A new exhibition that explores how personal identity has become embodied in a powerful landscape ... more A new exhibition that explores how personal identity has become embodied in a powerful landscape of anatomical imagery is opening at the Inigo Rooms, a new space within Somerset House designed to foster innovative forms of engagement between King's College London, the cultural sector and the public.The ancient philosophical tension between what we are and how we think, between human embodiment and identity, is being radically ramped-up and redefined by advances in anatomical knowledge and the brain sciences. At the same time, visual imaging techniques make this new knowledge visible and explicit, conferring huge explanatory power onto digitized medical imagery.How do we define the ‘self’ in an age of increasing materiality? The philosophical tensions between what we are and how we think, between human embodiment and identity, is being radically redefined by advances in anatomical knowledge. At the same time, visual imaging techniques make this knew knowledge visible, conferring ...
The Portrait Anatomised is a suite of five lenticular prints and forty-five mono-prints, exhibite... more The Portrait Anatomised is a suite of five lenticular prints and forty-five mono-prints, exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in 2013, with an accompanying catalogue. Aldworth was commissioned by Guy’s and St. Thomas’ Charity in 2009 to make a series of works exploring epilepsy. The research dimension of Aldworth’s project was the production of novel modes of expressing visually the experience of living with the disorder. Based as artist-in-residence in the neurophysiology department at St Thomas’ Hospital in London, Aldworth met with three patients, each with a different type of epilepsy. Weaving together their neuroscientific, clinical, and personal narratives revealed two aspects of the patients’ experience: (1) that they saw their epileptic seizures as an aspect of a more complex personality; and (2) the lack of visual representation of the ‘absences’ that characterize how epilepsy occurs in patients’ experience. In response to (1), Aldworth created portraits of her three ...
The past 25 years have seen a rapid growth of knowledge about brain mechanisms involved in visual... more The past 25 years have seen a rapid growth of knowledge about brain mechanisms involved in visual mental imagery. These advances have largely been made independently of the long history of philosophical – and even psychological – reckoning with imagery and its parent concept ‘imagination’. We suggest that the view from these empirical findings can be widened by an appreciation of imagination’s intellectual history, and we seek to show how that history both created the conditions for – and presents challenges to – the scientific endeavour. We focus on the neuroscientific literature’s most commonly used task - imagining a concrete object – and, after sketching what is known of the neurobiological mechanisms involved, we examine the same basic act of imagining from the perspective of several key positions in the history of philosophy and psychology. We present positions that, firstly, contextualise and inform the neuroscientific account, and secondly, pose conceptual and methodological...
A new exhibition that explores how personal identity has become embodied in a powerful landscape ... more A new exhibition that explores how personal identity has become embodied in a powerful landscape of anatomical imagery is opening at the Inigo Rooms, a new space within Somerset House designed to foster innovative forms of engagement between King's College London, the cultural sector and the public.The ancient philosophical tension between what we are and how we think, between human embodiment and identity, is being radically ramped-up and redefined by advances in anatomical knowledge and the brain sciences. At the same time, visual imaging techniques make this new knowledge visible and explicit, conferring huge explanatory power onto digitized medical imagery.How do we define the ‘self’ in an age of increasing materiality? The philosophical tensions between what we are and how we think, between human embodiment and identity, is being radically redefined by advances in anatomical knowledge. At the same time, visual imaging techniques make this knew knowledge visible, conferring ...
The Portrait Anatomised is a suite of five lenticular prints and forty-five mono-prints, exhibite... more The Portrait Anatomised is a suite of five lenticular prints and forty-five mono-prints, exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in 2013, with an accompanying catalogue. Aldworth was commissioned by Guy’s and St. Thomas’ Charity in 2009 to make a series of works exploring epilepsy. The research dimension of Aldworth’s project was the production of novel modes of expressing visually the experience of living with the disorder. Based as artist-in-residence in the neurophysiology department at St Thomas’ Hospital in London, Aldworth met with three patients, each with a different type of epilepsy. Weaving together their neuroscientific, clinical, and personal narratives revealed two aspects of the patients’ experience: (1) that they saw their epileptic seizures as an aspect of a more complex personality; and (2) the lack of visual representation of the ‘absences’ that characterize how epilepsy occurs in patients’ experience. In response to (1), Aldworth created portraits of her three ...
The past 25 years have seen a rapid growth of knowledge about brain mechanisms involved in visual... more The past 25 years have seen a rapid growth of knowledge about brain mechanisms involved in visual mental imagery. These advances have largely been made independently of the long history of philosophical – and even psychological – reckoning with imagery and its parent concept ‘imagination’. We suggest that the view from these empirical findings can be widened by an appreciation of imagination’s intellectual history, and we seek to show how that history both created the conditions for – and presents challenges to – the scientific endeavour. We focus on the neuroscientific literature’s most commonly used task - imagining a concrete object – and, after sketching what is known of the neurobiological mechanisms involved, we examine the same basic act of imagining from the perspective of several key positions in the history of philosophy and psychology. We present positions that, firstly, contextualise and inform the neuroscientific account, and secondly, pose conceptual and methodological...
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Papers by Susan Aldworth