Synapse Art Iniatives

SYNAPSE Art Initiatives

& its offspring Synapse Institute

The artist’s organisation, Synapse Art Initiatives Inc., was co-founded by Neil Berecry-Brown (a.k.a. Neil Brown, Neil Berecry) and Adrian Hall. It was incorporated as a non-profit association in 1993. Its incorporated status was eventually considered redundant, and lapsed circa 2000, and the Synapse name appropriated by another organisation. However its spirit continued.

“An agency of change it was itself infinitely changeable; an association having organic mutability and flexibility to accommodate the demands of practice developing in resonance with changes in the broader social, cultural and intellectual environment.”

Synapse had been based in Sydney, but when its people dispersed, some overseas, the batten passed to Gosford Art Flux Forum, eO inc., Brown’s Cows Art Projects, and LocoLocus, all having a more ‘genius loci’ regional and rural remit.

The page will be added to lists some of its activities. Prior to the diaspora progress had been made in formulating a “Synapse Institute” with education as its focus.

Because of its backgrounding relevance to Cooerwull Academy, a brief statement from that time follows. We have attempted to accommodate into the Academy many societal, cultural and philosophical changes that have occurred in the intervening 26 years.

Synapse institute

PREAMBLE:

The manifest forms and processes of creative endeavour are informed by a multiplicity of disciplines and traditions. Development of creative culture requires deep historical understanding, relativistic contextural analysis and the stimulus of intercultural exchange.

At an individual level it is strengthened by insights derived from self-knowledge and an understanding of the psychological processes of imagination and cognition that drive the research and action that we call art. This is so both in its current aspects and as it will develop in the future.

Free participation in the complexity and diversity of cultural life, to the fullest extent of individual concern is fundamental to realisation of both individual and collective potential.

Respect for the truthfulness and value of individual differences and an open-ended philosophically interpretative attitude are seen as essential principles.

MISSION STATEMENT

The objective of the Synapse Institute is to engender development of creative culture at the highest level of endeavour through praxis based research and education; to test assumptions, speculate and experiment with different models and to posit alternatives through imagination and invention.