In her piece called Small Worlds, Buntaine
takes inspiration from the “Small World Network” developed by Strogatz and Watts in 1998.
Imagine a spectrum that has a chaotic left and
an organized right. The small world network,
as a mathematical property, exists on a specific
part of the spectrum, which contains both
chaos and organization. Out of context, the
installation just looks like a series of strange
balls and sticks connected to one another. But,
taking into account Strogatz and Watts’ idea,
the three-dimensional figure is representative
of how small world networks exist within systems like voter networks, metabolic processing,
social networks, and more—including neural
networks. In this instance, neural imagery isn’t
visualized as it physically exists, but rather
is shown a form that demonstrates how it is
thought to operate under certain notions. For
Buntaine, this piece is “a pretty good illustration of my artistic process.”
paper into digital photography and images that
can be swiftly moved and modified. Plioplys allows his artistic work to dig deep into ideas that
float around in neurotheology—the way religious and spiritual experiences can be explained
in neuroscientific terms. These notions don’t fit
well into his work as a scientist and physician,
but as an artist, they are ripe for exploration.
Like Kamen, Plioplys is obsessed with working through layers. “Our brains are composed of
layers—it’s very much a layered phenomenon,”
he says. Those layers lend themselves towards
fostering complex thought processes and
emergent systems. Plioplys explores this trait
through Photoshop, working with hundreds of
different layers of images. The process, he says,
“is in keeping with how our brains work.”
Plioplys’ latest work, Siberia Souls, comprises a
set of diptychs presented as three-dimensional
Courtesy of artist Audrius Plioplys.
Someone with more experience traversing
different lines of work is Audrius Plioplys, an
artist and retired neurologist based in Chicago.
As a young man, Plioplys says he “realized I was
making a fundamental error in looking at neurology and art as two different worlds. For over
30 years now, I’ve been very actively combining neuroscience questions in my artwork—investigating how the mind works and how the
brain works, outside of the confines of clinical
research and laboratories, and in an art studio.”
Above all, Plioplys wants to know “what is it
that makes us human beings?”
Plioplys’ work has evolved over the years,
from early drawings and acrylic paintings on
SciArt in America April 2015
light sculptures. They are illuminated by LED
light systems ranging from static white to colorchanging, as a way to parallel “our own brain
functioning,” say Plioplys. “The left hemisphere
is analytical, black and white, and the right
hemisphere creative, colorful.” The diptychs
incorporate photographs and letters belonging
to departed individuals, with layers of the artist’s own neural networks, brain scan images,
and brain wave tracings representing the “three
layers of our own thought processes: conscious,
subconscious, and unconscious.”
“In putting in these ghostly images of these
departed individuals, I’m remembering them,”
says Plioplys. In the vein of neurotheology, he
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