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hello and we are live again so welcome everybody uh this is the fourth talk series that we've organized in collaboration with um ucl uh and hops 3d
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around this exhibition that opened about a month ago at mocta museum of contemporary digital art today we're going to be discussing about what cognitive science can bring to museums and artists and we have dr mariano
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babarubello mothering in this panel today so i will let mariana introduce the speakers and the panel topic and i will invite everybody watching this live talk to
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share any comments or questions today with us and we'll pick them up through the conversation so thank you again i will be moving backstage and come back towards the end of this talk to talk some more about the exhibition
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and and what's coming up as well and mocked up so mariana i'll let you introduce the panon and the speakers and welcome everybody thank you serena thanks a lot for organizing this series of panels and thanks to the
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speakers that we have with us today so that let me just make a quick introduction to the topic of today's panel so we're going to talk about cognitive science and cognitive science is a relatively recent discipline it
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tries to apply scientific methods in order to understand the mind the behavior and the brain in humans but not only in humans and while it has naturally developed as a fundamental and basic research
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field at the lab we are now seeing increasing interest in taking cognitive science outside of the lab and applying its insights in particular context for example in education
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and museums and art in general are particularly interesting context as well and cognitive science has a lot to say in that area autistic expression is a very distinctive and old
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human behavior and it involves a number of different cognitive processes for the artists for example in terms of emotions creativity and motor abilities even but also for the perspective of the
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viewer so again emotions visual auditory perception perhaps and memory so what you remember from what you've seen so museums contain a precious source of data for cognitive scientists
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to understand the human mind but maybe cognitive scientists can also provide museums and artists with a specific understanding of how the interaction between artworks and viewers can operate
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so to discuss potential applications of cognitive sciences to museums and art it's my pleasure to welcome here today three uh speakers from around the the world actually
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so we have professor helmut leather hello from so professor of psychology at the department of basic psychological research and research methods at the university of vienna and also
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head of the eva lab empirical visual and aesthetics lab so um his research focuses on the psychology of aesthetics with both empirical and the conceptual approach
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um we also have profess professor maurice benayun and so professor in the school of creative media at the city university in hong kong maurice is a new media artist curator
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and theorist and his work has tried to involve the viewer in different ways for example by using brain computer interfaces and we have also dr chantal echen felder who is head of education and digital
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collection at the stadl museum in frankfurt and she has been collaborated with collaborating with cognitive scientists for the last years and will be telling us about her experience
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so well i've had i've asked each speaker to prepare just a 10 minute presentation around the topic of today's panel and around each one's work and afterwards we'll have the opportunity to discuss the
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topic and we do in the audience so you you can ask questions and comments on the chat and um so yeah keep your comments and questions coming throughout so i've now asked
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professor helmut leather to to talk to us about his research please okay thank you very much and as you've heard i'm a scientist so i can't talk without
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showing images and therefore i've prepared a few slides and well first of all i want to thank um for the invitation to this exciting event especially to mariana and patrick haggard but also serena the background for
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organizing the session potential contributions of cognitive science for the future of museum so one hour is probably very short and due to my experience with zoom i also included a picture of myself so i'm
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a psychologist by education art historian i did as a minor and i'm generally fascinated by beauty so about 17 years ago i had the opportunity to found in vienna
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it's a visual empirical aesthetic research lab i think the first of its kind which we exclusively studies a psychology of aesthetics also beauty cognition and involved in motions
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and it's this fascinating face fascinating science of how the eye captures light and transforms it in the brain and from this kind of illustration of
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distribution of photons in our environment finally gets a visual representation of our environment well that's only fake but that's what we are studying and we are
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interested in various classes of objects typical for cognitive psychologists we study not only the perception but also the beauty of people faces design objects
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of nature architecture and especially interest in artworks and as you said conceptually as a background and a framework to our research we've developed this kind of model a
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kind of box model of information flow typical cognitive scientists stuff to explain what happens in the mind and brain of a perceiver and to guide you through this
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model very quickly was first published in 2004 it's a lot cited in the field of empirical aesthetics it tries to explain how we process artworks by claiming that there are perceptual analyzers followed by
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implicit memory integrations or familiarity aspects then explicit classifications where the perceiver in his perception perceives the style or the content
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and then followed by later stages that we called cognitive mastering trying to find a meaning trying to see what it actually means for him personally or in an art historical context and sorry stages of evaluation
