Mind
the gap will let us confront and analyse
multiple aspects of space, from the perspectives
of physics, architecture, urbanism, the arts,
neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. It
will be hosted at SISSA, with the active
participation of some of our PhD students in
cognitive neuroscience and in other fields.
We exist within a spatiotemporal dimension, one
that we still think of as the condition for
experience – as Kant had demonstrated in response
to Newton’s view of space as the absolute reality,
calling space and time the forms of intuition. The
general theory of relativity displaced Newtonian
assumptions, but our folk assumptions about our
spatiotemporal experience have not followed. Nor
are the psychology and physiology underlying our
ability to navigate the environment reducible to
physics. We imagine and remember ourselves in
spaces. Architecture and design model space so
that it becomes usable by the embodied, mobile,
relational creatures that we are. The constructed
spaces of cities determine social and economic
behaviors, and the spaces between us are functions
of emotional proximity and social cohesion. Our
proprioceptive and peripersonal senses develop
within socially shared spaces. The ability to
direct our attention and movements in space
appears to have evolved on a continuum with that
in our most distant ancestors. It is now, however,
being radically transformed by virtual
communication, which separates audiovisual
percepts from other modalities: it thereby leads
to a loss of synchronous affect and of congruence
between our embodied present within one spatial
environment and the social, emotional and
attentional relation to others.
These are some of the themes we aim to cover in
June.
Noga
Arikha and Alessandro Treves
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