Einstein's Brain Alan Dunning and Paul Woodrow Valencia: November 1996 Introduction: Einstein's Brain is a work that examines the idea of the world as a construct sustained through the neurological proccesses contained within the brain. What we are suggesting is that the world is not some reality outside ourselves, but, is the result of an interior process that makes and sustains our body image and its relationship to a world, and that the investigation of virtual reality and its accompanying social space is an exploration of the construction of consciousness. The presentation is accompanied by quicktime movies generated from the worlds we are developing, illustrating some aspects of the areas in which we are we are interested. They have been changed to offer some different readings, evocative of a neurologically sensed world open to a variety of interpretation and perception - some are slowed, some are staccato series of images, some suggest a walk or stumble through a landscape, others suggest blurred or tunnel vision, still others are rendered so as to make more obvious the spatial anomalies that exist in the worlds when one gets too close or too low in a landscape, and so on. The movies seen here are illustrations of some of the content of the work rather than actual examples (the form) of the work which manifests itself as large-scale, immersive, multi-media projections and installations. Einstein's Brain is a collaborative work that explores the notion of the brain as a real and metaphoric interface between bodies and worlds in flux. The work comprises several distinct projects, including CD-ROMs, films, navigable VR landscapes, and large multi-media installations using analog and digital projections. Each project has at its core a series of landscapes digitally generated from topographical maps, DFX models of the human body and brain, and neuro-physiological delineations, which are rendered and organized so as to provide familiar yet unnamable, naturalistic landscapes. Embedded in these scenes are semiotic references to literary, mythological, poetic and social content indicating that an appreciation of this artificial world through effect and appearance is congruent with a representation of the natural world inscribed over and over by mediating cultural bodies. The image of Einstein's Brain, a reference to the human brain and to Roland Barthes' essay serves not only as a metaphor, but also is a real and imaginary point of entry for a participant's journey through the virtual landscapes. The
figure of Einstein embodies a variety of references from the comic figure of the mad professor, to the socially conscious scientist and humanist. His name is synonymous with genius. His body seems feeble beside the awesome, mechanical power of his brain. His name invokes man's quest for the secret of the universe. His brain has passed into the world of myth. In our project, art has, to some extent, replaced mythology, and science, represented by the disembodied brain, has been supplanted by digital technology. The title of our project assumes a link between science and mythology, between the machine and its capacity to offer a key to the unknown and the continual re-presentation of familiar structures and myths. Since the death of Einstein and the preservation of his pickled brain, researchers have turned their attention towards the study of the brain, regarding it to be the primary source of body image and representation. As artists, the territory that we have staked out includes both the production of images and the investigation of perception, which can be subsumed under the general heading of representation. It comes as no surprise that the juxtaposing of social mythology, technology and visual perception might possibly produce interesting results. The myth of the brain is an intriguing and constantly reinvented one, since there is so little, comparatively speaking, that is known and perhaps can never be known. In one prototype of Einstein's Brain the viewer is greeted by an image of a brain through which he or she passes gaining access to an assortment of cranial landscapes - The Forest of Vowels, Lac d'indifférence, Ville de lumières, Lenin's Falls, among others. The landscapes are linked by titles and their detail to both literary and artistic sources. The Forest of Vowels is a reference to Nineteenth Century French Symbolist poet, Arthur Rimbaud, Lac d'indifference is a reference to Madeleine de Scudéry's romantic, narrative map, Carte du tendre which in turn refers to leading Situationist Guy Debord's detourned map of Paris, titled the Naked City. Debord's map, published in 1957, and consisting of randomly collaged fragments taken from a map of Paris linked together by directional arrows, summarized the Situationists' strategy for the exploration of urban space. 1 The map presents a garbled view of Paris, the fragments having no clear relation to each other except that of being linked by the arrows. From a text on the reverse of the map we are told that the arrows describe the "the spontaneous turns of direction taken by a subject moving through these surroundings in disregard of the useful connections that ordinarily govern his conduct.". These spontaneous turns exemplify the actions known to the Situationists as dérives. The dérive (drift or drifting) and its accompanying sense of dépaysement (disoriented or deceived) changed the meaning of the city and its concrete social construction of space by changing the way in which it was inhabited. The original map of Paris is revealed as a seamless representation in which diversity and distinction are concealed. Debord's Naked City, by contrast, is a city infinitely faceted, marked by division and difference. The notion of the fragmented, social space of the city inhabited by the dérive is also found within the virtual construct. Local urban space has been rendered obsolete by the decentralizing of the information highway. As actual cities break down, more and more it is the image of the city that gains credibility and replaces the local, concrete experience. Debord wrote in The Society of the Spectacle that "everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation." 1 In the discussion of Debord's Naked City we are indebted to the insights and scholarship contained within Thomas F. McDonough's "Situationist Space" published in October 67, MIT Press, Winter 1994.
