Representational strategies on Alzheimer's studies: a practice-based art research in a neuroscience laboratory
Lopes, Maria Manuela Carvalho de Sousa (2013) Representational strategies on Alzheimer's studies: a practice-based art research in a neuroscience laboratory. PhD thesis, University for the Creative Arts/University of Brighton.
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This project is practice-based and developed progressively through a body of four interrelated installation artworks. The personal practice focuses on specific areas of critical investigation, and on a continuous exercise seeking a reflective research hypothesis and an emerging methodology. Research methods familiar to my practice and an ethnographic approach have been used, with studio work mirroring an evolving embedded research process from fieldwork in neuroscience laboratories and a hospital.
This research constructs connections between visual art practice and neuroscientific research studies in the field of Alzheimer's disease (AD). It explores the relationship between the evolution of four installation works (which correspond to the chapter structure of the written thesis) and the nature of autobiographical memory, and the location of my art practice with regard to three artistic case studies. The aim is to explore the representational strategies of AD studies in the laboratory through art practice, alluding to the ( dys )functioning of autobiographical memory. Key elements include the visual, ordering, archiving and montage. The research acts as a metaphorical toolkit for providing a wider understanding of my practice of montage, archiving and time in connection with specific practices of neuroscientific research. Using successive artwork installations at different venues to elaborate on several simultaneous methods, I reflect on how images and sounds relating to AD research may be understood as interacting elements which, when enacted and re-enacted, produce certain effects and affects that aim to account for the nature of memory and the disease itself. Theories of autobiographical memory and current neuroscientific research on AD ( clinical neurology, neuropsychology, neuroimaging and molecular and cellular studies) are introduced and explored. 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 concepts of heterotopia and panopticon and Latour's actor-network theory. In creative terms, the major conclusions are the development of several novel methods of research, the resulting artefacts, and the practical materialization of these via the agency of installation. Overall they are infused with qualities such as the temporal, the invisible, the archive and the creative re-enacting character of biological cognitive processes and scientific representational strategies. This is suggested as a fertile area for new art-based explorations and critiques of developments in both contemporary art and science.
This thesis has been digitised by the Library at the University for the Creative Arts (UCA) for the purposes of preservation and dissemination.
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