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23/10/2008

The Einstein's Brain Project

LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre, Gijon

Ghosts in the Machine is a site specific project by Einstein’s Brain Project, produced by LABoral’s Projects Office that uses the ideas inherent in Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP) to examine ways in which we construct the world and extends it to the visual. EVP is the recording of errant noises or voices that have no explainable or physical source of origin. For some, the voices and images are simply subjective interpretations that we tend to hear voices in random patterns of sound and in the way we recognise forms in random visual patterns. For others, the voices are genuinely mysterious, opening up for example the possibility to communicate with other realms.

The Einstein’s Brain Project

Einstein's Brain is a collaborative, immersive, virtual and augmented reality work, begun in 1996, that explores the notion of the brain as a real and metaphoric interface between bodies and worlds in flux, that examines the idea of the world as a construct sustained through the neurological processes contained within the brain. It suggests 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, its potential use as a perceptual filter, and its accompanying social space is an exploration of the new constructions of consciousness and the consequent technological colonization of the body. Alan Dunning, Paul Woodrow and Morley Hollenberg are the main participants in a team of scientists, artist and technologists developing the virtual reality and bioelectrical work the Einstein’s Brain Project. In collaboration with team members from Japan, UK, US and Canada they are investigating ideas about consciousness and embodiment through the realization of shared, immersive virtual environments and the construction of surrogate bodies.

Alan Dunning has been working with complex multi-media installations for the past two decades, using the computer as a tool for generating data fields and, for the last 15 years, interactive environments. Since 1980, he has exhibited in more than 100 shows and has had more than 70 catalogues and reviews published on his work. His work has received numerous awards including grants from The Daniel Langlois Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canada Council, the Marion Fund, the Association of Commonwealth Universities, and the Alberta Art Foundation. He is represented in collections internationally, including those of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He is currently Head of the Media Arts and Digital Technologies Programme at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary. Paul Woodrow has been involved in a variety of inter-disciplinary and multi-media activities since the late 1960s, including performance art, installation, video, painting and improvised music. He has collaborated with many artists including, Iain Baxter (N.E.Thing Co.), Hervé Fischer (The Sociological Art Group Of Paris), Genesis P. Orridge (Coum Transmissions, England), Clive Roberstson (W.O.R.K.S, Canada). He has exhibited extensively in Japan, France, Italy, Sweden, England, Belgium, Russia, Puerto Rico, Argentina, and the United States, including the Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm and The Tate Gallery, London. He has received numerous awards from Canada Council and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. He is currently Coordinator of Graduate Studies, in the Art Department at the University of Calgary.

Morley Hollenberg is a Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Calgary. He completed his Doctoral training as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and his MD at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore. His research interests focus on receptor mechanisms and signal transduction pathways involved in the action of insulin, epidermal growth factor-urogastrone and other vasoactive agents that can regulate cell growth. He has served as Committee Chair at the Canadian Medical Research Council. His research work to date has led to the publication of 190 refereed manuscripts and over 45 book chapters, and has served as Editor for two books dealing with insulin, insulin action and Diabetes.

GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE AND THE ANTROPOMORPHISATION OF NOISE
By Erich Berger. Chief Curator of LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón
As scholars of the myriad aspects of self-fashioning we can usefully enlarge, and even alter, our humanistic understanding of culture, inflecting it with urgent discoveries in medicine, evolutionary and developmental biology, and the brain sciences. In other words, the role of culture is not just to stand outside, critiquing science, nor is science’s position external, and acting on culture. Rather, we are discovering at the most profound levels that our separate investigations belong to a joint project.1 LABoral is pleased to open its third exhibition in its Project Office. For a space like LABoral which is fully committed to the development of and experimentation with contemporary and emerging artistic practices it is crucial to be able to act swiftly and to have the possibility to show projects, emerging artists or to introduce new artistic concepts and practices. The exhibition section which serves these needs at LABoral is the Project Office. The Project Office is physically based at LABoral’s “Platform 1” with about 350 m2 and has a dedicated production budget of 10,000 euro. Per year 3-4 projects are produced. The Project Office welcomes proposals on an ongoing base which will be assessed by the curatorial team of LABoral for possible production and exhibition. LABoral invites artists, curators and practitioners of a diverse background and locality to participate. All materials and information necessary for submission are available on the website of LABoral http://www.laboralcentrodearte.org/. The current Project Office work is Ghosts in the Machine by the Canadian artist collaborative The Einstein’s Brain Project. In their installation, a simple technological setup produces audio and visual noise similar to the random black and white patterns and sounds we see and hear emerging on a TV screen when it is not tuned into a station. These audio visual patterns are scanned by a face tracking software and voice recognition system trying to recognize faces, words and sentences which are then projected and played in the exhibition space.

