The Extended Mind / Walk, Hands, Eyes (Edinburgh)

Talbot Rice Gallery and the University of Edinburgh are proud to present The Extended Mind, including Gianfranco Baruchello, Marcus Coates, Marjolijn Dijkman, Nikolaus Gansterer, Joseph Grigely, Agnieszka Kurant & John Menick, Daria Martin, William McKeown, Goro Murayama, Angelo Plessas, Magali Reus, as well as Myriam Lefkowitz’s Walk, Hands, Eyes (Edinburgh), a unique city-wide performance event.

Talbot Rice Gallery seeks to unlock the potential of universities to contribute to contemporary art, with both projects rooted in research called the History of Distributed Cognition (2014–18). Evidencing the transformative potential of culture to expand consciousness, this research looked at the history of the idea that our minds are extended across our bodies and the world: enabled by tools, technologies, institutions, materials and techniques. Working in collaboration with the academic team behind it, Talbot Rice Gallery now brings together contemporary subjects—shaped by artificial intelligence, robotics, the internet and global economics—and current artistic concerns with language, autopoiesis, materiality and embodiment.

Gianfranco Baruchello’s paintings describe our sometimes coincidental connection to systems—whether sociocultural, industrial, mechanical or virtual—which define our place in the world; Marcus Coates takes an experience-expanding vicarious trip to the Amazon jungle on behalf of another person, and presents cast shadow forms of extinct animals; Marjolijn Dijkman looks at how huge spatio-temporal scales can be brought into our understanding, including the portents of artificial intelligence and communications with extraterrestrial life; Nikolaus Gansterer manifests the symbols and processes we use to think; Joseph Grigely—deaf from the age of ten—displays the notes he has used to communicate, revealing our embodied relationship to language; Agnieszka Kurant & John Menick critically adopt Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to consider the emergence of anonymous, dispersed work forces; Daria Martin shows robots that learn through sensors interacting with human dancers; William McKeown’s abstract paintings capture the nuanced and active nature of perception; Goro Murayama uses self-generating techniques that result in artist and artwork emerging together; Angelo Plessas takes remote retreats from the insidious effects of the corporately-motivated internet to realise its consciousness expanding potential; Magali Reus makes sculptures that configure objects from everyday life in a way that helps us recognise their often unseen cognitive roles.

Alongside The Extended Mind, Talbot Rice Gallery is delighted to present Walk, Hands, Eyes (Edinburgh), an ongoing performative walking practice devised by French artist and choreographer Myriam Lefkowitz. Over the course of an hour’s silent walk, a participant and a guide form an immersive relationship with their surroundings. The participant has their eyes closed, but is asked at times to briefly open them to create a unique mental snapshot.
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Curated by Miranda Anderson, James Clegg and Tessa Giblin

Further to the support of ECA and the University of Edinburgh, The Extended Mind has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and Walk, Hands, Eyes (Edinburgh) has been supported by Creative Scotland.

Upcoming at Talbot Rice Gallery and on tour
Pine’s Eye (February 29–May 9, 2020) takes its title from the meaning of the word Pinocchio, and will use masks, effigies and automatons to twist ideas about the human form and its relationship to nature. Samson Young’s Real Music opens at Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, May 2–July 4, 2020, unfixing notions of authenticity at play in music, sculpture and society. Jesse Jones’ Tremble Tremble opens at Guggenheim Bilbao on the day of Halloween+Brexit; a selection of recent Trading Zone artists open in Shanghai in November; and the new Talbot Rice Residents at Edinburgh College of Art have arrived to take up their two-year residency.

Stay in touch with us as we explore what the 16th century University of Edinburgh, together with Edinburgh College of Art can contribute to contemporary art production today and in the future.