The Weapons of Choice series, hosted by Kate Davies gathers together multidisciplinary doers and thinkers to delve into the underlying processes behind the making of creative work. Engaging wild minds from the fields of art, design, technology and science in discussion, to explore how the tools available to creative minds activate design thinking in peculiar, particular ways.
Ever wondered what your neurons are up to as you sketch and make; as you lure and provoke your ideas into being? Weapons of Choice Part I; The Architect and the Brain Scientist, brings together the fabulously speculative mind of Architect and Academic Perry Kulper in conversation with leading cognitive neuroscientist, Professor Vincent Walsh to engage in an interrogation of creative practice. Kulper’s speculative work engages the territory of the drawing as a site of exuberant exploration and he will be discussing curiosity cabinets, flat out hunches, relational structuring, design methods - particularly analogic thinking, specific representation techniques for working and the use of language as a generative technology. Walsh, who has worked extensively with artists and musicians, brings an insight into the workings of the brain during creative acts, as we ask how the doing affects the thinking and to what extent it is possible to manipulate or nurture creativity. Conversation will be chaired and stirred by Kate Davies.
--
Perry Kulper is an architect and Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning. His interests include the generative potential of architectural drawing, the outrageously different spatial capacities of diverse design methods and in broadening the conceptual range by which architecture contributes to our cultural imagination. He has recently published Pamphlet Architecture 34, Fathoming the Unfathomable: Archival Ghosts and Paradoxical Shadows with Nat Chard. Prior to his arrival at the University of Michigan he was a SCI-Arc faculty member for 17 years as well as in visiting positions at the University of Pennsylvania and Arizona State University. Subsequent to his studies at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (BS Arch) and Columbia University (M Arch) he worked in the offices of Eisenman/ Robertson, Robert A.M. Stern and Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown before moving to Los Angeles.
Vincent Walsh is Professor of Human Brain Research at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London and a world expert on the brain and performance. Walsh’s Research Group is now entirely concerned with using modern brain science to change behaviour and performance in the world beyond the lab. In that space beyond the lab he has been scientific advisor to the Southbank on the presentation of Messiaen's synaesthesia, Scientist in Residence at the Royal Academy of Music, where he organised the first joint meeting of The Royal Society and The Royal Academy of Music on Creativity and the Brain, and chair of the Medicine and Music symposium at the Royal College of Medicine. He is also the scientific organiser of the British Library annual Science Symposium. He has just completed a Royal Society Industry Research Fellowship which will result in a new clinic for brain stimulation and depression. He also engages with public projects in the media and his work has featured on radio, television and in print media. As a scientist he has published 225 scientific papers on vision, awareness, time perception, music, synaesthesia and technical aspects of brain stimulation.
Kate Davies is an artist and architect. She is co-founder of art practice LiquidFactory, nomadic design studio Unknown Fields, and field robotics group RAVEN. At the AA she is Unit Master of Diploma 6, Director of the Unknown Fields visiting school and Head of Media Studies; which operates as an experimental testing ground within the school aimed at both reinforcing and reinventing the methods, tools and techniques with which students approach the design process.