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which then lead to aesthetic judgments this is an interesting artwork this is one artwork i like but also to a number of various aesthetic emotions that can range from well
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interesting i like it to while this is moving um up to even sometimes rarely a visual art but sometimes transformative experiences we also followed up
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um we also translated this into new scientific research where we proposed various brain regions and networks that might be responsible for as you can see on the left
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current model of aesthetic processing and for today i've brought three examples to quickly within this 10-minute slot to give you examples of what the empirical research that we're
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doing following our model could look like in the first example we studied where the art experience can be special in the museum so what did we do in this paper by bieber nadal
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we studied so to say the white cube you're all probably familiar with brian and dougherty's statements of the outside world must not come in so windows are usually sealed or walls are painted white the ceiling becomes a source of light
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the art is free as the same used to go to take on its own life well this is a special context and in this research we studied the effect
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of the real artwork in this kind of context in a museum here in vienna and compared it to what we usually provide as a context is an older image of our older laboratories where people sit in front of computer
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screens and look at art and for an exhibition here in vienna we compare two versions one in which people were in the real museum in a big room one room exhibition and looked at the real art
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and we somehow simulated the kind of museum on in this case big screens high resolutions with the same order of artworks as you can see here represented on the screen and you could move back and forth
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and we measured for each artwork and for the general experience how the experience was for a number of visitors and we found to make it really short that art was experienced better so it was like
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better it was found more interesting it was also found to be more um understandable when people saw the artworks in the museum so we later also did studies on trying to show
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what the reason for this might be but nevertheless summary of this study arts better in the museum my second example we are sorry we also found that recall
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for the artworks was only higher in the museum because somehow people remembered the spatial layout something interesting for creators of museum shows that the spatial layout in this
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case clearly helped to later recall a higher number of artworks for those people who saw the artworks first in the museum well my second example can we also
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capture the special art experiences of conceptual art in the museum and this was a study published last year um in which together with matthew palowsky and other researchers from our team we
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studied aesthetic experiences insulation art of an olaf eliasan exhibition here in vienna baroque baroque in which we studied this room an illusion of a ring
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against the mirror and battlefield paintings hang on the wall and compare this to the what you can see on the higher left the ice cu we equip people with mobile eye tracking glasses that can capture where
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people looked at and after each room we asked them to fill in comprehensive large number of questionnaires post hoc question questionnaires after having visited
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the full exhibition um as you can see illustrated here down in the so-called testing room and we made a lot of analyzes it's a very long paper i only show you one result so when people
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reported experienced emotions they had in these two different rooms it's a bright sun-like icu or the wishes where this wonder the ring illusion in the room with a battlefield
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paintings from very classical paintings we found in a way predictable differences in the emotional profile that they reported here i don't use my mouse but you can see the
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red stars little red stars indicating differences so the icu was felt as being happier more amusing and when you moved to the right hand side
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the intention was better understood in the wishes where this wonder the right-hand room but it was also in the center right under the middle illustration felt more sad
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elicited more sad feelings so these data show differences in participants emotional states appraisals visual exploration which together paint a picture of the aesthetic reactions to the work and these differences also showed how
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viewers appraisal strategies meaning making physical actions facilitated relatively more or less deep engagement with and enjoyment of the artworks
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my third example effects of beauty from lab to life so i know that artists and art historians are reluctant to use the word beauty but in psychology this is the word to describe many aspects that
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are related at least to aesthetics and as you see me also study faces bodies landscapes and so on so forgive me but this is an example where we um study beauty we were also involved in
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bolshoi in vienna on beauty very disputed show probably you know this in frankfurt um was also there in the applied museum and nevertheless in our
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laboratory research now over years we found that beauty determines how we perceive the world because beauty binds looks and where does this claim come from when you're exposed to a scene so this
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is one of our studies if you're exposed to a scene depicting two people different slightly in level of attractiveness or don't even if they differ not at all
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and we measure eye movements then the more eye movements people that that we can find on a certain object it's not only true for faces also other objects but in phases particularly
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and here you see the more red the more eye movements landed in the face of in this case a white person and this is a clear indicator that this person here found more beauty in the right than in the left face and that's very reliable
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and often been replicated in our studies here in vienna now we wanted to translate this into real life what we did was in michigan's a master sees this we've tested people varying portable eye
