Ann Greene Kelly, ICA, Los Angeles (original) (raw)

Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh, 2019

The Extended Mind/ Walk, Hands, Eyes (Edinburgh) Curated by Miranda Anderson, Tessa Giblin and James Clegg The Extended Mind exhibition explores the idea that our bodies, objects, language, institutions, other people and environments, expand our capacity to think, feel and orient ourselves in the world. This idea, that cognition is not simply something that takes place in the brain, is often called distributed cognition. A merging of academic and curatorial minds led to this exhibition by the History of Distributed Cognition project team and Talbot Rice Gallery as the main outcome of a collaborative project entitled the Art of Distributed Cognition (2019–20), led by Miranda Anderson and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Across the work of 13 international artists it includes: paintings that describe our sometimes coincidental connection to systems – whether sociocultural, industrial, mechanical or virtual – which define our place in the world (Gianfranco Baruchello); an experience-expanding vicarious trip to the Amazon Jungle and shadow puppets evoking extinct animals (Marcus Coates); works exploring the problematics of how huge spatio-temporal scales are brought into our understanding, including the portents of artificial intelligence and communications with extra terrestrial life (Marjolijn Dijkman); enactments of the symbols and processes we use to think (Nikolaus Gansterer); notes that an artist – deaf from the age of ten – has used to communicate, revealing our embodied relationship to language (Joseph Grigely); a project exploring the distribution of cognitive tasks across the emergent community of Turkers, remotely employed to do menial tasks (Agnieszka Kurant & John Menick); videos of robots that learn through embodied interactions with human dancers (Daria Martin); abstract paintings that capture the nuanced interplay between objective and subjective experiences and the active nature of perception (William Mckeown); works where artist and artwork emerge together through self-generating (autopoietic) processes (Goro Murayama); remote retreats from the insidious effects of the corporately-motivated internet (Angelo Plessas); and artworks that configure objects from everyday life in a way that helps us to recognise their often unseen cognitive roles (Magali Reus). The Extended Mind reveals other real and imagined places, showing how art plays a vital role in scaffolding new forms of understanding, enabling creative thinking beyond the constraints of one’s own unaided imagination.