Vernissages | Art and Memory: Sophie Calle "Room"

I start my evening walkabouts crossing a dark Central Park and walking toward the Lowell Hotel, which hosts Sophie Calle’s “Room”.

The self referential title of the installation located in a "real" hotel room is almost a psychological tautology, and pregnant of significance itself. The installation, part of the festival "Crossing the Line" organized by the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF), consists of a hotel room staged with objects of particular significance to the artist’s life: shoes, a typewriter, a wig, handwritten letters, photographs, dresses are the personal objects associated with memories and fantasies, casually placed in the hotel room almost as objects belonging to a typical hotel guest. Notes with sequential number tells stories about Calle’s life, where art becomes a means to tell memories to others.

Sophie Calle is a remarkable storyteller and mostly a “storymaker” mixing objects and written words, writing and performances, in stories blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction,  public and private life. Her art is made of life stories, mainly hers. Reality does not simply happen but is often the product of her design, as in 1979 work “Suite Vénitienne”;  the work consists of diaries, maps, drawings and photographs she took while following a man met at a Parisian party, all the way to Venice. The piece, traced Calle’s journey through an intricate series that she used to speculate on the man’s identity.

“Room” is  room 304, The Lowell Hotel, 28 East 63rd Street, New York

from midnight of October 13 to midnight of October 16.

Events NYC | Neuroscience: Eric Kandel on Memory at CUNY

Erkenne Dich selbst (know yourself)

This evening my walkabouts took me across the street from the Empire State Building: the Graduate Center of CUNY presented Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel, as launching event of the new Interdisciplinary Committee for Science Studies. Eric R. Kandel, M.D., professor at Columbia University and director of the Kavli Institute for Brain Science, received the Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine in 2000.

In his presentation dr. Kandel focused on memory and introduced the history of research on memory as a system problem and as molecular problem. He started with phrenology (from the Greek φρήν "mind" and λόγος "knowledge"): the popular XIX century discipline (now considered pseudoscience) was developed by the German physician Franz Joseph Gall and assigned cognitive functions and emotions to areas of the brain. The history of how cognitive functions became assigned to specific brain region was quite fascinating and quite amusing to learn how intelligence and emotional responses were determined as function of measurement of the skull.

Dr. Kandel's presentation progressed into contemporary neuroscience and introduced memory related topics such as the relationship between short term, long term, implicit and explicit memory, spatial learning in the hippocampus, influence of aging and how memory is effected by emotions. He also mentioned his upcoming book on art and neuroscience, with references to the German expressionism as well as Gestalt and visual illusions. The content was delivered with great clarity to be fully understood and appreciated even by an audience without specific more technical knowledge in the field of neuroscience.

In the QA session the audience introduced major themes such as neuroscience and ethics: can evil have a biological explanation?

Unfortunately the QA session ended before I was able to ask a question on mnemonic systems from the ancient Greece, Rome and the Renaissance ---as narrated in The Art of Memory by Frances A. Yates. As an artist interested in neuroscience and concerned with the transformation of space, the association between space and memory is quite relevant to my work.

To be continued...

PS The Empire State Building has nothing to do with dr. Kandel's presentation, I only took the photo on my way to CUNY, as I am always fascinated by the interaction of light with landmark building ---and I am not the only one, remember Andy Warhol? As the topic of the lecture was memory and this blog (as many others) is a collection of visual memories...why not including it?