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WITHOUT
ORGANS

A performative lecture
by Warren Neidich

Spike is pleased to present

THE BRAIN WITHOUT

ORGANS:
AYAHUASCA AND THE
CONCEPT OF NEURAL
REGRESSION

A PERFORMATIVE
LECTURE BY WARREN
NEIDICH

Wednesday, 21 June
2017, 7pm
Spike Berlin, Rosa-
Luxemburg-Strae 45

In the past few years, the

artistic community has
begun to understand the
importance of having a say in
answering Catherine
Malabous question: What
should we do with our
brain? We no longer want a
flexible brain imposed from
without and crafted by
neoliberalism to do its
bidding, but rather a
proactive brain that
constructs an alternative
world which then sculpts a
material brain accordingly.

For good reason the artistic

community has resisted
incorporating the knowledge
of neuroscience into its
repertoire of creative
apparatuses and methods,
fearing its message might be
reductive and deterministic.
But the recent advent and
acceleration of technologies
interfacing with the brain,
such as Google DeepMind,
brain-computer interfaces,
neural dust, cortical
implants, and optogenetics,
as well as the burgeoning
fields of consumer
neuroscience, institutional
neurolinguistic programming,
and neuroeconomics, give
reason to pause and
cogitate upon what the
future of the brains role in
constituting freedom of
choice might be.

Additionally, the impending

horrifying reality of the
seamless connection of the
brain to the Internet of
Everything and metadata,
what I call the Statisticon,
has created an emergency
necessitating immediate
action: especially when it is
the environment that forms
the epigenetic pressure to
sculpt the brains neural
plasticity.

Artists have the power to

change the brain and don't
even know it. We want a
material brain that is noisy,
empathic, and community-
oriented; not an optimized
one that can work longer,
more efficient hours in front
of a computer screen in an
office cubicle coordinating
drone strikes! I am wagering
that as we transition from
Fordism and post-Fordism to
Cognitive Capitalism, the
concept of the Body without
Organs and Schizo-analyis
no longer can or will provide
forms of active resistance.
The lecture will elaborate my
concept of the Brain without
Organs as a construct
specifically tailored to the
new challenges we face in
Neoliberal Cognitive
Capitalism.

WARREN NEIDICH is
professor of art at the
Weissensee
Kunsthochschule Berlin and
founder and director of the
Saas-Fee Summer Institute
of Art. His
Psychopathologies of
Cognitive Capitalism Part
3 (Archive Books) and
Neuromacht (Merve Verlag)
will be released this year.
Recent solo exhibitions
include "The Color of
Politics" at the Kunstverein
am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz,
Berlin, 2017; "The
Statisticon", Miami
Contemporary Projects,
Bogota, 2016; "The Artists'
Library", LAXART, Los
Angeles, 2016; and "The
Palinopsic Field", LACE, Los
Angeles, 2016. Neidich
studied photography, video,
neuroscience, medicine,
ophthalmology, and
architectural theory.