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Refresh!
First International Conference on the Histories of Media Art,
Science, and Technology,
September 28 - October 2, 2005
Banff New Media Institute, Banff, Alberta, Canada
Plenary Panel:
Image Science and "Representation": From a Cognitive
Point of View
September 30, 2005
Barbara Maria Stafford, Organizer
Although much recent scholarship in the Humanities and Social
Sciences has been "body-minded," this research has
yet to grapple with a major problem familiar to contemporary
cognitive scientists and neuroscientists. How do we reconcile
a top-down, functional view of cognition with a view of human
beings as elements of a culturally shaped biological world? Consciousness,
apparently, emerges from a more basic self-awareness cresting
from an ocean of background biological structures and processes
on which more determinate mental states are posited. Current
scientific investigations into autopoiesis (Varela, Luhmann),
emotion (Damasio, Griffiths, LeDoux, Redding), symbolization
(Clark, Deacon, Dennett, Putnam), mind-body relations (Bermudez,
Dretske, Solso), consciousness (Baer, Edelmann, Metzinger), "mental
representations" (P.S. Churchland, Fodor), visual and perceptual
systems (Zeki, Ramachandran), plus a host of other puzzling and
complex phenomena, open up fresh ways of not only figuring the
self but of approaching historical as well as elusive electronic
media --again or anew--from the deeper vantage of an embodied
and distributed brain. As Stephanie Strickland suggests in "Dali
Clocks: Time Dimensions of Hypermedia": understanding in
the twenty-first century "is less about structure and more
about resonance, about the ongoing fitting of moving mind to
moving world through moving medium."
Papers that struggle concretely to relate and integrate aspects
of the brain basis of cognition with any number of pattern-making
media are solicited to stimulate debate.
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