Space brain Laboratory study days

Created in 2009 by Ann Veronica Janssens, artist and teacher at the Beaux-Arts de Paris and Nathalie Ergino, director of the IAC/ Villeurbanne, the Space brain Laboratory explores practical and theoretical research connecting space, time, body, and brain. Emerging from the field of artistic experimentation and in the light of recent scientific advances, the Laboratory brings together researchers (astrobiology, anthropology, geology, etc.) and artists with intuition as a driving force, shared imagination and collective exchange as a mode of operation.

Through the research cycle "Towards a cosmomorphic world" launched in November 2016, the laboratory extends its field of exploration to the organic connections uniting humanity to the cosmos. As climatic upheavals and their consequences intensify, the questions raised today by the Anthropocene have driven humanity to acknowledge its relative part in the chain of living things and to recompose a common world, where human and non-human coexist. From epigenetics to ethology and geology, science reconsiders the vital relationships between a plurality of living things. Faced with these discoveries, our fundamental conceptions evolve: the dualistic principles of the Western approach separating man from nature, opposing matter and spirit, give way to a cosmological model, a vision of the world no longer anthropomorphic but "cosmomorphic."

How can creation and research contribute together to this necessary paradigm shift and establish a new way of looking at the world?

Station 13: Coexistences – what animality can teach us
Station 13 brings together a multiplicity of research practices, both artistic and scientific, acknowledging our links to the animal world. Estranged for a long time from philosophical and scientific thinking, the animal, once it had entered areas of critical analysis, began to disrupt our practices of knowledge, revealing the blind spots. Now integrated into the fields of anthropology and sociology, the animal resonates our own particularities and normative and normalizing frameworks through the conditions of its presence. In line with the constitutive interdisciplinary of the Laboratory, the idea of this station is to pull our gaze away from the center and towards the multiplicity of beings that make up the world, and in this way envisage other ways of living in it.

Station 13 will take place on Friday, December 14 at the Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris, from 10am to 6pm in the Amphithéâtre des Loges. Free admission. Also available live on Facebook from 10am. NB: all talks are in french.

On a proposal from Ann Veronica Janssens and Pierre Montebello. With the contributions of Jocelyne Porcher, Frédéric Joulian, Pierre Montebello, Aline Wiame and Bertrand Prévost.

Station 14: Matter and Metabolisms
For Station 14, the Laboratory proposes an exploration at the heart of matter, in light of current research being done in physics, biology, chemistry and geology. It is a question of collectively questioning the processes at play. Can one speak of organic or synthetic matter? Inert or living? Autonomous or “parasitic”? Extended to the field of molecular flows, current research dealing with the multiplicity of states of matter and processes of continuity and stability of forms in evolution composes a world of unlimited organizational potential. With regard to emerging and confirmed artistic practices, matter with its metabolisms becomes a paradigm for acknowledging the porosity between beings in the cosmos and thus for considering ways of creating a consistent world.

Station 14 will take place on Saturday, January 19 at the Institut d'art contemporain Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes, from 9am to 13pm. Free admission. Also available live on Facebook from 9am. NB: all talks are in french.

On a proposal from Hélène Meisel and Nathalie Ergino. With the contributions of Nathalie Ergino, Hélène Meisel, Hicham Berrada, Flora Katz, Nicolas Bourriaud, Vincent Fleury and Michel Mitov.

All details regarding lectures, talks, guests and participants of Station 13 and 14 are available on the Laboratory website: www.laboratoireespacecerveau.eu