“Subjective” – Corrado Corti

The talk will be available from Tuesday 16th February onwards on the Museion YouTube channel “MUSEIONbz”

This Museion initiative that features five online interviews inspired by the American artist, Matt Mullican’s artwork “102 Signs for a Museum Fence” seeks to weave a conversation between art and various other disciplines, such as neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, literature and design. The installation, which has been on display on the ground floor of Museion since last November, marks the opening of a new format at Passage that exhibits works from the museum collection, independently of the other shows on display.

The second event in the program hosts Corrado Corti. In his talk, the neuroscientist examines the complex system of colored symbols and pictograms that in Mullican’s installation reflect the world in which we live. Corti focuses on what the artist calls the world of subjective understanding. What happens in our minds when we see the range of colored symbols in Matt Mullican’s work? Shifting nimbly between cerebral areas, functions and neurons, Corrado Corti touches on the mechanisms of creativity and the concept of plasticity, or better the capacity of our brain to change and adapt to external situations and stimuli. This reveals fascinating connections and short circuits between the mechanisms of perception and artistic forms, like the “multidisciplinary nature” of the brain, for example.

The video with Corrado Corti is in Italian. Versions with German and English subtitles are also available.

Watch the video interview

In the coming weeks there will be more discussions with the linguist, Stephanie Risse, the philosopher, Paola Giacomoni, and the designer, Antonino Benincasa.

Having graduated in CTF at the University of Milan, Corrado Corti completed a PhD at the University of Cambridge in which he studied a number of glutamatergic receptors in schizophrenia. He has since worked as Head of laboratory and project leader at GlaxoSmithKline (Verona) in the development of new drugs for the treatment of anxiety, schizophrenia and sleep disturbances. He is currently a researcher at the Institute of Biomedicine (Eurac Research, BZ) in the study of a protein involved in epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease candidate genes.