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Rasa Baltė Balčiūnienė / Photo by E. Aleksandravičienė

LRT.lt

In October, Rasa Baltė Balčiūnienė, business psychologist, founder of HAI Institute and Amres Art Gallery, organised the first neuroaesthetics exhibition in Lithuania, "The Experience of Living Aesthetics: recognizing humanity", combining seemingly all of her competencies and areas of interest - from art to neuroscience, from the Ancient European civilisation studied by Marija Gimbutienė to business today.

R. Baltė Balčiūnienė tells LRT.lt readers how all this relates to the need for living aesthetics and knowledge, which has become more apparent in this era.

Your professional and self-realisation journey has many ties - psychology, business, art, coaching, ancient cultures and anthropology, etc. And they all seem to have intertwined in one fabric of the month-long exhibition. Is that how you had planned it - to reflect the connections of your personal journey?

- It is no coincidence that the exhibition has been labelled as interdisciplinary. At first it may seem that the named fields are difficult to combine, but after the successful outcome it is clear that this has become the distinctive and innovative feature of this exhibition. The connecting element of all these disciplines was, however, psychology, which can represent well how the environment shapes the person and the person shapes the environment. This is also my personal way of living - constantly decoding cultural codes, seeing how they work, and rejecting stereotypes changing.

Today, we talk a lot about the place of the human being in the era of artificial intelligence. While AI will be perfectly capable of capturing formalised, standardised knowledge, what will be unique about humans is the extent to which they are able to combine formalised, standardised knowledge with living, also known as tacit knowledge.

Living knowledge is knowledge based on human experience, competences, deeper knowledge of world phenomena and intuition. When we start to consciously pay attention to the growth of living knowledge, the impact of culture and the environment begins to emerge, which is new but very promising field today - living aesthetics. Today, when the environment is highly digitalised, technical, machine-like, and we work so much, living aesthetics is no longer a privilege, a choice of free time, but a necessity for our psyche to rest and recover.

- You have used a method of constellation that is unusual in this context to create the exhibition. What did it look like?

- The method of constellation (arrangement) used in psychology, which I have been practicing for twenty years in various organisations, in the creative and social spheres, has made the exhibition very intuitive. Usually, an art exhibition mainly presents the artwork itself, the history of its creation, the biographies of the artists, but in this one, the artwork draws attention first and foremost to the viewers themselves, to their states of being.

I have heard that tired, stressed exhibition visitors relaxed, rested, disconnected from the outside and immersed themselves in the sound narrative that accompanied the exhibition - an individual experience of the exhibition. That was the idea.

Constellations allow us to see when the energy is no longer there, and at the same time to grasp what new things may be emerging. With this long-term perspective, I can see very well how the information extracted in the layouts is realised later. I am particularly happy that constellations are finding their way into creative activities as a method of releasing creativity. For example, I myself have been involved in the layout of a number of film scripts.

- The description of the exhibition talks a lot about neuroaesthetics. How did you integrate this field of neuroscience?

- Neuroaesthetics provides a deeper understanding of the effects of aesthetic experiences on the brain and the internal state of the human being. Neuroaesthetics is still a relatively new and promising field of neuroscience, with a lot of recent research on how our brain evaluates and perceives aesthetic impressions, why we find certain things beautiful or attractive, and what biological, psychological and cultural factors may influence these perceptions.

Aesthetics, beauty, is a natural human quality, an aspiration. When we feel beautiful, good, pleasant - the reward centre in our brain is activated. In other words, the brain rewards us, and there is a natural urge to seek beauty. Experiencing it helps us to get out of mental constructions and stuckness. This has long been successfully applied in art therapy.

By introducing more art and aesthetics into our daily lives and exploring our reactions to it, we can significantly expand our thinking and feeling map. By following our inner impulses, we strengthen our nervous system and experience self-realization.

- We are particularly influenced by the living aesthetics you mentioned. Could you expand on how?

- Living aesthetics is not a new concept: it has been talked about since antiquity. I recently read that for Aristotle, beauty, aesthetics, was not just a matter of appearance or sensory experience, but a reflection of the harmony and order of the natural world. He used to walk with his students in the valley in the mornings, so that they could see the beauty of living nature and absorb knowledge more easily.

Genetically, we are still more adapted to being in nature than in cities. Looking at natural patterns triggers the relaxation centres in the brain, whereas looking at architectural forms does not. We are positively influenced by the colour green and by natural, repeating patterns, or fractals. We are instinctively inclined to react to natural fractals, and looking at them reduces emotional tension.

During the exhibition, we have expressed that a special inclination towards living aesthetics and beauty is encoded in the natural culture of our country. We had a pre-screening of the documentary "Marija Gimbutienė: An Inner - Sense of the Future", in which we heard the insights of our world's most famous Lithuanian scientist, who said that the Old European civilisation she had studied, our predecessors, nurtured a special, sensitive relationship with harmony, nature and beauty. It is in our roots.