Neuro Aesthetic Reading room

In collaboration with Warren Neidich ( www.warrenneidich.com )

Bouwery took on the challenge to translate New York-Berlin based conceptual artist Warren Neidich's concept of a machine of cultural exchange into an interactive architectural object.

Architectural concept - Telescopic Space

NAeR is a traveling object. The first condition of the piece is being an enclosed box, serving to protect its content while traveling. Once at its location the box will open along a linear, telescopic path to reveal its inner second skin, a lightweight tensile tissue, which allows the piece to explore and absorb its context and to create a flexible space.

The box’s skin is matte black as to indicate its absorbing quality and expressing the wear and tear ‘scars’ and other traveling marks as a mapping of its itinerary;  a journal as long term memory.

The tissue acts as a silver screen to reflect its content of constant change; influenced by visitors and users, serving as its short term memory .

The tissue will run as a band through the whole piece linking the various sorts of media/fields of knowledge within the reading room.

Concept Introduction by Warren Neidich:

Neuro-aesthetics describes a machine or mechanism that increases the flow between distributed and developing fields of knowledge which are directly or indirectly related such as architecture, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of mind, media studies, cultural studies and art history, just to name a few.  These fields are in parallel and distributed in the sense that research centers for them are contained in specialized libraries and universities where they are growing and developing independently.

Generally speaking they are developing in parallel on their own creating their own genealogy and discourse and the flow of information is limited by their separate histories, practitioners, methods of distribution, linguistic and semantic codes, context of associations and tools that operate upon and with specific active sites singular to their domains.

Neuro-aesthetics attempts to unbridle this specificity to incite interaction and exchange. The Neuro-aesthetic Reading Room is one such mechanism that creates an atmosphere and social context for this exchange to occur.

 The reading room is meant to travel. It is in fact contained in a crate within which it resides ready to emerge upon reaching its attended destinations which most of the time will be in art related spaces such as museums, galleries and so called alternative spaces.

 When the reading room arrives at its destination the contents of the crate will be unloaded or unsprung. As the case opens it unfolds into a series of library cabinets with content viewing apparatti, chairs, tables, walls, projections, etc.

As the name suggests the reading room is a place to view, read and ponder books, art publications, films, videos about neuro-aesthetics. As the room travels to other places its library will grow and reflect the local (heterogeneous) cultures and be a place of cultural exchange. Thus the reading room grows into a Cultural Being.