Warren Neidich @ Motto Berlin. August 25th, 2024
Posted in Uncategorized on August 21st, 2024
WARREN NEIDICH BOOK PRESENTATION @ MOTTO BERLIN, SUNDAY AUGUST 25th 2024
We have the pleasure to invite you to an improvisational performative reading event in which the audience chooses what is read and discussed.
Please join us from 4 to 7pm, food and drinks will be served.
(This is a kids friendly event)
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GLOSSARY OF COGNITIVE ACTIVISM (For a Not So-Distant Future)
By Warren Neidich
Eris Press; Columbia University Press (4th revised edition, February 2024)
A repository of vital knowledge and conceptual therapeutics, a toolbox
for the willing and the needy
—Anders Dunker, Los Angeles Review of Books
We are at one of those turning points that divide history into a ‘before’ and an ‘after.’ The ongoing transition from an information economy to an economy based in the workings of the brain and the mind has radical implications for human freedom and creativity, both of which are under threat from a rapacious, neurologically-oriented form of capitalism. Such moments require new languages in order for the unnamed, the unsayable, and the misunderstood to become known.
This is the task taken on by Warren Neidich’s Glossary of Cognitive Activism, now appearing in an expanded and fully revised fourth edition. Each of its entries—which range in topic from the central nervous system and brain-computer interfaces to ChatGPT and conceptual art—explicates a key term in contemporary culture. The cumulative effect is astonishing: while every entry can profitably be read in isolation, the Glossary as a whole amounts to a brilliant account of the material brain’s entanglement with its surrounding environment.
For Neidich the human brain is far more than grey matter encased in a skull: it is profoundly integrated with the social, political, and cultural phenomena that constitute the world in which we live. For this reason, human cognition is profoundly vulnerable to the new despotism that is seeking in various ways to reshape it, but it also has the capacity to serve as the site of potent acts of resistance.
Forging connections between such apparently disparate domains as neuroscience, ecology, political economy, and aesthetics, Neidich’s Glossary restores human cognition to its rightful status: not as the passive object of technological interventions or reductive theorizing, but as the starting point for any viable form of egalitarian and liberatory politics.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Warren Neidich Artist/Writer BIO (2022)
Trained in art, architecture, neuroscience, and medicine, Warren Neidich uses written texts and neon-light sculptures, written texts, photography and video to create cross-pollinating conceptual works that reflect upon situations at the border zones of art, critical neuroscience, and cognitive justice. He is founder and director of the Saas Fee Summer Institute of Art (2015-2024). Awards include Getty Research Institute award (2023), Stiftung Kunstfonds NEUSTART KULTUR (2020 and 2021), Hauptstadtkulturfonds (2021), and Katalogförderung des Berliner Senats (2017), Vilém Flusser Theory Award, Transmediale (2010), and a AHRB/ACE Arts and Science Research Fellowship (2004). Selected one-person and group exhibitions include the Venice Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, P.S.1 MOMA, Walker Art Center, MIT, Museum Ludwig (Köln, Germany), Haus Der Kunst (Munich), Zentrum für Kunst and Media (Karlsruhe, Germany), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin, Germany), Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg,( Wolfsburg Germany) KAI10 (Dusseldorf) and Kunsthalle Nuremburg, (Nuremberg, Germany). He was a tutor in the Departments of Visual Art, Computer Science, and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London (2004–2008), Research Fellow and PhD candidate at the Delft School of Design, TU Delft School of Architecture, 2006-2010 and Professor of Art at Weißensee Kunsthochschule, Berlin (2016–2018). He has been a visiting lecturer in the Departments of Art at Brown University, GSD Harvard University, Columbia University, Princeton University, the Sorbonne in Paris, France; and the University of Oxford and Cambridge University in the UK. His work has been the subject of over 150 magazine and newspaper articles, including The New York Times, Time Magazine, Artforum, Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, Bomb Magazine, Kunstforum International, Berlin Art Link, Der Tagesspiegel, 032C, The Art Newspaper, Hyperallergic, Artnet, GQ, Forbes, Vogue IT, Monopol, Performance Art Journal, and Frieze. Selected published books include American History Reinvented, 1989 (Aperture, NYC) Blow-Up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain, 2002,(DAP, NYC, NY and the University of California, Riverside, CA.) Cognitive Architecture: From Biopolitics to Noo-Politics, 2012, (001 Publishers, Rotterdam) Neuromacht,2015 ( Merve, Leipzig), The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, Parts 1, 2, and 3 (Archive Books, Berlin), 2013, 2015, 2017 and An Activist Neuroaesthetic Reader,2022, (Archive Books, Berlin).