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movements here along the dono canal the danube channel a big park in the center of vienna and we had people walk um for 300 meters wearing these glasses that recorded what they saw
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and where they looked at here there were sculptures there were also lots of gravity or wall paintings um along this channel this canal and here you see a short illustration
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300 meters long they walked we recorded from each participant what they saw where they looked at and then analyzed whether they looked longer how long they looked at each object on their path
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in this real life study the field study and we found that the beauty ratings that they later gave to the different objects depicted positively linearly correlated with the total
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fixation duration so even in everyday life somehow beauty of an object that is accepted as a category in aesthetics determines
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how people direct their looks in their everyday life so beauty buy-ins longer looks last slide so i tried to show you um very briefly that art is a topic in
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series of psychology of aesthetics that aren't in the museum somewhere special it's a big research topic but a lot of fun to do installation art can elicit predictably different responses and we can capture those
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especially when we also use psychophysiology and beauty determines the way we perceive the world not only in the lab but especially and that's more important in real life and we have just at the moment we start
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two new big projects sponsored um with a lot of money to study art in the real world here in vienna where we have small art insta installations put on the street and in
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another eu project we study the beauty of written text in everyday life when walking through a city like vienna well thank you very much for your attention and i now finish stop uh sharing my screen hope that
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works and i'm back you are wonderful thank you very much that was great and i'll ask now maurice to tell us a bit about his work and his view on the on the topic of
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today's panel so there's a screen to be shared again and the microphone to unmute i think so keep your questions coming in the
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audience if you want um i'm sure you've had lots of comments and things you'd like to to ask to helmut and the other speakers so just write them down okay thank you very much for inviting me
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talking about the so wide topics you know that unfortunately i've been crossing different parallel subjects uh all along my path and uh i could take
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10 hours to talk about this so that's that's a bit embarrassing so do not hesitate to interrupt me and to stop me if i'm too long uh so i i will try to go through uh some slides
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uh i don't know if you see my slides do you not yet okay share share screen something and it should work
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now you see yes okay um i think the the problem that there are many many so many questions in the question that you're asking here
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that i don't know how to address them separately so i will try to uh to go through uh by picking some elements of my practice that refer to that
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so in 93 i conceived art after museum which is a contemporary art collection in vr and i was just wondering how people would discover vr virtual reality works
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and what it means in terms of conception for the artist and in terms of display for the uh for the museum and how we this is not anymore a museum this is about that so
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we'll take more questions in 94 uh i started working with vr more concretely with the big questions and i did a vr work integrating artificial intelligence
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called um more let's say a more um uh it's it's more it's more about um neural network uh so it was called
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is a devil curved that followed the it's got flat and and uh people were invited to dig into a world made full of uh clouds and sky
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and to decorators in this world and then they would meet somebody uh a creature that would react to their behavior
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and most of my work uh most of my work of this time was about trying to understand the behavior of people interacting with an artwork
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and the behavior of the artwork trying to understand the people and so uh here this artwork is trying to set users because it works like uh
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you know it's a kind of a seductive creature based on five spheres emitting sounds coming from porn movies and actually trying to
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capture our attention to draw our attention uh because it's it works like a tv program a prime time tv program and so adapting itself according to how
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people pay attention uh to uh to uh its behavior and if we are not satisfied another creatures creature will appear with a different
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behavior different combination of spheres and so on until we get the best absolute tool to capture the audience
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the same year i did the tunnel under the atlantic it was a virtual vr tunnel between the pompidou center in paris and the museum in contemporary art in montreal for idea
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uh 1995 and i invited the audience the public to uh to uh dig into a material that was a cultural material
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and i wanted the public to react uh to express its interest in what he would meet uh by digging into this material and talk about
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talk with the other about what's going on on the other side and the can of ai was reorganizing the content uh it's more a kind of recommendation
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engine based on the behavior analysis and and and paying attention to what seems to be more interesting for you reorganizing the content providing
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better content and many many other things so that that's what the digging was about and i make it shorter because so if you dig a lot it's like digging into memory
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as you can see and then you meet the other on the other side uh so the video was floating so just imagine 95 is the beginning of the web
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so this is the first meeting after five days of digging with the people 6 000 kilometers away
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matthew we can see you in montreal and the others say that i can see you you're dressing in red with a white color which is of course the best demonstration of what
