Curators: Dr. Michal Mor

Opening Date: 24.11.2024 – 2.2.2025

"Computers Don't Create Art. Humans Do". Matty Mariansky

When art encounters passion, it evokes a powerful emotional response. It can revitalize our perception of creating meaning, perhaps even ushering in a new understanding. Matty Mariansky's work draws inspiration from preceding art and styles. It is constructed from a tapestry of his subjective experiences and contexts: memories, symbols, language, cultural associations that his brain processes through an organic neural network, enabling intellectual breakthroughs.

Creativity is a complex dance between prior knowledge and future vision. Our brain, as a sophisticated biological computer, forges novel connections between ideas, allowing us to experience the world in original and unexpected ways. Artificial intelligence, in turn, offers us a new tool to explore human thought processes, deepen our comprehension of creativity, and unlock fresh possibilities for connecting mind and body.

His work is termed generative art where the definition of rules and parameters, provided as codes to the computer, become autonomous and operate automatically. The resulting creation is dynamic, capable of changing each time it is activated, or even evolving and transforming over time. The machine might surprise the creators, exceeding their expectations by proposing and developing innovative ideas and surprising forms of expression. The missing component in the machine is the artist's emotional engine.

Mariansky invites us to a journey into the depths of the collective consciousness, where digital art serves as a tool for uncovering thought patterns. His works are like mirrors reflecting the complexity of the digital world and its impact on the human mind. Through sophisticated algorithms, he creates virtual labyrinths that invite us to "enjoy the loss of direction or the uncertainty inherent in our path," a concept known in Japanese culture as maiōmai. This philosophical approach encouraging us to stop seeking clear answers and start enjoying the journey itself, the constant search for meaning. In the digital labyrinth, we confront infinite possibilities and discover the boundaries and potential of human imagination.

The evolutionary process between artist and machine is how they learn from and enrich each other, culminating in a creation that is a unique synthesis of human creativity and computer calculation.

Matty Mariansky is an artist and technologist in the fields of machine learning, synthetic media, and generative art. He founded the AI community and newsletter "Ascent of Machines" which provides daily content and commentary on AI, technology, and life. He calls himself a "techno-optimist" and claims that every two weeks he learns something new in the field of AI that blows his mind.

From Crisis to breakthroughs in Thinking

We live in an era of deep crisis, and times of crises may globally alter brain functioning and affect the activities of those brain regions that are responsible for creative thought; therefore, crisis experiences can accelerate creative art activities, and by doing that can encourage the exit from crisis states to periods of enhanced creativity. Pre-historic studies teach us that elevated density of human societies may further enable breakthrough changes in inter-individual relationships (which in Hebrew we call ‘Havruta’, friendship- a term used primarily to describe group studies activities) and consequently, accelerated breakthroughs in high level special skills and technological development. Thus, the basis for breakthrough events in science and technology largely depends on increased concentrations of humans rich in advanced human skills, accelerated creativity and advanced innovation, which together inscribe cultural and technological progress the impact of which may enable overcoming crisis periods.

The solutions for crisis states that are offered by Mati Marinsky relate primarily to the intellectual aspects of such processes: language and faith shapes. The impact of his creations and their power on us depend on our ability to understand the accompanying message by activating those brain pathways which enable the acceleration of neuronal circuits and creativity at large. Notably, understanding creativity and written language, for example, may take place in distinct brain regions-for example, reading Japanese texts activates distinct brain regions from those activated by reading Western languages texts, which raises the question if such reading experiences ignite different thought processes.

As an artist, Mati does not expect to fully understand the implications of his art creations; rather, he expects that its impact on the viewers will be deepened and intensified by a computational entity which creates the relevant theory and in its way, plays the same role as the increase in population density that enables new innovative breakthroughs. The power of computational processes may thus accelerate cognitive developments and enable new solutions for crisis events. However, it remains unclear if the computational entity is culturally-dependent as well. We are in the beginning of a new way aimed to provide novel breakthroughs in our understanding of the power and revolutionary impact of computational cognition as well as its boundaries. For example, we do not yet know if it may change neuronal gene expression, my type of expertise…in any way, Mati Marinsky opens new doors for us and we all appreciate that.

Professor Hermona Soreq studies the molecular regulation of brain and body reactions to age, sex, stress and disease by focusing on systemic responses to messages of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine in diverse conditions, with a focus on small RNA regulators.

