Faux/real : the biology of consciousness
- WCU Author/Contributor (non-WCU co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
- Amanda Elizabeth Stephens (Creator)
- Institution
- Western Carolina University (WCU )
- Web Site: http://library.wcu.edu/
- Advisor
- Richard Tichich
Abstract: Consciousness begins when an experience with the physical world initiates a
brain-body perception and response feedback cycle as one acts, absorbs, reacts, processes
and rationalizes information. French phenomenological philosopher Merleau-Ponty
wrote, “The body is the vehicle of being in the world, and having a body is, for a living
creature, to be involved in a definite environment, to identify oneself with certain projects
and be continually committed to them.”(Merleau-Ponty) Merleau-Ponty speaks of a
biological bodily experience. My thesis exhibit investigates this idea of the biology of
consciousness through an installation environment that enfolds the viewer. The
environment employs magnifying devices to encourage a closer look in order to echo the
idea of the whole and the outward-inward feedback of perception and to assert the
importance of first-hand experience with the world.
Inside the gallery space, the viewer confronts an 8’x8’ plastic covered green
house in the middle of the gallery. Projections from the top of the greenhouse structure
onto three walls reveal three different perspectives from inside the structure. The first
projection displays a wide-angle perspective from inside the structure. The second
focuses on a fish tank of plants and vegetables. The third projection, from a camera hidden in the vegetation, exposes the eye of the viewer looking into one of the
magnifying glasses. Upon entering the greenhouse the viewer meets an array of
vegetables in different stages of life, growing out of jars and aquariums, each lit by its
own grow light. Many of the vegetable terrariums have magnifying devices to encourage
a closer look.
By entering the space and finding encouragement to investigate the parts more
intimately, the audience senses an echo of the experience of the perpetual outwardinward
manner of human perception. The experience with very real living plants in
contrast to the fake grass ("Astro-turf") stimulates an awareness of human biology as
inextricable from the cycle of human consciousness. In his book, Out of Our Heads Why
You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness, Alva
Noë, a professor at the Graduate Center, CUNY, states:
“The brain is not the thing inside of you that makes you conscious because, in fact, there
is no thing inside of you that makes you conscious. It would then turn out that
contemporary neuroscience has been in the thrall of a false dichotomy, as if the only
alternative to the idea that the thing inside you thinks and feels is immaterial and
supernatural is the idea that the thing inside you that thinks and feels is a bit of your
body: we’ve been thinking about consciousness the wrong way, as something that
happens in us, like digestion, when we should think about it as something we do, as a
kind of willed, living activity.”
Informed by artists like Mel Chin, whose installation “Revival Fields” addresses
ecological and sustainable issues, Faux/Real also involves sustainable implications.
However, this exhibit differs in its focus on biology as it pertains to consciousness.
Faux/real : the biology of consciousness
PDF (Portable Document Format)
1809 KB
Created on 2/1/2013
Views: 6950
Additional Information
- Publication
- Thesis
- Language: English
- Date: 2013
- Keywords
- consciousness, environment, hyperreal, Installation, interactive art, sculpture
- Subjects
- Installations (Art)
- Consciousness in art
- Biology in art