Ramón y Cajal between robots and ants: the CCCB targets the center of the brain

And suddenly, a friendly robot named RoboThespian launches into the soliloquy of ‘Hamlet’ with surprising courage. Impeccable ‘British’ accent, diction as if he had just come out of a private class with Alec Guinness and gestures worthy of the West End. He only lacks the skull. And, while we’re at it, a brain. Because in this story, you’ll see, the brain is important. But everything will come. In fact, that of intelligent machines, creativity and automatons in love with Shakespeare is one of the many threads that can be pulled these days at the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB) while going through the synapses and connections nerves of the exhibition ‘Brain (s)’. Yes, with the plural in parentheses because, as Jordi Costa, director of exhibitions at the center, is quick to point out, the human brain may be king, but the challenges of neuroscience go much further. “The brain is the most vital organ and, at the same time, the most unknown”, notes the director of the CCCB, Judith Carrera. And to shed a little light, nothing better than teaming up with the Wellcome Collection in London and the Fundación Telefónica (the exhibition will travel to Madrid at the end of the year) in an ambitious and educational excursion through and around hemispheres, neurons, lobes and cortex A journey with stops in matter, the mind and those cognitive agents capable of challenging human intuition. In the consciousness, memory and collective intelligence of insects as a reflection of evolution. Painting Alzheimer’s “If we humans had not conquered the planet, the earth would belong to the ants”, releases, enigmatic, Ricard Solé, physicist, biologist and curator together with Emily Sargent of an exhibition that brings together more than 300 objects including drawings, inventions , audiovisual installations, fragments of films such as ‘The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari’ and ‘The Brain of Planet Arous’, reproductions of Einstein’s sliced ​​brain and works by twenty artists. One of the most disturbing is the series of self-portraits that the American painter William Utermohlen signed while Alzheimer’s progressed relentlessly. Because where there is a brain, unfortunately, there are also pathologies, diseases and deterioration. BETWEEN SYNAPSES AND NEURONS The exhibition brings together more than 300 pieces, including original drawings by Ramón y Cajal, samples of Physarium smart cells and robotic devices such as RoboThespian, the ABC / EFE actor robot. Too thick? Not at all: the poster of the exhibition, with a colorful fireworks palm tree that is at the same time a beautiful brain, already indicates where the shots are going. Thus, from the exquisite drawings of the father of modern neuroscience, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, to the three robotic arms equipped with cameras that, pen at the ready, give full meaning to the concept ‘robot portrait; and from Descartes’ reflections on consciousness to those tiny spiders that, Solé explains, have externalized their minds into a web that multiplies their size by 10,000, ‘Brain(s)’ is installed where history, science, philosophy and culture converge to explore the complexity of the king organ. MORE INFORMATION news A stress transmitter that wakes up the brain more than 100 times a night has not been identified Or, at least, to try it, since, Solé warns, there are plenty of questions and no answers. The same ones that Mary Shelley and Charles Darwin searched for; Thomas Willis and Leonardo Torres Quevedo; Vesalius and Mariano Cubí. Names all of them that, between nods to phrenology and artistic reproductions of the brain activity of a sleeper, parade through an exhibition that also wants to be an exploration of a future marked by the disappearance of physical, biological and digital limits. A sci-fi future that virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and the RoboThespian machine have turned into raw realism.