YQI/Franke Nontechnical Talk: Serena Scapagnini - Painting and Neurology

The Shape of Thoughts - Down the flowing river of tributaries neurons

Serena Scapagnini is an Italian Visual Artist and Art Historian, whose artistic research focuses on neurons. For the last ten years, she worked in collaboration with Professor Michael Higley, neuroscientist at Yale School of Medicine, with SYNAPSES, a project dedicated to the mind. Using fluorescent neuroimaging techniques to visualize neurons, her mixed media works, define an interior landscape, following the flow of neurons like the tributaries of a river connecting through synapses, forming the shapes of our thoughts. Using paper as her predilected medium, Serena’s application of paint is dense and stratified on one part of the picture, and grows into etheric forms rarefying and allow the dendritic branches to dissolve into the white face of the paper.

For this event, Serena and Michael will be in conversation moderated by Florian Carle, exploring their collaboration and shared research, through ten years of brain images, reflections, works of art.

Host or Publisher Yale Quantum Institute