XPC LAB MANIFESTO! by XPC LAB

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EXPERIENTIAL COGNITION LABORATORY

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XPC L AB ART + COGNITIVE SCIENCE + PHENOMENOLOGY

CONTENTS •

INTRODUCTION

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ABSTRACT

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XPC LAB AS CONTEXT

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METHODOLOGIES

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MISSION STATEMENT

- FIGURE XPC

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INTENTION The XPC Lab proposes {Bracketing} radical new ‘Structures of Experience‘ called “Phenomenologies” accounting the subjectivity of experiences as inclusive academic middle-grounds in any inquiry into our shared human condition of cognizing the phenomena of Being in the world, through Art.

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XPC LAB MANIFESTO!

- ATMOSPHERES OF OPERATION

INTRODUCTION

“Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object.” 1

What is the hard problem we deal with at the XPC Laboratory? An observable dichotomy of objective and subjective truths of experiencing human life lingers between the gaps of science and art, in a space where everyday {lived} experiences are far removed from the inquiries of scientific materialists researching Consciousness. To address this, we need new ways in which people can access knowledge and understand the embodied human mind beyond science communication. We need cultural spaces for plural questions and investigations relevant to the times. The {XPC} Experiential Cognition Lab hopes to provide incubatory spaces for open-ended answers and rhetorical questions arising through subjective experiences by expanding artistic agency into objective scientific inquiries of reductionisms.

Artistic inquiry {Subject}: Experience as an objective investigative agency of human consciousness. Scientific inquiry {Objective}: Phenomenological exploration of Subjectivity through Art.

1. Smith, David Woodruff, “Phenomenology”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/phenomenology/ XPC LAB | 3

ABSTRACT ‘The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience’, a seminal book published in 1991 marked a shift in consciousness research when cognitive scientists started to look at the subject of ‘Qualia’ more seriously reflecting the subjective nature of experiences. The hard problem of accounting for Qualia can be traced to its very definition, which is the quality of experience under the scientific world view that is contrarily concerned with measurable quantities (Quanta). Even though we can never study subjectivity in a holistic sense due to the very nature of the irreducibility of experiences, Cognitive Science has made tremendous progress in the past three decades in accounting for Qualia. The looming colossal gap in understanding the relationship between the mind, body, and environment is the starting point in the XPC Lab’s artistic journey to bridge these gaps between Quanta and Qualia informed by the philosophical common grounds of Phenomenology in applying the theories of mind and cognition to Academic, Art, and Architecture research. The XPC Lab works at the edges of radical theories in Science and Philosophy critically situated in the practice of Art.

At the XPC Lab, abstractions are acceptable to reasonable degrees of academic scholarship for applied cognitive sciences, where not just scientists, but artists too are subject to Embodying Cognition outside scientific laboratories, as a means to practice the radical embodiment of consciousness, mind and brain research. XPC Lab’s projects help to expand awareness of the cognizing the self in the social consciousness, operating within the reaches of phenomenological methodologies, investigating new ways of “Experiencing” our own cognition.

The Lab exists at the source of knowledge production and dissemination in cultural domains. Open to collaboration towards catalyzing projects that broadly enable discourses around experiences of the human condition, both online and offline. Providing an accommodative spaces for expanding the horizons of our networked and shared socio-cultural realities as a site for curated experiences, disseminating knowledge of the human mind and intelligence through both material (Effect) and non-material (Cause) enacted reWhat is the role of Art in investigating the alities. Where theory and practice inquiries of Consciousness and Qualia? inform each other, at the XPC LAB we provide a philosophical framework for exploring Art-Science practices and inquiries into cog4E COGNITION nitive science using {theoretical} 1. E M B O D I E D {ATMOSPHERES} Phenomenological Methodolo2. E M B E D D E D gies by accounting for structured 3. E N A C T I V E experiences as empirical and em4. E X T E N D E D bodied data points for research.

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XPC L AB

L A B O R ATORY A S CON TEX T O F EM B O DIED KN OW LEDG E XPC L A B I S A S PAC E FO R EM B O D I E D, T R ANS D I S C I P L I NARY I NVE S T I GAT I O N S EXPER I M E NT I NG WI T H PEDAG OG Y, P E RC E P T I O N , S EN S I N G , E NAC T I NG ( PERFOR M I N G ) , M AK I NG, A N D EXPR E S S I NG T H RO U G H A RT-S C IE N C E P ROJ EC T S .

