Warren Neidich: Multidisciplinary Art, Activist Neuroaesthetics, and Cognitive Capitalism
Warren Neidich: Multidisciplinary Art, Activist Neuroaesthetics, and Cognitive Capitalism
COLECCIÓN MAG:
I love that you are an activist. I consider myself an activist too. Everything I read about your work, you being connected to this thing, it's like quantum physics, but like on the brain, you know?I think that the aesthetic part of it, I didn't get it personally that much, so maybe if you introduce me to that and all these kinds of different philosophies..
WARREN:
Thank you very much for being interested in my project Activist Neuroaesthetics which began in 1996 with my first lectures at the School of Visual Arts and culminated in the launching of www.artbrain.org and the Journal of Neuroaesthetics in 1996.
Neuroaesthetics changed to activist Neuroaesthetics in 2019 as part of an exhibition of that name and a reader produced by the Kunstverein Rosa-Luxembug Platz in Berlin with the assistance of Sarrita Hunn the Co director of my school the Saas Fee Summer Institute of Art and Susanne Prinz the director at the Kunstverein. . I was excited to hear that you were excited about the work.
To address your first question about activism, what does it mean, what is cognitive activism, and how am I an activist?
So first of all, I call myself a future activist and there is future activism. There is also past activistism, there is also present activism.
Let me explain. So past activism concerns trying to change or rewrite the wrongs of the past or of a history that has already been written. So for instance, in Australia, including Aboriginal peoples and allotting them a bigger, more important role in the history of Australia then they presently do where up to now they have been excluded. This has repercussions for their inclusion in present day economic, social and political inclusion today. Here in America there is still controversy concerning whether or not the African American experience and the history of slavery in American history, including the middle passage, should be taught in schools. I think that only 12 states mandate that it be part of the curriculum for K1-K12. But there are many examples of past activism including artistic works like Isaac Juliens installation, Lessons of the Hour, at MOMA which surveys a segment of history in a broader way and gives another history added volume.
Steve McQueens 12 years a Slave is another example. The past is revitalized and expanded in order to correct past omissions. You change the past to affect the present which can affect government policy.
Present activism concerns activism in the present. Protesting in real time on the street. Examples like demonstrating for a woman's right to choose or fighting for the rights of African Americans against racism and for social justice such as what took place on May 27 Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Los Angeles. But can also occur on social media in real time. These are examples of present activism.
In cognitive capitalism in which the proletariat or physical worker on the assembly line has become the cognitariat or mental worker producing data in front of a screen the situation has changed.
The embodied worker of the assembly line has become the corporeal worker in front of screens working in an isolated way. In other words because of the computer screen and the way that we're working right now, we are no longer working together in ways that we did. Worker solidarity is at risk and we live in a moment of dys-solidarity. We're remotely working together, but we're not engaged, with each other's physical presences as much as we had in the past.
We are experiencing the Fog of Digitality. This isolation presents a problem for present activism, there is a problem. It's not what it used to be. There is a lack of comradery and cooperative presence. As a result there are new challenges for assembling to resist. Although the Arab Spring was an example that new technologies have the potential to produce new possibilities for activism.
Future activism is the last category. It concerns understanding the perils of the future and acting on them before they occur. It is a speculative activism.
Certain people, certain individuals have certain interests, and those interests lead them to read certain kinds of books, study different kinds of subjects to educate themselves in certain ways.
My education has certainly been a unique one as I studied art, architectural theory, medicine and neuroscience. And as a consequence, when I look at all these digital technologies as a system of apparatuses and the power they constitute, especially understanding their negative externalities. Of course they have positive effects and those are its selling point but they also have a dark side. While I understand there positive outcomes and for instance their potential medical treatments I also foresee and understand their new potential for neural despotism and future unfreedoms.
New digital and neural technologies are a pharmakon. Pharmakon is rooted in Greek to mean both drug and poison. On one side a substance or technology might have great healing benefits but they have a dark side as poisons that may in the future enslave us without us even being aware of it. It is the worst science fiction movie made real.
Let's take the example of Brain Computer Interfaces. Paraplegic patient's learn to use their brain waves to control the movement of a cursor on a computer which is linked to a robotic arm or wheelchair. They are thus able to gain some independence. For instance they are able to bring a cup of water to their lips. But on the other hand, if a machine or an algorithm can decode a brain wave signal to move a robotic arm 10 years from now, they might be able to create a novel brain wave signal and send that signal back the other way, across the skull, to interact with the meaty brain and disrupt its thinking patterns, create memories or produce memory loss if it is associated with other technologies like Optigenetics or send in signals that sculpt neural networks in children during the critical period of brain development in order to create more supplicant and easily controlled subject of the future as adults.
These technologies could create generalized neural normativity and reduce neural variation and neural diversity.
