This April, art, and neuroscience come together in two exhibitions that are the result of a transdisciplinary course held at Concordia University. The students from the course Convergence: Arts, Neuroscience, and Society will present their work at Visual Voice Gallery in Montreal’s Belgo building and the Black Box at Concordia University.

The Convergence course invited students to creatively explore the intersection of arts, neuroscience, and society, and how these domains shape the understandings of ourselves and others. Concordia Fine Arts students worked with the RI-MUHC Brain Repair and Integrative Neuroscience program (BRaIN) and McGill Neuroscience students to create self-directed, collaborative projects which converge artistic and scientific research.

The artworks presented at the two exhibitions span a wide variety of media and approaches, including installation, interactive experiences, sculpture, silkscreen, and even an educational board game. Join us for the first Vernissage NEXT Friday, April 12 at Visual Voice Gallery!

Then join us on April the 13th! As part of the Convergence talks and exhibitions, our last SciArt talk of the year will feature Neuroscience Ph.D. Fernanda Pérez-Gay Juarez presenting
a talk about popularizing the cognitive neuroscience of art.

Blurb: "While art and the humanities remain accessible to non-experts (almost everybody can read Shakespeare or listen to the fifth symphony), science in its pure form remains hard to understand. For someone outside the field, reading a scientific paper in a peer-reviewed journal will feel much like trying to decipher an encrypted message: The article’s findings will be hidden behind an uninviting format full of scientific jargon and hard-to-grasp statistics. In a time when we begin to recognize the power of interdisciplinarity, this issue is becoming one of the major setbacks when it comes to building bridges between artists, scientists and humanists. In this context, Sinapsis: Conexiones entre el arte y tu cerebro (SYNAPSE: Connections between art and your brain) is a science broadcasting project conceived by neuroscientist Fernanda Pérez Gay J that aims to share recent and relevant studies around cognitive neuroscience of art. By broadcasting scientific information to the general public through youtube videos and social media, it aims to fuel scientific curiosity and to facilitate transdisciplinary exchanges around the subject of the brain, creativity and art."

Come join us to discover the journey of a neuroscientist looking for new ways to broadcast science!

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The Convergence Sci-Art/Art-Sci Conferences series focus on the crossover of disciplines with science, especially arts and communication. The talks cover subjects like the influence of media on modern science, the public perception of the scientific method, neuroscience popular misconceptions, architecture and biology in the medical practice, or science immersed artistic practice.

Convergence, Perceptions of Neuroscience is an independent initiative developed in partnership with the Brain Repair and Integrative Neuroscience (BRaIN) Program of the RI-MUHC and Concordia Faculty of Fine Arts. It is supported by the Canadian Association for Neuroscience, the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre, McGill University, and the Montreal General Hospital Foundation.