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is the fatigue function of communication that that has become dominant in the relation between people at the at the age of social network
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and so um this is another work where attention was important and and the audience is invited to use the photo cameras and to capture photos
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from uh authentic photo from the second world war in the bosnia war so this was presented in uh in lean south electronica and got to the uh the golden in 98
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so when you take a photo what you take is erased from the same and is printed out and so the experience is the appropriation of the content and at the same time you create
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ghosts that mean you're erasing but you're not totally removing the content which is a memory the common memory of the world [Music]
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so it's a group of people in vr environments taking photos and erasing the memory at the same time i try to make it short so this is some of the photos
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people take and of course the erase path and the memory uh that has been hidden uh becomes a very visible part of the scene and so
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uh then so sorry there is a problem with the order on my slides so this is uh uh so uh okay let's forget about that uh i just meant that there are different
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characters and behaviors in the artwork that create an artwork which is more society of agents and the relation with the public is totally different because this
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society is trying to to survive and the public is trying to understand the society so in in 97 i i conceived this exhibition called new
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image new network at the site in paris where all the content was reorganized in real time according to how people pay attention to it so it was a network exhibition
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and people could uh go on exploring this content online because a page web page was created automatically for them and this was a augmented reality exhibition
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inside the arc de triomphe that said state 10 years has been destroyed two years ago by the yellow vest so it took the two uh two floors
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plus at the top of the arduino in paris and this one i presented uh not this one specifically let's forget it the detail it's in the pompido center where i
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invited the people the audience to watch using vr binoculars an exhibition in the south of france in avignon called la bote beauty and so they were watching and
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by watching they were actually painting what i call the collective retinol memory and so they were adding different kind of contents mixing them and maybe giving giving the priority to
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some topics what i did again in china in 2005 was cosmopolis we invited the the people from shanghai chengdu and beijing to watch cities
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from around the world and to create by the collective retinal memory uh another kind of city that is a cosmopolis that reached something like 10 000
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visitors a day every day so i i tried to make it short more recently and still on display in the ctu gallery uh days this you can see this show
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with hong kong sk views which are 360 panoramic videos where by watching with a vr binoculars you
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you you create a a new perimeter what that includes your experience of watching and the experience of different people around the world and and of course an important thing i'm
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working on now is this uh project called brain factory where i developed the concept that i developed around the idea of the
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opposition between sublimation and ratification sublimation considered as the fact that we convert the world into data and verification that we convert the
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salt into matter and objects and so this was first the brain factory that you can probably better understand thanks to these short videos and i hope i have enough
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time to show you so uh the public is invited to use eeg headband and this is a show in a in taipei mocha taipei and they have to give
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shape to human abstractions and even to human values so to give shape is not giving shape by designing but giving shape by assessing the shape
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so is the appreciation of the shape according to a concept a human concept that is supposed to give to to to lead to something that would fit
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a wider audience so from one person to another they transmit the dna of the shape the dna of concept that give a collective design of human human attractions
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and later human values this is what we talked about so this was in in guangzhou in korea during uh idea 2019 and at the end of the process what you
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have designed the 3d model uh you you get you get a qr code and you cannot have it on a wallet and it's registered on the blockchain and so you can start trading
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so just imagine that you trade happiness you trade love anarchy art autonomy peace purity you trade them as values becoming value
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having a value and so people can decide by battering swapping them if you want if you want peace and love for power or if you want something else so
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this becomes transactional poetry and the experience of the visitor uh is an experience that is uh actually translated into poetry
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that means more ethical statement and people make choice by giving purity for trust or purity a down and then later respect finally pleasure or you give money for
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love and it becomes something like you always need more money to find love until this is automatically generated and of course all the data about how people how much
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people ask for the values become creates a ranking of values according to the culture to the people so if you're from korea from taiwan from uk
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from from italy uh it's different and so this is a periodic table of values where the values are organized in a hierarchy based on how people collect them
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and and and then the values become of course words and this is a calligraphy of values that result from the process of using eeg
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and this category is interpreted or read by the reader and it's an artificial intelligence that try to find similarities between the generated shapes
