THE EINSTEIN'S BRAIN PROJECT

BIO

Alan Dunning is a new media artist and founding member of the widely presented interdisciplinary art and science collaboration: The Einstein’s Brain Project, an art and science project developing works around issues of consciousness and representation in real time electronic media environments. Since 2000, he has exhibited in more than 70 shows and has had more than 90 papers, catalogues, books, articles and reviews reference 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 for the Arts, the Marion Fund, the Association of Commonwealth Universities and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. He is represented in national and international collections, including those of the National Gallery of Canada and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He is currently Head of the Media Arts and Digital Technologies Program at the Alberta College of Art + Design in Calgary.

Paul Woodrow was born in Leeds, England and has lived in Canada since 1967. He attended the Vancouver School of Art and Concordia University. He has been involved in a variety of inter-disciplinary activities, including performance art, installation video, painting and experimental music, jazz, blues and African 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), Clive Robertson (W.O.R.K.S, Canada) and Brian Dyson (Syntax). He has exhibited extensively in Japan, France, Italy, Sweden, England, Belgium, Iceland, Russia, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Spain and the United States, including the Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm, Tate Britain and Tate Modern. He has received numerous awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

For the past fourteen years Woodrow and Dunning have worked with Morley Hollenberg on the art/science collaboration The Einstein’s Brain Project. The project’s work has been shown internationally in Russia, Argentina, Spain and Switzerland. The project’s work has also been featured in several books, Data made Flesh, an essay by Katherine Hayles (Routledge, 2004), in New Philosophy of New Media (MIT, 2004), Art and Digital Media (Phaidon, 2009), and Art and Science (Thames and Hudson, 2010).

STATEMENT

“The Shapes of Thought is one of a series of works that visualize Electroencephalography (EEG) patterns as three-dimensional forms that have an accurate, one-to-one correspondence to the data: a geological record of the EEG patterns generated by the participant. In this particular work, the two participants were each wired to a 16 channel EEG as they sat silently in a room together. The work’s structure, and its occasionally converging forms, parallels recent science studies in brain-to-brain communication, in which participants appear to transmit information to each other when linked through an EEG interface. The forms generated are aesthetic forms that appear to have more in common with artistic images of seashells and crustaceans than scientific data, yet their form is an accurate representation of hard scientific data. Questioning the objectiveness of scientific representation, the work, quintessentially temporal and spatial, suggests that science’s models of reality are located between the poetic and the practical, uncertain, and always on the point of becoming. Even though the world of imaginary or poetic objects like these seem to exist at a distance from the physical world, they have a power to change our perception of the world in which we live, suggesting the mind’s capacity to invent and occupy imaginary worlds might possibly have ‘real’ and scientific value”.