Real Summer

In the summer of 2001, I returned to Tel Aviv after living in New York for a while. In my suitcase, I brought a digital camera. Free from work and obligations, I wandered around the city photographing everything Tel Avivian that I had missed - beach sand, rooftops against blue skies, peeling walls, friends, and random people. This year, 2024, I accidentally stumbled upon a forgotten folder on my disk containing that pile of photographs from back then. The photos looked wrong to me. Not accurate. Not good. Many things I clearly remembered weren't there. I remember being surprised by the sheer amount of antennas and electrical cables everywhere. I distinctly remember a sense of dark happenings behind the scenes, some kind of deal brewing unbeknownst to anyone (I landed in Tel Aviv exactly on the day the Twin Towers fell, which I had left behind). Even the composition, form, and the color of light and shadow - everything in the photos wasn't right. I took it upon myself to photograph again, using artificial intelligence, the memories from that summer, but this time as they truly were. The new photographs also started with innocent landscapes - a roof against the sky, a paddleboat on the beach. But I found myself drawn more and more to images where the ominous undercurrent finds its way to the surface, as it did then and as it has returned now.

A Science of Escape

Can an agent, built solely for the purpose of creating mazes, break free from the chains of its deterministic nature? And similarly, can humans escape their preordained paths and rebel against fate? Are we simply following a pre-written script, devoid of free will? Or can we choose and forge our own path? A Science of Escape explores the interplay between control and liberation. It searches for the place of the unexpected - system glitches that allow choice to triumph over destiny. A single seed number predetermines the outcome. But an injection of external noise and wild free will might turn things upside down. I found comfort in the predictable nature of logic and computer code, standing in contrast to the whirlwind outside. My role shifted from creator to curator. The lines of code represent compressed potential, which at its will may unfold into an infinite space of possible maze structures. Each time the algorithm creates a new unique maze for me, the boundless potential collapses into a single canvas and gives me free choice

Evra

Evra ("Evra K'dabra" or "Abracadabra") creates a meeting point between ancient Jewish texts and artificial intelligence through a reimagining of the Hebrew alphabet. Using an evolutionary algorithm trained on hundreds of modern Hebrew fonts, a new script was created where each letter is composed of only three lines. This uncompromising constraint forces the machine to find a creative solution, perhaps venturing into territory considered uniquely human. The new letters inscribed into clay a passage from Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Creation) that deals with the power of letters to create words and worlds. The encounter between an ancient text about creation through letter combinations and letters reborn through a digital process raises questions about the nature of creation and language in the technological age.

This work was done in collaboration with Dr. Eyal Gruss

Curators: Dr. Michal Mor

Opening Date: 17.5.2024 – 1.11.2024

The exhibit opened at the beginning of July 2024 and will be on display to the public until the end of October, is titled “Brainwaves Scorched”—an exhibition featuring works by Israeli artists and poets (Curator: Dr. Michal Mor).

A pioneering initiative by Professor Idan Segev brought together ten brain researchers and ten artists for a transformative three-day conference in 2004 at the Gottesman Etching Center, Kibbutz Cabri. During this conference, researchers presented their work on the brain, the visual system, hearing, movement, and the components and principles of the nervous system. In turn, the artists shared their creations and discussed the creative process.

Following this meeting, the etchings were compiled and printed in an art book titled “Art and Brain”. In 2022, a subsequent meeting between Israeli poets and brain scientists at Kibbutz Cabri resulted in the creation of poems and articles, which were compiled into a book titled “NeuroPoetics – Poetry Meets Science”

In 2024, 22 years later, the Brain Center chose to showcase the artwork and poems generated from these encounters throughout the Goodman Building and in the gallery. Additionally, on October 9, 2024, a conference titled “The Day Before Yesterday, Yesterday, and Tomorrow “will be held. This event will bring together researchers, artists, and poets to discuss the latest advancements in brain research, share experiences, and reflect on how these conferences have influenced their work over the years. The aim of this gathering is also to explore new “neuro-aesthetic” initiatives. The event will take place at The Martine de Souza-Dassault Brain Art Gallery in the Goodman Building, Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences at the Hebrew University.