The project investigates a process we as humans are engaged with in every moment of our life – cognition, the process of awareness or thought. This includes the awareness of oneself and the other, embedded in a shared environment. The other does not necessarily need to be a person, it simply can be something different, something which differentiates itself from the rest, a recognizable pattern against the noisy background of our everyday life. Cognition results in a drive, in a hunt for information. The dawn of electronic communication technologies which build the foundations for our contemporary information society also saw the emergence of yet another rather unknown story, the belief of notable figures of the time, to be able, through the wires, to communicate with spirits and ghosts: ... the imaginary apparatus of Edison sketched out in an early edition of Scientific American, Tesla and Marconi's interest in the uses of such technology to communicate with the spirit world. It's a history, a timeline which is used to found and support the contemporary phenomenon of EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon) or ITC (instrumental Transcommunication - a two way conversation with the spirits) - a modern , technology-driven double to spiritualism with white noise (Stochastic Resonance) and recording apparatus as support or "medium" (for messages from the beyond or beside).

Amongst other approaches Ghosts in the Machine can be seen as a technologically updated apparatus for the search of ghosts, updated in the sense of automated. An endless stream of data (the noise) is scanned for certain information, which in this case are patterns which look like a face or sound like a word. A computer algorithm, informed with what we would believe is ghostlike, is searching for spiritual evidence which is ironically facial features and language and by that essentially humanlike. It is about the anthropomorphisation of noise, not on a cognitive level but on the scale of probabilities of matching patterns. By looking at the installation from this perspective we realize that we are actually dealing with a process of surveillance, something which we are confronted with on an everyday basis. In our technologically informed and amplified environment also we produce willingly or unwillingly permanently an endless stream of data, in the internet, through credit cards and electronic communications, the services we use and the security cameras we encounter. Steadily we build up our own ghost in the machine, a double without substance, our databodies with their own lives to which we most likely have already lost the little connection and control we had but frighteningly real when turned against us. Ghosts in the Machine points towards a peculiar fight between epistemology and ontology and this strange oscillation between the desire for information and knowledge, the paranoia that every pattern could be meaningful and crucial and the certainty that others certainly do believe it.

GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE. ART, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
By Alan Dunning & Paul Woodrow
The collaboration of art science and technology possesses a long history within the practice of art. A knowledge of chemistry in the preparation of pigments, and understanding of perception, representational codes and artistic techniques were very much part of the first images makers’ repertoire (the cave painters.) Consequently the Einstein Brain project owes its origin to the historic practices of artists that have preceded it. The Einstein’s Brain Project is a collaborative group of artists and scientists who have been working together for the past twelve years. The aim of the group is the visualization of the biological state of the body through the fabrication of environments and simulations. The project has developed numerous systems and installations using analog or 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 formation of a space that engages with ideas about the representation of the body as a digital and cybernetic form.

THE BODY
In his book,”Pictures of the Body”, James Elkins has stated: “Every picture is a picture of the body. Every work of visual art is a representation of the body. To say this is to say that we see bodies even where there are none, and that the creation of a form is to some degree also the creation of a body. And if a splash of paint or a ruled grid can be a picture of a body--or the denial of a body--then there must be a desire at work, perhaps among the most primal desires of all; we prefer to have bodies in front of us, or in our hands, and if we cannot have them, we continue to see them as afterimages or ghosts.” Many theorists have already recognized the effect of digital technology on world culture as a crowning moment in the history of human kind. What is of concern is the degree to which technology has ostensibly constructed new boundaries between itself and the body. This notion of apparent division, however, is not as straightforward as it might seem. One could go to the other extreme and postulate that recent technology, in the form of the digital, has a tendency to enhance and extend the potentiality of the body rather than create unfamiliar restrictions.

