Memory as Material – a visual arts research practice in neuroscientific laboratories

In order to critically explore memory as material for art practice, I take my experience of an artistic residency in a neuroscience laboratory as a starting point to consider artistic encounters with distinct fields of research and matter. I explore my practice-based projects developed progressively through a body of interrelated installation artworks intertwined with the theme of memory. The residencies at different laboratories were performed under research methods familiar to my practice and an ethnographic approach has been used, with studio work mirroring an evolving embedded research process from fieldwork. The sample PhD constructs connections between visual art practice and neuroscientific research studies in the field of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The aim was to explore the representational strategies of AD studies in the laboratory through art practice, alluding to the (dys) functioning of autobiographical memory. The practice explored concepts of the material and immaterial, matter and code, the real and the imaginable, body and metaphor. Debates on visuality and ‘looking at’, the institutional gaze and the technology within which the visual and science are rooted, are examined using Foucault’s concept of panopticon and Latour’s actor-network theory.

In creative terms, this exploration allowed the development of several novel and unique methods of research, the resulting artefacts, and the practical materialization of these via the agency of installation. This article suggests that, while exploring a space for art practice within the discourse of memory embedded in scientific laboratories and medical practices dealing with the network of people involved, I have gained a space within the discourse on mind, memory and matter.