Opening Date: March 2023 – August 2023

The properties of sound, like smell, are dominant: sound – when it is present – cannot be avoided. Different people have different sensitivities to sounds and frequencies, to amplification, to clarity and to sound quality. Artists who make significant use of sound are in fact building on common perceptions and unconscious responses, at least in part.
In his attempt to reflect the world of images, the artist Amnon Wolman presents the world of the imagination, in which melodies are created in the brain on the basis of past and present external experiences, alongside the findings of the researchers who chart the path of the notes between their creation and their understanding and interpretation in the brain towards their transformation into an image.
Sound is the main material from which the artist constructs the works presented in the exhibition. Sound is a broad category that includes music, speech, noises, tone, memories, emotions and more. We hear sound all the time, and label it: some things are important, and some things are not; we label some things as music, and others not. Everything begins with hearing and listening.
The sound in this work also occurs in the viewer’s imagination, the visual noise created by the cables, and the possibility of seeing different images within that visual noise may suggest sounds. Hidden within that visual is also an analogy between the passage of electricity in electrical wires, and the passage of information along the neural pathways in the brain. The wires, which conduct the sound waves and the electricity in the exhibition, remain exposed, and they create a branched network of information processing and recall processes. The absence of any sound in a sound-based work is almost as significant as sound itself. The electric cables that are stretched along the walls and inter-connect  serve as a disturbance in space. Wolman’s visual presentation indicates the image of the voice as present in the gallery space, which becomes, perhaps, a resonant chamber.
A musical instrument built by the artist stands in a far corner of the gallery; its strings when pressed sound a short musical sequence or conversations with four researchers at the center: Dr. Naomi Habib, Prof. Israel Nelken, Prof. Aviv Mezer, and Prof. Yair Weiss. The viewer/listener is invited to connect different bits of music by clicking on different buttons to construct a musical piece.
This exhibition reflects the two main deliberations of the researcher and the artist: one is the transition from experiencing sound through hearing to conscious control of hearing, and the other is the relationship between the personal hearing of an individual and the shared hearing of a group that experiences sound together.

Acknowledgments: Thanks to the researchers who collaborated in this work: Dr. Naomi Habib, Prof. Israel Nelken, Prof. Aviv Mezer and Prof. Yair Weiss.
To the technicians and musicians who helped in the construction of the work: Noa Frenkel,  Yelin Yafet, and Omer Goldberg;
To Michal Mor, the Curator.

The sound causes vibrations in the eardrum, producing motion in the chambers of the inner ear, where a miraculous process produces electrical activity that represents the sound. The electrical activity in the ear causes activity in the brain. And so we hear. This is the story that appears in the neuroscience textbooks and which we teach our students.
This account is simple and concrete, with a clear and univalent causal connection between each stage of the process and the next; everything is deterministic, leaving no room for differences between listeners.
The conversations with Wolman give rise to a very different picture, one in which the act of hearing is linked in an essential way to the inner world of the viewer, to the categorization of the incoming sounds, to the separation between music and sounds that are not music, to what is important and what is not important, to processes of recall, to energy and information. This is undoubtedly a world which is personal and different for each person who experiences the exhibition.
In our conversations, I tried to explain this difference by stating that I was talking about sensation, whereas Wolman described perception. Perception is built on sensation, but the two are not isomorphic. Perception uses sensations as a raw material that is repeatedly processed and shaped, and may depend on everything that happens or has happened in the past to the viewer/listener. This is the process through which memories and emotions can intervene in the perception of sounds.
Yet, this is not quite an explanation, but rather a process of attaching labels. I know there are places in the brain where the electrical activity faithfully represents the sound, and other places where the electrical activity represents the resulting perception. How this transition happens, and what causes sounds to produce such a rich set of perceptions, these are still a mystery.

Opening Date: June 2022 – October 2022

Early photos from a family photo album. On the timeline and editing table – photos from another place and time of a young girl with braids, alongside some few more photos of her as an adolescent who matured to become a beautiful and promising woman. Colorful Life in black and white.

On the opposite wall: Four paintings, four variations on her figure are drawn from reflection upon that single photograph dating to the 1960s, a pastoral image portraying her against a backdrop of a local rocky landscape. The photo illustrates an intersection of gazes – she is devoting herself to the camera, and her partner, the photographer, captures her image through the lens in her most beautiful moments.

In the last decade, my mother has rapidly declined following Alzheimer’s disease that struck her and caught us all unprepared. We watched her as she lost her identity. Moving away from us into a world of oblivion.

The act of painting seeks to deal with reality with interpretive tools. It’s within the action’s power to build a world of images and identities by layering material. A painting carries within it the traces of time: covering, blurring, deduction, concealing and building again. The final product is a necessity of accumulating all the moves that have taken place along the way. The painting contains all of these. 

The painting remembers.

The motif of disappearance, erasure and repetition of the image is also repeated in a flickering film screened in the gallery, the result of a collaboration with video artist Neta Moses. In this film, a character is projected upon a painted canvas. The appearance of my grandfather’s character – my mother’s father – as I vaguely remember him from my childhood, similar to flickers of fragments of memory out of oblivion. It seeks to raise to the surface the lost memories and illuminate them, giving them renewed life for a mere moment.

