[8] He has collaborated with artists, curators and critics including: Barry Schwabsky (co-director of SFSIA), Armen Avanessian, Nicolas Bourriaud, Tiziana Terranova, Franco Berardi, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Isaac Julien,[9] Hito Steyerl,[10] Chris Kraus (American writer),[11] and many others.
A major theme in Neidich's practice can widely be summarised as neuroaesthetics (not to be confused with mainstream neuroesthetics), an area of critical and constructive thought, which can loosely be seen as the confluent impact of the brain on a cultured environment and, importantly, vice versa, upon which he began lecturing in 1996 at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Warren Neidich has studied in diverse fields since 1970 including Photography, Psychology, Biology, (BA Magna Cum Laude Washington University in St. Louis), Neurobiology (as research fellow at California Institute of Technology, under the laboratory of Roger Wolcott Sperry who later won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine) and Architecture, he is also a Board Certified Ophthalmologist from Tulane Medical Center.
[38] Neidich's appropriation of historical moments by means of photography has been discussed by John Welchman,[39] Christopher Phillips,[40] Graham Clarke,[41] and David Joselit.
[42] The series of altered photographs "Unknown Artist", which recast the early 20th-century art coterie as a social rather than an individual phenomenon, were installed at Berlin's Paris Bar in 1994 in collaboration with Martin Kippenberger and Michel Wertle.
It traced a journey across America fifty years after Jack Kerouac, culminating in a surrealist photographic exposé of the media encampment that grew outside the courthouse during the O.J.
Neuroaesthetics, (differing from the scientific approach with the same name often spelled neuroesthetics), believes that artists in all their modes such as poetry, cinema, installation art and architecture, using their own spaces, apparatuses, materials, sense of time, and performative gestures, can elaborate truths about the noumenal and phenomenal world on part with those generated by the sciences.
The post-structuralist brain/mind/body/world complex, in which cultural mutations are transposed into parallel changes in the mind, brain and body, expressed in works such as "Brainwash" (1997), Neidich's first application of his hybrid dialectics, developed greater tenacity in 1999 when Neidich curated "Conceptual Art as Neurobiological Praxis" at Thread Waxing Space in New York[46] which "rather than being a show about the collaboration between art and science or a reductive methodology of how the brain works, the exhibition attempted to promote the idea of a becoming brain" and included artists: Uta Barth, Sam Durant, Charline von Heyl, Jason Rhoades, Liam Gillick, Douglas Gordon, Thomas Ruff, Simon Grennan and Christopher Sperandio, and others.
Topics such as Neuro biopolitics were extended to include the political impact of immaterial labor and the Information Age on the production of architecture and built space, specifically in relation to the ways in which intense sensory and perceptual effect are now used to organize cultural attention.
In 2008 Onomatopee published Neidich's book Lost Between the Extensivity-Intensivity Exchange for which he outlined that the "inauguration of the 21st century could be described as a time of cultural torpor resulting from free floating anxiety, ambivalence, and wavering", going on to say, "the condition, suggested by the title, that of being lost in the ‘in-between zone’ of extensive and intensive labor and two evolving partially incommensurable world views, the local (tribal) and global (cosmopolitan) or the nation-state and the Earthling, merged"[50][51] "What has become obvious to me is that in our moment of cognitive capitalism in which the brain and mind are the new factories of the twenty-first century, forms of activism invented during industrial capitalism like refusal to work, absenteeism, and labor strikes are no longer up to the task" – Warren Neidich 2017[52][53] In Pizzagate (2017) Neidich returned to his earlier work on apparatus entitled 'Hybrid Dialectics' (1997–2003).
In May 2020, in response to the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic, Neidich curated the exhibition Drive-By-Art (Public Art in This Moment of Social Distancing) which took place at various locations, first in the Hamptons and then later in Los Angeles.