Artistic installations


As exemplary of the artistic installations we sketch four works. Further works are outlined at www.locked-in.com.

 








 

 

 

Thinking of You: A cyber and physical installation draws upon the social nature of the brain's electrochemistry as it reveals a deeper understanding into the visible nature of the internal dialogue. Actors in physical and cyberspace explore the intricacies of personal communication via interpretation and navigation of brain wave energies. By tracking their brain waves synchronically, they see each other and the composite brain wave they are drawing together.
Wondering if your temperaments are synchronous? In "Thinking of you", you can see if your brain waves match others on the web. Web cams monitor your faces while you're wearing EEG headbands that monitor the synchrony of your brain waves. An internal and external portrait of you evolves on the web screen.

(Nina Sobell, "Thinking of you", 2001) )


 

 

 

In MRI-Performance #1 (f-MRI = functional magnetic resonance imaging) a moment of electricity produced by the brain in response to a memory we may have believed we had forgotten will be isolated and recorded. The artist used a photograph from her childhood, which she had not seen in twenty years and did not view until she was inside the scanner. She created a memory experiment using her own biology as the medium. The resultant MRI image was generated by creating a composite of the data from the three cycles of stimulus and the three cycles of control. The control was then subtracted from the stimulus. Increased blood flow is seen in the temporal and frontal lobes, areas of the brain believed to be involved in associative memory, in which the senses receive a cue that triggers an encoded long-term remembrance.

(Stacy Pershall, "MRI Performance #1", 1998)

 

 




This Newspaper has already been read. The eyes' movements while reading were recorded, digitalized and then reproduced as a print-out. What emerges is an intimation of something that is actually an invisible process, namely reading; what remains behind is a trace of the intake of information. The result is a daily paper which has already been read - a complete and completely read Frankfurter Allgemeine, as it were. The paper was printed alongside a regular daily Frankfurter Allgemeine an in an identical manner using a rotary printing press. Kindly supported by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung GmbH, Frankfurter Societätsdruckerei GmbH and Hesse Ministry of Science and Art.

(Jochem Hendricks, "Newspaper", 1994) )

 




Breathing Video! is based on computer biofeedback. The User reanimates video loops projected by video beam. The self-hypnotic effect of biofeedback widens the boundaries of the body to encompass the video projection. Synchronizing one´s own breathing with strange gestures causes the social phenomenon of empathy to arise.

(Stefan Schemat: "Breathing Video!", 2001)