The blurring of the photographic image and the dissolution of reality into its primary and raw elements through stain, form and material, are used by Dan Orimian, the painter and son, as a tool to express the inconceivable gap between observing his mother’s present image and the gaping and inaccessible space left in her. The works bring together the perspectives of the artist, his mother and the viewers, capturing another perceptual gap described by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan when distinguishing between sight and gaze: the emergence of the mother figure as perceived by the visual system undergoes the interpretive gaze of the son as returned to him through her blurred, unfocused, frightened eyes, which can no longer recognize her world. The works manage to illustrate the twilight stage in the transition between the symbolic and realistic dimension, between the social order and the chaos from which things came and to which all things return.

Orimian is influenced by the work of the German painter Gerhard Richter who painted based on photographs in the early 1960s, with a free brush, to the point that the autonomous texture prevailed over the realistic image. The blurring of the painting emphasizes the passage of time, the inability to rely on the perception of reality and the elusiveness of the image that purports to present truth but cannot grasp it. What appears reappears again only to disappear. Disappearence, repitition, erasing again, until the finished painting shows something else. The intention is not to create a reproduction or reconstruction but to try and capture the function of traces of time and their erasure.

By mapping the brain at the cellular and molecular level, we reveal mechanisms behind the damage to the brain that leads to memory loss and cognitive impairment in Alzheimer’s disease. To do this we are using advanced technologies to track brain cells at a very high resolution and then combine these measurements with mathematical modeling.  

Our journey with Dan started by talking about the microscopic level of cells in the brain and their loss and dysfunction in the diseased brain and ended in a discussion of the loss of the individual in front of our eyes due to the disease. Dan’s work helped us reconnect to the core of our motivation to study this devastating disease. With his brush he helped us see through his eyes the emotional burden of following the disappearance of a loved one. Personally, Dan’s work took me back to my own journey with my grandmother during her struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, seeing her being present and absent at the same time, maintaining her humor and her wit while losing her memories and parts of herself.

Opening Date: November 2021 – March 2022

Alon Kedem describes himself as a hunter-gatherer, casting his net and gathering imagery from around the world. He roughly sketches these surprising images on the canvas, eventually turning them into the final piece. For Alon, the woven canvas is a field upon which imagery and signs are constantly in the process of becoming. By externalizing the images etched in his mind, the canvas absorbs them, captivating his urges. The paintbrush obscures, disassembles, and rebuilds the images – a constant state of invention, where each layer simultaneously erases and creates something new.

Throughout the act of creation, the artist must remain open to fleeting ideas – both those that develop into inspiration, and those that go seemingly nowhere. Either way, the memories are implanted on the porous jute, leaving traces on the underlying white canvas, which carries the weight of the memories – the echoes, the undeciphered traces.

The portraits seem to be watching as the artist gradually brings them to life within his temporary studio – the exhibition gallery. An artist’s studio is typically an intimate space where they experiment with their media. By transitioning his work into the gallery, Alon’s artistic and aesthetic considerations become public. The gallery becomes a space for reflection, combining the act of drawing with the act of looking at the artwork.

The portraits are silent witnesses to the artist’s illustrious activity, while the presence of visitors to the gallery creates a dialogue with the working artist.

We go along in our daily lives believing that what we perceive reflects the world “as it is”. Most of the time, we manage to ignore the elephant in the room – the unavoidable gap between what’s out there, and our subjective experience. There are moments when this gap becomes evident. It happens when we encounter people with brain damage who don’t experience the left side of space (known as unilateral neglect) or “mistake their wife for a hat” (metamorphopsia), but also when we look again and reveal a completely different thing, when I realize that my friend saw something very different from what I saw, when I see that the key I was frantically looking for was there all the time, and more broadly when we realize that we were looking at suffering, and saw it as something else, or didn’t see it at all. These moments reveal the fact that conscious experience is not a passive absorption of information, but an active creation, made out of memory in its broader sense, and sensations.

In the lab, we investigate this gap and the processes forming conscious experience, using scientific methods. Alon Kedem investigates a similar question, through his painting. His paintings expose, on canvas, the multilayered nature of the sensory experience. In his powerful portraits he depicts the holistic nature of human face processing (for those who do not suffer from prosopagnosia, or ‘face blindness’), the apparent chaos in some of his paintings makes us see something new with every look, and in his enigmatic paintings in which part of the world is viewed through a kind of an x-ray machine, he reveals hidden, subterranean layers of reality.

Kedem called his exhibition ‘working memory’, exposing the poetic nature of this seemingly professional term. Working memory is the process of holding information in an active (hence “working”) mode for a few seconds, for immediate use. For example, when we shift our gaze from the map we are holding, trying to match it with the environment we are navigating. Working memory thus allows us to transform an image after it is no longer visible. Working memory also echoes the work in (art)work, and how we remember it, and, also, the fact that memory, like artwork, is actively construed, and is malleable, continuously revised with another line and another layer. Kedem turned the gallery to a work-space and in doing so he is shaping the memory of his residence at ELSC. Furthermore, he is materializing the memory of his work on an empty canvas under his new painting, absorbing a physical memory trace of his new work. What will remain?