00:31:09
and chinese characters and of course an interpreter will try to figure out how the the terms and the key words found by the reader may create
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sentences that refer to philosophy of course at the end of the process of this immaterial thing become material may become material so they become prints like that but
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they're they are rafael so the the sword become objects and they can become clothes where people claim their values and they can becomes culture and artworks installations where people for
00:31:51
example can convert purity into an inflatable sculpture or make into marble uh the the footprint of freedom or uh the
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the shape with with honeycombs the shape of democracy and this is a big reificator that converts the thing into uh into um concrete
00:32:18
so different works made by uh my students who uh who uh try to create ratifications out of their out of the project
00:32:30
so uh just to make it short uh if the question is about how the space of the museum the exhibition the experience of the exhibition or the the the game of the artists
00:32:42
let's say how we changed we may say that the visitor here become an artist and then it becomes a curator selecting the best shape for a certain concept then a collector because you can
00:32:56
have a big collection of of vov tokens uh on the blockchain and then an art dealer because you sell your part of your collection to to to get the best and
00:33:08
a trader and the works include a society of characters of agents like a generator kelly grafer a printer reader interpreter scientist
00:33:21
and artist accountant and poet and philosopher and so on so that that's the concept and and just to finish with this little thing i'm working on
00:33:32
uh which is based on robotic arms uh it's an introduction to another project i would like to do which is called the cyber public and the saber public
00:33:44
is robots trying to understand why humans make art okay that sounds like a great question that we can carry for a discussion thank you maurice for
00:34:00
your beautiful talk um so i'll ask now uh chantal to to share your screen i think and and tell us a bit more of what you have been doing
00:34:13
at the start of the museum in frankfurt yeah thank you very much for the invitation so i try to share my screen and i hope it works
00:34:42
i've seen many comments and questions coming so keep them coming don't be shy and we will try to discuss these topics after i cannot share i don't know
00:35:00
what happens and when we tried it took also some time yes did you find the share button and share screen yeah yeah i i shared the screen and i shared the whole
00:35:20
the whole screen but the share button which is [Music] which is underneath i cannot um it's not uh it's not activating i think perhaps uh maurice if you
00:35:35
if you don't mind maybe angela oh sorry uh i'm still hearing oh i shouldn't i shouldn't i was reading the comments did you give it back so perhaps now you can try no i'm not
00:35:53
sharing anymore so do you still see me in my screen no no
00:35:59
okay anymore so it should be anything coming you see something not yet no
00:36:27
i don't understand what happened so maybe um i think you can i try and you um take the questions first or something i'm sure yeah i can do that let's do one
00:36:42
question um that was asked by patrick hagrid at the beginning um so i think it's rather directed to to helmut exactly so people often describe aesthetic
00:36:54
experiences as somehow exceptional and transcendent how should a cognitive model account for this if at all i think it also somehow relates to maurice's work where you try also to to
00:37:08
go beyond what people can directly tell about about the experience so perhaps helmet you have something uh to answer and then worries if you if you want to join as well
00:37:23
uh no i i answer i'm sorry sorry uh yeah it's difficult for me to say that uh uh that uh aesthetic experience are
00:37:38
exceptional maybe there become aesthetic experiences when they are exceptional i think it's a this shift uh in the quality of the experience that make it an aesthetic experience and
00:37:51
so that's and that's very important uh many of my work i've been about about the experience of watching and the experience of uh discovering the world
00:38:02
and and uh how we can uh reach certain level of uh not uh exceptionality not not not uh no not not a kind of magic but more
00:38:16
something meaningful so what would happen that makes sense uh from the experience of watching and discovering a certain content so this is uh i think mostly what i've been working on
00:38:28
so is that something right the helmet that that is a part of your of your models [Music] yeah i i think thank you very much for this interesting question indeed if we couldn't somehow explain
00:38:41
these exceptional self-reported sometimes even transformative states well the model would of course fail so from 2004 on we have developed three or four stages of this model
00:38:53
and in our latest version we try to exactly address this question so sometimes it's beyond just being interested and finding something fascinating or even finding it something is
00:39:06
exceptionally perceptual pleasing but sometimes you really feel that there is something going on that transforms you and in order to explain this we put in some extra boxes
00:39:18
that represent um schemata that you have when you approach an artwork and somehow how they interact with your self schema is what you see what you expect and if
00:39:32
not what kind of challenge and is it it and do you have to do you have a facial experience where you have to leave because the emotion that results from a kind of ambiguity gets too strong though is it something where the challenge seems to be possible to
00:39:45
become overcome and then suddenly puts you into what shiksha mihai would have called a kind of flow state even where you sometimes feel you have to do this now and then you transform the schema that
00:39:57
you have regarding art or yourself and if it's about yourself then it's transformative i hope that this refers to this patrick i'm very happy to share this paper with you and send it to you afterwards but of course this is one of the big
00:40:10
excitements and if there is something special and we started this kind of research years ago with art historically inspired hypothesis regarding the nature of aesthetic experiences
00:40:23
where we for example stated that not like in the kantian sense that aesthetic experiences are somehow emotional distant we also find evidence in various studies for this however
00:40:36
the aesthetic experience is one where certain cognitive features are extended in time so when you take the time to indulge in perception thinking
00:40:49
and in this special uh situation where often you've shown us lots of moving artworks dynamic artworks but the classical artwork is something that doesn't change but what changes is me during the
00:41:01
experience so i go through these different processing stages and steps through the artwork and this allows me to somehow monitor self-monitor the process of perception
00:41:12
cognition finding meaning why is something meaningful and so on i was also wondering whether how how does your model um account for more modern art where
00:41:25
it's not necessarily the aesthetics but also the concept uh that is behind the the work of art that is important um so how how how does your model account for that is there a different time course
00:41:37