{}{}{}{ The scope and reach of the laboratory are targeted at pragmatic and theoretical collaborations between artists, researchers, scientists, philosophers, students, educationalists, like-minded professionals, and practitioners investigating questions of human conditioning and consciousness within various constructs of cognitive sciences ‘Opened Up’ to arts and philosophy.

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PHILOSOPHY

P H E N O MEN OLO G IC A L M ET H ODO LOG IES RESEARCH + PR ACTICE

ART

COGNITIVE SCIENCE

PHENOMENOLOGY

Accommodative

Opening Up

Knowledge Production

Laboratory Practices

Cognitive Sciences

and Dissemination

Shifting the academic focus to enabling trans-disciplinary, holistic approaches rather than the reductionist approach to both scientific and philosophical inquiries of the human mind and condition in contemporary socio-cultural realities.

Opening up to questions outside objectivist premises that underlie most laboratory research and experiments and to promote subjective Art-Science inquiries:

Art-Science practices at the XPC Laboratory use Phenomenological methods of cognizing to build bridges of artistic novelty beyond science communication. To objectively explore ‘Qualia’ or Experiences as pragmatic sources of knowledge that are open to critical artistic perspectives on human conditioning.

Open to accounting abstract representations of lived “Experiences” outside clinical conditions by methodologically accommodating openness of Art-Science practices at the XPC Lab.

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Art practices as a means to radically structure and question scientific knowledge of the mind and consciousness through Phenomenology, Experimental Pedagogy, and Experiential Learning in Research and Practice of Cognitive Science. To overcome institutional barriers and limiting architectures constructiung structures for accounting Experiences qualitatively.

The intention is to research and curate Experiences manifested as empirical data to help better understand the human condition informed by research in Cognitive theories that enable creative fields of performance and traditional/ experimental/new media art with the help of theoretical understandings situated in Phenomenology.

MISSION XPC LAB is committed to scaffolding Consciousness research through structuring new Phenomenological Methodologies of quantifying ‘Qualia’ or Qualitative Experiences as research data that bridges the gaps between Scholarship and Art-Science practices, towards progressive ideologies of Social Justice and Environmentalism.

AIM To foster and expand the role of ‘Experiences’ of Art and Architecture in the societal contexts of Knowledge production and dissemination that are Phenomenologically embodied, outside the laboratories of Cognitive Science.

Architecture

Figure XPC: Circularity of knowledge represented in the Venn diagram showing ‘Experience’ at the core of overlapping investigations of the human mind and consciousness across Eastern and Western Phenomenology. An academic middle-ground for Opening Up the Cognitive Sciences through radical and inclusive Art-Science practices by subscribing to Phenomenological accounts of subjective experiences as points of empirical research data.

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MA NIFESTO Towards enhanced accountability for Qualitative Experience or ‘Qualia’ in the milieu of Cognitive Science: Finding a means to increase accountability and explore academic dimensions of Qualia or Qualitative Experiences by evaluating scientific data and knowledge on enactive or practice/ performative conditions of artistic expressions. Aiming to radically question the lines between the subject and object of “Experience”.

QUALIA

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MA NIFESTO XPC Lab as a site for knowledge production and dissemination: Fostering experimental methodologies that promotes an understanding of the human mind, body, and environment informed by Art-Science methodologies that objectively document “Experiences” as necessary permutations of the positions {Positionality} of • First-person (en)action, • Second-person interactions • Third-person narrative accounts {Research} of quantifying Qualia on subjective terms. QUANTA

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MANIFESTO Art-Science practice as Phenomenological Methodology: To implement Art as an expressive modality in expanding the middle ground between the sciences and the humanities, helping bridge the gaps between Cognitive Science and Qualia. Appropriating epistemic and pragmatic inquiries of Qualia as subjects to artistic layers of abstract subjective and objective representations of cognizing positionalities. METHODOLOGY

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MANIFESTO ART-SCIENCE

An Open Call for “Artistic Phenomenologies” COLL ABOR ATION Expanding the milieu of working on self-initiated research projects, the XPC Lab Manifesto is an open invitation for employing radical new Phenomenological Methodologies.

