A research line concerning the non-conscious cognitive dimension of the artistic event. While Structural Surplus describes the surplus as a relational phenomenon observable in open systems, NeuroArt investigates its origin: which pre-intentional cognitive processes generate the surpluses that the framework identifies.
La pregunta articuladora: qué produce el cerebro cuando el sujeto no decide, y cómo ese residuo organiza la obra. ha establecido que la memoria no recupera, sino que reconstruye: cada acto de recordar reescribe la traza bajo las condiciones del presente. La filosofía del arte y mi propio marco proponen lo mismo respecto a la obra: lo que llamamos “obra” no se contiene en el objeto, se activa cada vez en un sistema de relaciones culturales, técnicas y subjetivas. Las dos son operaciones, no cosas. Y las dos plantean el mismo problema a sus dispositivos de registro.
This section addresses this intersection without reducing it to scientific dissemination or artistic illustration. Its specific lines: the reconstructive condition of memory read through art theory, the notion of the work read through embodied cognition and perceptual inference, and recording models (archive, collection, blockchain, neural trace) as devices that manage—with varying success—the persistence of phenomena that are contextual operations.
This last line deliberately includes an inquiry into my own practice: the decision to register pieces on the blockchain is not foreign to this research; it is one of its objects.
Publications are incorporated according to the rhythm of research, not current events.
Relationship with Structural Surplus
NeuroArt is not parallel to Structural Surplus: it is a path towards the micro-cognitive foundation of the same phenomenon.
Structural Surplus identifies the surplus as a relational difference that reorganises the field of a system's possible configurations. NeuroArt proposes that this surplus is not merely formal or systemic, but a trace of non-conscious processes that exceed the subject's capacity for modelling.
The two lines operate at different levels of the same programme: the ontological-relational and the cognitive-processual.
Declared tension
This line introduces a critical possibility regarding the Structural Surplus programme: that the surplus may not be a property of the work, but an effect of the receiver's cognitive limitation. Maintaining both hypotheses in tension is part of the programme, not a contradiction that must be resolved in advance.
The series. Regimes of relevance
Five texts published in the public notebook that develop the line from its conceptual formulation to its technical consequences. They share a thesis: aesthetic understanding is a way of selecting the world, it rests upon regimes of relevance, and the distance between the human and the machine regime is not one of degree but of nature. Each text stands alone; together they trace a journey.
I. What matters and what is relevant. The starting thesis: aesthetic subjectivity as a way of selecting the world, and misunderstanding as a misalignment of relevances.
II. Where the machine looks. The empirical, measurable divergence between human and machine attention when faced with the same stimulus.
III. The effect of self. Self-relevance as the core of intense aesthetic judgement, and the boundary that a system without a self cannot cross.
IV. Processes without meaning. Generative art as a territory where human and machine share a process even if they do not share meaning.
V. The box that does not read itself. The limits of interpretability: why the machine regime of relevance is opaque even with total access to the system.
Status
Material accumulated in practice, theory in the process of explication. Vocabulary and references—critical neuroaesthetics, predictive processing, embodied cognition, distributed cognition—under development.