Discourse
Studies & Fragments I
Studies & Fragments II
Studies & Fragments III
Art of Neuroscience NIN 2026
Dilation-Constriction
The Visitor
Selected Works
Storybook
Photos
Teaching
Thinking
Store
Information
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.
For Art of Neuroscience 2026, I combined techniques drawn from the handmade textile folk-art traditions of my home state of Mississippi with lessons that have continued to unfold during my first year as a neuroscience PhD student in New York City. From a very early age, the women in my family and community inspired me to use these textile techniques. From the rural woods to the bustling city, these worlds may seem distant from one another, but they are connected by my lifelong ardor for exploring the strange truth of ourselves—and by my fascination with the brain, which began almost as soon as I learned what the organ was, and, in ways, even before then.
The approximately two-by-five-foot tapestry incorporates illustration, painting, found and antique objects, embroidery, antique lace, and other mixed media sourced from around New York City.
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 orchestrating themselves to pull her hand through space and toward that one external flower. Where was the origin of her decision? How did it unfold inside of every millimoment?
The Mystery of Volition notes structures and networks that neuroscience can identify and describe—the motor cortex, M1, and distributed brain systems involved in action—and places this science, which we perform in our labs day in and day out, alongside the very human feeling of: “I am conscious. I choose to act.”
Neuroscience gives us ways of mapping the neural processes associated with movement, intention, and decision-making, offering empirical insight into components of these experiences. Yet the subjective experience of willing an action remains seemingly ineffable, and its more elusive facets remain points of contention and fascination across several fields.
Throughout the piece, fragments of the phrase “the choice to act” are scattered among countless possible directions and decisions. Their dispersion emphasizes the strangeness of tracking elements of what feels so simple and natural in a subjective sense. Vectors radiate through the composition, giving these possibilities direction and magnitude: a visual language for movement toward one point rather than another. Science can make the final action feel almost inevitable.
The work does not attempt to answer where volition originates, nor does it try to resolve the convolutions that emerge whenever these questions travel across neuroscience, philosophy, and other domains. Instead, it simply respects our very animal feeling of desire, however small, and the experience of existing as an Agent alongside the biological processes we can observe and map.
Where does the choice to act reside? How does the brain generate the feeling of agency? And, in searching for these answers, how do we find ourselves?
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