Invisible World - a performance installation
The Einstein’s Brain Project
Alan Dunning
Alberta College of Art & Design, Calgary, Alberta,
Canada
einsteins-brain-project@shaw.ca
Paul
Woodrow
University
of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Abstract
This paper
briefly describes the performance
installation Invisible World from the series Body Degree Zero. This is a work
using the principles of Electronic Voice Phenomenon and the sound and vision
generated within the system itself to construct a generative environment that intimates a world beyond the
visible and audible. The
work suggests that the world is constructed through mental processes and raises
the possibility of a spiritual world largely constructed by random firings in
the brain. This paper describes the content and form of the work and
suggests some ways in which it may be approached.
Description
A highly
sensitive microphone and a camera are placed in an acoustically and visually
quiet box. Such data as is present in the system is sent to a computer where
audio is processed to reveal minute, otherwise inaudible sound, and video is
processed to reveal minute changes in light levels and examined for changes in
contrast, density and motion. The
results are projected onto a screen and
synchronized with sounds broadcast into the space. The work is presented
as a 30 minute performance by a machine and an attending audience. The machine
establishes a situation in which a perceiving body generates the content of the
work through imagined, apophenic and gestalt processes.
The
performance installation
Seemingly
random texts flash across a projected screen showing static. Almost incomprehensible sibilant speech
fills the room. An observer slowly begins to see pattern . Emerging from the
static are incomplete and degraded images recognized at the very moment they
disappear. Computer generated voices repeat and clarify the indistinct sounds.
Slowly out of the apparently random sounds and static there is the indication
of a haunted and occupied space..
Electronic
Voice Phenomenon (EVP)[1] is the recording of errant noises or voices that have
no explainable or physical source of origin. These recordings are made when the
recorder is unattended or inadvertently recording, or under circumstances
designed to record these voices: for example
recording in a sound proof box or with no microphone attached. It has been argued that the voices are
simply subjective interpretations - that we tend to hear voices in random
patterns of sound, in the way we recognize forms in random visual patterns.
Others believe the voices are from another world, opening up the possibility of
communication with the afterlife.. This installation uses the ideas inherent in
EVP to examine ways in which we construct the world through apophenia (the
seeing of connections where there are perhaps none) and gestalt effect (the recognition of pattern and form). Using techniques of EVP the installation sets
up an environment in which participants can attend to noises and images
generated from apparently silent and empty spaces.
The work draws on two ideas taken from parapsychology:
EVP and the Stone Tape Theory. In Nigel Kneale’s play,The Stone Tape. a team of scientists examine a ghostly event in an
old building. A programmer builds an application to analyze the nature of
observed reality and they discover the possibility of the stones themselves
being a kind of recording medium for traumatic images and events that transmits
its message directly to the brain.
Stone Tape
theory is a popular possibility for parapsychologists to explain ghostly
events. At the heart of the stone tape theory is that notion that the
experience of ghostly phenomena does not rely on the perception of a visible
external ghost, rather everything is perceived in the mind. Kneale's work plays
to our ongoing sense that there is an invisible world that surrounds us.
"It holds
an image - and when people go in there they pick it up. What you hear or what
you see is inside your own brain! …: Don't you get it yet? It must work like
... a recording. Fixed in the floor and the walls, right in the substance of
them. A trace ... of what happened in there. And we pick it up. We act as
detectors - decoders - amplifiers." [2]
Extending these ideas, Invisible World suggests that what we consider
the perceived world is a kind of psychic video generated by the processes in
the brain. Just as we perceive images and patterns in random flickering and
noise, so he woks suggests that the construction of our day to day world is
just one more imagined world derived from raw data. Taken
together these things suggest endless numbers of realities mapped on top of an
endless number of worlds, each to one degree or another imagined, and each more
or less visible. The constructed world is not entirely what it appears to be
and that the visible world is as much a phantom as the spirits we invoke. We
are suddenly reminded of Ramachandran's caution:
Your own body is a phantom, one that your
brain has temporarily constructed purely for convenience.[3]
The Einstein's Brain Project
The Einstein's Brain Project is a
collaborative group of artists and scientists who have been working together
for the past nine years. The aim of the group is the visualization of the
biological state of the body through the fabrication of environments,
simulations and installations. The Project has developed numerous systems and
installations using analog to digital interfaces to direct the output of the
human body to virtual environments that are constantly being altered through
feedback from a participant's biological body. The core of the Einstein's Brain
Project is a discursive space that engages with ideas about the constructed
body in the world and its digital cybernetic and post-human forms.
The Project’s virtual
environments and installations contextualize, visualize and examine physical,
spatial and mental human activity by measuring the electrical output of active
bodies in dynamic environments. Biodata is fed into real time immersive worlds
where it is displayed as aural and visual forms that represent the activity of
the human body. The project has designed a variety of methods to acquire data
using contact and non-contact sensors, and developed strategies to reveal
features, patterns and attributes in the captured data in order to visualize
its characteristics, and to represent the data as coherent and retrievable
information.
