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Studies & Fragments III
Art of Neuroscience NIN 2026
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The 2026 Art of Neuroscience award recipients were announced today at Waag Futurelab in Amsterdam during the Art of Neuroscience × NeuroNarratives symposium, in connection with the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The Mystery of Volition combines techniques drawn from the handmade textile folk-art traditions so integral to my experience of my home in the state of Mississippi with physical antique objects and lessons that have emerged from my time spent so far in NYC studying the neuroscience of aesthetic experience.
A woman sits among a field of flowers and chooses to pick just one. Why this one? Think of the thousands of electrical impulses and biological pulley systems that are orchestrating themselves to pull her hand through space and towards that one external flower. Where was the origin of her decision? How did it unfold inside of every millimoment?
Neuroscience uses several techniques to map these motions and intentions in ways that offer empirical insight, but the more elusive facets of these processes remain points of contention and fascination across several fields.
This artwork does not attempt to answer any of these questions. Instead, it presents the juxtaposition between the deeply animal feeling of desire, however small, and the experience of existing as an Agent, alongside the mappable components of that experience, which so easily begin to fall apart in conversation when we try to trace them across domains and fields.
The competition founded in 2011 by Tycho Hoogland at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN), an institute part of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) based in Amsterdam, began with an annual symposium exploring the convergence of art, technology, and neuroscience. LINK