} OPEN CALL CLAUSES { {Open all year round} Art + Science practices at the Experiential Cognition Lab are always open to proposals from artists with an academic propensity to collaborate and realize Art-Science projects, social experiments, academic research, content creation, critical and constructive practices, curation, etc. thus “opening up” the cognitive sciences through Embodied and Extended theories of cognizing to Artists from diverse global cultural backgrounds. We are open to mature proposals by practitioners informed by Cognitive Science, Arts and Humanities, Architecture, Curation, Education and Pedagogy, Environmentalism, and Social Justice. Any person or collective from across the world is invited to collaborate with the XPC Lab under the following phenomenological clauses.

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Invited practitioners: 1) Are intended to explore Experiential

Cognition Lab as a context for “Artistic Phenomenologies”: Acknowledging and extending the circularity of understanding human conditioning through ‘opening up’ cognitive science into deviant phenomenological investigations of ArtScience methodologies in the capacity of “Contributing Artist/s” subscribing to new radical laboratory approaches to design atmospheres of “Experiential Cognitions” as critical case studies of the human condition.

2) Have to constructively participate as

non-resident practitioner/s (embodied artist/s) who populate the inquiries of the (XPC) Experiential Cognition Lab’s effort to be a collective haven for questions of “Experiences” at the edges of Cognitive Science and Art, diligently informed by Phenomenology in subjective understandings of the human condition that is an ever-evolving subject.

3) Will qualitatively and pragmatically

look at both theoretical and practical issues to add to the expanding knowledge of the human conditioning informed by phenomenological “Structures of Experience”; scaffolding artistic content worthy of academic standards and personally represent the documentation of proposed projects open to intersubjective validation and criticism.

4) Should necessarily have an embodied

aspect of lived “Experience” explored artistically/performatively. “Contributing Artists” are encouraged to use traditional/new media art modalities and enabling technologies open to all fields of Cognitive Science and Art.

5) Will incorporate “Phenomenological

Art-Science Methodologies” prescribed by the Experiential Cognition (XPC) Laboratory’s Manifesto. Each “Art-Science” project: [No time or space restrictions]

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• will have both artistic and scientific • research questions. • will have academic research and online collaboration phases. • will have to abide by phenomenological documentation methods. • will propose projects that are independently financed. Applying for external grants is encouraged. • will effectively use design as a cognitive affordance to achieve artistic causalities that adopt a reflective, participatory approach, opening up the relation between the scientific study of work practice and role-playing of Experiences, embedded in the XPC Lab’s proposed research and ArtScience methods of knowledge production and dissemination.

6) Artists/scientists/scholars on success-

ful collaboration will be gratified and associated with the Experiential Cognition Lab, acknowledged as “Contributors”. Proposals are expected to voluntarily produce visual and written project reports/papers and artist statements for proposed Art-Science projects as a part of the Lab’s archival effort to disseminate data as substantial documents of scholarship at the edges of academia.

7) Will have access to the Lab’s grow-

ing online and offline research collection related to our primary investigation and will receive support from practicing researchers and peers for applying to propose “Art-Science methodologies” through consultation and collaboration; incubated in sustainable and enabling capacities under mutual agreement.

8) Will operate under specified “Atmo-

spheres”: It is important to define atmospheres of operation at the Lab in identifying the cornerstones of an Art-Science project operating in enabling phenomenological reductions and structures of experiences.

{ATMOSPHERES} @ XPC LAB “Atmospheres” of Social Justice and Environmentalism. Following are the milieus of operation open to the XPC Lab’s Art-Science inquiries and interventions: - Academic research: Cognitive Science, Humanities, Architecture and Art Institutions/Cultural Organizations, Centres, Art/Science Labs, related spaces for, Contemporary Art and Architecture, Info- and Bio-Tech, Health and Spirituality, Education and Pedagogy, etc. - Artist Studios, Talks, Panel Discussions, Conferences, Screenings, Performances, Social experiments, Walks, Public spaces, Classrooms, Virtual landscapes, Phone Applications, etc. - Digital Archives, Research Papers, Blogs, Publications, Online content, Podcasts, video, photography, etc. - Art and Science Grants, Calls, Councils, and Associations. - Art/Science Shows, Festivals, Galleries, and Museums. - Independent/Collective Art and Curatorial Practices. - Workshops, Events, Exhibitions, Expositions, etc.

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Experiential Cognition Laboratory MANIFESTO | 2020 For more information contact Principal Investigator: Shashank Satish XPC LAB, BENGALURU. Since 2017 holycowstudio.in/home/xpc-lab/ xpc.laboratory@gmail.com