Upcoming Talks

09.05.2024: Art in Urban Spaces: Assessing the Psychological and Societal Effects of two Public Art Exhibitions in Berlin, IAEA (Mallorca, Spain, 8-10 May 2024); presenter: Corinna Kühnapfel

Art that is publicly displayed has the potential to captivate us. It offers opportunities to emotionally connect, reflect, and possibly alter our perspectives. This can apply to outdoor sculptures and murals, but also to art showcased in public street-level galleries. In two free, street-level contemporary exhibitions at Gallery Wedding (Berlin), curated by Solvej Ovesen, we engaged pedestrians with the exhibitions and assessed mood, values, and attitudes before and after the experience.

The first exhibition, “The Mine Gives, the Mine Takes” by Ana Alenso highlighted the link between Venezuela's socio-economic crisis and unregulated gold mining, aiming to raise awareness about the impacts of metal purchases. We found that this exhibition influenced visitors (N = 50) by increasing their awareness of nature while diminishing their mood and hedonic values.

The second exhibition, "Job Center. Psychic Places" by Emily Hunt, focused on community engagement and perceptions of local relationships in the neighborhood the gallery is situated in. Participants (N = 64) reported a heightened sense of neighborhood connection and improved subjective wellbeing after interacting with the exhibit.

Furthermore, in these studies, we included approaches taking into consideration the perspective of the artists and curator by interviewing them about their aims to instill emotional engagement in the viewers. Preliminary results show that in both studies, the extent to which feeling the emotions the artist intended to evoke in the viewer, yet not those of the curator, as well as subjective aesthetic evaluation of each exhibition (as good, interesting, etc.), predicted changes in the variables we measured pre- and post-exposure.
We discuss our findings regarding insights into the impacts of brief art engagements in urban and accessible everyday settings on the transformative potential of art concerning our moods, well-being, the attitudes we hold, the cognitive processing enabled in art settings, and potential behavioral changes.

Beauty is often rather ascribed to nature than to urban settings. I will outline a different line of thinking by tracing the freedom of potential of urban living related to the historical concept Stadtluft macht frei (urban air is freeing) to a concept of urban beauty. This will be related to studies in empirical aesthetics on architecture and urban planning. One claim will be that urban visual aesthetics always include elements of what could be called an impure or an embellished seeing, i.e. mental states that are informed by socio-cultural, embodied-affective, and enactive (i.e. generative) perception.

Recent Talks

"Reconciling Aesthetic Hedonism with Aesthetic Cognitivism” presented at IAEA (Philadelphia, USA, 2023); presenter: Joerg Fingerhut

Recent Workshops

1st AoN Working Table on Aesthetic Cognitivism on the occasion of the 59th Venice Biennale of Art Serra dei Gardini, Viale Giuseppe Garibaldi, Venice November 24th, 2022. organizers: Corinna Kühnapfel, Joerg Fingerhut

The Association of Neuroesthetics Berlin (AoN_Platform for Art and Neuroscience) will hold its 1st AoN Venice Working Table on the topic of Aesthetic Cognitivism in collaboration with the EU H2020 project ARTIS (Art and Research on Transformations of Individuals and Societies; Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin/University of Vienna).

In an open format, philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists will discuss the transformative power of art. The epistemic gain that can be achieved through the arts has always been central to the field of aesthetics (Baumgarten 1750/58) and neuroesthetics alike (Zeki 1998, 1999). For this event, we aim to critically assess the value of empirical approaches to the arts. Each discussant will give a 5-10 minute input on a research question or topic they find pressing. This Working Table will be accompanied by a more artistic format in 2023 that will highlight artistic and curatorial perspectives on the topic.
More information can be found here.