More recently the work of the Einstein’s Brain Project, has developed generative systems in order to reference the ideas inherent in EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon) to examine ways in which we construct worlds, and bodies in worlds, through pareidolia, (a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus - often an image or sound - being perceived as significant), apophenia (the seeing of connections where there are none) and the gestalt effect (the recognition of pattern and form). William J Mitchell speculates that the emergence of digital imaging has forced us “… to adopt a far more wary and more vigilant interpretive stance - much as recent philosophy and literary theory have shaken our faith in the ultimate grounding of written texts on external reference, alerted us to the endless self-referentiality of symbolic constructions, and confronted us with the inherent instabilities and indeterminacies of verbal meaning.”1 Mitchell is cautioning us about the uncertainty of the values we can assign to the photographic, and the complexities of image production and visual truth in the digital era, or as he remarks, the idea of ”…photographic documents as truthful reports about things in the real world.”

This work uses the ideas inherent in Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP) to examine ways in which we construct the world through pareidolia, (a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus - often an image or sound - being perceived as significant), apophenia (the seeing of connections where there are none) and the gestalt effect (the recognition of pattern and form). EVP 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 alone, or under controlled circumstances. Most often white or pink noise is used as a medium that is acted upon by other electromagnetic forces. This electromagnetic medium produces forms that are, occasionally, like human speech. For some the voices are simply subjective interpretations - which we tend to hear voices in random patterns of sound, in the way we recognize forms in random visual patterns. For others, the voices are genuinely mysterious, opening up the possibility of communication with the dead.

In Ghosts in the Machine (2008) two projectors project large images onto the walls of a room. One projection shows video static overlaid with text and the outlines of bounding boxes, the other shows black and white images of what appear to be blurry and indistinct images of human faces suspended like apparitions in the space. Ambient noise fills the space. Just at the threshold of recognition can be heard what appear to be human speech in different languages. A CCD camera is turned on but enclosed in a light tight box. Its input is adjusted with maximum gain and brightness to reveal the video noise inherent in the system. This noise forms the optical equivalent of audio noise and is used in a similar way to provide a medium that can be modified by external forces to produce images and sounds. The video noise is mapped to audio by sampling pixels in a Quicktime matrix and using the values to manipulate a stream of white noise.

Voice recognition software parses the modulated noise and translates any sufficiently voice-like sounds into its nearest vocal equivalent, which is sent to the screen as text and rendered into audio by speech synthesizers into Italian, German, English or Spanish. Face tracking algorithms using a cascade of Haar classifiers scan each video frame and look for any combination of pixels that form the basic characteristics of a human face. These are areas that can be loosely characterized as eyes, nose and mouth with a sufficient degree of symmetry. When the software finds such a combination of pixels and symmetry, the software draws a bounding box defining the area and zooms the area to full screen, its contrast and brightness is adjusted, blurred and desaturated to clarify the found images. The images produced are only occasionally reminiscent of human faces. More often than not the images produced are recognized as indeterminate organic forms with volume and Figure 2. Static analyzed for facial arrangements space, but fail to resolve themselves into anything recognizable. But occasionally, images are produced that are strikingly like a face although in actuality containing only the barest possibility of being so.

Ghosts in the Machine is a generative, closed system. Random noise from a CCD camera is analyzed for patterns. An algorithm looks for patterns that match the basic geometry and physiognomy of the human face. What it actually finds are pixels on a screen forming blobs and patches of colour that have no actual relation to a real world face. They have no indexical relation to an object. They are not images of people, but another kind of image loaded with meaning, which arises accidentally, but irresistibly, from the hybrid interaction between machine and body. To all intents and purposes when these patches of pixels look like faces, they are images of faces. That such obscure images resolve themselves into faces without conscious effort, and that remain even when attending closely to them, suggests that it is paradoxically their lack of objective meaning that generates their form. It is the very ambiguity and intedeterminacy of the images that allows the brain to reconfigure them as indexical. This work is one of several that examine systems of meaning making that rely on pattern recognition, and the problematized relationship between meaning and the meaningful.

CONCLUSION
In this installation the computer does the hard work of analyzing a complex visual field, but the real task of meaning making is left to the observer. The algorithms find faces in the field that barely meet the requirements of a facial arrangement. The structuring of these images really consisting only of blobs and indeterminate grain, as faces is left to the observer. Seeing, representation and the interpretation of external phenomena has never been a matter of objectivity. Seeing is a complex activity and the perception of visual forms, aesthetic experience and cognitive interpretation are more at home with the aleatory, the misperceived and phenomena of indeterminacy than with the notion of the world as a fixed reality. It is these that drive the installation.

LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre
Los Prados, 121 - Gijon

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