For the first semester of the 2017/2018 aca­dem­ic year, I am the artist-in-res­id­ence at the Neth­er­lands Insti­tute of Advanced Sci­ence (NIAS). On octo­ber 26th 2017, i presen­ted a sem­in­ar on my book pro­ject ‘The supernormal’.

NIAS Sem­inars are aimed to stim­u­late sci­entif­ic cross-pol­lin­a­tion with­in the NIAS aca­dem­ic com­munity. All research fel­lows dis­cuss their pro­jects dur­ing a sem­in­ar on their research sub­ject. In my sem­in­ar, i elab­or­ated a bit more on the struc­ture of the pro­ject and fur­ther­more I focused on the main ‘back­story’ that seems to emerge out of my research on Tin­ber­gen’s concept of the super­nor­mal stim­u­lus until now, namely the heavy debate between nat­ur­al sci­ent­ists (neur­os­cient­ists, cog­nit­ive sci­ent­ists, etc.) and sci­ent­ists from the human­it­ies (art his­tor­i­ans, philo­soph­ers) on the ‘reduc­tion­ist approach’ of art and aesthetics.