Talk
Jérôme Decock | artist, co-founder of LAb[au]
Manuel Abendroth | artist, architect, curator, co-founder of LAb[au]
Axel Cleeremans | professor, Université libre de Bruxelles, director of the Centre for Cognition and Neuroscience Research (CRCN), principal investigator of the ERC EXPERIENCE project
Since September, the artist duo LAb[au] and the team at the ULB’s Centre for Cognition & Neuroscience Research (CRCN), led by Axel Cleeremans, have been working together as part of Experience Lab, a residency developed by Ohme in conjunction with the EXPERIENCE (ERC) research project, which is dedicated to the study of consciousness. On the one hand, an artistic practice that has long explored colour, language and systems; on the other, scientific research that explores the nature of subjective experience. In this conversation, Axel Cleeremans, Jérôme Decock and Manuel Abendroth reflect on the first few months of this exchange: the shared questions surrounding colour and perception, the methods emerging at the intersection of the two disciplines, and what art and the science of consciousness can learn from one another.
LAb[au], a laboratory for art and urbanism, is an artists’ collective founded in Brussels in 1997 by Manuel Abendroth and Jérôme Decock. Their practice, situated at the intersection of conceptual art, architecture and information theory, explores the fundamental structures of perception: colour, time, language and systems. In 2026, they are the artists-in-residence for the Experience Lab programme, developed by Ohme in partnership with the EXPERIENCE project (ERC/ULB/CRCN).
Axel Cleeremans is a professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles, where he heads the Centre for Research in Cognition and Neuroscience (CRCN). He is the principal investigator on the EXPERIENCE project, a five-year research programme funded by the European Research Council (ERC), which focuses on a fundamental question in the science of consciousness: what is the purpose of consciousness?
Session: Arts & Sciences Initiatives in the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles
Venue: Kanal Box 2
Time: 16:35 – 17:05
Duration: 30′
Language: French
