Frab's Advent Calendar: # 8-9 Nodes Journal

Before reading Nodes, unless you are a university yourself, strip yourself of any prejudices. On academic rigidity, on the narrowness of form, on the meticulous citation of sources. When you read "Journal of art and neuroscience" on the cover, you know that you are entering a unique hybrid of its kind: a scientific magazine, yes, but one that touches very tasty chords for anyone in life who is terribly curious. 

Nodes is an Italian magazine, more precisely Roman, which deals with a complex and incredibly fascinating topic: the link between art and neuroscience. This is the production of Numero Cromatico, a research center that is concerned with investigating the connection between these two worlds.
Inside you will find almost always original contents that fit into the scientific debate on a new branch of neuroscience. 

An independent Italian magazine which, I would like to underline, has reached the beauty of 10 years, maintaining an editorial staff and a group of substantially young collaborators. A small, yet another sign of how to choose one's own path and persevere in the search for meaning and beauty can pay off in publishing and give a magazine a future.

In addressing the issue of this tenth year, now in the 17-18 edition (yes, the latest editions are all "double" numbers - the last one you can find WHO) you know you are entering a beautiful project to touch with your hand and very refined. The issue is made up of a total of 8 contents, in which the authors go very deeply into almost always analyzing real scientific experiments. 

The introduction of the rite is the editorial by editor-in-chief Dionigi Mattia Gagliardi who thinks about how to rethink art in the future, but the magazine then delves into a very hot topic and often taken for granted in the world of art and in real life: the "need for uniqueness". By corroborating its theses with a consistent number of scientific references, the article weaves the web of a very subtle reasoning, or rather when the search for uniqueness conditions the world of art and the work itself. If the search for uniqueness has been known for centuries in the artistic world, it is also true that some great masters have become such precisely because they are able to emerge instead within collective movements. The article tells of social experiments as proof of continuous changes around this theme, for example considering China and Japan as totems of collectivism that in recent years are strongly pushing the young generations of artists to emancipate themselves as individuals. In the same way, the art market itself demonstrates with numbers that works labeled as a "copy" of someone else, even if authentic, have less appeal. 
In general, the article by Jacobsen, Marschallek and Weiler is a truly fascinating dissertation even for the most profane on a topic that concerns our lives, our expectations, our being in everyday life. 

And in general it is on this that Chromatic Number does not fail despite the complexity of the times: in hitting the point of very topical issues, looking at them with the raw truth of numbers and the severe and often incontrovertible words of science. It does so by also recounting the acting practice and its link with physicality, the uncertainty in art, neuroscience and the functioning of mechanisms of human appreciation for architecture and design and of sensations that music causes us in the different harmonies. 

The magazine is made in 500 numbered copies and very accurate in the paper object that you will find in your hand. Small applause also for the willingness to use Italian as well as a complete translation into English, which is always necessary, a sign of closeness despite the complexity of the topics dealt with to that "I wish but I cannot" which in our peninsula still distances independent magazines from people for pure linguistic limits. 

For those in the area, on 11 December 2021 we present the new issue in Rome in our space at Contemporary Cluster (WHO the event e WHO the magazine can already be ordered). We are waiting for you!