Exploring the central interface between human emotion and computational intelligence — the brain. Cognitive Sensations is pleased to launch a three month public programme, launching with an immersive digital artwork by Sarah Selby.

“Our cognitive relationship with digital devices provokes big societal questions related to privacy, control and political freedom. This programme is an exciting opportunity to explore our future as we become biologically connected to machines.” - Founder, Gabriella Warren Smith

Our decisions, emotions and everyday movements are traced by the technological giants of our society, making personal data the most valuable currency of the 21st century. 

The Downloadable Brain is a programme of events, writing and art examining the future connection between technology and cognition. It visualises and imagines a foreseeable future of sentient machines and the rise of Artificial Intelligence — a world of immense biological and technological innovation.

The conditions and rules for this digital future have yet to be determined — yet the symbiosis between humans and AI draws increasingly closer. Technological progression has enabled human thought to be read and stored by machines, and in turn, humans can nudge screen activity through the power of their thoughts alone. What should we expect as brain reading technology becomes increasingly embedded within society? Our programme takes a multidisciplinary approach in science and art to explore the possible answers.

Igniting our programme, we are inviting the public to be the first to view Sarah Selby's new immersive digital commission at our launch event on May 12th 2021. Inspired by our developing relationship with technology and the use of human participation in helping computers to achieve their goals, Selby has created an interactive artwork inspired by CAPTCHA farms. Visitors will engage with an AI to help produce a living and growing artificial brain that will evolve during the course of the programme.

Founder Gabriella Warren-Smith will unveil her ambitious programme, revealing plans for Marcos Lutyens’ immersive artwork exploring emotion tracking, an AR exhibition by emerging artists Ash//Ella, and a short story by writer Stephen Oram. Immersing viewers on and offline — the programme offers to transfix and transform the walls of viewers homes, and immerse them in the new technology that is quickly adapting into our everyday. 

In addition, we will announce one artist and two writers commissioned through our new fund from Arts Council England. Throughout the programme audiences can enjoy a range of innovative events, including a live brain controlled movie by Richard Ramchurn followed by a Q&A on past and future concepts of mind reading with researcher Flora Lysen.

This creative programme will be underpinned by innovative research; with its themes unravelled through Beyond Biology: Robots, Telepathy and Artificial Brains — a symposium co-hosted by Henry Shelvin from the Centre for the Future of Intelligence. Connecting artists and researchers Anna Dumitriu, Dr. Marcello Ienca, Abou Farman & Henry Shevlin — the event will unpick three technological futures; machines that can think for themselves; technological copies of humans; and the ability to read thoughts through brain data. 

We hope you can join the launch, marking this cornerstone in our organisation's history and celebrating our summer programme, please book onto our Eventbrite page here. 

This programme is possible thanks to funding from Arts Council England. 

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About Cognitive Sensations: 

Cognitive Sensations is a CIC that publishes and commissions multi-disciplinary work exploring the impact of technology on society, with a specific focus on building research at the intersection between art, science and digital culture.

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About artists, researchers and organisations:

Abou Farman is a new media artist and Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research. His work is concerned with immortality and the secularization processes in relation to technology, with an interest in transhumanist ideals and cryonics. His ethnographic research focused on technoscientific projects in the US attempting to achieve physical immortality is explored in his latest book, On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience (2020). 

Ash//Ella are an artist duo based in Liverpool, using performative storytelling to configure their connection to the corporeal and virtual realms. Their work is often held in mundane settings with surreal interference. Through shared anticipation of human convergence with technology, their research embodies the interplay of physical and cyber materiality which formulates outcomes that sit between video, audio, installation and performance. 

Anna Dumitriu works with BioArt, sculpture, installation, and digital media to explore our relationship to infectious diseases, synthetic biology and robotics. She has an extensive international exhibition profile including ZKM, Ars Electronica, BOZAR, Philadelphia Science Center, The Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, LABoral, Art Laboratory Berlin.

Flora Lysen is a historian of science fascinated by the circulation of scientific images and stories about new research discoveries. Flora works as a researcher at the Science and Technology Studies research group at Maastricht University, and as a tutor at the Sandberg Institute Amsterdam for artists examining alternative facts, speculative fiction and imagined pasts and futures.

Henry Shevlin is Senior Researcher at The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. He leads the Consciousness and Intelligence Project and Kinds of Intelligence Reading Group, and in 2018 organised the Varieties of Mind conference. 

Dr Marcello Ienca is a neuroethicist and cognitive scientist working at the Department of Health Sciences and Technology at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Ienca will present his research on the (neuro)ethical and societal implications of emerging technologies at the human-machine interface. He is the PI of the projects "Neurotechnology, Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights", "Digitalizing Elderly Care", and "Hybrid Minds".

Marcos Lutyens is a Los Angeles artist, who’s practice centers on the investigation of consciousness to engage the visitor’s embodied experience of art. He aims to install exhibitions of infinite scale and nature in the minds of visitors, investigating consciousness with social groups such as the third-gender Muxhe, Raeilians, synaesthetes, border migrants, space engineers and mental architects. 

Richard Ramchurn is a practising artist and researcher working across the mediums of theatre, film and digital technology and is the Artistic Director at AlbinoMosquito. His current work centres around affective filmic brain computer interface technology.

Rod Dickinson is one of the curators of the Control Shift digital art festival in Bristol 2020, that is an attempt to rethink and reshape our digital tools with creative practice. His artworks have also been shown across Europe and beyond and explore the history and legacy of behavioral science and its impact on governance, often using software and other digital technologies. He is also Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at The University of the West of England.

Sarah Selby is an interdisciplinary artist exploring digital culture through creative applications of emerging and pervasive technologies. Her work blurs the boundaries between the digital and physical, exploring how they overlap, contradict and impact one another. She seeks to expose and critique invisible and intangible systems, using art to provoke discussion amongst new voices.

Stephen Oram is a London-based science fiction writer. He works with artists, scientists and technologists, including King’s College London researchers to explore possible future outcomes of their research through short stories. His Nudge the Future collections have been praised by publications as diverse as The Morning Star and The Financial Times.

The Royal Standard is a Liverpool’s largest artist-led studio, community and gallery, which aims to support emerging artists through studios, development opportunities, events and exhibitions.