Kissing and staring in times of neuro-mania The social brain in art-science experiments

This chapter explains a contentious area, in which art-science experiments can play an important investigative part. It argues that such art-science installations, as entangled experiments, can help to reimagine the empirical and conceptual outlines of research into the social brain but that such reflections are also always paired with other logics and tendencies, including, for example, art’s position in an innovation-oriented neuro-techno-scientific society and art’s relation to ‘neuro-enchantment’. Attending to current discourses on the position of brain science, one can start to see why art-science experiments are especially imperative in this academic arena and why potential reconfigurations of neuroscientific concepts stemming from these art-science experiments are so important today. Some artworks may be seen as fortifying the aforementioned materialist tendencies of brain imaging. The chapter provides examples of art-science installations in which the participating members of the public alternate positions as spectators, as experimenters and as objects of investigation.