Warren Neidich

Warren Neidich is an American artist who lives in Berlin and Los Angeles.

He was a professor at Kunsthochschule Weißensee School of Art, Berlin and visiting scholar at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles.

Neidich is founding director of the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art (SFSIA).

He has collaborated with artists, curators and critics including: Barry Schwabsky (co-director of SFSIA), Armen Avanessian, Nicolas Bourriaud, Tiziana Terranova, Franco Berardi, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Isaac Julien, Hito Steyerl, Chris Kraus (American writer), and many others.

His work has been exhibited at numerous institutions including: MoMA PS1, Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA – Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California Museum of Photography, ICA – Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Warren Neidich has studied in diverse fields since 1970 including Photography, Psychology, Biology, (BA Magna Cum Laude Washington University in St. Louis), Neurobiology (as research fellow at California Institute of Technology, under the laboratory of Roger Wolcott Sperry who later won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine) and Architecture, he is also a Board Certified Ophthalmologist from Tulane Medical Center.

From 1985 to 1997 Neidich worked on a number of projects investigating the relationship between power and representation, focusing on reenactment, staging, fictive documentary and performance.

Major works from this time include the American Civil War studies The Battle of Chickamauga and Amputation without Anaesthesia exhibited at The Photographic Resource Center, Boston in 1991 and "American History Reinvented" (1986–1991) at Burden Gallery, Aperture Foundation, New York City, in 1989.

Neidich's appropriation of historical moments by means of photography has been discussed by John Welchman, Christopher Phillips, Graham Clarke, and David Joselit.

The series of altered photographs "Unknown Artist", which recast the early 20th-century art coterie as a social rather than an individual phenomenon, were installed at Berlin's Paris Bar in 1994 in collaboration with Martin Kippenberger and Michel Wertle.

In 1994, Neidich's photography-based sculptural installation Collective Memory and Collective Amnesia (1991–94) used the culturally-constructed story of Anne Frank to reflect upon pop culture's vulgarization of history.

Neidich's slide show projection "Beyond the Vanishing Point: Media Myth in America" was shown at N.Y. Kunsthalle, NYC in 1995.

It traced a journey across America fifty years after Jack Kerouac, culminating in a surrealist photographic exposé of the media encampment that grew outside the courthouse during the O.J. Simpson trial in Los Angeles (1995–97).

The book Camp O.J., published by D.A.P. exposed the condition of infotainment.

These research projects took the form of texts and lectures entitled "Neuroaesthetics", first delivered at the School of Visual Arts in New York, 1995–1996 when Neidich was visiting lecturer in the Department of Photography and Related Media under Charles Traub.

A major theme in Neidich's practice can widely be summarised as neuroaesthetics (not to be confused with mainstream neuroesthetics), an area of critical and constructive thought, which can loosely be seen as the confluent impact of the brain on a cultured environment and, importantly, vice versa, upon which he began lecturing in 1996 at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Cognitive capitalism (cognitive-cultural economy), 'critical' neuroscience, neuroplasticity, post-Workerism, immaterial labor, and epigenesis are recurring themes since 1996, while earlier themes, between 1985 and 1996, were interested in culturally based work about race, politics, historical reenactment, fictive documentary, staging, photographic practice, the archive, and anachronistic technology.

In 1996 Neidich, began to explore the phenomenological conditions surrounding the cultural and historical aspects of his work.

His website artbrain.org, which includes The Journal of Neuro-Aesthetic Theory, was published online in 1997.

In 1997 With the help of Nathalie Angles, current director of Residency Unlimited, he launched the platform artbrain.org, consisting of The Journal of Neuroaesthetics and Netspace Gallery.

Neuroaesthetics, (differing from the scientific approach with the same name often spelled neuroesthetics), believes that artists in all their modes such as poetry, cinema, installation art and architecture, using their own spaces, apparatuses, materials, sense of time, and performative gestures, can elaborate truths about the noumenal and phenomenal world on part with those generated by the sciences.

These truths compete effectively in the marketplace of ideas.

The post-structuralist brain/mind/body/world complex, in which cultural mutations are transposed into parallel changes in the mind, brain and body, expressed in works such as "Brainwash" (1997), Neidich's first application of his hybrid dialectics, developed greater tenacity in 1999 when Neidich curated "Conceptual Art as Neurobiological Praxis" at Thread Waxing Space in New York which "rather than being a show about the collaboration between art and science or a reductive methodology of how the brain works, the exhibition attempted to promote the idea of a becoming brain" and included artists: Uta Barth, Sam Durant, Charline von Heyl, Jason Rhoades, Liam Gillick, Douglas Gordon, Thomas Ruff, Simon Grennan and Christopher Sperandio, and others.

Neidich's video-works from this period include Apparatus, Memorial Day (1998), Kiss, and Law of Loci(1998–99).

The exhibitions "The Mutated Observer Part 1" (2001), and "The Mutated Observer Part 2" (2002) at the California Museum of Photography showcased a number of handmade apparatuses, so-called "Hybrid Dialectics", in vitrines adjacent to those of the museum's collection.

Neidich has collaborated with Goldsmiths College on several occasions since 2003, when he was visiting artist and lecturer.

In 2005 he organized the first symposium on Neuroaesthetics, and in 2014, with Mark Fisher, he organized a symposium titled 'The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: The Cognitive Turn Organized'.

Neidich's essay The Neurobiopolitics of Global Consciousness, published in the Sarai Reader 'Turbulence ' in 2006, clearly connected the ideas of neural plasticity, epigenesis and Empire.

Topics such as Neuro biopolitics were extended to include the political impact of immaterial labor and the Information Age on the production of architecture and built space, specifically in relation to the ways in which intense sensory and perceptual effect are now used to organize cultural attention.

At Delft School of Design, Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands (where he was a PhD candidate under Professor Dr. Arie Graafland), in 2008 he co-organized "Architecture in Mind: From Biopolitics to Noo politics."

He was collaborator, along with Elena Bajo and others, on Exhibition 211 in New York, 2009.

Architecture & Mind in the Age of Communication and Information'', 2010.

In relation to his exhibitions and extended theories he has edited and published over 10 books, including Neuromacht, Merve Verlag (German), 2017 , the Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part One (2013), Two (2014), and Three (2017), Archive Books (English), the Noologist's Handbook and Other Art Experiments, Anagram, 2013, From Noopower to Neuropower: How Mind Becomes Matter, 2010 and, ''Cognitive Architecture.

From Biopolitics to Noopolitics.

On these topics he has published several books including: Neuromacht, 2017, Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part One, Two, and Three, The Noologist's Handbook and Other Art Experiments, 2013, From Noopower to Neuropower: How Mind Becomes Matter, 2010 and Cognitive Architecture (From Biopolitics to Noopolitics. Architecture & Mind in the Age of Communication and Information), 2010, and Blow Up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain, 2003.

Neidich's work has examined the co-evolution of the history of art, brain, and mind, which provides a critical foundation to his understanding of neuroaesthetics as an ontologic process.

The key to neuroaesthetics is the investigation of apparatuses in which a network of heterogeneous discourses is administered.

As the world and technology change, so to the apparatuses which organize it, and the cognitive strategies with which one can understand it.

This is especially true of the information age, which distributes such apparatuses non-linearly and profusely.

Neidich's work is inspired by Michael Snow, Stan Brakhage, Jean-Luc Godard and the Apparatus Theory of Stephen Heath.