Numero Cromatico presents HOBIT – How Our Brain Innovates Thinking: online seminars on art and neuroscience. Since 2021, the aim of HOBIT is to bring to the public, both experts and non-experts, connections and knowledge from the scientific as well as and the humanistic world, and explore, with the help of scientists, artists and researchers in various fields of knowledge, the cognitive mechanisms, theories and research that relate the role of the brain in aesthetic experience. 

HOBIT 1

March 15–21, 2021

The topic of HOBIT 1

Our body’s health and functioning are issues of fundamental importance today. These are not only issues that concern the medical field, but have implications for many other disciplinary fields including art. In recent years, on the one hand, artists and scholars in the humanities have turned their attention to the cognitive aspects of perception in the brain and the bodily, empathic and psychological experience of art; on the other hand, there has been a growing interest of the neuroscientific world in art, architecture and design. 

The time is therefore ripe to delineate a new hybrid territory between art and neuroscience, in order to enhance both disciplines but also to create a citizenship more aware of the challenges facing humanity. 

Speakers: Massimo Salgaro; Salvatore Gaetano Chiarella; David Freedberg; Dionigi Mattia Gagliardi; Giulia Torromino; Manuel Focareta; Marco Marini and Luisa Amendola. 

HOBIT 2

Superstimulus. How the brain participates in the work of art

March 14–21, 2022

The topic of HOBIT 2 

This year’s edition arises from the concept of Superstimulus, a particular phenomenon of perception discovered by the ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen in 1948 and then brought back into the limelight in recent years thanks to studies in the field of neuroaesthetics. 

A superstimulus is defined as an artificial stimulus, quantitatively or qualitatively enhanced compared to how it occurs in nature, that provokes instinctive reactions in the user that are more intense than normal. Can art then be defined as a superstimulus? Can performative movement, theatre and dance, fit into this definition? Can literature or even digital and virtual experience be a starting point for studying this particular phenomenon of perception? 

Speakers: Delfina Stella; Paolo Oricco and Maria Luisa Abate from Marcido Marcidorjs e Famosa Mimosa; Dionigi Mattia Gagliardi; Andrea Pinotti; Grazia Pulvirenti and Renata Gambino.

HOBIT 3

Art of Touch. The role of tactile perception in aesthetic experiences

from March 16 until May 12, 2023

The topic of HOBIT 3

Touch is,  from the earliest days of life, that which allows us to get to know the world and experience reality. Although it is taken for granted compared to other senses, touch is fundamental for “getting in touch” with oneself and relating to others. Through touch, we are able to move coherently in the environment and recognise and define the world around us. 

Today, thanks to the contribution of philosophy, neuroscience and art, we know that the tactile experience does not stop at the action of touching an object, a body, a surface, but that it is actually involved in several perceptual mechanisms, which involve experiences and memories also derived from other sensory processes, including vision. Touching thus becomes a physical but also an abstract operation, involved in a multitude of aesthetic experiences related to vision, such as observing a painting or sculpture, reading a book, watching a film, experiencing a virtual immersive environment or participating in a performance. 

What kind of contact is created between the observer and the work in the aesthetic experience? What does neuroscience tell us today about the tactile experience? Can we talk about vision as a multi-componential mechanism that also integrates experience from the other senses including touch? How does tactile experience guide us in everyday life and during artistic enjoyment, be it real or virtual?

These are just some of the questions the third edition of HOBIT will try to answer through the point of view of different disciplines, involving international artists, art historians, scholars and researchers.

Speakers: Dionigi Mattia Gagliardi; Michele Cometa; Dina Riccò; Giulia Scapin and Cristina Loi; Daniela Cotimbo; Emanuele Arielli; Virgilio Sieni.

HOBIT 4 

The Role of Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

from March 21 until May 16, 2024

The topic of HOBIT 4

Starting from the middle of the last century, the idea that machines could also “think” has taken hold. Today this idea seems to have been realised – but is it really so? According to various scholars, the future holds the prospect of an integration and adaptation between human beings and artificial intelligence.

Issues such as emotions, creativity, imagination, consciousness – hitherto prerogatives of the human brain – are now being questioned and, in this complex moment of transition, art can be an interesting tool for studying and proposing new solutions, for imagining how to face the  future challenges of humanity.

Speakers: Franco “Bifo” Berardi; Marta Bertolaso; Dionigi Mattia Gagliardi; Anna Donise; Valentino Catricalà; Andrea Pinotti; Daniela Cotimbo.