Mark Cohen, a professor in residence at the Semel Institute, has received a $100,000 grant from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine as part of a project to support interdisciplinary projects that meld art, science, engineering and medicine.
In his grant from the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative, Cohen will collaborate with Philip Beesley, an internationally recognized Toronto-based visual artist and architect, who serves as an architecture professor at the University of Waterloo and a professor of digital design, architecture and urbanism at the European Graduate School.
The team will study how to make environments with goals and motivations that are mimetic of living systems and that interact in a purposive manner with their human inhabitants.The environments themselves will be designed based on body plans developed through evolution. The broader goal of the project is to explore the concept of “smart buildings” that anticipate the needs of their residents.
With more than 44 years of experience in neuroscience research and technology development to understand the physiology of human cognition, Cohen will contribute expertise in sensory systems and the functional architectures of the human brain, the grant application states. In addition to exploring relationships between structure and function in the brain, Cohen’s lab is involved in state-of-the-art data analysis approaches, such as machine learning.
Beesley is principal of his own architecture firm and director of the Living Architecture Systems Group, whose designs explore hylozoism — the theory that everything is alive — through technologically complex and visually breathtaking structures that contain embedded sensors and actuators that react to viewers. Beesley attracted attention at Sydney’s Biennale in 2012 with his installation “Hylozoic Series: Sibyl,” with New Scientist commenting that the “artificially alive artwork tantalises and surprises.”