The
works establish a recursive loop in which the invisible actions of the body are
manifest and an inhabitant is required to monitor both the changing environment
and the body that manifests it. This is achieved through the use of a
relational vocabulary of representation, in which identities are lost and
gained, subsumed by a non-identifiable collection of other identities. One
interesting consequence of this is that body-degree-zero comes to represent an
alternative, functional alternative, to the Cartesian or Lacanian constructions
of self: no longer minds fed back onto the self-reflection of psychology or
philosophy, rather "bodies" fed back upon themselves -- experiencing
the data derived from a physical presence that both is and is not theirs.
Heartbeats that form not only the internal rhythm of living, but an external
soundscape; brainwaves that, stripped of the illusion of privacy, begin to
gyrate on electronic screens; and McLuhan's prophecy fulfilled as the
data-skeleton of autonomic bodily processes becomes clothing worn, subject to
all the same rules of designer fashion and aesthetic self-fashioning.
Invisible
Worlds work uses the imagining body as one important interface between the body
and its world and makes this visible. By focusing our attention on the
mind/body as engaged in the construction of meaning rather than in
perception, the mind/body itself is
seen as an image and sound generator. The work sets up a feed back loop that
re-imagines the already imagined, through the cycles of interpretation and
reinterpretation attached to existing and developing emotional, intellectual
and cultural body states.
In
comprehending a world in which individuals are merely phantoms imagining
themselves and their reality, the viewer is transfigured, changed in form and
condition, a semiotic ghost. While these particular characteristics of matter
are yet to be determined, the transformation suggests that the virtual, the
illusory is also substantial. Lost, the participant is metamorphosed by the
realization that external worlds are constructions of the internal.
The Einstein’s
Brain Project seeks to establish a space where the participatory subject is submerged
in the object. This is not the casual glance at a world passing by a train car
window. On the threshold of the imaginary the viewer becomes both the object of
the gaze and the subject which gazes. As the viewer moves into the imagined
world it transforms itself into a series of forking paths, projections of
bifurcation, suggesting continuous and continual choices. The paths act as
transitory, flickering representations of connectivity between discrete
sections or locations in the brain. In this world there are invisible,
incomprehensible connections, as if a fading trail is positioned somewhere
between two fading pathways, locating itself in nothingness, lodged within the
infinite space between polarities, between worlds.
Conclusion
Given the complex relationship between the
construction of the self and the construction of space a body in an imagined
world has moved towards a hybrid state, composed of biological organism and
machine in which it is not always precisely clear who makes and who is made. The
boundary between organism and non-organism, actor and non-actor, self and
non-self has been abandoned and our postmodern bodies are artificial
constructions of technologies and technological discourses that are in
continual decay and renewal. The body is so inextricably enmeshed with its
surroundings and the technologies that support it, that representations of the
body become indistinguishable from the mechanisms of its representation and
erasure.
This complex interplay of phenomena and
energies is Body Degree Zero. Body Degree Zero, the non-body, the body without
skin, without ego boundary, is the evolutionary consequence of the
super-distribution of identity over increasingly broad and responsive real-time
networks. The body enfolds the world and the world enfolds the body - the
notion of the skin as the boundary to the body falls apart. The body, as here
not there, and its defining sense of the other is a mental construction - every perception of the other is a
creation and every invocation a re-creation.
This is the:
...
visceral extension of the material body with the aim of turning all autonomic
functions into observable (excremental) data -- or the inverse -- a
data-constipation in which the virtual lodges itself unyieldingly into the
material body? or perhaps again a
relation -- now, not between bodies and world, but between perception and
information with body-degree-zero as the unwritten script that might perhaps
only be defined in terms of the variables allowed to inform the shapes it takes?
it seems that perhaps what is crucial to the formulation of zero- degree
content is precisely the same zero-degree that finds its way into Barthes'
zero-degree writing [4] -- not in the sense of a reliance on interpretive
presence for the formation of content, but rather in the immanent state of
information without audience -- the metamorphosis into the absence of an
unidentifiable body that nevertheless seems, for all intents and purposes, to
still exist despite its unidentifiability.
In
the work of the Einstein’s Brain Project the imaginary is seen as a recursive,
social loop used for self and contextual awareness. The imaginary and its
accompanying sense of disorientation or deception is used to generate new
meanings and new understandings freed, as it were, not just from the burden of
communication, but also from the oppositions of pattern and randomness, and
presence and absence. As objects, bodies and worlds recombine freely through
movements that imply no fixed form and no fixed substance the possibility
emerges of degree zero bodies and states pregnant
with all past and future specifications. [5]
References
[1]Electronic
voice phenomena (EVP) were first discovered by the Swedish artist Friedrich
Jürgenson in 1959. Jürgenson was recording birdsong using a reel-to-reel tape
recorder. When he replayed the tapes, he heard faint but intelligible voices in
the background, even though there was no-one else in the vicinity when the
recordings were made. By repeating the procedure, Jürgenson found that the
voice recordings could be reliably replicated.
[2] Kneale, N. December 25,
1972. The Stone Tape, Produced on BBC Television,
[3] Ramachandran V.S., Blakeslee Sandra
Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, William Morrow
and Co. Quill, 1998
[4] Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology. Trans. Lavers A, and
Smith C. Jonathan Cape, London, 1984
[5] Hiebert, Ted. Unpublished. In conversation with
Alan Dunning and Paul Woodrow, Vancouver, 2003
[6] Barthes, Roland, Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology . Trans. Lavers A,
and Smith C. Jonathan Cape, London 1984