for example for the aesthetic experience because you need the interpretation so you need reading you need explanation probably but to make it short because we need time for chantal to share
00:41:49
news as well nevertheless so the model i think why was it so successful because in the way it was planned to only explain contemporary art however psychology of the arts for over a century
00:42:02
was so backward looking always looking at van gogh's and impressionist or old-style paintings but in a way when you read the paper you realize that we
00:42:14
aimed for explaining art of today or at least the potential of explaining it out of today and one of the limits we have we can only study artworks or mostly we can study artworks on computer screens
00:42:28
which is a serious limit um compared to several kinds of art and the barak bar work for example that i showed you the iliason was of course a very pleasant cooperation with the museum um on these kind of
00:42:41
conceptual art where of course most psychologists would claim hey this can never be studied that's too complex but i i think we've shown we can thank you so i think chantal is ready now so we're looking forward to your
00:42:55
presentation thank you now now yeah i think you're muted you have 20 newt you have to unmute oh but now it's screen sharing i'm afraid you don't see our window
00:43:33
you should unmute yes so but is still your screen uh the screen sharing uh working yeah yes it is full screen okay so sorry for the technical pro
00:43:52
problems i'm very happy to be invited in this very interesting panel and i just want to would like to show you some things which we do in a steady museum
00:44:06
so we have since several years again and again collaborations with neuroscientists and we try to see aesthetic experiences from
00:44:20
to perspective first just to show you this is the daily museum in frankfurt this is the old front and here you see underneath the little green hill there's the wing of contemporary art
00:44:34
it's in traditional art museum we have old masters modern art and contemporary art and as
00:44:46
almost all art museums we have tried to give our broad and diversified public different kinds of art encounters and here for this
00:44:57
question today it's divided into individual art experience guided tours and of course we have several hands-on workshop
00:45:10
offers also and we also have programs for people with disabilities different kinds of offers
00:45:23
and different ages we have collaborations and also for these kind of offers we like to have a collaboration with a scientist from other
00:45:36
disciplines so we can at the end shape our offers in a better way for example we have also a program called art for life it is a program for people suffering
00:45:49
from cancer and those groups they have first have a guided tour and afterwards they are doing uh practical work in our studio
00:46:00
and we have this was also a study and collaboration with the goethe university here in frankfurt a program for people suffering from dementia
00:46:12
and their families and also here we have this kind of talk between a guide and the the group of dementia patients and the relatives
00:46:27
and afterwards here a collaboration of practical work at the end and in the study there was proven that most of the patients
00:46:42
liked this program very much and that the living conditions um because they are in families where someone has dementia is suffering from dementia
00:46:55
um this are very often there are tensions between the relatives and the patients so the living conditions in almost every participant
00:47:10
families have been battered after taking part in the program and we did in the last six years now many steps
00:47:24
towards digital offers not only because of corona what we have now but um we were one of the first museums uh experimenting with the
00:47:36
digital strategy and therefore we have different offers also a vr offer in our museum but for us it was
00:47:49
very important to to shape these offers upon certain experiences and on the basis of exchange with other
00:48:01
scientists of other disciplines so first of all before we began to develop our digital offers we were taking a look back on what are the
00:48:14
key features of art education in museums and what is functioning there so the first thing is the impulse of the original on a non-verbal level by stimulating
00:48:27
perception and then on the second level you have the conveying information through storytelling and the entertaining performance of the art educator
00:48:39
and um on the third level you have a close interaction between the educator and the visitors in front of the original the problem is uh if you are in the digital realm that
00:48:53
your average attention span is only eight seconds if nothing interesting happens on your website so the biggest challenge is how can we keep
00:49:05
the user interested over a long period of time so we developed or resampled the key features of digital art education
00:49:17
which are multimedia content and that we offer the microcosm of art in micro units and the vast content in very very small units so it can be
00:49:32
easily be understood and to provide interactive tools and gamification methods and also to offer a diversified learning
00:49:46
environment for a guided self-study and of course storytelling is even more important in the digital realm as in the physical space
00:49:57
and very important is also a visual example based learning so um on this basis we developed a lot of digital offers from the digitorials to
00:50:10
an art history online course our vr time machine and a game for children called imagers and we have a digital collection and much more
00:50:22
just to give you some examples and on yeah on a broader level we have a research
00:50:37
cooperation with the max planck society in general and in special here in frankfurt we have the max planck institute of empirical aesthetics and since a few years now we
00:50:50
have a close uh collaboration and in 2018 there was one day of this conference international conference on
00:51:02
neuro aesthetics in the wild has taken place in the stadium museum and we had a panel where even helmut leader was also
00:51:13
participating and we were discussing a little bit the similar questions like today and this was the beginning of
00:51:26
a closer collaboration of the schtel and the institute of empirical aesthetics in frankfurt and um on this day also i don't know if you can see
00:51:38
the lady in the middle she's wearing uh these uh glasses these eye-tracking glasses we had a guided tour in the museum and the data were collected
00:51:50
um what happened in the um the brain during this guided tour and this was only one example to look um and to bring closer together
00:52:05
[Music] research and neuroscience and aesthetics and what happens in a museum or during a museum visit and what the institute of um
00:52:18
empirical aesthetics in frankfurt is interested in is to change um the site so many studies are taken in the
00:52:29
um are not taking in museums but more in in scientific um uh spaces so uh not in the wild so um here they want to
00:52:43
broaden research more in a real museum environment and another thing we have in this cooperation with the max bank society it's called the gust commentary so we
00:52:57
invite several scientists from different disciplines but many neuroscientists to make a guided tour
00:53:09
in front of our artworks but explaining uh things in their area in their discipline so elizabeth binder as you see above she was talking about
00:53:25
people being suffering from traumatic after war or other severe things or we had a very interesting talk
00:53:40
from moritz helmstetter um he explained uh how what happens when uh you are maybe in front of a painting of cezanne and cezanne is just at the beginning
