Mediating Public Space: Art and Technology That Goes Beyond the Frame Art Gallery

Ornamental

In 1948, Claude Shannon’s A Mathematical Theory of Information laid the groundwork for the digital age. It defined the term information, introduced the unit bit and revolutionized how we communicate. Shannon’s work gives us physical parameters to define an often perceivably abstract entity: information. It’s a seemingly strange and wonderful truth in the digital age that information is physical—where one is often led to believe that information lives in the ether of clouds.

In a reflection on data materialism in the digital age, Ornamental creates an emergent system of generative visualizations from live EEG brain data scanned in the gallery. The brain-scanning EEG reader serves as a symbolic data-extracting channel from one’s mind, more specifically the extraction of an idea in its most raw and often incomplete form on a noisy information channel. The idea takes the form of binary trees or L-systems that are the fundamental data structure of mapping analog signals to digital encodings. The scanned ideas mutate the binary trees as initial seed data for a thought that is in a constant state of mutation and flux. It is easy to classify an idea as a finalized stagnant thing, but Ornamental plays with the possibility of seeing cognitive ideas as temporal physical living entities, transferring form from brain to keystroke to pixel to paper to iris to brain, from host to host to host.

This work was produced during an artist residency with the Victoria & Albert Museum and Goldsmiths, University of London, Department of Computing