{artbrain.org} was conceived about a year ago to create a place where visual artists, film makers, poets, writers, art historians, curators, architects and others whose work had been or is presently inspired by research in cognitive neuroscience and neuro-philosophy could publish and exhibit their work. As a former researcher in neuro-biology, ophthalmologist and working artists I was intrigued by the confluent discourses that bound cognitive neuroscience and aesthetics. Subjects like attention, gaze, blind spot, scopic regimes and consciousness are just some of examples of subjects you might just as easily find at a cognitive neuroscience meeting as a art history conference. The recent interest in cybernetics and its early historical links to neurobiology was another inciting factor. The early founders of cybernetics such as Norbert Weiner, Warren McCollough and John Von Neuman were all neurobiologists investigating feed forward and feedback mechanisms in neural networks. In fact cybernetics is defined in the Webster New World Dictionary as "a science dealing with the comparative study of complex electronic calculating machines and the human nervous system in an attempt to explain the nature of the brain."

The first site, which is currently up and running, consisted of basically "The Journal of Neuro-aesthetic Theory" and "Net-space", our on line gallery. A detailed analysis of the site and its construction, particularly the way its' design is linked to fundamental actions of the nervous system, is beyond the scope of this small introduction and can be found under the editors note at {artbrain.org}. We asked a philosopher, John Symons, an artist Martina Siebert, a cultural theorist, Thyrza Goodeeve, and a neurobiologist, Anjan Chatterjee, to respond to the question "Can an Art Object Investigate the Brain?" . Charles Wolfe's essay "Proprioception" and my own work on the "Cultured Brain" expanded the scope of the question. Warren Sachs, an online architect formerly of the M.I.T. Media Lab, created what he calls "Conversation Maps" which are dynamic systems that investigate what is being spoken about across diffuse areas of the web and are inspired by neural networks. Steven Holl and Lindy Roy, New York based architects, presented recent projects inspired in some way by the brain for our on-line gallery. This is just a small glimpse of the site as there is much much more. We will formerly launch the site at Location 1 in late May.

The second site is already under way. The focus of the journal will concern cinema and the brain. It will look at the question of why cinema is such a good means to investigate memory.
Colin Gardner will use Bergson to deconstruct the question of memory and the optical unconscious in Antonioni's "Blow Up". Yann Beauvais will look at memory in avant-guarde cinema and video of the sixties and Rebecca Epstein will look at the use of flashback as a cinematic device in the construction of narrative and non-narrative forms especially in the case of the film "Memento". Ken Jacobs will feature a short clip from his performance "The Nervous System". We are still looking and talking to many artists concerning this subject. The gallery will be curated by Anne Ellegood from the New Museum, Sylvie Fortin of the Ottawa Art Gallery and Natalie Angles, an independent curator and the executive producer of the site and will concern artworks inspired by neural mapping. We already know that we will work with the architect Allan Bruton who has created a psychic space inspired by the cinematically rendered neuro-biologic implications of the Rorschach ink blocks. At the end of this year we hope to publish a physical publication to commemorate the best of the first two sites of {artbrain.org}.