00:53:54
or at the frontier of realistic painting and abstract painting so if he paints a tree the tree doesn't look like a tree but human beings are able to recognize
00:54:09
this what he paints as a tree and this is um very interesting if you compare it with today's level of artistic intelligence which has very
00:54:22
a lot of difficulties in recognizing for example that zazan tree as a tree so we have different lectures of um scientists in this area and also
00:54:36
in this program we would like to intensify our collaboration and to conclude we think that museums and art institutions need
00:54:48
a lot of more research like helmut later also talked about from the perspective of neuroscience in the field of aesthetic experiences so that we can develop appropriate
00:55:02
museum offers because we would like to um have examined the mental processes of art encode encounters so what happens if you are
00:55:14
standing in front of an artwork to see if there's a difference between art experiences with or without museum education to learn more about deepening the aesthetic experience with creative
00:55:27
workshops and to create a better basis for developing digital offers and we would like to prove that art encounters support
00:55:37
physical and psychological well-being with this um i would like to end thank you very much that was really interesting and it's great to see
00:55:51
uh what kinds of initiatives you've been uh developing here in frankfurt thank you um so we have many questions in the audience
00:56:02
i'd suggest just one question um so perhaps it will appear on the screen so it's around the topic of uh interactions and uh how important it is or how positive it can be to to have an
00:56:15
interaction between the public and the the art that they are viewing what so for example for the perspective of the museum what can you develop as new ways of interacting or engaging
00:56:28
with the audience i think maurice interaction is at the heart of your work right um always trying to um to adapt the the what the viewer is is seeing according to
00:56:39
to what he he's asking for somehow and helmut i was wondering also whether uh the fact that you can interact with an artwork is going to change somehow the way that you appreciate uh
00:56:51
what's what you're seeing so i think maybe we can show the the questions on the screen while we try to answer this question of interactivity maybe as well gamification and on a
00:57:04
further level so perhaps chantal if you want to give us the perspective of the museum on how to engage with the audience [Music] i was very interested in the work of
00:57:18
maurice a bit because we almost use the same the same model um in the analog and the digital way to
00:57:30
interact with our audience for example if we would like to engage people more with our artworks we are working with this these terms that you mentioned this emotional
00:57:44
terms like for example justice or faith or friendship or something or anger we we try to bring together what people feel um
00:57:59
and that they are invited to to make a choice for example um they have to look in our museum which kind of artwork they think
00:58:11
uh fit to this firm for example and then there's a debate going on and people discussing uh because everyone has individual emotions and understanding of emotions
00:58:25
but on the other hand you have some more objective rules that you can maybe say this is an artwork which makes you angry and it makes everyone angry and then other
00:58:40
artwork is more calm and you you can generate this discussions and we are using the same also in in some of our digital uh applications so i was
00:58:52
very interested in in your work maurice uh i think i muted we have the i think i have to to clarify something we are not it's not because you we are talking about a museum or an exhibition
00:59:13
place that we are talking about the same thing if we are talking about a place where you exhibit paintings and sculpture i mean static elements it's something
00:59:25
different in terms of public experience from compared to a place where you can have a dynamic content and i have to i have to say that i've been working more
00:59:37
on places where the content sound imagine and everything happening uh could uh evolve according to the experience of the visitor
00:59:49
so i was describing that in the 90s as a as organic museum design where the the content is like a living being dialoguing with the public and this
01:00:03
living being reacts uh not to please but to uh like two people talking about a specific topic and this reaction this experience would
01:00:16
enrich the experience of the visitor because the visitor has a feeling that it exists for the place so it's a very specific relation that i've been working on
01:00:29
on building uh you know and and it would be probably confusing to uh to really compare the processes because we are not talking in this case about what what is the
01:00:42
experience of discovering of course i've been doing things in in a more traditional environment but always able to uh introduce the possibility for
01:00:54
the space itself to have a form of expression uh that would reflect the experience of meeting somebody that's that's very interesting um helmut yes
01:01:07
well thank you very much more and more questions and they're all interesting but i try to stick to the ones that we agreed on to discuss um we have now come to a stage where we more and more acknowledge that
01:01:19
different viewers of course bring different things into the museum so it's it is educational level interest it can be the actual motivational state um as already asked by some of our um
01:01:32
audience questions wonderfully asked and we include this of course in all our empirical studies we've developed questionnaires for example on art experience
01:01:43
and art expertise um on the level of what do i know about art but also how do i how important this art for me but we also believe that more and more getting deeper into the motives of the perceiver can help to refine the
01:01:57
model and then to pick the kind of processes that we deem that are deemed relevant to create a kind of overwhelming positive or not so positive experience
01:02:08
at the same time um of course we aware that we can have informed experiences where someone teaches us helps us and that's what museum also provides these days to not only present the art
01:02:21
to the informed viewer but they also give information but this level also has to be carefully chosen because we we have to respect that the artist's intention might not be fully explained might not
01:02:35
at all taking the magic out of the artwork the the possibility to to be surprised and experience and bring in your own experiences into resonance with the artwork that all these sounds very
01:02:47
uncognitive scientists would like to say no but i think we can measure and implement these things also in empirical studies but this has to be respected so only one study we've published a few years ago showed that
01:03:00
when people with alzheimer who have very strong distortions of their memory they can't remember a lot of things they can't remember that we've measured them
01:03:11
for the aesthetics preferences but they show rather stable aesthetic preferences which means the aesthetic sense our feeling of beauty which is something more abstract it's not much about knowledge but that this remains
01:03:25
or even persists in states where our memory can be severely severely distorted and that's of course related to the dementia studies that you do this university in frankfurt and so on but
01:03:37
very interesting stuff where cognitive sciences can also deliver something that is not trivial it's not what everyone knows but it's something new and suddenly boosts a kind of action in the museum
