Verbier Art Summit 2025
Curated by Philip Tinari, Director of the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in China, the 2025 edition of Verbier Art Summit reflects on the pressing theme “QUARTER LIFE CRISIS: Art in a World on the Brink”.
On this occasion, the EPFL+ECAL Lab presents an interactive installation showing how art and technology can empower our brain to increase wellbeing and lead to new therapies.
The Ming Shan Digital Experience addresses modified states of consciousness, leading to concentration, relaxation and self-perception. The project combines the practices of Taoism, a culture dating back thousands of years with contemporary technology to support meditation practices. The results of this research open perspectives for a medical project aimed at alleviating syndromes of dementia.
Artistic practice is already at the core of new therapeutic approach involving the brain to address tinnitus. Almost a billion people worldwide suffer from it. In the majority of cases, the noise experienced does not come from the ear, but from the brain, which considerably limits the possibilities of treatment. The new approach consists of training the area of the brain that generates this noise to carry out other tasks. This involves a series of exercises for patients that includes seeing a visualization of their brain activity. This visualization is at the heart of the process: meaning, aesthetics, emotional impact, cultural dimensions have a major impact on the therapy.
On Saturday April 5, part of the Talk Programme, Olaf Blanke, Director of the Centre for Neuroprosthetics and of the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at EPFL, and Nicolas Henchoz, Director of the EPFL+ECAL Lab, will share insights on how collaboration of artists with engineers and medical doctors can lead to new therapies.