Big Pictures and Neuroimaging at Ars Electronica Festival 2012
From August 30 to September 3, 2012, Scientists and Artists from around the world will come together at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria, to assemble a puzzle. Researchers from our Institute will try to contribute a little to that.
I am Peter, by the way, and this is “NeuroCognition”, the open group blog of the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Human Cognitive and Neurosciences. As the MPIs PR guy, I’ll start off our blog on the new Scilogs.com platform.
So, what was that about a puzzle in Linz?
This year's Festival will be all about putting together ideas in search of “The Big Picture”. On (Brain) Imaging's role in this search, I’ll actually just quote the Festival's press release, because it’s put very nicely there:
Imaging Procedures Deliver the Icons of our Age … Like the first satellite picture of our Blue Planet that displayed such extraordinary power in demonstrating the fact that we’re all in the same boat. Or animated images of the human brain and its gigantic network of synapses, and visualizations of our DNA and thus of the building blocks of life itself. … and Social Networks Disseminate them Globally
Since 1979, the Ars Electronica Centers yearly festival has grown into one of the world's major meetings for Science, Arts and Society. Credit: Nicolas Ferrando, Lois Lammerhuber. Via Flickr
In Linz, Max Planck Research Group Leader Daniel Margulies will present entries from the Brain-Art Competition 2012, a contest organized by him and The Neuro Bureau. Winners were announced during the 2012 OHBM Annual Meeting in Beijing in June. (For more on the Brain-Art Competition, see Daniel's post at the old NeuroCognition Blog. A gallery of all entries can be found at http://www.neurobureau.org/BrainArt/Gallery2012.html).
At the BIG PICTURE Symposium Science and Art I, Gabriele Lohmann from the Department of Neurophysics will talk about possibilities and limitations of neuroscientific imaging as well as the Science behind big news stories like this: "Brain Imaging Reveals What You're Watching“ (Technology Review). Doctoral students David Moreno-Dominguez and Christoph Leuze will answer questions at interactive terminals, where visitors can try out different visualisation methods.
There's not much left to say, except: Don’t miss it, see if the puzzle is actually put together! I assume there will be some livestreams of the events, so just keep your eyes open for those.
As an aside: even more imaging experts from the MPI may have found their way to Linz if it wasn’t for the Brainhack, an "unconference" for collaborative neuroscience, happening at our Institute around the same time. See brainhack.org for more information.