Due to the a high number of visuals in this presentation an audio file is not available on this occasion. RSA Arts & Ecology, in collaboration with the Barbican’s Radical Nature exhibition, presents an evening of experiment with neuroscientist R Beau Lotto.
To understand the human mind it is necessary to understand what we actually see when we open our eyes. Colour suggests an answer to this question: we see not the world as it is, but a world that was useful to see in the past.
Beau Lotto performs a series of experiments involving the sky, music and bumblebees that show how quickly the brain can learn to see what is useful, and demonstrate that our perception and conception of the world reflects our past physical, social and cultural interactions.
These optical and colour experiments illustrate that none of us is an outside observer of nature defined by our essential properties, but is instead defined by our interactions with nature.
Join us at the RSA to experience how colour, vision and “seeing ourselves see” can contribute to a richer, more empathetic view of nature and human nature.
Speaker: R Beau Lotto, Reader in neuroscience and head of Lottolab at University College London.
Radical Nature is the first exhibition to bring together key figures across different generations who have created utopian works and inspiring solutions for our ever-changing planet.
The exhibition draws on ideas that have emerged out of Land Art, environmental activism, experimental architecture and utopianism.
Work by pioneering figures such as the architectural collective Ant Farm and visionary architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, artists Joseph Beuys, Agnes Denes, Hans Haacke and Robert Smithson, are shown alongside pieces by a younger generation of practitioners including Heather and Ivan Morison, R&Sie(n), Philippe Rahm and Simon Starling.
For more details on Radical Nature Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009 visit the Barbican website.
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