Max Epstein, Olga Golzer

Curators: Michal Mor

Opening Date: March, 2021 | Closing Date: August, 2021

Curation is the act of creating of new contexts for displaying cultural artifacts. Since the 1990s, interdisciplinary cooperation has given rise to multi-voiced interpretations by artist, curator, and scientist – pushing aside the concept of singular “genius.”
The beginning of this discourse can be found in the magical encounter between artists Max Epstein and Olga Goltser, examining objects collected during their wanderings, whether down an alley, along the coast, or in nature. Broken dishes, pieces of pottery or metal, anything and everything – testimonies to memories past that have become theirs through the act of re-creation. The exhibition is pungent with time, space, detachment, and ingathering, truly a cultural and linguistic hybrid. Combined with each new viewing, a new tale is spun.
This exhibition is a 'Rashomon' of sorts, interpreting the displayed objects in different ways; each version is logical, complete, and persuasive – and may contradict previous versions. The pieces of art comprise a collection of riddles, hints, and contradictions that operate on you – the viewer – virtuosically, raising questions about the explicit and implicit values on display. These converse about the relativity of truth, and its reliance on the eye of the beholder. “ It is not the hand that rewrites the material, it is the observing eye that tries to find readiness to present the object (Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives. 2013).
You are welcome to write your own text panels for this exhibition by filling this form.
 

Musings on art and brains
Impressions by Prof. Israel Nelken

Perception comes with a sense of immediacy, a direct and intimate relation with the external objects that are perceived. But this immediacy is an illusion. The brain receives information from the environment through a limited, noisy set of sensors – the eyes, ears, and all the rest. These senses report about the external world by partial, noisy measurements. Thus, we perceive the world through a veil. Perception can be construed as the attempt of the brain to reconstruct reality - the reality that gave rise to the sensory signals. This process is complex. Sensory processing, which is performed automatically and without awareness, engages huge territories of the mammalian brain, and takes substantial amount of time.
While brains are remarkably successful in this process, they are not infallible. Visual illusions are an example – we perceive things that are not there. Less known, but as compelling, are cases of bistable perception – situations in which the ambiguity of the sensory input results in perception flipping between two very different percepts. For example, in the artificial situation in which two different images are presented to the two eyes, we perceive either one of the images or the other, but not a mix of the two.
The art presented here challenges perception as well. The daily objects that are placed together in unusual combinations, the multiple layers of color and print on paper, the organization of the whole in space – each of these engages the interpretative mechanisms that are so important for perception. The incongruity of these compositions results in multiple possible interpretations that, as in bistable perception, hover around while pushing each other in and out of awareness.

AUGURIES OF INNOCENCE from Olga Goltser on Vimeo.

This exhibition deals with discrepancies between sensory input and the deciphering of reality. It is a collaboration between artist Ayelet Carmi and Dr. Ayelet McKyton, a neuroscientist whose research explores the limitations of re-learning to see after experiencing blindness. Her initial study, which was conducted in Ethiopia in collaboration with Prof. Ehud Zohary’s laboratory, measured and monitored children’s sight following cataract surgery. Dr. McKyton’s current research project is under the auspices of Dr. Netta Levin’s laboratory at Hadassah. She studies adults with a congenital sight-loss condition who have undergone innovative treatments to fix retinal dysfunction.
Dr. McKyton has discovered a critical period during development that our brains are capable of learning a particular way of interpreting sensory input. Once this window of opportunity closes, it is difficult, if not impossible, to learn this skill.
Similar themes emerge from Ayelet Carmi’s artwork; her drawings are a glimpse into the ambivalence that ensues when proper visual input is not, or cannot, be interpreted clearly. Using translucent parchment paper as her base, she draws layer after layer of imagery. Shapes emerge as three-dimensional representations, multiplicities of reality, in which elements and facts are repeatedly broken down and reassembled. The artist abandons tangible reality in favor of an alternative, imagined version. Taking this liberty, she enables the viewer to ponder reality while creating the world anew. Through Carmi’s artwork, the viewer actively sees and thinks about the world in a new light, as its physical reality lays before their very eyes.
This scientific-artistic conversation begins with a physical event within subjects’ brains, continues with a researcher deciphering her findings, and includes an artist’s re-interpretation, until, finally, the gallery visitor joins in as an active participant.