01:03:50
sure so we have another question now on screen so you mentioned recording emotional responses to artworks are you looking at eye tracking group discussions or are you also evaluating more comprehensive neurological responses for example eeg
01:04:03
graphs is it about me we use them all so our range of measures of emotion is emotion for a long time was a tricky concept in psychology so most
01:04:17
uh psychologists will agree it was not we were stronger in memory reaction times of cognitive classification seeing that there is something what it is deciding and so on um
01:04:29
but now we have a tradition of 25 years of measuring emotions and what to be honest i for a long time i thought that the best way to capture emotions that people have when looking at an artwork is
01:04:41
facial emg it's a measurement of the frowning the negative or the smiling muscle here in the cheekbones that i have this is something that allows you to measure the dynamics of an emotional response when you suddenly see
01:04:55
something um very very reliably but we also of course at the moment use we have fmri in vienna we are we use fniers which allows us to measure yeah
01:05:07
less reliable less detailed but also portable in real life and more uh responses in the brain we have eeg and so on and so on there's only one way and this is a bit
01:05:21
disputed so what what happens if you like something eventually your eyes go up a little bit but it's not so clear how eye tracking can reveal something about our underlying emotions
01:05:33
i would like to say something about a tracking question you know because as i've been working a lot with the experience of watching uh making photos and using binoculars
01:05:47
and telescopes and so on yeah people ask me why i was not focusing on ice eye tracking it's because i i know how eye tracking works uh eye tracking is related to some kind of primitive
01:06:02
uh behavior of the brain which is tracking if there are some possible aggression coming some predator coming or some potential prey and so this uh
01:06:16
action is not uh always significant uh regarding to a specific topic because even if i'm looking at the screen i may i may look at what things happen around and this
01:06:30
doesn't say so much about uh so this is why i've been focusing on tracking uh intentional watching you know when you have
01:06:41
binoculars you do that you do that this is intentional this is not the eye moving this is watching and so uh it's uh it's a very different and and
01:06:55
the telescope was fantastic for that you know the big telescopes uh i did for the for the arduino for for the uh the um cosmopolis installation
01:07:08
because really you can really focus on what people look at and and even in that field if they want to do that they can
01:07:20
but uh this becomes noise that that was my perception i'm not an expert on that so i'm not i'm not gonna say that i'm an um but uh this is for me it's a very
01:07:35
important uh issue and i'm always happy to to share about that because uh i'm interested in uh other understanding perception and so on yeah it's it's
01:07:47
interesting as indirect ways of getting at the experience right not directly asking about experience but getting other types of measures underlying the experience so time is running i'm afraid
01:08:01
so i'll ask each of you if you want to make a final comment about the discussion on the topic um open to you so perhaps let's start with maurice who isn't muted yeah it's a a bit late but i mean i'm
01:08:15
fine i'm fine discussion is interesting thank you um so chantal would you like to to say some concluding words yeah and i i'm
01:08:30
yeah i got some um i am confirmed and going more in this direction to search for collaborations and
01:08:43
i was happy that you brought in the the term of magic yeah we ha we don't have to explain art to death but we have to to keep this magic moment
01:08:57
and maybe we have research who um confirms us to to to leave this space this imagination space for for visitors for artists and
01:09:11
and to to get this as a serious thing because we know that in our world determined by numbers and data magic
01:09:23
moments and feelings are not so considered so on a high level but maybe this kind of research gives us back this kind of space which
01:09:34
is the creative sphere for both artists and visitors thank you helmut uh would you like to thank you well i'm very pleased about this so i'm
01:09:48
fascinated by the artworks i saw by maurice and i'm i'm also always pleased when i hear what museums already acknowledge about the interaction between science and art however there
01:09:59
and we started 20 years ago i was so many people that you can't do empirical research in in art this is about stick with letters and numbers and color patches but first technical
01:10:14
progress had made so many things possible so we have better measurements we have higher quality screens we have portable stuff we can bring into the museum and at the same time especially these
01:10:27
days now you some of you might know i don't know where you all are but we are in vienna and we have opened the museum two weeks ago so we can go back to the museum before we can go back to the restaurant to the hotel
01:10:39
into the sports stadium and so on and we well we especially believe that this is the right priority because the kind of treasures and objects that can serve our well-being our
01:10:51
happiness in a huge variety of levels it's not just like kicking the chelsea goal and cheering for a moment which of course all the visitors makes them happy but it's something that the child
01:11:04
appreciates and even the person suffering from alzheimer can have the aesthetic pleasure so i think the full range of things have not yet been lifted and i think i'm very pleased that i'm part of this panel
01:11:16
where we can present our research and i hope that this interaction in the long run also has um has many and multitude of effects thank you very much um i think it was a really interesting
01:11:29
uh discussion and it was great to hear all these different points of view museum artists and scientists and i hope we will engage in more discussions like this because it's i guess useful for everyone so
01:11:42
perhaps serena you want to say final words about the last panel of the series thank you so much marianna this was wonderful to watch and listen to
01:11:54
so once again i've learned so much just by listening to all of your comments and experience and everyone for um thank you for sharing all the questions and relevant
01:12:08
comments as well with us today so i want to thank you mariana for moderating this wonderful panel session and patrick as well for being with us and researching around this topic i want to also remind everybody that the
01:12:22
exhibition uh is going to be open until the 9th of may on macta so abstract art in the age of new media also including the work of maurice in the exhibition
01:12:33
please feel free to go ahead and browse and also try the experiment that ucl has put together because i think will be extremely fascinating to see what you can remember and how you navigate the space
01:12:47
so these serious stocks will be available on our youtube channel so feel free to rewatch them and share them with your audience and also to say that we made an nfd poster of the exhibition available to
01:12:59
support all the participating artists in the show that you can now collect them this is also a limited edition of 100. so thank you again for being with us today
01:13:11
and enjoy the exhibition and thank you again mariana for the moderation thank you enjoy take care thank you thank you i'm sorry
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