Abstract

In the lecture "Music Mirrors Mind," composer and director Gene Coleman explores the concepts of Neuroaesthetics and Neuro Music. Coleman defines Neuro Music as an area of research and composition based on the study and application of models and concepts from Auditory Neuroscience. He gives an introduction to his methods to compose Neuro Music, using examples from his recent works. He makes a case for why artists should understand how perception, cognition and thinking work and how they are the basis for creativity. The emerging fields of Neuro Music and Neuroaesthetics in conjunction with new technologies have the potential for enormous impact on the way musicians and artists think about and make their work. Coleman will talk about the influence of architecture and visual art on his work, his experiments with the Neurodata technology called "The Source," the creation of the Institute for Music and Neuroaesthetics and the Neuro Music ensemble CONJURE.

Bio

Gene Coleman is a composer, artistic director of The Institute for Music and Neuroaesthetics and a member of the META lab at UC Santa Barbara. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, The US-Japan Friendship Commission and the American Academy in Rome. He has created over 70 works for various instrumentation and media. Central to his work is the inventive use of sound, image and time, and the desire to create experiences that expand our understanding of the world. Since 2001 his work has focused on the global transformation of culture and music’s relationship with neuroscience, video and architecture. His most recent research and compositions explore the concepts of Neuro Music and Neuroaesthetics. He studied painting, music and film making at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where his teachers included experimental filmmakers Stan Brakhage and Ernie Gehr, composer Robert Snyder, and visual artists Barbara Rossi and Oliver Jackson. In 2024 his album of Neuro Music called Exploratorium was released on the UK label Falls Walls.

Abstract

My practice is driven by the ambition to design life—a synthetic, bottom-up pursuit of liveliness itself. This talk traces a research trajectory that builds on origin-of-life sciences, orchestrating three core agencies to prefigure a future artificial life form: AI ontologies (‘soft’ ALife) to model intelligence; electroactive microbes (‘wet’ ALife) to provide a metabolic, communicative ‘flesh’; and dynamic mineral substrates to form resilient, structural ‘bones.’ Such a pursuit demands a foundational ethic: to take full responsibility for the designed entities. Following Latour, this means learning to love our monsters. The ambition is not spectacle, but to forge mutualistic relationships with constructed life—relationships as demanding and creative as those with nature. The result is architectures that counter an extractive industrial logic by contributing through their day-to-day existence to the overall liveliness of the world. Expanding the potential of life is an Earth imperative. While autonomous artificial life remains the horizon, the urgent work is to build its ethical, material, and intellectual prerequisites. I will present this work, arguing for a future where our built environment is not just sustainable, but constitutively alive.

For further reading, you can download a PDF of her book "Liquid Life: On Non-Liner Materiality"

Bio

Professor Rachel Armstrong, PhD, is a practitioner and theorist whose work establishes a new trajectory for architecture: the design of artificial life. With a First Class Honours in medical science (University of Cambridge) and a PhD in Architecture (UCL), her practice is a synthetic pursuit of liveliness grounded in origin-of-life sciences. Her designs and prototypes are vibrant, metabolic systems that host, support, and propagate life, transforming architecture's role from creating static spaces to cultivating dynamic, living ecosystems.

Professor Rachel Armstrong's current roles also include:

Project Coordinator: Microbial Hydroponics (Mi-Hy)
Microbial WiFi Project
Exhibitor: Spika
EIC Ambassador

Abstract

I will present recent and ongoing work in the RE Touch Lab on emerging haptic and robotic technologies. Modern computing and AI operate at extraordinary speed over vast, high-dimensional data spaces, but their agency in the physical world is sharply constrained. Haptic and robotic systems provide this agency, but with constrained physical output bandwidth: they provide few degrees of freedom, and operate at far slower speeds than is feasible in computational domains. I will describe ongoing research in my group that is directed at alleviating such bottlenecks and at enabling computational systems with greater physical agency. A logical extension of these ideas: computationally authorable physical reality, an unmapped possibility whose territory and implications are compelling, if unclear.

Bio

Visell is Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and MAT Affiliate Faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Visell directs the RE Touch Lab, where they pursue fundamental and applied research on the future of interactive technologies, with emphasis on haptics, robotics, and electronics, including emerging opportunities in human-computer interaction, sensorimotor augmentation, soft robotics, and interaction in virtual reality.

Dr. Visell’s research has been generously supported through multiple awards from the National Science Foundation and other government agencies, tech industry companies, and philanthropic foundations. He has published more than 75 scientific works, and served as editor and author of two books on VR, including "Human Walking in Virtual Environments" (Springer Verlag, 2013). His work has received four awards and more than a dozen award nominations at prominent academic conferences. Dr. Visell is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2018), of a Hellman Family Foundation Faculty Fellowship (2017), and a Google Faculty Research Award (2016).

Dr. Visell spent more than five years in industry working at technology companies. He was the digital signal processing developer at Ableton from 2001 to 2003, where he wrote algorithms that have shaped music produced by artists ranging from The Roots to Deadmau5. Previously, he was a research scientist working on speech recognition at Vocal Point (now part of Nuance, makers of the Siri voice assistant). Prior to that, he designed auditory displays for underwater sonar at ARL, Austin, Texas. Dr. Visell later worked in interactive art, design, and robotics research at the University of the Arts Zurich, at FoAM, Belgium, at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, and at the art-architecture-technology group Zero-Th, which he co-founded in 2004. His creative works and activities have been presented at cultural venues including Ircam / Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), SIGGRAPH, Phaeno Science Center (Wolfsburg, Germany), La Gaité Lyrique (Paris), the Oboro Center (Montreal), and the Biennale of Design St. Etienne (France).