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→Introduction: Disaster series
Recent studies have demonstrated approximate reconstructions of visual and auditory stimuli from neuroimaging. This project, ''The Disaster Series'', uses this technique to explore the idea of brain as filter. Test subjects are enlisted as closed conduits for audio/visual material, hidden from the audience, which is then reconstituted and exhibited as processed through their brains. The resultant videos are shown either in near real time (just post event) or at a later date as a kind of compound neuro-portraiture/printmaking project. This process confounds ideas of private/public and internal/external space. Inputs are hidden, data is grabbed from the invisible space of the subjects' heads, and the results, intimately processed, are displayed in public.
This projects dwells in the aesthetics of the imperfect reconstruction, as seen in Nishimoto et al's reconstruction videos below. They are marked by an aesthetics of incompleteness, ambiguity, inchoate meaning. Above all I find them effused with a sense of pathos. Someone (something?) is suffering from the lack of adequate information. This project stages that extraction and attempt reconstruction of imagery from the brain as an aspirational, desirous event. The system enacts the impossible desire to peer inside another's head, to see through other's eyes. e reconstruction of imagery as an aspirational, desirous event. This emphasizes the unbridgeable gulf between self and other, interior and exterior world.
The key determinants of meaning in this piece are the choice of video material for the training database, the choice of test subject/performers, the nature of the test stimulus to be filtered through the subject, and the output display context. The artworks below give some sense of the poetic/aesthetic ballpark I am aiming for, at least as far as subject matter.