Neuroscience Talk: Sense Lab

For this semester's neuroscience lecture, I went to a panel featuring Brian Massumi, Erin Manning, and Ralph Savarese of the Neurohumanities Research Group. Their talk was focused on their lab - called the Sense Lab - which is a lab composed of artists, academics, researchers, dancers, and writers all working together to explore the active passage between research and creation.

The Sense Lab focused on the relationship between the physical senses and the manner in which we "make sense" of the world. They hypothesized that there is an implicit connection between the creation of art on the sensing body and philosophy,

I was particularly interested in the Sense Lab's laboratory of philosophy of radical empiricism. They focused on bringing people together not through what they produced but through the beginning levels of processing. They explored how knowledge is produced, as well as how to articulate with people in different areas of thought. I was surprised at how many people were interested in the project when they first began in 2004, whether they were academics or beginning artists. Additionally, the are not supported by any university. Their funds come through their processes, and not their products.