I am talking here about the variation of the nervous system that composes the primary repertoire. The primary repertoire is that population of nervous elements that composes the early nervous system before learning or experience takes place. It is according to the neuroscientist Joachim M. Fuster the source of our Freedom. Homogenizing it could have serious consequences.
So these things really scare me, and I really need to talk about them and against them. So that's why I call myself a future activist.
COLECCIÓN MAG:
I love it.
WARREN:
Thank you.
COLECCIÓN MAG:
What's the solution in your mind? What are you working on? Why is ArtBrain off? Why is it no longer functioning as a platform? Why is there... Your ArtBrain, right? ArtBrain is off the market?
WARREN:
www.artbrain.org is still available and can be interacted with. I created it as I already mentioned in 1995 and was first posted in 1996 as www.artbrain.org and consisted of the Journal of Neuroaesthetics and the Chaoid Gallery.
About five years later neuroscientist started using the term and created their own discourse very different from my own and very different from what we were working on. www.artbrain.org was about artists using their own materials, platforms, apparatuses, concepts of space and time and art histories to investigate the fields of sensation, perception, and cognition.
The result of the accumulation of artistic facts which goes back actually to the 18th century or maybe further back to the cave drawings of Lascaux. Artists and their practices create an alternative paradigm with which to understand sensation, perception and cognition. A paradigm very different from that created by the scientific approach.
Today scientific neuroaesthetics, what I call positivist neuroaesthetics, is being used in marketing campaigns for products, sponsored by military organizations like DARPA, entangled with Big Tech especially for surveillance protocols and the sensational industry of immersive experience.
However, in 2019 we decided it had become necessary to give our practice a different name. Too many people were confused by what we were doing and associating us with the positivist neuroaesthetics. So https://activistneuroaesthetics.art was born. It was part of a festival organized by the Kunstverein Rosa Luxemburg Platz in Berlin and included a reader, exhibition and symposium. The reader can be found on Amazon under the title An Activist Neuroaesthetic Reader. Twenty authors contributed such as Franco Berardi, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Reza Negarestani, Slavoj Žižek, Tony David Sampson, Tiziana Terranova, and Anuradha Vikram. The symposium was combined with my school The Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art. This year 2026, the book 30 years of artbrain.org will be published by Archive Press. Last year our school collaborated with Creative Time to create Art Apparatus and the Neural Digital Entanglement (2024).
COLECCIÓN MAG:
Could you speak about the school? As I understand one of its missions is to make the ideas surrounding Cognitive Capitalism available. What is cognitive capitalism and why do you think its so important right now?
WARREN:
Yes that's right. Saas Fee Summer Institute of Art was launched in 2015 at the invitation of the European Graduate School and its director Hubertus Von Ameluxen. Since we started there and the program was named at that time we decided to retain the name.
One of the aporias that I felt was lacking in the theory being taught in art schools was that which emanated from the Italian Post Operaismo group of political philosophers who focused on the future effects of cybernetics in the workplace and in our lives.
So much of their theory has become super relevant today in our world of digitality. Prior to its emergence as an institution I had been working on activist neuroaesthetics and actually published a book while in my studies in architecture at the TU School of Architecture in Delft Holland called Cognitive Architecture from Biopolitics to Noo politics.
It was there that I discovered the writing of Franco Berardi, Maritzio Lazzarato, Sylvia Federici, Tony Negri, Yann-Moulier Boutang and Christian Marazzi on Cognitive Capitalism. In cognitive capitalism the brain and the mind are the new factories of the 21st century and the issues and critique surrounding the mind and brain became even more important.
COLECCIÓN MAG:
What is cognitive capitalism?
WARREN:
Cognitive capitalism as the name implies concerns a form of capitalism that focuses on the mind and brain or prioritizes it.
We are no longer proletariats working on assembly lines but instead cognitariets or mental laborers working on screens creating data. And that data is not simply passive in the sense that it's collected, distributed, and sold to corporations, policing agencies, and the government. It's actually active.
In our present moment especially post-Covid we as a society have increased our screen time. We are all cognitiariats working for free on search engines and social media. We make our own plane and hotel reservations and if we make mistakes we are penalized.
We stream movies and shop on-line. The digital environment is now in my opinion the most important environment interacting with the developing brain, especially during critical or sensitive periods but all through life.
You remember I mentioned the primary repertoire as a well of neural potential. There is also something called the secondary repertoire which is the population of nervous elements, neurons and glia, which has been sculpted by the environment and experience.
That secondary repertoire used to be the result of the effects of nature and built space but today these have been supplanted by the environment of the screen and the architecture of the Internet. The architecture of the brain is no longer being sculpted by nature as it was when we were hunter-gatherers 2 million years ago. It's now being sculpted by digital architectures. This is bound to progress. Just as Taylorism managed the workers body to increase their surplus value of physical work on the assembly line in industrial capitalism today through a process I have named Hebbianism the intense and engineered architecture of the screen and its latent connections found in the internet and digital platforms are managing the brain’s connections. It creates what I am referring to as mental surplus labor.
