Of the Artistic Nude and Technological Behaviorism. Leon Harmon and the First Steps towards Neuromorphic Hardware

Neuromorphic technologies lie at the core of 21st century neuroscience, especially in the “big brain science” projects started in 2013 – i.e. the BRAIN Initiative and the Human Brain Project. While neuromorphism and the “reverse engineering” of the brain are often presented as a “methodological revolution” in the brain sciences, these concepts have a long history which is strongly interconnected with the developments in neuroscience and the related field of bioengineering since the end of World War II. In this paper I provide a short review of the first generation of “neuromorphic devices” created in the 1960s, by focusing on the work of Leon Harmon and his “neuromime,” whose material history overlapped in a very interesting sense with the visual and artistic culture of the second half of the 20th century.