Finally, the Mind-Twitter Intersection

Last year, Ben McGrath wrote a great article for the New Yorker about the new frontier in prosthetics, which involves using the brain to transmit signals to robotic appendages. I was reminded of that article by the Silent Barrage installation at Exit Art over the weekend, and again by this bit of news.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin have successfully used the brain-computer interface to send tweets. Their research has much loftier goals, but the Twitter project has garnered a ton of media attention.

An Evening in Rat Brains

Lately I’ve been into exploring the science-art intersection/interaction/interface. This is something I’ve been interested in since I began, in college, to notice congruence between my studies in geomorphology and literature. As my understanding of natural processes deepened, so did my thinking on literary structure and themes—I found I could use science as a context for thinking about literature, and vice versa.

I hadn’t given much thought to the visual art/science intersection before a few of months ago, when I attended a “Wonder Cabinet” at NYU. There, I spoke with a couple of artists who have created a new kind of perspective drawing. As we talked about their process of discovery and creation, I was struck by how much their inspiration was rooted in their observation of their experience of the world. In addition to beginning work on a written piece about these artists, I have been thinking a lot about the ways in which science and visual art influence each other.

This past Friday, I went to Exit Art’s Corpus Extremus exhibition. The exhibition consisted of work by a bunch of artists who are “using bio- and media- technologies to investigate questions of life and death.” Inside the gallery, familiar pieces of the biological world were being presented at unfamiliar, grotesque scales—there were enlarged photographs of diseased living tissue in thin section, and films projected on large screens depicting surgery on unidentifiable body parts. One installation featured a group of plants in a sterile, symmetrical setting. There were taxidermied rabbits under red light, and digital images of transgenic (genetically altered) insects made to fluoresce. Together, these pieces seemed to pose some question about the boundary (or lack of boundary) between the living and non-living worlds. I don’t know what the question was, exactly, but its mere suggestion made me uneasy.

In the middle of the gallery there was an installation of tall, white poles with robotic parts attached. The parts were moving up and down at seemingly random intervals and tracing black circles around the poles. I walked around in between the poles and let the weirdness of the situation build. Some of the poles were heavily marked by activity; others were entirely still. There was something unsettling about the unpredictability of their movement, their silence punctuated by a sudden mechanical hum.

When I found the placard containing the curator’s notes, I learned that the robotic arms on the 36 poles were responding to electronic stimulus from a petri dish in Atlanta, Georgia which contained a network of rat neurons; the base of the dish was covered in electrodes that could both send and receive information. Above my head was a camera which was recording my movement and sending electrical impulses through the internet, through the electrodes, to the neural network in Atlanta.



In some bizarre way, the rat neurons and I were part of a closed neural circuit, like the knee-jerk reflex or the loops our brains access when we perform simple, rote tasks. Furthermore, I was witnessing the ability of neurons to control kinetic, robotic movement. This was more than just the boundary between living and non-living worlds—it was an example of the way science can manipulate the interaction between them. While the interaction here was virtually uncontrolled and artistic in nature, the implications for controlled interaction were quite real to me as I stood there, in what had come to feel like a virtual space in which I was both wandering around within, and influencing a network of rat neurons.

I’m pretty sure the point of the installation (called Silent Barrage) was to get us thinking about harnessing neural networks to control robotics, and I think that’s pretty cool. But on the train home, the thing I couldn’t stop thinking about was the exchange between my own movements—recorded by the camera—and the rat neurons. There was something intimate about wandering around inside of living neurons’ electrical output, and knowing those neurons were responding to stimulus created by me (I may not have taken all of this so personally, but the exhibit was closing when I was there, and I was alone. I even got locked in the gallery for a minute, before someone came out of the back office to direct me out the side door). When do we get to enjoy such immediate, unfiltered interaction with a foreign set of brains? Certainly not amid the body language, perfumes, and fabrics on a Friday night on the L train.

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Pictures: http://www.exitart.org/site/pub/exhibition_programs/corpus_extremus/index.html

Silent Barrage is an installation by artists Guy Ben-Ary and Philip Gamblen in collaboration with the Dr. Steve Potter Lab in Atlanta, Georgia. It made its world premiere at Exit Art.