The “Emergence of Consciousness” project is a collaboration between artist Anna Dumitriu, philosopher Blay Whitby and computational neuroscientist Luc Berthouze.

The project draws together rigorous practice-based artistic methodologies and scientific research to attempt to investigate the notion of conscious experience from a philosophical point of view, inspired by perspectives of embodiment (Varela, Thomson and Rosch, 1992) and situatedness (Brooks, 1991) in evolutionary robotics  and neural network learning systems.

An outcome will be a new performance artwork using sensory and movement deprivation (e.g. blindfolds, physical restraints etc) and augmentation to reflect physical developments in the human body (from infancy to old age). It will create an embodied representation of how experience might be constructed, through physical interaction with the environment and other performers, and the emergence of shared beliefs.

By taking on the role of a robotic agent the artist will try to begin to understand her own mind in new ways and by working with a scientist and a philosopher meaningful interactions can develop with the potential to produce innovative outcomes.

The project is funded by Arts Council England and supported by The Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at The University of Sussex. It has been awarded a Cultural Olympiad London 2012 Inspire Mark.

News

A paper by Blay Whitby and Anna Dumitriu on the Emergence of Consciousness project was accepted for the British Psychological Society’s ‘Consciousness & Experiential Psychology Section Annual Conference 2009: Consciousness and Belief’. The conference took place at Oxford University between 11th and 13th September 2009. The title of the paper is “Beliefs, Learning and Embodied Experience”.

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