Through sculpting of the neural plasticity of the brain a simulation of the network pattern of the internet and virtual reality are reconstituted in the meaty brain. This is what is meant by the neural-digital entanglement . As a result the efficiency of mental work of the cognitariat is increased. The brain and the internet or digitality become entangled into a singular process. This sculpting is part of a longer historical process that forms the basis of the co-evolution between technology and the brain that has been going on, according to the French anthropologist Andre Leroi-Gourhand and the French techno-philosopher Bernard Steigler, for the past 2.5 million years.
Stiegler coined the expression exosomatic organogenesis in which changes in technology stimulate concordant changes in the brain through a process of mirroring.
First there is an externalization and exporting of certain brain functions to techniques or technologies that exist outside the brain such as GPS or a calculator. The brain becomes an expanded and externalized system and is no longer simply housed in the cranium but rather is an intracranial-extracranial complex or continuum. This puts pressure on a system of co-evolutionary maieutics in which the material brain and its immaterial and non-living mechanical counterpart participate in trans-epochal or transgeneration choreography, the outcome being changes in the brain anatomy of time.
The process is bidirectional with changes in the brain resurfacing as changes of techniques and so on and so forth. Accordingly the development of the frontal brain which is so prominent in homo sapiens is an example of such a process. This process is still ongoing and the brain maybe continue to change. This is cause to celebrate and as well as one of anguish and sadness.
Let me explain further.. Like Stiegler I believe that the dominant history of technology, there are also minor histories, is anthropocentric.
The evolution of techne is one dominated by anthropocentric technologies that in the process of dominating nature has been destroying it. I might add that they are also destroying us. It turns out that these same technologies that subdue nature can be converted to technologies of war and killing. The spear point used to hunt is also a soldier's weapon.
I believe there is a genealogical relationship between fire and spears points of the Homo habilis and ChatGPT of the homo sapien. They are extractive and anthropocentric technologies. Don't kid yourself for one minute. This extraction of the capacities of the human brain make up the core purposes of artificial neural networks and deep learning artificial networks like ChatGPT.
The capitalist extraction of the worker concerns white collar labor not only blue collar labor as it once did. Mental labor and the attention economy that it depends upon are the new gold of the 21st century.
However, the extraction is not about extracting natural resources as it had been, for instance, in colonialism. But now the extraction is of the human mental processes and consciousness. My piece exhibited at the Digital Art Festival in Taipei in 2022 was called From the Society of the Spectacle to the Consciousness Industry dealt with these issues. Social media and AI are technologies of the consciousness industry.
COLECCIÓN MAG:
What do you see as the consequences of such extraction?
WARREN:
I am arguing that what has evolved in the past 2.5 million years is an anthropocentric brain whose neural architecture mirrors the Anthropocentric technologies that helped to form it.
As a result we no longer have the capacity to think outside the system of technologies that in fact created the very organs of thought that we use to think and understand. And through green washing and digiwashing these networks are maintained and expanded. Big Tech, Big Pharm and Advertising, now even neural consumerism, are an elaborate nexus of relations that perpetrate the Anthropocene, Capitalocene and Plantation. They lead to a neurologic condition I refer to as eco agnosia or the incapacity to comprehend climate change.
What I'm calling for is to talking about the Ecocene as a means to push back against the Anthropocene. So there was the Holocene before the Anthropocene. Before man imposed himself on the earths crust and atmosphere, there was the Holocene.
Then there's the Anthropocene, which is the age of man and his relationship to the destruction of the planet and the environment. And the next stage is the Ecocene.
So the Ecocene is where we embrace, we embrace, nature. We embrace deep ecology. We embrace the idea that human beings' consciousness has to be intertwined with plant and animal consciousness. Not supercilious, not above, but interactive and interconnected with the natural world or at least what is left.
COLECCIÓN MAG:
Thank you Warren, it's been great speaking with you.
WARREN:
Thank you.
UPCOMING EVENTS
1. Brutus, Rotterdam, 'From the Society of the Spectacle to the Consciousness Industry' in an exhibition called AUTONOMOUS, set to open March 24
2. Iliggocene – The Age of Dizziness. opening on March 21st 2026 and run through July 12th. I will show A Proposition for an Alt-Parthenon Marbles: The Phantom as Other at Kindl during this art festival.
3. Minerva Museum, Hefei China, I will show Lightening of Choa Lake opening Oct 2025
4. Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art, Paris, From Dry to Wet Conceptualism. Hosted by Centre des Récollets and Master in Arts & Vision of Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sobornne. September 1-6. IG: @warrenneidich @SFSIA