In the Nineties, with this collapse of the real and the waning of direct experience the dérive no longer occurs in the labyrinth of the streets but within the labyrinth of images, inside the virtual world of simulation. The dérive is mirrored in the continual, moment-by-moment, construction of the self. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes the self as, "an evanescent reference state, so continuously and consistently reconstructed that the owner never knows that it is being remade unless something goes wrong with the remaking. Present continuously becomes past, and by the time we take stock of it we are in another present, consumed with planning for the future, which we do on the steppingstones of the past. The present is never here." 2 The similarities between the function and relationship of the brain to the body are reflected in the manner in which city and countryside are socially represented. The landscape is viewed by urban dwellers as a support system for their well being, not only on account of its physical resources but as a site for spiritual and emotion renewal. The city, on the other hand is viewed as the primary site for self-representation where prescriptions for alternative configurations and projections of future lives can be tried and tested. The city is the site which dispenses change. The image of a multifaceted urban environment is constantly under review and subject to rapid mutation as technology develops new models of representation under the aegis of market forces, concerns with national security, entertainment and general research and development. The urban-image-feedback-loop to which we as inhabitants subscribe is similar to Damasio's notion of a "dispositional representation of the self that is in the process of changing as the organism responds to an object." This representational process occurs in the brain. Earlier images of the relationships between the urban and rural worlds were congruent with the classic, dualistic models of the mind and body. The city was the seat of ideas, of reason and culture, the countryside was signified by labour, by magic and nature. The city was at the centre of an economy where the labour and bodies of a surrounding countryside sustained the civic mind. In contrast, our current conception of life is so completely and concentratedly located in the city as to rupture the traditional relationship and cause the countryside to disappear entirely into sentimental images of the wild and of escapist rural peace. Just as contemporary life has been epitomized by the city and its identifying images to the extent that it has rendered the countryside seemingly invisible, unusable and deserted, so the concentration of self inside the chemical processes of the brain have made the body similarly invisible, uninhabited and useless. The VR landscapes generated from within the Einstein's Brain project are uninhabited except by the participant. The disembodied participant's perception of the landscape is manifestly a mental construct. The participant is inside an imaginary world and the location of this world is inside the brain. Flying or floating disembodied through the landscapes, the only points of reference are degrees of familiarity, images called up from memories of history or mythology. In a world where everything is, thus, seen as sign or symbol, everything is an index, everything has meaning beyond its visual presence. The landscapes generated from the physical and visual structure of the brain are a visible representation of invisible, mythic processes. These worlds are not external to the body, but, are properly thought of as being inside the body. This accounts for the invisibility of the body in a virtual space. The body disappears because it is turned in on itself. The ego-boundary is no longer the point at which the body begins and ends in relation to an external environment, but is, rather, the very limit of the world. 2 Antonio R. Domasio, "Descartes Error", Avon Books, New York, 1994
In these spaces the world is liquid, in constant flux. Paradoxically, although we are presented with a seamless homogenizing, representation it is sustained only by the most fluid of supports, that of memory. All things - histories, identities, images and contexts - are infinitely interchangeable. What you have seen today may or may not be seen or remembered tomorrow. Constantly misled and disoriented, like the Situationist's dérive, no journey can ever be mentally retraced. This is a liquid history marked by the disappearance of enduring images and objects, rendered ephemeral and insubstantial by the means and sites of their production. Images created here are at the very end of or outside of history. There is only an imagined past and an imaginary future. What in these spaces would constitute an enduring, image or text? How might one establish the historical record or pass on a tradition? How might we construct a history in the face of a disappearing and constantly changing history? Are there digital angels or witnesses? How would one reconfigure a lost body? Are there digital beaches for Man Friday to leave a record of his existence, a digital shroud (in a digital Turin) to hold the index of an absent wound? What is the place of labour in the new space? What constitutes work? How might we recognize the index of labour? In the digital cathedral or the electronic canal? This collaboration on Einstein's Brain started because of a shared interest in the Situationists and their liberating use of social and imaginary space, in memory, in language and hypertextuality and in ephemeral, site-specific installation. Virtual reality promised a medium where these interests could be accommodated within a space that was even beyond the reach of André Malraux's Museum Without Walls What the promise of virtual reality actually delivers is somewhat different. Because of the financial and technical requirements of much work utilizing virtual reality, museum's, and their sponsors, still have enormous control over what is seen, what is said and to whom it is said. Understanding that the aura of a work of art has been replaced by spectacle, major museums across the world mount increasingly impressive displays of digital art supported by an arcane technology largely unavailable to the average artist. Artists, particularly those who operate outside the institutional or commercial worlds (either by choice or otherwise), have access only to what are essentially consumerlevel, trickle-down technologies - and often second or third-hand versions of these. Even artists interested in technological processes and practices are limited in their connection to the industrial and scientific worlds. Here, VR is a particularly difficult area for artists to access. In spite of the developments in VRML which do promise wide distribution of some kinds of virtual worlds, the enormous hardware and software costs and high-level expertise required to engage fully with the medium suggest that unless there are some real idealogical and economic paradigm shifts in making production and presentation systems available the artistic input will be severely limited. The response of many artists to the unattainable spectacles presented by the museums, the public obsession with newness and invention - with the glitz of technology - has been to resist entering those discourses located in the digital domains, and view the technological economies with suspicion. While remaining open to new ideas and technologies, traditionally artists have strongly resisted the political and military agendas set by industry and government. While some responses have been attempts to deconstruct, make visible and critique these agendas, their resistance has often taken the form of an intentional marginalization, an attempt to step
outside of the social structures of a late capitalist (read uncaring) world. In a technological world of the instant, the repeatable, the connected, one tendency is to romanticize and privilege the traditions of the handmade, the unique and the local. Another is to develop a counter-culture predicated on discarded technologies or beliefs - a kind of hacker culture. This bricoleur, ad hoc, outsider approach may well subvert some of the discourses, but, also may have the effect of creating a kind of folk-art technology that is doomed to remain anecdotal and ineffectual, unconnected to the main social and political debates. The cultural changes that have occurred and are occurring due to the digital revolution are immense. These developments are accompanied by major revisions to social perception. It is important for the contemporary artist to enter fully into the most pressing discourses and to develop innovative and imaginary solutions (a pataphysics if you will) whose purpose is to forge links between traditional concerns and new directions. The shift from aesthetic response to concerns about communication and social space from media specificity to interdisciplinary action are critical components of this new research. Not only does this mean crossing the boundaries of art related disciplines, but, also, discovering ways in which non-art disciplines function as systems of representation and finding the accompanying means with which to utilize them.