Yesterday at the PSM Gallery in Schöneberg (Berlin), Sophie Erlund was presenting half a day of workshop and presentations around her VR piece Nature is an event that never stops. She has been working on that piece for the last six months, and it will be on display until 25.02.2023. It’s fantastic, definitely worth a trip to this part of the city where a cluster of galleries is established, on the opposite side of the canal from the Neue Nationalgalerie.
The artwork is a collaboration with the EER group, a mixed bunch of scientists and artists interested in playful approaches to inquire into perception. They offer pathways between cognitive science and installation art, using a “French” method to conceive and evaluate these hybrid setups: microphenomenology. The cognitive scientist Katrin Heimann interviewed visitors and presented her first conclusions in the first part of the workshop in text-heavy slides. She invited us to close our eyes as she channeled the experiences “in first-person” that she had collected. In the second part, Karsten Olsen presented his work on “cultural transmission,” the cognitive mechanism that is explored in the piece by Sophie Erlund. How are sketches or colors transformed as they are memorized and transmitted?
Microphenomenology is the child of the philosopher Claire Petitmengin. The method is elaborating on a technique called the “elicitation interview” which was invented by Pierre Vermersch (1994) and further developed in collaboration with Nathalie Depraz and Francisco Varela as a “phenomenological practice” in the book On Becoming Aware: A pragmatics of experiencing (2003). It is a delicate practice, a deep dive of the interviewer and the interviewee into the sensations and thoughts that occurred during a targeted experience. Claire Petitmengin has conducted research in contemplative science for the last 30 years. The method she teaches indeed shares many principles with meditation, evolving self-inquiry into interpersonal approaches. The method came to me in a new light influenced by the work of EER member Joe Dumit: what if we took it as a contact improvisation exploration inside and around a phenomenon? That day, we centered the interpersonal perceptive field on the lived experience of unprepared visitors going through the VR “film” of Sophie Erlund.
The final panel featured the artists Sophie Erlund and Helene Nymann, the neuroscientist, poet, and brain activist Pireeni Sundaralingam, and the anthropologist and cognitive scientist Andreas Roepstorff. It was introduced by Helena Herzberg, the art manager of PSM Gallery. The session was touching on many topics ranging from cognitive flexibility in school kids to funding schemes for art-science endeavors. Excellent both in content and shape, this two-hour conversation strokes a powerful chord. The participants took the context of EER and the production of the VR piece as a start. The focus went quickly to the serious political implication of bringing together in playful ways the knowledge of cognitive neuroscience and that of artists. Challenged by the audience, speakers stated the urgency of encouraging resistance against the pervading rigidity of the educating system, as well as the uncertainty-adverse societal context. Staging and sharing more-than-human perceptions, as Erlund does so masterfully in her VR film, is one of the many ways to champion tender attention to other people's experiences. As the EER member and play scholar Amos Blanton puts it in the end: bringing children and adults into creative exercises brings up the fears of failing and coming short. Yet the moment when they become engaged in the aesthetic activity, these fears dissolve and the joy of tinkering takes over. Hearing these words, I lifted up my head from my iPad for a short moment, reflecting on graphic ethnography and my experience of teaching ethnography through drawing. So much food for thought today, and great insights on how to frame an art-science VR experience. The panel, as well as the other interventions of the day, were documented and will be available soon on https://www.eer.info/
All the info is on the website of the gallery.
Sharing my sketchy fieldnotes on the spot with anthropologist colleague Andreas Roepstorff w/ ©Yoonha Kim, exchanging first-person impressions in embodied way at the end of the day.