce a final project. I chose to take some content from a podcast we had listened to and create an infographic showcasing that content. The content of my poster is from the RadioLab podcast episodes on color.