Arts Meet Science for Students (AMSS)
Update: April.3th, 2023
About AMSS
Arts Meet Science Project for Students (AMSS) is a joint group mainly of undergraduate and postgraduate students specializing in medical and biological science, music, sound engineering, fine arts, and design. AMSS combines all knowledge from arts to science to understand human nature. Art students and artists in the group are interested in the sensory processing of the brain, because essentially all forms of art constitute sensory stimuli to the beholders. One of the significant problems concerning art-science collaborations is that few of them have reported performance assessment (Lesen et al., 2016), to which our members with art background could make a great contribution. Our members are now recognizing that art can be effectively utilized as a scientific experiment, while science as an artistic exploration. We hope our activities would provide a reference for future productive collaborations.
AMSS is supported by Arts Meet Science Project (AMS), an organization comprised of scientists and artists from across the globe who believe that artistic and scientific pursuits will benefit the society. AMS seeks to endow the next-generation of artists and scientists with a broader perspective and deeper cultural appreciation, enabling them to expand the scope of their contributions as well as to take the initiative to foster changes in the modern world facing some critical issues. Towards this end, AMS has hosted several public forums with eminent artists and scientists interested in cross-disciplinary collaborations of the arts and science fields. AMS has also backed up and made constructive suggestions for AMSS activities in the hope of facilitating opportunities for innovation and intellectual motivation.
Ongoing Groups & Activities
Here is the outline of each group's activity in AMSS. Each group holds regular meetings.
Musicology Group
This group aims to provide a scientific basis for traditional music theories and to find universal principles that would explain and predict human musical behavior.
The group members are addressing these key questions:
1. musical structures effective in eliciting emotion and physiological responses
2. visual imagery from music
3. interpersonal synchrony in feeling grooves
4. musical pleasure hinging upon prospective and retrospective states of expectation
5. manipulation of attentive listening
6. perception of electronic sounds
Vision and Art Group
This group aims to examine outstanding art works in order to form hypotheses about how the brain processes visual information and to apply existing neuroscientific evidence to the comprehension of art and the practice of making art.
The group members are addressing these key questions:
1. functional anatomy of the visual system
2. neural representations of form, color, brightness, and motion
3. nature and nurture of art evaluation
4. spiritual emotions elicited by abstract art (in conjunction with emotions elicited by music)
5. providing an overview of art history (using Reductionism in Art and Brain Science by Eric R. Kandel as a textbook)
6. exploring philosophical theories on aesthetics
Biology and Analytic Philosophy Group
This group aims to examine philosophical themes and debates regarding gene concepts in order to reshape the philosophy of gene against the scientific backdrop of the postgenomic era. Furthermore, art students in this group are trying to create art works that illustrate how the new molecular biosciences are reforming the basic concepts of heredity.
The group members are addressing these key questions:
1. the definition of the word 'information' currently used in biology
2. exploring theories of information that can be used to represent living organisms (specifically, DNA
sequences and gene transcription)
3. applying the philosophy of gene to abstract concepts in biology (e.g. autonomous system, dynamic
order, entropy and extropy, differentiation between the self and the environment)
4. the utility of gene concepts for a variety of topics in humanities research (e.g. a sense of identity,
otherness and mind, intersubjectivity in language learning and use, the causal theory of perception)
5. artistic expression of biological phenomena
'Touch with Your Brain' Group
This group aims to create science-inspired art works encouraging the audience to feel the crosstalk between different senses. Both medical students and art students utilize the emerging evidence for multi-sensory interaction and integration in the human brain, with the belief that collaboration between like-minded artists and scientists can ideally extend the frontiers of science and art.
The group members are addressing these key questions:
1. importance of visual, auditory, and tactile senses in sensory integration
2. neural mechanisms responsible for cross-modal phenomena between auditory and visual perception
(e.g. the McGurk effect)
3. tactile sensation provoked by visual or auditory stimuli alone
4. physiological responses related to illusory tactile sensation
5. body ownership by cross-modal congruency effect
6. dynamics of art evaluation with/without instructive workshops regarding the art implementation